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I don't know how this can be debatable.

Everything that I have heard and read show that Macs are cheaper when factoring in TCO. In addition to less support (how many times have heard "...my company has 1000 PCs with 100 PC support techs and 2000 Macs with 3 Mac support techs...") and longer lasting hardware ("...we have a SE/30 that we still use as a mail server...") to increased productivity ("...virus? What stinking virus?...It just works!)

Here's a few examples I found when googling for info on Mac vs. Windows TOC:

Macs Shine In Total Cost Of Ownership
"The TOC (total operating cost) for the Wintel machines amounts to $253.86 per year, every year until it is retired," Canterbury told Sellers. "The Macs run us $53.25 per year. Quite a difference and one our board and parents heard loud and clear."

Return On Investments between the Macintosh and Windows platforms.
[NOTE: of course this is where the Mac shines but I think that it translates to other areas of general productivity]
"This benchmark supersedes a common but misleading bench-mark: cost-of-ownership. An ROI benchmark correlates the cost of ownership and productivity of media producers to revenue and profit. Detailed ROI analysis reveals that a Macintosh-using creative professional produces $26,441 more annual revenue and $14,488 more net profit (per person) than a Windows user of comparable skill engaged in similar work."

Why most people should buy a Macintosh rather than a Windows PC
A study from technology research company, Gartner has found Apple Macintosh computers to be up to 36 percent cheaper to own and run than competing PC products. The study utilised Gartner's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) methodology, which takes into account the direct and indirect costs of owning IT infrastructure.

And there are just so many other ones that I grow tired of providing the information

i use netspace and for AU70 a month i get 8 gigs at 512/128. no excess usage charges and i can check my usage on their website

Once our bodies can live 500 years, barring accident, the obstacle to longevity will be our minds. With 500 years of memories, role models, lovers, enemies, how can we keep it together, running our current model of individual personality? Reinventing yourself will be a survival requirement. I liked Greg Egan's treatment of immortals in Diaspora and John Varley's Steel Beach. What's your strategy for the long term?

i'm sorry, would that be the 1Mbps that's bigger or smaller than the three plans as follows?

Home 1500 Lite 1500k/256k $119.95 8Gb
Home 1500 1500k/256k $149.95 9Gb/9Gb (18Gb total)
Home 1500 Plus 1500k/256k $199.95 14Gb/14Gb (28Gb total)

as seen here for example?

every single one of those is over 1Mbps.

ashridah
(ps, prices are in $AUD, and yes, data is expensive here, nothing new there.)

The traditional Sci-Fi of rocket ships, blaster guns, and aliens may be on decline

Actually, all that stuff is *coming back* (if often with a postmodern, ironic slant): the most recent trend in SF (that I'm aware of) is the "new baroque space opera".

The original poster is *seriously* (as in, 30 years) behind the curve on SF - the move away from technology was in the 70s (the "New Wave"), then we had the 80s stylized technology ("Cyberpunk"), then the 90s with a lot of *great* work on the impact of technology on society, and now we're retooling the 50s-style space opera. (Which may indeed have a lot to do with the current doldrums in human space flight.)

The recent Tolkien-triggered interest in fantasy had zero impact on SF - the two fields are well enough decoupled from each other these days. SF is bigger, healthier, and better than ever before, if you know where to look. Some rough guidelines:

1) any SF made in Hollywood is utter crap. For Hollywood, SF = juvenile adventure stories. Ignore movies, ignore TV, ignore games, ignore movie, TV, and gaming tie-ins.

2) the primary form of SF is the *short story*, not the novel. Short stories are the ongoing dialogue of ideas between SF authors; novels are what they fluff their short stories up into when they need money to pay the bills. Read the short stories!

3) to read the current short stories, you subscribe to SF *magazines*, such as Interzone, Asimovs' SF, Analog, Fantasy & SF, to name but the largest.

4) to catch up on the last two decades, buy past editions of "The Year's Best SF" edited by Gardner Dozois. You'll have the best short stories and novellas of a year at an unbeatable price. Gardner knows the field like no one else.

I have yet to make friends with the "new baroque" style - my favorite stuff is the work speculating on the implications of the latest, cutting-edge science, and its impact on society. If you're not scared of plots pivoting on the finer points of quantum mechanics, biotechnology, and theory of computation, Greg Egan is the man here. His short stories are collected in "Axiomatic" and "Luminous".

I could go on now about all the wonderful *old* SF that people who never dug deeper than Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke are missing out on (ever heard of Tiptree?) but that's left as an exercise to the reader :-)

- nic

Disclaimer: I don't have time to read the mags, and am still working on last year's Dozois - so I'm about two years behind the curve myself.

• Greg Egan
• Iain (M.) Banks
• Alistair Reynolds
• Ken MacLeod
• Richard Morgan
• Peter F. Hamilton
• Plus one of the old masters back at work: M. John Harrison

For two downloadable examples, check out this moving short story about a week in the life of an immortal. Note how we can still empathize with the losses immortals must have. (And note that unlike this story, immortality is usually just background in Egan's stories (just like contemporary writing doesn't focus on how our average age is 70).) Or for a great read, download or buy Cory Doctorow's novel 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.' Day to day struggles of people who just happen to be in the starting centuries of immortality.

But what really interests me are the motivations of people who hate the idea of immortality or longevity. Now, if these people were like the Amish ("go on ahead with your tech, but we're going to hang out here for a while") that'd be one thing. But George Bush's chief bioethicist is one of them. Geoge Bush's decisions will be made^hhhInfluenced by someone who has been said to think:

'According to Kass, it is a deeply fundamental aspect of life to suffer and die. When we try to fix this natural order, we lose our soul, our essential humanity.'

I think that given the opportunity for longevity treatments (antibiotics, heart transplants) he'd take them, saying that the particular treatment isn't terrible (like Bennett on gambling). But meanwhile he causes lots of damage, because as treatments are introduced, you cannot easily separate longevity treatments from quality of life treatments. If Kass thinks one of these (longevity /immortality) is ultimately evil, then he might well be willing to sacrifice the other (q of l) in order to prevent the former. To stop reproductive cloning (because delayed twinning is evil, you know?) we also have to stop theraputic cloning, for example.

Me, I want both longevity and quality of life. Of course I'd like to try for 160, just like a person who could only expect to make 40 would love to try for 80. But if not, I'd love to have a much better time in my last decades. I don't see the necessity or beauty of strokes, dementia, arthritis... I don't see this virtue of suffering that Kass sees, and I doubt that he voluntarily skips anti-suffering treatments as they become available. However, I think he will work hard to delay when they become available. That's scary.

As a thought experiment, imagine a world where all arts- books, symphonies, photos, movies, plays, scuptures- had an average lifespan of 70 years, then they start to crumble away, 99% gone by 100, all gone by 120 years. So all we knew about Murasaki Shikibu, Michelangelo, W. Shakespeare, and Beethoven were that they existed; and jazz fans were already losing Louis Armstrong's works. Imagine people in that world saying "Its great we lose these works: unless they disappear no new works will be created. It is unethical to try to extend these creations to survive to 140 or 500 years..." Humanity survived our average lifespan going from 25 to 40 and 40 to 75: I think we're perfectly capable of working out the logistics of 120 or 160 or 300.

For a sci-fi take, read Permutation City by Greg Egan.

Comparing authors and the literature with directors and the SF movies...

Authors

• Know about the history of SF literature, including what has become stale or cliched.
• Must be aware of scientific developments of the past 40 years, especially if the author specializes in "Hard SF"
• Get help or critiques from other writers / scientists: many of the best SF writers are both (i.e. Benford, Vinge)
• Go to SF conventions where topics include recent discoveries in science, technology and medicine; bleeding edge new writers and concepts; and which new novels or short stories should get recognized via awards like the Hugo.

• Get away with plots and backstory that were already old 30 years ago in the SF literature
• Don't seem to want to admit their relationship with / dependancy on the SF literature, so don't read or seek criticism from SF writers. (Anecdotal evidence- they rarely participate in regular SF conventions (instead going to Media Cons) and even more rarely hang out in the audience, listening and learning.)
• Don't know the state of the art in scientifically consistent (even if not plausible) technobabble. Apparently not aware of the evil overlord's rules and other long-known lists of cliches to avoid.
• Don't have any idea about recent SF writers. Nor do their critics, so as in this case the movie/TV show will always be compared to one of "Wells, Verne, Bradbury, Star Trek, Star Wars, Bladerunner (or rarely PKDick) and The Matrix," all nice but they could use some higher standards. Leads to critics calling movies like Harris's Fatherland ("ohhhh, what if Hitler *won* WWII?") original, because they don't know that the SF subfield of alternate history is decades old.

Hmmm, sounds a lot like Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan

From the article about grey goo:
"-- Space itself, an invisible froth of subatomic forces and short-lived particles, might undergo a "phase transition" like water molecules that freeze into ice. Such an event could "rip the fabric of space itself. The boundary of the new-style vacuum would spread like an expanding bubble," devouring Earth and, eventually, the entire universe beyond it."

Greg Egan's latest book, Schild's Ladder is a great story penned from this premise.

Iain M Banks is probably not counted as hard-scifi author but his books are thought-provoking and entertaining as hell (I even recommend you to take a look at his non-scifi books, published under the name Iain Banks, some real gems there too). Try The Player of the Games, Use of Weapons or State of the Art which is a excellent collection of short stories. Cheers, Tero

If you want a good perspective bender, check out Wicked: The life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West...

Greg Egan is an Australian writer whose AIs have many of the characteristics that Watson describes, so much so that I'm surprised Watson didn't mention him.

See, in particular, the novels Diaspora and Schild's Ladder and the short story The Planck Dive.

Diaspora is the best, IMHO. It is a biography of an AI from birth to what you might call retirement long, long after its birth. The birth is fascinatingly described in AI terms familiar to readers of Daniel Dennett and Marvin Minsky.

Greg Egan is an Australian writer whose AIs have many of the characteristics that Watson describes, so much so that I'm surprised Watson didn't mention him.

See, in particular, the novels Diaspora and Schild's Ladder and the short story The Planck Dive.

Diaspora is the best, IMHO. It is a biography of an AI from birth to what you might call retirement long, long after its birth. The birth is fascinatingly described in AI terms familiar to readers of Daniel Dennett and Marvin Minsky.

Yet again, the real world imitates one of his stories. He has a couple of stories based in a world where everyone's brain is swapped out for a crystal computer. Mindfuck stuff about the true seat of consciousness, mortality and the meaning of "human". Just remembered "Reasons to be cheerful", specifically about brain prosthesics and personality.

Home page with free stories

This is my third Greg Egan post in the last few months and they've all been ontopic. He thinks big thoughts about our near future and is a much better writer than Cory Doctorow, imho.

Greg Egan, for one, has found quite a lot of material in "the details". Novels about , amongst other topics, a Theory of Everything (Distress) and influencing the collapse of quantum uncertainty (Quarantine) and short stories about all sorts of *very* hard science. Some interesting bio-ethics stuff too, to forge a tenuous Niven link. Good official homepage with lots of full stories online.

I've always enjoyed Greg Egan's's stories. They often deal with bizarre post-Singularity-type themes.

There are a few providers that provide mirrors of linux software...

and some of these provide this software free, or rather it doesn't count towards the download quota.

However one can see that the providers in Australia are now slowly starting to shift away from the circa 13c/meg exceess download rates.

A few have started offering plans that slow down once you reach your cap.(Netspace)

One provider (Internode) even has a new flat rate sort of plan in which there are no download 'limits' or caps as such but rather a priority list, and peoples place on the priority list is based on how much they download...

then in times of congestion those on the bottom of the priority list slow down a lot, those in the middle slow down a little, and those on the top dont slow down.

Then when it gets uncongested again, everyone downloads fast...

So I think theres some good Broadband plans out there now in Australia, the biggest problem in relation to Oz Broadband is Telstra... they have monopolised literally the whole broadband market and they are pretty much the sole reason why the uptake of broadband in Australia has been so slow.

A good place to check out the Broadband scene in Australia is Whirlpool

• Alastair Reynolds
• Iain Banks
• Greg Egan

Schild's Ladder is a much better story than your inane post.

greg egan. every book of his i have read has made my brain hurt severely. which is a good thing ;-). he usually starts of with one mindblowing idea and just when you kinda get a grip on that, he smacks you upside the head with another. a couple of my favourites are "permutation city" and "diaspora". you can check out some of his short stories (and cool applets he has written to demonstrate the concepts from his books) here: greg egan
awesome writer

Perhaps Egan's site explaining his works will be of help: http://www.netspace.net.au/~gregegan/

I'd mostly agree, but there's an exception to every rule, and in this case it's Greg Egan. Of course, he is able to make up science because he well aware of developments at the cutting edge of mathematical physics; a cosmologist friend of mine was very impressed by the calculations of photon paths near a black hole that Egan has posted on his website, which anticipated some recent work posted to astro-ph.

