How, exactly, are you claiming the GPLed code as your own?
By distributing / publishing it without the GPL.
You might be able to splice a hair between "copyright infringement" and "plagarism", but you'll still be smacked by your boss.
And that is why I (and Stallman before me) said it is a good way to release software under the GPL. If you start with GPLed software, you have two choices: keep it in house & don't release it (which many Universities and funding agencies are O.K. with) or release it under the GPL.
The GPL is a politically motivated license. It was designed to encourage EVERYONE to use the GPL, which is the "good thing" Stallman was going for.
In a world where not everyone uses the GPL, and in fact there are people who will break relationships over use of the GPL's sticky copyleft, the "better thing" for you is a soft copyleft such as the BSD license.
With a non-sticky copyleft, the Other Guy (which would be you, since you're deriving) has the choice of using the same license, not distributing it, or using a different license.
So, in the situation we're talking about, the BEST thing to do would be to start with non-GPL style open source, because then you're certain that even if your university goes on to sell it for grant money and refuses to distribute the source, there won't be any heartache afterward.
(Does it help change the world to an FSF utopia? No, it doesn't.)
Absolutely not. Plagiarism would be violating the GPL. Making a derivative work is not a violation. The ony thing you should have to worry about is the contracts with your University and funding agencies.
Wrong. Dead wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.
Anyone can have just about anything on their local system, that they never show anyone. A researcher can steal quite liberally from someone else in a paper they are writing for practice, or becuase they wanted to just write the paper. None of that's plagarism.
Plagarism is when you publish or submit something and call it your own. Plagarism is, by a coincidence that probably has something to do with Stallman's experience in academia, triggered by the same act that triggers the requirements of the GPL.
Making a derivitive work, giving it someone else, and not using the GPL *IS* a violation of the GPL. And if you have an agreement that keeps you from doing that, you can and should be left holding the bag for your idiotic approach to a legal issue you should have brought up months ago.
How many academic contracts can you show me which prevent you from starting with copyleft code?
How many academic contracts can you show me that prohibit the teacher from shitting on thier desk? Or stealing money from the administrator's pocket?
You, ah, DO realize that using GPL'd code without legal authority to release it is copyright infrigement--otherwise known in the academic field as plagarism--correct?
Your university or employer can and should expel/fire you if you try and force them to use a copyleft license they have no intention of using. Just as they can and should expel/fire you if you try and submit "Noksagt Windows XP" as your final project.
It's called being a whistleblower. You cannot be fired for it.
Sure you can. If the employer was dumping toxic sludge in the gutter and you called your governor, you'd be a whistleblower. If you notice that they seem to be committing copyright violations and blab about it, you might very well be lying.
Especially if the goverment can't prove a thing, the copyright holder setttles or doesn't care, and YOU can't find the cash to mount a good enough defense.
Not to metion the fact that, since the questioner had already installed the software, my not-a-lawyer-but-I-read-a-lot mind thinks "hey, he sounds like an accomplice, not an innocent whistleblower."
If you're installing that much software and worry about it, tell your boss that you're uncomfortable taking possibly illegal actions and want them to indemnify you against any actions or liability that may come about by you following your boss's instructions.
But, really, the smart thing to do is to spend the $500 to ask a lawyer this question. They'll know what protection your state gives innocent employees of criminal organization, and what can and can't be indemnified against.
And a good lawyer will also be able to tell you how your state's employment laws can keep you from losing your job if you refuse to perform illegal acts.
Anyone who attempts to live by any reasonable code of ethics is going to find themselves quite often rooting for, actively assisting, or even becoming, "criminals".
Not so.
You forget the utmost important first step--petitioning ones governmetn for a redress of grievences.
And that very important second step--attempting to change the government through peaceful means.
And since you mentioned doing things that are illegal, let's not forget the first rule of civil disobedience, as taught by Ghandi and King--you NEED the other side to be seen to carry out the law onto you. Nothing gets steps 1 and 2 moving better than publicly, ethically, and purposefully violating an unjust law.
"I want to get high" is not, not, NOT a good reason to break the law. "I want to be ABLE to get high" is, and the moral difference between the two is enormous.
