Rocket experiment captures glow attributed to renegade stars in intergalactic space.
Source: Half of stars lurk outside galaxies : Nature News & Comment
How would our philosophies today be different if our solar system were not part of a galaxy? If we developed in a cosmic void with as little hope of ever reaching another star as of swimming across the Pacific ocean?
this sense of flow is a monstrous illusion—so says contemporary physics. And Newton was as much a victim of this illusion as the rest of us are. It was Albert Einstein who initiated the revolution in our understanding of time. In 1905, Einstein proved that time, as it had been understood by physicist and plain man alike, was a fiction. Our idea of time, Einstein realized, is abstracted from our experience with rhythmic phenomena: heartbeats, planetary rotations and revolutions, the swinging of pendulums, the ticking of clocks. Time judgments always come down to judgments of what happens at the same time—of simultaneity. … What Einstein had shown was that there is no universal “now.” Whether two events are simultaneous is relative to the observer. And once simultaneity goes by the board, the very division of moments into “past,” “present,” and “future” becomes meaningless.
Does time have a future? Yes, but how much of a future depends on what the ultimate fate of the cosmos turns out to be.
If there is one proposition about time that all scientifically inclined thinkers can agree on, it might be one due to the nonscientist Hector Berlioz, who is reputed to have quipped, “Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”
Source: xkcd: 4.5 Degrees
The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations.
The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices.
Arguing that DRM doesn’t work is, it turns out, missing the point. DRM is working really well in the video and book space. … Had CDs been encrypted, iPods would not have been able to read their content, because the content providers would have been able to use their DRM contracts as leverage to prevent it.
DRM’s purpose is to give content providers control over software and hardware providers, and it is satisfying that purpose well.
As a corollary to this, look at the companies who are pushing for DRM. Of the ones who would have to implement the DRM, they are all companies over which the content providers already, without DRM, have leverage: the companies that both license content from the content providers and create software or hardware players. Because they license content, the content providers already have leverage against them: they can essentially require them to be pro-DRM if they want the content. The people against the DRM are the users, and the player creators who don’t license content. In other words, the people over whom the content producers have no leverage.
Source: Ian Hickson – Google+