What do you mean by "then everything is pre-determined?" In one sense, obviously the previse nature of the past events of the past you see are pre-determined, because they already happened. Or do you mean that viewing the past confirms a Deterministic view of the universe? How so?
I once read an SF short story that featured windowpanes which light took decades to pass through - thereby letting you look at the past.
The story included the poignant scene of the protagonist looking out at his wife and child playing in the garden - but they had died 15 years earlier. The character used to hang around near the windows, hoping for glimpses of his dead wife, because he, of course, had no control over when he saw her; the windows would "replay the past" in strict linear sequence.
Does anyone know the name & author of the story?
In the story, the windowpanes were made of optical fibre nanotubes that were so tightly coiled up in the windows that the windows could accomodate tubes a few light-years long.
This research suggests more feasibly ways of doing this, though.
Really? In the shop the camera refused to trip the shutter with a K-mount lens attached. Also, the manual stated that the camera is compatible with K-FA, K-FA2 etc. lenses, and K lenses with K to K-Fa autofocus adapter only (which would extend the effective focal length of the lens by a further 1.7x).
The point is, with cameras like the MZ-S, older lenses just work, metering and all included (with obvious limitations related to the absence of the A setting).
On the expensive *istD, K-mount lenses do not "just work". If one looks at the camera's mount, it quite obviously lacks the linear aperture lever the camera uses to sense the aperture setting you set the lens at.
I would love the *istD to "just work" with older lenses. I hope Pentax fixes it in a later model.
I checked out the new digital SLR yesterday. Unfortunately, it is not compatible with all the old lenses a K-1000 can take. Lenses without the A (automatic) setting on the aperture ring will not work on it.
And its a crying shame. I hope they fix it in the next mode.
More and more I find that the mainstream news sources are plain flat-out wrong on just about any topic I happen to know about.
This goes beyond just the SCO thing and silly statements like "SCO owns the Unix operating system" and "Linus Torvalds founded the Open Source movement".
Its getting so bad, that as soon as read about some remote country in the news, I feel the urge to whip out a map and check whether such a country even exists!
Which is exactly my point: the fact that radio antennas currently "look at the ground" has more to do with engineering and economical constraints than a fundamental nature of radio waves.
And anyway, even if you do look at the ground, you could distinguis lights of the same colour from different sources if you notice which side of the bumbs they cast their shadows.
Which shows just how much you can determine from eletromagnetic radiation if you throw massive signal processing capabilities (neurons) and a suitable sensor (retina) at the problem.
Next ponder the fact that our brains can distinguish an organ and harmonica playing middle C from a soprano singing the same note; even without the benefit of spatial separation...
If there are two red lights shining from two different hilltops, do you have trouble distinguishing them?
You would if you could not distinguish the direction from which the light falls onto you - if your eyes were like these sensors that switch on outdoor lights when night falls. Which is what radio antennas are like currently.
If radio antennas were more like radio telescopes instead, a radio could "see" in which direction a particular radio station transmits from, and thus tell them apart. Currently that would be prohibitively expensive, but it does show that the supposed "interference" is an artifact of the sensing device, not of the waves themselves.
The point is to do optimization at compile time and at run time, since at run time a lot of other information becomes available.
For the compiler to be able to prove that one branch is taken more than another is often impossible, but at run-time you can just statistically observe that and adjust accordingly.
Crazy as it may sound, even if you do code straight to the native Crusoe instruction set, you would still need a Crusoe-to-Crusoe "code morphing" layer to get full performance.
Remember, their chips' have no out of order execution units; they do this all in software. Instead of having lots of silicon to do agressive instruction scheduling optimizations on each instruction every time round a loop you re-execute the same old instruction again, their "code morphing" layer gets to lazily decide when to put in more effort into instruction recoding as it becomes obvious that a section of code need it.
And the beauty of it all is that these instruction translations are saved in memory - you get to preserve a lot more state, you get to save instruction sheduling decisions, whereas silicon has to always repeatedly make those decisions over and over again as it reexecutes the same instruction.
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What do you mean by "then everything is pre-determined?" In one sense, obviously the previse nature of the past events of the past you see are pre-determined, because they already happened. Or do you mean that viewing the past confirms a Deterministic view of the universe? How so?