I'd mostly agree, but there's an exception to every rule, and in this case it's Greg Egan. Of course, he is able to make up science because he well aware of developments at the cutting edge of mathematical physics; a cosmologist friend of mine was very impressed by the calculations of photon paths near a black hole that Egan has posted on his website, which anticipated some recent work posted to astro-ph.

This is the first chapter of greg egan's book, diaspora, which describes a simulated neurogenesis in software, the technique of which was reverse engineered from the fractal patterns of human DNA.

Although this is science fiction, and art in only the literary sense, would it not qualify as prior art?

With the millions of PCs sitting around with "Idle" as the busiest process, imagine getting a penny or so per CPU second, selling CPU time on the open market to the

• Oil/mineral prospectors who need to process geo data
• The national weather service predicting hurricanes
• Your local genome sequencer

Now, you have a value for CPU time on the open market. You should be able to

• Get a tax deduction for cycles given to SETI, cancer foundations, etc.
• Have a value to sue for the loss when you're DOS-ed

For a reference of a future society that uses this, see Greg Egan's "Distress" and perhaps "Permutation City"

Greg Egan's 'Permutation City'
Amazon

Also, he has a great site:
Greg Egan

this is one of the most interesting threads at /. i ever read. thanks to all of you hobby- and junior- and full-grown-astronomers/-physicians to share your knowledge with the unwashed masses. :)

as i'm a fan of this noblest profession myself, i want to place a link here to the online version of one of my favourite fictional short stories. it is titled "The Planck Dive" and is written by Greg Egan. if you are into hard-sf, it's a must-read. it features a nice description of a black-hole-jump... :)

have fun!

Your particular definition of scratch involves compiling the C source code.
Some might say scratch could also be:
- Writing it in assembly
- Writing it in x86 machine language
- Flipping the bits on the hard drive
- Re-inventing the C source code

All of the methods require additional tools:
- A tool to take the Hard Disk and provide a file structure, write a boot sector and loader
- A tool with some commands to copy the compiler there
- A tool to take the C source code and generate the machine language binary code

You might find it similar to how mammals develop. As far as I know, most mammals require parents to feed, care, and raise their young. I can't think of any fertilized egg, fetus, or newborn that can survive without the parent to hand down their knowledge (I even heard that the reason we are able to live past 30 is to provide knowledge as grandparents or family/clan elders).

I have thought of one way to completely write the OS with only one machine. A long time ago, the old IBM PCs (and Apple computers) had a key sequence which would break into debug mode. After this mode starts, you would be able to type in the machine code to get a rudimentary system going. Another way would be to get an old ethernet card with a rom chip and burn a startup rom. Then you type in the boot loader.
For example: a bootable ``Hello World!'' program, consisting of just over 100 lines of assembler code.

While 100 lines of code is easy to hand type, imagine typing in the 10,000-100,000 characters for an extremely simple operating system. Then imagine hand typing in the machine code for a C compiler (yikes!), unless you want to hand type in the millions to 100's of millions of bytes of machine code to write a Linux system. There would be another way speed it up if you take apart a keyboard, wire it to a device capable of playing back keystrokes. I started to work on this but have postponed it until better times. I did start out by building Linux from Scratch and it took me 30-40 hours of very patient, slow progress. The complexity of even a minimal Linux is boggling when you jump in, compile, link, and see how much text scrolls by your screen when compiling it.

The advantage to Linux from Scratch is you have the greatest control over the OS. Without your direct control over every detail it won't run, as it depends on your Linux knowledge or following the tutorial to install.

Other links:
From-PowerUp-To-Bash-Prompt-HOWTO
How to Write an Operating System

If you want an extremely minimalist Linux distro, there's a list at :http://www.linux.org/dist/index.html
Select Category-minimalist, Platform-Intel compatible and click go.
Search for gateway on the page.