But if you're furthering the second option, I expect to see (1) a copy of your letter to your two senators, house representative, 2-3 state represenatives, governor, and president asking them to legalize your drug of choice, (2) a record of you politically supporting candidates that would legalize your drug, inclusive of mobilization efforts on seemingly unrelated issues, and finally (3) that you publicly and without guile or deciet violate the law and accept the consequences thereof.
While it's quite possible that infamous.net is based in some horrible third-world regime where you aren't allowed to vote to call your nation's leader an illeterate putz, if you're comparing drug use to Christian Martyrdom, the Underground Railroad, and Women's lib you're almost certainly right here in the US of A.
"Street crime" is usually taken care of by the police and is really none of your business. Imagine some moron busting the heads of the local pot dealer out of respect for "justice."
You say that second part like it's a bad thing.
Just because you want to get high doens't mean that it's not illegal.
A physics major I once knew suggested a bubble of slow time riding on a bubble of fast time. If that were possible, then you wouldn't need to go faster than the speed of light to travel faster than the speed of light.
This is similar to the "collapse and expand the universe" argument. Oddly enough, "warp drive" is in fact a plausible FTL drive system--once you get over that whole "bending the fabric of space and time" thing.
God created everything, in the story you believe. Including Lucifer. Lucifer serves god's plan, by tempting humans into doing what we know is evil.
That's not Lucifer. Lucifer is the angel who was put above all other angels, but then rebelled against God and so was cast down for his crime.
The one you're thinking about is ha'sa'tan, whose hebrew name I constantly misspell. HST is not a devil or a specific spirit, but rather a title held by one of God's angels. It's a position in the divine court akin to a district attorney--a Good being who plays "devil's advocate"--a good act, and a rightful act.
Humans that are tempted by ha'sa'tan may do evil, but their doing evil is wrong.
In the story, only humans have "free will", the ability to "defy god", and that only according to some interpretations of the story.
Yes, some Christian theology reserves free will for huamanity. But this does not in and of itself mean that non-human servants of God cannot go against God--it merely means that they alter their nature by doing so.
By this theology, Lucifer et al either are nothing more than myths, or they are angels who chose to not be angels, and in doing so were the motive force that punished themselves.
As I said, there are ample reconciliations already extant in Christian theology.
Your "argument from authority" really holds no weight.
It's not an argument from authority. It's a simple statement of completeness. An argument from authority would be "the church said so."
You're welcome to keep trying to poke holes in Christian theology, of course. I'm merely poiting out that you'll more than likely come up short--just as I would if I tried poking holes in the theory of evolution, for example.
(Oh, and btw--Galileo wasn't "brave." He was smacked around for actual heresy, not small things like "the world is round.")
To keep this interesting discussion going, I'd like to point out that there are many Christians in America today who require childbirth in the name of morality.
And your point is? Are you saying that childbirth is wrong? Or that abstinence is somehow morally wrong?
Not only do most Christian churches not require childbrith, but most of those that do require it on a level not greatly exceeding population replacement--and many of the latter allow priesthood as an alternative to childbearing.
How does christian morality judge the lives of, say, Russian children orphaned by Soviet purges of their Eastern Orthodox parents (on that religious basis), who became prostitutes or other criminals to survive
By and large as tragic. And even those that rail against those that did not value their faith above their lives hold final judgement as something for God, not man.
Or how about the Romanian nun crucified to death in an exorcism?
Another tradgedy. Right action does not always lead to right results, and neither does good action.
Or all the people tortured to death for insufficient faith during the Inquisition, at the hands of those with sufficient faith?
The church is an imperfect thing, and has done evil acts. Those evil acts were wrong. What's your point?
Our discussion was about the equivalence between the Christian idea of good and evil and the moral argument of right vs. wrong. You have so far failed to provide a temporal example that supports your argument.
I believe that god is as imaginary as the tooth fairy
And that's why it's insulting. Not because you don't believe god exists, but because you relegate him to the level of the tooth fairy--a ribald lie told to children to get them to give up baby teeth.
The tooth fairy is a whole different sort of fiction than a deity--those that tell their children about deities and take them to church every sudnay are not lying, and it's patently dishonest to imply that they are. Which the word "imaginary" does.
I'm not upset that you don't believe, or that you think I'm wrong. You're more than welcome to both viewpoints. What upsets me is your insistence that you can make offensive, insulting word choices and I'm not supposed to respond or correct you.
Mature adults can handle disagreement, but they also take the viewpoint of their audience into consideration and attempt to refrain from offending them if they can.
It is possible to use quantum physics to describe a car driving down the street.
Part 1: The principle of parsimony comes into play here. Since the real-life measurements we use are all based on newtonian physics, newtonian physics are correct to describe how they react.
Part 2: Prove it. I won't even make you account for the engine.
What happens when the file or filesystem format becomes obsolete?
You smack yourself for not hitting "convert" when three other file systems passed you by.
FAT16 is *still* readable, despite being three WINDOWS filesystems old. I understand that most Linux FS choices can similarly upgrade or update certain counterparts.
And, really RAID *is* is the way to go. When you want to convert to a new file system, you just create a new array, send the data over, and add the newly empty ones to the new array. If you have enough redundancy, you can even do it in your array.
As for file formats--it's highly unlikely that DOC, PDF, GIF, or JPEG are going to anyplace incompatible without easy and abundant conversion utilities. Arguing otherwise is just silly, and shows ignorance of the last twenty years of technological development.
The only practical solution for "permanent" data storage currently are huge RAID hard disk arrays where you can replace a drive as it goes faulty.
Who says RAID has to be done with hard drives?
Yes, you need to have a regular system of rearchival, but a DVD-based or tape-based system could work just as well and give you just as much redundancy.
Either (1) the same way you hear something that travels faster than sound or (2) by marking two coordinates in space/time and seeing the difference between them. If it's less than c, the thing's FTL.
The robot shouldn't be allowed kill people just 'cause the owner tells it to. And number 1 there is extremely narrow, and for a literal-thinking machine, difficult to implement..
Why do you think #1 is there?
Aasimov's robots had near-human inteligence. Which means that they can interpret rules as well as a human. Which means that "do domestic chores" can be enough to keep the robot from whoring out or going on a murderous rampage, without having the robot edit your diet because it's "harmful" to you.
Aasimov was naive in thinking that the first use of robots WOULDN'T be military. My rules would not only cover that, but also plug the holes he frequently pointed out--and at the same time ensure that you couldn't buy a robot off the street and turn it into a weapon.
Do you know what the problem with that line of argument is?
In 10,000 BC they had birds, and saw that SOMETHING was over that ridge.
In 500 AD they had traders that moved past the "known world".
In 1400 AD they all KNEW that the world was already round, it was just one Spanish guy who thought the world was smaller than it is, but got lucky and didn't starve to death in the middle of the pacific.
In 1900 they saw planets and meteroites, and knew that things could travel in space--they just didn't know how to get there.
In 2000--well, yes, we haven't ever seen anything travel faster than light. But we haven't seen fairy tales jump off the book and come to life, either.
it's not arrogance, man. It's called SCIENCE.
Oh, one more thing:
If Newton's laws can be broken, why can't Einsteins?
Newton's laws weren't broken. It's just that the world is either more complex than Newton concieved his explanation in, and so we need to adjust the definition of "object" and "force" a bit.
Some particles have their entire existence faster than light.
I must have missed a news article, then. Care to enlighten me as to where and when we confirmed the existance of those theoretical particles?
And, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't you talking about quantum-scale effects--i.e., the sytem where we need to use an entirely different set of physics that what works to describe a car driving down the street?
I didn't say he did. In fact, I was merely pointing out why we can say "FTL is impossible" far better than our 1900s counterparts could say "flight is impossible" or our 1940s counterparts "supersonic flight is impossible."
It's entirely plausible that there exists an as-yet undiscovered propulsion mechanism that will allows us sufficient accelleration to break objectively-measured C--we might outrun out our own image similiarly to how supersonic flight outruns its own sound. We've never gotten anything macroscopic to go that fast, and it might act very differently when we do it.
