What's even funnier to me, is that these are often the same people that get mad about "the 1%"
Are they? My understanding is that BitCoin appeals mainly to the libertarians, while the Occupy crowd is/was made up largely of liberals. Despite the similar names, those are very different worldviews.
A 'virtual model' equates to 'proof-of-concept'? Since when?
I assumed they meant they had brought the technology to the phase where the next thing they plan to do is build a proof-of-concept. Maybe I'm being to generous in my interpretation, though.
That theory only makes sense, if there are multiple "identical" mirror images of our universe, that are just behind us or ahead of us in time; for example, a pre-existing universe that is identical to ours in every way, but started 1 year after ours --- so the Earth calendar today would read Jan 3, 2013..... and of course, another existing universe at every offset between 1 second and 200+ trillion years behind us, and ahead of us.
Why not create the required universe "on the fly"? I don't see any particular reason why every possible destination universe would need to be pre-created in advance.
Not to mention that a fixed set of pre-created universes would still suffer from paradoxes as soon as the second time traveller jumped into the same destination universe as a previous time traveller, so it wouldn't really solve the paradox problem...
You cannot go backwards in time. Once you do, your alteration of that timeline is permanent. The mere existence of time travelers immediately and irrevocably inflicts an alteration of that timeline which is cosmic in scale, paradoxes can and will (and have) happened.
The paradoxes are neatly avoided if the jump back in time causes a copy of the universe to be made -- as a time traveller, you land in the newly-created duplicate universe, and you're free to kill Hitler or whatever without causing a paradox, because your own past remains safely unchanged.
As to whether making an automatic copy of the universe is a reasonable thing to do, I won't speculate, but there are hints that such a thing might not be completely implausible. (or at least, no less implausible than reverse-time-travel in the first place;))
in the West subject themselves to (ie rich and middle class families are not having many kids because they can't afford it, or couldn't support children in their oh-so-important careers).
I don't think it's that, or at least not just that. There's also:
- Access to affordable birth control. In third world countries, birth control isn't always affordable or easy to come by.
- Greater equality for women. In many "traditional" cultures, the woman in a relationship may not have much control over when she has sex with her husband, or whether birth control is used. That commonly leads to more pregnancies that the woman might have preferred to have.
- Better support for retirement. In many third-world countries, there is no Social Security, or Medicare, or 401K plans. Your children are literally your retirement plan; either they will support you after you can no longer support yourself, or you will die. That's an incentive for many people to have additional children, as a way to prepare for their own future.
funny...it's impossible to prove that god doesn't exist... i'd love to see you try:-)
There are (at least) three positions a person can hold regarding God's existence:
1. "I believe that God exists" (aka religion) 2. "I believe that God does not exist" (aka atheism) 3. "I hold no beliefs concerning either the existence or the non-existence of God" (aka agnosticism)
So while you are correct that it's impossible to prove the non-existence of God (in fact it's impossible to prove the non-existence of anything, since you can't exhaustively search the universe), it is also not necessary to do so. It's perfectly logical to hold position 2 or 3 without proof; substitute "Santa Claus" or "Bigfoot" for God, and you're likely to see that you already hold a similar position yourself.;^)
So God the universe is not omnipotent, cannot bring about most of the miracles attributed to it in doggerel like most of the Bible, and most certainly cannot create your cat-dog creature.
Cannot, or simply does not?
I know that if I was the administrator of an experiment that I had kept running for the last 14 billion years, I would be very reluctant to taint its results by changing its mechanisms part-way through the process.
I'd rather see the universe as a wonder unknoweable with the eyes of a child than as a jaded atheist who thinks life has no purpose other than to be.
Fair enough, but just to defend the (non-jaded) atheists -- there is nothing about atheism that requires the atheist to believe that life has no purpose. (Religious people would argue that meaning can only come from God, but atheists would respond that meaning actually comes from people, not God)
You know why military contractors don't usually change products, even when they're obsolete? Because it costs a lot of money to re-certify those products, especially things with life-support or energetic applications.
I suppose that as a private company, they could try the "Kerbal Space Program" approach -- skip the re-certifications in favor of building a large number of spacecraft inexpensively, in the hopes that at least one of them will make it. 1058 volunteers at four to a spaceship gives them 264 chances, and only one has to succeedâ¦.;)
Not earth-shattering, but potentially quite useful, especially if you can pick up the car near where you are, and drop it off near your destination. That would be much more practical than the current car-rental paradigm, where you have to find a place near your destination to park the rental car, continue paying for the rental car while you're at your destination, and likely pay for parking as well.
Well, the first DARPA robotic-driving challenge was an embarrassment as well. Subsequent years saw great improvement, though, as the teams learned from their initial failures.
Wake up Amerikka - that subsidy is a temporary, fleeting thing. And, once you are registered, once you're in the system, you can never again be without insurance.
Well, yes. That's the point -- universal healthcare through universal insurance. Not really all that different from what we've done with auto insurance for years, and that works well enough.
Admittedly it's not as efficient or reliable as a single-payer system, but it's nevertheless preferable to our previous "just wait until you're at death's door, then go to the emergency room and run up an amazing tab on somebody else's dime" healthcare model.
Oh well - maybe they won't have Big Macs at the relocation and reeducation camps
Dystopian fantasies, cute. Not a good approach if you want to be taken seriously, though.
Naw, man, that's the Depends that you smell. And no shower on the other end - talk about a motivator.
That's not even the worst of it. From the article:
The astronauts also had improvised snorkels made out of plastic tubing and Velcro, extending from their helmets down into the chest area of the spacesuit. If water encroached, the tube would allow them to breathe air from the lower part of the suit.
Let the voters vote directly for the laws they want.
I don't think there is anything magic about the voters that would prevent them from passing laws that are even more stupid and/or corrupt than those passed by politicians. It wouldn't be long before the voters passed a law guaranteeing a pony for every citizen, followed quickly by a second law making taxation illegal. The pony apocalypse would follow shortly thereafter.
Then again, I'd point out that there are few arguments in favor of this that wouldn't apply exactly and perfectly well to the FEDERAL government and US regions/states.
I think we decided against doing that in 1865. I don't think very many people (outside of the South, anyway) will be interested in re-opening that particular can of worms.
Another business that can't survive without tax payer money to help keep the costs down on a vehicle that only wealthy folks can afford. Brilliant.
And above is another example of someone who can't think past next quarter's profit report.
Fortunately, there are people who can, and they've come to the realization that transitioning away from 100% reliance on fossil fuels is a good idea, and will benefit everyone in the long run.
But in a system with 100's of competing products, who wants to run their business by having hundreds or thousands of highly volatile currencies as a exchange?
Nobody, of course. But that only means that most of the competing currencies will die a quick death from lack of support. In the end there will probably be one or two currencies that retain enough mindshare to survive; BitCoin may or may not be one of them, but it does have first-mover status, which is a significant advantage.
Quite true. Under US law, "WMD" includes any rifle with a bore larger than 0.50", and anything explosive for use against persons or property, including hand grenades. So of course Saddam's army had WMDs.
That may well be the case, is some irrelevant lawyer fashion, but the existence of large-bore rifles were definitely not the justification the Bush administration was using during the lead-up to the Iraq War:
"Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." -- George W. Bush, Oct 6, 2002 (link)
Put simply, the Bush administration was telling the American public that Iraq had the capability and them motive to nuke (or gas) American cities, and that was why an invasion was necessary. And that was a lie.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't you have gotten some bitcoins when they were $0.30 each, not so long ago?
I would have, but I had already invested all of my retirement money in Flooz, you insensitive clod.
What's even funnier to me, is that these are often the same people that get mad about "the 1%"
Are they? My understanding is that BitCoin appeals mainly to the libertarians, while the Occupy crowd is/was made up largely of liberals. Despite the similar names, those are very different worldviews.
'Knock' is detonation. The words you are looking for are 'piston slap'.
No, 'piston slap' is something different. It's what we do to people who quibble about terminology. ;)
A 'virtual model' equates to 'proof-of-concept'? Since when?
I assumed they meant they had brought the technology to the phase where the next thing they plan to do is build a proof-of-concept. Maybe I'm being to generous in my interpretation, though.
The question really isn't whether or not it could last 30 years, but rather would you *want* it to?
I think so. Even if you decide it's too out-of-style to keep, it will be easier and more profitable sell a working old car than a non-working old car.
The primary advantage seems to be that it improves visibility in foggy conditions.
The secondary advantage is that if you remove your headlight covers, you can light the car in front of you on fire with the touch of a button.
A half dozen or so ought to be enough.
That theory only makes sense, if there are multiple "identical" mirror images of our universe, that are just behind us or ahead of us in time; for example, a pre-existing universe that is identical to ours in every way, but started 1 year after ours --- so the Earth calendar today would read Jan 3, 2013..... and of course, another existing universe at every offset between 1 second and 200+ trillion years behind us, and ahead of us.
Why not create the required universe "on the fly"? I don't see any particular reason why every possible destination universe would need to be pre-created in advance.
Not to mention that a fixed set of pre-created universes would still suffer from paradoxes as soon as the second time traveller jumped into the same destination universe as a previous time traveller, so it wouldn't really solve the paradox problem...
You cannot go backwards in time. Once you do, your alteration of that timeline is permanent. The mere existence of time travelers immediately and irrevocably inflicts an alteration of that timeline which is cosmic in scale, paradoxes can and will (and have) happened.
The paradoxes are neatly avoided if the jump back in time causes a copy of the universe to be made -- as a time traveller, you land in the newly-created duplicate universe, and you're free to kill Hitler or whatever without causing a paradox, because your own past remains safely unchanged.
As to whether making an automatic copy of the universe is a reasonable thing to do, I won't speculate, but there are hints that such a thing might not be completely implausible. (or at least, no less implausible than reverse-time-travel in the first place ;))
in the West subject themselves to (ie rich and middle class families are not having many kids because they can't afford it, or couldn't support children in their oh-so-important careers).
I don't think it's that, or at least not just that. There's also:
- Access to affordable birth control. In third world countries, birth control isn't always affordable or easy to come by.
- Greater equality for women. In many "traditional" cultures, the woman in a relationship may not have much control over when she has sex with her husband, or whether birth control is used. That commonly leads to more pregnancies that the woman might have preferred to have.
- Better support for retirement. In many third-world countries, there is no Social Security, or Medicare, or 401K plans. Your children are literally your retirement plan; either they will support you after you can no longer support yourself, or you will die. That's an incentive for many people to have additional children, as a way to prepare for their own future.
MAC addresses are the new BitCoins. Buy 'em up while they're cheap!
funny...it's impossible to prove that god doesn't exist... i'd love to see you try :-)
There are (at least) three positions a person can hold regarding God's existence:
1. "I believe that God exists" (aka religion)
2. "I believe that God does not exist" (aka atheism)
3. "I hold no beliefs concerning either the existence or the non-existence of God" (aka agnosticism)
So while you are correct that it's impossible to prove the non-existence of God (in fact it's impossible to prove the non-existence of anything, since you can't exhaustively search the universe), it is also not necessary to do so. It's perfectly logical to hold position 2 or 3 without proof; substitute "Santa Claus" or "Bigfoot" for God, and you're likely to see that you already hold a similar position yourself. ;^)
So God the universe is not omnipotent, cannot bring about most of the miracles attributed to it in doggerel like most of the Bible, and most certainly cannot create your cat-dog creature.
Cannot, or simply does not?
I know that if I was the administrator of an experiment that I had kept running for the last 14 billion years, I would be very reluctant to taint its results by changing its mechanisms part-way through the process.
I'd rather see the universe as a wonder unknoweable with the eyes of a child than as a jaded atheist who thinks life has no purpose other than to be.
Fair enough, but just to defend the (non-jaded) atheists -- there is nothing about atheism that requires the atheist to believe that life has no purpose. (Religious people would argue that meaning can only come from God, but atheists would respond that meaning actually comes from people, not God)
You know why military contractors don't usually change products, even when they're obsolete? Because it costs a lot of money to re-certify those products, especially things with life-support or energetic applications.
I suppose that as a private company, they could try the "Kerbal Space Program" approach -- skip the re-certifications in favor of building a large number of spacecraft inexpensively, in the hopes that at least one of them will make it. 1058 volunteers at four to a spaceship gives them 264 chances, and only one has to succeedâ¦. ;)
Not earth-shattering, but potentially quite useful, especially if you can pick up the car near where you are, and drop it off near your destination. That would be much more practical than the current car-rental paradigm, where you have to find a place near your destination to park the rental car, continue paying for the rental car while you're at your destination, and likely pay for parking as well.
Well, the first DARPA robotic-driving challenge was an embarrassment as well. Subsequent years saw great improvement, though, as the teams learned from their initial failures.
Wake up Amerikka - that subsidy is a temporary, fleeting thing. And, once you are registered, once you're in the system, you can never again be without insurance.
Well, yes. That's the point -- universal healthcare through universal insurance. Not really all that different from what we've done with auto insurance for years, and that works well enough.
Admittedly it's not as efficient or reliable as a single-payer system, but it's nevertheless preferable to our previous "just wait until you're at death's door, then go to the emergency room and run up an amazing tab on somebody else's dime" healthcare model.
Oh well - maybe they won't have Big Macs at the relocation and reeducation camps
Dystopian fantasies, cute. Not a good approach if you want to be taken seriously, though.
Naw, man, that's the Depends that you smell. And no shower on the other end - talk about a motivator.
That's not even the worst of it. From the article:
The astronauts also had improvised snorkels made out of plastic tubing and Velcro, extending from their helmets down into the chest area of the spacesuit. If water encroached, the tube would allow them to breathe air from the lower part of the suit.
"Dutch oven" doesn't even begin to cover it.
Let the voters vote directly for the laws they want.
I don't think there is anything magic about the voters that would prevent them from passing laws that are even more stupid and/or corrupt than those passed by politicians. It wouldn't be long before the voters passed a law guaranteeing a pony for every citizen, followed quickly by a second law making taxation illegal. The pony apocalypse would follow shortly thereafter.
Why is this so hard to understand? Did you skip that day of 8th grade US Government?
Everybody understands that. The debate is about whether it's a bug or a feature.
Then again, I'd point out that there are few arguments in favor of this that wouldn't apply exactly and perfectly well to the FEDERAL government and US regions/states.
I think we decided against doing that in 1865. I don't think very many people (outside of the South, anyway) will be interested in re-opening that particular can of worms.
Another business that can't survive without tax payer money to help keep the costs down on a vehicle that only wealthy folks can afford. Brilliant.
And above is another example of someone who can't think past next quarter's profit report.
Fortunately, there are people who can, and they've come to the realization that transitioning away from 100% reliance on fossil fuels is a good idea, and will benefit everyone in the long run.
But in a system with 100's of competing products, who wants to run their business by having hundreds or thousands of highly volatile currencies as a exchange?
Nobody, of course. But that only means that most of the competing currencies will die a quick death from lack of support. In the end there will probably be one or two currencies that retain enough mindshare to survive; BitCoin may or may not be one of them, but it does have first-mover status, which is a significant advantage.
Quite true. Under US law, "WMD" includes any rifle with a bore larger than 0.50", and anything explosive for use against persons or property, including hand grenades. So of course Saddam's army had WMDs.
That may well be the case, is some irrelevant lawyer fashion, but the existence of large-bore rifles were definitely not the justification the Bush administration was using during the lead-up to the Iraq War:
"Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." -- George W. Bush, Oct 6, 2002 (link)
Put simply, the Bush administration was telling the American public that Iraq had the capability and them motive to nuke (or gas) American cities, and that was why an invasion was necessary. And that was a lie.