Um, yes. Net cost: $2500, plus many hours of my time, all wasted.
but over here in the UK it's actually fairly easy to go to court without a lawyer, and they do a lot to make it easier.
Congratulations. The English have always had a reputation for being sensible.
And our legal systems are pretty similar to each other, when you look at them...
Formally, yes. In practise, I am not so sure. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the US is not entirely of English ancestry, even culturally speaking. We got enough Continentals, with their Roman curia love of Proper Procedure, to drag us away from the get-to-the-damn-point Saxon/Danish warband original conception of English law. Pity.
will this really do anything to solve any of the problems we currently have?
No. But the difference between the problem of getting men to Mars and the "problems" you mention -- and you could just as well have added the "problems" of the inevitability of death, taxes, and bad luck -- is that the former can actually be solved.
I think space exploration is a worthwhile endeavor, but AFTER we make life a little better for the next generation.
Some of us feel that space exploration is how we make life better for the next generation. We leave them a more exciting future, a new frontier to conquer, new adventures to motive them, and new technology to serve them. We tend to feel that throwing vast amounts of time and money down various rat-holes, by trying to "solve" insoluble problems that have been with us unchanged since the birth of Christ is much like the ancient Egyptians building enormous pyramids to please nonexistent gods -- a foolish and futile waste of our childrens' inheritance.
Actually, nothing takes a better edge than plain (unfortunately rust-prone) carbon steel. Stainless steel takes a much poorer edge. Don't know why, but there it is. This is why the best knives for the kitchen are carbon steel and need to be protected from staying wet.
No, no, the thing that keeps the cost of lawyers up is the fact that the justice system is set up to utterly screw you, even in trivial matters, unless you have a lawyer well-known to the Court by your side.
Result: almost infinite demand for lawyers. Infinite demand + finite supply = very high equilibrium price. I don't think the cost of doing business (including advertising) is significant. If it were the profit margin on lawyering would be slim, and we all know that's not the case, har har. And some people think ExxonMobil makes obscene profits...!
Now, if the system were arranged so that for routine matters you could just go into Court yourself and put your case plainly without fearing for your life, the demand for lawyers would be reasonable, and their price more in line with the value of their service.
Hubble's replacement is the James Webb Telescope, and has been in the works for a long time. Slated for launch in 2013, it will have a 6.5 meter primary mirror (Hubble's is 2.4 meters), be optimized for the near-infrared (so it can see through dust clouds, and further back in time and/or farther away), and orbit at the second Lagrange point about a million miles from Earth, instead of right around Earth like Hubble. That means it won't be bothered by light from the Earth, so it can see far dimmer things, and also that it can point steadily without having to compensate for its rapid orbital motion, unlike Hubble.
Hubble is certainly very nice for crowd-pleasing photos, and it's done valuable science, but I think the astrophysics community is a lot more interested in JWST. Near IR astronomy seems much more fruitful in terms of actual science than visible, is my impression. Considering a Shuttle mission costs something like $250 million, it is not clear that the money is best spent prolonging the aging Hubble's lifetime another few years. Bear in mind the Shuttle fleet is to be grounded in 2010 anyway, so there can be no more servicing missions, and Hubble's hardware is beginning to wear out.
Why is it that liberals use Google and other online technology to influence elections?
Because they believe more firmly that it will work. The other side is, well, conservative. They remain skeptical that the net has as much influence as its most starry-eyed dreamers say it has. They figure their time, money and effort is better put into old-fashioned politicking, e.g. local get-out-the-vote organizations, having people call their neighbors, or walk over and knock on doors come election day, or having the candidate over to the church after Sunday pancakes to talk, et cetera and so forth.
Wrap the entire building in foil. Add a layer of thin dielectric, then another layer of foil.
Must remember to put rubber mats in all the entryways, of course.
Bonus benefit: no need for a security system. Just give the phone number of the county coroner to the janitor, so that if someone tries to break in overnight, the bodies will be cleaned up before anyone arrives for work in the morning.
Well, just to answer one point in the middle of your fine-sounding speech, no, as a matter of fact I don't believe in democracy. The majority is always right? Reality is what we vote it to be? Ten million fools make better decisions than one? Please. Ask me to believe the stars control our destiny -- that would be much easier to swallow. I think a person can only believe in democracy the same way he might believe in the second coming of Christ or the 99 virgins awaiting him in Paradise if he lives a good Islamic life. It's an act of completely blind religious faith.
However: while we know wise and just rulers exist amongst us, we have never been able to set up a system that reliably picks them out. Every attempt ends in disaster. So...democracy is that with which we're left when every other idea falls flat. As the sage said, democracy is the worst possible political system -- except for any other.
So I live with it, because all other choices are worse. But, no, I haven't drunk the Kool Aid, so I don't believe in democracy with the customary sacred fervor. I merely accept its necessity, the way I accept the necessity of death and taxes.
Using a computer-captured image of your face in Court would presumably come under the same rules as using a photograph of your face. More or less, if you appear in public, your image can be used.
The more interesting question, I suggest, is whether a computer recognition of your face is going to be in any way equivalent to a human recognition of your face.
For example: if you stroll into a 7-Eleven, and the donuphage with a badge sitting there swilling coffee thinks you look like a famous bank robber whose mug has been circulated by the FBI, then he's entitled to take you into custody, and search you (for his own safety and those nearby, et cetera). If he finds half a gram of coke on you, you're in trouble. Now suppose it isn't the cop's eye/brain combination that "recognizes" you as a bank robber, but rather his shoulder-mounted camera/computer combination. Is he still entitled to act in the same way?
You can argue it both ways: (1) the camera/computer is almost certainly always going to be worse at this kind of thing than the eye/brain. Recognition is about the single most important thing our eyes and brains do, and they are highly optimized for it by natural selection. If it could be done better and faster, we would do it. So, we should trust the camera/computer less. But (2) the camera/computer is not subject to the vagaries of human psychology, mood, et cetera. The cop may take you in unreasonably because he doesn't like your skin color or length of hair, the camera/computer isn't subject to the same prejudices. So maybe it's better to trust the mindless device.
Actually that's a bit dangerous. If they realize you're lying, and can convince a Federal jury that you were, then you can be sent to prison, even if you were concealing something harmless. Just ask Martha Stewart.
In fact, it's not out of the realm of possibility that they'd rather you lied than flat out refused, since once you've lied and they know it you're on a serious hook, and they can then negotiate with you for what they really want. You're much better off just politely refusing.
am I in any way legally required to type / provide my password?
Nope. But then they're not legally required to let you into the country, either. I suspect if they really wanted to see what's on your hard drive, you'd be given the choice of giving them the password or sleeping in the airport arrival lounge until a Federal judge heard the case.
Ah. Let me introduce a new word into the discussion, then: hyperbole.
The bit about crawling over broken glass was mere rhetorical flourish. The serious statement is the bit before that, where I said I think it's absurd to try to get to the polls those who aren't concerned enough to vote when it's as easy as it is. The Republic is better off if such lazy and unconcerned folks don't vote. Do you disagree?
Well...first of all, if your physiology is well-adapted to the radio waves from the Sun, why would the radio waves coming from the transmitter matter? Same photons, right? The Sun has generated plenty of radio all its life -- if we turn the receiver to a "blank" spot on the spectrum and turn the squelch off we can easily hear old Sol crackling and sputtering away in the radio spectrum.
Secondly, one of the weirdnesses about quantum mechanics and chemistry that may be tripping us up here is this: photons have to be above a certain energy threshold to cause a chemical reaction (which is what we're fearing here, a chemical reaction in a cell that does something bad, like mutating a gene in a piece of DNA). And if the photons are below the energy threshold, nothing happens, no matter how many of them there are. It isn't like a million low-energy photons can "add up" to one high-energy photon, because the electronic transition that has to happen to get the reaction going has to happen all at once, by absorbing one photon. It can't happen a little bit at a time, by absorbing many small photons -- that's what makes the whole business "quantum."