(OTOH, certain supercollideresque experiments do come darn close on a microscopic scale, and to date no one's totally revised Special Relatvity due to the actual experiements.)
I've never been really impressed with Asimov's rules for robots. They're pretty plainly obvious, but nobody came up with them, because there wasn't any need (there still isn't!)
A: Re-read Asimov and replace "robot" with "artifical intelligence." Or, better yet, "android."
B: Asimov created his rules to tell stories about the rules, including how they were a bad idea. Not to mention that there should be 5, not 3.
1: An android must perform only those tasks which it has been designed to do.
2: (So long as it does not conflict with the above,) An android must obey the commands of its owner.
3: (So long as it does not conflict with the above,) An android must not take any action, or refrain from taking any action, that results in harm to a person.
4: (So long as it does not conflict with the above,) An android must not allow itself or any other object to come to harm.
5: (So long as it does not conflict with the above,) An android must obey the commands of all persons that are not its owner.
Because nothing, nothing, has ever been seen to travel faster than the speed of light.
We saw computers small enough to be used by a single person. We saw birds that flew. We saw objects that travelelled faster than the speed of sound (bullets, mostly.)
Now, of course, non-linear space travel a'la B5, Andromeda, or BG, which don't break relativity but instead sidestep it, is "plausible." (Heck, warp drive is "plausible"--and probably plays havoc with astronomy.)
The MS-DOS shell was the core of the OS beore Windows 95 came about, and before Windows 3.1 took off it WAS the operating system. DOS is what made MS the predominant figure; DOS is what MS licensed to IBM way back in the day.
I've a question I'd like to ask this guy: how come people 3 feet tall are smarter than you?
"Becauase it's an average. There are also women who can beat me up, fatter men who can run faster, and folk who eat more than I do but weight way less."
All those burnt trees along the side of the highway (forget the @#$!ing number, haven't driven it in years) got a shot from above to determine how well the forest is recuperating.
Slashdot Mirror
How, exactly, are you claiming the GPLed code as your own?
By distributing / publishing it without the GPL.
You might be able to splice a hair between "copyright infringement" and "plagarism", but you'll still be smacked by your boss.
And that is why I (and Stallman before me) said it is a good way to release software under the GPL. If you start with GPLed software, you have two choices: keep it in house & don't release it (which many Universities and funding agencies are O.K. with) or release it under the GPL.
The GPL is a politically motivated license. It was designed to encourage EVERYONE to use the GPL, which is the "good thing" Stallman was going for.
In a world where not everyone uses the GPL, and in fact there are people who will break relationships over use of the GPL's sticky copyleft, the "better thing" for you is a soft copyleft such as the BSD license.
With a non-sticky copyleft, the Other Guy (which would be you, since you're deriving) has the choice of using the same license, not distributing it, or using a different license.
So, in the situation we're talking about, the BEST thing to do would be to start with non-GPL style open source, because then you're certain that even if your university goes on to sell it for grant money and refuses to distribute the source, there won't be any heartache afterward.
(Does it help change the world to an FSF utopia? No, it doesn't.)
Absolutely not. Plagiarism would be violating the GPL. Making a derivative work is not a violation. The ony thing you should have to worry about is the contracts with your University and funding agencies.
Wrong. Dead wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.
Anyone can have just about anything on their local system, that they never show anyone. A researcher can steal quite liberally from someone else in a paper they are writing for practice, or becuase they wanted to just write the paper. None of that's plagarism.
Plagarism is when you publish or submit something and call it your own. Plagarism is, by a coincidence that probably has something to do with Stallman's experience in academia, triggered by the same act that triggers the requirements of the GPL.
Making a derivitive work, giving it someone else, and not using the GPL *IS* a violation of the GPL. And if you have an agreement that keeps you from doing that, you can and should be left holding the bag for your idiotic approach to a legal issue you should have brought up months ago.
How many academic contracts can you show me which prevent you from starting with copyleft code?
How many academic contracts can you show me that prohibit the teacher from shitting on thier desk? Or stealing money from the administrator's pocket?
You, ah, DO realize that using GPL'd code without legal authority to release it is copyright infrigement--otherwise known in the academic field as plagarism--correct?
Your university or employer can and should expel/fire you if you try and force them to use a copyleft license they have no intention of using. Just as they can and should expel/fire you if you try and submit "Noksagt Windows XP" as your final project.
It's called being a whistleblower. You cannot be fired for it.
Sure you can. If the employer was dumping toxic sludge in the gutter and you called your governor, you'd be a whistleblower. If you notice that they seem to be committing copyright violations and blab about it, you might very well be lying.
Especially if the goverment can't prove a thing, the copyright holder setttles or doesn't care, and YOU can't find the cash to mount a good enough defense.
Not to metion the fact that, since the questioner had already installed the software, my not-a-lawyer-but-I-read-a-lot mind thinks "hey, he sounds like an accomplice, not an innocent whistleblower."
If you're installing that much software and worry about it, tell your boss that you're uncomfortable taking possibly illegal actions and want them to indemnify you against any actions or liability that may come about by you following your boss's instructions.
But, really, the smart thing to do is to spend the $500 to ask a lawyer this question. They'll know what protection your state gives innocent employees of criminal organization, and what can and can't be indemnified against.
And a good lawyer will also be able to tell you how your state's employment laws can keep you from losing your job if you refuse to perform illegal acts.
Anyone who attempts to live by any reasonable code of ethics is going to find themselves quite often rooting for, actively assisting, or even becoming, "criminals".
Not so.
You forget the utmost important first step--petitioning ones governmetn for a redress of grievences.
And that very important second step--attempting to change the government through peaceful means.
And since you mentioned doing things that are illegal, let's not forget the first rule of civil disobedience, as taught by Ghandi and King--you NEED the other side to be seen to carry out the law onto you. Nothing gets steps 1 and 2 moving better than publicly, ethically, and purposefully violating an unjust law.
"I want to get high" is not, not, NOT a good reason to break the law. "I want to be ABLE to get high" is, and the moral difference between the two is enormous.
But if you're furthering the second option, I expect to see (1) a copy of your letter to your two senators, house representative, 2-3 state represenatives, governor, and president asking them to legalize your drug of choice, (2) a record of you politically supporting candidates that would legalize your drug, inclusive of mobilization efforts on seemingly unrelated issues, and finally (3) that you publicly and without guile or deciet violate the law and accept the consequences thereof.
While it's quite possible that infamous.net is based in some horrible third-world regime where you aren't allowed to vote to call your nation's leader an illeterate putz, if you're comparing drug use to Christian Martyrdom, the Underground Railroad, and Women's lib you're almost certainly right here in the US of A.
"Street crime" is usually taken care of by the police and is really none of your business. Imagine some moron busting the heads of the local pot dealer out of respect for "justice."
You say that second part like it's a bad thing.
Just because you want to get high doens't mean that it's not illegal.
A physics major I once knew suggested a bubble of slow time riding on a bubble of fast time. If that were possible, then you wouldn't need to go faster than the speed of light to travel faster than the speed of light.
This is similar to the "collapse and expand the universe" argument. Oddly enough, "warp drive" is in fact a plausible FTL drive system--once you get over that whole "bending the fabric of space and time" thing.
God created everything, in the story you believe. Including Lucifer. Lucifer serves god's plan, by tempting humans into doing what we know is evil.
That's not Lucifer. Lucifer is the angel who was put above all other angels, but then rebelled against God and so was cast down for his crime.
The one you're thinking about is ha'sa'tan, whose hebrew name I constantly misspell. HST is not a devil or a specific spirit, but rather a title held by one of God's angels. It's a position in the divine court akin to a district attorney--a Good being who plays "devil's advocate"--a good act, and a rightful act.
Humans that are tempted by ha'sa'tan may do evil, but their doing evil is wrong.
In the story, only humans have "free will", the ability to "defy god", and that only according to some interpretations of the story.
Yes, some Christian theology reserves free will for huamanity. But this does not in and of itself mean that non-human servants of God cannot go against God--it merely means that they alter their nature by doing so.
By this theology, Lucifer et al either are nothing more than myths, or they are angels who chose to not be angels, and in doing so were the motive force that punished themselves.
As I said, there are ample reconciliations already extant in Christian theology.
Your "argument from authority" really holds no weight.
It's not an argument from authority. It's a simple statement of completeness. An argument from authority would be "the church said so."
You're welcome to keep trying to poke holes in Christian theology, of course. I'm merely poiting out that you'll more than likely come up short--just as I would if I tried poking holes in the theory of evolution, for example.
(Oh, and btw--Galileo wasn't "brave." He was smacked around for actual heresy, not small things like "the world is round.")
To keep this interesting discussion going, I'd like to point out that there are many Christians in America today who require childbirth in the name of morality.
And your point is? Are you saying that childbirth is wrong? Or that abstinence is somehow morally wrong?
Not only do most Christian churches not require childbrith, but most of those that do require it on a level not greatly exceeding population replacement--and many of the latter allow priesthood as an alternative to childbearing.
How does christian morality judge the lives of, say, Russian children orphaned by Soviet purges of their Eastern Orthodox parents (on that religious basis), who became prostitutes or other criminals to survive
By and large as tragic. And even those that rail against those that did not value their faith above their lives hold final judgement as something for God, not man.
Or how about the Romanian nun crucified to death in an exorcism?
Another tradgedy. Right action does not always lead to right results, and neither does good action.
Or all the people tortured to death for insufficient faith during the Inquisition, at the hands of those with sufficient faith?
The church is an imperfect thing, and has done evil acts. Those evil acts were wrong. What's your point?
Our discussion was about the equivalence between the Christian idea of good and evil and the moral argument of right vs. wrong. You have so far failed to provide a temporal example that supports your argument.
I believe that god is as imaginary as the tooth fairy
And that's why it's insulting. Not because you don't believe god exists, but because you relegate him to the level of the tooth fairy--a ribald lie told to children to get them to give up baby teeth.
The tooth fairy is a whole different sort of fiction than a deity--those that tell their children about deities and take them to church every sudnay are not lying, and it's patently dishonest to imply that they are. Which the word "imaginary" does.
I'm not upset that you don't believe, or that you think I'm wrong. You're more than welcome to both viewpoints. What upsets me is your insistence that you can make offensive, insulting word choices and I'm not supposed to respond or correct you.
Mature adults can handle disagreement, but they also take the viewpoint of their audience into consideration and attempt to refrain from offending them if they can.
It is possible to use quantum physics to describe a car driving down the street.
Part 1: The principle of parsimony comes into play here. Since the real-life measurements we use are all based on newtonian physics, newtonian physics are correct to describe how they react.
Part 2: Prove it. I won't even make you account for the engine.
What happens when the file or filesystem format becomes obsolete?
You smack yourself for not hitting "convert" when three other file systems passed you by.
FAT16 is *still* readable, despite being three WINDOWS filesystems old. I understand that most Linux FS choices can similarly upgrade or update certain counterparts.
And, really RAID *is* is the way to go. When you want to convert to a new file system, you just create a new array, send the data over, and add the newly empty ones to the new array. If you have enough redundancy, you can even do it in your array.
As for file formats--it's highly unlikely that DOC, PDF, GIF, or JPEG are going to anyplace incompatible without easy and abundant conversion utilities. Arguing otherwise is just silly, and shows ignorance of the last twenty years of technological development.
The only practical solution for "permanent" data storage currently are huge RAID hard disk arrays where you can replace a drive as it goes faulty.
Who says RAID has to be done with hard drives?
Yes, you need to have a regular system of rearchival, but a DVD-based or tape-based system could work just as well and give you just as much redundancy.
Either (1) the same way you hear something that travels faster than sound or (2) by marking two coordinates in space/time and seeing the difference between them. If it's less than c, the thing's FTL.
The robot shouldn't be allowed kill people just 'cause the owner tells it to. And number 1 there is extremely narrow, and for a literal-thinking machine, difficult to implement..
Why do you think #1 is there?
Aasimov's robots had near-human inteligence. Which means that they can interpret rules as well as a human. Which means that "do domestic chores" can be enough to keep the robot from whoring out or going on a murderous rampage, without having the robot edit your diet because it's "harmful" to you.
Your rules would allow robot weaponry.
Yes, they would.
Aasimov was naive in thinking that the first use of robots WOULDN'T be military. My rules would not only cover that, but also plug the holes he frequently pointed out--and at the same time ensure that you couldn't buy a robot off the street and turn it into a weapon.
Do you know what the problem with that line of argument is?
In 10,000 BC they had birds, and saw that SOMETHING was over that ridge.
In 500 AD they had traders that moved past the "known world".
In 1400 AD they all KNEW that the world was already round, it was just one Spanish guy who thought the world was smaller than it is, but got lucky and didn't starve to death in the middle of the pacific.
In 1900 they saw planets and meteroites, and knew that things could travel in space--they just didn't know how to get there.
In 2000--well, yes, we haven't ever seen anything travel faster than light. But we haven't seen fairy tales jump off the book and come to life, either.
it's not arrogance, man. It's called SCIENCE.
Oh, one more thing:
If Newton's laws can be broken, why can't Einsteins?
Newton's laws weren't broken. It's just that the world is either more complex than Newton concieved his explanation in, and so we need to adjust the definition of "object" and "force" a bit.
Some particles have their entire existence faster than light.
I must have missed a news article, then. Care to enlighten me as to where and when we confirmed the existance of those theoretical particles?
And, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't you talking about quantum-scale effects--i.e., the sytem where we need to use an entirely different set of physics that what works to describe a car driving down the street?
Einstein did NOT say it was impossible.
I didn't say he did. In fact, I was merely pointing out why we can say "FTL is impossible" far better than our 1900s counterparts could say "flight is impossible" or our 1940s counterparts "supersonic flight is impossible."
It's entirely plausible that there exists an as-yet undiscovered propulsion mechanism that will allows us sufficient accelleration to break objectively-measured C--we might outrun out our own image similiarly to how supersonic flight outruns its own sound. We've never gotten anything macroscopic to go that fast, and it might act very differently when we do it.
(OTOH, certain supercollideresque experiments do come darn close on a microscopic scale, and to date no one's totally revised Special Relatvity due to the actual experiements.)
I've never been really impressed with Asimov's rules for robots. They're pretty plainly obvious, but nobody came up with them, because there wasn't any need (there still isn't!)
A: Re-read Asimov and replace "robot" with "artifical intelligence." Or, better yet, "android."
B: Asimov created his rules to tell stories about the rules, including how they were a bad idea. Not to mention that there should be 5, not 3.
1: An android must perform only those tasks which it has been designed to do.
2: (So long as it does not conflict with the above,) An android must obey the commands of its owner.
3: (So long as it does not conflict with the above,) An android must not take any action, or refrain from taking any action, that results in harm to a person.
4: (So long as it does not conflict with the above,) An android must not allow itself or any other object to come to harm.
5: (So long as it does not conflict with the above,) An android must obey the commands of all persons that are not its owner.
UM Why is FTL impossible again?
Because nothing, nothing, has ever been seen to travel faster than the speed of light.
We saw computers small enough to be used by a single person. We saw birds that flew. We saw objects that travelelled faster than the speed of sound (bullets, mostly.)
Now, of course, non-linear space travel a'la B5, Andromeda, or BG, which don't break relativity but instead sidestep it, is "plausible." (Heck, warp drive is "plausible"--and probably plays havoc with astronomy.)
Just in case folk take the above seriously:
The MS-DOS shell was the core of the OS beore Windows 95 came about, and before Windows 3.1 took off it WAS the operating system. DOS is what made MS the predominant figure; DOS is what MS licensed to IBM way back in the day.
The Unix shell is the implementation of the Unix philosophy of small parts working together.
Which KDE, Linux, and Gnome have perserved so very, very well.
I've a question I'd like to ask this guy: how come people 3 feet tall are smarter than you?
"Becauase it's an average. There are also women who can beat me up, fatter men who can run faster, and folk who eat more than I do but weight way less."
Random guess:
All those burnt trees along the side of the highway (forget the @#$!ing number, haven't driven it in years) got a shot from above to determine how well the forest is recuperating.