What about the frostbite? That's actually the least plausible result of Sunshine's suitless spacewalk. The cold wouldn't cause Mace too much harm in just 15 seconds, even if he encountered the very lowest temperatures in space. That's because heat leaves the body very slowly in a vacuum. The more likely damage would be a "space hickey"--caused from the swelling and bursting of the skin's small blood vessels--which would look more like the effects of freeze-drying a wart than a case of frostbite.
It is a good thing, but it only half solves the problem. While this decreases the incentive for google to file for offensive patents, it does nothing to mitigate the need for defensive patents, lest they be sued by a small non-OIN-member patent troll.
Furthermore, the bacteria in question is almost certainly safe because it evolved 4 mya, in the ocean, in the absence of humans, and likely in absence of a dense population of mammals of any kind. Now ask yourself, how many bacteria are there, and how many are harmful to humans. Further, probe how the few harmful strains became that way, and you'll find that they almost all developed as a result of centuries to millennia of interaction with dense populations of humans and other domesticated animals. The likelihood of a bacteria isolated from humans that is harmful to humans is so small as to be negligible. We might as well be worried about pushing asteroids off course...
I've patented the process of stripping new lines from a slashdot post. It is a clear improvement over the current functionality, and I expect my royalty check posthaste.
True, but perhaps the handful of lawyers that represent multiple sleazy clients (or chase ambulances, or advertise for their shady medical class actions) should stop whoring themselves out. It makes them look, well, sleazy.
On top of that, perhaps the bar should discourage those few lawyers from being so sleazy, as it brings down the reputation of the whole profession.
I wasn't aware of that, but 0.1c/year on average would almost certainly require FTL. See there aren't many (any?) of habitable planets within 10 ly, so to even get this colonization going you're going to need FTL.
I'm with you on the bit about civil law, but would it even be possible for sound exchange to cut off someone who sued them? Don't they make their money on compulsory licenses? IANAL, obviously, but I would think as long as you offer to pay sound exchange they have to let you play their songs.
That is if they're just sending out probes. If they're capable of colonizing it would be more suitable to envision them as a constantly expanding sphere. Consider that the prevailing wisdom puts the initial migration across the Bering Strait at ~14000 years ago, and there is archaeological evidence of people at the tip of S. America ~11000 years ago. Humans colonized along an ~12000 mi axis in ~3000 years, and at the time the fastest mode of transport was walking.
That is to say if FTL travel were possible the galaxy should have been colonized.
Yes, but if you and a hundred thousand of your friend all had spaceships, and 100,000 years, your progeny would number in the hundreds of trillions and you'd have colonized the entire galaxy. Which is the point of the paradox, populations grow exponentially, so where are they?
My preferred explination, c really is the universal speed limit.
The big, giant, should be intuitive answer that you omitted is that FTL travel is impossible, therefore, even if there are other civilizations out there they will never be able to reach us.
our galaxy was not conducive to intelligent until recently
Sounds like a twisted version of the anthropic principle.
The reason the Fermi Paradox is interesting is that "recent" in astronomical terms is a long, long time in even geological terms. Even if what you say were true, there would have been many times the incubation period for intelligent life to develop between then and now, and we still should have seen something by now.
It might be tired and exhausted, but it illustrates that first that Semites are an ethnic (not a religious) group, therefore being an anti-semite is akin to being a racist, not a religious bigot. This is important because racists don't get to use God to justify their hatred. Second by pointing out that Arabs are Semites you demonstrate not only the two groups similarities, but also that this is politically, not racially motivated hatred, this also separates the Arab "anti-semites" from the Nazi anti-semites, diffusing appeals or comparisons to the holocaust.
Call them the more accurate anti-zionists if you want. Anti-semite is purposely imprecise rhetoric designed to elevate a simple political rivalry.
Eh, if the N. Koreans lack the ability to make a simple gun type bomb (remember we didn't even test the little boy design prior to Hiroshima) I don't think it's a matter of time, I think they're either too incompetent or hamstrung by sanctions to be able to do it at all. It's probably going to take them a long time to get a sufficient quantity of fissle material to even try again, and we might actually make progress diplomatically before then.
