Of course, it's only 14.4 (~1KB/sec) but for email and even a terminal session it's not too bad. You only get around 15 minutes/month for free, and after that it's pretty steep. But you can get unlimited service for $5/month.
We're going on a long road trip early next year, and I plan to get unlimited for that month. Then I can check my email and even do some text websurfing from the car - you usually get good signal on major highways.
(Just to forestall some AC troll, no, I won't be checking email while driving.)
Re:The worst abuses of their budgets
on
NASA Contractor Fraud
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
A friend of mine used to work for NASA, helping run their IT stuff. They had no budget for buying computers - zero, zip, nada. So they were forced to buy "printer test equipment". I wonder how much of the 'fraud' comes from creative budget reallocations like that?
A few years ago, I read an article that you can fit every person/family in the world with their own house, and the area it would take would be able the size of Texas.
Okay, I did the math. Check it out here. One quote:
Obviously, this isn't an argument, it's a non sequitur. If that's not obvious, let's take it all the way to the limit, and see if it still seems convincing. Let's assume 4.5 ft^3/person. There's 1.47x10^11 ft^3/mile^3. Divide that by 4.5 and then by 6x10^9 and you get ~.20 mi^3 to hold the world's population! Heck, we only need a cube ~3000 ft on a side! We can stack everyone in a corner of the Grand Canyon and leave the rest of the planet untouched!
Just a couple weeks ago I finally got the money together and stuck an Antec 300W power supply in my machine (ASUS P5A, K6-II/500, Geforce 2 MX400, etc., etc.). It had been unstable ever since I put in the Geforce, in both Linux and Windows. Unplugging a couple of peripherals (a CD-RW and a floppy drive) seemed to help.
Since the 300W one went in (replacing an old 235W) it's been rock solid, even with the CDRW and floppy reattached. Now if I only had time to play games...
In the other types of black holes, such as the Kerr black hole (uncharged, spinning), Reisnner-Nordstrom (charged, zero angular momentum), and the Kerr-Newman black hole (charged, spinning) it is possible to cross the event horizon without striking the singularity. Instead, you can pass into another universe.
Indeed, it's theoretically possible that you will pass through many universes. This is a one-way trip, however. If you try to get back to where you were, you will encounter the singularity and die.
Wait a minute. From everything I've read, one of the properties that really distress physicists is the fact that rotating and/or charged black holes produce Closed Timelike Curves (CTC's), i.e. time travel. Without hitting the singularity.
Feet first into the mulcher is too good a fate for this ass clown. Shooting old men and children and women. In the back. I'm having a hard time coming up with suitable retribution...
Arms off at the elbows, spinal cord cut at the waist. Let him try changing his own diapers with his hooks.
I did not, however, even consider the power issue. I recently bought a new case with a 300W power supply, so if all else fails, perhaps I'll check that route. Thanks.
I had some real problems with my GeForce 2 MX card in an ASUS P5A motherboard until I reduced the power drain by unplugging some things (e.g. floppy, CD-R/W, etc.). That improved stability a lot.
I just got a new 300W power supply last night. Once I get it installed, we'll see if I can both play games and burn CDs on the same machine...
Simply put, the US has every legal right to go back in and remove Saddam. He's masterminded (failed) plot to assasinate George Bush Sr. The fact that he's an idealogue maniac, willing to test gas agents on his own people, use them as human shields, fund terrorists, hand a briefcase of anthrax to al queda, or any other nightmare scenarios gives the US a moral right to do so.
Saddam's regime is heavily secular, and Saddam himself is nominally Sunni. Neither of these traits endear him to the fundamentalish Shiite terrorist types. He's funded anti-Iran terrorists (for obvious reasons) and some Palestinian terrorists (more as public-relations with the rest of the Arab world than because he actually cares).
There is, at the moment, zero evidence that Hussein has worked with al Queda, and a lot of reasons to suppose that he wouldn't. Sure, all those Ay-rabs look the same to us patriotic Americans, but they do have differences.
See, e.g. here, or here.
So far as I can see, our government wants to attack Iraq because it knows how to attack armies, but has no clue how to go after mobile and decentralized terrorists.
I'd run my own damn space program. I figure a billion should grease enough wheels to get the stupid laws about space off the books. Then make an O'Niell colony or three and start moving people up there.
Start making solar power satellites and such. Our energy needs didn't grow as fast as they predicted in the 70's, partly because of better computer controls and automatic regulation. But if we could make electricity cheap enough we could save the petroleum for plastics.
See O'Neill's The
High Frontier for how to do it with 1970's tech. Imagine what we could do now. We've discovered that it's not trivial to build a small, closed-loop ecology (Biosphere II wasn't run well, but it still learned a few useful things) but we don't have to worry about making it closed-loop from the start.
Heck, if there's water ice on the Moon like they think, it'll be even easier. A billion ought to get things started, no problem.
I mean, literally! I had played Adventure a couple of times on Stella yesterday, just waxing nostalgic. And last night I had a dream that I had to map the thing to 3D. (Yes, I have weird dreams. It could be worse; my poor father has dreams where he's mowing the lawn.)
Perhaps the real issue is that PayPal is a monopoly. CitiCrap doesn't count.
Do you mean that it's not very common, or that it has some fundamental problem? If the latter, what's the problem with Citibanks's c2it? I just heard about it today in this article.
By definition, God's rules would be good, not arbitrary. There are two reasons: First, since he made the universe, he clearly knows the best way for it to work.
What about a God that creates a universe and then perversely gives rules to the inhabitants that are ill-suited for that universe, for Its own amusement? I don't think you can get away with that "by definition".
God is an all-wise being... any rule he makes would be the epitome of wisdom.
A theist friend of mine wants to write an evolutionary ethics simulator that he thinks would arrive at things like the Golden Rule and such. Why couldn't a creator of our universe have similar goals in mind - for us to derive our own ethics? More generally, why would a creator necessarily be perfectly wise? Why not just finitely but greatly wise?
Moreover, if such a creator is so greatly superior to us, how could we know anything about It? I mean, even if It told us about Itself, how could we trust that information? It could be fooling us, or not giving us a complete picture. I'm sure a lot of sheep have a pretty worshipful view of their shepherd, and lots of evidence that they are well cared for... until they get to the slaughterhouse.
God is the creator; by definition, his creations could not be equal to him
Creations surpass their creators in specific capacities all the time. That's why we make the class of creations called "tools". None of the creators of Deep Blue could have beat Kasparov at chess, but their creation did. Again I think you'll need to justfity that "by definition".
God recognizes what's good because he created the underlying structure of everything in the universe -- and the rules are a function of that.
Now this is interesting - I haven't run into too many theists who've realized this way of deriving ethics. Like a chessboard has certain rules of operation, and our desire to win means that certain strategies are better than others. Sacrificing your queen early on is almost never a wise move, for example.
There are physical rules that govern how our universe operates, and from our desires we can derive what strategies are best for achieving them.
Of course, this means that we don't need God as a law-giver (soverignty and authority don't matter to what's ethical or not), only perhaps as a law-relayer. And that has yet to be established.
...to know completely what choice is best in all instances would imply a way to foreknow the future.
Why couldn't we be created so that we could see the full four-dimensional structure of space-time? Again, justification is needed.
I would argue that the answer is that there was no other way. At this point, however, we have reached a level of such hypothetical esotericism that I don't there's any way we can, as humans, completely understand why...that brings us back again to the subject of faith
Well, as C.S. Lewis said, faith is having the courage of your convictions, being able to stick to what you've determined is right in the face of adversity (like not panicking when the anaesthesiologist drops the mask on your face; you've already decided that the surgery is the best course of action).
Faith is not believing in something depsite what your judgement tells you. And my best judgement is that no theist point of view that I've come across holds up.
...the issue of universal soverignty: the question of whether God has the right to be soverign, to make the rules, or whether we have the right to make our own rules.
I don't think that's phrased well. The notion of God "making" the rules runs smack into the Euthyphro Problem I alluded to in another post. If God's rules are arbitrary, then we simply have the case of "might makes right", the biggest bully on the block gets to make the rules.
On the other hand, if there's something about the rules that are inherently good, then that's something that's not under God's control (otherwise we'd be smack dab in the middle of the former case). God recognizes what's good, It doesn't make the good good.
