No kidding. The whole article feels like it should come with the heading "This message brought to you by the Insurance Industry, looking out for our^H^H^Hyour interests!"
It's rather irrelevant what you think, Mr. Bigelow. There are currently international treaties banning any nation (and by extension any citizen of a nation) from claiming extraterrestrial territory. So bugger off and do something useful with your money.
My understanding is that the false positive rate is so high that it's essentially useless at determining if someone is lying. As others have alluded to, it is the subject's belief that the interrogator with his machine that can somehow determine lies from truth that counts. Since even innocent people accused of a crime and interrogated in this fashion will have high stress levels, the machine itself has absolutely no technical capacity to determine truth or lie. The secret to beating a polygraph boils down to knowing that it's all smoke and mirrors and pseudoscientific BS.
"Flawed in principle" is putting it rather mildly. I'd put it as "complete and utter bullshit." Polygraphs are on a level with dousing and voodoo dolls.
Basic research is the sea out of which major new technologies grow. Perhaps you think the West should just cede its technological dominance because it costs money to get there, but some of us see that as a form of cultural suicide.
The US is at absolutely no fucking risk of going broke. The sheer value of its human, industrial and natural resources make that just about impossible.
The sad part is that we're not using some great portion of the profits from oil to work on alternatives. When we run out of oil or its environmental effects become so deleterious that we can no longer justify its use, we will have squandered vast amounts of money and resources.
Basic research is the cornerstone of pretty much all technological developments of the last two centuries. Do you seriously imagine that our materials technologies would be anywhere near where they are now without basic research into chemistry and physics?
Let me guess, you're one of those people who thinks that all development is just a series of Eureka! moments.
If they can pull it off, it tells Pakistan, "We can land a nuke on Islamabad just as easily as we send a probe to Mars." This is exactly how the US-USSR space race played out. The Apollo and Soyuz programs were all about demonstrating the capacity of missile technology.
How many of his defenders would hire him to manage critical systems? If the guy came on to my premises looking for a job, I'd have him escorted odd the premises,
I dare you to take the keys to your boss's car and when confronted by legal proceedings, use the likely lack of policy saying "You must turn in your employer's keys" as your big argument for your behavior.
If we're postulating that in the next few centuries we come up with energy sources that could accelerate us to something like 20% of c, then I'd say we probably have the tech to build the shielding. We'd have to, as moving at such a high fraction of c means radiation approaching us going to be blue shifted, and thus more intense.
But hey, if it makes you feel special to imagine we're doomed and that there is some sort of limit on the kinds of technologies that we can develop to deal with what would still remain problems of physics as we understand it now, be my guest.
Um, no. What stops anything from going faster than the speed of light is that the faster an object goes, the more massive it becomes. As it approaches a high fraction of c its mass approaches infinity. To get all the way to c would require an infinite amount of energy. Photons can move at c because they are massless. It is that requirement of infinite energy that makes c the ultimate speed limit. Nothing with mass can ever reach c.
Even if that turns out to be the case, the one thing we may develop in the future are better ways of harnessing energy. Even if the speed of light remains the limit, and no feasible way around it (ie. wormholes, warp, whatever), we could still conceivably accelerate spacecraft to a reasonably high fraction of c which would, while not helping out observers on Earth, allow voyagers, one way or the other, to reach other stars in far less time. Tens of thousands of years to the nearest possible lifebearing solar systems could be dropped to a few centuries.
If worse comes to worse, if we ever create energy sources capable of accelerating us to a reasonably large fraction of c, even if, in Earth time, visiting another solar system might tens or hundreds of thousands of years at non-relativistic speeds, the occupants of such a craft would experience time dilation, and for them it would be a much shorter ride.
Exactly. We don't know what we don't know. So yes, at the moment, the best we can do is find these planets, see if we can recognize the signatures of life (the discovery of which would be monumental whether we can ever get there or not), and bequeath that information to future generations who may have far greater technical and scientific capabilities than we do.
We spend the next few centuries analyzing it with ever better optical and spectroscopic technology, and maybe, if we're really bloody lucky, we figure out some new physics and end up going there.
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Yes, because someone is going to follow said driver to their destination, and then beat them to death with a crowbar.
Well fuck then! I'm going to start driving backwards, that way my insurance company gives me money!
No kidding. The whole article feels like it should come with the heading "This message brought to you by the Insurance Industry, looking out for our^H^H^Hyour interests!"
