open source contributor to hyperledger sawtooth and seth, apache brooklyn, jclouds and qpid; enterprise software engineer; java, big data, cloud, security, open source, distributed systems, messaging, virtualisation, lolcats.
yeah, but intent matters, and someone purchasing an ebook is probably making a good faith attempt to obtain the media in a way that compensates the author - hence my elision in the passage i quoted, which seems to mean well, but is badly phrased. a downloader pirating the book is directly violating the author's rights wheras the purchaser is really also a victim along with the author - they are being deprived of money for something the seller has no legal right to provide. ianal and all that applies, of course!
i found richard branson's reaction to his space flight experience interesting too - the man is usually very polished and is the poster child for sound bitey pr, but the post landing interview showed him almost babbling incoheretly - it was obvious he had had an incredible and hard to define or articulate experience.
to me, it seems like bezos did exactly the right thing. he got the champagne out the way, then listened to what shatner had to say. and then, when shatner got overwhelmed by emotions, bezos took off his sunglasses and hugged shatner, which was a really touching moment. it's really hard to listen to someone monologuing and not interrupt or distract them, probably more so if you're like bezos and used to being the centre of attention, but he does it and let's shatner have his say. good for both of them!
are you suggesting that fusion plants will be petawatt sized? because that's really not the case. i think the lcoe of fusion is predicted to be around the same as natural gas, with the DEMO reactor costing twice as much.
yeah, although sibling commenters are complaining about the type of adverts seen on today's platforms being different; namely that byte and computer shopper had ads that were 'useful' or 'interesting' by some definition, compared to youtube or facebook.
i think this often reflects more on the viewer, and the type of content they access, than on the platform. depending on the videos i watch, along with some judicious approval or disapproval via the thumbs up/down buttons presented and skipping boring or irrelevant ads and vice-versa, i now am presented with much more appropriate and interesting or informative adverts for products and services i wouldn't have known existed and so on.
there's a lot to be said for targeted advertising, whether through specific platforms or media (such as only advertising in byte magazine and therefore reaching a specific audience of tech-literates) or via big data style ad platforms such as adsense on youtube.
surely seawater can simply be desalinated on site with the plentiful electricity available, and the only fresh water needed would be during initial startup?
maybe, but if not, and (hypothetically) if it could solve the problem of carbon neutral energy and therefore halt global climate change, destruction of Yellowstone as a 'beautiful place' could well be a price worth paying in the long run. i don't think it's likely though, fortunately for Yellowstone!
> we do use nuclear weapons [in] their role as a deterrent
Yeah, I first heard this idea as the main point of Daniel Ellsberg's (also known for his first book, 'The Pentagon Papers' on Vietnam strategy) recent book 'The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner' [0] which documents the USA's 'use' of nuclear weapons, based on his work at RAND. It was a really interesting read, would recommend.
if you give someone begging on the street with a drug habit money that they use for drugs, they either won't have to steal to fund their habit or they won't suffer through painful drug withdrawl, neither of which is good (the first for society, the second for them) so there's that. whether it'd be the ethically correct thing to refuse just because you don't approve of drug use is a complicated question...
you are interacting with the chronic permanently homeless population, what gp is talking about is the fact that there is an even larger population of temporarily homeless. although the statement is true, i don't think it is a useful distinction, because what most people mean by 'homeless' is those chronic cases, anyway, and that is the problem society, government and homeless charities are trying to solve. acknowledging there is another set of people with similar problems is great, but as pointed out, these people generally are getting the support they need, and are a 'solved' problem (in some sense) unlike the people you have been interacting with, who still need some kind of help and are not receiving it...
the skepticism is justified by simply defining homelessness as being without a home for more than a few weeks (the 'usual' definition, tbh) thus making gp's statement obviously false, i suppose.
but isn't that exactly the process by which one obtains knowledge about a subject? i.e. i don't know much about X, i propose theory Y that may explain part of it, i test theory Y to see if it holds, if it does, i now know more about X, namely that Y explains it.
i thought about this as well, when i first learned about unification of forces, it seems like an obvious thing to try and reason about, so let's go!
