Let me rewrite that headline and put the opposite spin on it.
"In an encouraging move affirming freedom of the press in Britain, a British judge has ruled against newspaper censorship, saying that a newspaper has the right to publish the name of a blogger if they are able to find it. In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an injunction to stop The Times from printing the name of Richard Horton, a blogger who anonymously revealed confidential details of police cases on his blog. "
Does that sound better? Same facts, just reversing the spin.
You still end up with global causality violation if an object can communicate outside its light cone.
Perhaps a knowledgable phycisist can clarify: is the light cone thingy a fundamental rule necessary to make our current theories work, or is it merely a consequence following from the fact that our current theories generally do not allow for faster-than-light travel? If the latter, a warp drive wouldn't "violate" any causality rule.
I'm not sure that I entirely understand the way the question is phrased. However, to try to answer your question: if the basic laws of physics (i.e., Maxwell's equations) are the same in a moving reference frame as they are in a fixed reference frame, then the ability to communicate outside the light cone is also the ability to communicate backwards in time. If you can communicate backwards in time, causality is violated.
So, if "the laws of physics are the same in a moving reference frame as they are in a fixed reference frame" is what you refer to as a "fundamental rule," then, yes, the light cone "thingy" is a fundamental rule, and communicating outside the light cone (i.e., faster than light) violates causality.
It's not absolutely, completely, unambiguously clear that strict forward-causality is a necessary law of physics... but it's hard to come up with self-consistent laws of physics without it.
What you're missing is that she's already been found guilty once. And even though Media Sentry and the RIAA suck and I hate to see them win, a lot of tech savvy people, myself included, thinks the evidence shows she's guilty.
Nope. The judge gave the jury the wrong instructions, so she's not guilty-- the verdict was thrown out-- and it doesn't matter what you think the evidence shows, since you're not on the jury.
It's obvious that we're dealing with computer technology and if you don't understand it you need to hire a computer technologist
Unfortunately, "it's obvious" is not actually a legal argument.
You don't need to understand auto mechanics to know whether a car was stolen or not. The argument of whether, or what, you need to understand to understand whether a song was stolen or not is not, in fact, obvious.
The machine cranks out 1 piece per day, a maximum of 365 pieces per year. At that rate, how many years does it take to recoup the cost of the machine, with at least $500 worth of solar panels?
Well, if the pieces sell for fifty dollars each, you've recouped the cost of $500 worth of solar panels in ten days.
That assumption is that for communication, sharing intelligence is more important than sharing genetics.
Yep, "assumption" is the key word here.
We have no particular reason to believe that there's any truth to this assumption.
How many human languages have we managed to decipher in the absence of either a Rosetta stone or native speaker? What's the current status of understanding Linear-A, a language that people have been attempting to decipher for nearly a century?
We can't even communicate in any meaningful way with squids, which are genetically far more closely related to us than any possible extraterestrials. What in the world makes us think that it would be any easier to communicate with extraterrestrials?
(3) "Secure and reliable forms of identification" for purposes of this directive means identification that (a) is issued based on sound criteria for verifying an individual employee's identity; (b) is strongly resistant to identity fraud, tampering, counterfeiting, and terrorist exploitation; (c) can be rapidly authenticated electronically;
Exactly!
There is no directive to do any background checks of employees' medical history, financial history, sexual conduct, history of posts to the private areas of Facebook, party membership, and so forth. Verify identity, yes. Blanket approval for any kind of background checks, no.
and (d) is issued only by providers whose reliability has been established by an official accreditation process."
Right. The directive allows them to investigate the reliability of the providers-- not the employees, but the business that makes the badges.
While I was in the Air Force, I had a security clearence and had to go through the same background checks. I told them from the beginning I had smoked pot before and had
And the point is that this has nothing whatsoever to do with security checks-- this is for all employees, not just ones with security clearance.
And, the other point is that they are lying about. They said it is required by HSPD-12. It is in fact, not required by HSPD-12.
You are happily working at your established job and some presidential directive comes down that establishes that you need a background check to get your smart card needed to access the network and do your job. Current employees are now offered the "choice" of submitting to a background check or lose their jobs.