I'm not saying I wouldn't move my chair away from the beast as far as I could, or stay in that room my entire career, but I wouldn't worry about it too much over the short term. After all, every one of us modern humans typically spends his entire day inside a building -- i.e. inside a giant wire cage radiating 60 Hz radio energy -- instead of outside. We ride several times a year above most of the atmosphere in airplanes, exposing ourselves to extremely high-energy cosmic radiation. We breathe all kinds of interestingly reactive compounds of nitrogen and oxygen from engine exhaust all day and night. It probably does, in the end, add up to something, and probably we die of this instead of that somewhat more often than our ancestors did. But, well, no one gets out alive anyway. Chances are probably very good that something mundane like cholesterol or a drunk driver will get you before the radio waves do...if that's any consolation.
So you're implying better decisions are made by those who aren't concerned enough about the outcome to be (in my words) "serious" or (in your words) "crazy [and] single-minded"?
Hmm. So if I decide how your income is spent, and vice versa, we'll both be better off? Interesting logic.
Then you suspect wrong. First of all, turnout in the last national election was 57% of the voting-age population. 57% of the population can't be classified as "extremists" without perverting the definition of "extreme."
Secondly, the most recent national-level election history has been one of sharp and sudden swings, e.g. from Carter to Reagan/Bush to Clinton and on to Dubya, not to mention the '94 Republican tidal wave, and possibly the Democratic resurgence this year. That makes no sense at all if only dedicated partisans -- who hardly ever change their vote -- are voting. On the other hand, it does make sense if large masses of votes come from a bunch of flaky uninformed wishy-washy oh-I-dunno fools whose votes can be easily swayed by a clever political ad or blip in the economy or a sex scandal or some other random noise. It's like there's a wire loose in the national decision-making apparatus (or inside their pointy little heads), so any random thwack on the case makes the output voltage flop around crazily.
Thirdly, the history of the Republic has been one of steadily expanding franchise. That is, as you reel back the decades and centuries, fewer and fewer people have been allowed to vote. If the country is in shambles now and it wasn't then, and this has anything at all to do with who votes, then it must be that widening the franchise -- making it easier for more people to vote -- is what has led to trouble.
Don't be so sure. The frequency of the photons matters a lot. That's why a bright day's sunlight turned into X or gamma rays will kill you dead.
It would be strange indeed if FM radio waves, which have a very low energy per photon, could do any serious harm to a body. Little in our body resembles an antenna big enough to download them. Cell phone waves are much higher frequency, of course, but exposure to them is still nothing like our daily exposure to visible, IR, UV, radio and every other photonimal in the electromagnetic zoo from old Sol overhead.
God forbid. The last thing I want is some lazy doofus voting and cancelling out the effect of my carefully-researched, painstakingly thought-out vote.
I say make it much harder to vote. Make people crawl a hundred yards over broken glass on Sunday night at 4 AM in a driving rainstorm to vote. Then only those of us really fucking serious about the whole business will be making the decisions.
Democrats will take the 435-member House of Representatives back by a likely margin of 5-15 seats. There are almost no serious analysts who disagree on this point.
Why wouldn't we want to think about the possible consequences of our inventions?
Becausing thinking takes energy and time, which may be put to better use elsewhere. Or to put it more poetically:
"If all of us contemplate the Infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera."
While we always hear quite a lot about the wisdom of thinking everything out ahead of time, I'll just mention that there's a lot to be said for trial-and-error, too. You waste a lot less time thinking carefully through things that will never happen, for example.
No kidding? That's amazing. I would never have imagined that. So the explosion involves some kind of jetting effect that sends the remnant off with a high velocity? That's wild.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever tried?
Um, yes. Net cost: $2500, plus many hours of my time, all wasted.
but over here in the UK it's actually fairly easy to go to court without a lawyer, and they do a lot to make it easier.
Congratulations. The English have always had a reputation for being sensible.
And our legal systems are pretty similar to each other, when you look at them...
Formally, yes. In practise, I am not so sure. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the US is not entirely of English ancestry, even culturally speaking. We got enough Continentals, with their Roman curia love of Proper Procedure, to drag us away from the get-to-the-damn-point Saxon/Danish warband original conception of English law. Pity.
will this really do anything to solve any of the problems we currently have?
No. But the difference between the problem of getting men to Mars and the "problems" you mention -- and you could just as well have added the "problems" of the inevitability of death, taxes, and bad luck -- is that the former can actually be solved.
I think space exploration is a worthwhile endeavor, but AFTER we make life a little better for the next generation.
Some of us feel that space exploration is how we make life better for the next generation. We leave them a more exciting future, a new frontier to conquer, new adventures to motive them, and new technology to serve them. We tend to feel that throwing vast amounts of time and money down various rat-holes, by trying to "solve" insoluble problems that have been with us unchanged since the birth of Christ is much like the ancient Egyptians building enormous pyramids to please nonexistent gods -- a foolish and futile waste of our childrens' inheritance.
Actually, nothing takes a better edge than plain (unfortunately rust-prone) carbon steel. Stainless steel takes a much poorer edge. Don't know why, but there it is. This is why the best knives for the kitchen are carbon steel and need to be protected from staying wet.
No, no, the thing that keeps the cost of lawyers up is the fact that the justice system is set up to utterly screw you, even in trivial matters, unless you have a lawyer well-known to the Court by your side.
Result: almost infinite demand for lawyers. Infinite demand + finite supply = very high equilibrium price. I don't think the cost of doing business (including advertising) is significant. If it were the profit margin on lawyering would be slim, and we all know that's not the case, har har. And some people think ExxonMobil makes obscene profits...!
Now, if the system were arranged so that for routine matters you could just go into Court yourself and put your case plainly without fearing for your life, the demand for lawyers would be reasonable, and their price more in line with the value of their service.
Goodness, just because it's optimized for near IR doesn't mean it can't do visible. They're right next to each other in the spectrum, you know.
Because each side has a finite supply of time, effort, and money.
Hubble's replacement is the James Webb Telescope, and has been in the works for a long time. Slated for launch in 2013, it will have a 6.5 meter primary mirror (Hubble's is 2.4 meters), be optimized for the near-infrared (so it can see through dust clouds, and further back in time and/or farther away), and orbit at the second Lagrange point about a million miles from Earth, instead of right around Earth like Hubble. That means it won't be bothered by light from the Earth, so it can see far dimmer things, and also that it can point steadily without having to compensate for its rapid orbital motion, unlike Hubble.
Hubble is certainly very nice for crowd-pleasing photos, and it's done valuable science, but I think the astrophysics community is a lot more interested in JWST. Near IR astronomy seems much more fruitful in terms of actual science than visible, is my impression. Considering a Shuttle mission costs something like $250 million, it is not clear that the money is best spent prolonging the aging Hubble's lifetime another few years. Bear in mind the Shuttle fleet is to be grounded in 2010 anyway, so there can be no more servicing missions, and Hubble's hardware is beginning to wear out.
Why is it that liberals use Google and other online technology to influence elections?
Because they believe more firmly that it will work. The other side is, well, conservative. They remain skeptical that the net has as much influence as its most starry-eyed dreamers say it has. They figure their time, money and effort is better put into old-fashioned politicking, e.g. local get-out-the-vote organizations, having people call their neighbors, or walk over and knock on doors come election day, or having the candidate over to the church after Sunday pancakes to talk, et cetera and so forth.
Soon enough we'll know who was right.
Honestly, 90% of the media who covers the technology beat are the biggest pack of crybabies in the world.
I don't think you need the qualification in boldface.
Wrap the entire building in foil. Add a layer of thin dielectric, then another layer of foil.
Must remember to put rubber mats in all the entryways, of course.
Bonus benefit: no need for a security system. Just give the phone number of the county coroner to the janitor, so that if someone tries to break in overnight, the bodies will be cleaned up before anyone arrives for work in the morning.
