It's a great short; some people have already posted links. I got some karma to burn, so here's the last 'chapter', the one I find most...moving? (AC is the ultimate evolution of Man's computer, transdimensional, infinitely powerful, The Question is simply "how can entropy be reversed")...
Matter and energy had ended and with it space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer attendant ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man.
All other questions bad been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC-might not release his consciousness.
All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.
But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.
A timeless interval was spent in doing that.
And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.
But there was no one to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer---by demonstration---would take care of that, too.
For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
Hm, I'd say that's more Insightful than Funny - I mean, it is a rather serious metaphysical question if we really are facing a gloomy, dark, cold, lonely end to things, is there some way we can reverse entropy, maybe going beyond pure science and empiricism?
Anybody remember the Asimov short story, name escapes me, with the central computer that answered questions, and from time to time different generations would ask it "How can entropy be reversed?"; every time the answer was "There is as yet insignificant data to compute an answer." Eventually, mankind dies off and leaves this multidimensional hyperspatial uber-computer, which is left with one unanswered question, and it churns away, until the Universe reaches the end, heat death...and this computer finally gets the data, and the answer, and it booms out..."Let There Be Light".
Yeah, but eventually, since the cooling asymptotically approaches absolute zero, you'll only be able to get a delta-T of a few tenths of a Kelvin, which isn't enough to do any meaningful work. (IANAP either, but IAAChemist, and I'm only two semesters out of PhysChemI/Thermodynamics, so I like to think I have a faint idea of what's going on)
Here's IBMs rackmount servers - it looks like the only 1U they have is powered by a 375MHz 604e. The POWER4 (POWER is an acronym, Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC, all caps:P) rackmounts all look at least 2U; I suspect the massive heat output of a POWER4 makes it impossibe or at least extremely unfeasible to cram into a 1U box. Are there any POWER4 blades or IceCube prototypes, either?
Well, most PowerBook owners really don't seem to be concerned that an AlienWare desk/laptop with a 3.06GP4 can run Photoshop so-and-so times faster; they seem to be more into the idea of a gorgeously-designed machine with an OS that allows them the ease of use to actually work efficiently, while still allowing them all the power they could ever want. Laptop people tend to realize much more than desktop people that a computer isn't always and end unto itself; most of the time it's just a tool for getting the job done, and they'll choose the best one available. Plus they have that great ad with Yao Ming and Verne Troyer...still can't figure out why they didn't premiere it during the Superbowl, though.
If you under-utilise the service you've bought then that's your problem.
Right...I have unlimited 10Mb dowloads (optonline), how the hell can I *not* under-utilize it? Even day-to-day, I still get 8Mb; 1MB/s*3600s/h*24h/d = 86,400MBytes, 86.4 gigs a *day*. I download maybe 2GB on a good day...
I probably wouldn't...I don't even want to begin to imagine what the government would do to you if they caught you with *anything* labeled "Secret Government Property". Sheesh, I mean, that's just ASKING for it..
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
And Ashcroft and Bush, and Republicans in general, are HUGELY pro-gun. So maybe we should try and either sway their views, or work in some other political framework that respects the 2nd Amendment (Libertarianism, anybody?), instead of handing over that fundamental power of the individual, trusting in them to do the Right Thing.
[side note, TJ also said "Firearms are the American yeoman's liberty teeth"]
...you're missing the point that Ashcroft want to give us all as many guns as we can carry out of the store, no waiting or checks! [deliberate hyperbole] Now, personally, I think the man's unholiness incarnate, but I do sleep a bit better at night knowing my small arsenal in the closet will be there safe and secure for the day the Ministry Of Homeland Security comes goose-stepping through town. I hope they put nice bright decorations on their chests...
Last I heard the most dangerous job in America was still those lobster (or something) fisherman in Maine or whatever.
It's king crab fishing in the Bering Sea - the height of crab season just happens to be the middle of winter on one of the roughest bodies of water on the planet. I can't find the numbers in a two-minute google search, but IIRC out of a fleet of ~300 men, 2 to 6 don't come back each season - and that's assuming no boats sink. The blood sweat and tears of hard-working men must be a hell of a seasoning, king crab is what, $20/lb?
She was sent to her death (an unpleasant one, slow suffocation, dehydration, or burning up) and they knew they had no way to get her down.
Heh, then you'll hate to hear that the dog they sent up before her got cooked on launch (insufficient insulation on the casule, drag heating). Anyway, Laika was actually euthanized before reentry with drug-laced food - the Russians weren't THAT bad.
more Xboxes in the living room for him to make software profits off of.
umm, but isnt' the point to buy the Xbox at a loss from M$, then install XBMP and load up the hard drive with media, avoiding buying any more software and giving M$ a profit? hell, the only Xbox game I'd waste my money on is Halo anyway..
A *lot* ob bands have always actively encouraged audio bootlegging of their shows; it was the "p2p" before there was p2p, and a really good way to keep your audience's goodwill - "wow, i can go to the concert and make a tape to take home? cool."
Re:Martin Black - could be much better
on
Blacker Than Black
·
· Score: 1
If you engineered the pyramids to the right angles and spacing, to a high enough degree of precision, you could have the scattered light interfere perfectly destructively, giving something very close to 100% absorption. It would probably be rather expensive to manufacture in bulk, and have to be kept *very* clean, but for any application where you need something that extreme to begin with, those shouldn't be insurmountable problems.
What's amazing is that there's very few mainstream publications that mention how poor the Simpsons are *today* compared to a decade ago. They all praise the show, it constantly wins awards, etc.
Well, take a look around you...frankly, most entertainment-oriented TV (vs. edumacational stuff like Discovery) these days is shit. The Simpsons has definitely slid waaay downhill in the last decade (is the new staff the Family Guy crew perchance?), but it's still hands-down the best show on television today.
...this is a Good Thing for production instruments, but it won't matter much for research/labwork/prototypes; right now I'm working on laser detection of single atmospheric particles; we needed a *black* coating for the inside of the chamber, but it didn't need to be particularly robust, just dark - so we smoked it with a flame. Carbon black is the least reflective substance known, IIRC it absorbs something like 99.996% of incident radiation...anybody who's seen the inside of an old kerosene lamp chimney knows exactly what they mean in the article when they talk about the 'black velvet' appearance. We did have some problems with it 'popcorning' as we pumped the chamber down, but a staged evacuation with good degassing periods took care of that.
Oh, this would make a great solar heating material - somebody mentioned the specific heat of the material, but as long as you have a thin layer backed by a heatsink, the specific heat doesn't matter (it's just the amount of heat a material can contain per gram; if you have just just a tiny bit of black substance, it doesn't matter how much heat it stores); it's all about the absorbtion.
[N]otebooks are all about sacrificing this compatibility for just smaller and lighter devices...This isn't what I want.
And that's why you don't use one. But there are a lot of people who would rather have (or need) smaller and lighter, rather than more open, hardware; that or they're Apple users and have to get OEM hardware anyway.
---Dismembering a person to remove, e.g., their eyeballs, will not work to fool biometrics systems. A dead eyeball is noticeably dissimilar from a live one.
Not if you kidnap them, bring them alive and kicking right to the front door, then either hold their head up, or if they don't cooperate, you dig their eye out and hold it up on a pen in front of the scanner - ~30 seconds shouldn't make a difference in the freshness...haven't any of you seen Demolition Man?
Re:This is a dupe - let's keep it all OT, ok?
on
Linux on the iPod
·
· Score: 1
Duuude...staying on topic for even a single reply is just gonna encourage them to post even more dupes - "well, they still discuss the articles, it can't be that bad.." If we make every dupe story nothing more than an endless string of "DUPE" posts and trolls, with not a single tiny shred of redeeming conversation (i.e. nothing more than a total waste of/.'s disk space and bandwidth), *maybe* the ed's will actually take the time to read the last 3 days's stories, all right there on the front page, before they post a dupe.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm, I'd say that's more Insightful than Funny - I mean, it is a rather serious metaphysical question if we really are facing a gloomy, dark, cold, lonely end to things, is there some way we can reverse entropy, maybe going beyond pure science and empiricism?
