>>The key expression in the first sentence is: "in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether."
Which was exactly my point. Aether was "disproven" using the Michelson-Morey experiments, and it has become sort of a poster-child for stupid scientific theories, but what the aether said, in essence, was that empty space had a structure. This was opposed by various other people (Newton) that thought space was simply empty. Einstein's inspiration, Ernst Mach, though that space was a real thing.
Anyhow, the point is that the aether-ish point of view won out with relativity. It was not precisely what the previous view of aether was, but as Einstein said, as you quoted, it was right in the general sense of space having structure.
>>Yay for phlogiston and aether. Dark matter might end up on the list of ideas that physcists turned to in order to explain things that had other explanations. La plus ca change...
And yet we're back to something like aether with relativity and string theory. Relativity says that empty space has a structure, and string theory says empty space is made up of a lattice of vibrating strings that propagates everything in the universe.
>>make full time 32 hours >>and move to a 4 day work week. That will cut down on the need for transport and put more people to work as well.
Oddly enough, when they tried this in South America, it didn't work out very well..
We have plenty of energy on this planet - talk of running out of fuel hundreds of years from now seems a bit premature. We *should* have fusion up and running by the time all our hydrocarbons and fissilables have run out.
>>There isn't any possible thermodynamic cycle on the planet that could generate *useful* energy from what the Sun gives us to move things around, cool and heat homes, etc, at a fast enough *rate* to keep us going at the current pace
You missed that article yesterday on thorium-powered cars, eh?
>>Team Fortress (besides hire their devs after they were finished products). And, for the record, Team Fortress and Counterstrike are still to this day better games than the sequels that came out under your name.
It's true - graphics aside, the original Team Fortress was head and shoulders better than Team Fortress Classic or TF2. Though the speed and smoothness of gameplay, I guess, is secondary to modern day users.
It gets even worse when you realize you have to do subsurface scattering to get realistic looks for a lot of surfaces (like, oh, skin). Then you no longer can terminate a photon when you reach most surfaces, but then have to further reflect and refract photons from that point.
It does make for nice looking materials, though... without it, you get those iconic hard and shiny surfaces in ray traced images, like the famous metal balls.
>>Even with the US having 400000 tons of thorium, I figure that's enough to power 150 billion cars. Sound like a lot, not really. In 100 years we'll be back to the same spot we are now and be guilty of pushing the problem off to our descendants.
Well, if 1g of Thorium is enough for 75,000 miles, and people drive an average of 15,000 miles per year, then every car will consume 200 milligrams per year.
That's enough for 2 trillion car-years of fuel. And that's just America's reserves. The worldwide reserves are estimated to be about 4x larger, though undoubtedly even more can be found via mineral exploration, or 8 trillion car-years of proven reserves.
>>it does not give journalists a blanket protection from breaking the law and having a warrant served on them.
Hmm?
"Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Chen is protected from a warrant by both state and federal laws.
The federal Privacy Protection Act prohibits the government from seizing materials from journalists and others who possess material for the purpose of communicating to the public. The government cannot seize material from the journalist even if itâ(TM)s investigating whether the person who possesses the material committed a crime by receiving or possessing the material, which seems to be the nature of the investigation involving Chen.
Instead, investigators need to obtain a subpoena, which would allow the reporter or media outlet to challenge the request and segregate information that is not relevant to the investigation."
>>But X, with sound? Dude: It's half-past 2011, and audio with X are still completely different entities, with sound being a complete crapshoot. I don't want to doubt you, so I'll just ask: How did you make that work? Have I missed something in the past 16 years?
This was in a workstation lab, where people are all sshd into a unix host. You do a who, see what host they're on, then you ssh into their individual host, and then xaudio by default will play things right out of their speakers. To launch xwindows apps, you just added the -display 0:0 tag to xv or whatever.
>>I never tried dumping stuff into another user's/dev/tty: Though I'm sure it would've been interesting, I really liked the FreeBSD shell account I was using and it had competent admins who I didn't want to give a reason to get rid of me. )
Yeah, the ttys were traditionally world-writable to enable programs like talk to work. So you could just cat files right into people's ttys, or just type small messages ("I love you" or "}}}" appearing in the middle of their code was always amusing) and they couldn't do anything about it. The sysadmins eventually set things up so that you couldn't just write into a tty directly, but IIRC they made talk suid 0, so if you wanted to piss off your buddy, you could just write a small shell script to constantly spawn talk requests to his console.
My friends and I had a lot of fun in computer labs. Woe unto the person that didn't xlock their console. =)
>>I hate to go all wikipedia on you, but [citation needed]. >>You have no proof of how the police would act, or that they would treat you any differently to the way they treated Apple other than your baseless ranting.
"Microsoft and Adobe are members of REACTâ(TM)s steering committee, a group of 25 companies that includes Apple Inc., Symantec Corp., KLA-Tencor Inc., Applied Materials Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc., and acts as a liaison between industry and law enforcement." http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2009/05/18/story2.html
"The federal Privacy Protection Act prohibits the government from seizing materials from journalists and others who possess material for the purpose of communicating to the public. The government cannot seize material from the journalist even if itâ(TM)s investigating whether the person who possesses the material committed a crime by receiving or possessing the material"
Yet they broke down his front door and "Among the items seized from Chenâ(TM)s house were four computers and two servers, an iPhone, digital cameras, records from a Bank of America checking account and the printout of an e-mail sent to Chen from Gawker Media Managing Editor Gaby Darbyshire earlier that day. The e-mail referred to Californiaâ(TM)s shield law and specifically stated that police cannot use a search warrant against a journalist to identify a confidential source, or obtain notes and other unpublished information from a news story." http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/iphone-raid/
>>Being or not being an Apple fanboy here is not relevant - we're discussing the police and their role in investigating crime and executing warrants.
It's clear you think that Apple can do no wrong, and are not at all bothered they have a paramilitary police force (that is breaking federal law) at their beck-and-call that kicks down journalists doors.
The link was to the REACT team site, to show who I was talking about, not as a reference for them serving as jackbooted thugs for tech companies, which is what they are.
Stop letting your rabid fanboism get in the way. The police task force certainly gave more privilege to Apple than the "damn fine policing" or whatever stupid phrase you used to describe it.
No need to edit my old posts. Let's put it this way - if someone outright stole some prototype from my corporation (let alone found it at a bar and tried to return it to me), I'd have trouble getting the local police to even give me the time of day. Apple got boots to go through the door of the Gizmodo reporter within 24 hours.
You can't be bothered to do research on these guys? Fine, you're a lazy jackass like most people on here. But the facts above speak for themselves.
If you ever read the backstory, they actually tracked down the guy that lost it, and tried to give it back to the iPhone devs at Apple. Not the Apple Coat Check desk.
Considering that Diablo 2 has precisely that option to make an online or offline character, I think the answer would be: they actually spent effort BREAKING the game for people with poor net connections.
I've avoided buying a single always-on game so far (fuck Ubisoft), and am really debating how much I want to play D3 now.
Your assumptions are wrong. Engineers have a know bias toward conservative and uberconservative thinking. Look up the Salem Hypothesis for a particularly noxious explanation of this phenomenon.
Likewise, there's lots of Christian scientists. Don't let your blinders get in your way. Idiot Young Earth fundies are not equatable to Christianity in general, or even the "Religious Right".
The simple fact is, there tends to be a lot of latent anger in some marginalized groups. The recent riots in an otherwise peaceful and liberal London is a great example of that.
As long as European countries persist in amti-business policymaking, they're going to have these problems.
Slashdot Mirror
>>The only way we can achieve this goal is to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions immediately, given the information we presently have.
The only way? Certainly not. With enough CO2-free energy sources, you can certainly pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.
>>The key expression in the first sentence is: "in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether."
Which was exactly my point. Aether was "disproven" using the Michelson-Morey experiments, and it has become sort of a poster-child for stupid scientific theories, but what the aether said, in essence, was that empty space had a structure. This was opposed by various other people (Newton) that thought space was simply empty. Einstein's inspiration, Ernst Mach, though that space was a real thing.
Read about the debate here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_argument
Anyhow, the point is that the aether-ish point of view won out with relativity. It was not precisely what the previous view of aether was, but as Einstein said, as you quoted, it was right in the general sense of space having structure.
>>Yay for phlogiston and aether. Dark matter might end up on the list of ideas that physcists turned to in order to explain things that had other explanations. La plus ca change...
And yet we're back to something like aether with relativity and string theory. Relativity says that empty space has a structure, and string theory says empty space is made up of a lattice of vibrating strings that propagates everything in the universe.
>>There is no such thing as laser induced fission.
I believe the original article said fission would not occur?
>>we have thousands of square miles on this earth with bright sunshine and almost never clouds nor storms.
Yes.
>>we can turn cellulose into butanol, and grow sufficient crops on scrub land for our vehicles
No.