So, which is it? The Golden Rule ("He who has the gold [power] makes the rules"); or, the rules are just out there, independent of God, and "soverignty" doesn't enter into it?
Now, there's still the possibility that God acts as an oracle, perfectly recognizing what's good and relaying it to us, but as I said, "soverignty" isn't relevant. And in the case of your experiment hypothesis, why not create beings that share the same perfect recognition of, and apparently approval for, good? Why wouldn't that be the best course of action?
> in which case there is no problem with a being both having free will and yet never wanting to do evil.
OK
...
If they were created hardwired to "not want evil", then they have no choice in the matter of decisions between one or the other.
I assume you see the problem there. If God can be both free and never want to do evil, then it isn't a logical contradiction to have "free beings that didn't want to [do] evil".
This God doesn't sound like an automaton to me. It doesn't sound like one incabable of doing things some might consider evil, either.
Like 1 Samuel 15:3 and Joshua 10:40, I agree. Note that if you agree with this, then your professed agreement with the "experiment" hypothesis in the next response is puzzling, since there would definitely be a possibility for God to, at least once in a while, be wrong on a question of ethics and morals.
> After all, God dislikes evil and doesn't want it around.
Perhaps... but more likely it's because God is probably a little stronger in matters of philosophy than you are.
"I know God exists, and He's smarter than you, so there must be something wrong with what you said, even though I personally can't think of it or point it out." Sorry, but that's how that comes across.
Yes, God can do whatever He wants. He could be an evil God if he wanted. But He doesn't want to do that, because his very nature is good. I mean, I could get on all fours and act like a dog if I wanted, but why would I want to?
But that's the whole point! Why didn't God create more beings whose 'very nature' was good, who didn't want to do evil? Why not make an Adam and Eve that didn't want to break rules?
The normal anser to this question is, "because they wouldn't have free will". But you yourself just said that God could choose to do evil, but doesn't want to. So either:
A: God has free will, in which case there is no problem with a being both having free will and yet never wanting to do evil. Therefore, God would have created free beings that didn't want to evil. After all, God dislikes evil and doesn't want it around. But It didn't, so we have a contradiction.
or B: God doesn't have free will. Like I said, a robot.
Most religious people tend to define evil as opposing the will of God.
But then you run smack into the Euthyphro Problem. Is something good just because God says so, or does God say so because it's good?
If the former, then we just have the ultimate case of "might makes right"; if there was anything other then the arbitrary whim of God driving the choices, then we'd be in the latter case.
So God just happens to be the biggest bully around. Doing what It wants may be wise, but not inherently moral. You're 'just following orders', like lots of perpetrators of war crimes. They just picked the wrong bully to pander to, assuming God didn't want them to do that.
And if it is the latter case, then you can't use this as a defense for the free will problem, because God conforms to good, and doesn't define it; so if God is perfectly good and has free will, then It could create beings that would do so as well... and didn't.
Many times agnostics think that God should come down and fix everything, etc. but that doesn't happen... due to the fact that we are given free will
Generally people say, "God couldn't create a being that both had free will and yet would never choose evil, that's a contradiction in terms."
I then ask, "Okay, God is perfect and we're told It will never choose to do evil. So, does God have free will?"
If yes, then there's no contradiction, and God would have created beings like that instead of us humans. If no, then how could such a robot be deserving of worship? It might be wise to kowtow to It, but how could it be moral?
The directors commentary is just flat spectacular.
Did you notice that they talk about the technical travails in making it, they mention little incidents that happened along the way, and so forth - but they don't comment on the story itself, the plot, or anything like that?
Even they recognize that the movie was all about the technology used in making it, and the story was entirely secondary.
If time travel were possible, somebody... would have traveled into the past already.
As has been noted, GR time machines can't go back any further than when they were assembled. So you can't goi back any further than the first one.
...consider what a knife to the throat of the infant Hitler would have done to history...
It's impossible to know. History is chaotic. Consider a simple thing, like weather. That's chaotic, with a lambda on the order of a few days. You appear, kill baby Hitler, disappear. A few days later, it's raining instead of sunny.
All the weather, subsequently, is different. That affects when people make love; even a small difference in position and timing changes which sperm reaches the egg. The next generation consists of completely different individuals from the one in "our" history. Madonna and Nelson Mandela are never born.
If you can change the past, then you must, and you can't predict how you will change it.
* If I could travel back in time, then why would we not have seen people doing so already? Wouldn't travelers from OUR future visit us now?
Easily shot down. All the time machines that we can come up with consistent with general relativity have something in common... you can't go back any further than when the time machine was first put together. So, we don't have time travellers (yet) because we haven't built a time machine.
Shameless plug: I wrote up a time travel page that covers essentially every objection in this article.
Of course, Pascal strings have a fixed maximum length, and netstrings don't. And they don't just handle ASCII, any type of data can be stuffed into them. Including, recursively, other 'netstrings'.
Anyway, I didn't see anything on that page stating that this would change the world. The "original" part is coming up with a simple way to encode them that's trivial to parse, can be recursively embedded, and has minimal overhead with some chance for error-checking.
A wonderful Tetris version, the point of which was to be as annoying as possible. Not unlike the character from Star Trek...
The sounds were annoying when they weren't actually insulting, the lookahead would frequently lie (just infrequently enough that you'd find yourself trusting it at the worst possible time), and then of course the innovations like invisible blocks and pieces on the later levels.
It all comes together when you hear the "nyah-nyah" sound when it randomly takes a block away from a line you've almost completed...
In such a drought situation, both tribes were simply ill-prepared and can only blame themselves. I would say "move to more favourable circumstances or die." Or find alternate sources of nutrition. [...]
Any situation can be reduced to a set of clear-cut circumstances.
Droughts can, and have, come on suddenly, without any means of predicting them. (Imagine one caused by a meteor strike.) Technology may not be available to store food indefinitely against possible calamity. (And it hasn't, for most of human history, assuming there was a surplus to store.) You can't simply postulate "alternate sources of nutrition." Moving may easily not be an option.
But, so long as you're willing to allow me to specify what I like, here we go:
Two tribes, living in peace in a fertile valley on the south edge of a desert. Further south is a lush jungle. Then, one day, a meteor strike causes widespread devastation in the jungle, sparking volcanism and drought. The river in the valley is running dry fast, cut off by a lava flow.
It's known from previous trips that there's a relatively fertile region to the north, across the desert. But it's several weeks on foot, and helicopters haven't been invented. There aren't any oases in the desert on the way. (We won't even consider what happens if the people living there aren't open to new guests...)
There's no point in going south, the jungle is fast becoming a desert. Only the valley walls saved the tribes from the worst effects of the meteor impact. The valley itself won't last long; the lava flow's getting closer at a rate of feet per minute, no signs of stopping.
There are equal numbers of survivors of both tribes. It's known how much water it will take to get across the desert. What's left in the muddy riverbed is exactly half of what's needed.
If they all go, they will all die of thirst before they get to liveable conditions. Only half of them can make it. Period. The clock is ticking, water is evaporating as you gather with the others to decide what to do.
Now, whose kid is going to be in the group that sets out - yours or some kid from the other tribe? And how many people will be in that group? (What if, as often happens in the real world, the other tribe isn't inclined to listen to reason?)
"If it came down to my kid's life or some random stranger's life, I'll keep my kid's life."
Your arguments indicate that you believe it is perfectly fine for families to kill each other if it is in their own self-interest.
To some extent, yes, but the alternative is not quite the return to nomadic hunter-gatherers as you portray.
I remember my mother once said, "If there were no men, there'd be no war." I asked her to imagine that there are two tribes living in a valley, and she's in one of those tribes. A drought hits. There simply isn't enough food to support both tribes.
Now, is she going to let her daughter starve, or is she going to provide the food to keep her alive, by force if necessary?
In the real world things are never as clear-cut as they are in artificial moral dilemmas. But I think in some circumstances it can be moral to initiate force. (Such conditions don't obtain in any developed country today, though.)
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/hacks/05/
Of course, it's only 14.4 (~1KB/sec) but for email and even a terminal session it's not too bad. You only get around 15 minutes/month for free, and after that it's pretty steep. But you can get unlimited service for $5/month.
We're going on a long road trip early next year, and I plan to get unlimited for that month. Then I can check my email and even do some text websurfing from the car - you usually get good signal on major highways.