As I pointed out when this was posted on the NASAwatch website, the actual presidential directive, HSPD-12, is a directive that says government identification cards (including NASA IDs) should have pictures and be difficult to forge. Nothing more. The presidential directive does not say anything about requiring an invasive background check including checking medical, financial, and other personal background information along with a blank authorization to check any records at all. Nothing.
The whole thing about background checks was a stealth policy change that was slid into the new ID regulations by the OPM. It has nothing to do with HSPD-12, and most particularly it was not authorized by presidential directive.
"but most nuclear thermal engines have a poor thrust to weight ratio for launching from the surface"
The Soviet RD-0410 seemed promising.
??? RD-0140 had a thrust that wasn't even twice the weight of the engine. (e.g., http://www.astronautix.com/engines/rd0410.htm ). If you carry enough fuel to give you enough delta-V to get to orbit, it wouldn't even lift its own weight.
In general, nuclear thermal rockets are poor as booster stages for Earth launch.
STNP and Dumbo too. It's not perfect, but if you couple it with a cheap enough propellant (the 0410 used LH2, which is not cheap), you may have something as a result.
Liquid hydrogen's cheap enough. The problem with it is the low density. However, since the specific impulse is inversely proportional to the square root of the molecular mass of the exhaust, if you don't use hydrogen or helium, your specific impulse drops so much that you might as well just use chemical. (I've also proposed lithium, with lower specific impulse, but still better than chemical if you can run hot enough, and it's much much denser than hydrogen. Lithium and boron hydrides are good, too.)
I don't quite get it. You say ""I bought my own domain name to use as a self-promotion tool" but then you don't seem to know what it is that you want to promote. Not your self personally, I assume, since you said that you don't want to put personal information on it.
I think if you can answer the question of what it is that you want to "self" promote, then the question of what you should do with your web page becomes clear. The answer will be, put onto the domain stuff that showcases whatever it is that you want to promote.
Just because the Military chose not to prosecute does not mean these were sweet villagers minding their shops and tending their gardens when "inaccurately" picked up.
They were caught with weapons in hand in combat or with large weapon caches.
Not really.
In the wake of 9-11, the approach taken was that if it wasn't clear sure whether somebody was a terrorist or not, it was prudent to detain them and try to figure it out the details later.
I can understand this attitude-- it's the "better safe than sorry" approach. It's not the way we do things in the US normally ("I'm not sure if this guy is a criminal or not, so let's arrest him until we can figure it out" wouldn't be allowed by any police force in America), but I can't say that I don't understand the reasoning.
But the consequences of that way of operating is that many, or possibly most, of the people picked up actually aren't terrrorists.
(and the downside of that is that, although they may not have been terrorists before they were detained, five years in Gitmo may very well have changed their attitudes... so "better safe than sorry" may actually make us unsafe, and definitely sorry.)
Nice non sequiter there. Of the "70% to 90%" who were picked up, almost all of them were cleared and released immediately. Those detentions have nothing at all to do with Gitmo.
I think you weren't paying attention.
These aren't terrorists, they're Uighurs-- this is a Muslim minority in China. Basically, they're being released because they shouldn't have been picked up in the first place, but they can't be released to China, because the Chinese government considers dissidents terrorists.
Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future. They prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change.
Does the American Revolution not count as a radical political transformation? Federal republics were not common in 1776.
Yes, but at the time the American Revolution started, we were Brits.
As a SF writer, let me point out that the "predictions" of SF are very often more about what makes interesting storytelling, and not accurate predictions of what real life is going to be a hundred years from now. If the choice is between putting a "gosh, wow" element in the story, or putting in a boring element-- well, it's a story. If you want predictions, you should be writing nonfiction.
I think the problem is that many people think the controversy is whether or not global warming is happening. The answer is that it is happening, the global average temperature is climbing. This is based on hard evidence obtained by measuring. Arguing that it isn't is like arguing that the world is flat. The real question and controversy is whether or not our past and present actions are having a measurable effect.
Yes, that's the problem-- if you listen to the media, you would indeed think that this is a "controversy."
It is not a controversy. It is a settled question. There are vast amounts of data, extremely detailed computer models, vertical temperature profiles, satellite measurements. The "controversy" does not exist. The controversy is entirely manufactured by people pushing a "there is no global warming so we don't have to do anything" agenda.
Back fifteen years ago, when the finite-element global climate models only had a few hundred nodes or so, there was some legitimate controversy. But the models, and the computers they run on, have gotten vastly better. The data have gotten better. The measurement techniques have gotten better. Real scientists have spent vast amounts of time looking at the question, and looking at the data, and looking at the models, and looking at the critiques of the models, and finding the errors and making better models.
It's very odd. All through the 70s, any textbook on atmospheric science you might look at would mention the effect of anthropogenic carbon dioxide on global temperature, but since they said that it wouldn't be really a measurable amount until the next century, it wasn't at all controversial. All through the 80s, the same, and it wasn't controversial. All through the 90s, the same (although now "the 21st century" didn't look quite so far away...) but all off a sudden, in the 2000s, when it actually can be measured-- and is measured-- suddenly it's "controversial." The data have all gotten better, but suddenly they're "controversial." The models have gotten better, but suddenly they're "controversial."
It is, basically, a conspiracy theory of science, in which tens of thousands of scientists are all wrong, or stupid, or misguided, or paid off, and are just unwilling to correct the errors in their models that make them incorrectly predict that the atmosphere is doing exactly what the simple physics suggests it would be doing. But conspiracy theories are amusing in the movies, not in real life.
My frost-bit annuals, planted well after the last-frost date for this location, beg to differ...
Yeah, this is exactly the kind of irrelevent arguments you tend to hear. To be fair, the idiotic media hype makes it seem as if this really is the argument for global warming: one warmer-than-average summer, and the headlines read "Global warming is here," and one worse-than-average hurricane season and headlines say "Global warming! Hurricanes are getting worse!"
Global warming is a long-term average rise of temperature over time scales of decades. One warm winter, even a handful of warm winters, has nothing to do with it. Temperatures still fluctuate-- climate change doesn't negate the existence of changes in the weather. And we're talking about the average heat balance of the globe-- any particular spot may still be warmer, or cooler, or unchanged.
The rule for northeast Ohio is, don't plant your tomatoes until the end of May. I planted mine at the end of April. Guess what? They're doing fine. Has global warming moved the growing season up by a month? No, you can't conclude that-- one season, one place, that's not relevant. Global warming is about averages, and about time scales of decades. Got that? Averages. Decades.
There is plenty of controversy, except among those taking funds from govt's, companies, etc who have a vested interest in global warming.
Yes, that's an amazing argument that just can't be refuted: just say that all the science that disagrees with your opinion is biased. You don't need to prove it, you can just assert it, and repeat it over and over until people get tired of arguing. It's such a great argument that you can use it to disprove anything, refute any amount of evidence, no matter how much there is. Evolution? The science establishment has a vested interest in saying it's established science! Did we really land on the moon? The science establishment vested interest in saying we did! UFOs in Roswell? The science establishment has a vested interest in pretending that they invented all that technology we stole from crashed saucers! Tesla invented free power and the oil companies had him killed? The science establishment has a vested interest!
Throw out all those studies, and we can talk.
Yep, that's the argument of the AWG deniers, all right. Throw out all the science. Exactly.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me rewrite that headline and put the opposite spin on it.
"In an encouraging move affirming freedom of the press in Britain, a British judge has ruled against newspaper censorship, saying that a newspaper has the right to publish the name of a blogger if they are able to find it. In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an injunction to stop The Times from printing the name of Richard Horton, a blogger who anonymously revealed confidential details of police cases on his blog. "
Does that sound better? Same facts, just reversing the spin.
Perhaps a knowledgable phycisist can clarify: is the light cone thingy a fundamental rule necessary to make our current theories work, or is it merely a consequence following from the fact that our current theories generally do not allow for faster-than-light travel? If the latter, a warp drive wouldn't "violate" any causality rule.
I'm not sure that I entirely understand the way the question is phrased. However, to try to answer your question: if the basic laws of physics (i.e., Maxwell's equations) are the same in a moving reference frame as they are in a fixed reference frame, then the ability to communicate outside the light cone is also the ability to communicate backwards in time. If you can communicate backwards in time, causality is violated.
So, if "the laws of physics are the same in a moving reference frame as they are in a fixed reference frame" is what you refer to as a "fundamental rule," then, yes, the light cone "thingy" is a fundamental rule, and communicating outside the light cone (i.e., faster than light) violates causality.
It's not absolutely, completely, unambiguously clear that strict forward-causality is a necessary law of physics... but it's hard to come up with self-consistent laws of physics without it.
It's obvious that we're dealing with computer technology and if you don't understand it you need to hire a computer technologist
Unfortunately, "it's obvious" is not actually a legal argument.
1) Sometimes it is, like when we're talking about patents.
Unfortunately we're not talking about patents.
Patents and copyrights are similar, but not the same. Whether an invention is obvious is a feature of patent law... but not copyright law.
What you're missing is that she's already been found guilty once. And even though Media Sentry and the RIAA suck and I hate to see them win, a lot of tech savvy people, myself included, thinks the evidence shows she's guilty.
Nope. The judge gave the jury the wrong instructions, so she's not guilty-- the verdict was thrown out-- and it doesn't matter what you think the evidence shows, since you're not on the jury.
It's obvious that we're dealing with computer technology and if you don't understand it you need to hire a computer technologist
Unfortunately, "it's obvious" is not actually a legal argument.
You don't need to understand auto mechanics to know whether a car was stolen or not. The argument of whether, or what, you need to understand to understand whether a song was stolen or not is not, in fact, obvious.
That's because you're an Apple fanboi and the RDF caused you to read it wrongly. That or he was joking, you choose.
Nobody ever jokes on slashdot, so it must be that fanboi thing.
I do notice that the moderation got changed from informative to "funny".
A troll, I think. At least, I don't see that text in the cited article.
The machine cranks out 1 piece per day, a maximum of 365 pieces per year. At that rate, how many years does it take to recoup the cost of the machine, with at least $500 worth of solar panels?
Well, if the pieces sell for fifty dollars each, you've recouped the cost of $500 worth of solar panels in ten days.
Uh, is this a trick question?
That assumption is that for communication, sharing intelligence is more important than sharing genetics.
Yep, "assumption" is the key word here.
We have no particular reason to believe that there's any truth to this assumption.
How many human languages have we managed to decipher in the absence of either a Rosetta stone or native speaker? What's the current status of understanding Linear-A, a language that people have been attempting to decipher for nearly a century?
We can't even communicate in any meaningful way with squids, which are genetically far more closely related to us than any possible extraterestrials. What in the world makes us think that it would be any easier to communicate with extraterrestrials?
But there is more:
(3) "Secure and reliable forms of identification" for purposes of this directive means identification that (a) is issued based on sound criteria for verifying an individual employee's identity; (b) is strongly resistant to identity fraud, tampering, counterfeiting, and terrorist exploitation; (c) can be rapidly authenticated electronically;
Exactly!
There is no directive to do any background checks of employees' medical history, financial history, sexual conduct, history of posts to the private areas of Facebook, party membership, and so forth. Verify identity, yes. Blanket approval for any kind of background checks, no.
and (d) is issued only by providers whose reliability has been established by an official accreditation process."
Right. The directive allows them to investigate the reliability of the providers-- not the employees, but the business that makes the badges.
While I was in the Air Force, I had a security clearence and had to go through the same background checks. I told them from the beginning I had smoked pot before and had
And the point is that this has nothing whatsoever to do with security checks-- this is for all employees, not just ones with security clearance.
And, the other point is that they are lying about. They said it is required by HSPD-12. It is in fact, not required by HSPD-12.
You are happily working at your established job and some presidential directive comes down that establishes that you need a background check to get your smart card needed to access the network and do your job. Current employees are now offered the "choice" of submitting to a background check or lose their jobs.
As I pointed out when this was posted on the NASAwatch website, the actual presidential directive, HSPD-12, is a directive that says government identification cards (including NASA IDs) should have pictures and be difficult to forge. Nothing more. The presidential directive does not say anything about requiring an invasive background check including checking medical, financial, and other personal background information along with a blank authorization to check any records at all. Nothing.
The whole thing about background checks was a stealth policy change that was slid into the new ID regulations by the OPM. It has nothing to do with HSPD-12, and most particularly it was not authorized by presidential directive.
And I am not sure I would like to be anywhere close to a hot exhaust of Lithium vapor.
No problem, we'll recruit a ground crew of people with bipolar disorder!
"but most nuclear thermal engines have a poor thrust to weight ratio for launching from the surface"
The Soviet RD-0410 seemed promising.
??? RD-0140 had a thrust that wasn't even twice the weight of the engine. (e.g., http://www.astronautix.com/engines/rd0410.htm ). If you carry enough fuel to give you enough delta-V to get to orbit, it wouldn't even lift its own weight.
In general, nuclear thermal rockets are poor as booster stages for Earth launch.
STNP and Dumbo too. It's not perfect, but if you couple it with a cheap enough propellant (the 0410 used LH2, which is not cheap), you may have something as a result.
Liquid hydrogen's cheap enough. The problem with it is the low density. However, since the specific impulse is inversely proportional to the square root of the molecular mass of the exhaust, if you don't use hydrogen or helium, your specific impulse drops so much that you might as well just use chemical. (I've also proposed lithium, with lower specific impulse, but still better than chemical if you can run hot enough, and it's much much denser than hydrogen. Lithium and boron hydrides are good, too.)
I don't quite get it. You say ""I bought my own domain name to use as a self-promotion tool" but then you don't seem to know what it is that you want to promote. Not your self personally, I assume, since you said that you don't want to put personal information on it.
I think if you can answer the question of what it is that you want to "self" promote, then the question of what you should do with your web page becomes clear. The answer will be, put onto the domain stuff that showcases whatever it is that you want to promote.
Ps. for nuclear-thermal i assume you mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) which so many people love the idea of...
No, that's nuclear pulse propulsion.
Nuclear thermal means a reactor (not a bomb) produces heat, which heats a fluid that is then ejected as reaction mass (e.g., NERVA).
Nuclear thermal is great for in-space propulsion, but most nuclear thermal engines have a poor thrust to weight ratio for launching from the surface.
Will see a craft reach the surface of one of the gaseous giants.
Unlikely, seeing as the gas giant planets don't have surfaces.
Just because the Military chose not to prosecute does not mean these were sweet villagers minding their shops and tending their gardens when "inaccurately" picked up.
They were caught with weapons in hand in combat or with large weapon caches.
Not really.
In the wake of 9-11, the approach taken was that if it wasn't clear sure whether somebody was a terrorist or not, it was prudent to detain them and try to figure it out the details later.
I can understand this attitude-- it's the "better safe than sorry" approach. It's not the way we do things in the US normally ("I'm not sure if this guy is a criminal or not, so let's arrest him until we can figure it out" wouldn't be allowed by any police force in America), but I can't say that I don't understand the reasoning.
But the consequences of that way of operating is that many, or possibly most, of the people picked up actually aren't terrrorists.
(and the downside of that is that, although they may not have been terrorists before they were detained, five years in Gitmo may very well have changed their attitudes... so "better safe than sorry" may actually make us unsafe, and definitely sorry.)
Nice non sequiter there. Of the "70% to 90%" who were picked up, almost all of them were cleared and released immediately. Those detentions have nothing at all to do with Gitmo.
The article you are replying to said: "...were sent home from Guantanamo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed 'no threat' to American forces." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?ei=5088&en=4579c146cb14cfd6&ex=1274241600&pagewanted=all "
Did you not actually read the article you're responding to????
Check out, say,
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2005/04/10/china-religious-repression-uighur-muslims
or http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4435135.stm
Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future. They prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change.
Does the American Revolution not count as a radical political transformation? Federal republics were not common in 1776.
