Cause and effect is a property of time, or equivalent ways to arrange events in some sort of dimension. Time and dimensions are properties of the universe, and so can't be applied to things outside of it. That means that when you're dealing with things such as the cause of the big bang, which is what you imply you are discussing, there is no reason to assume there must be a cause at all, or alternatively, as there is no time, there would be no paradox implied by having the cause of it being something in its own future, i.e. the universe causing itself somehow in a loop-like structure.
I don't consider true randomness as in quantum mechanics to be a very plausible candidate for free will either. Consider it this way: suppose you simulated your brain precisely on a computer that used radioactive decay to provide random numbers for simulating particle interactions. Would you notice any difference if somebody stole the radioactive source and swapped it for a good pseudorandom number generator?
if you're on vulnerable hardware, once some malware that uses this trick has gained root, nothing short of physically setting fire to the motherboard will clean it. Reinstalling from scratch can't help you.
What political stability would mean is that no organisation would want to have offensive weapons. If the technology became common, it would be putting the weapons within reach of individuals instead, by one act of difficult to trace sabotage or theft.
You can never rely on individuals to behave sensibly.
Such technology could only bring world peace if it were incredibly tightly controlled. Something that can make real food could also make a wide variety of really nasty weapons, starting at plain explosives or poisons and working up from there.
The problem is that the poverty -> rebellion step is a lot more tenuous and subject to all sorts of other factors such as government intervention compared to the lack-of-money -> poverty step.
So in order to show your disapproval of the Chinese government's abuse of their people, you want to oppose and actively resist their attempt to do something to raise quality of life for those same people?
Maybe Microsoft should sell UAC as part of a security bundle aimed at XP business users. It would piss off several firewall makers but that would be a small price to pay to be able to get more money from ancient XP licenses.
If the data doesn't get updated, somebody is missing an opportunity. Capitalism causing the problem, let the same rabid approach to competition solve it...
"Need a funeral? Call Graves'R'Us for all your dead child disposal needs! Catering included, low low prices."
Are judges held accountable for demonstrably wrong decisions? Are juries? You can never be absolutely sure of avoiding lunatics, but I'd prefer a lunatic who has been shown to follow rules and has an attention span long enough to take in actual evidence rather than merely replaying a preconception in their head on a loop while ignoring what happens in court.
Ares V is Apollo all over again. Apart from a slight change in scale of a few parts and the more modern materials, it's identical in almost every respect.
Microwaves aren't easily aimed. A maser is a very different type of device to an optical laser, the only similarity is that they both give coherent radiation. Lenses for microwaves aren't practical and the emitters aren't inherently directional as lasers are. The reason why the space power satellite would have needed such a giant field of rectennas is that at >100km range, getting more than 50% of the beamed power into a patch of less than a kilometre is next to impossible.
I've wanted to see the ISS moved to a higher orbit for a long time now, preferably to an equatorial orbit. It could be very useful as a place to store and assemble components of a Mars mission spacecraft if it were in an orbit that is in the same plane as the planetary-solar orbits. The problem is that to put it significantly higher it would either need very effective radiation shielding for the slow move through the van allen belts, or evacuation for the move followed by replacing all the electronics. A slow transit through high radiation belts is a painful thing for any hardware. You get the same problems using it for a Mars mission mothership too, but with the added irritation of it being an extremely heavy monster of a station, probably needing more fuel to shift it than you would save by it already being in space.
It's not good, it's the lesser of two evils. Ludicrously restrictive intellectual property laws are purely a bureaucratic problem and can be reversed fairly easily. It's a preferable to have to deal with that sort of problem rather than wars, climate change, piss-poor education standards.... and so on.
If you've got something truly decentralised, ie - no defined server to allow anybody to find one another, it would surely be necessary for it to evolve from a previous p2p standard. You need enough clients running right from the start to allow for any one client to be able to connect to some others just by looking around for peers in random locations. You could partly do it the darknet way, connecting only to people you know, but that would end up very fragmented.
In the case of Mars, what we're looking for is survivors from a long dead ecosystem. Any big changes to the world caused by life would have happened billions of years ago and been wiped away by now.
Same here, but for slightly different reasons. One of the primary functions of my gaming PC is indie games, which now often turn up in flash form but still occasionally have an executable installer. Nothing I do, no matter what security software I have, is going to make me trust that system after so many executables from odd corners of the internet have been run on it. I just treat it as potentially infected but still working and give it very limited network access.
The league of stereotypes would kick me out in an instant if they found out I was telling you this. The reason windows users still need to get laid is because they don't have access to the secret entries in/dev
What I really want from noscript is the option to just block flash. I've got flashblock, and it works, but it doesn't work in quite the same way that noscript does. Flashblock fails occasionally, it seems to let flash load for a fraction of a second and then kill it and replace it, which is not always helpful.
That's really only true on a personal level now. For decades it hasn't applied to whole populations, religious lunatics have long ago got the idea of pressuring scientists to keep quiet on some matters. With enough fanatics around to maintain the peer pressure, even the well educated technological elite of a society can be religious nutjobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Cause and effect is a property of time, or equivalent ways to arrange events in some sort of dimension. Time and dimensions are properties of the universe, and so can't be applied to things outside of it. That means that when you're dealing with things such as the cause of the big bang, which is what you imply you are discussing, there is no reason to assume there must be a cause at all, or alternatively, as there is no time, there would be no paradox implied by having the cause of it being something in its own future, i.e. the universe causing itself somehow in a loop-like structure.
