For initial tests, by Florey, in 1940, on human subjects, it had required two professors, five graduates and ten assistants working almost every day of the week for several months to produce enough penicillin to treat six patients.
What do you suppose penicillin cost in 1940? Here's a clue, in an anecdote about an early patient, from the same history:
In 1946 my osteomyelitis returned....Dad chose a hazardous job so his son could get hospital care, He worked days and afternoon shifts, and at times "bonus hours" as well. But Mum couldn't sleep when Dad was on afternoon shift. and getting home around 1 am or later. There was lots of stress at home.
Penicillin was a miracle drug that was now available for the treatment of conditions caused by infection - like osteomyelitis. Sulfa drugs had stopped the bone disease in '42, but still a hip fusion was needed. Also, though the sulfa worked on the short run, it did not eliminate the infection from the bone marrow.
This time Dr. Mowat used penicillin to stop the infection right away. It also eradicated it completely. Not once in all these years did osteomyelitis ever come back!
Theory: "Easy - because there's no money in the cure. They want your repeat business to feed their cash cow. How are they going to do that with a one-time cure?"
Experiment: "Fourth-quarter earnings released Wednesday [8 Feb 2006] show that [British drug-maker GlaxoSmithKline]'s revenue continues to surge, mainly on strong sales of its vaccines and treatments for asthma and diabetes..."
One hopes that the Supreme Court will interpret the clause to mean that District Court has discretion to issue an injunction, but only on a showing that an injunction is equitable.
Yes, well, let's hope if they do they also draw a few bright lines for the future information of potential parties to a dispute, and not give us some more fucking Sandra Day can't-make-up-my-mind oh-it-just-depends "balancing" tests that mean it almost always takes litigation to see who is right under the law.
Goodness, old-fashioned ballistic missiles come down at something like Mach 25 or so. If a missile defense technology worked at all, shooting down scramjets would be child's play.
Mmmm, I think you also need to be seen as willing to use them to make a credible threat. That is, I agree with the parent poster: nuclear weapons are, frankly, a dead end, except as a purely defensive deterrent between equals or as a terrorist/guerilla weapon by small powers against large. They are widely acknowledged as suicide weapons, the use of which at least your culture and government, if not your entire population, cannot survive.
Now a suicide weapon is a credible threat if you're waging asymmetric warfare -- if you're a small poor state with nothing to lose anyway, so to speak, threatening a much richer country with delicate international trade treaties to preserve, a soft population unwilling to absorb even a 0.1% population loss, et cetera. So if you're Iran or North Korea threatening the US, it might work*. It also works if you're the US facing down the USSR, because then they're a mutual suicide pact, and as long as everyone is rational, an uneasy peace prevails.
But they're worthless for threatening someone much smaller than you, who can nevertheless be annoying. As annoying as Syria might be, no one imagines it's possible that the US would nuke Damascus. The political fallout would be intolerable. That's why the US finds nukes of no use in threatening Syria or Iran, and instead relies on the much more credible threat of the 3ID comin' a-knockin' on Mr. Dictator's door.
----- * Although in fact I think it would not. If North Korea actually credibly threatened the United States with a nuclear strike clearly traceable to Kim's government, the traditional restraints on the use of overwhelming force would evaporate and the US would find itself fairly free to evaporate Mr. Kim with a 20 kiloton tactical warhead. The fact that ten thousand North Koreans would die with him would not be considered particularly important, if a credible nuclear threat were reliably known to exist.
That's why these countries play cat-and-mouse with the nukes. They know very well that as soon as it becomes clear they have one and are likely to use it, the gloves of civilization come off the nuclear fist and they're well and truly fucked. So they want to keep it all shadowy and coy, maybe we do and maybe we don't, la la la, because they know the US is certainly willing to purchase a little bit of peace of mind, give a little on this or that point of negotation just to avoid having to worry about the problem. (And, of course, the largest motivation in all such cases is rattling the saber for the poor slobs at home, so they tolerate your brutal impoverishing regime a little bit longer. If North Koreans weren't all starving, and ordinary Iranians getting just a bit tired of these humorless towel-heads telling them whether or not they can watch Britney Spears shake her tits on the tube, none of this would be happening.)
