A copy of me would go on to new and different things, but poor old organic me would perish.
Though there are the weird cases, like where sub-parts of the brain are gradually replaced by cybernetic equivalents. At one end of the process you have a purely organic mind, and at the other end a purely silicon (or whatever) one. At what point along that spectrum (if any) does the original person die?
In short, God can be un-caused, but nature can't be.
Why?
Yeah. We have never observed mass/energy being created or destroyed. Every time we've thought we did, it turned out not to be the case.
You posit something that has no beginning or end? Why not mass/energy? It has so far passed all experimental tests for that property...
God gave mankind the gift of free will so that they could use that free will to obey him and thus show that they loved him as much as he loved them.
Hmm. They chose to do evil, right? So why didn't God make humans that both had free will and yet would never choose to do evil? Oh, that's impossible, you say? A logical contradiction? Then I just have one more question...
If no time travellers turn up on May 7th, will everyone stop promoting it after the date?
Models of time travel based on relativity involve creating an area of spacetime where, basically, things are warped enough that moving in space in the right way moves you backward in time. Like a rapidly rotating black hole.
These have the feature that you can't go any further back than when the area was first created (e.g. when the black hole was first 'spun up'). So if time travellers don't show up, it may just be that no naturally-ocurring areas of spacetime exist that reach back far enough. We certainly don't have the tech to make one yet, and won't for centuries minimum.
Turns out there are orbits that can easily and naturally 'fall' from one Lagrange point to another. And the Lagrange points for a complicated moon system like Jupiter's intersect frequently, so you can use to very efficiently hop from one moon to another while using orders of magnitude less fuel.
It's much slower than traditional orbital transfers, but so much cheaper that it's worth using. It's already been used on SMART and Galileo:
There's a lot that could be done with gravity, actually.
Time dilation would be hard to handle, but a relativistic FPS could be fairly cool. Imagine combat in a situation like in the book "Redshift Rendezvous". You have to figure out where the other guy actually is instead of just where you can see him, and you have to aim your shots at where they are going to be.
Distorting perspective and shifting colors could make for some complex gameplay. Difficulty levels could adjust the max speed of light. With 'Easy', relativistic effects are merely annoying (like lag in an online game), by the time you get to 'Hard' speed of light is 10 m/s and your tactics are completely different.
I'll guess that the game patches proved too much an inconvience, as the creator would have to remake the LiveCD after every update.
There are several ways to handle this. Consider the way Debian handles building CDs, it grabs a bunch of chunks and then stiches it together into a CD. Just update the chunks that need it and burn a new CD. No need to re-grab an entire ISO for an extra semicolon in a config file.
Even simpler is having some drivers to grab patches off the HD or even a USB stick as it's booting up. Then you don't have to re-burn at all.
Yeah, I like closed time-like curves! Still, It'd be nice to see them do the math with a rotating "dark-energy star". A Tipler cylinder doesn't need an event horizon to generate CTCs, and this would be even denser...
Hell, Cygwin does much of that, too. Still doesn't make Windows more than tolerable. I liked one comment I saw about this article so much I made it a.sig:
"Choice, flexibility and cost are really the driving factors [for
Linux adoption]. And Microsoft would have to stop being Microsoft
to ever compete with that combination." - emkey
One key stat from two years of games (the preso's copyright 2003): Average poly's/sec: 52,000 (max 145,000). (The specs talk about 60-75 million poly's/sec...)
This five year old machine has that kind of processing power?
Sure. Some people even built a computing cluster out of them. But actually getting that performance in practice is really difficult. I saw a presentation online once that indicated real games seldom if ever get more than a fraction of that.
You obviously don't watch enough dvd's to have encountered the already common feature of disabling the navigation buttons during previews and commercials before the main feature starts.
I'm so glad I picked a DVD player that had a modified firmware available for it. It disabled region coding and analog Macrovision. But the beautiful thing was disabling the 'UOP' (user operations) register. This is the spot in the DVD player where a DVD can request disabling things like fast-forward, next chaper, menu, etc.
