But, if the black holes formed in the good ol' days of expansion, they could have started relatively small (since galaxies came from specs of this era) and ballooned along with everything else in the universe... essentially being their present size from birth.
Now, if a black hole is simply a collapsed star, it does beg the question of just how far it had to order out for all of those nummy stars and nebulae... it takes a lot of space to come up with 300 million solar masses of ordinary stars.
There was a/. fantasy known as Natalie Portman. She was fine, perky teen specimen, and all the open-sourcers admired her...
One fateful eve, her spaceship (running M$ 98 of course) suddenly lost control and began careening toward the mother of all black holes...
The mighty minds of/. strove to her rescue, and the fastest, most sturdy Linux and BSD warships sped to save her from her horrible, premature teen death... Yes, their minds may have held dreams of conquest after their heroic deads, but speed there they must...
The first of the ships there, in fact pilotted by the first/. Portman stalker, took her into its loving tractor beam and brought her aboard.
The/.er could not resist her temptuous teenage charms, and immediately threw himself onto her. She could not resist him for long however, as he was a great man of high ordeals and open sourced fantasies. But, as they lay back against the control panel, disaster struck, and the ship took off into the hole...
And so, like a wave of lemmings, the/. fleet followed the ill-fated life boat of young Natalie... And after, the mammoth servers and sparkling Slashcode fell silent in remembrance of the fallen...
But soon after, as life returned to normal, a great cry went up... 'Where did all those hot grits go? Where are the musings of illogical and impossible Beowulf clusters? Why are people only using their moderation points for good?' And then they realized. The young, tender Natalie had been sacrificed to purify the soul of Slashdot...
Okay, sue and moderate... I'm just waiting for a bus, sheesh.
to do with the radiation. The radiation is caused by the particles fighting to escape from the gravity and expelling a great deal of their energy in the form of X-rays... Conservation of mass does enter the picture when we speak of virtual to real particles, entropy and evaporation though...
Does this doctor type in all caps and insist that Einstein was the biggest conman of history? Okay, probably not, but there is this Dr. Amed... excuse me DR. AMED SYEN or something like that who also clutters up the String theory forum with spam.
And I doubt it's the grant money that really bothers these guys... at worst it would be the realization that their lives' work was worthless.
Although, it is hard to argue there isn't a 'popular' opinion in the scientific community. Big Bang works remarkably well, except that we don't know all of the ingredients yet, so it's hard to use any predicting power.
Well, there is a bit of controversy on that, I believe...
As is, black holes have a definite, but not necessarily measurable mass... it's just the mass they started with plus the mass of whatever they have eaten and minus what has been lost to Hawking radiation.
Now, the singularity... yes it does supposedly approach infinite density (approach is an important mathematical distinction), and is even capable of shredding the very Einsteinian laws that define it. The only reason it's tolerated, physicists say (kind of a strange reason, but I don't have the tools to judge) is because the singularity is locked away, and no information can be transmitted about it. The universe doesn't know that there's this strange point at where space-time curvature (gravity) approaches infinity.
To make things really weird, Brian Greene added a nifty component to string theory (which is what gave him credibility for his book besides being a damned good physicist). In the 6 curled dimensions, there is a transformation was allows space to remain continuous, but plants the seed for a black hole... That folding may be part of what keeps the universe from tearing itself apart during black hole formation.
Either way, its pretty nifty how the 'weakest' force in the universe can kick the other three's asses when enough mass is involved....
Black holes do behave a bit more like ordinary objects than most know... Not only do they grow and shrink (thanks to some quantum trickery), but they also aren't black...
In fact, the reason we know they exist is that they actually radiate energy. Their methodical evaporation causes flashes of X-rays to pulse out...
I always thought it was a weird kind of doublethink that black holes were thought to be rather static while the universe has to come from a single point of mass and energy... but I still don't know all the math yet, so it's hard to tell for sure.
What do you mean not possible? You looked at the world of software/books/music, etc? Except for the media upon which they are printed, there is no net consumption, yet these are HUGE industries.
It is quite a fascinating thing to think about the perfect recycling of everything, including chemicals, though. Unfortunately, perfect cycling would require other a command economy or lots of evolution time in the marketplace... A EULA for carpeting though! Corporations being responsible for their product at all times (except if we break it...this would probably be an attorney's worst night), interesting.
No, an economy, a capitalist one at that, and money are two divergent entities. An economy is the mastrabatory cycle of exchanging goods and services we go through our whole lives. Capitalism's prime tenet is that someone invests their time/energy/money (which is a condensed form of the other two) to realize something.
Money, on the other hand, is in principle, an infinite resource, and is independent of the person using it. Think of Ted Turner... he has captured the residue of tens of thousands of actors, executives, accountants, technicians, etc etc's time and talents. All of that energy is condensed into his hands, which leverages power.
If all we want is to eat, screw and grow old, though, there is absolutely no reason that an economy must be destructive. We could recycle forever if the processes were designed right. Of course, we all want to screw, which often is aided by some measure of power, which would be money. But fixing that game is a whole other question...
My dad showed me a little BASIC and I played with HyperCard at the school, but neither really quite got me feeling I had any real power, and I quickly lost interest with writing essential the same thing over and over (since I didn't know arrarys, structs or other useful data management)... Problem with my dad is that he only taught things I asked him about (and not knowing much, I know realize I asked a lot of wrong questions).
However, my favorite programming experience was with Hypercard (mostly cuz I could manipulate my doodles in a 'game'), even though I realized it was rather weak as a general-use language. But, I did a maze game (pretty limited one) and even allowed for a couple of creature combats.
Whatever you choose to show your kids how to do this, (and if they're interested) I'd recommend working on a dungeon-maze type game. It's fairly fun, and you get to show the use of variables, arrays, calculations for leveling/combat systems and the rest.
Of course, that's just me as a kid. I liked Final Fantasy and drawing, so making a mini-RPG was a natural choice for me. But, trudging through all the nuances of 'programming' (Hypercard, remember?) was a lot more rewarding when I took just a couple of steps forward in making my game.
...Thing NASA itself faced in the late 60's. That is, the entire world watched Apollo 11, a few less watched 12, lots less 13 (until it had probs) and then interest fell off so much they canceled 18 (I think). Maybe Disney has underestimated the American public's utter lack of attention span on anything but mental candy...
As is, I hope that Disney has at least the taste and goodwill to broadcast the momentous first couple of days ad-free, even if that's when premiums would be at their highest.
P.S. Anyone here read the Red Mars series... great piece of space exploration and a look at the transnationals (metanats in their nastier form)
I agree... especially with all those custom/niche/nonmainstream apps that only exist on Windows. My own personal stab on this is that I was trained on a program called SolidWorks for our CAD, and after going to try AutoCAD, I saw my boss' point that it was an antiquainted waste of time to learn. Unfortunatley, I'll probably have to learn it some day, because it is the popular choice, and I like to work and eat.
And when I do work, I want the right tool for the job, which Linux's ability to do is laughable at best right now.
As for Windows, I haven't lost any data that I care about for quite some time... part of this may be the Pavlovian Alt-F-S I smack every time I stop to think, but my BSOD's are nearly zero, and when it does crash it's while doing something that isn't available on Linux anyway! And my fridge does stop working and spoils all my food once in a while. It sucks, and it's called a power outage, but we're all used to it in a region where the lines ice over every winter.
I know it's not *impossible* to write open source in Linux... I'm asking if those wonderful tools that you were talking about mandated that the game become open-source. If so, it may be useful in a Machivellian sense to sacrifice that bit of code to make it easier (and more attractive) to write native or ported Linux games. Did Loki use any GPL'ed tools or develop their own? Many vendors would prefer not to reinvent the wheel.