It's rather irrelevant what you think, Mr. Bigelow. There are currently international treaties banning any nation (and by extension any citizen of a nation) from claiming extraterrestrial territory. So bugger off and do something useful with your money.
For some /.ers that's going to mean they have to do grunt suppression.
My understanding is that the false positive rate is so high that it's essentially useless at determining if someone is lying. As others have alluded to, it is the subject's belief that the interrogator with his machine that can somehow determine lies from truth that counts. Since even innocent people accused of a crime and interrogated in this fashion will have high stress levels, the machine itself has absolutely no technical capacity to determine truth or lie. The secret to beating a polygraph boils down to knowing that it's all smoke and mirrors and pseudoscientific BS.
I'm on DSL, you insensitive clod!
"Flawed in principle" is putting it rather mildly. I'd put it as "complete and utter bullshit." Polygraphs are on a level with dousing and voodoo dolls.
Basic research is the sea out of which major new technologies grow. Perhaps you think the West should just cede its technological dominance because it costs money to get there, but some of us see that as a form of cultural suicide.
The US is at absolutely no fucking risk of going broke. The sheer value of its human, industrial and natural resources make that just about impossible.
Not to mention it causes cancer!
The sad part is that we're not using some great portion of the profits from oil to work on alternatives. When we run out of oil or its environmental effects become so deleterious that we can no longer justify its use, we will have squandered vast amounts of money and resources.
It is a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
If you like anarchy, I urge you to mocve'to somalia, a real Libertarian paradise
I imagine the US would have a whole lot more enemies if it gave up its ability to project force to multiple geographic locations simultaneously.
And what do you have, photon police that go around the EU hunting for people pumping more dB than is allowed?
Basic research is the cornerstone of pretty much all technological developments of the last two centuries. Do you seriously imagine that our materials technologies would be anywhere near where they are now without basic research into chemistry and physics?
Let me guess, you're one of those people who thinks that all development is just a series of Eureka! moments.
If they can pull it off, it tells Pakistan, "We can land a nuke on Islamabad just as easily as we send a probe to Mars." This is exactly how the US-USSR space race played out. The Apollo and Soyuz programs were all about demonstrating the capacity of missile technology.
How many of his defenders would hire him to manage critical systems? If the guy came on to my premises looking for a job, I'd have him escorted odd the premises,
I dare you to take the keys to your boss's car and when confronted by legal proceedings, use the likely lack of policy saying "You must turn in your employer's keys" as your big argument for your behavior.
If we're postulating that in the next few centuries we come up with energy sources that could accelerate us to something like 20% of c, then I'd say we probably have the tech to build the shielding. We'd have to, as moving at such a high fraction of c means radiation approaching us going to be blue shifted, and thus more intense.
But hey, if it makes you feel special to imagine we're doomed and that there is some sort of limit on the kinds of technologies that we can develop to deal with what would still remain problems of physics as we understand it now, be my guest.
Um, no. What stops anything from going faster than the speed of light is that the faster an object goes, the more massive it becomes. As it approaches a high fraction of c its mass approaches infinity. To get all the way to c would require an infinite amount of energy. Photons can move at c because they are massless. It is that requirement of infinite energy that makes c the ultimate speed limit. Nothing with mass can ever reach c.
Even if that turns out to be the case, the one thing we may develop in the future are better ways of harnessing energy. Even if the speed of light remains the limit, and no feasible way around it (ie. wormholes, warp, whatever), we could still conceivably accelerate spacecraft to a reasonably high fraction of c which would, while not helping out observers on Earth, allow voyagers, one way or the other, to reach other stars in far less time. Tens of thousands of years to the nearest possible lifebearing solar systems could be dropped to a few centuries.
If worse comes to worse, if we ever create energy sources capable of accelerating us to a reasonably large fraction of c, even if, in Earth time, visiting another solar system might tens or hundreds of thousands of years at non-relativistic speeds, the occupants of such a craft would experience time dilation, and for them it would be a much shorter ride.
Exactly. We don't know what we don't know. So yes, at the moment, the best we can do is find these planets, see if we can recognize the signatures of life (the discovery of which would be monumental whether we can ever get there or not), and bequeath that information to future generations who may have far greater technical and scientific capabilities than we do.
We spend the next few centuries analyzing it with ever better optical and spectroscopic technology, and maybe, if we're really bloody lucky, we figure out some new physics and end up going there.
Unless, of course, y'know, we don't know everything there is to know about physics.