It feels amazingly good to be able to skip over all that crap with one touch of a button.
"If you haven't ported your program, it isn't portable." An old saying in the programming world, and it has some truth to it. The best situation is to write the code on at least three platforms at once. This catches at least 90% of the 'gotchas' before they spread all over the code.
The other nice thing is that a bug that doesn't cause any symptoms on one platform might crash immediately and horribly on another platform. A lot of bugs get caught very early in the development cycle this way, too.
Separating out the GUI is important for real portability. Fortunately, the vast majority of apps can decompose pretty naturally into an "engine" and a "GUI".
Either:- 1) Design for performance 2) Design for portability
It's not impossible to design for both. Indeed, even games can be done this way - look at the original Quake, which had (at least) a software, Glide, and OpenGL renderer, and ran well even on hardware people literally throw out today.
But if you've got an already-written app, the saying above comes into play. Heck, I once worked with an app that had been designed to be portable, but the people writing it hadn't actually run it on anything but Solaris. Moving it even to other Unixes was a real chore; I'd run screaming before trying to port it to Win32.
I've got a force-feedback joystick which is nice for a couple of games in Windows. It works fine as a regular joystick in Linux, but when I looked around for tools to write force-feedback programs, I really only found some stuff for DirectX.
Is there anything open out there? Does someone have to reverse-engineer the protocol to get it to work?
And, in case you were wondering why we live longer on average, it's not due to medicine, it's almost entirely due to public health measures, a reliable food supply, and prevention.
I, personally, have lived a lot longer than I otherwise would have thanks to medicine. Got very sick and was hospitalized for a week at six months of age. I would almost certainly have been an infant mortality statistic without modern medical care.
"Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious
Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude
has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues
for as many centuries as it takes." - Patrick Nielsen Hayden
I'm happy to inform you that you can get an iPaq h3800 series handheld on eBay for about $100-200
Now that looks interesting! Skimming the docs it appears that the onboard hardware is, in fact, supported. I tremble, though, because:
Get this: after you install the bootloader, you get the base system uploaded and bootstrapped using... Zmodem!
Cute. I would probably enjoy doing this (I am a geek and all), but our next baby is due any day now and I don't think I'll have much time to tinker for a while. Still, I'm going to have to start looking on eBay. Thanks!
Slashdot Mirror
Though there are the weird cases, like where sub-parts of the brain are gradually replaced by cybernetic equivalents. At one end of the process you have a purely organic mind, and at the other end a purely silicon (or whatever) one. At what point along that spectrum (if any) does the original person die?
Reminds me of this story.
Why?
Yeah. We have never observed mass/energy being created or destroyed. Every time we've thought we did, it turned out not to be the case. You posit something that has no beginning or end? Why not mass/energy? It has so far passed all experimental tests for that property...
Hmm. They chose to do evil, right? So why didn't God make humans that both had free will and yet would never choose to do evil? Oh, that's impossible, you say? A logical contradiction? Then I just have one more question...
Does God have free will?
Models of time travel based on relativity involve creating an area of spacetime where, basically, things are warped enough that moving in space in the right way moves you backward in time. Like a rapidly rotating black hole.
These have the feature that you can't go any further back than when the area was first created (e.g. when the black hole was first 'spun up'). So if time travellers don't show up, it may just be that no naturally-ocurring areas of spacetime exist that reach back far enough. We certainly don't have the tech to make one yet, and won't for centuries minimum.
More info here.
Then you should avoid this site completely. :->
It's much slower than traditional orbital transfers, but so much cheaper that it's worth using. It's already been used on SMART and Galileo:
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050416/bob9. asp (even mentions using it for Jupiter moon exploration!)
http://www.ufoindia.org/news_intsuperhighway.htm
Time dilation would be hard to handle, but a relativistic FPS could be fairly cool. Imagine combat in a situation like in the book "Redshift Rendezvous". You have to figure out where the other guy actually is instead of just where you can see him, and you have to aim your shots at where they are going to be.
