The far more significant application would be that we would finally have a substance exhibiting (hopefully) negative spacetime curvature, which we could use to stabilize wormholes.
Inertial mass and gravitational mass are observed - for normal matter - to be exactly equivalent. There's no actual reason they should be though, since they're the product of very different interactions
Well, if you believe General Relativity, they darn well better be equivalent. In fact, Einstein took the Equivalence Principle as one if his starting points when developing GR. If the Equivalence Principle fails (which it must if anti-matter falls up), then they will have disproven Einstein's theory, which would be very big news, indeed.
Which would hence be the value of a test that it is in fact enforced. Again: we can only assume it's true because the laws we know work in other cases assume it's true. But there's no implicit reason to think that we aren't simply observing a whole lot of local cases where some higher principle is simplifying to General Relativity, or where at the fringes there's a small correcting constant which isn't significant in most normal situations.
This type of measurement is where new physics comes from - it's why there's people who have been measuring alpha to ever greater precision, even though we've no reason to think it'll deviate if current theory is a complete explanation.
Obviously there must be some credence to this idea for such an experiment to take place, but since my understanding is that gravity is an inherent effect of mass warping space, wouldn't anti-matter possess mass in the same way that matter does, so why would gravity act differently?
Just asking. Not trying to claim anything.
Inertial mass and gravitational mass are observed - for normal matter - to be exactly equivalent. There's no actual reason they should be though, since they're the product of very different interactions - it's perfectly logical to have something which "weighs" a 1000kg when experiencing electromagnetic acceleration, and only 10kg when experiencing gravitational acceleration.
For normal matter, this is the case. For antimatter it's presumed but not actually tested, and therein lies the rub. Even a slight deviation would be huge - and have big implications for the question of why the universe has so much matter in the first place.
The problem is there's something like a 1000. Total.
Actually measuring them accurately is a challenge, although no one in the physics community really expects the answer to be "they fall up" at this point. It would be a huge upset if they did.
You could launch an ion-drive craft from the ISS which would take a long slow orbit to the telescope, refill the liquid helium, then orbit back to the ISS for resupply.
Given that the only time I've even heard about this game was the news story about the torrent-release, it perhaps suggests that, like the real world, he had more serious problems then piracy in the first place.
EDIT: Not to mention he did kick the game out to torrent sites, the issue has gone viral and now you've just got tons of people downloading to see it.
This is unique insofar as they released their own cracked version, whereas I believe Earthbound and Serious Sam would detect modified launchers and activate their DRM. One of the Batman games (Arkham asylum, I think) did the same thing, it messed up your batarang so you couldn't complete certain parts. People posted about the issue, thinking it was a bug, on the official forums and then got publicly shamed by a moderator who exposed the fact the 'bug' was related to pirating the game. I don't like DRM but at least they're being creative! But with Game Dev Sim, you could argue it's not DRM.
yep most of the others who have done this have been able to actually write some cracking detection and haven't been stupid enough to a) distribute the data files without strings attached on p2p networks by themselves and b) to admit that they did do a release that way.
Its still, overall, a stupid idea. When you make it so your cracked version breaks in a non-obvious way, what you've done is create a bunch of people who hear about the game from friends or posts as being "broken" and decide they won't buy the game. They don't hear that it's only broken if its been cracked.
It's pretty sad when someone can't even work up the reading comprehension to grasp the story from a short summary.
In total, if you play the cracked version of the game, the simulator will ramp up the rate of piracy for your simulated company's games, so you will lose. It stacks the odds against you.
it's not a cracked copy. it's a release by the developers that has built in defects. IT IS NOT A NEW STRATEGY, several other games have done that too.
you know why they did this? for publicity.
This backfired pretty hard for Westwood with Red Alert 2 if I recall, since the game had something like a 26-digit CD key and would install and start self-destructing your units if you got one character wrong with no warning.
The correct conclusion from the thousands of forum posts asking why things were blowing up was not "stop pirating".
This. The trend of human progress has been for us to get more per capita. It is not unreasonable to think that along that trajectory, a sufficiently advanced - probably post-scarcity society - wouldn't have any real concerns for things like mass energy generation, provided you weren't planning on blotting out a significant portion of your host star's energy, or maybe strip-mining the local gas giants rings.
When the effort required is simply the interest of individuals, and the approval of your peers (see: don't destroy the aesthetics of the solar system too much) it seems unlikely that certain groups wouldn't be interested enough to attempt interstellar travel using the currently known laws of physics. Especially since practically no other pursuit, comprehendable to minds on our scale, would even be likely to tax the resources of an automated, type-2 civilization. Sex parties don't have particularly taxing material demands:)
Of course, it's also quite possible the known laws of physics aren't what they seem, FTL is common-place and the Earth is just in a well-regulated galactic neighbourhood where non-interference is the norm.
The power to melt the metal could be generated from atomic batteries and solar panels.
Or a parabolic mirror to concentrate sunlight until the focus is hot enough.
This. People forget frequently that space is a very different environment to Earth - no convection means that whatever gets hot, stays hot, a hell of a lot longer then it does down here.
To that end though, the idea that nothing mined in space can be profitably returned to Earth is hardly a reliable observation at the moment either. The only thing we know is the capital costs are large but that says nothing about scalability once the initial spend and research is done.
In LEO it's pretty much free if you have no particular timetable for it. The ISS will re-enter in what, about 6-10 years if it doesn't fire it's station keeping thrusters every once in a while?
Widening the 405 is an expensive and only temporary band-aid to the problem of traffic congestion. The hamburger analogy explains why:
Let's give everyone free McDonald's hamburgers. Let's put 10,000 hamburgers a day on a table in front of the Capitol (or wherever).
What would happen? People would take and eat the hamburgers, and once word got out, all 10,000 hamburgers would be taken very quickly every day. We may thus infer that because people need food and they really seemed to like those burgers, McDonald's hamburgers are an important public good.
A city planner might notice a problem: those 10,000 hamburgers just aren't enough. They get taken very early in the morning, so not everybody has a chance to get a hamburger. The obvious solution--because burgers are a highly-valued public good--is to provide more free burgers. So the city planner starts to provide 20,000 hamburgers a day.
You can see where this is going. People start going out of their way to get the free hamburgers, and planning their day around that trip. The city has to keep providing more and more free burgers--eventually millions a day--to keep satisfying the demand for free hamburgers.
Free hamburgers are like unpriced freeway lanes. Eventually they will all get taken up. Any city planner (and Elon Musk) should know that a shortage happens when the price of an item is set below the going rate determined by supply and demand. It's much, much easier and cheaper to fix the problem of traffic congestion once and for all with a variable price set at the market equilibrium rate than by trying to build your way out of traffic congestion. Even Randal O'Toole agrees.
Road planning history is full of people who were just convinced that it was all about tolls, and tend to assume that tolls have no overhead in implementation or collection - both in monetary and congestion terms. They also don't have a stunning track record of being implemented alongside the actual substitutes needed to have them reduce congestion - because if you need to go somewhere up that road, then either you can get there, or you can't.
On the other hand, funding a lobby group (which seems to be what he did?) to get the project prioritized is probably one of the best uses of his funds, given how politics in the US currently works.
Yes. The sad part is that not enough people ever asks WHY they cost tens of millions of dollars. Even you, in your own way - seem to have been programmed to just 'accept' the fact that simple things cost millions of $'s, when it's public money being 'spent'.
Do you know? Are you qualified to estimate the budget on such a project from your long history of public works and highway repair management experience? Have you bothered to Google search for some comparison information, taking into account size, scope, terrain and road state? Modern practice?
Or are you yet another person who'll bitch about waste without actually knowing what it is?
BitTorrent really needs some better client-side tools to make use cases like this more common.
Though that does get me wondering if you couldn't modify say, Nautilus, to automatically export torrent files (or generate on the fly torrent files) of files available on computer shares and keep a track of them so it would automatically use the torrent to download them from a local machine.
There are a lot of people out there using SOHO internet routers which are hard capped at 2500 NAT sessions. BitTorrent can easily take down the network by blocking outbound DNS until some of the sessions are dropped. It's an amazingly annoying problem, and it's not a well-advertised feature of routers (and getting over 10k is hard to find still for some reason).
Personally I find it staggering that a Linux box will handle 48k+ sessions no sweat on pretty much any type of hardware, but we're still well below the IPv4 port range in terms of allowable NAT sessions on most hardware.
This is probably worth posting a bug report about, because the desktop definitely doesn't need that much RAM but I'm not surprised the ramdisk for the installer can over do it.
This is incorrect. All currently known laws become meaningless as all your variables go towards infinity. This doesn't mean there are no laws - simply that we lack the theory to describe them in such extreme conditions.
It's the "what's infinity * infinity? Infinity!" - it doesn't really describe anything real. Of course, this situation changes dramatically if we could show that the variables didn't go to infinity, but were bounded in some fashion. Presently, we can't though.
Ammonia isn't great to be around but as far as I know it's pretty harmless environmentally. Reactive enough that it'll be destroyed pretty quick if there's a release.
Why should you have any right to say what others do and do not do with the software that you write? Under the GPL, someone could add something relatively simple and then sell the software, they would just need to adhere to the requirements of the GPL in the process.
Because legally those rights exist and will be used against you if you don't?
[quote]If you care about the old people, you want working people to be able to store their wealth in a stable system, where the value of that savings will not be wiped out over time by inflation. Even better if the value of their savings grows over time.[/quote]
Currency is not an investment.
Although I'm starting to realize that people who advocate deflationary currency are the types who never bother to put their money in interest-gaining bank accounts then whine about inflation.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't mean to defend GP's assertion, but this strikes me as irrelevant. Apple now is a very different company than Apple then.
Which is why we had the iPhone 3G, 3GS, 4, 4S...
So you know, the exact same problems with literally anyone carrying a cellphone today.
The most notable effect of Google Glass has been a resurgence of the internet tough guy.
The far more significant application would be that we would finally have a substance exhibiting (hopefully) negative spacetime curvature, which we could use to stabilize wormholes.
Inertial mass and gravitational mass are observed - for normal matter - to be exactly equivalent. There's no actual reason they should be though, since they're the product of very different interactions
Well, if you believe General Relativity, they darn well better be equivalent. In fact, Einstein took the Equivalence Principle as one if his starting points when developing GR. If the Equivalence Principle fails (which it must if anti-matter falls up), then they will have disproven Einstein's theory, which would be very big news, indeed.
Which would hence be the value of a test that it is in fact enforced. Again: we can only assume it's true because the laws we know work in other cases assume it's true. But there's no implicit reason to think that we aren't simply observing a whole lot of local cases where some higher principle is simplifying to General Relativity, or where at the fringes there's a small correcting constant which isn't significant in most normal situations.
This type of measurement is where new physics comes from - it's why there's people who have been measuring alpha to ever greater precision, even though we've no reason to think it'll deviate if current theory is a complete explanation.
Obviously there must be some credence to this idea for such an experiment to take place, but since my understanding is that gravity is an inherent effect of mass warping space, wouldn't anti-matter possess mass in the same way that matter does, so why would gravity act differently?
Just asking. Not trying to claim anything.
Inertial mass and gravitational mass are observed - for normal matter - to be exactly equivalent. There's no actual reason they should be though, since they're the product of very different interactions - it's perfectly logical to have something which "weighs" a 1000kg when experiencing electromagnetic acceleration, and only 10kg when experiencing gravitational acceleration.
For normal matter, this is the case. For antimatter it's presumed but not actually tested, and therein lies the rub. Even a slight deviation would be huge - and have big implications for the question of why the universe has so much matter in the first place.
The problem is there's something like a 1000. Total.
Actually measuring them accurately is a challenge, although no one in the physics community really expects the answer to be "they fall up" at this point. It would be a huge upset if they did.
You could launch an ion-drive craft from the ISS which would take a long slow orbit to the telescope, refill the liquid helium, then orbit back to the ISS for resupply.
Given that the only time I've even heard about this game was the news story about the torrent-release, it perhaps suggests that, like the real world, he had more serious problems then piracy in the first place.
EDIT: Not to mention he did kick the game out to torrent sites, the issue has gone viral and now you've just got tons of people downloading to see it.
This is unique insofar as they released their own cracked version, whereas I believe Earthbound and Serious Sam would detect modified launchers and activate their DRM. One of the Batman games (Arkham asylum, I think) did the same thing, it messed up your batarang so you couldn't complete certain parts. People posted about the issue, thinking it was a bug, on the official forums and then got publicly shamed by a moderator who exposed the fact the 'bug' was related to pirating the game. I don't like DRM but at least they're being creative! But with Game Dev Sim, you could argue it's not DRM.
yep most of the others who have done this have been able to actually write some cracking detection and haven't been stupid enough to a) distribute the data files without strings attached on p2p networks by themselves and b) to admit that they did do a release that way.
Its still, overall, a stupid idea. When you make it so your cracked version breaks in a non-obvious way, what you've done is create a bunch of people who hear about the game from friends or posts as being "broken" and decide they won't buy the game. They don't hear that it's only broken if its been cracked.
It's pretty sad when someone can't even work up the reading comprehension to grasp the story from a short summary.
In total, if you play the cracked version of the game, the simulator will ramp up the rate of piracy for your simulated company's games, so you will lose. It stacks the odds against you.
it's not a cracked copy. it's a release by the developers that has built in defects.
IT IS NOT A NEW STRATEGY, several other games have done that too.
you know why they did this? for publicity.
This backfired pretty hard for Westwood with Red Alert 2 if I recall, since the game had something like a 26-digit CD key and would install and start self-destructing your units if you got one character wrong with no warning.
The correct conclusion from the thousands of forum posts asking why things were blowing up was not "stop pirating".
This. The trend of human progress has been for us to get more per capita. It is not unreasonable to think that along that trajectory, a sufficiently advanced - probably post-scarcity society - wouldn't have any real concerns for things like mass energy generation, provided you weren't planning on blotting out a significant portion of your host star's energy, or maybe strip-mining the local gas giants rings.
When the effort required is simply the interest of individuals, and the approval of your peers (see: don't destroy the aesthetics of the solar system too much) it seems unlikely that certain groups wouldn't be interested enough to attempt interstellar travel using the currently known laws of physics. Especially since practically no other pursuit, comprehendable to minds on our scale, would even be likely to tax the resources of an automated, type-2 civilization. Sex parties don't have particularly taxing material demands :)
Of course, it's also quite possible the known laws of physics aren't what they seem, FTL is common-place and the Earth is just in a well-regulated galactic neighbourhood where non-interference is the norm.
Or a parabolic mirror to concentrate sunlight until the focus is hot enough.
This. People forget frequently that space is a very different environment to Earth - no convection means that whatever gets hot, stays hot, a hell of a lot longer then it does down here.
To that end though, the idea that nothing mined in space can be profitably returned to Earth is hardly a reliable observation at the moment either. The only thing we know is the capital costs are large but that says nothing about scalability once the initial spend and research is done.
In LEO it's pretty much free if you have no particular timetable for it. The ISS will re-enter in what, about 6-10 years if it doesn't fire it's station keeping thrusters every once in a while?
Widening the 405 is an expensive and only temporary band-aid to the problem of traffic congestion. The hamburger analogy explains why:
Free hamburgers are like unpriced freeway lanes. Eventually they will all get taken up. Any city planner (and Elon Musk) should know that a shortage happens when the price of an item is set below the going rate determined by supply and demand. It's much, much easier and cheaper to fix the problem of traffic congestion once and for all with a variable price set at the market equilibrium rate than by trying to build your way out of traffic congestion. Even Randal O'Toole agrees.
Road planning history is full of people who were just convinced that it was all about tolls, and tend to assume that tolls have no overhead in implementation or collection - both in monetary and congestion terms. They also don't have a stunning track record of being implemented alongside the actual substitutes needed to have them reduce congestion - because if you need to go somewhere up that road, then either you can get there, or you can't.
On the other hand, funding a lobby group (which seems to be what he did?) to get the project prioritized is probably one of the best uses of his funds, given how politics in the US currently works.
Yes. The sad part is that not enough people ever asks WHY they cost tens of millions of dollars. Even you, in your own way - seem to have been programmed to just 'accept' the fact that simple things cost millions of $'s, when it's public money being 'spent'.
Do you know? Are you qualified to estimate the budget on such a project from your long history of public works and highway repair management experience? Have you bothered to Google search for some comparison information, taking into account size, scope, terrain and road state? Modern practice?
Or are you yet another person who'll bitch about waste without actually knowing what it is?
BitTorrent really needs some better client-side tools to make use cases like this more common.
Though that does get me wondering if you couldn't modify say, Nautilus, to automatically export torrent files (or generate on the fly torrent files) of files available on computer shares and keep a track of them so it would automatically use the torrent to download them from a local machine.
There are a lot of people out there using SOHO internet routers which are hard capped at 2500 NAT sessions. BitTorrent can easily take down the network by blocking outbound DNS until some of the sessions are dropped. It's an amazingly annoying problem, and it's not a well-advertised feature of routers (and getting over 10k is hard to find still for some reason).
Personally I find it staggering that a Linux box will handle 48k+ sessions no sweat on pretty much any type of hardware, but we're still well below the IPv4 port range in terms of allowable NAT sessions on most hardware.
This is probably worth posting a bug report about, because the desktop definitely doesn't need that much RAM but I'm not surprised the ramdisk for the installer can over do it.
This is incorrect. All currently known laws become meaningless as all your variables go towards infinity. This doesn't mean there are no laws - simply that we lack the theory to describe them in such extreme conditions.
It's the "what's infinity * infinity? Infinity!" - it doesn't really describe anything real. Of course, this situation changes dramatically if we could show that the variables didn't go to infinity, but were bounded in some fashion. Presently, we can't though.
Ammonia isn't great to be around but as far as I know it's pretty harmless environmentally. Reactive enough that it'll be destroyed pretty quick if there's a release.
Isn't this all based on the "linking is integration" argument which depends heavily on a court precedent in the first place?
I'm pretty sure previously you could link to GPL libraries without having to be GPL yourself, since one was regarded as a self-contained platform.
Why should you have any right to say what others do and do not do with the software that you write? Under the GPL, someone could add something relatively simple and then sell the software, they would just need to adhere to the requirements of the GPL in the process.
Because legally those rights exist and will be used against you if you don't?
[quote]If you care about the old people, you want working people to be able to store their wealth in a stable system, where the value of that savings will not be wiped out over time by inflation. Even better if the value of their savings grows over time.[/quote]
Currency is not an investment.
Although I'm starting to realize that people who advocate deflationary currency are the types who never bother to put their money in interest-gaining bank accounts then whine about inflation.