>>we have thorium supply sufficient for four thousand years of breeding
The reproductive cycle of my species does not depend on Thorium.
>>Also, the population will peak at less than 20% more than there is now by early 2070s, so runaway population not even an issue.
Yes.
>>make full time 32 hours
>>and move to a 4 day work week. That will cut down on the need for transport and put more people to work as well.
Oddly enough, when they tried this in South America, it didn't work out very well..
We have plenty of energy on this planet - talk of running out of fuel hundreds of years from now seems a bit premature. We *should* have fusion up and running by the time all our hydrocarbons and fissilables have run out.
>>There isn't any possible thermodynamic cycle on the planet that could generate *useful* energy from what the Sun gives us to move things around, cool and heat homes, etc, at a fast enough *rate* to keep us going at the current pace
You missed that article yesterday on thorium-powered cars, eh?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/08/12/172229/8-Grams-of-Thorium-Could-Replace-Gasoline-In-Cars
But don't let me interrupt you. Your mega-paragraph could make for a great start to a Unabomber-like manifesto some day.
>>You get some shitty milage if you can burn a tank of gas idling for a couple hours.
Yes, in fact. Zero.
>>Putting an environmental impact fee (tax) on fuel would be a more reliable compensation for your impact than GPS
Right. And fuel taxes encourage people to drive more fuel-efficient cars, which is a good thing, right?
These tracking taxes on cars are evil, for a lot of reasons.
>>The _original_ TF was a mod for Quake 1. I quickly switch to a Mega-TF; the gameplay in Mega TF was MUCH better, the gameplay in TF was crap.
MegaTF was a mod by and for immature, teenaged, crackheads. Beavis and Butthead quotes, etc.
Obviously, I'm a bit biased toward CustomTF being the best mod for QWTF, of course.
>>Team Fortress (besides hire their devs after they were finished products). And, for the record, Team Fortress and Counterstrike are still to this day better games than the sequels that came out under your name.
It's true - graphics aside, the original Team Fortress was head and shoulders better than Team Fortress Classic or TF2. Though the speed and smoothness of gameplay, I guess, is secondary to modern day users.
People still play the original, though. You can join a bunch of old school holdouts on http://www.facebook.com/groups/178060565542861/
It gets even worse when you realize you have to do subsurface scattering to get realistic looks for a lot of surfaces (like, oh, skin). Then you no longer can terminate a photon when you reach most surfaces, but then have to further reflect and refract photons from that point.
It does make for nice looking materials, though... without it, you get those iconic hard and shiny surfaces in ray traced images, like the famous metal balls.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_scattering)
>>Even with the US having 400000 tons of thorium, I figure that's enough to power 150 billion cars. Sound like a lot, not really. In 100 years we'll be back to the same spot we are now and be guilty of pushing the problem off to our descendants.
Well, if 1g of Thorium is enough for 75,000 miles, and people drive an average of 15,000 miles per year, then every car will consume 200 milligrams per year.
That's enough for 2 trillion car-years of fuel. And that's just America's reserves. The worldwide reserves are estimated to be about 4x larger, though undoubtedly even more can be found via mineral exploration, or 8 trillion car-years of proven reserves.
>>I'm willing to bet 1g of refined Thorium is under $200
Thorium Oxide is $300/kilo, which is enough fuel to run your car for longer than you'll have the car.
http://www.indexmundi.com/en/commodities/minerals/thorium/thorium_t1.html
>>it does not give journalists a blanket protection from breaking the law and having a warrant served on them.
Hmm?
"Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Chen is protected from a warrant by both state and federal laws.
The federal Privacy Protection Act prohibits the government from seizing materials from journalists and others who possess material for the purpose of communicating to the public. The government cannot seize material from the journalist even if itâ(TM)s investigating whether the person who possesses the material committed a crime by receiving or possessing the material, which seems to be the nature of the investigation involving Chen.
Instead, investigators need to obtain a subpoena, which would allow the reporter or media outlet to challenge the request and segregate information that is not relevant to the investigation."
>>But X, with sound? Dude: It's half-past 2011, and audio with X are still completely different entities, with sound being a complete crapshoot. I don't want to doubt you, so I'll just ask: How did you make that work? Have I missed something in the past 16 years?
This was in a workstation lab, where people are all sshd into a unix host. You do a who, see what host they're on, then you ssh into their individual host, and then xaudio by default will play things right out of their speakers. To launch xwindows apps, you just added the -display 0:0 tag to xv or whatever.
>>I never tried dumping stuff into another user's /dev/tty: Though I'm sure it would've been interesting, I really liked the FreeBSD shell account I was using and it had competent admins who I didn't want to give a reason to get rid of me. )
Yeah, the ttys were traditionally world-writable to enable programs like talk to work. So you could just cat files right into people's ttys, or just type small messages ("I love you" or "}}}" appearing in the middle of their code was always amusing) and they couldn't do anything about it. The sysadmins eventually set things up so that you couldn't just write into a tty directly, but IIRC they made talk suid 0, so if you wanted to piss off your buddy, you could just write a small shell script to constantly spawn talk requests to his console.
My friends and I had a lot of fun in computer labs. Woe unto the person that didn't xlock their console. =)
>>I hate to go all wikipedia on you, but [citation needed].
>>You have no proof of how the police would act, or that they would treat you any differently to the way they treated Apple other than your baseless ranting.
"Microsoft and Adobe are members of REACTâ(TM)s steering committee, a group of 25 companies that includes Apple Inc., Symantec Corp., KLA-Tencor Inc., Applied Materials Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc., and acts as a liaison between industry and law enforcement."
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2009/05/18/story2.html
"The steering committee shall, at a minimum, meet quarterly to review task force activities, and provide advice, recommendations, strategic input and direction for task force consideration."
http://publicintelligence.net/rapid-enforcement-allied-computer-team-react-task-force/
"The federal Privacy Protection Act prohibits the government from seizing materials from journalists and others who possess material for the purpose of communicating to the public. The government cannot seize material from the journalist even if itâ(TM)s investigating whether the person who possesses the material committed a crime by receiving or possessing the material"
Yet they broke down his front door and "Among the items seized from Chenâ(TM)s house were four computers and two servers, an iPhone, digital cameras, records from a Bank of America checking account and the printout of an e-mail sent to Chen from Gawker Media Managing Editor Gaby Darbyshire earlier that day. The e-mail referred to Californiaâ(TM)s shield law and specifically stated that police cannot use a search warrant against a journalist to identify a confidential source, or obtain notes and other unpublished information from a news story."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/iphone-raid/
http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts1795
>>Being or not being an Apple fanboy here is not relevant - we're discussing the police and their role in investigating crime and executing warrants.
It's clear you think that Apple can do no wrong, and are not at all bothered they have a paramilitary police force (that is breaking federal law) at their beck-and-call that kicks down journalists doors.
The link was to the REACT team site, to show who I was talking about, not as a reference for them serving as jackbooted thugs for tech companies, which is what they are.
Stop letting your rabid fanboism get in the way. The police task force certainly gave more privilege to Apple than the "damn fine policing" or whatever stupid phrase you used to describe it.
No need to edit my old posts. Let's put it this way - if someone outright stole some prototype from my corporation (let alone found it at a bar and tried to return it to me), I'd have trouble getting the local police to even give me the time of day. Apple got boots to go through the door of the Gizmodo reporter within 24 hours.
You can't be bothered to do research on these guys? Fine, you're a lazy jackass like most people on here. But the facts above speak for themselves.
I'd mod you up, but I'm using Slashdot on a smartphone.
They have trouble fitting sentences with "Project Falcon Experimental Hypersonic Glider Launch Vehicle Test-2" within the 140 character limit.
Or maybe it just went rogue, as experimental hypergliders are wont to do.
If you ever read the backstory, they actually tracked down the guy that lost it, and tried to give it back to the iPhone devs at Apple. Not the Apple Coat Check desk.
They're not JUST for Apple. They conducts raids at the behest of any of the major tech companies. Do some research, my man.
Considering that Diablo 2 has precisely that option to make an online or offline character, I think the answer would be: they actually spent effort BREAKING the game for people with poor net connections.
I've avoided buying a single always-on game so far (fuck Ubisoft), and am really debating how much I want to play D3 now.
Your assumptions are wrong. Engineers have a know bias toward conservative and uberconservative thinking. Look up the Salem Hypothesis for a particularly noxious explanation of this phenomenon.
Likewise, there's lots of Christian scientists. Don't let your blinders get in your way. Idiot Young Earth fundies are not equatable to Christianity in general, or even the "Religious Right".
The simple fact is, there tends to be a lot of latent anger in some marginalized groups. The recent riots in an otherwise peaceful and liberal London is a great example of that.
As long as European countries persist in amti-business policymaking, they're going to have these problems.