(Just to forestall some AC troll, no, I won't be checking email while driving.)
A friend of mine used to work for NASA, helping run their IT stuff. They had no budget for buying computers - zero, zip, nada. So they were forced to buy "printer test equipment". I wonder how much of the 'fraud' comes from creative budget reallocations like that?
Okay, I did the math. Check it out here. One quote:
Do you volunteer to be on the bottom layer?Since the 300W one went in (replacing an old 235W) it's been rock solid, even with the CDRW and floppy reattached. Now if I only had time to play games...
Indeed, it's theoretically possible that you will pass through many universes. This is a one-way trip, however. If you try to get back to where you were, you will encounter the singularity and die.
Wait a minute. From everything I've read, one of the properties that really distress physicists is the fact that rotating and/or charged black holes produce Closed Timelike Curves (CTC's), i.e. time travel. Without hitting the singularity.
How does this square with your description above?
Arms off at the elbows, spinal cord cut at the waist. Let him try changing his own diapers with his hooks.
I had some real problems with my GeForce 2 MX card in an ASUS P5A motherboard until I reduced the power drain by unplugging some things (e.g. floppy, CD-R/W, etc.). That improved stability a lot.
I just got a new 300W power supply last night. Once I get it installed, we'll see if I can both play games and burn CDs on the same machine...
Okay, I give. Where are those three paragraphs?
Saddam's regime is heavily secular, and Saddam himself is nominally Sunni. Neither of these traits endear him to the fundamentalish Shiite terrorist types. He's funded anti-Iran terrorists (for obvious reasons) and some Palestinian terrorists (more as public-relations with the rest of the Arab world than because he actually cares).
There is, at the moment, zero evidence that Hussein has worked with al Queda, and a lot of reasons to suppose that he wouldn't. Sure, all those Ay-rabs look the same to us patriotic Americans, but they do have differences.
See, e.g. here, or here. So far as I can see, our government wants to attack Iraq because it knows how to attack armies, but has no clue how to go after mobile and decentralized terrorists.
Start making solar power satellites and such. Our energy needs didn't grow as fast as they predicted in the 70's, partly because of better computer controls and automatic regulation. But if we could make electricity cheap enough we could save the petroleum for plastics.
See O'Neill's The High Frontier for how to do it with 1970's tech. Imagine what we could do now. We've discovered that it's not trivial to build a small, closed-loop ecology (Biosphere II wasn't run well, but it still learned a few useful things) but we don't have to worry about making it closed-loop from the start.
Heck, if there's water ice on the Moon like they think, it'll be even easier. A billion ought to get things started, no problem.
I mean, literally! I had played Adventure a couple of times on Stella yesterday, just waxing nostalgic. And last night I had a dream that I had to map the thing to 3D. (Yes, I have weird dreams. It could be worse; my poor father has dreams where he's mowing the lawn.)
Do you mean that it's not very common, or that it has some fundamental problem? If the latter, what's the problem with Citibanks's c2it? I just heard about it today in this article.
What about a God that creates a universe and then perversely gives rules to the inhabitants that are ill-suited for that universe, for Its own amusement? I don't think you can get away with that "by definition".
God is an all-wise being... any rule he makes would be the epitome of wisdom.
A theist friend of mine wants to write an evolutionary ethics simulator that he thinks would arrive at things like the Golden Rule and such. Why couldn't a creator of our universe have similar goals in mind - for us to derive our own ethics? More generally, why would a creator necessarily be perfectly wise? Why not just finitely but greatly wise?
Moreover, if such a creator is so greatly superior to us, how could we know anything about It? I mean, even if It told us about Itself, how could we trust that information? It could be fooling us, or not giving us a complete picture. I'm sure a lot of sheep have a pretty worshipful view of their shepherd, and lots of evidence that they are well cared for... until they get to the slaughterhouse.
God is the creator; by definition, his creations could not be equal to him
Creations surpass their creators in specific capacities all the time. That's why we make the class of creations called "tools". None of the creators of Deep Blue could have beat Kasparov at chess, but their creation did. Again I think you'll need to justfity that "by definition".
God recognizes what's good because he created the underlying structure of everything in the universe -- and the rules are a function of that.