[caveat - i'm not a physicist, but]
we know forces unify at higher temperatures/energies, and there is no limit to how high temperature can get (maybe? i guess temperature is the same as the mean velocity of the particles, so for particles with mass this cannot exceed c, right?) however the the high energy zone is inaccessible with current technology above a certain level.
but in the other direction, we hit a floor at zero kelvin. which we can access, and can therefore test. so we know that going right down to zero kelvin / electron-volts / joules / meteres per second does not split any of the known forces further. this is how we know that they are the fundamental forces, i think.
but, you can do both, right? that's what alternative text titles and descriptions of images are for, and the font is used to render test that has already been downloaded as utf-8/ascii/whatever characters making up the content of the html tags in the document. lynx exists. screen readers for the blind exist. that's no reason to try and downgrade the aesthetic experience for everyone else. i mean, i remember usenet and gopher, the web and html are just better, prettier, nicer to look at - a well laid out and designed page of content makes me happy, assuming the content is something i'm interested in, but even that isn't nescessary sometimes. and sure, i'm sad for vision impaired people who can't experience that, and sites that don't provide accessible versions of their content are bad and wrong, of course - but that doesn't mean i need to dilute my own experience to match. it'd be like banning people from going hill-walking because wheelchair users can't participate. the correct response it to try and work out how to include and enable access foir the wheelchair users without destroying the experience for everyone else - put in a cable car or something, i don't know. so yeah, i agree with your sentiments in the last two paragraphs above, i just think there's a better way to solve that problem - upgrade everyone's experience.
good question. every household got a big blue envelope with large print writing in it saying something like 'important information about organ donation changes' (or similar, can't find my copy now) and a pamphlet inside. like i said, this was sent to every household, so it does miss the homeless, illiterate and non english speakers (although the pamphlet had instructions in other languages explaining how to access more information) and there were press, radio, tv, internet and outdoor adverts, as i recall. i mean, only covid-19 health information dissemination has been more extensive recently. but, you're right, would be interesting to know how effective the campaign was, and im sure they checked, since it cost a fair bit of public money, so the information should be available somewhere online...
so, basically your only problem is that the possibility of opt-out may not be adequately communicated? and, i think everyone would agree that changing the law but not telling anyone would be bad and wrong. but, spoiler alert, that didn't happen. and if we found someone who could or did not understand, the default would be to not use their organs.
shaped charge type 40mm HE grenades would be fine if you have to defend against a heavily armoured killer robot, but ones like this with exposed hydraulic lines will fall over and curl up after a well placed knife attack, or maybe 12ga flechette rounds from a shotgun if you need a ranged attack.
to be honest, why have corporate colours or logos either, or use photographs or artwork that causes extra bytes of data to be downloaded for mere cosmetic effect. i think corporate websites should consist of either the english word 'good' or the english word 'bad' based on whether the company is determined to be worthy, say by a committee headed by this dude, with an ASN.1 encoded block of data available for download for any ancilliary information required.
so, how does this square with the statement claiming "[...] galaxies in the Local Group stay together" despite space-time expansion, since a galaxy seems rather larger than my proposed space-railway...
edit: also, thanks for the explanations - i think i need to learn more and/or head to physicsoverflow ;)
> over the long distances, the railways would be torn apart by expansion
i'm not sure i get it. as i understood it, it was the fact that forces over a small scale dominate the effects of space expanding that prevents e.g. atoms getting bigger. so why would my space-railway tracks (made of continuous welded steel space-rails) not stay the same size (2m wide by thousands of light years long) as well?
sure. however, i don't want to consume wholesome media where people are nice to each other but the writing or directing is absolutely terrible and uninspired, ruining the niceness - and having been exposed to christian young adult fiction, i found that it was awful low quality rubbish, in the vast majority of cases, sadly. it turns out that reality includes awful people, and well written books will tend to be written realistically and therefore end up containing these people or situations, and are generally better, due to contrasts and complexities thus created, etc...
fundamentally? yes, of course. there's no physical laws or reason why you couldn't - just observe the usual caveats, such as being unable to achieve 100% efficiency, that sort of thing.
now, the question of how to design an actual working solution? i don't know; and basically, it depends. you would then also have the problem of whether it was possible to implememnt that solution, using real matter and physical objects...
unfortunately, that was probably the question you really wanted answered, right?
alastair reynold's revelation space series certainly doesn't have ftl, apart from maybe [jumper clowns spoiler deleted]; the conjoiner drives use [science] to achieve 1g acceleration to get to near light speed, and time dilation is part of many of the plots.
wait - does this mean that some super capable civilisation could link the various galaxies in their inter-galactic empire with a space-railway (i.e. using actual physical tracks between them in space) assuming they have the staggeringly vast amount of matter and/or energy needed, then this would gravitationally bind them together and space between them could not expand?