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How To Communicate Faster-Than-Light
higuita writes "With faster technologies showing up everyday, people need to prepare in advance the problems of faster-than-light communication. The main problem is that packages will arrive to the destination before they are sent, forcing a huge redesign of most protocols. Read here the first draft RFC. Any network expert is free to help fine tune this draft."
It's still 1/4 in the states.
In some parts of the world it's still April 1st.
like the entire USA. which basically is the world.
It's still 1/4 in the states.
Well, no. In the states it's 4/1.
All of Europe should be on 2/4 by now though.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
It wouldn't. It would only appear to the observer on the receiving end to arrive before it was sent. If you don't know about the difference between the speed of sound and the speed of light, never noticed that phenomenon, and someone stands on the far side of an open field from you, and shouts something, you hear it when you hear it. If you are a simple person (by which I don't mean stupid, just not sophisticated, or hip to the jive of the light/sound speed dif,) you might well assume that the moment you heard it was the moment he called it out to you, which is a common occurrence over SHORT distances.
Then he takes a pair or empty, metal fuel cans, and bashes them together over his head, and chucks them to the ground. The moment the cans banged together, you hear only silence, or perhaps the chirping of nearby small birds. It's eerie. It sure looked like he banged the hell out of those cans. A couple seconds drag by then you hear CLANG!!! How'd THAT happen? He seems to have banged them together BEFORE he banged them together. (If you assume the auditory report of the collision is the MOMENT at which it happened.)
In fact, the banging together of the cans occurred NOT ONLY before you HEARD it, it happened before you SAW it.
If the sun winked out into darkness, (but retained its mass) we would not know it for about 8 minutes, because that's how far away the sun is. At the colossal speed of LIGHT, that gulf of space is crossed by light in about that time. To us on Earth, we see the sun shining at noon, noon plus 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3... 7 minutes, then right about at 8, WHOOSH, the sun goes out. Humanity instantly panics of course, but we don't care about the little peon ants that shoot guns at the demon eating the sun, to drive it away as they do whenever there's a lunar eclipse...
But the sun vanishes despite their heroic efforts. We know from our understanding of astrophysics that the sun actually vanished 8 minutes or thereabouts BEFORE we observed it vanishing, which is of course strange and counter-to-reason, but it's what we now understand as a rule of the universe. Some physicists/astronomers/etc. might insist that since we can't get anywhere faster than light, for all intents it IS now when the light from an event arrives, but that's as silly as imagining a letter sent last week was actually sent this morning because you GOT it your mailbox THIS morning. Any argument to the contrary not based on an EXPERIMENT, is sophistic and specious, especially when you consider a message between sender and its intended recipient who are traveling (if at all) in the same direction, with the same speed, acceleration, etc., in other words, have the same relativistic frame of reference.
If I'm on a planet that is moving just as Earth does, and neither toward nor away from it, 1 light year distant, if you sent a radio signal January 1st, 2013, I would receive it on January 1st, 2014. If I had no idea how far away you were, or thought you were just over the horizon, I might think you sent it January 1st, 2014, but you sent it a year earlier. The day I receive the message, it is on YOUR planet, 2014. If I immediately reply, you will receive the response January 1st, 2015.
The only known exception to this phenomenon is if you have a spaceship that is propelled, as it were, by an Infinite Improbability Drive, in which case you can not only be at any arbitrary point in the universe at any time you so choose, (provided you know EXACTLY how improbable your ship being at that location IS, and have a fresh, really HOT cup of tea...) but in fact you can end up in any TIME if you're not careful. You could, for instance, narrowly escape death by jumping a vast gulf of TIME rather than space, and end up at Milliways.
If you do, you must try the quadruped; he insists that he's tender, juicy and delicious!
Of course, the story we're discussing is an April Moron's joke, (I hold that the teller of such tales is the fool, but what do I know?) Still, it's still an interesting topic, so I have chimed in.
Note to the editors. The fun in april fool is to make ONE silly joke and try to pass it as genuine. Becoming the onion all day is not. Also, nice try with the ROT13 stuff, did not work very well.
Tomorrow is another day...
Quite frankly I'm surprised Slashdot is able to get April Fools articles out at all.
I come here every year expecting to hear about {insert Google joke of the year} on April 3rd after every other news outlet had published it, and then again a dupe on April 5th.
You know damn well that the answer has to do with basing everything around tens so you can *huh* do things in your head. Also memorizing 400 conversion factors...I need that brain power for other shit.
Perhaps you play by this "has to happen before noon" rule, but this year is the first I have ever heard of that, in 30 years of living in this country and fucking with people's head on April 1st. I'd say this is a stupid and not widely-followed rule for this pseudo-holiday. I don't even go in to work until noon: How am I going to offend and torment my coworkers if I can't prank them during our normal office hours?
Failure. That's what your post and arrogant attitude reek of. Stay home and practice, and perhaps you can have something interesting to prank people with next year instead of crying over timing and being butthurt about AM vs PM(which nobody on Slashdot has trouble understanding, despite your condescending snarkyballs comment).
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
"Unless the last 200 years of science were all some incredible mistake, we will never find a way to prove the Earth is round." ~15th Century AD
"Unless the last 200 years of science were all some incredible mistake, we will never find a way to prove that the Earth orbits the Sun." ~16th Century AD
Science is always evolving and incorporating discoveries. When we start ignoring things science has not already proven, we have already failed.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits