I have to give BSG a lot of credit for space combat because they did allow ships to turn 180 while still traveling in the same direction. Most space combat I've seen treats the ships like aircraft instead of rockets, so I was very pleasantly surprised.
Totally agreed on that point. And the Newtonian flight mechanics were probably the most realistic element of space combat in the re-imaged series.
And yeah, realism in this case would mean a lot of BVR combat, with the added element of total silence in space, and that's not going to create the kind of wow-factor and dramatic tension people expect. That's what I was getting at with the "rule of cool" description.
Why are you so set against (living ships)?
Well, it's partly as you said, they've been done to death. But they weren't a good idea the first time I saw them either.
If a setting had "living ships" that had AIs running on a computer network, with Von Neumann machines the size of specks handling repairs (this could be nano-tech, but doesn't have to be nano-scale to work), and a personality that interacted with the crew, I would be happy. That's hard science. Each concept is realistic, attainable and futuristic. Provided certain elements of realism were respected, like finite resources and realistic time-frames for repairs, I'd have no problem with it, and calling this ship "alive" would not seem unreasonable.
This isn't what modern soft science fiction has.
What soft sci-fi has are ships made of meat. Carbon based, amino acid/protein, water-as-a-solvent, meat. This often gets rooted in canon, either explicitly, through the writers saying that's what the ship is made of, or implicitly, by showing a lack of biochemical barriers (the classic "virus plot" where the ship gets sick with something that infects humans for instance).
Inevitably, the meat-ship is shown being stronger/more advanced than its metal counterparts, and often repairs without expending biomass or energy, at a rate that makes bacterial growth look sluggish.
This. Is. Bad. Biology. Ask any bio major, or prof, or even an interested amateur. This is very much rooted in the same bad science that gave us the version of evolution seen on Star Trek, which bears no resemblance at all to actual scientific evolution. It's like the moment a ship being biological is established, science goes flying out the window.
Sure it might, likely has all sorts of fluids in it. Cooling, material transfer, hydraulics and so on. Just because it's a "living ship" does not mean it's made from the same material as life on Earth.
You're reaching. Recall we're talking about BSG here (and the other series that had this cliche).
The Cylon Raider brain bled actual blood. Not coolant, hydraulic fluid or any such material.
That's a design decision, if the easiest way to make an AI is to grow one from brain tissue than why not just make that part of the ship?
A brain the size of a large dog? That can be outflown by a human pilot? In a setting where they have truly mechanical AI (in the form of Cylon Centurions)? Right, that's clearly a more efficient design.
No, they simply don't have your limited imagination and understand that just because life on earth is made out of something that doesn't mean all life must be made of that. Plenty of great hard science fiction covering that area I should add......Why are you imposing the arbitrary restriction of it having to be made of Earth style organic material?
Because, in series like BSG/B5/Farscape/etc, the carbon based, amino acid derived nature of the living ships is canon, meaning this isn't a question of me imposing my own "limited imagination". This is a case of the writers failing to do the research. And copying each others ideas without checking whether the copied idea made any sense in the first place.
Now, I will grant you, life could evolve to fit niches completely unlike our own. But that isn't what's being discussed here, and you're veering off course by bringing it up.
Show me a series which has biological/organic spacecraft (including series where the craft are cybernetic), and where the biological components are expressly derived from some living tissue that has no common elements with our own, and we'll talk. Don't speak of hypothetical examples, show an actual one.
Note that by "no common elements" I mean none. No viruses from the crew infecting the ship (BSG, Voyager). No common nutrients, like where the ship can "eat" human food (Lexx, Farscape, SW EU). Completely alien chemistry - show me a series with a ship like that.
Life has no limitations
I'm going to take this one quote as a sterling example of what's wrong with your argument.
Life has limitations. Organic life based around carbon chemistry using water as a solvent is inherently limited in what ranges of temperature, pressure and ionizing radiation it can operate. There is earth life that can survive exposure to space (water bears are an example), but only through mechanisms that allow such life to shut down and restart at a later time. This is not my opinion, it is an established chemical and biological fact. Put another way, ask someone with knowledge of biology greater than or equal to my own (a biology professor for instance), and they will back me up on this point.
Want to get around those limitations by using different chemistries? Okay. What are you using in lieu of carbon as a primary building block? What solvent are you using? What system of energy transfer serves for metabolic function? All forms of life will have limits, even if those limits differ from our own. Simply saying that the living tissue in question is not carbon based does not excuse it behaving in impossible ways.
Any life would face the same limitations imposed by the laws of physics. Many bio-ships in fiction are thermodynamically impossible. The writers try to get around issues with mechanical ships (reaction mass and repair) by using tissue in lieu of machinery, ignoring that the problems are not mechanical in nature, but are instead the laws of physics.
I'll let slide the question of how exactly said goop was effecting the repairs.
What was in my head when I was talking bio-ships in BSG was actually more the stuff like the meat brain found inside the Cylon Raiders. That made zero sense, except insofar as it was needed for a contrived Deus Ex Machina.
Seriously, they don't even have the excuse of not possessing computers perfectly able to do the same job. The Centurions demonstrated that. Nor was this a question of having biological systems for a biological pilot, as the Raiders were essentially unmanned ships. They had no excuse.
I always assumed that there were some peripheral systems open to infection (external sensors or communications maybe?) and that the lack of networking simply isolated the inevitable infections until the affected systems could be reset. Press a button, load from ROM, and whatever viruses got spammed at the communications receiver (or whatever) are deleted.
But that does raise the question of why all the systems aren't networked except the vulnerable ones. Is there seriously some reason why they couldn't network the non-vulnerable systems?
Once you give ships self-repair capability or a good deal of intelligence, "living" ships are a natural extension. It may be cliched beyond redemption, but it's not that great a stretch.
Except that's not what's being addressed here.
I will grant that a ship with sophisticated self-repair, artificial intelligence and the ability to communicate is very much like a "living ship". It also won't bleed if you shoot it, nor does it have a spongy mass of brain tissue at the controls.
The kind of living ships you're talking about, where repair nano-tech and advanced computing are invoked, is more often found in written science fiction. And is just fine as far as hard science goes.
What BSG, B5, Farscape and some of the latter additions to Star Wars and Star Trek involve is ships made of living tissue. And that makes no sense whatsoever. It's like the writers somehow got the idea in their heads that flesh can be engineered to extreme levels of durability and regeneration, or without the limitations of conservation of matter and energy. It ties into a fundamental misunderstanding about the capabilities and limitations of evolution and life in general.
Want to see a ship made or organic matter? Wooden sailboat. You'll note we make our warships out of steel, and would continue to do so even if we could make a wooden boat that healed.
BSG is no more scientifically plausible than Star Trek, they just use words like "evolution" instead of "warp drive"
I'd put the two series on par with each other, as far as bad biology and misunderstanding evolution go. Recall that Star Trek produced such unscientific crap as "Threshold", that TNG episode where they start devolving into animals and that Enterprise episode with the one species limiting the evolution of the other. BSG was similarly bad about abusing life sciences for fun and profit.
But then again, I'd challenge anyone to name a soft science fiction series that paid any mind to realistic biology, natural selection or any related topics. No seriously, check your list of sci-fi favourites. What you find is either a) they abuse biology in the same manner as BSG/B5/ST/Farscape/etc, or b) they don't touch on the subject at all, thus averting the problem, like SW/Firefly/TSCC/etc.
Biology is the one field of science where the more educated viewers of sci-fi are willing to excuse even the most basic errors, while physics and astronomy are probably the fields where errors are most noticed.
I think it ended rather poorly, but hey, that's just my opinion.
In the science department: No, BSG wasn't as bad as star trek, but neither was it good enough to deserve acclaim. It was, by the end, about B5/Firefly level, maybe a little better in some areas and worse in a few others. To wit:
1. Unobtainium. I realize Tylium was a holdover from the original 70's BSG. But they displayed it having a range of properties that completely exclude it from being any real life element or compound. It would have been trivial to give Tylium the properties of either Deuterium or Helium-3, and simply work from the assumption that the protagonists have different words than us for the elements. Hell, "frak" already established that the writers were ready to sub in one word for another.
2. Magic. B5 and star trek have been guilty of this too. Is it too much to ask that a sci-fi series stick to a rational universe? Or at least leave sufficient ambiguity that the few supernatural events might have been natural ones instead?
3. Space combat. This one is kinda a case of rule of cool. Realistic space combat wouldn't look like much. But really, the ranges involved in BSG are much too short, both for weapons fire and for targeting/detection.
4. Living ships. Seriously, this one's been done by every major soft science fiction series in the last 15 years, and has got to stop. Living tissue has no place in spacecraft design, except the warm meatbags who fly the damn things (and possibly as part of their life support).
Other than those 4 things, the series wasn't bad, science-wise. I'll give free passes on FTL and generated gravity, as those are virtually prerequisites for the type of setting involved. It may have been the first soft sci-fi series to employ concepts like mind uploading as major plot elements. Concepts like the Galactica being minimally automated made sense in context. They actually addressed realistic details like the number of survivors dwindling and running out of resources.
So the higher you can raise that denominator, the better off society will be in the long term
I second this.
The education system should determine what the minimum competency for a subject ought to be, then aim higher than that minimum for the majority of students. Everybody needs basic math, as was acknowledged by the author of TFA. And everybody should be exposed to the non-basic stuff.
If some students only learn the minimum, that's alright. But most should be taught substantially more than that. And this should apply to all the subjects they take.
I think its time you cracked a book on economics and then get back to the rest of us on how exactly you went wrong.
He is wrong. But economics has nothing to do with it.
The green revolution and the shift away from large families are what averted Malthus. The former is applied science, and the later is societal change brought about by increasing life expectancy and quality of life, and reduced childhood mortality, which in turn owe a lot to medicine and sanitation. I don't think you'll find this in an economics book, though I'm prepared to be proven wrong on this point. Actually, upon further reflection, you might find details on the green revolution in an econ book, so perhaps that was your point.
A more relevant detail is that there wasn't exponential growth, ad infinitum, from the 19th century until the present. Most western nations would be in population decline were it not for immigration from the developing world.
Except in patent law, there is a distinction between discovery and creation, at least in theory.
It is arbitrary where we choose to differentiate, you're right about that. But the line is drawn on the basis of observation versus utilization.
If I observe that objects of differing mass fall at the same velocity if air resistance is taken away from the equation, I cannot patent that. If I use this observation to determine that slowing decent via increasing surface area is possible, and create a parachute, I can patent that. Or I could if those examples weren't hundreds of years old and therefor covered under prior art.
Identifying genes, where they are and what they do, is observation. Tinkering with them is utilization.