Well, just to answer one point in the middle of your fine-sounding speech, no, as a matter of fact I don't believe in democracy. The majority is always right? Reality is what we vote it to be? Ten million fools make better decisions than one? Please. Ask me to believe the stars control our destiny -- that would be much easier to swallow. I think a person can only believe in democracy the same way he might believe in the second coming of Christ or the 99 virgins awaiting him in Paradise if he lives a good Islamic life. It's an act of completely blind religious faith.
However: while we know wise and just rulers exist amongst us, we have never been able to set up a system that reliably picks them out. Every attempt ends in disaster. So...democracy is that with which we're left when every other idea falls flat. As the sage said, democracy is the worst possible political system -- except for any other.
So I live with it, because all other choices are worse. But, no, I haven't drunk the Kool Aid, so I don't believe in democracy with the customary sacred fervor. I merely accept its necessity, the way I accept the necessity of death and taxes.
Using a computer-captured image of your face in Court would presumably come under the same rules as using a photograph of your face. More or less, if you appear in public, your image can be used.
The more interesting question, I suggest, is whether a computer recognition of your face is going to be in any way equivalent to a human recognition of your face.
For example: if you stroll into a 7-Eleven, and the donuphage with a badge sitting there swilling coffee thinks you look like a famous bank robber whose mug has been circulated by the FBI, then he's entitled to take you into custody, and search you (for his own safety and those nearby, et cetera). If he finds half a gram of coke on you, you're in trouble. Now suppose it isn't the cop's eye/brain combination that "recognizes" you as a bank robber, but rather his shoulder-mounted camera/computer combination. Is he still entitled to act in the same way?
You can argue it both ways: (1) the camera/computer is almost certainly always going to be worse at this kind of thing than the eye/brain. Recognition is about the single most important thing our eyes and brains do, and they are highly optimized for it by natural selection. If it could be done better and faster, we would do it. So, we should trust the camera/computer less. But (2) the camera/computer is not subject to the vagaries of human psychology, mood, et cetera. The cop may take you in unreasonably because he doesn't like your skin color or length of hair, the camera/computer isn't subject to the same prejudices. So maybe it's better to trust the mindless device.
Actually that's a bit dangerous. If they realize you're lying, and can convince a Federal jury that you were, then you can be sent to prison, even if you were concealing something harmless. Just ask Martha Stewart.
In fact, it's not out of the realm of possibility that they'd rather you lied than flat out refused, since once you've lied and they know it you're on a serious hook, and they can then negotiate with you for what they really want. You're much better off just politely refusing.
am I in any way legally required to type / provide my password?
Nope. But then they're not legally required to let you into the country, either. I suspect if they really wanted to see what's on your hard drive, you'd be given the choice of giving them the password or sleeping in the airport arrival lounge until a Federal judge heard the case.
Ah. Let me introduce a new word into the discussion, then: hyperbole.
The bit about crawling over broken glass was mere rhetorical flourish. The serious statement is the bit before that, where I said I think it's absurd to try to get to the polls those who aren't concerned enough to vote when it's as easy as it is. The Republic is better off if such lazy and unconcerned folks don't vote. Do you disagree?
Well...first of all, if your physiology is well-adapted to the radio waves from the Sun, why would the radio waves coming from the transmitter matter? Same photons, right? The Sun has generated plenty of radio all its life -- if we turn the receiver to a "blank" spot on the spectrum and turn the squelch off we can easily hear old Sol crackling and sputtering away in the radio spectrum.
Secondly, one of the weirdnesses about quantum mechanics and chemistry that may be tripping us up here is this: photons have to be above a certain energy threshold to cause a chemical reaction (which is what we're fearing here, a chemical reaction in a cell that does something bad, like mutating a gene in a piece of DNA). And if the photons are below the energy threshold, nothing happens, no matter how many of them there are. It isn't like a million low-energy photons can "add up" to one high-energy photon, because the electronic transition that has to happen to get the reaction going has to happen all at once, by absorbing one photon. It can't happen a little bit at a time, by absorbing many small photons -- that's what makes the whole business "quantum."