Now this is interesting - I haven't run into too many theists who've realized this way of deriving ethics. Like a chessboard has certain rules of operation, and our desire to win means that certain strategies are better than others. Sacrificing your queen early on is almost never a wise move, for example.
There are physical rules that govern how our universe operates, and from our desires we can derive what strategies are best for achieving them.
Of course, this means that we don't need God as a law-giver (soverignty and authority don't matter to what's ethical or not), only perhaps as a law-relayer. And that has yet to be established.
Why couldn't we be created so that we could see the full four-dimensional structure of space-time? Again, justification is needed.
I would argue that the answer is that there was no other way. At this point, however, we have reached a level of such hypothetical esotericism that I don't there's any way we can, as humans, completely understand why...that brings us back again to the subject of faith
Well, as C.S. Lewis said, faith is having the courage of your convictions, being able to stick to what you've determined is right in the face of adversity (like not panicking when the anaesthesiologist drops the mask on your face; you've already decided that the surgery is the best course of action).
Faith is not believing in something depsite what your judgement tells you. And my best judgement is that no theist point of view that I've come across holds up.
I don't think that's phrased well. The notion of God "making" the rules runs smack into the Euthyphro Problem I alluded to in another post. If God's rules are arbitrary, then we simply have the case of "might makes right", the biggest bully on the block gets to make the rules.
On the other hand, if there's something about the rules that are inherently good, then that's something that's not under God's control (otherwise we'd be smack dab in the middle of the former case). God recognizes what's good, It doesn't make the good good.
So, which is it? The Golden Rule ("He who has the gold [power] makes the rules"); or, the rules are just out there, independent of God, and "soverignty" doesn't enter into it?
Now, there's still the possibility that God acts as an oracle, perfectly recognizing what's good and relaying it to us, but as I said, "soverignty" isn't relevant. And in the case of your experiment hypothesis, why not create beings that share the same perfect recognition of, and apparently approval for, good? Why wouldn't that be the best course of action?
OK
> in which case there is no problem with a being both having free will and yet never wanting to do evil.
OK
I assume you see the problem there. If God can be both free and never want to do evil, then it isn't a logical contradiction to have "free beings that didn't want to [do] evil".
This God doesn't sound like an automaton to me. It doesn't sound like one incabable of doing things some might consider evil, either.
Like 1 Samuel 15:3 and Joshua 10:40, I agree. Note that if you agree with this, then your professed agreement with the "experiment" hypothesis in the next response is puzzling, since there would definitely be a possibility for God to, at least once in a while, be wrong on a question of ethics and morals.
> After all, God dislikes evil and doesn't want it around.
Perhaps... but more likely it's because God is probably a little stronger in matters of philosophy than you are.
"I know God exists, and He's smarter than you, so there must be something wrong with what you said, even though I personally can't think of it or point it out." Sorry, but that's how that comes across.
But that's the whole point! Why didn't God create more beings whose 'very nature' was good, who didn't want to do evil? Why not make an Adam and Eve that didn't want to break rules?
The normal anser to this question is, "because they wouldn't have free will". But you yourself just said that God could choose to do evil, but doesn't want to. So either:
- A: God has free will, in which case there is no problem with a being both having free will and yet never wanting to do evil. Therefore, God would have created free beings that didn't want to evil. After all, God dislikes evil and doesn't want it around. But It didn't, so we have a contradiction.
- or B: God doesn't have free will. Like I said, a robot.
How can I make this any clearer?But then you run smack into the Euthyphro Problem. Is something good just because God says so, or does God say so because it's good?
If the former, then we just have the ultimate case of "might makes right"; if there was anything other then the arbitrary whim of God driving the choices, then we'd be in the latter case.
So God just happens to be the biggest bully around. Doing what It wants may be wise, but not inherently moral. You're 'just following orders', like lots of perpetrators of war crimes. They just picked the wrong bully to pander to, assuming God didn't want them to do that.
And if it is the latter case, then you can't use this as a defense for the free will problem, because God conforms to good, and doesn't define it; so if God is perfectly good and has free will, then It could create beings that would do so as well... and didn't.
Generally people say, "God couldn't create a being that both had free will and yet would never choose evil, that's a contradiction in terms."