Genetic modification and tailored organisms should be patentable. For example, if someone were to develop a useful modified single celled organism that processed sewage into biofuel, I could see patenting that as valid. It's engineering after all, just with genes instead of gears.
But discovery has never been patentable in any other field, and that's what's being discussed in TFA. You can't patent if there's prior art, can't patent something you've found rather than made, and can't patent abstract scientific knowledge. You cannot patent the lever or pulley, and in a mechanics to biology comparison, those are the best analogues to genes. Except it's even worse, because those two examples were developed by humans in the first place, so at least somebody long dead could claim ownership, whereas genes are strictly a natural occurrence.
Game are not serious things, but legal lawsuits are!
My intent was to prove the opposite, that games are in fact to be taken seriously and that the "it's just a game" argument is poorly thought out, though I can see why you'd take that the way you did (my post was brief).
But I am going t take issue with the blanket statement that all lawsuits are serious things. Most are anything but serious, except to those directly involved.
A lawsuit is serious when its outcome establishes a broad precedent. A suit that establishes that truth is an absolute defence against libel is a good example of a suit that affects society as a whole. But when a lawsuit falls under a narrowly defined niche, it becomes much less serious for the rest of us. A suit over the fine points of contract law for example does not affect society overmuch, particularly if it doesn't establish any new precedent. And no, most cases are not precedent setting.
There are thousands of suits every year. A handful actually matter to everyone. A slightly larger number matter to people loosely attached to the interested parties. Most don't even matter that much.
On-topic, a lawsuit over the use of third party hack programs for cheating in single player games is niche. It is of interest to the narrowly defined field of video game intellectual property law. It does not establish new precedent about third party hacks more generally, because the precedent is already there (see previous suits by blizzard, such as BNetD).
Ergo, the only people who actually have any reason to care about the outcome of the suit are... the gamers and the game's industry.
Who really cares that these people are getting sued? They just make cheats for a game.
See how that works out? If the game is unimportant (and any game is intrinsically unimportant to people who don't play it), then it hardly matters to you what the developers are doing against the makers and users of cheats.
Haven't "scientists" been saying stuff like this since about the mid-1800s? "Peak Oil", "Population Overcrowding", "Global Warming"... all modern-day myths that never seem to die no matter how much they're refuted.
"Population overcrowding?" I assume you mean Malthusian predictions of doom, circa the 19th century. Thing is, that didn't account for the green revolution. Crop yields stayed ahead of population growth, but it took clever minds to develop the tech that allows this. And the problem is still there; not everyone has access to sufficient food and water (not just quantity, but also quality). Where you are now is likely a part of the world that's lucky enough to have endemic obesity instead of malnutrition.
That wasn't a case of "ooh, those scientists predicted danger, and look how wrong they were". That was a case of a genuine threat being averted by human ingenuity. If people had dismissed the threat of overpopulation inducing famine as a "myth", as you just did, then they would have done nothing, and the myth would become fact. Instead, they took preventative action.
In the long run, I have every confidence that we'll break our dependence on oil, and that peak oil and climate change will be averted much like the famines predicted by Malthus were. That will not mean the problems never were in the first place.
You seem to be holding that the threats to the long term wellbeing of the human race are "myths". They are facts. And if they do not come to pass, it will not be because we sat around and did nothing - a crisis averted by intelligence is a learning experience, not proof that there never was a threat to begin with.
I used to know of a really thorough analysis on some forum some place that showed that even under the most magically perfect circumstances, it can never be a net energy gain to mine the moon and bring it back to earth. I think they even extended that to asteroids. Anyone know it?
Dunno where you saw the analysis, but I can guess at some of the assumptions.
For instance, "net energy gain" implies that the object of the exercise is to obtain energy. About the only fuel we would need to go into space for is He3, and we don't yet have the means to turn it into energy, period. Everything else is either only available on Earth (i.e. fossil fuels), or available in sufficient quantity to make space extraction uneconomical (i.e. uranium).
So, aside from beaming power back to Earth from orbiting solar collectors (which you're clearly already aware of), going into space is not a useful solution for any of our power needs on Earth. Which was probably what the analysis you're remembering was saying.
If the object of the exercise is not to obtain energy, but to instead exchange energy for something else, like say rare earth metals, then mining offworld is workable, it just requires infrastructure and demand, both lacking at present. Mining on Earth remains the cheaper option for the foreseeable future.
Murdoch would like to make the internet be like tv, and has many of the resources required to force this upon the rest of us.
While I don't doubt he wants that, I do doubt he can achieve it.
"Force this upon the rest of us"? How exactly? He could buy out ISPs and force policy change, I suppose. And then run them into the ground with his "vision". At a basic level, he's limited not by resources but by return on investment. Murdoch wants to make money, and will abandon any plan that proves itself sufficiently unprofitable. Business men are tiresomely predictable where their wallets are concerned.
You seem to be arguing either that he could turn a profit on making the internet closed and limited, or that he wouldn't care if he didn't make a profit, if it advanced some nefarious plan. Trouble is, I think the former extremely unlikely, and the latter, well, his nefarious plan would need to pay off in a huge way to justify the loss. He's greedy, not stupid. Evil, maybe, but the self-interested kind of evil, not the Saturday morning cartoon kind.
Sure, but getting to and from is a bitch. And moving them into Earth orbit is the sort of thing you only screw up once. I'm all for mining the belt, but we need substantially better tech for both ground to orbit and in-system flight. Mind you, in the long run setting up such infrastructure is worthwhile for non-commercial reasons, so we really ought to be investing more in it on general principles.
