There's a fundimental problem here. Wouldn't the second neuron goto a parallel universe and not THIS timeline?
No. Why would anybody think that? The neutron isn't world-hopping; it's time travelling. If it really goes into the past, it will run into itself. Forget about that crap with the parallel universes. Nothing in General Relativity forces time travelers into a parallel universe. They go into the past of our universe. And that's what time travelling is supposed to be.
Re:you just dont get it
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2
What? Don't be silly. If I time travel back one year, I won't be gone. In fact, if I take care of myself in the year after I time travel, I'll still be around now, just one year older than you would have expected me to be.
You obviously don't understand this stuff at all. Why do you think he expects to see two neutrons, or rather two versions of the same neutron, but one of which has travelled into the past? When the neutron time travels, it is not going into some other universe; it will go into the past and live alongside the "younger" version of itself. Stop saying stupid shit.
Re:An explanation of why this man is a crank.
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2
I agree that this guy is a crank. I followed the link you recommended, however, and decided that I have absolutely no reason to trust your judgement. The stuff on the linked website is totally idiotic, something that could only live on the internet because there are no editors who actually know something about the matters being discussed. I find your credulity depressing.
The real reason why the guy is a crank is because he obviously doesn't understand the consequences of time travel. There is no way that his time travelling into the past is going to keep his father from dying of cancer, even if he did accomplish ibuilding a time machine. After all, if had succeeded in going into the past and talking his father out of smoking, that would all have already happened. Since it didn't happen, we can only conclude that either he failed in time travelling to meet his young father, or that he failed to convince him. After all, it's history books that record the actions of time travelers into the past, and all the actions of all time travelers into our past are finished. (That's why it's the past; it's not like there will be "new" actions in the past.) Time travelers with detailed history books can already read about their exploits in the past.
The stuff about the alternate universes is also absolute crap. I know of nothing in General Relativity that would force anything to reappear in an alternate universe. And this guy doesn't really beleive it either--that's why he expects to see two neutrons, or rather one neutron and its slightly older, time-travelling duplicate. It's not like he thinks the neutron will actually go into an alternate universe, but rather into ours.
It's important to remember that travel into an alternate universe is not time travel. If I travel into a universe with a duplicate of Menudo and a duplicate of me as an infant, I don't see why I should think I time-travelled. I would only time travel if I actually got to interact with the real Menudo and the real infant version of myself.
Read: Lewis, David K (1976) "The Paradoxes of Time Travel" American Philosophical Quarterly 13; 145-152
This article should have been required reading before anybody posts half-baked musings about "paradoxes" and time travel. The upshot is that these grandfather paradoxes have a straightforward solution.
I think your comments are based on a confusion. If somebody travels back into our past, then sometime in our past a time traveler has arived. All the deeds of a time traveler to the past have already happened. You don't have to worry about a time traveler "changing the present" or the future, because all their actions are finished (duh; they happened in the past).
Don't let ill-conceived science fiction movies convince you otherwise.
I honestly don't expect the DivX Networks to land any fancy contracts with the movie industry once their watermarking scheme is finished. Even if they did, I'd wouldn't jump around, because I'm not sure I like the DivX people anymore. They turned greedy and lame, and we should never encourage people who try to support their greed on a proprietarty fork of GPL software. On the other hand, I still prefer them to MS or Real.
As far as piracy goes, nothing will change. People who know how to encode movies and shows will do it using the latest and greatest codec available, and you can bet that even if they have the option to stick a watermark in it, they won't do it.
Of course, one reason why "moviez" folks would want the industry to standardize on watermarked DivX rather than watermarked.WMV is because once you hack off the watermark, in the former case you get a clean DivX movie, where in the latter, you get something much uglier.
Re:Why not post it to Usenet?
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2
This is a very good point. I looked at Freenet load balancing a bit, and it's a neat system. Of course, one benefit in telling people to just "get it on Freenet" instead of the FTP is that many people would actually install Freenet.
As a pretty bad coder (my education is in the humanities) who would like to do something to help out worthy OSS projects, I'd feel good about myself if I contributed some of my bandwith towards the distribution of KDE3, or Mandrake8, or whatever.
It's ironic, the more I think about it, that there are two very independent "from the people, to the people" movements on the internet. One is the P2P movement, where regular users are the sources and the recipients of files. The other movement is the OSS phenomenon, where regular smart people write programs that the rest of us use. It's amazing that there is so little P2P distribution of OSS. I'd much rather see all the hosting costs go towards paying programmers.
Look, it's going to be a long time before one of these copy schemes is present on every single copy of the CD released around the world. The article says clearly this only affects Germany, or at most, Europe. Well, let an Australian buy the "normal" CD, rip it with EAC, compress to.ape and upload the files to usenet. That way, everyone can burn a bit-for-bit identical copy of the CD even if they live in Germany, without the stupid limitations on use. A fringe benefit of this system is that your contribution to the Sony tyrany is exactly 0.00 Euros.
Just don't count on me to be the guy who buys the CD to rip it for you.:)
It's funny... my CD-ROM is made Sony! If it got screwed up, by the Sony disk, I don't think there would be much trouble at finding the party at fault!
Why not post it to Usenet?
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Look, obviously, a ton of people will be downloading this, and the people hosting it are just volunteers who support KDE out of goodwill. I think major releases like this should just be posted to usenet. I mean, 100 Megs (or even 700 megs for all the different binary distributions) is barely a drop in the usenet bucket, everyone would get excellent transfer rates, the ftp would be for people without usenet access, and everyone would be happy!
Also, it would be an important example of how usenet binaries serve and important and legal purpose.
I would really support a Slashdot code of ethics that says: you can't announce major software before the developers do unless you have already posted it to Usenet.
Interesting! Wow, these Google folks sound pretty cool. The fact their operation works so well with such minimal overhead means doom, imho, to anyone seeking to compete with them... especially someone who has to buy and administer NT on the servers. I pity them. Hopefully, a general lack of interest in their engine will mean they don't have to buy many more MS contracts for extra servers.
I think the poster's complaint was something of the sort that the AA fonts in Gnome are barely readable. And I'm afraid I have to agree. If you look at screenshots here you'll find that many of the words on the screen really require some guessing before you figure out what the letters are. Some of the letters have no parts that are darker than medium gray, though the font is set to display black. Yet, their some of their neighbors are black and quite heavy. This would drive me crazy! I'm sure it looks better with the font size pumped up, but on this scale, the resutlts don't inspire confidence yet.
However, I agree with you that this is the time to be nice, and I honestly am greatful that Gnome is taking its first steps towards good anti-aliasing and nice-looking fonts.
But I do like your "creative shapes" ideas. It would be sad to fiberglass over it, though, because I take it a part of the point is that it's "shock resistant" because when you bump it, its deformations absorb a lot of impact energy. It might be cool, though, to find a huge condom or surgical glove and latex over it...
One reason people worry about the sea levels rising is that billions (I'm not exaggerating) of people live below the near-future sea level if current warming trends continue. No, they're not all going to drown, but they will need a new place to live and work. One example we can now relate to: the sea does not need to rise many meters before there is no more Manhattan (other than some buildings protruding from water). That's not to mention the Netherlands...
After some consideration, I find that I must agree with you. Actually, I really enjoyed the movie, but when I dusted off my old book and hooked up with the BBC radio adaptation, I must say that I liked PJ's movie much less.
Everything in it felt incredibly rushed; it was nuts! It turns out that the BBC play took about 4 hours to do FoTR, including narration of visuals which were obviously missing. Still they left in a whole lot more dialogue. It was actually more interesting and exciting than the movie--and ten times deeper. PJ cut an hour off that time, but on film he had the luxury of conveying a lot more information per unit time, because he has both audio and video. So why does it feel like I got so much less?
To be fair to him, I'm not sure I could pick out many parts that I thought were a waste of time. I do remember some distortions which I thought to be unnecessary because they saved no time at all, but perhaps they set us up for future distortions in the other two movies. Maybe the problem with LOTR is that it's not inherently filmable.
"[I]t's an "Alerting you to a lying company" story."
Then the point returs: who cares? Is Slashdot also going to alert us about inaccurate palm readers and deceitful telephone psychics? (Please don't submit a story with a headline like "Jamaican psychic Cleo claims she can accurately advise you on your life decisions" and then wait for readers to uncover that her claim is actually inaccurate.) Really, we should know better. The editors here should know better.
I wish we could see a list of the stories they rejected today. (Nothing from me; this isn't personal.) I think we'd then see there is a lot of real nerd news going on while we are being fed bunk.
Thank you! You are exactly right in both describing the system and diagnosing its fatal flaw. With standard factoring encryption, it doesn't matter who intercepts the message; they still have to do a lot of numbercrunching to decode the content.
With this revolutionary technology; all you get is the basic "security through obscurity", as witnessed in the sentence "This is number is exchanged with the server through a secure process known only to Prescient." Gee, I wonder how long it will take people to figure out the double-dog-secret process. If these Canucks are lucky, it will be during testing. If they are not, it will be a year after hundreds of companies, cell phones and whatever else standardize on this silly system.
I was thinking the same thing. I for one hope that when AOL packages this as a Netscape release they're not to cheap to compile with the newest Intel compiler. IIRC, there was a Slashdot story a while ago about the incredible performance benefits of that compiler over GCC. I remember suggesting that it be used widely to compile RPMs and other binary files for Linux and got flamed pretty hard. My reason was that anything that makes Linux work faster will increase people's interest in the platform, but the flamers thought it was irreligious of me to suggest a GCC alternative. I'm sure those attitudes remain... sigh...
Not quite right; you just need to read the reports right. For example, Kernel compile times are not a sythetic benchmark. Encoding a 10-minute.wav file into.mp3 with LAME is not a sythetic benchmark. Neither is the encoding time for converting a MPEG-2 movie to DivX5. These are all things that many of us actually do on our computers, and sit there waiting for them to finish.
Sure, there are absolutely meaningless benchmarks, like whether you can get 181 or 197 FPS in your Quake3. Even good monitors cannot refresh faster than 150 times per second, so this really is beside the point. But it's not quite fair to act like these online speed tests don't teach us anything relevant to normal use of our machine.
This might have been something other than FUD even a year ago, but since the 266A chipset, I think Athlon platforms took the lead in this area too. Please read up on this widely-available news.
Is my personal responsibility offending your political correctness?
Your nonsense grammar is!
...the price of there processors
...there starting to wonder...
Where???
I hope this is a sign that you are not a native English speaker. In both of these cases, I think the word you were looking for is "they're". I've put you on my "grammar enemies" list and I'll be watching your posts. They will hopefully improve.
The real danger for OpenBeOS is that when it's done, no one will care. Consider that an OpenOS/2 would generate very little interest these days even if it ran OS/2-native programs as well as the original. Basically, there are no compelling OS/2 native programs anymore, so in 2002, only real computer perverts would ever be interested in an OS/2 clone. As enthusiastic as BeOS fans are now, how much of that enthusiasm will remain when OpenBeOS is done? A few geeks prone to nostalgia, but not enough to ignite a "movement".
However, with this AtheOS fork, there is right now a working OS that runs the Be API. This means that updating Be-native programs is not totally in vain, and it also means that some people might even write new apps for the Be API. This wouldn't happen if the only hope to keep that API alive was the promise of OpenBeOS somewhere down the road. This is not to slight OpenBeOS; it's just a very ambitious project that will not produce well-functioning results for a while. By the time it does, it can count itself lucky when Ahte-Linux-BeOS apps will run on it after only a recompile.
As long as OpenBeOS developers don't defect, this AtheOS fork can only help them. Think about it: yet another operating system that runs programs using the Be API. This means that there might actually be future programs with the Be API, and that more of the existing ones might continue to be maintained.
One real danger for OpenBeOS is that by the time it's done, no applications worth running will be available for it. FranensteinBeOS's are just the thing needed to keep the flame going until OpenBeOS is done.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have time to do that! :)
No. Why would anybody think that? The neutron isn't world-hopping; it's time travelling. If it really goes into the past, it will run into itself. Forget about that crap with the parallel universes. Nothing in General Relativity forces time travelers into a parallel universe. They go into the past of our universe. And that's what time travelling is supposed to be.
You obviously don't understand this stuff at all. Why do you think he expects to see two neutrons, or rather two versions of the same neutron, but one of which has travelled into the past? When the neutron time travels, it is not going into some other universe; it will go into the past and live alongside the "younger" version of itself. Stop saying stupid shit.
The real reason why the guy is a crank is because he obviously doesn't understand the consequences of time travel. There is no way that his time travelling into the past is going to keep his father from dying of cancer, even if he did accomplish ibuilding a time machine. After all, if had succeeded in going into the past and talking his father out of smoking, that would all have already happened. Since it didn't happen, we can only conclude that either he failed in time travelling to meet his young father, or that he failed to convince him. After all, it's history books that record the actions of time travelers into the past, and all the actions of all time travelers into our past are finished. (That's why it's the past; it's not like there will be "new" actions in the past.) Time travelers with detailed history books can already read about their exploits in the past.
The stuff about the alternate universes is also absolute crap. I know of nothing in General Relativity that would force anything to reappear in an alternate universe. And this guy doesn't really beleive it either--that's why he expects to see two neutrons, or rather one neutron and its slightly older, time-travelling duplicate. It's not like he thinks the neutron will actually go into an alternate universe, but rather into ours.
It's important to remember that travel into an alternate universe is not time travel. If I travel into a universe with a duplicate of Menudo and a duplicate of me as an infant, I don't see why I should think I time-travelled. I would only time travel if I actually got to interact with the real Menudo and the real infant version of myself.
This article should have been required reading before anybody posts half-baked musings about "paradoxes" and time travel. The upshot is that these grandfather paradoxes have a straightforward solution.
Don't let ill-conceived science fiction movies convince you otherwise.
As far as piracy goes, nothing will change. People who know how to encode movies and shows will do it using the latest and greatest codec available, and you can bet that even if they have the option to stick a watermark in it, they won't do it.
Of course, one reason why "moviez" folks would want the industry to standardize on watermarked DivX rather than watermarked .WMV is because once you hack off the watermark, in the former case you get a clean DivX movie, where in the latter, you get something much uglier.
As a pretty bad coder (my education is in the humanities) who would like to do something to help out worthy OSS projects, I'd feel good about myself if I contributed some of my bandwith towards the distribution of KDE3, or Mandrake8, or whatever.
It's ironic, the more I think about it, that there are two very independent "from the people, to the people" movements on the internet. One is the P2P movement, where regular users are the sources and the recipients of files. The other movement is the OSS phenomenon, where regular smart people write programs that the rest of us use. It's amazing that there is so little P2P distribution of OSS. I'd much rather see all the hosting costs go towards paying programmers.
Just don't count on me to be the guy who buys the CD to rip it for you. :)
It's funny... my CD-ROM is made Sony! If it got screwed up, by the Sony disk, I don't think there would be much trouble at finding the party at fault!
Also, it would be an important example of how usenet binaries serve and important and legal purpose.
I would really support a Slashdot code of ethics that says: you can't announce major software before the developers do unless you have already posted it to Usenet.
Interesting! Wow, these Google folks sound pretty cool. The fact their operation works so well with such minimal overhead means doom, imho, to anyone seeking to compete with them... especially someone who has to buy and administer NT on the servers. I pity them. Hopefully, a general lack of interest in their engine will mean they don't have to buy many more MS contracts for extra servers.
However, I agree with you that this is the time to be nice, and I honestly am greatful that Gnome is taking its first steps towards good anti-aliasing and nice-looking fonts.
But I do like your "creative shapes" ideas. It would be sad to fiberglass over it, though, because I take it a part of the point is that it's "shock resistant" because when you bump it, its deformations absorb a lot of impact energy. It might be cool, though, to find a huge condom or surgical glove and latex over it...
One reason people worry about the sea levels rising is that billions (I'm not exaggerating) of people live below the near-future sea level if current warming trends continue. No, they're not all going to drown, but they will need a new place to live and work. One example we can now relate to: the sea does not need to rise many meters before there is no more Manhattan (other than some buildings protruding from water). That's not to mention the Netherlands...
Everything in it felt incredibly rushed; it was nuts! It turns out that the BBC play took about 4 hours to do FoTR, including narration of visuals which were obviously missing. Still they left in a whole lot more dialogue. It was actually more interesting and exciting than the movie--and ten times deeper. PJ cut an hour off that time, but on film he had the luxury of conveying a lot more information per unit time, because he has both audio and video. So why does it feel like I got so much less?
To be fair to him, I'm not sure I could pick out many parts that I thought were a waste of time. I do remember some distortions which I thought to be unnecessary because they saved no time at all, but perhaps they set us up for future distortions in the other two movies. Maybe the problem with LOTR is that it's not inherently filmable.
Then the point returs: who cares? Is Slashdot also going to alert us about inaccurate palm readers and deceitful telephone psychics? (Please don't submit a story with a headline like "Jamaican psychic Cleo claims she can accurately advise you on your life decisions" and then wait for readers to uncover that her claim is actually inaccurate.) Really, we should know better. The editors here should know better.
I wish we could see a list of the stories they rejected today. (Nothing from me; this isn't personal.) I think we'd then see there is a lot of real nerd news going on while we are being fed bunk.
With this revolutionary technology; all you get is the basic "security through obscurity", as witnessed in the sentence "This is number is exchanged with the server through a secure process known only to Prescient." Gee, I wonder how long it will take people to figure out the double-dog-secret process. If these Canucks are lucky, it will be during testing. If they are not, it will be a year after hundreds of companies, cell phones and whatever else standardize on this silly system.
I was thinking the same thing. I for one hope that when AOL packages this as a Netscape release they're not to cheap to compile with the newest Intel compiler. IIRC, there was a Slashdot story a while ago about the incredible performance benefits of that compiler over GCC. I remember suggesting that it be used widely to compile RPMs and other binary files for Linux and got flamed pretty hard. My reason was that anything that makes Linux work faster will increase people's interest in the platform, but the flamers thought it was irreligious of me to suggest a GCC alternative. I'm sure those attitudes remain... sigh...
Sure, there are absolutely meaningless benchmarks, like whether you can get 181 or 197 FPS in your Quake3. Even good monitors cannot refresh faster than 150 times per second, so this really is beside the point. But it's not quite fair to act like these online speed tests don't teach us anything relevant to normal use of our machine.
This might have been something other than FUD even a year ago, but since the 266A chipset, I think Athlon platforms took the lead in this area too. Please read up on this widely-available news.
"Hammerhead" would be a pretty cool name for something!
Your nonsense grammar is!
Where???
I hope this is a sign that you are not a native English speaker. In both of these cases, I think the word you were looking for is "they're". I've put you on my "grammar enemies" list and I'll be watching your posts. They will hopefully improve.
However, with this AtheOS fork, there is right now a working OS that runs the Be API. This means that updating Be-native programs is not totally in vain, and it also means that some people might even write new apps for the Be API. This wouldn't happen if the only hope to keep that API alive was the promise of OpenBeOS somewhere down the road. This is not to slight OpenBeOS; it's just a very ambitious project that will not produce well-functioning results for a while. By the time it does, it can count itself lucky when Ahte-Linux-BeOS apps will run on it after only a recompile.
One real danger for OpenBeOS is that by the time it's done, no applications worth running will be available for it. FranensteinBeOS's are just the thing needed to keep the flame going until OpenBeOS is done.