This is what air cover is all about. As you might imagine, detecting and neutralizing (a/k/a "blowing to bits") any platforms capable of launching such an attack is the first priority of the air wing based on a carrier. They're generally quite good at it, too. This is why you don't want to get within a dozen miles of a carrier group without being very sure you have the commander's permission.
No, I believe it's derived by a Haussdorf axial transformation from the null eigenvalue of Finagle's fourth free-factored form of Murphy's Law (in B-flat minor).
Ooookay, let's think this out. You're Joe Creditcardbanker, and you get a payment from Mr. Citizen for $6500. You screw up a little and neglect to credit it promptly. Now Mr. Citizen calls, angry. WTF? Where's my payment, dude? You've got two choices, Joe:
(1) Uh...I messed up, Mr. Citizen. Sorry! Please don't sue us!
(2) Not my fault, Mr. Citizen! You should see the forms the gummint makes us fill out when this happens! Blame Homeland Security! Blame Bush! Osama! Lions and tiger and bears, oh my! Come to think of it, you're gosh-darn lucky we managed to credit you at all...
In other words, let us take due note of Hanlon's Axiom: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Well...I figure legislators are a lot like poorly-trained children, you know? They need attention. If they can't get it by being good, then they'll just get it by being bad.
It's not unenforceable, it's just unconstitutional, and therefore will not happen.
You may be thinking that New Jersey has no jurisdiction over people who live in other states. Not true. New Jersey asserts jurisdiction over everyone who lives in New Jersey and also everyone who does business in New Jersey, or who materially affects a citizen of New Jersey or the general interests of the citizens of New Jersey.
Hence, if you, Joe Citizen of any U.S. state other than NJ, or even a citizen of another country, do something over the 'net that affects someone in NJ, and is illegal under NJ law, then a NJ court will have no problem issuing a warrant for your arrest. The governor of NJ (or rather one of his underlings in law enforcement) would then issue a request for extradition to your state or country. If that request is granted, then your home state or country arrests you as a courtesy to NJ and (if necessary by force) sends you to NJ to stand trial.
How often is extradition granted? Depends. Between the states of the United States, or between countries of the EU, almost always. For credible accusations of traditional crimes of violence, like murder, rape, arson, or robbery, then again almost always. For nonviolent crimes, and crimes where public policy differs widely, like fraud, child custody violations, or Internet crime such as this one -- all bets are off.
So in this case, you're almost certainly right -- if New Jersey criminalized anonymous posting, I doubt very much if most states in the Union, let alone most Western countries, would honor an extradition request. But as a general rule, you do not escape a state's jurisdiction merely because you don't live there.
This is silly. The New Jersey Supreme Court has already decided that citizens of New Jersey enjoy a strong First Amendment right to anonymity in their online postings.
I doubt this bill even gets out of committee, let alone gets passed by the NJ Assembly so that it can be immediately struck down by a NJ judge. As for why, then, a hopeless, pointless bill was introduced by Assemblyman Biondi -- mmmm, maybe he's got an election coming up? Needs to do a little grandstanding?
Well...don't forget the old adage: Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
Or, one might usefully add: lecture, complain, editorialize, supervise, criticize, legislate, litigate -- and otherwise stand about telling those who are doing how to do it better.
My college, a highly geeky place, took as its motto the Latin phrase mens et manus ("The mind and hand"). No mention of os ("the mouth"). 'Cause we know which organs the truly creative person uses most.
Mmmm, I dunno. Don't you think they learned something from designing and running the SSME for twenty-odd years? Or something about good heat-shield design by landing the orbiter 100 times successfully and once unsuccessfully?
In science and engineering, even a failed experiment is progress. If nothing else you learn what not to do next time, but far more often the data you collect when things don't go the way you expect them to is highly useful for the next try. It may be that the Shuttle is not the right way to go, is a dead end and all that. But as a scientist I find it completely unbelievable that the experience of building and flying it will not prove enormously valuable in designing its successor.
This is rocket science, after all. It's to be expected that we'll fail again and again, until we succeed. But that doesn't mean we're throwing darts randomly at the target. Every time we miss, we learn something. That's just the way science and engineering works. Most times you figure out the right way to do something by what may seem to outsiders as the hilariously boneheaded process of doing it every possible wrong way first, then trying what's left.
Top-down, Aristotelian science, where we begin with basic principles of how the Universe works, and then deduce cleverly all our practical technology, so that all our machines work perfectly the first time we start them up, has been nothing but a complete failure since the time of the Romans. We have found that the only science successful in the long term is empirical, bottom-up. When you want a new machine, you build it and try it. When it breaks or does something unexpected, you study it, figure out why, and try again. You deduce fundamental principles from the outcome of your experiments, not the other way around.
Hence all new technology begins by failing, over and over again. Only with time does it work, and do we develop beautiful theories to explain why it works. Seems crazy, yes, but history shows this is the only reliable way to build new technology. Cultures that emphasize empiricism and "just try it" and tolerate failure are technologically innovative. Cultures that emphasize conformity to accepted "truths" and discourage taking risks stagnate technologically.
The real problem with NASA, I submit, is that they fail too rarely, or rather, are allowed to fail too rarely. Exploring space with bold new technology is dangerous by definition. If astronauts are not dying in space accidents fairly routinely, it means no real progress is being made. You might as well expect to fight a war without any soldiers dying, or learn to play championship tennis without ever losing a match.
I applaud the application of "incentives" to promote enhancements in society....But, what I am waiting for is the next paradigm shift or revolution. When will it come? What will it be?
Wait, I have an idea! Call me crazy, but...what if we set up some kind of system in which there were millions of small prizes that anyone could win, just by having a good idea and implementing it. And furthermore, what if we decentralized the whole decision-making process of the exact amount of the prize to be awarded, and to whom and when it would be distributed. Made it a sort of grass-roots open-source effort.
Like, anyone could instantly reward the quality of someone else's innovative contribution to society, at any time, on the spot. It'd be like millions of little X-Prizes, distributed every day by millions of volunteers.
We could print certificates for the prizes, on special (green?) paper. They'd be redeemable for meals in superior restaurants, electronic merchandise -- heck, even new cars if someone accumulated enough of them. People could just carry prize certificates around with them all the time, in a pocket-sized foldable leather case, and instantly reward anyone they found providing a superior product or service.
This way, people with the best ideas as judged by the entire community of users and potential users could expect to rapidly accumulate lots of the little green prize certificates, without needing to prove the worth of their work to some overworked and underimaginative government agency. I suppose it's a little weird to imagine taking government entirely out of the business of guiding and rewarding technological creativity, but I have the feeling a decentralized system of rewards like this could prove to be the most powerful incentive to innovate the world has ever seen.
His greatest problem as an artist is not piracy, it's obscurity...
Indeed, and perhaps that's because he's not a very successful author. His own creative work may not sell especially well on its own merits. Which may explain why he personally goes to some lengths to get publicity -- any publicity -- by saying provocative things that are sure to get headlines somewhere, or giving speeches and taking stands that try to tap into some kind of broad-based social discontent (like that of people unhappy with the RIAA attack on music file exchange).
But other authors are successful, and their major problem would be piracy, if downloading work was more or less a one-click process. Danielle Steele (ugh), John Grisham, Tony Hillerman and so on are likely to have a very different perception of the "biggest problem" facing an artist than Cory Doctorow, if millions of net-nonsavvy readers could just navigate to www.getcherbestsellerhere.com and with one click grab their latest book for free.
To be sure, there are pretty much by definition far more mediocre artists than superb artists, so any random poll of authors will always find a majority in favor of mo' publicity rather than better control of the fruits of their creative labor. I'd guess it's only the young authors who are confident of becoming best-selling authors sooner or later who want to hedge their bets a little, so to speak, by making sure that when they become so successful that millions wait excitedly to read their next work, then they can control how and when that work is distributed -- so that, among other things, they can be sure it's used as they'd wish it to be and they can reap an appropriate reward.
Listening to the passion with which Cory Doctorow opines on these subjects gives me pause: after all, it's common that those most anxious to share the wealth are those who contribute least to its creation. You know? It's like the guy who very much wants to split the dinner check equally is always the one who ordered lobster, fois gras, triple-chocolate surprize and a magnum of champagne, not the guy who ordered the plain salad and glass of tap water.
Oh! Yes, of course. I'd assume all the U-238 that you could was scavenged already that way. I mean, how dumb would one have to be to spend bazillions extracting and refining atomic fuel and then throwing much of its energy content away, unused? Dumb enough to climb the fence looking for weapons-grade fissionables, maybe...
Well, first concentrate it so that it's really, really radioactive. So it'll kill you in 10 minutes, give you cancer in 30 seconds, that kind of thing. Then just pile it all up on a big waterproof pad -- say a wide shallow dish carved out of an outcrop of bedrock, out in the middle of the desert somewhere.
Next, put up an ordinary 10-foot chain-link fence around the pile, with signs on the fence every hundred feet, in a few different languages, saying:
If you cross this fence, you will die.
Don't bother guarding the fence. It's just a helpful little fitness-to-survive test. Every time someone too incautious, too mindlessly anti-authority, or too stupid to ponder helpful signs comes along, the average intelligence of the species will go up a bit.
I'd even suggest not putting up a fence with warning signs, just to speed the process up even more. The mummified corpses strewn near the pile will certainly be a plain enough warning to those of adequate intelligence. But I suppose it's more civilized to give even the first customers a sporting chance...
Courts do not like people telling them that the law does not apply to them.
I'm not sure this is true. I think the question of whether a given Court has jurisdiction, and whether a given law applies to a given situation, are both arguments that lawyers routinely make before a Court. I don't think Courts think these arguments are tantamount to saying the law doesn't apply to someone. They're just saying a particular law doesn't apply, or a particular Court doesn't have jurisdiction.
Indeed, I think questions of jurisdiction and applicability of the law are often raised first by good lawyers, because they can be decided by a judge in preliminary hearings -- the expense of a trial is not necessary, and if they win on these "procedural" questions, then they don't need to win on the merits.
In this case, for example, the Craigslist people would make this argument: Judge, even if a trier of fact (e.g. a jury) finds that each and every allegation made by the plaintiff is true, they can't prevail, because the law does not make what they say we have done illegal. If the judge buys this claim, boom, Craigslist wins immediately, and doesn't need to present a shred of evidence as to what they did or did not do, or intended to do. It's a very cheap victory.
So I would expect they will raise these arguments first. If they lose, then they will argue that they were not, in fact, discriminatory as defined by the law. I find it significant that the lawyers quoted think the suit is entirely without merit, a complete nonstarter. Given that the AP will be sympathetic to the plaintiffs, if they could have found a respected lawyer to say they stood a chance, they would have.
Incidentally, I don't agree the FHA is on sturdy legs here. The constitutionality of the FHA rests on a fairly creative interpretation of the Commerce Clause, which is why it does not -- and cannot -- apply to strictly private transactions, meaning those in which none of the parties is "in the regular business" of buying, selling, or renting property. If the Court finds that Craiglist is just a conduit here, just a way for one private party to communicate to another, like posting in a chat-room or standing up at a neighborhood barbecue and announcing you've a room for rent, then I don't see how the FHA can apply.
Nah, it doesn't violate conservation of energy per se. It only does so if you say it appears without an equivalent amount of energy disappearing. Does it? It's your story.
No problem. But let me point out you need the universe to fork() in 1955, when time-traveling Marty arrives, not in 1985, when he departs. It's in 1955 that the two universes diverge.
Which means the interesting difficulty you have is explaining how Marty's decision in 1985 caused the universe to fork() in anticipation thirty years earlier. Tricky.
It's an interesting thought. I think it's not exactly equivalent to the many-worlds hypothesis, because you've split the observer before he makes the measurement.
The two problems I see are that, first, you haven't explained how the observer gets "entangled" with the system. You start with a direct product of observer and system (|obs >|sys>) and then magically this turns into a sum of direct products (|obs sys0> + |obs sys1>). From the "density matrix" point of view, you started out with a mixed (semi-classical, or semi-coherent) state and it turned into a pure (or coherent) state. That seems a bit odd. Usually the evolution runs the other way...
The second problem is that you've retained the quantum ket in your final state, which you suggest encompasses two universes (one which the observer measures eigenvalue 0, one in which he measures eigenvalue 1). But by describing this pair of universes with the ket, you've by implication kept the possibility of quantum interference between the two universes. That seems inconsistent with the definition of "universe." How can one universe interfere with another??
Slashdot Mirror
I'm Karl Jenkins, and I object to your vision. I need that $1 to pay the rent, man.
Perhaps about as many as could affort penicillin in 1940?
From an interesting history of penicillin:
For initial tests, by Florey, in 1940, on human subjects, it had required two professors, five graduates and ten assistants working almost every day of the week for several months to produce enough penicillin to treat six patients.
What do you suppose penicillin cost in 1940? Here's a clue, in an anecdote about an early patient, from the same history:
In 1946 my osteomyelitis returned....Dad chose a hazardous job so his son could get hospital care, He worked days and afternoon shifts, and at times "bonus hours" as well. But Mum couldn't sleep when Dad was on afternoon shift. and getting home around 1 am or later. There was lots of stress at home.
Penicillin was a miracle drug that was now available for the treatment of conditions caused by infection - like osteomyelitis. Sulfa drugs had stopped the bone disease in '42, but still a hip fusion was needed. Also, though the sulfa worked on the short run, it did not eliminate the infection from the bone marrow.
This time Dr. Mowat used penicillin to stop the infection right away. It also eradicated it completely. Not once in all these years did osteomyelitis ever come back!
Hmmm. Let's compare:
Theory: "Easy - because there's no money in the cure. They want your repeat business to feed their cash cow. How are they going to do that with a one-time cure?"
Experiment: "Fourth-quarter earnings released Wednesday [8 Feb 2006] show that [British drug-maker GlaxoSmithKline]'s revenue continues to surge, mainly on strong sales of its vaccines and treatments for asthma and diabetes..."
One hopes that the Supreme Court will interpret the clause to mean that District Court has discretion to issue an injunction, but only on a showing that an injunction is equitable.
Yes, well, let's hope if they do they also draw a few bright lines for the future information of potential parties to a dispute, and not give us some more fucking Sandra Day can't-make-up-my-mind oh-it-just-depends "balancing" tests that mean it almost always takes litigation to see who is right under the law.
Goodness, old-fashioned ballistic missiles come down at something like Mach 25 or so. If a missile defense technology worked at all, shooting down scramjets would be child's play.
It's about having the capability to do so.
Mmmm, I think you also need to be seen as willing to use them to make a credible threat. That is, I agree with the parent poster: nuclear weapons are, frankly, a dead end, except as a purely defensive deterrent between equals or as a terrorist/guerilla weapon by small powers against large. They are widely acknowledged as suicide weapons, the use of which at least your culture and government, if not your entire population, cannot survive.
Now a suicide weapon is a credible threat if you're waging asymmetric warfare -- if you're a small poor state with nothing to lose anyway, so to speak, threatening a much richer country with delicate international trade treaties to preserve, a soft population unwilling to absorb even a 0.1% population loss, et cetera. So if you're Iran or North Korea threatening the US, it might work*. It also works if you're the US facing down the USSR, because then they're a mutual suicide pact, and as long as everyone is rational, an uneasy peace prevails.
But they're worthless for threatening someone much smaller than you, who can nevertheless be annoying. As annoying as Syria might be, no one imagines it's possible that the US would nuke Damascus. The political fallout would be intolerable. That's why the US finds nukes of no use in threatening Syria or Iran, and instead relies on the much more credible threat of the 3ID comin' a-knockin' on Mr. Dictator's door.
-----
* Although in fact I think it would not. If North Korea actually credibly threatened the United States with a nuclear strike clearly traceable to Kim's government, the traditional restraints on the use of overwhelming force would evaporate and the US would find itself fairly free to evaporate Mr. Kim with a 20 kiloton tactical warhead. The fact that ten thousand North Koreans would die with him would not be considered particularly important, if a credible nuclear threat were reliably known to exist.
That's why these countries play cat-and-mouse with the nukes. They know very well that as soon as it becomes clear they have one and are likely to use it, the gloves of civilization come off the nuclear fist and they're well and truly fucked. So they want to keep it all shadowy and coy, maybe we do and maybe we don't, la la la, because they know the US is certainly willing to purchase a little bit of peace of mind, give a little on this or that point of negotation just to avoid having to worry about the problem. (And, of course, the largest motivation in all such cases is rattling the saber for the poor slobs at home, so they tolerate your brutal impoverishing regime a little bit longer. If North Koreans weren't all starving, and ordinary Iranians getting just a bit tired of these humorless towel-heads telling them whether or not they can watch Britney Spears shake her tits on the tube, none of this would be happening.)