You mean spreedsheets? Word processing? Data entry?
This is what about 95% of the business world would consider real work, and, hell, I could do that on an old PowerMac for all I care!
You mean like 3d animation? CAD stuff? Most variety for that is still on Windows... Including the non-mainstream stuff I consider best.
Well, I guess Linux serves and crunches data the best of all the OS's (it better damn well, since that's what Unix was written for)...
The point of the article is trying to help Linux go from a robust to a robustly *useable* OS where you could do anything your nasty little heart pleases without having to write it youself.
...The very reason I'm still on Windows rather than Linux. Linux has an uphill battle in these arenas right now mostly because MS has almost everyone in the world developing/optimizing/etc. for their OS because it's the quickest way to hit the largest market. However, this shows that there are passable Linux drivers out there, and that the multimedia infrastructure is steadily increasing... Now, it just remains for one of you Linux-lovin' wizards to create the must-have game for Linux ONLY and start pulling those fans over. BTW, if you use GPL'ed libraries (this would be the equivalent of the MS Foundation Classes/ActiveX whatever), I'm assuming you have to open the source, right? If so, it may be necessary to kill off this clause and allow the multimedia developers/game writers to keep the IP they have worked to build...
See, now I feel a little more enlightened. I did not realise that RedHat did the support deal and actually allowed you to copy their CDs...
Now, if my favorite 3d app would only go Linux... since that's the only place I really care about making this comp a hot rod. Everything else on here pretty much lets Windoze along its merry little way.
There is a reason the platform was called 'Wintel' for a long time... I'm sure the I-64 blueprints have been sitting in Redmond HQ almost since conception. Some of you may not regard Gates as a visionary, but even he knows that 64 bit's the logical next step.
Windows will have 64 bit ready... now, how well it runs in the second question of course.
But until I can do everything in Linux I can on my Windoze box... well, let's say I'll be stuck here for a long, long time. Oh, well, it only crashes a time a day or so.
Robots may not have taken over the world, but you should ask anyone that works at GM or any other major industry if they're still looking over their shoulders anyway. Also, you may notice that AI may imitate real life (and possibly usurp it after all)... don't forget this planet was bare for a whole 3 billion or so years... then simple for about 1 billion... and only in the very most recent times have we seen an explosion of complex forms. I think one of the author's points is that we have to really think about this now, because it will probably be faster than even we techs can imagine when it hits the critical threshold. Secondly, the bio-revolution may allow us to cheat, as we could have an extra way to reverse engineer the wetware supercomputer. Many things have made convincing movies (and not 'convincing worlds') that we now know and love/hate. Outsiders (and self-thinking insiders) even tried to tell Goddard that large rockets wouldn't fly because of 'high-school' physics! --- Madeline Albright's Playboy Centerfold -- Some things should never be open-sourced.
...That I've unwittingly written part of the Unabomber's manifesto in one of my movie scripts, only backwards, kind of: The argument of the villian to the hero in the script is that a great deal of human suffering is caused by our limitations and ignorance. People's lives are dreary because they lack the capacity to go out and do something more inspiring than be find a constant stream of mind candy by Hollywood after their shift at the local McDonald's or amazon.com what have you. Why do we produce so much crap that we don't need and create a system to make it seem needed? To provide jobs for millions upon millions of unnecessary lives. Wouldn't it just be better to create a world population of a few tens of millions of elites and vanquish the rest of humanity. The elites would simply be open-source artists because there would be robots (that serve the function of the masses without the need) to give them the basics. As artists, they wouldn't need much beyond that. Which way would be more likely? The elite to engineer themselves and require AI to service them or for AI to become so powerful we'd have to engineer ourselves just to compete? I'd say both are equal odds, just depends how the game plays. Finally, I'd like to clarify that the article wasn't about the AI gaining dominance through a Terminator scenario... It was about us as humans forking over all of our decisions to the machines and then forgetting how to even come up with the questions. We techs are already regarded as gods for our marginal (yes, I mean very marginal) advantage over the masses. Imagine how quickly the majority would cower before a truly superior intellect that no one would stand up to.