I don't consider true randomness as in quantum mechanics to be a very plausible candidate for free will either. Consider it this way: suppose you simulated your brain precisely on a computer that used radioactive decay to provide random numbers for simulating particle interactions. Would you notice any difference if somebody stole the radioactive source and swapped it for a good pseudorandom number generator?
Er... no, I'm talking nonsense there apparently. Reading incompetence on my part.
if you're on vulnerable hardware, once some malware that uses this trick has gained root, nothing short of physically setting fire to the motherboard will clean it. Reinstalling from scratch can't help you.
What political stability would mean is that no organisation would want to have offensive weapons. If the technology became common, it would be putting the weapons within reach of individuals instead, by one act of difficult to trace sabotage or theft.
You can never rely on individuals to behave sensibly.
Such technology could only bring world peace if it were incredibly tightly controlled. Something that can make real food could also make a wide variety of really nasty weapons, starting at plain explosives or poisons and working up from there.
The problem is that the poverty -> rebellion step is a lot more tenuous and subject to all sorts of other factors such as government intervention compared to the lack-of-money -> poverty step.
So in order to show your disapproval of the Chinese government's abuse of their people, you want to oppose and actively resist their attempt to do something to raise quality of life for those same people?
Maybe Microsoft should sell UAC as part of a security bundle aimed at XP business users. It would piss off several firewall makers but that would be a small price to pay to be able to get more money from ancient XP licenses.
If the data doesn't get updated, somebody is missing an opportunity. Capitalism causing the problem, let the same rabid approach to competition solve it...
"Need a funeral? Call Graves'R'Us for all your dead child disposal needs! Catering included, low low prices."
Are judges held accountable for demonstrably wrong decisions? Are juries? You can never be absolutely sure of avoiding lunatics, but I'd prefer a lunatic who has been shown to follow rules and has an attention span long enough to take in actual evidence rather than merely replaying a preconception in their head on a loop while ignoring what happens in court.
Ares V is Apollo all over again. Apart from a slight change in scale of a few parts and the more modern materials, it's identical in almost every respect.
You just wait a few decades, the biotech revolution will find the 802.11g gene eventually.
Microwaves aren't easily aimed. A maser is a very different type of device to an optical laser, the only similarity is that they both give coherent radiation. Lenses for microwaves aren't practical and the emitters aren't inherently directional as lasers are. The reason why the space power satellite would have needed such a giant field of rectennas is that at >100km range, getting more than 50% of the beamed power into a patch of less than a kilometre is next to impossible.
The other possibility is that we have a few orders of magnitude more submarines than we let on....
You heard nothing, I didn't write this.
I've wanted to see the ISS moved to a higher orbit for a long time now, preferably to an equatorial orbit. It could be very useful as a place to store and assemble components of a Mars mission spacecraft if it were in an orbit that is in the same plane as the planetary-solar orbits. The problem is that to put it significantly higher it would either need very effective radiation shielding for the slow move through the van allen belts, or evacuation for the move followed by replacing all the electronics. A slow transit through high radiation belts is a painful thing for any hardware. You get the same problems using it for a Mars mission mothership too, but with the added irritation of it being an extremely heavy monster of a station, probably needing more fuel to shift it than you would save by it already being in space.
It's not good, it's the lesser of two evils. Ludicrously restrictive intellectual property laws are purely a bureaucratic problem and can be reversed fairly easily. It's a preferable to have to deal with that sort of problem rather than wars, climate change, piss-poor education standards.... and so on.
If you've got something truly decentralised, ie - no defined server to allow anybody to find one another, it would surely be necessary for it to evolve from a previous p2p standard. You need enough clients running right from the start to allow for any one client to be able to connect to some others just by looking around for peers in random locations. You could partly do it the darknet way, connecting only to people you know, but that would end up very fragmented.
And all you DRM fetish purists
"Ohhh, encrypt me stronger baby. More Secure, more secure! That's it! Ohhhhh..." ?
The one word I was thinking of was "Meh."
Now to spend the next few minutes trying to work out whether that actually counts as a word...
Until your mail server gets added to a load of blacklists and you find yourself unable to contact half of your clients.
In the case of Mars, what we're looking for is survivors from a long dead ecosystem. Any big changes to the world caused by life would have happened billions of years ago and been wiped away by now.
Same here, but for slightly different reasons. One of the primary functions of my gaming PC is indie games, which now often turn up in flash form but still occasionally have an executable installer. Nothing I do, no matter what security software I have, is going to make me trust that system after so many executables from odd corners of the internet have been run on it. I just treat it as potentially infected but still working and give it very limited network access.
The league of stereotypes would kick me out in an instant if they found out I was telling you this. The reason windows users still need to get laid is because they don't have access to the secret entries in /dev
What I really want from noscript is the option to just block flash. I've got flashblock, and it works, but it doesn't work in quite the same way that noscript does. Flashblock fails occasionally, it seems to let flash load for a fraction of a second and then kill it and replace it, which is not always helpful.
That's really only true on a personal level now. For decades it hasn't applied to whole populations, religious lunatics have long ago got the idea of pressuring scientists to keep quiet on some matters. With enough fanatics around to maintain the peer pressure, even the well educated technological elite of a society can be religious nutjobs.