Anybody remember the Asimov short story, name escapes me, with the central computer that answered questions, and from time to time different generations would ask it "How can entropy be reversed?"; every time the answer was "There is as yet insignificant data to compute an answer." Eventually, mankind dies off and leaves this multidimensional hyperspatial uber-computer, which is left with one unanswered question, and it churns away, until the Universe reaches the end, heat death...and this computer finally gets the data, and the answer, and it booms out..."Let There Be Light".
Yeah, but eventually, since the cooling asymptotically approaches absolute zero, you'll only be able to get a delta-T of a few tenths of a Kelvin, which isn't enough to do any meaningful work. (IANAP either, but IAAChemist, and I'm only two semesters out of PhysChemI/Thermodynamics, so I like to think I have a faint idea of what's going on)
Here's IBMs rackmount servers - it looks like the only 1U they have is powered by a 375MHz 604e. The POWER4 (POWER is an acronym, Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC, all caps :P) rackmounts all look at least 2U; I suspect the massive heat output of a POWER4 makes it impossibe or at least extremely unfeasible to cram into a 1U box. Are there any POWER4 blades or IceCube prototypes, either?
Yes, they ran it during the Bowl - but I *first* saw it about a week before the game.
Well, most PowerBook owners really don't seem to be concerned that an AlienWare desk/laptop with a 3.06GP4 can run Photoshop so-and-so times faster; they seem to be more into the idea of a gorgeously-designed machine with an OS that allows them the ease of use to actually work efficiently, while still allowing them all the power they could ever want. Laptop people tend to realize much more than desktop people that a computer isn't always and end unto itself; most of the time it's just a tool for getting the job done, and they'll choose the best one available.
Plus they have that great ad with Yao Ming and Verne Troyer...still can't figure out why they didn't premiere it during the Superbowl, though.
Hmm...well, this is only US$34.99 a month, the next cheapest is probably 56k...I'll just underutilize :)
If you under-utilise the service you've bought then that's your problem.
Right...I have unlimited 10Mb dowloads (optonline), how the hell can I *not* under-utilize it? Even day-to-day, I still get 8Mb; 1MB/s*3600s/h*24h/d = 86,400MBytes, 86.4 gigs a *day*. I download maybe 2GB on a good day...
Who wouldn't take it?
I probably wouldn't...I don't even want to begin to imagine what the government would do to you if they caught you with *anything* labeled "Secret Government Property". Sheesh, I mean, that's just ASKING for it..
Minor nitpick, but I thought the acronym was IFF, 'Identtify Friend/Foe'?
Thanks..
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
And Ashcroft and Bush, and Republicans in general, are HUGELY pro-gun. So maybe we should try and either sway their views, or work in some other political framework that respects the 2nd Amendment (Libertarianism, anybody?), instead of handing over that fundamental power of the individual, trusting in them to do the Right Thing.
[side note, TJ also said "Firearms are the American yeoman's liberty teeth"]
...you're missing the point that Ashcroft want to give us all as many guns as we can carry out of the store, no waiting or checks! [deliberate hyperbole] Now, personally, I think the man's unholiness incarnate, but I do sleep a bit better at night knowing my small arsenal in the closet will be there safe and secure for the day the Ministry Of Homeland Security comes goose-stepping through town. I hope they put nice bright decorations on their chests...
Although I must say that Liberman as a veep would have been rather scary.
OK, I'm assuming you're planning on voting Dem in 2004; what are you going to do if Lieberman wins the nomination?
Last I heard the most dangerous job in America was still those lobster (or something) fisherman in Maine or whatever.
It's king crab fishing in the Bering Sea - the height of crab season just happens to be the middle of winter on one of the roughest bodies of water on the planet. I can't find the numbers in a two-minute google search, but IIRC out of a fleet of ~300 men, 2 to 6 don't come back each season - and that's assuming no boats sink. The blood sweat and tears of hard-working men must be a hell of a seasoning, king crab is what, $20/lb?
She was sent to her death (an unpleasant one, slow suffocation, dehydration, or burning up) and they knew they had no way to get her down.
Heh, then you'll hate to hear that the dog they sent up before her got cooked on launch (insufficient insulation on the casule, drag heating). Anyway, Laika was actually euthanized before reentry with drug-laced food - the Russians weren't THAT bad.
more Xboxes in the living room for him to make software profits off of.
umm, but isnt' the point to buy the Xbox at a loss from M$, then install XBMP and load up the hard drive with media, avoiding buying any more software and giving M$ a profit? hell, the only Xbox game I'd waste my money on is Halo anyway..
I'm still not seeing *any* comments for the first 3 stories (this being the top one)...waaaaaaah, i want my /.!!
A *lot* ob bands have always actively encouraged audio bootlegging of their shows; it was the "p2p" before there was p2p, and a really good way to keep your audience's goodwill - "wow, i can go to the concert and make a tape to take home? cool."
If you engineered the pyramids to the right angles and spacing, to a high enough degree of precision, you could have the scattered light interfere perfectly destructively, giving something very close to 100% absorption. It would probably be rather expensive to manufacture in bulk, and have to be kept *very* clean, but for any application where you need something that extreme to begin with, those shouldn't be insurmountable problems.
What's amazing is that there's very few mainstream publications that mention how poor the Simpsons are *today* compared to a decade ago. They all praise the show, it constantly wins awards, etc.
Well, take a look around you...frankly, most entertainment-oriented TV (vs. edumacational stuff like Discovery) these days is shit. The Simpsons has definitely slid waaay downhill in the last decade (is the new staff the Family Guy crew perchance?), but it's still hands-down the best show on television today.
...this is a Good Thing for production instruments, but it won't matter much for research/labwork/prototypes; right now I'm working on laser detection of single atmospheric particles; we needed a *black* coating for the inside of the chamber, but it didn't need to be particularly robust, just dark - so we smoked it with a flame. Carbon black is the least reflective substance known, IIRC it absorbs something like 99.996% of incident radiation...anybody who's seen the inside of an old kerosene lamp chimney knows exactly what they mean in the article when they talk about the 'black velvet' appearance. We did have some problems with it 'popcorning' as we pumped the chamber down, but a staged evacuation with good degassing periods took care of that.
Oh, this would make a great solar heating material - somebody mentioned the specific heat of the material, but as long as you have a thin layer backed by a heatsink, the specific heat doesn't matter (it's just the amount of heat a material can contain per gram; if you have just just a tiny bit of black substance, it doesn't matter how much heat it stores); it's all about the absorbtion.
[N]otebooks are all about sacrificing this compatibility for just smaller and lighter devices...This isn't what I want.
And that's why you don't use one. But there are a lot of people who would rather have (or need) smaller and lighter, rather than more open, hardware; that or they're Apple users and have to get OEM hardware anyway.
---Dismembering a person to remove, e.g., their eyeballs, will not work to fool biometrics systems. A dead eyeball is noticeably dissimilar from a live one.
Not if you kidnap them, bring them alive and kicking right to the front door, then either hold their head up, or if they don't cooperate, you dig their eye out and hold it up on a pen in front of the scanner - ~30 seconds shouldn't make a difference in the freshness...haven't any of you seen Demolition Man?
Duuude...staying on topic for even a single reply is just gonna encourage them to post even more dupes - "well, they still discuss the articles, it can't be that bad.." If we make every dupe story nothing more than an endless string of "DUPE" posts and trolls, with not a single tiny shred of redeeming conversation (i.e. nothing more than a total waste of /.'s disk space and bandwidth), *maybe* the ed's will actually take the time to read the last 3 days's stories, all right there on the front page, before they post a dupe.