As for the political situation in the middle east, it may be true that the House of Saud and the Ayatollah don't intend their nations to become liberal enough to replace them, but a little bit of liberty is hard to argue against from a rational (i.e. not islamist) perspective. The thing is when you gain a little liberty you tend to call for a little more and a little more, until you have essentially a functional democracy, what's more you can even get there with a hereditary head of state - see England and Sweden.
I'd never ever advocate an isolationist policy, but I also don't think we should be throwing our weight around unless we really need to. I didn't say we should be ignoring Kim Jong-Ill and Ahmadinejad, I said we should quit with the posturing. Personally I think that with Iran it is possible to go under Ahmadinejad, directly to the people - especially if we enlist the help of countries like Jordan. It is my understanding that there are a lot of remarkably progressive Persians who would love nothing more than a little bit more liberty, and once again, Ahmadinejad, was elected, the course could change if we gave them a reason not to elect another anti-western president.
N. Korea is sticky. You have to go through Kim Jong-Il, as there really is no way to reach the people. You have to convince him to act in the best interests of his people, which is no easy sell. I don't understand their reluctance to engage in multi-lateral talks, nor do I understand Bush's insistence on them, but I really think that is the way to go.
N. Korea is also pretty interesting, the cynic in me says the only reason they weren't the member of the "Axis of Evil" to be singled out for invasion was that they probably did (do?) actually have WMDs, and they probably would have actually used them, and all we really wanted was a show of force. No sense in getting bogged down in a conventional military conflict...
Also, I've got to believe that China loves having N. Korea around. Every time Kim Jong-Il says something it makes Hu Jintao look downright progressive.
Sanctions have to be the way to coax N. Korea into acting responsibly, but aside from the nuke issue, I'm not sure sanctions will work in Iran. I'm inclined to let Iran build a nuclear power plant for civilian use with no sanctions, provided they choose a design such as a pebble bed reactor that makes enrichment infeasible, and they buy their fuel, not produce their own. But other than that one issue, which I do think can be resolved once we get past Ahmadinejad's posturing, doing business with Iran might just be the thing to drag them the 21st century.
The last thing I want is ala carte TV. It might be cool today, when only techies do it, therefore propping up shows that techies like, but imagine if everybody did it...
How much more would it cost to get the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, or the SciFi Channel compared to the American Idol Channel, the Real World Channel, or the Survivor Channel?
Think of it this way, today the popular shows are subsidizing the niche (good) shows, with ala carte the niche shows will have to survive with just their own audiences.
If TV pricing moves to ala carte the good shows will be eclipsed (even more so) by the popular shows.
Eh, they're not just bottled tap water, they're RO treated municipal tap water. They bacterial count is sometimes higher because RO removed the chlorine in the tap water, the chlorine whose sole purpose is to inhibit bacterial growth.
The health issues presented by bacterial and municipal tap water are different. You aren't going to get sick from drinking either, but there might be a couple more incidences per million people of cancer due to the PCBs and other nasties in the tap water.
The hugeness of the universe is surpassed by only its age. Besides, if we confine ourselves to the galaxy, in which there is a still a huge probability of intelligent life. If we further confine ourselves to the regions of the galaxy life and colonization is possible, , i.e. not too close to the galactic center nor too far out on the outer arms, the space, while still huge, should have been colonized by now if it FTL were possible.
Maybe they wouldn't have found earth, but to take your flu season analogy a step further, while you might not catch the flu every year, you undoubtedly know someone who did. That is to say that if FTL were possible, we should be able to detect a massive galactic civilization. If a interstellar capable society were able to expand its territory by only 1 light year per year (trivial if you have FTL), it would take only 150,000 years to travel from one side of the galaxy to the other, even if the colonizing society kept to the outer rim, and didn't cut across the middle. In other words, a very short amount of time even in geologic time scales, and a veritable blink in galactic time scales.