This is what air cover is all about. As you might imagine, detecting and neutralizing (a/k/a "blowing to bits") any platforms capable of launching such an attack is the first priority of the air wing based on a carrier. They're generally quite good at it, too. This is why you don't want to get within a dozen miles of a carrier group without being very sure you have the commander's permission.
No, I believe it's derived by a Haussdorf axial transformation from the null eigenvalue of Finagle's fourth free-factored form of Murphy's Law (in B-flat minor).
Ooookay, let's think this out. You're Joe Creditcardbanker, and you get a payment from Mr. Citizen for $6500. You screw up a little and neglect to credit it promptly. Now Mr. Citizen calls, angry. WTF? Where's my payment, dude? You've got two choices, Joe:
(1) Uh...I messed up, Mr. Citizen. Sorry! Please don't sue us!
(2) Not my fault, Mr. Citizen! You should see the forms the gummint makes us fill out when this happens! Blame Homeland Security! Blame Bush! Osama! Lions and tiger and bears, oh my! Come to think of it, you're gosh-darn lucky we managed to credit you at all...
In other words, let us take due note of Hanlon's Axiom: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Well...I figure legislators are a lot like poorly-trained children, you know? They need attention. If they can't get it by being good, then they'll just get it by being bad.
It's not unenforceable, it's just unconstitutional, and therefore will not happen.
You may be thinking that New Jersey has no jurisdiction over people who live in other states. Not true. New Jersey asserts jurisdiction over everyone who lives in New Jersey and also everyone who does business in New Jersey, or who materially affects a citizen of New Jersey or the general interests of the citizens of New Jersey.
Hence, if you, Joe Citizen of any U.S. state other than NJ, or even a citizen of another country, do something over the 'net that affects someone in NJ, and is illegal under NJ law, then a NJ court will have no problem issuing a warrant for your arrest. The governor of NJ (or rather one of his underlings in law enforcement) would then issue a request for extradition to your state or country. If that request is granted, then your home state or country arrests you as a courtesy to NJ and (if necessary by force) sends you to NJ to stand trial.
How often is extradition granted? Depends. Between the states of the United States, or between countries of the EU, almost always. For credible accusations of traditional crimes of violence, like murder, rape, arson, or robbery, then again almost always. For nonviolent crimes, and crimes where public policy differs widely, like fraud, child custody violations, or Internet crime such as this one -- all bets are off.
So in this case, you're almost certainly right -- if New Jersey criminalized anonymous posting, I doubt very much if most states in the Union, let alone most Western countries, would honor an extradition request. But as a general rule, you do not escape a state's jurisdiction merely because you don't live there.
This is silly. The New Jersey Supreme Court has already decided that citizens of New Jersey enjoy a strong First Amendment right to anonymity in their online postings.
I doubt this bill even gets out of committee, let alone gets passed by the NJ Assembly so that it can be immediately struck down by a NJ judge. As for why, then, a hopeless, pointless bill was introduced by Assemblyman Biondi -- mmmm, maybe he's got an election coming up? Needs to do a little grandstanding?
Well...don't forget the old adage: Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
Or, one might usefully add: lecture, complain, editorialize, supervise, criticize, legislate, litigate -- and otherwise stand about telling those who are doing how to do it better.
My college, a highly geeky place, took as its motto the Latin phrase mens et manus ("The mind and hand"). No mention of os ("the mouth"). 'Cause we know which organs the truly creative person uses most.
Mmmm, I dunno. Don't you think they learned something from designing and running the SSME for twenty-odd years? Or something about good heat-shield design by landing the orbiter 100 times successfully and once unsuccessfully?
In science and engineering, even a failed experiment is progress. If nothing else you learn what not to do next time, but far more often the data you collect when things don't go the way you expect them to is highly useful for the next try. It may be that the Shuttle is not the right way to go, is a dead end and all that. But as a scientist I find it completely unbelievable that the experience of building and flying it will not prove enormously valuable in designing its successor.
This is rocket science, after all. It's to be expected that we'll fail again and again, until we succeed. But that doesn't mean we're throwing darts randomly at the target. Every time we miss, we learn something. That's just the way science and engineering works. Most times you figure out the right way to do something by what may seem to outsiders as the hilariously boneheaded process of doing it every possible wrong way first, then trying what's left.