I once read an SF short story that featured windowpanes which light took decades to pass through - thereby letting you look at the past.
The story included the poignant scene of the protagonist looking out at his wife and child playing in the garden - but they had died 15 years earlier. The character used to hang around near the windows, hoping for glimpses of his dead wife, because he, of course, had no control over when he saw her; the windows would "replay the past" in strict linear sequence.
Does anyone know the name & author of the story?
In the story, the windowpanes were made of optical fibre nanotubes that were so tightly coiled up in the windows that the windows could accomodate tubes a few light-years long.
This research suggests more feasibly ways of doing this, though.
Really? In the shop the camera refused to trip the shutter with a K-mount lens attached. Also, the manual stated that the camera is compatible with K-FA, K-FA2 etc. lenses, and K lenses with K to K-Fa autofocus adapter only (which would extend the effective focal length of the lens by a further 1.7x).
The point is, with cameras like the MZ-S, older lenses just work, metering and all included (with obvious limitations related to the absence of the A setting).
On the expensive *istD, K-mount lenses do not "just work". If one looks at the camera's mount, it quite obviously lacks the linear aperture lever the camera uses to sense the aperture setting you set the lens at.
I would love the *istD to "just work" with older lenses. I hope Pentax fixes it in a later model.
I checked out the new digital SLR yesterday. Unfortunately, it is not compatible with all the old lenses a K-1000 can take. Lenses without the A (automatic) setting on the aperture ring will not work on it.
And its a crying shame. I hope they fix it in the next mode.
More and more I find that the mainstream news sources are plain flat-out wrong on just about any topic I happen to know about.
This goes beyond just the SCO thing and silly statements like "SCO owns the Unix operating system" and "Linus Torvalds founded the Open Source movement".
Its getting so bad, that as soon as read about some remote country in the news, I feel the urge to whip out a map and check whether such a country even exists!
Which is exactly my point: the fact that radio antennas currently "look at the ground" has more to do with engineering and economical constraints than a fundamental nature of radio waves.
And anyway, even if you do look at the ground, you could distinguis lights of the same colour from different sources if you notice which side of the bumbs they cast their shadows.
Which shows just how much you can determine from eletromagnetic radiation if you throw massive signal processing capabilities (neurons) and a suitable sensor (retina) at the problem.
Next ponder the fact that our brains can distinguish an organ and harmonica playing middle C from a soprano singing the same note; even without the benefit of spatial separation...
Radio is light. Think about this.
If there are two red lights shining from two different hilltops, do you have trouble distinguishing them?
You would if you could not distinguish the direction from which the light falls onto you - if your eyes were like these sensors that switch on outdoor lights when night falls. Which is what radio antennas are like currently.
If radio antennas were more like radio telescopes instead, a radio could "see" in which direction a particular radio station transmits from, and thus tell them apart. Currently that would be prohibitively expensive, but it does show that the supposed "interference" is an artifact of the sensing device, not of the waves themselves.
Hmmm. If God is pro-Open Source, I suppose genetic engineering would be OK, then :-)
For the compiler to be able to prove that one branch is taken more than another is often impossible, but at run-time you can just statistically observe that and adjust accordingly.
Remember, their chips' have no out of order execution units; they do this all in software. Instead of having lots of silicon to do agressive instruction scheduling optimizations on each instruction every time round a loop you re-execute the same old instruction again, their "code morphing" layer gets to lazily decide when to put in more effort into instruction recoding as it becomes obvious that a section of code need it.
And the beauty of it all is that these instruction translations are saved in memory - you get to preserve a lot more state, you get to save instruction sheduling decisions, whereas silicon has to always repeatedly make those decisions over and over again as it reexecutes the same instruction.
And why is there no reason for the teacher to fear losing their job for sending an innocent kid to jail?
Implicit in you reasoning is the assumption of a system which protects those who accidentally persecute the innocent.
What is the ratio of "potention killers" who talk big about blowing up the school vs. those who actually do?
Why live in a society which skews it's commonsense about what to do towards the latter, when the former is actually more prevalent?