What do you mean? We all get to suggest our own punishments in court. That's the nature of settlement... of course, the judge also gets the right to deny our requests if they're not reasonable, as is happening in this case.
I'd believe it's called due process. Last time I heard, the rule of law applied to EVERYONE, not just when it's convenient or popular. Of course, if you really wanted to nail M$... just find a way to get a stained blue dress into the executive board room and watch National Enquirer do its worst.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, if a black hole is simply a collapsed star, it does beg the question of just how far it had to order out for all of those nummy stars and nebulae... it takes a lot of space to come up with 300 million solar masses of ordinary stars.
There was a /. fantasy known as Natalie Portman. She was fine, perky teen specimen, and all the open-sourcers admired her...
One fateful eve, her spaceship (running M$ 98 of course) suddenly lost control and began careening toward the mother of all black holes...
The mighty minds of /. strove to her rescue, and the fastest, most sturdy Linux and BSD warships sped to save her from her horrible, premature teen death... Yes, their minds may have held dreams of conquest after their heroic deads, but speed there they must...
The first of the ships there, in fact pilotted by the first /. Portman stalker, took her into its loving tractor beam and brought her aboard.
The /.er could not resist her temptuous teenage charms, and immediately threw himself onto her. She could not resist him for long however, as he was a great man of high ordeals and open sourced fantasies. But, as they lay back against the control panel, disaster struck, and the ship took off into the hole...
And so, like a wave of lemmings, the /. fleet followed the ill-fated life boat of young Natalie... And after, the mammoth servers and sparkling Slashcode fell silent in remembrance of the fallen...
But soon after, as life returned to normal, a great cry went up... 'Where did all those hot grits go? Where are the musings of illogical and impossible Beowulf clusters? Why are people only using their moderation points for good?' And then they realized. The young, tender Natalie had been sacrificed to purify the soul of Slashdot...
Okay, sue and moderate... I'm just waiting for a bus, sheesh.
to do with the radiation. The radiation is caused by the particles fighting to escape from the gravity and expelling a great deal of their energy in the form of X-rays... Conservation of mass does enter the picture when we speak of virtual to real particles, entropy and evaporation though...
And I doubt it's the grant money that really bothers these guys... at worst it would be the realization that their lives' work was worthless.
Although, it is hard to argue there isn't a 'popular' opinion in the scientific community. Big Bang works remarkably well, except that we don't know all of the ingredients yet, so it's hard to use any predicting power.
As is, black holes have a definite, but not necessarily measurable mass... it's just the mass they started with plus the mass of whatever they have eaten and minus what has been lost to Hawking radiation.
Now, the singularity... yes it does supposedly approach infinite density (approach is an important mathematical distinction), and is even capable of shredding the very Einsteinian laws that define it. The only reason it's tolerated, physicists say (kind of a strange reason, but I don't have the tools to judge) is because the singularity is locked away, and no information can be transmitted about it. The universe doesn't know that there's this strange point at where space-time curvature (gravity) approaches infinity.
To make things really weird, Brian Greene added a nifty component to string theory (which is what gave him credibility for his book besides being a damned good physicist). In the 6 curled dimensions, there is a transformation was allows space to remain continuous, but plants the seed for a black hole... That folding may be part of what keeps the universe from tearing itself apart during black hole formation.
Either way, its pretty nifty how the 'weakest' force in the universe can kick the other three's asses when enough mass is involved....
Um... I don't think the 300-times c microwaves really exist... It's probably one of those quantum probability tricks that crops up from time to time.
In fact, the reason we know they exist is that they actually radiate energy. Their methodical evaporation causes flashes of X-rays to pulse out...
