Our physical makeup doesn't include an "extension" into the weak or strong nuclear forces -- at least not such that we'd recognize them using only our senses -- but we still have pretty solid theories on them which were discovered because the theories we already had (primarily QED at the time) simply weren't sufficient as we learned how to probe deeper and deeper into reality.

Or dark matter. We know there's something wrong with our physics because things don't line up. The exact same scenario Maxwell and his contemporaries saw when they were starting to realize that electricity and magnetism were different aspects of the same underlying force. The same scenario as when Einstein realized that Newton's gravity was wrong in just that teensy tiny way.

Sooner or later we'll figure out whether DM is a real thing and perhaps even learn some of its properties, or we'll figure out what's wrong with our equations and fix them. Either way though, these historical scenarios exemplify ways that science can probe things that our senses can't pick up and manage to come up with useful theories as to how they work.

The trouble with that is, when given the option of paying or not, the vast majority of users will choose "not," at least given a wide enough target audience (some niches may be filled with more generous people of course..)

So it becomes a question of opportunity cost: That is, your software price has to be low enough to warrant your customer paying you directly rather than just grabbing the source and compiling for themselves. And since people generally don't value their time anywhere near what its actually worth, that's probably going to be a fairly low dollar amount in most cases.

Would it work for some businesses? Sure. But likely not for most of them. Sure you could give away the software and charge for support, but that only really works when your customers are large firms that can afford multiple-thousand-dollar support contracts. For everyone else, they'll try Googling for an answer first and if they can't find one or can't make sense of it, they'll just uninstall your software rather than paying $10-50/hr for a off-contract support call.

Keep in mind we're living in a world where its difficult to get people to pay $1-2 for an app on their app store of choice -- most people either won't bother with it at all, will find a way to pirate it, or will just stick with the free version (which isn't all that bad for the developer cause ad money, but its a bloody disaster for the industry as a whole given how obnoxious and untrustworthy most of the ad farms are.. not to mention requiring the developer to waste time building and distributing a completely separate "free" version and integrating with ad farm APIs and whatever that could otherwise be used to better their core product.)

There is one reason: Derivative works. Since copyright as its currently defined generally prevents derivative works, having it expire into the public domain is necessary for the next generation of artists (or currently, their great grandchildren..) to build upon those works.

How many movies and books wouldn't exist if things like Homer, Shakespeare, Brothers Grimm, etc weren't considered public domain? How much Disney (aka: the primary proponent of perpetual copyright extension) wouldn't exists without those?

How much music wouldn't exist if Bach and Beethoven and other greats weren't generally available to modern musicians (or even music schools) because their estates still held copyrights and demanded $10,000 per "performance?"

The confusing part comes in when "other people" can offer the artist's work for less than the artist can (or is willing to.)

So by taking a literal reading of your comment, the people who don't want to pay are 100% entitled to pirate the works. And it seems as if the world's consumers mostly agree with that assessment.

Previously this was compensated for by physical counterfeits being (relatively) expensive to make and (relatively) easy to trace, and thus copyright was fairly easy to enforce. Digital copying eliminates both of those limitations, making copyright very difficult if not impossible to enforce.

There will still be time. Figuring out how to measure it without any entropy is another question (perhaps you could measure the rate of expansion of the universe. Assuming its accelerating at a fairly consistent rate, measuring that rate at any particular point would give you a measure of the amount of time passed since your last measurement. Of course then you have the question of how you could figure out whether the rate of acceleration has changed.)

You could also perhaps measure the rate of zero-point particle production (which wouldn't stop)? Not sure if that's consistent enough to act as a clock. I do know that you'd need to measure it over an enormous amount of space in order to have any sort of accuracy, even if its theoretically plausible.

Both measurement methods of course would require a device.. which you wouldn't have since you can't build useful devices without entropy. But we're all talking about "in principle" anyway since I doubt we'll be around long enough to test these things in practice!

In any case, as far as current physics can tell it would be "infinite" either way. We of course can't predict 10^100 years into the future with any great accuracy (another inflation period hits? Or a deflation period? Or maybe expansion energy has a finite maximum and just stops when that runs out? Who knows.) But if there are no surprises with respect to how the universe continues to expand, then it will certainly (not) end with an infinite amount of time where any intelligence that somehow exists will be bored as hell.

> is not infinite, it is finite
Yes, that's basically definition.

> as if he knew the number
Why would he have to know the number? I can tell you that your lifespan is finite, but I can't tell you the exact second you will die. Knowing that its finite doesn't require knowing exactly what finite number it will come to.

> IT NEVER GETS TO ZERO
Irrelevant, because we're interested in usable energy. If the energy differential is at its minimum (non-zero) value and you try to extract exactly that much energy, you'll find that something will prevent you (most likely in terms of the device needed to extract that energy will itself take more energy than you can extract.) Because as you said, it never gets to zero -- including the fact that we can't force it to zero. So while you may be right in that the absolute energy differential will never be zero, the extractable energy can be.

> assuming also that Physics will stop dead
What? Do you expect them to look into the future and write an article based on the physics we might know in 100 years? 1000? 1,000,000? Its kind of by necessity that the author only use physics that we actually know about.

Or perhaps you expect him to base his article on branes or multiple universes or other shit that have absolutely zero evidence beyond "we can make some math work out if we try"? That seems even more bogus than extrapolating today's knowledge of physics into the future.

Well gravity won't "end" as such, but assuming the expansion of the universe continues accelerating, we will eventually be in a state where individual atoms are being pushed apart by expansion faster than gravity can pull them back together.

The same argument will apply to the EM force eventually (breaking molecules apart into individual atoms and then ions.)

And finally to the strong force, though I'm not sure exactly how that one will work since quark binding works different from EM binding -- in particular, pulling two quarks apart generally produces new particles which, if I'm thinking correctly (and I may not be, I'm an armchair physicist at best..) would end up converting expansion energy into particle showers, which would in turn have some strange effects:

First, the universe would be "filling up" with new stuff as the conversion goes on, and

Second, if the expansion energy is conserved at all like normal energy is, this continual particle production should eventually stop the acceleration of expansion. Though it wouldn't stop expansion itself -- it would have to come to an equilibrium where the universe is expanding exactly fast enough to match the energy consumption of the particle production, which would still be orders of magnitude beyond ions recombining into atoms never mind gravitationally binding large objects like stars again.

If the expansion of the universe ever reverses, entropy will (very very slowly) start decreasing.

I mean right now it doesn't look like that's likely to happen (I mean the expansion isn't just continuing -- its getting faster.)

But given that we have absolutely no idea what drives said expansion, we can't be completely sure that it won't stop or even reverse in the future. Or hell, even "jump" again like it did during inflation.. and if that happens.. would it jump in or out?

All we've got to work with is an extrapolation from what we've seen -- which obviously only includes the past, and not even all of that!) But without gaining some knowledge of how the underlying systems work, there's no reason to really believe that our extrapolations will bear out over the time scales of potentially hundreds of billions of years.

We named the underlying system "dark energy" -- a term means "we know it exists but basically nothing else about it.

This question itself is very anthropocentric -- you have to define "eyesight," which is already based on our human experience of the world.

But if you break it down, "eyesight" is just specific cells reacting in specific manners to specific wavelengths of photons.

If you're in a system with little to no light, you simply wouldn't evolve that type of cell. Deep earth creatures are already known to have no eyes (or just have vestigial eyes left over from when their ancestors first crawled down a hole.)

Similarly, sound is just specific cells evolved to recognize specific compression waves in the air (primarily, though they work in other mediums to some extent of course.) If we evolved in a medium that didn't transmit sound very easily, we probably wouldn't have ears.

Smell (and taste) is specific cells evolved to recognize specific types of chemical composition. If we evolved in a world that didn't have so many unique chemicals (or they were so mixed together that everything would always "smell" the same) then we probably wouldn't have a sense of smell.

Lungs are specific cells evolved to process oxygen. If we didn't live in an oxygen-rich world, we wouldn't have lungs (fish already don't have lungs, though gills are also designed to process oxygen, just in a different manner.)

Now how exactly an intelligence that developed without any recognition of light would figure out what a photon is or what its properties are, I have no idea. And I doubt anyone else does either since we've got no baseline to even begin to make such guesses. But assuming such an intelligence could develop deep scientific understanding, they'll eventually run into the fact that photons are a natural part of atomic interactions.

You could similarly ask yourself how a species that can't "see" quarks would be able to develop a theory of quarks and gluons. That is, our species. Well simply, we use what we have and extrapolate solutions for things that don't "work" given our current understanding, then figure out ways to test if those solutions match reality.

You do realize that "enough AutoCAD users" just doesn't exist? Most users, especially those who are using the software for their work, don't really give a rats ass if they're using a "FOSS" system. Most of them probably don't even know what that acronym stands for never mind what it means.

Most users only care if the software works, and works with as little effort as possible. End of story. Just like most people don't really pay attention to the cleanliness of your kitchen as long as the food tastes good and doesn't make them sick.

Of course we have government food inspectors to ensure that your kitchen is clean and that your employees wash their hands and whatever. Something similar might be interesting for software development but would be a lot more challenging as there's not really any globally correct best practices like there is with food prep (and of course there's the political aspect of empowering government over business practices, which never goes over well in the US even when its demonstrably beneficial never mind a situation like this where its somewhat questionable.)

Accuracy and stability are FAR more important than speed. 150ms delay isn't really all that much when you're only making small, deliberate movements.

These doctors aren't trying to perform a rocket jump in your chest cavity. They're trying to line up the perfect headshot against a mostly unmoving target.

Even more likely is that they'd require you to store sperm/eggs and then be tied or otherwise sterilized so that reproduction can be specifically chosen based on laws/person's life/whatever (and yes, almost certainly the person's economic and social standing because humans probably won't stop being assholes to each other.)

Its the only way to really maintain population control while still allowing people to play with each others' fun bits whenever they want (which you won't be able to stop no matter what you do.)

Though obviously it would require perfecting storing and using sperm/eggs for potentially dozens if not hundreds of years. We're running around a decade or two at the most right now and that wouldn't be sufficient in a world where raising a kid could theoretically be desired and plausible at 100 or 150 years of age or later.

Not to support that guy's inane rambling, but this is a terrible analogy -- the difference of course being that the police _CAN_ break the lock on your house.

Yes it may take a couple of extra seconds, but that's a far cry from the couple of extra universe lifetimes it could take to break properly implemented encryption.

It would be a more apt analogy if your typical front door was a 24" steel vault door that takes several hours of torching to cut through (and presumably the rest of your house would be equally solid so that they can't just go smash a window instead..) And even then its a far cry from breaking modern encryption.

But its a good excuse for ramming unfair laws down our throats.

You'll get zero public support if you're a billion dollar company (that pays almost no taxes to boot) and you start whining about your profits.. but if you word it as "safety" and "what if its your kid in the way when the ev1L haxx0rs can't brake?," our human nature tends to make us stop worrying about silly things like logic and reasoning and focus purely on the emotional content.

Its an extremely tilted uphill battle to be on the other side of those kind of arguments, no matter how stupid, vague or even outright fallacious they are. My mind no longer registers "Ford's profits vs your freedom," it only hears "my kids vs your freedom."

You can call me stupid or naive for falling for it (and you'd be right, in a sense) but that doesn't change the situation since I'm not seeing you as the enemy and don't easily trust what you say anyway, and slamming me with insults isn't helping that in the slightest.

The threshold doesn't have to be high though -- it only has to be higher than the opportunity cost for spamming. Once you hit that point, going further does little or nothing to help your cause but can negatively impact additional legitimate edge cases.