sentientbicycle
sentientbicycle on Hacker News
"So now textbook authors are forced to license their books in such a manner?" No. This would be much bigger news if that were the case. This is who would make them from the council digest:
"The bill would require the council to establish a competitive
request-for-proposal process in which faculty members, publishers,
and other interested parties would apply for funds to produce, in
2013, 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and
related materials, meeting specified requirements."
This will enable the exact opposite of your last three conjectures. It will decrease the cost of textbooks, the quality will go up, and we'll have even more options to choose from. Plus this is a big win for other educational enterprises. Under the CC BY license outside industries will be able to utilize the material for commercial endeavors.
Alcumbierre himself states that it does not violate causality. from:
http://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw81.html > The possibilities for FTL travel or communication implicit in the Alcubierre drive raise the possibility of causality violations and "timelike loops", i.e., back-in-time communication and time travel. Alcubierre points out that his metric CONTAINS NO SUCH CLOSED CAUSAL LOOPS, and so is free of their paradoxes. However, he speculates that it would probably be possible to construct a metric similar to the one he presented which would contain such loops.
So either he's a laughing stock and nobody is talking about that or (more likely) you are wrong.
OOoohhhh. I totally get it now. You are an unpublished internet stranger and the Alcubierre drive has been scrutinized by some of the top minds in physics. But your criticisms are more important for some reason I don't know. Mkay, going to bed now.
Edit:
By the way. I did read the thing about point A and B and understand it completely. The thing is, it doesn't matter. This is why I'm absolutely sure now that you haven't got a clue as to what the drive actually does. Here let me explain it to you like you are 5. If you send a packet of information from point A to point B, and it goes faster than light, then yes that will screw with causality. But if instead you bring point A closer to point B, it will appear as though it is "traveling" (notice the quotes) faster than light. It is however not traveling. it isn't moving. No movement through space. Freefall. zero movement. Stillness. Think about that for a moment. Absolutely positively no movement. Complete stillness. There is a lack of motion with this drive relative to the speed of light. Mind you this isn't a wormhole because even wormholes can screw with causality. This is a space creator/destoyer. Destroys in the front, creates in the back. No movement is involved. I know it's really hard to wrap your head around but just think about it for a couple of days. think about bringing point A closer to point B instead of going through all the trouble of sending the information. Remember, doesn't move.
I'm sorry, but I just can't find any sort of citation stating that the Alcubierre drive violates any of these principles. I also can't find any mention of paradoxes incurred by the drive and there is only one mention of where the meta-materials themselves would have to violate the light speed limit. Here is how I understand it (and correct me if I'm wrong), but it is not travelling in a vacuum, it is crunching that vacuum in front and expanding it in the back. This doesn't violate any laws because we know our universe is actually already doing this (expanding at a greater than light speed). If what you say is true then the galaxies that are currently moving away from us at those "super-luminal" (not actual super-luminal because we all know that's impossible) speeds shouldn't exist, but we know these do exist and we know why they appear to be doing so. Because of the expansion of the universe.
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=575 So since this is already done naturally is it not feasible to do so artificially?
But aside from all that it seems a little short-sighted to howl about how people can't do something. Time and time again nay-sayers have been proven wrong.