As far as we can tell relativity indicates that any FTL, including bending space-time or using wormholes, implies time travel, which enables causality violations. If you can send matter or information from point A to point B faster than light could traverse the distance you can still time travel. (Here's a decent explanation of why this is so: http://www.sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html)
The best explanation I've read about why FTL is unlikely starts with colonization. Given the immense age of the universe it is unlikely that we are the first intelligent race to evolve. Given that any where that life evolves is prone to local catastrophe, any intelligent life will seek to colonize nearby planets. Given the exponential(ish) nature of population growth and tech development any once a society colonizes local planets it will be advantageous to colonize any and all available space. Therefore, if FTL travel were possible it seems unlikely in the extreme that an older, more advanced society hasn't already colonized large swaths of (at the very least) the galaxy. If large swaths of the galaxy were colonized it further seems unlikely that we'd still be hidden to them, or that they'd be undetectable to us.
The rather mundane conclusion is that we're likely to remain in our little corner of the galaxy for our entire history as a civilization, and further, in the unlikely event that we ever do manage to bump into another civilization large scale trade will be impractical given the immense interstellar distances.
(well that and FTL necessarily allows time travel, which breaks causality, which seems logically impossible)
I mean, this is Theatre Management 101 stuff here. This is a goshdamn INTERVIEW question. "You're on shift, and one of your ushers reports he saw some kids using a camera phone. What do you do?"
I wouldn't be surprised if this is an interview question, and the only acceptable answer is call the police. Alternatively, it may be a training topic, where managers learn that not calling the police is a fireable offense.
If google crashes it won't because of their esoteric apps aren't bringing in money, it will be because advertising dries up.
I'm not sure what the medium to long term trends in advertising spending are going to be, but no one is denying that google has put together a pretty stellar business around advertising.
Google which have no discernible business plan besides making money.
I wasn't aware that this sort of thing was a problem - at least if it's working out for them (which it is)
No, and no. There is a time honored tradition called the submarine patent, where you patent something, wait for someone else to develop it, wait some more for it to become profitable, and then sue. See NTP v. RIM for case in point, or read about the patent shenanigans surrounding the invention of the LASER (back when it was still capitalized).
Now, I know that some of you are out there saying the enemy of my enemy... But really it is nonsense like this that causes the big dogs to file so many stupid patents. If they don't patent the stupid and obvious, someone else might - and then sue them for it.
More companies need to see the light like IBM and realize that all patents after the first thousand or so are a liability, not an asset, and a cost, not an investment. Soon, after more suits like this start happening (look to the pharma and chemical industries) more major companies will start lobbying for patent reform, and then we might get something accomplished.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely, whoever raised that .7 needs to be spoken to in the harshest possible terms.
It is a good thing, but it only half solves the problem. While this decreases the incentive for google to file for offensive patents, it does nothing to mitigate the need for defensive patents, lest they be sued by a small non-OIN-member patent troll.
The iPhone is not...
* A video game emulation platform
I see no reason why games designed for the iPhone couldn't catch on.
Furthermore, the bacteria in question is almost certainly safe because it evolved 4 mya, in the ocean, in the absence of humans, and likely in absence of a dense population of mammals of any kind. Now ask yourself, how many bacteria are there, and how many are harmful to humans. Further, probe how the few harmful strains became that way, and you'll find that they almost all developed as a result of centuries to millennia of interaction with dense populations of humans and other domesticated animals. The likelihood of a bacteria isolated from humans that is harmful to humans is so small as to be negligible. We might as well be worried about pushing asteroids off course...
I've patented the process of stripping new lines from a slashdot post. It is a clear improvement over the current functionality, and I expect my royalty check posthaste.
True, but perhaps the handful of lawyers that represent multiple sleazy clients (or chase ambulances, or advertise for their shady medical class actions) should stop whoring themselves out. It makes them look, well, sleazy.
On top of that, perhaps the bar should discourage those few lawyers from being so sleazy, as it brings down the reputation of the whole profession.
0.1c per what? 0.1c/year?
I wasn't aware of that, but 0.1c/year on average would almost certainly require FTL. See there aren't many (any?) of habitable planets within 10 ly, so to even get this colonization going you're going to need FTL.
I'm with you on the bit about civil law, but would it even be possible for sound exchange to cut off someone who sued them? Don't they make their money on compulsory licenses? IANAL, obviously, but I would think as long as you offer to pay sound exchange they have to let you play their songs.
That is if they're just sending out probes. If they're capable of colonizing it would be more suitable to envision them as a constantly expanding sphere. Consider that the prevailing wisdom puts the initial migration across the Bering Strait at ~14000 years ago, and there is archaeological evidence of people at the tip of S. America ~11000 years ago. Humans colonized along an ~12000 mi axis in ~3000 years, and at the time the fastest mode of transport was walking.
That is to say if FTL travel were possible the galaxy should have been colonized.
Yes, but if you and a hundred thousand of your friend all had spaceships, and 100,000 years, your progeny would number in the hundreds of trillions and you'd have colonized the entire galaxy. Which is the point of the paradox, populations grow exponentially, so where are they?
My preferred explination, c really is the universal speed limit.
The big, giant, should be intuitive answer that you omitted is that FTL travel is impossible, therefore, even if there are other civilizations out there they will never be able to reach us.
The reason the Fermi Paradox is interesting is that "recent" in astronomical terms is a long, long time in even geological terms. Even if what you say were true, there would have been many times the incubation period for intelligent life to develop between then and now, and we still should have seen something by now.
It might be tired and exhausted, but it illustrates that first that Semites are an ethnic (not a religious) group, therefore being an anti-semite is akin to being a racist, not a religious bigot. This is important because racists don't get to use God to justify their hatred. Second by pointing out that Arabs are Semites you demonstrate not only the two groups similarities, but also that this is politically, not racially motivated hatred, this also separates the Arab "anti-semites" from the Nazi anti-semites, diffusing appeals or comparisons to the holocaust.
Call them the more accurate anti-zionists if you want. Anti-semite is purposely imprecise rhetoric designed to elevate a simple political rivalry.
Eh, if the N. Koreans lack the ability to make a simple gun type bomb (remember we didn't even test the little boy design prior to Hiroshima) I don't think it's a matter of time, I think they're either too incompetent or hamstrung by sanctions to be able to do it at all. It's probably going to take them a long time to get a sufficient quantity of fissle material to even try again, and we might actually make progress diplomatically before then.
As for the political situation in the middle east, it may be true that the House of Saud and the Ayatollah don't intend their nations to become liberal enough to replace them, but a little bit of liberty is hard to argue against from a rational (i.e. not islamist) perspective. The thing is when you gain a little liberty you tend to call for a little more and a little more, until you have essentially a functional democracy, what's more you can even get there with a hereditary head of state - see England and Sweden.
I'd never ever advocate an isolationist policy, but I also don't think we should be throwing our weight around unless we really need to. I didn't say we should be ignoring Kim Jong-Ill and Ahmadinejad, I said we should quit with the posturing. Personally I think that with Iran it is possible to go under Ahmadinejad, directly to the people - especially if we enlist the help of countries like Jordan. It is my understanding that there are a lot of remarkably progressive Persians who would love nothing more than a little bit more liberty, and once again, Ahmadinejad, was elected, the course could change if we gave them a reason not to elect another anti-western president.
N. Korea is sticky. You have to go through Kim Jong-Il, as there really is no way to reach the people. You have to convince him to act in the best interests of his people, which is no easy sell. I don't understand their reluctance to engage in multi-lateral talks, nor do I understand Bush's insistence on them, but I really think that is the way to go.
N. Korea is also pretty interesting, the cynic in me says the only reason they weren't the member of the "Axis of Evil" to be singled out for invasion was that they probably did (do?) actually have WMDs, and they probably would have actually used them, and all we really wanted was a show of force. No sense in getting bogged down in a conventional military conflict...
Also, I've got to believe that China loves having N. Korea around. Every time Kim Jong-Il says something it makes Hu Jintao look downright progressive.
Sanctions have to be the way to coax N. Korea into acting responsibly, but aside from the nuke issue, I'm not sure sanctions will work in Iran. I'm inclined to let Iran build a nuclear power plant for civilian use with no sanctions, provided they choose a design such as a pebble bed reactor that makes enrichment infeasible, and they buy their fuel, not produce their own. But other than that one issue, which I do think can be resolved once we get past Ahmadinejad's posturing, doing business with Iran might just be the thing to drag them the 21st century.