A big asteroid impact would also likely be out of our hands in terms of prevention
Depends on the value of "big". The biggest asteroids in the system have been mapped, and aren't threats. There's an upper limit on the size of any celestial body that might wander into us, baring something extrasolar. AFAIK, there is nothing that could impact us, could be detected, but couldn't be moved.
The key is time, as was rightly noted further up the thread. If the would-be impactor is still a year away, and we've got or can get the equipment needed to divert it ready to go in a hurry, we're fine. Small changes in trajectory can lead to wide course deviations if you give them long enough. And some methods of deflection are more subtle than just blasting it off course; I've seen proposals for moving asteroids off course by altering their albedo, which is more elegant than a nuke, but takes longer to take effect.
Why are we not seriously trying to Terraform Mars?
Because we do not have the capability to do so, and aren't likely to in the foreseeable future. Read up on some of the non-fictional assessments of what making Mars livable would entail.
When and if we do get such capabilities, terraforming will still take a very, very long time. A realistic estimate is at least a century of continuous effort to put a breathable atmosphere in place, and frankly, that's optimistic. We'd need infrastructure in the rest of the solar system in place first, to supply the resources needed, specifically to thicken the Martian atmosphere, add a liquid hydrosphere and make the introduction of life possible. I doubt we can get that infrastructure in place from where we are now without many decades and countless trillions devoted to doing so, and that isn't even stage one of the terraforming process, it's stage zero.
Put another way, with the resources it would take to make Mars habitable, we could easily fix most of our current problems here on Earth, regarding climate, resource scarcity, energy and ecology. After all, it's the same problems in both cases. And we'll never, ever be able to move a significant portion of our population to Mars even if the planet could support life; a spacecraft carrying a thousand colonists would be an amazing feat of engineering, and ten rounds trips would move less than a hundred thousandth of the current world population.
Second this. You don't want the solution to be punitive to the infected computer owner, you want it to be disruptive to the botnet operators. A simple "your zombie PC has been disconnected, please contact us to reconnect" followed by instructions on cleaning malware would cut the problem in half. Added bonus, after it happened to them for the first time, the end user would hopefully wise up a bit about security and adopt minimum standards of prevention and safety.
You doubtlessly dismiss stuff all the time, because your first impression left you disinterested, or gave you cause for dismissal. Not just political parties, obviously, though likely those as well. A book you might have liked, but the title and cover just threw you, and you didn't pick it up. A TV show that might have been good, but the name and TV guide description left you thinking it'd suck. A charitable organization whose purpose you'd have supported, but for the dumb acronym and campy saccharine pitch they threw.
And even if you're somehow above all that (doubt it), most people aren't. Why would you expect it not to apply to a political party? People make snap judgments every day.
Now, you might say that politics is more important, and that people should apply a greater standard of examination than they do for entertainment. But I ask you: have you paid any attention to all those far-out third parties that doubtless populate your local politics? No. You'd dismiss most of them at first glance.
That's an excellent idea. I know if a candidate was up for election where I am, and was a representative of the "Pirate" party, most people would think it was a joke (like the Rhinoceros party). The only votes they'd get would be for shits and giggles.
Conversely, if they represented the "Free Information" party or something that conveyed the same idea but was less clunky sounding, they'd be taken seriously. Hell, the Green party habitually gets taken seriously, and they're much for fringe, and have a sillier name.
That argument is a good one for why a developer/publisher should avoid DRM. What it fails to address is how they should stay in business.
Look, obviously simply eschewing DRM does not result in would-be pirates deciding to buy the game instead. You said it yourself, it's as easy for them to get the torrent of a non-DRMed game as it is to get the torrent of a DRMed triple-A title.
So how does an indie developer or old games distributor or what-have-you make enough money to remain solvent? DRM won't help. Building better games won't help, because quality does not deter piracy. Limit themselves to consoles and MMOs perhaps? Yeah, great, and that leaves those of us who like computer games with single player out to dry.
Sell more copies? Okay, that leaves the legitimate purchaser subsidizing the pirates free ride. And you need to find more legitimate customers somewhere. How exactly do you convince a pirate to buy the game instead? Because asking nicely or locking games up under intrusive security measures clearly isn't working.
Legal and regulated. The illegality of prostitution is only part of the problem with the current state of affairs.
Prostitution carries with it some serious societal issues. Coercion from pimps, poverty, VD, and back-alley abortions have been associated with prostitution for thousands of years. None of these will go away if the laws against soliciting are lifted.
Illegality adds another problem; it forces the business under the rug, leaving hookers essentially without legal recourse - they can be robbed, raped, killed, or otherwise harmed because the perp knows the victim won't go to the cops, or won't be missed.
Legalizing prostitution without regulating it will solve the last problem, but not the rest. Keeping it illegal only removes the problems from public view, and makes the situation worse for those involved. You need to legalize it, while imposing health and safety regulations.
OTOH, any charges against Assange are going to look that way, real or fabricated. Remember the old joke about conspiracy theories: if there's evidence to support them, then the truth has been uncovered, and if there's no evidence to support them, that just proves the conspirators are doing a good job of covering up.
My prediction is that this whole affair will never be resolved to anyone's satisfaction.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to give BSG a lot of credit for space combat because they did allow ships to turn 180 while still traveling in the same direction. Most space combat I've seen treats the ships like aircraft instead of rockets, so I was very pleasantly surprised.