Distorting perspective and shifting colors could make for some complex gameplay. Difficulty levels could adjust the max speed of light. With 'Easy', relativistic effects are merely annoying (like lag in an online game), by the time you get to 'Hard' speed of light is 10 m/s and your tactics are completely different.
I thought the ozone layer pretty much went away during magnetic pole reversals, which have happened much more freqently than local GRBs...
There are several ways to handle this. Consider the way Debian handles building CDs, it grabs a bunch of chunks and then stiches it together into a CD. Just update the chunks that need it and burn a new CD. No need to re-grab an entire ISO for an extra semicolon in a config file.
Even simpler is having some drivers to grab patches off the HD or even a USB stick as it's booting up. Then you don't have to re-burn at all.
Yeah, I like closed time-like curves! Still, It'd be nice to see them do the math with a rotating "dark-energy star". A Tipler cylinder doesn't need an event horizon to generate CTCs, and this would be even denser...
Don't underestimate the value of e-books. Reference material when you need it and entertainment when stuck waiting somewhere.
Both of them give you the option of running most Linux software on Windows. Cygwin just requires that they be recompiled.
Neither one of them has set the desktop world on fire, either.
"Choice, flexibility and cost are really the driving factors [for Linux adoption]. And Microsoft would have to stop being Microsoft to ever compete with that combination." - emkey
Sony's SCEE group.
One key stat from two years of games (the preso's copyright 2003): Average poly's/sec: 52,000 (max 145,000). (The specs talk about 60-75 million poly's/sec...)
Sure. Some people even built a computing cluster out of them. But actually getting that performance in practice is really difficult. I saw a presentation online once that indicated real games seldom if ever get more than a fraction of that.
I'm so glad I picked a DVD player that had a modified firmware available for it. It disabled region coding and analog Macrovision. But the beautiful thing was disabling the 'UOP' (user operations) register. This is the spot in the DVD player where a DVD can request disabling things like fast-forward, next chaper, menu, etc.
It feels amazingly good to be able to skip over all that crap with one touch of a button.
The other nice thing is that a bug that doesn't cause any symptoms on one platform might crash immediately and horribly on another platform. A lot of bugs get caught very early in the development cycle this way, too.
Separating out the GUI is important for real portability. Fortunately, the vast majority of apps can decompose pretty naturally into an "engine" and a "GUI".
Either:- 1) Design for performance 2) Design for portability
It's not impossible to design for both. Indeed, even games can be done this way - look at the original Quake, which had (at least) a software, Glide, and OpenGL renderer, and ran well even on hardware people literally throw out today.
But if you've got an already-written app, the saying above comes into play. Heck, I once worked with an app that had been designed to be portable, but the people writing it hadn't actually run it on anything but Solaris. Moving it even to other Unixes was a real chore; I'd run screaming before trying to port it to Win32.
I wonder how slow the "slower, free" access will be. (I also wish my wifi card hadn't been stolen, I live in Oakland County...)
Is there anything open out there? Does someone have to reverse-engineer the protocol to get it to work?
With space travel, there'd be the opportunity to move elsewhere...
I, personally, have lived a lot longer than I otherwise would have thanks to medicine. Got very sick and was hospitalized for a week at six months of age. I would almost certainly have been an infant mortality statistic without modern medical care.
Why would everybody stay on one planet?
There are other planets, you know. Given time, we could even make more of them like Earth...
"Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes." - Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Now that looks interesting! Skimming the docs it appears that the onboard hardware is, in fact, supported. I tremble, though, because:
Get this: after you install the bootloader, you get the base system uploaded and bootstrapped using... Zmodem!
Cute. I would probably enjoy doing this (I am a geek and all), but our next baby is due any day now and I don't think I'll have much time to tinker for a while. Still, I'm going to have to start looking on eBay. Thanks!