The last thing I want is ala carte TV. It might be cool today, when only techies do it, therefore propping up shows that techies like, but imagine if everybody did it...
How much more would it cost to get the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, or the SciFi Channel compared to the American Idol Channel, the Real World Channel, or the Survivor Channel?
Think of it this way, today the popular shows are subsidizing the niche (good) shows, with ala carte the niche shows will have to survive with just their own audiences.
If TV pricing moves to ala carte the good shows will be eclipsed (even more so) by the popular shows.
Eh, they're not just bottled tap water, they're RO treated municipal tap water. They bacterial count is sometimes higher because RO removed the chlorine in the tap water, the chlorine whose sole purpose is to inhibit bacterial growth.
The health issues presented by bacterial and municipal tap water are different. You aren't going to get sick from drinking either, but there might be a couple more incidences per million people of cancer due to the PCBs and other nasties in the tap water.
The hugeness of the universe is surpassed by only its age. Besides, if we confine ourselves to the galaxy, in which there is a still a huge probability of intelligent life. If we further confine ourselves to the regions of the galaxy life and colonization is possible, , i.e. not too close to the galactic center nor too far out on the outer arms, the space, while still huge, should have been colonized by now if it FTL were possible.
)
Maybe they wouldn't have found earth, but to take your flu season analogy a step further, while you might not catch the flu every year, you undoubtedly know someone who did. That is to say that if FTL were possible, we should be able to detect a massive galactic civilization. If a interstellar capable society were able to expand its territory by only 1 light year per year (trivial if you have FTL), it would take only 150,000 years to travel from one side of the galaxy to the other, even if the colonizing society kept to the outer rim, and didn't cut across the middle. In other words, a very short amount of time even in geologic time scales, and a veritable blink in galactic time scales.
As far as we can tell relativity indicates that any FTL, including bending space-time or using wormholes, implies time travel, which enables causality violations. If you can send matter or information from point A to point B faster than light could traverse the distance you can still time travel. (Here's a decent explanation of why this is so: http://www.sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html
The best explanation I've read about why FTL is unlikely starts with colonization. Given the immense age of the universe it is unlikely that we are the first intelligent race to evolve. Given that any where that life evolves is prone to local catastrophe, any intelligent life will seek to colonize nearby planets. Given the exponential(ish) nature of population growth and tech development any once a society colonizes local planets it will be advantageous to colonize any and all available space. Therefore, if FTL travel were possible it seems unlikely in the extreme that an older, more advanced society hasn't already colonized large swaths of (at the very least) the galaxy. If large swaths of the galaxy were colonized it further seems unlikely that we'd still be hidden to them, or that they'd be undetectable to us.
The rather mundane conclusion is that we're likely to remain in our little corner of the galaxy for our entire history as a civilization, and further, in the unlikely event that we ever do manage to bump into another civilization large scale trade will be impractical given the immense interstellar distances.
(well that and FTL necessarily allows time travel, which breaks causality, which seems logically impossible)
I'm not sure what the medium to long term trends in advertising spending are going to be, but no one is denying that google has put together a pretty stellar business around advertising.
I wasn't aware that this sort of thing was a problem - at least if it's working out for them (which it is)
Do this and read articles like this Maybe not perfect, but I'd call it reform.
Unless the EU has modified the SI meaning of month, I think they'd still have a hard time from 2004-2005.
No, and no. There is a time honored tradition called the submarine patent, where you patent something, wait for someone else to develop it, wait some more for it to become profitable, and then sue. See NTP v. RIM for case in point, or read about the patent shenanigans surrounding the invention of the LASER (back when it was still capitalized).
Now, I know that some of you are out there saying the enemy of my enemy... But really it is nonsense like this that causes the big dogs to file so many stupid patents. If they don't patent the stupid and obvious, someone else might - and then sue them for it.
More companies need to see the light like IBM and realize that all patents after the first thousand or so are a liability, not an asset, and a cost, not an investment. Soon, after more suits like this start happening (look to the pharma and chemical industries) more major companies will start lobbying for patent reform, and then we might get something accomplished.
Yeah it's too bad that the only undeveloped land in Alaska is separated from the "major population centers" by a mile of water.