Yes, but at the time the American Revolution started, we were Brits.
As a SF writer, let me point out that the "predictions" of SF are very often more about what makes interesting storytelling, and not accurate predictions of what real life is going to be a hundred years from now. If the choice is between putting a "gosh, wow" element in the story, or putting in a boring element-- well, it's a story. If you want predictions, you should be writing nonfiction.
I think the problem is that many people think the controversy is whether or not global warming is happening. The answer is that it is happening, the global average temperature is climbing. This is based on hard evidence obtained by measuring. Arguing that it isn't is like arguing that the world is flat. The real question and controversy is whether or not our past and present actions are having a measurable effect.
Yes, that's the problem-- if you listen to the media, you would indeed think that this is a "controversy."
It is not a controversy. It is a settled question. There are vast amounts of data, extremely detailed computer models, vertical temperature profiles, satellite measurements. The "controversy" does not exist. The controversy is entirely manufactured by people pushing a "there is no global warming so we don't have to do anything" agenda.
Back fifteen years ago, when the finite-element global climate models only had a few hundred nodes or so, there was some legitimate controversy. But the models, and the computers they run on, have gotten vastly better. The data have gotten better. The measurement techniques have gotten better. Real scientists have spent vast amounts of time looking at the question, and looking at the data, and looking at the models, and looking at the critiques of the models, and finding the errors and making better models.
It's very odd. All through the 70s, any textbook on atmospheric science you might look at would mention the effect of anthropogenic carbon dioxide on global temperature, but since they said that it wouldn't be really a measurable amount until the next century, it wasn't at all controversial. All through the 80s, the same, and it wasn't controversial. All through the 90s, the same (although now "the 21st century" didn't look quite so far away...) but all off a sudden, in the 2000s, when it actually can be measured-- and is measured-- suddenly it's "controversial." The data have all gotten better, but suddenly they're "controversial." The models have gotten better, but suddenly they're "controversial."
It is, basically, a conspiracy theory of science, in which tens of thousands of scientists are all wrong, or stupid, or misguided, or paid off, and are just unwilling to correct the errors in their models that make them incorrectly predict that the atmosphere is doing exactly what the simple physics suggests it would be doing. But conspiracy theories are amusing in the movies, not in real life.
My frost-bit annuals, planted well after the last-frost date for this location, beg to differ...
Yeah, this is exactly the kind of irrelevent arguments you tend to hear. To be fair, the idiotic media hype makes it seem as if this really is the argument for global warming: one warmer-than-average summer, and the headlines read "Global warming is here," and one worse-than-average hurricane season and headlines say "Global warming! Hurricanes are getting worse!"
Global warming is a long-term average rise of temperature over time scales of decades. One warm winter, even a handful of warm winters, has nothing to do with it. Temperatures still fluctuate-- climate change doesn't negate the existence of changes in the weather. And we're talking about the average heat balance of the globe-- any particular spot may still be warmer, or cooler, or unchanged.
The rule for northeast Ohio is, don't plant your tomatoes until the end of May. I planted mine at the end of April. Guess what? They're doing fine. Has global warming moved the growing season up by a month? No, you can't conclude that-- one season, one place, that's not relevant. Global warming is about averages, and about time scales of decades. Got that? Averages. Decades.
There is plenty of controversy, except among those taking funds from govt's, companies, etc who have a vested interest in global warming.
Yes, that's an amazing argument that just can't be refuted: just say that all the science that disagrees with your opinion is biased. You don't need to prove it, you can just assert it, and repeat it over and over until people get tired of arguing. It's such a great argument that you can use it to disprove anything, refute any amount of evidence, no matter how much there is. Evolution? The science establishment has a vested interest in saying it's established science! Did we really land on the moon? The science establishment vested interest in saying we did! UFOs in Roswell? The science establishment has a vested interest in pretending that they invented all that technology we stole from crashed saucers! Tesla invented free power and the oil companies had him killed? The science establishment has a vested interest!
Throw out all those studies, and we can talk.
Yep, that's the argument of the AWG deniers, all right. Throw out all the science. Exactly.