Top-down, Aristotelian science, where we begin with basic principles of how the Universe works, and then deduce cleverly all our practical technology, so that all our machines work perfectly the first time we start them up, has been nothing but a complete failure since the time of the Romans. We have found that the only science successful in the long term is empirical, bottom-up. When you want a new machine, you build it and try it. When it breaks or does something unexpected, you study it, figure out why, and try again. You deduce fundamental principles from the outcome of your experiments, not the other way around.
Hence all new technology begins by failing, over and over again. Only with time does it work, and do we develop beautiful theories to explain why it works. Seems crazy, yes, but history shows this is the only reliable way to build new technology. Cultures that emphasize empiricism and "just try it" and tolerate failure are technologically innovative. Cultures that emphasize conformity to accepted "truths" and discourage taking risks stagnate technologically.
The real problem with NASA, I submit, is that they fail too rarely, or rather, are allowed to fail too rarely. Exploring space with bold new technology is dangerous by definition. If astronauts are not dying in space accidents fairly routinely, it means no real progress is being made. You might as well expect to fight a war without any soldiers dying, or learn to play championship tennis without ever losing a match.
I applaud the application of "incentives" to promote enhancements in society....But, what I am waiting for is the next paradigm shift or revolution. When will it come? What will it be?
Wait, I have an idea! Call me crazy, but...what if we set up some kind of system in which there were millions of small prizes that anyone could win, just by having a good idea and implementing it. And furthermore, what if we decentralized the whole decision-making process of the exact amount of the prize to be awarded, and to whom and when it would be distributed. Made it a sort of grass-roots open-source effort.
Like, anyone could instantly reward the quality of someone else's innovative contribution to society, at any time, on the spot. It'd be like millions of little X-Prizes, distributed every day by millions of volunteers.
We could print certificates for the prizes, on special (green?) paper. They'd be redeemable for meals in superior restaurants, electronic merchandise -- heck, even new cars if someone accumulated enough of them. People could just carry prize certificates around with them all the time, in a pocket-sized foldable leather case, and instantly reward anyone they found providing a superior product or service.
This way, people with the best ideas as judged by the entire community of users and potential users could expect to rapidly accumulate lots of the little green prize certificates, without needing to prove the worth of their work to some overworked and underimaginative government agency. I suppose it's a little weird to imagine taking government entirely out of the business of guiding and rewarding technological creativity, but I have the feeling a decentralized system of rewards like this could prove to be the most powerful incentive to innovate the world has ever seen.
His greatest problem as an artist is not piracy, it's obscurity...
Indeed, and perhaps that's because he's not a very successful author. His own creative work may not sell especially well on its own merits. Which may explain why he personally goes to some lengths to get publicity -- any publicity -- by saying provocative things that are sure to get headlines somewhere, or giving speeches and taking stands that try to tap into some kind of broad-based social discontent (like that of people unhappy with the RIAA attack on music file exchange).
But other authors are successful, and their major problem would be piracy, if downloading work was more or less a one-click process. Danielle Steele (ugh), John Grisham, Tony Hillerman and so on are likely to have a very different perception of the "biggest problem" facing an artist than Cory Doctorow, if millions of net-nonsavvy readers could just navigate to www.getcherbestsellerhere.com and with one click grab their latest book for free.
To be sure, there are pretty much by definition far more mediocre artists than superb artists, so any random poll of authors will always find a majority in favor of mo' publicity rather than better control of the fruits of their creative labor. I'd guess it's only the young authors who are confident of becoming best-selling authors sooner or later who want to hedge their bets a little, so to speak, by making sure that when they become so successful that millions wait excitedly to read their next work, then they can control how and when that work is distributed -- so that, among other things, they can be sure it's used as they'd wish it to be and they can reap an appropriate reward.
Listening to the passion with which Cory Doctorow opines on these subjects gives me pause: after all, it's common that those most anxious to share the wealth are those who contribute least to its creation. You know? It's like the guy who very much wants to split the dinner check equally is always the one who ordered lobster, fois gras, triple-chocolate surprize and a magnum of champagne, not the guy who ordered the plain salad and glass of tap water.
Er, yes, you're correct. I was being sarcastic. A side comment on the canonical state of humanity, you might say.
Oh! Yes, of course. I'd assume all the U-238 that you could was scavenged already that way. I mean, how dumb would one have to be to spend bazillions extracting and refining atomic fuel and then throwing much of its energy content away, unused? Dumb enough to climb the fence looking for weapons-grade fissionables, maybe...
Well, you could make RTGs I guess. Not much call for them, outside of spacecraft, unless hybrid automotive technology takes an...unusual...turn.
Uh oh, better make a note on the design spec:
Install drainage channels.
Where would we put it?
Well, first concentrate it so that it's really, really radioactive. So it'll kill you in 10 minutes, give you cancer in 30 seconds, that kind of thing. Then just pile it all up on a big waterproof pad -- say a wide shallow dish carved out of an outcrop of bedrock, out in the middle of the desert somewhere.
Next, put up an ordinary 10-foot chain-link fence around the pile, with signs on the fence every hundred feet, in a few different languages, saying:
If you cross this fence, you will die.
Don't bother guarding the fence. It's just a helpful little fitness-to-survive test. Every time someone too incautious, too mindlessly anti-authority, or too stupid to ponder helpful signs comes along, the average intelligence of the species will go up a bit.
I'd even suggest not putting up a fence with warning signs, just to speed the process up even more. The mummified corpses strewn near the pile will certainly be a plain enough warning to those of adequate intelligence. But I suppose it's more civilized to give even the first customers a sporting chance...
Courts do not like people telling them that the law does not apply to them.
I'm not sure this is true. I think the question of whether a given Court has jurisdiction, and whether a given law applies to a given situation, are both arguments that lawyers routinely make before a Court. I don't think Courts think these arguments are tantamount to saying the law doesn't apply to someone. They're just saying a particular law doesn't apply, or a particular Court doesn't have jurisdiction.
Indeed, I think questions of jurisdiction and applicability of the law are often raised first by good lawyers, because they can be decided by a judge in preliminary hearings -- the expense of a trial is not necessary, and if they win on these "procedural" questions, then they don't need to win on the merits.
In this case, for example, the Craigslist people would make this argument: Judge, even if a trier of fact (e.g. a jury) finds that each and every allegation made by the plaintiff is true, they can't prevail, because the law does not make what they say we have done illegal. If the judge buys this claim, boom, Craigslist wins immediately, and doesn't need to present a shred of evidence as to what they did or did not do, or intended to do. It's a very cheap victory.
So I would expect they will raise these arguments first. If they lose, then they will argue that they were not, in fact, discriminatory as defined by the law. I find it significant that the lawyers quoted think the suit is entirely without merit, a complete nonstarter. Given that the AP will be sympathetic to the plaintiffs, if they could have found a respected lawyer to say they stood a chance, they would have.
Incidentally, I don't agree the FHA is on sturdy legs here. The constitutionality of the FHA rests on a fairly creative interpretation of the Commerce Clause, which is why it does not -- and cannot -- apply to strictly private transactions, meaning those in which none of the parties is "in the regular business" of buying, selling, or renting property. If the Court finds that Craiglist is just a conduit here, just a way for one private party to communicate to another, like posting in a chat-room or standing up at a neighborhood barbecue and announcing you've a room for rent, then I don't see how the FHA can apply.
Nah, it doesn't violate conservation of energy per se. It only does so if you say it appears without an equivalent amount of energy disappearing. Does it? It's your story.
No problem. But let me point out you need the universe to fork() in 1955, when time-traveling Marty arrives, not in 1985, when he departs. It's in 1955 that the two universes diverge.
Which means the interesting difficulty you have is explaining how Marty's decision in 1985 caused the universe to fork() in anticipation thirty years earlier. Tricky.
It's an interesting thought. I think it's not exactly equivalent to the many-worlds hypothesis, because you've split the observer before he makes the measurement.
The two problems I see are that, first, you haven't explained how the observer gets "entangled" with the system. You start with a direct product of observer and system (|obs >|sys>) and then magically this turns into a sum of direct products (|obs sys0> + |obs sys1>). From the "density matrix" point of view, you started out with a mixed (semi-classical, or semi-coherent) state and it turned into a pure (or coherent) state. That seems a bit odd. Usually the evolution runs the other way...
The second problem is that you've retained the quantum ket in your final state, which you suggest encompasses two universes (one which the observer measures eigenvalue 0, one in which he measures eigenvalue 1). But by describing this pair of universes with the ket, you've by implication kept the possibility of quantum interference between the two universes. That seems inconsistent with the definition of "universe." How can one universe interfere with another??