While a circle can be described with only one dimension, that doesn't make it one-dimensional. It has length and width, just like any other 2D shape. A true one-dimensional object is a line, which has only length. If a circle was 1D, a sphere would also be 1D by the same reasoning. Which it isn't.
Re:traveling faster than light doesnt mean much
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Time Travel
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· Score: 1
While you didn't say much, I'll try to address it. Darkness doesn't move faster than light at all. If you have a star ten light-years away, and you put a big blinder up in front of it to block all the light coming to Earth, the darkness (remember, darkness means absence of light!) will still take ten years to reach us. Until that time we'll still be seeing light sent from that star.
Black holes and dark matter have next-to-no importance on this issue at all, since they're matter, which has mass, and therefore can't go faster than the speed of light anyway.
The empty void of space doesn't 'travel' at all, again, because it's just absence of matter. So 'void' travels even slower than 'darkness', if you insist on thinking they move at all.
However, the shotgun approach may have saved your post - gravity might propagate faster than light. No-one's been able to measure 'the speed of gravity' yet. So, if some mass did suddenly pop into existence somewhere, the gravitational effects might reach every instantaneously. But wait! Mass can't do that, under our current set of rules. Unless wormholes can pop in and out of place a-la Farscape / Star Trek, matter can't just wink into existence somewhere without an equal amount of quantum-mechanics-style anti-matter (not necessarily the same as 'normal' anti-matter) popping into existence to cancel it out. So, the gravitational field has to follow its matter around... and matter, again, doesn't go faster than light. All done!
Re:Ill explain
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Time Travel
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Still a bit off. First, the distinction needs to be made between a going-to-the-past time machine or a going-to-the-future time machine. The latter is easier to make: either travel near the speed of light so time moves more slowly for you, or just get yourself cryogenically frozen. Since you're moving down the timestream, there are no problems with you ending up down a different branch than that which you started on.
A traveling-to-the-past machine, however, is quite different. You don't just pick another possible reality and hop to it - that's not a time machine at all, and you've probably been watching too much Sliders. Instead you trace back along the path you took through time-space. You could, conceivably, end up following a different branch from your destination. However, since you'd be following your own path through time-space backwards, you'd be affected by the trip as well, growing younger, losing memories, et cetera. The current model of time travel dictates you could only go back until the time at which your time-machine became operational, as well. And, of course, since your consciousness would have be rewound, so to speak, you'd have effectively ceased to exist. Probably the only use for it would be repeatedly hopping back until you found a branch of the timestream that you liked (or one in which your time machine was destroyed before you could go time-traveling again!). You wouldn't remember anything at all, though, so the distinction between reliving a part of your life and suicide would be a very fuzzy one. In effect, you'd have snuffed out your own existence in favour of creating another branch on the tree of time-space.
What the problem is is the old affecting-your-past-so-you-don't-time-travel-in-th e-first-place paradox. The only way to not change your past is to avoid your 'light cone', which exists in a sort of four-dimensional time-space. To avoid influencing your past, you have to make sure that you don't come close enough to yourself that you could alter anything about yourself. The only way to do so would be to be outside your light-cone: for example, 2 light-years away when you were two years back, 10 light-years when you were ten years in the past, etc.
As I explained in my re: the inherent paradox is that if you can move faster than the speed of light, then a light-cone doesn't really demark the correct time-space area you'd have to avoid. You'd have to avoid an even larger area based on the speed you were traveling, which would mean you'd have to travel faster, which would mean you'd have an even larger cone to escape, etc etc.
Re:He does not understand his own theories.
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Time Travel
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· Score: 1
If the experiment 'works' one mirror universe will have two neutrons in the net, while the others will have one (and one will have none). One timestream can then say w00t, another w0t?, and a whole whack 'what a quack'. Well, sort of - multiply those all by an infinitely large quantity.
There's a mathematical proof for each of the laws of thermodynamics, actually. Being that that is all a priori, it's not subject to the same rules - you can prove something with logic, something you can't do with empirical analysis.
S'easier to travel into the future than that. Just get yourself cryogenically frozen. If you're lucky, you might even not die in the process!
Re:ways around the time travel paradox
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
First of all I assume by "someone in the future" you mean a human on earth. In this case, one of the simplest ways to avoid the future time travelers paradox is to posit that a backwards time travel of N years must physically be accompanied by a spatial displacement of more than N light years. That way, nobody who travels back in time can interact with anything affecting their own past, since they can't interact outside of their light cone.
This, of course, would mean they'd have to travel faster than the speed of light, which not only would put them at risk of causing Star Trek-style space messups, but also at having their hat blow off.
Well, that's not the only problem. If you can move faster than the speed of light (which you'd have to, to stay out of your light cone) wouldn't that mean that the light cone doesn't define how much could be influencing an object? I mean, if you can move faster than light, say C plus 1 km/hr, wouldn't that speed then dictate the size of the cone you'd have to escape? In effect, you'd never be able to avoid influencing your past by moving in space as you moved in time, because you'd always have to be going a little faster than you are to get away from yourself.
Re:hey...
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 2, Informative
It's because in some theories of time travel, you get younger as you go back. This (sort of) gets around the meeting-yourself problem, as well as not horribly screwing up thermodynamics, because it conserves the amount of matter and energy in the universe (by not making duplicates of you). This has a few implications, if it is true:
You and your time machine had better stay put for a while, or you'll end up moving to where you were at the target time when you timetravel.
You'd better hope that your time machine is younger than you, or you might time travel to before you were born - and there's not a heck of a lot you can do when you're just a sperm and an egg!
You probably won't remember anything, because your brain will return to its prior state when you travel back in time. Bad!
Should you go back in time and then scuttle your time machine or otherwise prevent yourself from time-traveling back, icky bad stuff will happen!
Finally, since you and everything around you will be exactly as it was at the target time, you probably won't change anything at all - because you won't even know you've gone back in time!
All these effects, in sum, make time travel pretty useless. S'not a great theory in my boat, actually.
Re:laws for time travellers? who cares?
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
It'd be the only way to avoid creating those tricky paradoxes, see.
For this to work, you have to believe in the 'multiverse', a infinitely large collection of parallel universes that grows at an infinite rate, because whenever the state of the universe could be different, a new parallel universe spawns where it is different. For example, there's a universe where I forgot to brush my teeth this morning. An infinite number of them, actually. Even the simple flux of space that quantum mechanics dictates (the kind that makes Hawking radiation from black holes) would be enough to spawn parallel universes. So, when you go back in time, your leave your universe (because if you didn't, you'd have changed things so that you might not go into the past in the first place) and enter someone else's (who, coincidentally, is just like you). Of course, if you buy into these sorts of multiverse shenanigans, the anthropic principle easily explains away God, so there's a bit of a consequence to this easy way out of the time travel problems.
And, of course, time travel is still breaking the laws of thermodynamics, which as we all know from Doom, will summon hellspawned chaos beastlings to wreak heck on us all. So don't do that.
A good analogy that might help you wrap your mind around it is the plot of Chrono Cross, the sequel to Chrono Trigger. In Chrono Trigger, the heroes go and defeat a world-destroying monster called Lavos - except, this means that they wouldn't have had to go back in time in the first place, but a mind-bending paradox is averted by parellel universes popping up where they did, and some where they didn't go back in time. See? Simple. Well, maybe not. Fun game at least.
Shouldn't the/. people be trying to encourage women to get into IT, rather than encouraging behaviour which scares them off?
No. It's a bit of a stupidity filter, see. We don't want to have to deal with the types of people who be offended by something as completely inoffensive as this article. Like you.
For the record, I was offended by your attempt at a joke concerning the Slashdot administrators' sexualities. After a long-winded post on how we should all be sensitive and politically correct, why did you have to tack on a little 'fag joke'? Christ, shut the hell up. Your trolling skills would be better spent on things that are at least moderately funny.
Anabolic steroids only make your wang bigger if you take them before or during puberty. Your own 'proof' says so. And really, taking steroids during or before puberty is a very, very bad idea.
No. In the same manner that you can't use graphite to fix up the L1 on XP to overclock them, it won't work for the L5s either.
For whatever reason (protecting the amateur overclocker from himself, maybe?) AMD set up the bridges on XP chips to be unlinkable without something that has very low resistance (like silver paint). Graphite won't cut it anymore.
Silly researchers, Cloud never talks. You ask the *supporting* cast in Square games when you want answers. Cloud will just say '...' and hit you with his sword.
Re:Why do people still use Angelfire???
on
Homemade Gauss Gun
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Come April 1st, Geocities will no longer support FTP. So, it's now just as bad as Angelfire.
Also not correct. Diablo II was such a system, where the Battle.net servers did all the work and the client accepted the input and rendered the result. This didn't stop a few smart players from writing a packet-sniffing app to remove the element of randomness from the game by revealing information intended to be 'hidden' from players.
The issue is the same as black-box hardware. As long as you have all the input and all the output at your disposal, you can eventually break the system by emulating its parts. The degree to which potential crackers need to do this is your degree of obfuscation; the higher, the better, if you want to keep it from being cracked. Given enough time, everything can and will be. The point is to make it so difficult that it's not worth the effort (for example, if the time to crack the product would exceed the product's planned obsoletion).
Besides, there aren't an infinite number of wavelengths in between. Light can only certain wavelengths, as described by the laws of quantum physics. If this weren't the case, every light source would be putting out an infinite amount of energy.
The laser does not produce an infinite amount of wavelengths. Each layer produces one dominant wavelength, and one to several weaker wavelengths.
As for consumer applications, don't hold your breath. Unless these are cheaper to produce than your supermarket price-checker, they'll stay in the realm of science for now. Multi-spectrum lasers are useful simply because they're light that all goes in one direction, which makes them useful for observing molecules.
Christ, have you ever tried to get on Battle.net without a legitimate CD key? You can't just use a key generator, because there are at least a hundred 1337 h4xx0rs out there using whatever key you get generated - and that's IF Battle.net lets you on, since none of the key generators have perfectly cracked Blizz's 'secret code'.
Playing on Battle.net requires a CD key. This is probably the only reason I bought the game, seeing as I could have just used burned discs and a fake key otherwise.
Bnetd DOES circumvent their copy protection. Are you pissed because you can't play D2 on your linux box? Shouldn't be using a fucking linux box for gaming, dipshit.
If you knew anything about the current situation, you'd be aware that everyone and his dog has been playing leaked copies of the Warcraft 3 beta, using versions of bnetd. Blizzard spent money making Warcraft III, and the #warcraft3 DALnet crew stole it. Don't give me none of this fair-use bullshit, there's no fair use for a closed beta if you weren't invited to test it.
If I describe to you, in detail, the plans for top-secret U.S. weaponry (you know, stealth jets and the like) it's still considered treason. Or rather, terrorism, since I'm not American. The code is being read; that does not automatically validate it as free speech in the eyes of the law.
Slashdot Mirror
The trick is to nuke units right beside their cities instead, see. SDI doesn't stop that.
Different versions of you, yes. There's still only one you, although they're probably all quite similar to each you.
Therefore all horses are the same colour as themselves, you mean?
While a circle can be described with only one dimension, that doesn't make it one-dimensional. It has length and width, just like any other 2D shape. A true one-dimensional object is a line, which has only length. If a circle was 1D, a sphere would also be 1D by the same reasoning. Which it isn't.
Black holes and dark matter have next-to-no importance on this issue at all, since they're matter, which has mass, and therefore can't go faster than the speed of light anyway.
The empty void of space doesn't 'travel' at all, again, because it's just absence of matter. So 'void' travels even slower than 'darkness', if you insist on thinking they move at all.
However, the shotgun approach may have saved your post - gravity might propagate faster than light. No-one's been able to measure 'the speed of gravity' yet. So, if some mass did suddenly pop into existence somewhere, the gravitational effects might reach every instantaneously. But wait! Mass can't do that, under our current set of rules. Unless wormholes can pop in and out of place a-la Farscape / Star Trek, matter can't just wink into existence somewhere without an equal amount of quantum-mechanics-style anti-matter (not necessarily the same as 'normal' anti-matter) popping into existence to cancel it out. So, the gravitational field has to follow its matter around... and matter, again, doesn't go faster than light. All done!
A traveling-to-the-past machine, however, is quite different. You don't just pick another possible reality and hop to it - that's not a time machine at all, and you've probably been watching too much Sliders. Instead you trace back along the path you took through time-space. You could, conceivably, end up following a different branch from your destination. However, since you'd be following your own path through time-space backwards, you'd be affected by the trip as well, growing younger, losing memories, et cetera. The current model of time travel dictates you could only go back until the time at which your time-machine became operational, as well. And, of course, since your consciousness would have be rewound, so to speak, you'd have effectively ceased to exist. Probably the only use for it would be repeatedly hopping back until you found a branch of the timestream that you liked (or one in which your time machine was destroyed before you could go time-traveling again!). You wouldn't remember anything at all, though, so the distinction between reliving a part of your life and suicide would be a very fuzzy one. In effect, you'd have snuffed out your own existence in favour of creating another branch on the tree of time-space.
As I explained in my re: the inherent paradox is that if you can move faster than the speed of light, then a light-cone doesn't really demark the correct time-space area you'd have to avoid. You'd have to avoid an even larger area based on the speed you were traveling, which would mean you'd have to travel faster, which would mean you'd have an even larger cone to escape, etc etc.
If the experiment 'works' one mirror universe will have two neutrons in the net, while the others will have one (and one will have none). One timestream can then say w00t, another w0t?, and a whole whack 'what a quack'. Well, sort of - multiply those all by an infinitely large quantity.
There's a mathematical proof for each of the laws of thermodynamics, actually. Being that that is all a priori, it's not subject to the same rules - you can prove something with logic, something you can't do with empirical analysis.
S'easier to travel into the future than that. Just get yourself cryogenically frozen. If you're lucky, you might even not die in the process!
- First of all I assume by "someone in the future" you mean a human on earth. In this case, one of the simplest ways to avoid the future time travelers paradox is to posit that a backwards time travel of N years must physically be accompanied by a spatial displacement of more than N light years. That way, nobody who travels back in time can interact with anything affecting their own past, since they can't interact outside of their light cone.
This, of course, would mean they'd have to travel faster than the speed of light, which not only would put them at risk of causing Star Trek-style space messups, but also at having their hat blow off.Well, that's not the only problem. If you can move faster than the speed of light (which you'd have to, to stay out of your light cone) wouldn't that mean that the light cone doesn't define how much could be influencing an object? I mean, if you can move faster than light, say C plus 1 km/hr, wouldn't that speed then dictate the size of the cone you'd have to escape? In effect, you'd never be able to avoid influencing your past by moving in space as you moved in time, because you'd always have to be going a little faster than you are to get away from yourself.
- Finally, since you and everything around you will be exactly as it was at the target time, you probably won't change anything at all - because you won't even know you've gone back in time!
All these effects, in sum, make time travel pretty useless. S'not a great theory in my boat, actually.For this to work, you have to believe in the 'multiverse', a infinitely large collection of parallel universes that grows at an infinite rate, because whenever the state of the universe could be different, a new parallel universe spawns where it is different. For example, there's a universe where I forgot to brush my teeth this morning. An infinite number of them, actually. Even the simple flux of space that quantum mechanics dictates (the kind that makes Hawking radiation from black holes) would be enough to spawn parallel universes. So, when you go back in time, your leave your universe (because if you didn't, you'd have changed things so that you might not go into the past in the first place) and enter someone else's (who, coincidentally, is just like you). Of course, if you buy into these sorts of multiverse shenanigans, the anthropic principle easily explains away God, so there's a bit of a consequence to this easy way out of the time travel problems.
And, of course, time travel is still breaking the laws of thermodynamics, which as we all know from Doom, will summon hellspawned chaos beastlings to wreak heck on us all. So don't do that.
A good analogy that might help you wrap your mind around it is the plot of Chrono Cross, the sequel to Chrono Trigger. In Chrono Trigger, the heroes go and defeat a world-destroying monster called Lavos - except, this means that they wouldn't have had to go back in time in the first place, but a mind-bending paradox is averted by parellel universes popping up where they did, and some where they didn't go back in time. See? Simple. Well, maybe not. Fun game at least.
No. It's a bit of a stupidity filter, see. We don't want to have to deal with the types of people who be offended by something as completely inoffensive as this article. Like you.
For the record, I was offended by your attempt at a joke concerning the Slashdot administrators' sexualities. After a long-winded post on how we should all be sensitive and politically correct, why did you have to tack on a little 'fag joke'? Christ, shut the hell up. Your trolling skills would be better spent on things that are at least moderately funny.
Anabolic steroids only make your wang bigger if you take them before or during puberty. Your own 'proof' says so. And really, taking steroids during or before puberty is a very, very bad idea.
No. In the same manner that you can't use graphite to fix up the L1 on XP to overclock them, it won't work for the L5s either.
For whatever reason (protecting the amateur overclocker from himself, maybe?) AMD set up the bridges on XP chips to be unlinkable without something that has very low resistance (like silver paint). Graphite won't cut it anymore.
Silly researchers, Cloud never talks. You ask the *supporting* cast in Square games when you want answers. Cloud will just say '...' and hit you with his sword.
Come April 1st, Geocities will no longer support FTP. So, it's now just as bad as Angelfire.
The internet is dead, I tell you! Woe! Woe!
Also not correct. Diablo II was such a system, where the Battle.net servers did all the work and the client accepted the input and rendered the result. This didn't stop a few smart players from writing a packet-sniffing app to remove the element of randomness from the game by revealing information intended to be 'hidden' from players.
The issue is the same as black-box hardware. As long as you have all the input and all the output at your disposal, you can eventually break the system by emulating its parts. The degree to which potential crackers need to do this is your degree of obfuscation; the higher, the better, if you want to keep it from being cracked. Given enough time, everything can and will be. The point is to make it so difficult that it's not worth the effort (for example, if the time to crack the product would exceed the product's planned obsoletion).
Besides, there aren't an infinite number of wavelengths in between. Light can only certain wavelengths, as described by the laws of quantum physics. If this weren't the case, every light source would be putting out an infinite amount of energy.
The laser does not produce an infinite amount of wavelengths. Each layer produces one dominant wavelength, and one to several weaker wavelengths.
As for consumer applications, don't hold your breath. Unless these are cheaper to produce than your supermarket price-checker, they'll stay in the realm of science for now. Multi-spectrum lasers are useful simply because they're light that all goes in one direction, which makes them useful for observing molecules.
Playing on Battle.net requires a CD key. This is probably the only reason I bought the game, seeing as I could have just used burned discs and a fake key otherwise.
Bnetd DOES circumvent their copy protection. Are you pissed because you can't play D2 on your linux box? Shouldn't be using a fucking linux box for gaming, dipshit.
If you knew anything about the current situation, you'd be aware that everyone and his dog has been playing leaked copies of the Warcraft 3 beta, using versions of bnetd. Blizzard spent money making Warcraft III, and the #warcraft3 DALnet crew stole it. Don't give me none of this fair-use bullshit, there's no fair use for a closed beta if you weren't invited to test it.
Funniest... post... EVER!
Their target audience, apparently, does not include people capable of critical thinking.
If I describe to you, in detail, the plans for top-secret U.S. weaponry (you know, stealth jets and the like) it's still considered treason. Or rather, terrorism, since I'm not American. The code is being read; that does not automatically validate it as free speech in the eyes of the law.