Totally agreed on that point. And the Newtonian flight mechanics were probably the most realistic element of space combat in the re-imaged series.
And yeah, realism in this case would mean a lot of BVR combat, with the added element of total silence in space, and that's not going to create the kind of wow-factor and dramatic tension people expect. That's what I was getting at with the "rule of cool" description.
Why are you so set against (living ships)?
Well, it's partly as you said, they've been done to death. But they weren't a good idea the first time I saw them either.
If a setting had "living ships" that had AIs running on a computer network, with Von Neumann machines the size of specks handling repairs (this could be nano-tech, but doesn't have to be nano-scale to work), and a personality that interacted with the crew, I would be happy. That's hard science. Each concept is realistic, attainable and futuristic. Provided certain elements of realism were respected, like finite resources and realistic time-frames for repairs, I'd have no problem with it, and calling this ship "alive" would not seem unreasonable.
This isn't what modern soft science fiction has.
What soft sci-fi has are ships made of meat. Carbon based, amino acid/protein, water-as-a-solvent, meat. This often gets rooted in canon, either explicitly, through the writers saying that's what the ship is made of, or implicitly, by showing a lack of biochemical barriers (the classic "virus plot" where the ship gets sick with something that infects humans for instance).
Inevitably, the meat-ship is shown being stronger/more advanced than its metal counterparts, and often repairs without expending biomass or energy, at a rate that makes bacterial growth look sluggish.
This. Is. Bad. Biology. Ask any bio major, or prof, or even an interested amateur. This is very much rooted in the same bad science that gave us the version of evolution seen on Star Trek, which bears no resemblance at all to actual scientific evolution. It's like the moment a ship being biological is established, science goes flying out the window.
Sure it might, likely has all sorts of fluids in it. Cooling, material transfer, hydraulics and so on. Just because it's a "living ship" does not mean it's made from the same material as life on Earth.
You're reaching. Recall we're talking about BSG here (and the other series that had this cliche).
The Cylon Raider brain bled actual blood. Not coolant, hydraulic fluid or any such material.
That's a design decision, if the easiest way to make an AI is to grow one from brain tissue than why not just make that part of the ship?
A brain the size of a large dog? That can be outflown by a human pilot? In a setting where they have truly mechanical AI (in the form of Cylon Centurions)? Right, that's clearly a more efficient design.
No, they simply don't have your limited imagination and understand that just because life on earth is made out of something that doesn't mean all life must be made of that. Plenty of great hard science fiction covering that area I should add... ...Why are you imposing the arbitrary restriction of it having to be made of Earth style organic material?
Because, in series like BSG/B5/Farscape/etc, the carbon based, amino acid derived nature of the living ships is canon, meaning this isn't a question of me imposing my own "limited imagination". This is a case of the writers failing to do the research. And copying each others ideas without checking whether the copied idea made any sense in the first place.
Now, I will grant you, life could evolve to fit niches completely unlike our own. But that isn't what's being discussed here, and you're veering off course by bringing it up.
Show me a series which has biological/organic spacecraft (including series where the craft are cybernetic), and where the biological components are expressly derived from some living tissue that has no common elements with our own, and we'll talk. Don't speak of hypothetical examples, show an actual one.
Note that by "no common elements" I mean none. No viruses from the crew infecting the ship (BSG, Voyager). No common nutrients, like where the ship can "eat" human food (Lexx, Farscape, SW EU). Completely alien chemistry - show me a series with a ship like that.
Life has no limitations
I'm going to take this one quote as a sterling example of what's wrong with your argument.
Life has limitations. Organic life based around carbon chemistry using water as a solvent is inherently limited in what ranges of temperature, pressure and ionizing radiation it can operate. There is earth life that can survive exposure to space (water bears are an example), but only through mechanisms that allow such life to shut down and restart at a later time. This is not my opinion, it is an established chemical and biological fact. Put another way, ask someone with knowledge of biology greater than or equal to my own (a biology professor for instance), and they will back me up on this point.
Want to get around those limitations by using different chemistries? Okay. What are you using in lieu of carbon as a primary building block? What solvent are you using? What system of energy transfer serves for metabolic function? All forms of life will have limits, even if those limits differ from our own. Simply saying that the living tissue in question is not carbon based does not excuse it behaving in impossible ways.
Any life would face the same limitations imposed by the laws of physics. Many bio-ships in fiction are thermodynamically impossible. The writers try to get around issues with mechanical ships (reaction mass and repair) by using tissue in lieu of machinery, ignoring that the problems are not mechanical in nature, but are instead the laws of physics.
I'll let slide the question of how exactly said goop was effecting the repairs.
What was in my head when I was talking bio-ships in BSG was actually more the stuff like the meat brain found inside the Cylon Raiders. That made zero sense, except insofar as it was needed for a contrived Deus Ex Machina.
Seriously, they don't even have the excuse of not possessing computers perfectly able to do the same job. The Centurions demonstrated that. Nor was this a question of having biological systems for a biological pilot, as the Raiders were essentially unmanned ships. They had no excuse.
I always assumed that there were some peripheral systems open to infection (external sensors or communications maybe?) and that the lack of networking simply isolated the inevitable infections until the affected systems could be reset. Press a button, load from ROM, and whatever viruses got spammed at the communications receiver (or whatever) are deleted.
But that does raise the question of why all the systems aren't networked except the vulnerable ones. Is there seriously some reason why they couldn't network the non-vulnerable systems?
Once you give ships self-repair capability or a good deal of intelligence, "living" ships are a natural extension. It may be cliched beyond redemption, but it's not that great a stretch.
Except that's not what's being addressed here.
I will grant that a ship with sophisticated self-repair, artificial intelligence and the ability to communicate is very much like a "living ship". It also won't bleed if you shoot it, nor does it have a spongy mass of brain tissue at the controls.
The kind of living ships you're talking about, where repair nano-tech and advanced computing are invoked, is more often found in written science fiction. And is just fine as far as hard science goes.
What BSG, B5, Farscape and some of the latter additions to Star Wars and Star Trek involve is ships made of living tissue. And that makes no sense whatsoever. It's like the writers somehow got the idea in their heads that flesh can be engineered to extreme levels of durability and regeneration, or without the limitations of conservation of matter and energy. It ties into a fundamental misunderstanding about the capabilities and limitations of evolution and life in general.
Want to see a ship made or organic matter? Wooden sailboat. You'll note we make our warships out of steel, and would continue to do so even if we could make a wooden boat that healed.
BSG is no more scientifically plausible than Star Trek, they just use words like "evolution" instead of "warp drive"
I'd put the two series on par with each other, as far as bad biology and misunderstanding evolution go. Recall that Star Trek produced such unscientific crap as "Threshold", that TNG episode where they start devolving into animals and that Enterprise episode with the one species limiting the evolution of the other. BSG was similarly bad about abusing life sciences for fun and profit.
But then again, I'd challenge anyone to name a soft science fiction series that paid any mind to realistic biology, natural selection or any related topics. No seriously, check your list of sci-fi favourites. What you find is either a) they abuse biology in the same manner as BSG/B5/ST/Farscape/etc, or b) they don't touch on the subject at all, thus averting the problem, like SW/Firefly/TSCC/etc.
Biology is the one field of science where the more educated viewers of sci-fi are willing to excuse even the most basic errors, while physics and astronomy are probably the fields where errors are most noticed.
I think it ended rather poorly, but hey, that's just my opinion.
In the science department: No, BSG wasn't as bad as star trek, but neither was it good enough to deserve acclaim. It was, by the end, about B5/Firefly level, maybe a little better in some areas and worse in a few others. To wit:
1. Unobtainium. I realize Tylium was a holdover from the original 70's BSG. But they displayed it having a range of properties that completely exclude it from being any real life element or compound. It would have been trivial to give Tylium the properties of either Deuterium or Helium-3, and simply work from the assumption that the protagonists have different words than us for the elements. Hell, "frak" already established that the writers were ready to sub in one word for another.
2. Magic. B5 and star trek have been guilty of this too. Is it too much to ask that a sci-fi series stick to a rational universe? Or at least leave sufficient ambiguity that the few supernatural events might have been natural ones instead?
3. Space combat. This one is kinda a case of rule of cool. Realistic space combat wouldn't look like much. But really, the ranges involved in BSG are much too short, both for weapons fire and for targeting/detection.
4. Living ships. Seriously, this one's been done by every major soft science fiction series in the last 15 years, and has got to stop. Living tissue has no place in spacecraft design, except the warm meatbags who fly the damn things (and possibly as part of their life support).
Other than those 4 things, the series wasn't bad, science-wise. I'll give free passes on FTL and generated gravity, as those are virtually prerequisites for the type of setting involved. It may have been the first soft sci-fi series to employ concepts like mind uploading as major plot elements. Concepts like the Galactica being minimally automated made sense in context. They actually addressed realistic details like the number of survivors dwindling and running out of resources.
So the higher you can raise that denominator, the better off society will be in the long term
I second this.
The education system should determine what the minimum competency for a subject ought to be, then aim higher than that minimum for the majority of students. Everybody needs basic math, as was acknowledged by the author of TFA. And everybody should be exposed to the non-basic stuff.
If some students only learn the minimum, that's alright. But most should be taught substantially more than that. And this should apply to all the subjects they take.
I think its time you cracked a book on economics and then get back to the rest of us on how exactly you went wrong.
He is wrong. But economics has nothing to do with it.
The green revolution and the shift away from large families are what averted Malthus. The former is applied science, and the later is societal change brought about by increasing life expectancy and quality of life, and reduced childhood mortality, which in turn owe a lot to medicine and sanitation. I don't think you'll find this in an economics book, though I'm prepared to be proven wrong on this point. Actually, upon further reflection, you might find details on the green revolution in an econ book, so perhaps that was your point.
A more relevant detail is that there wasn't exponential growth, ad infinitum, from the 19th century until the present. Most western nations would be in population decline were it not for immigration from the developing world.
Except in patent law, there is a distinction between discovery and creation, at least in theory.
It is arbitrary where we choose to differentiate, you're right about that. But the line is drawn on the basis of observation versus utilization.
If I observe that objects of differing mass fall at the same velocity if air resistance is taken away from the equation, I cannot patent that. If I use this observation to determine that slowing decent via increasing surface area is possible, and create a parachute, I can patent that. Or I could if those examples weren't hundreds of years old and therefor covered under prior art.
Identifying genes, where they are and what they do, is observation. Tinkering with them is utilization.
That's my basic take on it as well.
Genetic modification and tailored organisms should be patentable. For example, if someone were to develop a useful modified single celled organism that processed sewage into biofuel, I could see patenting that as valid. It's engineering after all, just with genes instead of gears.
But discovery has never been patentable in any other field, and that's what's being discussed in TFA. You can't patent if there's prior art, can't patent something you've found rather than made, and can't patent abstract scientific knowledge. You cannot patent the lever or pulley, and in a mechanics to biology comparison, those are the best analogues to genes. Except it's even worse, because those two examples were developed by humans in the first place, so at least somebody long dead could claim ownership, whereas genes are strictly a natural occurrence.
Game are not serious things, but legal lawsuits are!
My intent was to prove the opposite, that games are in fact to be taken seriously and that the "it's just a game" argument is poorly thought out, though I can see why you'd take that the way you did (my post was brief).
But I am going t take issue with the blanket statement that all lawsuits are serious things. Most are anything but serious, except to those directly involved.
A lawsuit is serious when its outcome establishes a broad precedent. A suit that establishes that truth is an absolute defence against libel is a good example of a suit that affects society as a whole. But when a lawsuit falls under a narrowly defined niche, it becomes much less serious for the rest of us. A suit over the fine points of contract law for example does not affect society overmuch, particularly if it doesn't establish any new precedent. And no, most cases are not precedent setting.
There are thousands of suits every year. A handful actually matter to everyone. A slightly larger number matter to people loosely attached to the interested parties. Most don't even matter that much.
On-topic, a lawsuit over the use of third party hack programs for cheating in single player games is niche. It is of interest to the narrowly defined field of video game intellectual property law. It does not establish new precedent about third party hacks more generally, because the precedent is already there (see previous suits by blizzard, such as BNetD).
Ergo, the only people who actually have any reason to care about the outcome of the suit are... the gamers and the game's industry.
Who really cares though?
It's a game.
Works both ways though.
Who really cares that these people are getting sued? They just make cheats for a game.
See how that works out? If the game is unimportant (and any game is intrinsically unimportant to people who don't play it), then it hardly matters to you what the developers are doing against the makers and users of cheats.
Haven't "scientists" been saying stuff like this since about the mid-1800s? "Peak Oil", "Population Overcrowding", "Global Warming"... all modern-day myths that never seem to die no matter how much they're refuted.
"Population overcrowding?" I assume you mean Malthusian predictions of doom, circa the 19th century. Thing is, that didn't account for the green revolution. Crop yields stayed ahead of population growth, but it took clever minds to develop the tech that allows this. And the problem is still there; not everyone has access to sufficient food and water (not just quantity, but also quality). Where you are now is likely a part of the world that's lucky enough to have endemic obesity instead of malnutrition.
That wasn't a case of "ooh, those scientists predicted danger, and look how wrong they were". That was a case of a genuine threat being averted by human ingenuity. If people had dismissed the threat of overpopulation inducing famine as a "myth", as you just did, then they would have done nothing, and the myth would become fact. Instead, they took preventative action.
In the long run, I have every confidence that we'll break our dependence on oil, and that peak oil and climate change will be averted much like the famines predicted by Malthus were. That will not mean the problems never were in the first place.
You seem to be holding that the threats to the long term wellbeing of the human race are "myths". They are facts. And if they do not come to pass, it will not be because we sat around and did nothing - a crisis averted by intelligence is a learning experience, not proof that there never was a threat to begin with.
I used to know of a really thorough analysis on some forum some place that showed that even under the most magically perfect circumstances, it can never be a net energy gain to mine the moon and bring it back to earth. I think they even extended that to asteroids. Anyone know it?
Dunno where you saw the analysis, but I can guess at some of the assumptions.
For instance, "net energy gain" implies that the object of the exercise is to obtain energy. About the only fuel we would need to go into space for is He3, and we don't yet have the means to turn it into energy, period. Everything else is either only available on Earth (i.e. fossil fuels), or available in sufficient quantity to make space extraction uneconomical (i.e. uranium).
So, aside from beaming power back to Earth from orbiting solar collectors (which you're clearly already aware of), going into space is not a useful solution for any of our power needs on Earth. Which was probably what the analysis you're remembering was saying.
If the object of the exercise is not to obtain energy, but to instead exchange energy for something else, like say rare earth metals, then mining offworld is workable, it just requires infrastructure and demand, both lacking at present. Mining on Earth remains the cheaper option for the foreseeable future.
Murdoch would like to make the internet be like tv, and has many of the resources required to force this upon the rest of us.
While I don't doubt he wants that, I do doubt he can achieve it.
"Force this upon the rest of us"? How exactly? He could buy out ISPs and force policy change, I suppose. And then run them into the ground with his "vision". At a basic level, he's limited not by resources but by return on investment. Murdoch wants to make money, and will abandon any plan that proves itself sufficiently unprofitable. Business men are tiresomely predictable where their wallets are concerned.
You seem to be arguing either that he could turn a profit on making the internet closed and limited, or that he wouldn't care if he didn't make a profit, if it advanced some nefarious plan. Trouble is, I think the former extremely unlikely, and the latter, well, his nefarious plan would need to pay off in a huge way to justify the loss. He's greedy, not stupid. Evil, maybe, but the self-interested kind of evil, not the Saturday morning cartoon kind.
Sure, but getting to and from is a bitch. And moving them into Earth orbit is the sort of thing you only screw up once. I'm all for mining the belt, but we need substantially better tech for both ground to orbit and in-system flight. Mind you, in the long run setting up such infrastructure is worthwhile for non-commercial reasons, so we really ought to be investing more in it on general principles.