I've tried the following ones because they have the basic OS requirements for a user, they load from a floppy, and move resources to RAM:
Alphalinux
muLinux

Your particular definition of scratch involves compiling the C source code.
Some might say scratch could also be:
- Writing it in assembly
- Writing it in x86 machine language
- Flipping the bits on the hard drive
- Re-inventing the C source code

All of the methods require additional tools:
- A tool to take the Hard Disk and provide a file structure, write a boot sector and loader
- A tool with some commands to copy the compiler there
- A tool to take the C source code and generate the machine language binary code

You might find it similar to how mammals develop. As far as I know, most mammals require parents to feed, care, and raise their young. I can't think of any fertilized egg, fetus, or newborn that can survive without the parent to hand down their knowledge (I even heard that the reason we are able to live past 30 is to provide knowledge as grandparents or family/clan elders).

I have thought of one way to completely write the OS with only one machine. A long time ago, the old IBM PCs (and Apple computers) had a key sequence which would break into debug mode. After this mode starts, you would be able to type in the machine code to get a rudimentary system going. Another way would be to get an old ethernet card with a rom chip and burn a startup rom. Then you type in the boot loader.
For example: a bootable ``Hello World!'' program, consisting of just over 100 lines of assembler code.

While 100 lines of code is easy to hand type, imagine typing in the 10,000-100,000 characters for an extremely simple operating system. Then imagine hand typing in the machine code for a C compiler (yikes!), unless you want to hand type in the millions to 100's of millions of bytes of machine code to write a Linux system. There would be another way speed it up if you take apart a keyboard, wire it to a device capable of playing back keystrokes. I started to work on this but have postponed it until better times. I did start out by building Linux from Scratch and it took me 30-40 hours of very patient, slow progress. The complexity of even a minimal Linux is boggling when you jump in, compile, link, and see how much text scrolls by your screen when compiling it.

The advantage to Linux from Scratch is you have the greatest control over the OS. Without your direct control over every detail it won't run, as it depends on your Linux knowledge or following the tutorial to install.

Other links:
From-PowerUp-To-Bash-Prompt-HOWTO
How to Write an Operating System

If you want an extremely minimalist Linux distro, there's a list at :http://www.linux.org/dist/index.html
Select Category-minimalist, Platform-Intel compatible and click go.
Search for gateway on the page.

I've tried the following ones because they have the basic OS requirements for a user, they load from a floppy, and move resources to RAM:
Alphalinux
muLinux

Brin- science fiction writer, where writers:

• must be familiar with current SF literature and scientific developments of the past 40 years.
• Often send drafts out to other writers / scientists (many other SF writers are both- Benford, Vinge, Forward...) for criticism before the final version.
• go to conventions where discussions and panels cover recent discoveries in science, technology and medicine.
• know about and read the bleeding edge writers (because of things like the Nebula and Hugo Awards (read nominees here)) like modern space opera writer Clute, makes up his own plausible-sounding mathematical systems Greg Egan, Alistair Reynolds and, writing from the other side of the singularity, Charlie Stross.

Lucas- science fiction (though he won't admit it) movie / TV director, where directors:

• can get away with plots and backstory that were already old 30 years ago in the SF literature
• Don't want to admit to being SF, so don't read or seek criticism from other SF writers. (Anecdotal evidence- they rarely participate in regular SF conventions (instead going to Media Cons) and even more rarely hang out in the audience, listening and learning.) Leads to situations like Whelon thinking Firefly is original because it is gritty and doesn't have phasers.
• Aren't aware of the state of the art in scientifically consistent (even if not plausible) technobabble. Apparently not aware of the evil overlord's rules and other long-known lists of cliches to avoid.
• Don't have any idea about recent SF writers- the critics don't either, and so the movie/TV show will always be compared to one of "Wells, Verne, Bradbury, Star Trek, Star Wars, Bladerunner (or rarely PKDick) and The Matrix," all nice but they could use some higher standards. Leads to critics calling movies like Harris's Fatherland ("ohhhh, what if Hitler *won* WWII?") original, because they don't know that the SF subfield of alternate history is decades old.

But I doubt Lucas will ever hear Brin: Lucas seems to have surrounded himself with yesmen, who rarely pass on negative articles. (Plus, for him to listen would be evidence that his work and inspiration came in part from SF and the space opera of his youth.)

Greg Egan is an author, programmer, and scientist.

In one of his short stories, he mentions having a setup where a whitelist of people you know are allowed to send you email for free, and anything else requires a minimum payment (which can be set from 0 to as high as you want). Tired of spam? I wouldn't be, for 25 cents a spam. That'd pad my bank account nicely.

How could it be done? There are already proposed extentsions to the SMTP command set so that clients and servers could agree on an amount and pass a token to each other (be sure you're using a TLS aware MTA, like Postfix), and it could be verified by both sides with the 3rd-party escrow server (which manages the money). Paypal is the only current online money system with enough momentum to make this work well for everyone, but maybe another one will come up :)

Either way, it makes it easy to stop spam by removing the one thing that spammers like -- the cheapness. Only people who want spam (haha), or people who don't live in the 21st-century (MTA wise) will have to deal with the 20th century scourge known as spam.

For a java applet simulation of this, go here. They also have a pretty good explanation, but I didn't understand it until I played around with the applet for a while.

Actually it is possible to have both a group and phase velocity faster than c. For a cool applet demonstration by Greg Egan, visit this.

You can also do an experement yourself with a high bandwidth op amp. Make a current follower circuit (hook the output up to the - input) but introduce a long delay into that connection with a long cable. Now send a gaussian pulse into the + input and watch the output with an oscilliscope. If your op amp has high enough bandwith, the output pulse will appear before the input pulse. What is happening is that the very leading edge of the pulse is being amplified into the whole pulse in order to satisfy the golden rule of op amps: the two inputs must be at the same voltage.

This (and all other systems like it) only work on waves that are analytic functions, which means that then entire function can be completely reconstructed from the behavior at one point. Analytic functions cannot be used to transmit information, so we still cannot use this to communicate faster than light.

It is a proud and defiant ignorance allowed because the audience doesn't know better- they don't know of the SF books beyond the "Sword of Han Solo" serials on the NYTimes lists. The same reviewers would never review a modern comedy as "the tradition of Mark Twain and Charlie Chaplin" or a mystery as "part of the long history from Poe to Doyle." i.e. if it is another genre they'll have at least a basic knowledge of it: for example, that westerns went from simple ("Indians bad") to complex, and that other countries (Japan, Italy) are part of cowboy movie history. They'll know that Elvis isn't modern rock and Martha Graham isn't cutting edge dance. But with SF they'll use 40 year old movies as their example (in turn based on 60 year old stories/ideas, as SF movies tend to be far behind the literature) without embarrassment.

So what- let them be ignorant, some could say. But when reviewers don't know about or ignore modern SF, it hurts more than some thin-skinned fandom:

• It lets the modern non-SF author get away with slumming or borrowing. Authors need (and the good ones want) to be held to a higher standard.
  
• It prevents the SF authors from getting credit as the people who originated or built up a concept.
  
• It keeps the reader from finding out about the history and authors who've done a concept. The reader doesn't get a "if you like Z, you might also like X and Y, who started it..."
  
• It lets the reviewers get away with sloppy work.

So I'll be happy to see (what I assume are at least good sellers) books like Dozois' Best SF Stories of the Year and more showing up. Reviewers will have to first account for the writers like Ian McDonald, the rapidly approaching (and hope he pulls it off) Singularity Charlie Stross, and just intensely good Greg Egan, before they blow off SF as spaceship-westerns.

Is it possible to send a long-lived low speed probe like Voyager to Alpha Centairi? I wonder if after 40,000 years when the probe arrives at alpha centauri, it could send it's radio signals back to earth. Then the signals would be recieved by a time machine, which would in turn transport them back to our time. So you in effect have a fast intersteller flight while only sending out a cheap probe going 30,000 MPH.

Well, I see no paradox there, -provided- that the time machine sends signals back to a point in time four years after probe launch. (Because the alpha centuri system is approx 4ly away.) As you say, the win is that you only need interplanetary-speed probe technology to get the probe there.

I can see one difficulty: as someone else in this thread has pointed out, neutrons are all pretty much identical, and not really suitable for transmitting information. I guess we'd need to make this work for leptons before we could achieve anything useful.

I'd tend to think of all this stuff as moving things around in space-time rather than actual time-travel. You're just subtracting from the t co-ordinate rather than adding to x, y, or z, which we're more used to thinking about.

The question is whether sending the data back through time will use any less energy than accelerating the probe to near light-speed would...

Note: IANAP, but I do have half a physics degree from 10 years back.

Regarding your other conjectures, there's a Greg Egan short story of the usual high quality where citizens are allocated a few hundred bytes a day of inter-temporal bandwidth, which they use to send a "diary" back to their junior selves. Unfortunately I cannot recall the name of the story and I am in the office right now so I can't look it up. I'll reply to this from home with the title if nobody else has filled the gap by then...

Additionally, wormholes play a key part in Egan's novel "Diaspora".

Zack

• Find the stories in anthologies like Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction Series
  with authors like
• 'Sensawunda' as an illicit drug Charlie Stross
• 'Linux Jihad' creating Ken Macleod
• what if you wake up and you're the copy Greg Egan
• or what if your copy isn't fully sentient David Marusek
  

I found this on Greg Egan's (the SF author and programmer) site: Subluminal Applet

Please forgive my lack of knowledge in this area, but what you said just doesn't make sense to me. If you can send waves FTL, and send information on those waves, then it logically follows that you can send information FTL... What am I missing?

Take a look at this applet and this page. They give a good illustration of the concept:

[...]If dn(v)/dv is sufficiently negative, it can reduce the denominator in Equation (3) to less than one, yielding a group velocity greater than c. Why is this not a contradiction of special relativity? No energy or information needs to travel at the group velocity in order for the shape of the wave to exhibit features that move at that speed. If you tried to signal someone with a superluminal pulse by dropping a shutter in its path at the last moment, you'd find you were too late: the pulse would happily "pass through" the shutter, because every influence that was actually responsible for its appearance on the other side would have passed through already.

Please forgive my lack of knowledge in this area, but what you said just doesn't make sense to me. If you can send waves FTL, and send information on those waves, then it logically follows that you can send information FTL... What am I missing?

Take a look at this applet and this page. They give a good illustration of the concept:

[...]If dn(v)/dv is sufficiently negative, it can reduce the denominator in Equation (3) to less than one, yielding a group velocity greater than c. Why is this not a contradiction of special relativity? No energy or information needs to travel at the group velocity in order for the shape of the wave to exhibit features that move at that speed. If you tried to signal someone with a superluminal pulse by dropping a shutter in its path at the last moment, you'd find you were too late: the pulse would happily "pass through" the shutter, because every influence that was actually responsible for its appearance on the other side would have passed through already.

This is the basic misunderstanding of what the phase, group, and signal velocities of a wave system are. The bottom line is that you cannot send information using these superluminal signals, so there are no time travel/relativity problems. A nice Java applet showing this is here.

HowTo Build a Minimal Linux System from Source Code

Linux from Scratch

Now if someone can tell me why programs (so far MAKEDEV and Lilo) won't run from
harddrive /dev/hdd1 I'll be a happy little linuxer

I can't clarify this one, but I can perhaps shed a little light on the cesium experiment. No pun intended.

It didn't involve FTL transmission. Not at all. What happened was that they observed a wavefront travelling FTL. Wavefronts aren't information by themselves; they're merely the conincidental addition of light waves of different wavelengths.

For a concrete demonstration of this, together with a better explanation than I could ever give, please point your Java-enabled browser at this page.

-Billy

Please turn your attention to Greg Egan. The best current SF writer if you ask me. Cooool ideas, great science, nice plots. Excellent reading for those who like hard SF. The author is an Australian programmer, he has a cool web site with many of his works available online:
http://www.netspace.net.au/~gregegan/

SF of the finest class. Sense of Wonder included.

Egan's homepage can be found at http://www.netspace.net.au/~gregegan/.

The problem is that anything where you've got a long voyage with people being killed looks like the the Odessey. Greg Egan's The Plank Dive has an offhand comment about these sort of myths being strange attractors for pre-literate stories.

No, I'm not thinking of Wang's Carpets. The story I'm thinking of was on Egan's website. The story is called "Oceanic" as someone else pointed out.

I might have read the story called "Luminous", but I can't find a collection called "Luminous" on Amazon.com. Another odd thing is that Egan's biblio on his website lists "Reasons to be Cheerful" (which I'm sure I've read) as being in "Luminous" (which I know I haven't read) and NOT in "Axiomatic" (which I own). It also lists "Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies" (which I don't recognize the title of) as being in Axiomatic.

Maybe I'll have to write directly to him to find out where I can get these books...
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MailOne

Cool, so now Permutation City can be real?

For those who don't know, it is a novel by Greg Egan about an alternate reality created simply by encoding the rules of its existence in cellular automata. It's a great read if you're into this sort of stuff.
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Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom