Sorry but your knowledge of basic high school physics (first semester) is appalling (leads me to believe that you're a little young ).
You MUST be trolling.
YOu are simply incoprrect when you say that you do NOT have to reach 25,000 (or Mach 25 as you out it) to escape Earth's gravity because of the *engines* on a craft sigh). In point of fact you simply DO.
Out and out wrong. The escape velocity is merely the speed at which the craft would be traveling if it had fallen toward the Earth from infinity. You do not have to travel at the escape velocity to move away from the Earth. If you have a source of thrust, you may move at whatever velocity you please.
The rest of your post is (unfortunately) just a layperson's opinion about physics and I'm sorry but a rather poor opinion at that.
And you're what, a professional physicist? Certainly not, since your error is a grievous one.
At any rate, your post should be marked "troll," not "informative."
The article's from February. Here's the January Slashdot Discussion. Has anything new happened?
Yes. The number of Slashdotters who are opposed to the idea seems to have gone up (based on a totally informal evaluation by myself). I'd say that's very significant, and very encouraging.
11. Start to pull down Service Pack One; per Microsoft's instructions, all firewalls are turned off.
So what you're saying is, "Microsoft rocks! And by the way, don't do what they say, it's wrong!" Okay, Mr. Consistency.
Dork...
I think you're the dork, for being suckered by Microsoft into believing that a system which can get 0wn3z0r3d within ten minutes of installation unless you happen to turn on the firewall is actually a "good" system worth paying money for.
We Linux people don't even pay for our operating system and we at least get something which isn't rootable directly out of the box.
(Note to those who will inevitably think I'm Microsoft-bashing: I typically stick up for Microsoft in situations where it is appropriate, but in this case, it really is moronic that Microsoft recommends disabling the firewall during Windows Update.)
I say, take a look at a whale, a swallow, a spider, a virus. Can human engineers do better than these self-replicating, self-healing machines that are perfectly optimised to their environments?
Yes. We can do WAY better.
The problem with life, is that it is very dependant on its environment. Look at the massive damage we humans are causing to life on Earth through our (objectively small) changes to the environment. Change the average temperature by a few degrees, and poof, hundreds of species vanish.
Yes, this is evolution in action. But it also demonstrates the extremely brittle quality of organisms which have evolved through natural selection.
Now, consider an artifial "organism" that has been designed by humans. We can, with our intelligent brains, invent a design that is functional across a wide array of environments. It's conceivable that we can create a vehicle that can fly, drive on land, crawl up mountains, float on water, and submerge itself in the ocean. Can you possibly imagine nature coming up with something like that?
No, intelligence always wins out over evolution. As intelligent beings, we have learned to take advantage of natural selection in the form of genetic algorithms, but there is nothing inherently superior, magical, or more correct about a GA than any other way of solving a problem.
Surely that just means your physical model of the real world is not correct?
Whether it's correct or not is irrelevant, if the machine you are using to do the simulation cannot carry out the calculations with sufficient precision to avoid exponentially diverging from reality (otherwise known as "chaos").
Perfectly simulating reality is impossible. This statement has not been proven, but I firmly believe it, along with a multitude of other people who are quite adept at simulation methods.
Hence, the original poster's comment still applies: A GA will quickly learn to exploit the mathematical oddities inherent in the imperfect physical simulation to its advantage. This makes the "solutions" very unfit for survival in the real world, which does not possess these simulated quirks.
As an example, I remember reading some research where they were using a "manual GA" to optimize a certain oscillator circuit. They arrived at an extremely good solution, which was a very stable, pure frequency oscillator. However, when they took the circuit to a new location and ran it again, the performance was terrible. It turned out that the circuit had been optimized to take advantage of some peculiar radio frequency signal that was being generated by another piece of equipment in the lab. Without this external signal, the circuit did not function correctly.
This is very typical of genetic algorithms. They "learn" to take advantage of local oddities in the simulation environment.
This mathematical property (exponential accumulation) explains why the genetic algorithm is the algorithm of choice in nature
What a misguided statement. Nature is not self-aware and it does not make "choices." There was not some moment in the past where the universe decided, "Hey, I'm going to implement evolution, because that's the best algorithm for creating life."
Evolution is a tautology. It essentially states, "Those individuals who survive, are the ones who survive." Really, that's all it boils down to. Yet you imply that evolution is somehow the "best" algorithm, when in fact, it's a logical inevitability. It is inevitable that the individuals who are best at surviving in their environment will be the ones who reproduce. This is an inarguable, tautological statement.
I don't see why you find anything at all surprising or mysterious about natural selection. "That which survives, survives. That which dies, dies." Really, who would'a thunkit?
That's good if you're trying to set up a car to win that game, but if you're actually trying to win a real car race with a real car, if the only fitness function you have is sending your driver out for a few million trial laps it's just not going to cut it.
That's why for problems with very expensive fitness functions, it's often better to use a simulated annealing technique. In SA, there is only one individual, not a whole population, so you only have to evaluate fitness once per iteration instead of potentially hundreds or thousands of times.
Simulated annealing works like this: make a random (or in some implementations, a heuristically guided) change to the current individual. Evaluate the new fitness. If the change has improved the fitness, accept the change. Otherwise, choose at random whether to accept the change, with the chance of acceptance slowly decreasing over time. Hence the term "simulated annealing," named after the process of annealing steel by cooling it slowly, which allows the crystal domains to enlarge.
This means that sometimes changes are accepted which actually decrease the fitness, with the hope that you might perhaps be able to escape a local maximum on the fitness landscape.
In my experience, simulated annealing often works well in the same situations that a GA works well. And it's much easier to implement, too.
Editors, WHY do you post a story that contains such controversial information, when the claims can so easily be verified? All you had to do was a simple test, sending a Gmail invite to a Hotmail account. This would have taken what, ten seconds, maybe a minute?
Would you post a "Linus Torvalds found dead in bathtub" story without trying to confirm it?
Seeing as many of the Slashdot editors also work for "real" paper publications, I can't believe you people are still employed with supposed research "skills" like these.
The worst it can do is wreck my life by letting people find out that I have their cds on me, and they'd think that I like that band.
This statement makes me want to puke. Has teenage culture really descended so low?
Kid, it doesn't matter what you listen to. If your friends shun you for your music choices, then you don't need them as friends. I realize you're young and this is how it's "supposed" to work, and that it all makes so much "sense" to you right now, but from my perspective (somebody 10 years older) it's really ridiculous.
When you mold your own personality to fit the groupthink of your peer group, that's an enormous betrayal of yourself.
But I doubt I'm getting through, and I'm sure you've heard it all before...
Janet's stunt was contrary to the expected content of the program in question.
HAH! That's utterly ridiculous. The singers rubbed their crotches, groped each other, gyrated in skin-tight leather, and did you even listen to what the lyrics were saying? And you're saying it's the tit that was contrary to what was expected?!
I was at a roller skating rink a few months ago, and they were playing modern dance club music. Let me give you a sample of some of the lyrics (I may not be exactly right): "Take it down low, pick it up slow, roll it all around, poke it out like your back broke." The song is telling girls/women how to entice men using their asses.
For some reason it's acceptable to play those kind of lyrics to a bunch of middle-school children but if they see a TIT it's a disaster?!
My belief is even more confirmed now. The American aversion to flesh is a deep, and dangerous, neurosis.
Uhh. if you want to lower your contribution to carbon dioxide emissions, I'd suggest to stop breathing.
Naah.. The carbon in the CO2 I breathe out came from the food I eat, which came from animals and plants. The plants got their carbon from atmospheric CO2. Therefore I am simply replacing the CO2 which was removed from the atmosphere by the plants. And since I'm growing a beer gut, you could actually say that I've removed a net amount of carbon from the atmosphere!
As for carbon monoxide, it is reactive and doesn't stick around for very long in the atmosphere.
You can show as many nipples as you want in the U.S., the idea is that parents should have warning so that they can DECIDE for themselves whether they want to introduce that matter to their children.
You missed the point. The entire dance act was extremely sexual. Nobody would have complained if that's all it was. But a NIPPLE pops out and OH, LORDY!
Grow the hell up. Being offended by a nipple is about equivalent to kids on the playground freaking out about "cooties." It's okay for young children to suck on the goddamned things, but not to see them?
I mean CRIPES. You turn on a news channel these days and what do you hear? "Young black man shot by police. Girl kidnapped, raped, and decapitated. 10 soldiers die in Iraq. Man beheads niece with samurai sword. Meth lab discovered in science closet at the high school."
It's okay to expose your children to that shit, but a brief show of flesh is a catastrophic event?
Have you ever considered that our "offense" at seeing a nipple is merely a neurosis our parents have transferred to us, down through the Puritanical generations? For Christ's sake, there are more important things in this world!
So it's important for humans to curb CO2 emissions when mother nature is is pumping out about 20 THOUSAND TIMES MORE THAN THE U.S. ALONE?
Maybe you need a refresher on how to divide numbers. In 1994, as I've already shown, the U.S. alone emitted about 1.3 billion tons. The paper the parent poster linked to shows CO2 emissions from the biggest volcanic sources. They add to about 1 billion tons.
So in fact, the U.S. is emitting about 30% more CO2 per year than all the most active volcanic and geothermal areas combined. Worldwide human emissions are even greater.
Umm... volcanic emissions, estimated at about a billion tons per year?
Sorry, I meant biological causes. You're correct, volcanoes do steadily emit CO2, SO2, and a bunch of other gases. We also have no way of stopping that. If anything, this just makes it more important to curb our own emissions.
both of you forgot to establish that global warming is a bad(tm) thing.
We have no way of predicting what the outcome of severe global warming might be. It might turn out well for us, or it might turn out badly. However, what we do know is that conditions as they are right now are quite tolerable.
Would you crack open a multi-million dollar turbojet engine and start tweaking trimmer knobs at random with no knowledge of the effects, or surprise interactions that you hadn't anticipated?
Would you open the Windows registry and start changing keys at random, just because there's no "proof" it will have any bad effect? I mean, after all, maybe you'll get lucky and make your system 20 times faster! Right.
If I remember correctly, in 1995 the about 50 thousand tons were produced worldwide
You're way off. In 1994, the U.S. alone produced over 1.3 billions tons of carbon (not CO2, just carbon; the CO2 weighs even more than that).
while about 500 million tons were produced by natural causes.
Natural causes do not "produce" CO2. They merely recycle carbon. The CO2 emissions of living organisms have no net effect on the global carbon balance, because all they are doing is moving it around, from the atmosphere into the biosphere and back again.
It is true that methane emissions from cows are an issue. This is because methane is many, many times more effective than CO2 at trapping heat. But the net amount of carbon still remains the same.
I'm not sure that cumulatively saving a billion dollars accomplishes anything. The difference per person won't be felt.
But perhaps the difference in terms of carbon dioxide emissions will be felt. The issue shouldn't be about saving money, it should be about being environmentally responsible.
There are several sources of loss in switching supplies. These include (in no particular order): inductive loss to the case caused by the magnetic fields of the AC inputs (this can be reduced by careful positioning of the wires to cancel as much magnetic field as possible); resistive losses in the wires themselves; capacitor leakage current (normally negligible); hysteresis loss in the toroidal inductors; resistive loss in the switching transistor as it transitions between the on and off states; power consumed by the switching regulator circuitry; power consumed to turn the power supply fan.
Switching supplies can approach 90% efficiency if they are carefully built. Such supplies will cost more, naturally, but an improvement from 60% to 90% efficiency will save you the extra cost over the course of a year or so. And, of course, you can feel better that you are contributing slightly less to carbon dioxide emissions.
Yes. For those who replied to this comment who seem a little confused... What is incorrect about the statement is the claim that the problems can't be solved in any finite length of time.
This is not the meaning of NP-hard. There are many NP-hard problems which can be solved in finite time. For example, the traveling salesman problem.
The "NP" stands for nondeterministic polynomial. What this means is that any particular solution to the problem can be checked in polynomial time. The "nondeterministic" means that the problem could be solved in polynomial time if you could simultaneously ("nondeterministically") check all possible solutions at once. (Does this remind you of quantum computing in any way? Hmm...)
The "hard" means the problem belongs to a general class of NP problems, all of which are equivalent to each other. This means that if anyone ever finds a polynomial-time algorithm to solve a NP-hard problem, then they have solved all NP-hard problems.
However, this researcher has not solved the NP-hard problem, he has merely come up with a very good algorithm which tends to give good solutions nearly all of the time. Whether or not the technique is "lossy" really isn't the issue here.
If have have two boxes... A and B, which have lids on them which are shut, and if I look in box A, and either a rubber duck, or a pineapple appears, how do I know that the contents of box B have changed? I cannot open box B to look at the contents beforehand to know when they change, because that would set the state of box A.
This is confusing. You talk about things "changing" and looking in the box to see the "contents" beforehand. In the entangled state, the boxes have no "contents" to speak of, only superposed wavefunctions. By observing what is inside the box you collapse both the superposition and the entanglement.
You are asking, how can you know definitively that, before you open one of the boxes, there indeed exists an entangled superposition inside the boxes. You cannot know this. If you open a box to observe the contents, you will never observe a quantum superposition (that would be an absurdity -- it would cause your brain to enter a superposition as well. What the heck would that feel like?), you instead cause the objects to collapse to a well-defined state.
It makes no sense.
Quite right:-) But in some way, it's all connected with consciousness and observation. It seems like our consciousness is always in a well-defined state, and this "rubs off" on whatever we observe, causing any superpositions to collapse. And even if our brains did enter some kind of superposition, would we know it? Would we perceive the superposition, or would we be two superposed people, each observing what he thinks is a well-defined state?
These are questions we probably won't have answers for for a long, long time.
Re:Programmer productivity is a more important met
on
Java Faster Than C++?
·
· Score: 1
I can't find pointers to those studies right now.
Java doesn't have pointers, thus your difficulties.
Anybody got some references?
Now, references we can handle. Haha, get it?! Handle! Hah! Okay, nevermind.
Slashdot Mirror
No, since it would have infinite mass. F = ma, so if m is infinite, there is no finite value of F that will accelerate the object.
With a very large supply of fuel, yes, it's possible. But not an infinite one :-)
You MUST be trolling.
YOu are simply incoprrect when you say that you do NOT have to reach 25,000 (or Mach 25 as you out it) to escape Earth's gravity because of the *engines* on a craft sigh). In point of fact you simply DO.
Out and out wrong. The escape velocity is merely the speed at which the craft would be traveling if it had fallen toward the Earth from infinity. You do not have to travel at the escape velocity to move away from the Earth. If you have a source of thrust, you may move at whatever velocity you please.
The rest of your post is (unfortunately) just a layperson's opinion about physics and I'm sorry but a rather poor opinion at that.
And you're what, a professional physicist? Certainly not, since your error is a grievous one.
At any rate, your post should be marked "troll," not "informative."
Yes. The number of Slashdotters who are opposed to the idea seems to have gone up (based on a totally informal evaluation by myself). I'd say that's very significant, and very encouraging.
Look at his step 11:
11. Start to pull down Service Pack One; per Microsoft's instructions, all firewalls are turned off.
So what you're saying is, "Microsoft rocks! And by the way, don't do what they say, it's wrong!" Okay, Mr. Consistency.
Dork...
I think you're the dork, for being suckered by Microsoft into believing that a system which can get 0wn3z0r3d within ten minutes of installation unless you happen to turn on the firewall is actually a "good" system worth paying money for.
We Linux people don't even pay for our operating system and we at least get something which isn't rootable directly out of the box.
(Note to those who will inevitably think I'm Microsoft-bashing: I typically stick up for Microsoft in situations where it is appropriate, but in this case, it really is moronic that Microsoft recommends disabling the firewall during Windows Update.)
Yes. We can do WAY better.
The problem with life, is that it is very dependant on its environment. Look at the massive damage we humans are causing to life on Earth through our (objectively small) changes to the environment. Change the average temperature by a few degrees, and poof, hundreds of species vanish.
Yes, this is evolution in action. But it also demonstrates the extremely brittle quality of organisms which have evolved through natural selection.
Now, consider an artifial "organism" that has been designed by humans. We can, with our intelligent brains, invent a design that is functional across a wide array of environments. It's conceivable that we can create a vehicle that can fly, drive on land, crawl up mountains, float on water, and submerge itself in the ocean. Can you possibly imagine nature coming up with something like that?
No, intelligence always wins out over evolution. As intelligent beings, we have learned to take advantage of natural selection in the form of genetic algorithms, but there is nothing inherently superior, magical, or more correct about a GA than any other way of solving a problem.
Whether it's correct or not is irrelevant, if the machine you are using to do the simulation cannot carry out the calculations with sufficient precision to avoid exponentially diverging from reality (otherwise known as "chaos").
Perfectly simulating reality is impossible. This statement has not been proven, but I firmly believe it, along with a multitude of other people who are quite adept at simulation methods.
Hence, the original poster's comment still applies: A GA will quickly learn to exploit the mathematical oddities inherent in the imperfect physical simulation to its advantage. This makes the "solutions" very unfit for survival in the real world, which does not possess these simulated quirks.
As an example, I remember reading some research where they were using a "manual GA" to optimize a certain oscillator circuit. They arrived at an extremely good solution, which was a very stable, pure frequency oscillator. However, when they took the circuit to a new location and ran it again, the performance was terrible. It turned out that the circuit had been optimized to take advantage of some peculiar radio frequency signal that was being generated by another piece of equipment in the lab. Without this external signal, the circuit did not function correctly.
This is very typical of genetic algorithms. They "learn" to take advantage of local oddities in the simulation environment.
What a misguided statement. Nature is not self-aware and it does not make "choices." There was not some moment in the past where the universe decided, "Hey, I'm going to implement evolution, because that's the best algorithm for creating life."
Evolution is a tautology. It essentially states, "Those individuals who survive, are the ones who survive." Really, that's all it boils down to. Yet you imply that evolution is somehow the "best" algorithm, when in fact, it's a logical inevitability. It is inevitable that the individuals who are best at surviving in their environment will be the ones who reproduce. This is an inarguable, tautological statement.
I don't see why you find anything at all surprising or mysterious about natural selection. "That which survives, survives. That which dies, dies." Really, who would'a thunkit?
Wow. Tell us, what've you been smoking today? Something highly evolved, I hope!
That's why for problems with very expensive fitness functions, it's often better to use a simulated annealing technique. In SA, there is only one individual, not a whole population, so you only have to evaluate fitness once per iteration instead of potentially hundreds or thousands of times.
Simulated annealing works like this: make a random (or in some implementations, a heuristically guided) change to the current individual. Evaluate the new fitness. If the change has improved the fitness, accept the change. Otherwise, choose at random whether to accept the change, with the chance of acceptance slowly decreasing over time. Hence the term "simulated annealing," named after the process of annealing steel by cooling it slowly, which allows the crystal domains to enlarge.
This means that sometimes changes are accepted which actually decrease the fitness, with the hope that you might perhaps be able to escape a local maximum on the fitness landscape.
In my experience, simulated annealing often works well in the same situations that a GA works well. And it's much easier to implement, too.
Would you post a "Linus Torvalds found dead in bathtub" story without trying to confirm it?
Seeing as many of the Slashdot editors also work for "real" paper publications, I can't believe you people are still employed with supposed research "skills" like these.
This statement makes me want to puke. Has teenage culture really descended so low?
Kid, it doesn't matter what you listen to. If your friends shun you for your music choices, then you don't need them as friends. I realize you're young and this is how it's "supposed" to work, and that it all makes so much "sense" to you right now, but from my perspective (somebody 10 years older) it's really ridiculous.
When you mold your own personality to fit the groupthink of your peer group, that's an enormous betrayal of yourself.
But I doubt I'm getting through, and I'm sure you've heard it all before...
HAH! That's utterly ridiculous. The singers rubbed their crotches, groped each other, gyrated in skin-tight leather, and did you even listen to what the lyrics were saying? And you're saying it's the tit that was contrary to what was expected?!
I was at a roller skating rink a few months ago, and they were playing modern dance club music. Let me give you a sample of some of the lyrics (I may not be exactly right): "Take it down low, pick it up slow, roll it all around, poke it out like your back broke." The song is telling girls/women how to entice men using their asses.
For some reason it's acceptable to play those kind of lyrics to a bunch of middle-school children but if they see a TIT it's a disaster?!
My belief is even more confirmed now. The American aversion to flesh is a deep, and dangerous, neurosis.
Naah.. The carbon in the CO2 I breathe out came from the food I eat, which came from animals and plants. The plants got their carbon from atmospheric CO2. Therefore I am simply replacing the CO2 which was removed from the atmosphere by the plants. And since I'm growing a beer gut, you could actually say that I've removed a net amount of carbon from the atmosphere!
As for carbon monoxide, it is reactive and doesn't stick around for very long in the atmosphere.
You missed the point. The entire dance act was extremely sexual. Nobody would have complained if that's all it was. But a NIPPLE pops out and OH, LORDY!
Grow the hell up. Being offended by a nipple is about equivalent to kids on the playground freaking out about "cooties." It's okay for young children to suck on the goddamned things, but not to see them?
I mean CRIPES. You turn on a news channel these days and what do you hear? "Young black man shot by police. Girl kidnapped, raped, and decapitated. 10 soldiers die in Iraq. Man beheads niece with samurai sword. Meth lab discovered in science closet at the high school."
It's okay to expose your children to that shit, but a brief show of flesh is a catastrophic event?
Have you ever considered that our "offense" at seeing a nipple is merely a neurosis our parents have transferred to us, down through the Puritanical generations? For Christ's sake, there are more important things in this world!
Maybe you need a refresher on how to divide numbers. In 1994, as I've already shown, the U.S. alone emitted about 1.3 billion tons. The paper the parent poster linked to shows CO2 emissions from the biggest volcanic sources. They add to about 1 billion tons.
So in fact, the U.S. is emitting about 30% more CO2 per year than all the most active volcanic and geothermal areas combined. Worldwide human emissions are even greater.
Sorry, I meant biological causes. You're correct, volcanoes do steadily emit CO2, SO2, and a bunch of other gases. We also have no way of stopping that. If anything, this just makes it more important to curb our own emissions.
We have no way of predicting what the outcome of severe global warming might be. It might turn out well for us, or it might turn out badly. However, what we do know is that conditions as they are right now are quite tolerable.
Would you crack open a multi-million dollar turbojet engine and start tweaking trimmer knobs at random with no knowledge of the effects, or surprise interactions that you hadn't anticipated?
Would you open the Windows registry and start changing keys at random, just because there's no "proof" it will have any bad effect? I mean, after all, maybe you'll get lucky and make your system 20 times faster! Right.
I was restricting myself to things which could be built for under, say, $1000 :-)
I didn't mean to imply otherwise. It is the most obvious and well-known way of causing states to collapse.
You're way off. In 1994, the U.S. alone produced over 1.3 billions tons of carbon (not CO2, just carbon; the CO2 weighs even more than that).
while about 500 million tons were produced by natural causes.
Natural causes do not "produce" CO2. They merely recycle carbon. The CO2 emissions of living organisms have no net effect on the global carbon balance, because all they are doing is moving it around, from the atmosphere into the biosphere and back again.
It is true that methane emissions from cows are an issue. This is because methane is many, many times more effective than CO2 at trapping heat. But the net amount of carbon still remains the same.
But perhaps the difference in terms of carbon dioxide emissions will be felt. The issue shouldn't be about saving money, it should be about being environmentally responsible.
Switching supplies can approach 90% efficiency if they are carefully built. Such supplies will cost more, naturally, but an improvement from 60% to 90% efficiency will save you the extra cost over the course of a year or so. And, of course, you can feel better that you are contributing slightly less to carbon dioxide emissions.
Yes. For those who replied to this comment who seem a little confused... What is incorrect about the statement is the claim that the problems can't be solved in any finite length of time.
This is not the meaning of NP-hard. There are many NP-hard problems which can be solved in finite time. For example, the traveling salesman problem.
The "NP" stands for nondeterministic polynomial. What this means is that any particular solution to the problem can be checked in polynomial time. The "nondeterministic" means that the problem could be solved in polynomial time if you could simultaneously ("nondeterministically") check all possible solutions at once. (Does this remind you of quantum computing in any way? Hmm...)
The "hard" means the problem belongs to a general class of NP problems, all of which are equivalent to each other. This means that if anyone ever finds a polynomial-time algorithm to solve a NP-hard problem, then they have solved all NP-hard problems.
However, this researcher has not solved the NP-hard problem, he has merely come up with a very good algorithm which tends to give good solutions nearly all of the time. Whether or not the technique is "lossy" really isn't the issue here.
This is confusing. You talk about things "changing" and looking in the box to see the "contents" beforehand. In the entangled state, the boxes have no "contents" to speak of, only superposed wavefunctions. By observing what is inside the box you collapse both the superposition and the entanglement.
You are asking, how can you know definitively that, before you open one of the boxes, there indeed exists an entangled superposition inside the boxes. You cannot know this. If you open a box to observe the contents, you will never observe a quantum superposition (that would be an absurdity -- it would cause your brain to enter a superposition as well. What the heck would that feel like?), you instead cause the objects to collapse to a well-defined state.
It makes no sense.
Quite right :-) But in some way, it's all connected with consciousness and observation. It seems like our consciousness is always in a well-defined state, and this "rubs off" on whatever we observe, causing any superpositions to collapse. And even if our brains did enter some kind of superposition, would we know it? Would we perceive the superposition, or would we be two superposed people, each observing what he thinks is a well-defined state?
These are questions we probably won't have answers for for a long, long time.
Java doesn't have pointers, thus your difficulties.
Anybody got some references?
Now, references we can handle. Haha, get it?! Handle! Hah! Okay, nevermind.