A big asteroid impact would also likely be out of our hands in terms of prevention
Depends on the value of "big". The biggest asteroids in the system have been mapped, and aren't threats. There's an upper limit on the size of any celestial body that might wander into us, baring something extrasolar. AFAIK, there is nothing that could impact us, could be detected, but couldn't be moved.
The key is time, as was rightly noted further up the thread. If the would-be impactor is still a year away, and we've got or can get the equipment needed to divert it ready to go in a hurry, we're fine. Small changes in trajectory can lead to wide course deviations if you give them long enough. And some methods of deflection are more subtle than just blasting it off course; I've seen proposals for moving asteroids off course by altering their albedo, which is more elegant than a nuke, but takes longer to take effect.
Why are we not seriously trying to Terraform Mars?
Because we do not have the capability to do so, and aren't likely to in the foreseeable future. Read up on some of the non-fictional assessments of what making Mars livable would entail.
When and if we do get such capabilities, terraforming will still take a very, very long time. A realistic estimate is at least a century of continuous effort to put a breathable atmosphere in place, and frankly, that's optimistic. We'd need infrastructure in the rest of the solar system in place first, to supply the resources needed, specifically to thicken the Martian atmosphere, add a liquid hydrosphere and make the introduction of life possible. I doubt we can get that infrastructure in place from where we are now without many decades and countless trillions devoted to doing so, and that isn't even stage one of the terraforming process, it's stage zero.
Put another way, with the resources it would take to make Mars habitable, we could easily fix most of our current problems here on Earth, regarding climate, resource scarcity, energy and ecology. After all, it's the same problems in both cases. And we'll never, ever be able to move a significant portion of our population to Mars even if the planet could support life; a spacecraft carrying a thousand colonists would be an amazing feat of engineering, and ten rounds trips would move less than a hundred thousandth of the current world population.
Second this. You don't want the solution to be punitive to the infected computer owner, you want it to be disruptive to the botnet operators. A simple "your zombie PC has been disconnected, please contact us to reconnect" followed by instructions on cleaning malware would cut the problem in half. Added bonus, after it happened to them for the first time, the end user would hopefully wise up a bit about security and adopt minimum standards of prevention and safety.
Not that I entirely disagree with you, but...
You doubtlessly dismiss stuff all the time, because your first impression left you disinterested, or gave you cause for dismissal. Not just political parties, obviously, though likely those as well. A book you might have liked, but the title and cover just threw you, and you didn't pick it up. A TV show that might have been good, but the name and TV guide description left you thinking it'd suck. A charitable organization whose purpose you'd have supported, but for the dumb acronym and campy saccharine pitch they threw.
And even if you're somehow above all that (doubt it), most people aren't. Why would you expect it not to apply to a political party? People make snap judgments every day.
Now, you might say that politics is more important, and that people should apply a greater standard of examination than they do for entertainment. But I ask you: have you paid any attention to all those far-out third parties that doubtless populate your local politics? No. You'd dismiss most of them at first glance.
That's an excellent idea. I know if a candidate was up for election where I am, and was a representative of the "Pirate" party, most people would think it was a joke (like the Rhinoceros party). The only votes they'd get would be for shits and giggles.
Conversely, if they represented the "Free Information" party or something that conveyed the same idea but was less clunky sounding, they'd be taken seriously. Hell, the Green party habitually gets taken seriously, and they're much for fringe, and have a sillier name.
That argument is a good one for why a developer/publisher should avoid DRM. What it fails to address is how they should stay in business.
Look, obviously simply eschewing DRM does not result in would-be pirates deciding to buy the game instead. You said it yourself, it's as easy for them to get the torrent of a non-DRMed game as it is to get the torrent of a DRMed triple-A title.
So how does an indie developer or old games distributor or what-have-you make enough money to remain solvent? DRM won't help. Building better games won't help, because quality does not deter piracy. Limit themselves to consoles and MMOs perhaps? Yeah, great, and that leaves those of us who like computer games with single player out to dry.
Sell more copies? Okay, that leaves the legitimate purchaser subsidizing the pirates free ride. And you need to find more legitimate customers somewhere. How exactly do you convince a pirate to buy the game instead? Because asking nicely or locking games up under intrusive security measures clearly isn't working.
However, if prostitution were legal...
Legal and regulated. The illegality of prostitution is only part of the problem with the current state of affairs.
Prostitution carries with it some serious societal issues. Coercion from pimps, poverty, VD, and back-alley abortions have been associated with prostitution for thousands of years. None of these will go away if the laws against soliciting are lifted.
Illegality adds another problem; it forces the business under the rug, leaving hookers essentially without legal recourse - they can be robbed, raped, killed, or otherwise harmed because the perp knows the victim won't go to the cops, or won't be missed.
Legalizing prostitution without regulating it will solve the last problem, but not the rest. Keeping it illegal only removes the problems from public view, and makes the situation worse for those involved. You need to legalize it, while imposing health and safety regulations.
OTOH, any charges against Assange are going to look that way, real or fabricated. Remember the old joke about conspiracy theories: if there's evidence to support them, then the truth has been uncovered, and if there's no evidence to support them, that just proves the conspirators are doing a good job of covering up.
My prediction is that this whole affair will never be resolved to anyone's satisfaction.