I always thought it was a weird kind of doublethink that black holes were thought to be rather static while the universe has to come from a single point of mass and energy... but I still don't know all the math yet, so it's hard to tell for sure.
Would IBM or whoever contracts their IS and 'Net services terminate because it's too much trouble to deal with the DoS attacks?
It is quite a fascinating thing to think about the perfect recycling of everything, including chemicals, though. Unfortunately, perfect cycling would require other a command economy or lots of evolution time in the marketplace... A EULA for carpeting though! Corporations being responsible for their product at all times (except if we break it...this would probably be an attorney's worst night), interesting.
No, an economy, a capitalist one at that, and money are two divergent entities. An economy is the mastrabatory cycle of exchanging goods and services we go through our whole lives. Capitalism's prime tenet is that someone invests their time/energy/money (which is a condensed form of the other two) to realize something.
Money, on the other hand, is in principle, an infinite resource, and is independent of the person using it. Think of Ted Turner... he has captured the residue of tens of thousands of actors, executives, accountants, technicians, etc etc's time and talents. All of that energy is condensed into his hands, which leverages power.
If all we want is to eat, screw and grow old, though, there is absolutely no reason that an economy must be destructive. We could recycle forever if the processes were designed right. Of course, we all want to screw, which often is aided by some measure of power, which would be money. But fixing that game is a whole other question...
However, my favorite programming experience was with Hypercard (mostly cuz I could manipulate my doodles in a 'game'), even though I realized it was rather weak as a general-use language. But, I did a maze game (pretty limited one) and even allowed for a couple of creature combats.
Whatever you choose to show your kids how to do this, (and if they're interested) I'd recommend working on a dungeon-maze type game. It's fairly fun, and you get to show the use of variables, arrays, calculations for leveling/combat systems and the rest.
Of course, that's just me as a kid. I liked Final Fantasy and drawing, so making a mini-RPG was a natural choice for me. But, trudging through all the nuances of 'programming' (Hypercard, remember?) was a lot more rewarding when I took just a couple of steps forward in making my game.
As is, I hope that Disney has at least the taste and goodwill to broadcast the momentous first couple of days ad-free, even if that's when premiums would be at their highest.
P.S. Anyone here read the Red Mars series... great piece of space exploration and a look at the transnationals (metanats in their nastier form)
Looks like it's hard to argue with the fact that in Linux, if you don't_want_to_do_it_our_way, you can't do it at all right now.
Damn the once a week (once an hour, don't you guys ever configure this stuff??) BSOD's and full steam ahead!
I agree... especially with all those custom/niche/nonmainstream apps that only exist on Windows. My own personal stab on this is that I was trained on a program called SolidWorks for our CAD, and after going to try AutoCAD, I saw my boss' point that it was an antiquainted waste of time to learn. Unfortunatley, I'll probably have to learn it some day, because it is the popular choice, and I like to work and eat.
As for Windows, I haven't lost any data that I care about for quite some time... part of this may be the Pavlovian Alt-F-S I smack every time I stop to think, but my BSOD's are nearly zero, and when it does crash it's while doing something that isn't available on Linux anyway! And my fridge does stop working and spoils all my food once in a while. It sucks, and it's called a power outage, but we're all used to it in a region where the lines ice over every winter.
Makes sense.
I know it's not *impossible* to write open source in Linux... I'm asking if those wonderful tools that you were talking about mandated that the game become open-source. If so, it may be useful in a Machivellian sense to sacrifice that bit of code to make it easier (and more attractive) to write native or ported Linux games. Did Loki use any GPL'ed tools or develop their own? Many vendors would prefer not to reinvent the wheel.
This is what about 95% of the business world would consider real work, and, hell, I could do that on an old PowerMac for all I care!
You mean like 3d animation? CAD stuff? Most variety for that is still on Windows... Including the non-mainstream stuff I consider best.
Well, I guess Linux serves and crunches data the best of all the OS's (it better damn well, since that's what Unix was written for)...