I'm not saying I wouldn't move my chair away from the beast as far as I could, or stay in that room my entire career, but I wouldn't worry about it too much over the short term. After all, every one of us modern humans typically spends his entire day inside a building -- i.e. inside a giant wire cage radiating 60 Hz radio energy -- instead of outside. We ride several times a year above most of the atmosphere in airplanes, exposing ourselves to extremely high-energy cosmic radiation. We breathe all kinds of interestingly reactive compounds of nitrogen and oxygen from engine exhaust all day and night. It probably does, in the end, add up to something, and probably we die of this instead of that somewhat more often than our ancestors did. But, well, no one gets out alive anyway. Chances are probably very good that something mundane like cholesterol or a drunk driver will get you before the radio waves do...if that's any consolation.
So you're implying better decisions are made by those who aren't concerned enough about the outcome to be (in my words) "serious" or (in your words) "crazy [and] single-minded"?
Hmm. So if I decide how your income is spent, and vice versa, we'll both be better off? Interesting logic.
So you're wondering whether I'm willing to sound like a confused fool in public in order to learn something?
Yup.
Thanks for the pointer.
Then you suspect wrong. First of all, turnout in the last national election was 57% of the voting-age population. 57% of the population can't be classified as "extremists" without perverting the definition of "extreme."
Secondly, the most recent national-level election history has been one of sharp and sudden swings, e.g. from Carter to Reagan/Bush to Clinton and on to Dubya, not to mention the '94 Republican tidal wave, and possibly the Democratic resurgence this year. That makes no sense at all if only dedicated partisans -- who hardly ever change their vote -- are voting. On the other hand, it does make sense if large masses of votes come from a bunch of flaky uninformed wishy-washy oh-I-dunno fools whose votes can be easily swayed by a clever political ad or blip in the economy or a sex scandal or some other random noise. It's like there's a wire loose in the national decision-making apparatus (or inside their pointy little heads), so any random thwack on the case makes the output voltage flop around crazily.
Thirdly, the history of the Republic has been one of steadily expanding franchise. That is, as you reel back the decades and centuries, fewer and fewer people have been allowed to vote. If the country is in shambles now and it wasn't then, and this has anything at all to do with who votes, then it must be that widening the franchise -- making it easier for more people to vote -- is what has led to trouble.
Don't be so sure. The frequency of the photons matters a lot. That's why a bright day's sunlight turned into X or gamma rays will kill you dead.
It would be strange indeed if FM radio waves, which have a very low energy per photon, could do any serious harm to a body. Little in our body resembles an antenna big enough to download them. Cell phone waves are much higher frequency, of course, but exposure to them is still nothing like our daily exposure to visible, IR, UV, radio and every other photonimal in the electromagnetic zoo from old Sol overhead.
God forbid. The last thing I want is some lazy doofus voting and cancelling out the effect of my carefully-researched, painstakingly thought-out vote.
I say make it much harder to vote. Make people crawl a hundred yards over broken glass on Sunday night at 4 AM in a driving rainstorm to vote. Then only those of us really fucking serious about the whole business will be making the decisions.
Democrats will take the 435-member House of Representatives back by a likely margin of 5-15 seats. There are almost no serious analysts who disagree on this point.
I wonder why we need to have the election, then?
Why wouldn't we want to think about the possible consequences of our inventions?
Becausing thinking takes energy and time, which may be put to better use elsewhere. Or to put it more poetically:
"If all of us contemplate the Infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera."
While we always hear quite a lot about the wisdom of thinking everything out ahead of time, I'll just mention that there's a lot to be said for trial-and-error, too. You waste a lot less time thinking carefully through things that will never happen, for example.
No kidding? That's amazing. I would never have imagined that. So the explosion involves some kind of jetting effect that sends the remnant off with a high velocity? That's wild.