I then ask, "Okay, God is perfect and we're told It will never choose to do evil. So, does God have free will?"
If yes, then there's no contradiction, and God would have created beings like that instead of us humans. If no, then how could such a robot be deserving of worship? It might be wise to kowtow to It, but how could it be moral?
Did you notice that they talk about the technical travails in making it, they mention little incidents that happened along the way, and so forth - but they don't comment on the story itself, the plot, or anything like that?
Even they recognize that the movie was all about the technology used in making it, and the story was entirely secondary.
As has been noted, GR time machines can't go back any further than when they were assembled. So you can't goi back any further than the first one.
It's impossible to know. History is chaotic. Consider a simple thing, like weather. That's chaotic, with a lambda on the order of a few days. You appear, kill baby Hitler, disappear. A few days later, it's raining instead of sunny.
All the weather, subsequently, is different. That affects when people make love; even a small difference in position and timing changes which sperm reaches the egg. The next generation consists of completely different individuals from the one in "our" history. Madonna and Nelson Mandela are never born.
If you can change the past, then you must, and you can't predict how you will change it.
I cover all this and more in my time travel page.
Easily shot down. All the time machines that we can come up with consistent with general relativity have something in common... you can't go back any further than when the time machine was first put together. So, we don't have time travellers (yet) because we haven't built a time machine.
Shameless plug: I wrote up a time
travel page that covers essentially every objection in this article.
Anyway, I didn't see anything on that page stating that this would change the world. The "original" part is coming up with a simple way to encode them that's trivial to parse, can be recursively embedded, and has minimal overhead with some chance for error-checking.
It it earth-shattering? No, but it's clever.
The sounds were annoying when they weren't actually insulting, the lookahead would frequently lie (just infrequently enough that you'd find yourself trusting it at the worst possible time), and then of course the innovations like invisible blocks and pieces on the later levels.
It all comes together when you hear the "nyah-nyah" sound when it randomly takes a block away from a line you've almost completed...
Droughts can, and have, come on suddenly, without any means of predicting them. (Imagine one caused by a meteor strike.) Technology may not be available to store food indefinitely against possible calamity. (And it hasn't, for most of human history, assuming there was a surplus to store.) You can't simply postulate "alternate sources of nutrition." Moving may easily not be an option.
But, so long as you're willing to allow me to specify what I like, here we go:
Two tribes, living in peace in a fertile valley on the south edge of a desert. Further south is a lush jungle. Then, one day, a meteor strike causes widespread devastation in the jungle, sparking volcanism and drought. The river in the valley is running dry fast, cut off by a lava flow.
It's known from previous trips that there's a relatively fertile region to the north, across the desert. But it's several weeks on foot, and helicopters haven't been invented. There aren't any oases in the desert on the way. (We won't even consider what happens if the people living there aren't open to new guests...)
There's no point in going south, the jungle is fast becoming a desert. Only the valley walls saved the tribes from the worst effects of the meteor impact. The valley itself won't last long; the lava flow's getting closer at a rate of feet per minute, no signs of stopping.
There are equal numbers of survivors of both tribes. It's known how much water it will take to get across the desert. What's left in the muddy riverbed is exactly half of what's needed.
If they all go, they will all die of thirst before they get to liveable conditions. Only half of them can make it. Period. The clock is ticking, water is evaporating as you gather with the others to decide what to do.
Now, whose kid is going to be in the group that sets out - yours or some kid from the other tribe? And how many people will be in that group? (What if, as often happens in the real world, the other tribe isn't inclined to listen to reason?)
Your arguments indicate that you believe it is perfectly fine for families to kill each other if it is in their own self-interest.
To some extent, yes, but the alternative is not quite the return to nomadic hunter-gatherers as you portray.
I remember my mother once said, "If there were no men, there'd be no war." I asked her to imagine that there are two tribes living in a valley, and she's in one of those tribes. A drought hits. There simply isn't enough food to support both tribes.
Now, is she going to let her daughter starve, or is she going to provide the food to keep her alive, by force if necessary?
In the real world things are never as clear-cut as they are in artificial moral dilemmas. But I think in some circumstances it can be moral to initiate force. (Such conditions don't obtain in any developed country today, though.)