The point of the article is trying to help Linux go from a robust to a robustly *useable* OS where you could do anything your nasty little heart pleases without having to write it youself.
...The very reason I'm still on Windows rather than Linux. Linux has an uphill battle in these arenas right now mostly because MS has almost everyone in the world developing/optimizing/etc. for their OS because it's the quickest way to hit the largest market. However, this shows that there are passable Linux drivers out there, and that the multimedia infrastructure is steadily increasing... Now, it just remains for one of you Linux-lovin' wizards to create the must-have game for Linux ONLY and start pulling those fans over. BTW, if you use GPL'ed libraries (this would be the equivalent of the MS Foundation Classes/ActiveX whatever), I'm assuming you have to open the source, right? If so, it may be necessary to kill off this clause and allow the multimedia developers/game writers to keep the IP they have worked to build...
Now, if my favorite 3d app would only go Linux... since that's the only place I really care about making this comp a hot rod. Everything else on here pretty much lets Windoze along its merry little way.
Windows will have 64 bit ready... now, how well it runs in the second question of course.
But until I can do everything in Linux I can on my Windoze box... well, let's say I'll be stuck here for a long, long time. Oh, well, it only crashes a time a day or so.
Janet Reno's swimsuit calendar
When open source goes very, very wrong....
blah
Robots may not have taken over the world, but you should ask anyone that works at GM or any other major industry if they're still looking over their shoulders anyway. Also, you may notice that AI may imitate real life (and possibly usurp it after all)... don't forget this planet was bare for a whole 3 billion or so years... then simple for about 1 billion... and only in the very most recent times have we seen an explosion of complex forms. I think one of the author's points is that we have to really think about this now, because it will probably be faster than even we techs can imagine when it hits the critical threshold. Secondly, the bio-revolution may allow us to cheat, as we could have an extra way to reverse engineer the wetware supercomputer. Many things have made convincing movies (and not 'convincing worlds') that we now know and love/hate. Outsiders (and self-thinking insiders) even tried to tell Goddard that large rockets wouldn't fly because of 'high-school' physics! --- Madeline Albright's Playboy Centerfold -- Some things should never be open-sourced.
...That I've unwittingly written part of the Unabomber's manifesto in one of my movie scripts, only backwards, kind of: The argument of the villian to the hero in the script is that a great deal of human suffering is caused by our limitations and ignorance. People's lives are dreary because they lack the capacity to go out and do something more inspiring than be find a constant stream of mind candy by Hollywood after their shift at the local McDonald's or amazon.com what have you. Why do we produce so much crap that we don't need and create a system to make it seem needed? To provide jobs for millions upon millions of unnecessary lives. Wouldn't it just be better to create a world population of a few tens of millions of elites and vanquish the rest of humanity. The elites would simply be open-source artists because there would be robots (that serve the function of the masses without the need) to give them the basics. As artists, they wouldn't need much beyond that. Which way would be more likely? The elite to engineer themselves and require AI to service them or for AI to become so powerful we'd have to engineer ourselves just to compete? I'd say both are equal odds, just depends how the game plays. Finally, I'd like to clarify that the article wasn't about the AI gaining dominance through a Terminator scenario... It was about us as humans forking over all of our decisions to the machines and then forgetting how to even come up with the questions. We techs are already regarded as gods for our marginal (yes, I mean very marginal) advantage over the masses. Imagine how quickly the majority would cower before a truly superior intellect that no one would stand up to.
What do you mean? We all get to suggest our own punishments in court. That's the nature of settlement... of course, the judge also gets the right to deny our requests if they're not reasonable, as is happening in this case.
I'd believe it's called due process. Last time I heard, the rule of law applied to EVERYONE, not just when it's convenient or popular. Of course, if you really wanted to nail M$... just find a way to get a stained blue dress into the executive board room and watch National Enquirer do its worst.