The aether articles on Wikipedia from the poster below have alot of information. I knew the Aether was generally dismissed because of the Morley light experiment, but I always thought it was dismissed for the wrong reason. Nice to know that, even though I wouldn't really call what I'm thinking of particulate, there's still some thought going into the possibility that the universe is actually something, instead of a bunch of nothing with some space dust (ie, planets, stars, etc).
I think the term "fabric of spacetime" or "continuum" from Star Trek shows is a little closer to the terminology, but again, fabric sort of denotes two dimensions, as if you can tear it. It'd be a bit like an ant in the middle of a fishbowl trying to "tear" the water.
Anyway, interesting thoughts, glad there are others that have the same ideas. Just like chimps.:-)
As an armchair physicist, the concept of energy in the nothingness of space is interesting to me. My crackpot guess is that all matter is just a complex ripple of whatever the universe is made of. Where you see a vaccuum, it's really just "flat" matter. The planets (as an easy example) are sort of twists and molds in the material of the universe. It's a bit hard to picture in three dimensions, but take a block of jello (or for the tried and true geeks, a 10x10 gelatinous cube) as the universe, and the imperfections inside (more dense areas, less dense areas, churned areas, etc) represent the planets and stars.
It sort of makes sense in terms of gravity as well - you can "stretch" this material to some extent (sort of like winding up taffy to make a piece of candy) and that essentially makes the trip from point A to B take a shorter amount of time (because the effective time between A and B is the same, but since they are now farther apart, you get there "faster", ie, gravitational pull).
Not saying it makes sense, but it's fun to think about.:-)
Sure, but where's the human compassion? We're the evolutionary equivalent to a Chevy Suburban in a petting zoo. Can't we survive without taking everything down on the way?
Not to be a wet blanket on the whole "Survival of the human race" thing, but are we worth it? It seems that just about every other creature on this planet lives in harmony with each other and nature in general. Humans overpopulate, pave over, and drain natural resources. We're not in the cycle of nature, it seems, and given that, how can we expect to survive long term, unless we either drastically change our way of living and our approach towards nature, or just keep spreading out, like Mr. Smith's analogy of a virus.
Just seems that humans aren't playing by the rules - we grow in population out of proportion to what the environment can withstand. Great for our survival over other species in the short term, but bad for our survival in the long term, as nothing can sustain us for very long.
Go into space? I guess...but to what end? Whose end?
Wife is always telling me to get a cable organizer for the monitor, mouse, keyboard, network, and tower. This aspire is basically an all-in-one that's slightly portable if you want to move it to the kitchen table. One cable (power). Aesthetically pleasing. I wonder if that's who they're marketing to....(husbands of interior designing wives).
Someone replied: "Ever heard of Adobe Acrobat? That's what it's for." I'd like to say they missed the point of the question, which isn't just edits to a document. What I think the poster, and myself, are searching for is a web-based document server that tracks who's working on what, when. So if I decide I'm going to work on the Abstract of a paper, I go online, download it, and work on it. Let Word or whatever track my exact edits.
When another user decides to edit it, they'll see that it's "checked out" and that they should work on something else, or contact me to continue with my edits. This avoids people working on the same document. Version control. It doesn't have to be complex to the end user, but I think the behind-the-scenes work for tracking uploads and downloads, different document piles, etc, would be extensive.
Then how can it be possible to run a problem-free Windows installation simply by following a handful of common-sense pointers ?
Just had a fully patched, Windows Fire-walled, Sophos Antivirused, IPSec-filtered WinXP SP2 box get hacked (lots of free french films). User uses Thunderbird for email. I'm still scratching my head about that one.
I don't imagine it's designed to block emissions of light from within anyway, just turns outside light away. So if you're holding a flashlight, or happen to have body heat, it'll likely be seen.
The people voicing their opinion over things like this, remind us and our representatives that we are aware and unhappy about the path we are taking. You always need opposing viewpoints so you can see the matter more clearly yourself. If we didn't raise a stink about the NSA records, then it's just another step where the government said, "Well, the people were fine with it, so let's move on to the next step."
As an easier example, my internal jury is still out on abortion rights - it's a tough topic. Murder? Responsibility? Women's rights? At the moment, I'd like the right for women to choose. But because others have been railing against it for so long, I've come to accept that it's not that simple. While I'm still for choice, I'm strongly for personal responsibility in the matter (abstinence, protection, adoption, and even acceptance of the child if need be).
Not to nit-pick: But NSA doesn't conduct military ops; it can only "recommend" that the Pentagon take out Qwest.
Actually, it would have the CIA send in an undercover agent to create dissent amongst the vice presidents, eventually allowing their angst to trickle down to the ranks, where in-fighting will eventually become a coup attempt, resulting in the instability of Qwest's stock, causing the company to eventually declare Chapter 11, where its equipment will be bought out by a cooperating company, and its employees put to pasture.
I've been using the DVR from Comcast for about 9 months now to record normal and HD channels. I don't have Tivo to compare to, but I will say that the recordings (and there are alot of them) are 100% every time. No white noise or lost signals, etc. The one gotcha is that it seems that if the system starts recording with it "off" (not powered down though), it sets it to mute. And so far, I haven't figured out a way to remove the mute without stopping the recording, turning it off again, then continuing the recording.
But the signal is always whatever is on the TV: if HD is goofy (which does happen - pixellation, etc), then the DVR recording will be goofy. I guess mileage is varying (how's your cooling?)
Read Alastair Reynolds if you'd like a similar far future premise with characters that are more than a half inch deep, and a writing style that won't leave you thinking you could easily have done a better job.
To show the variety of people's opinions, I recently picked up Mr. Reynold's Revelation Space. I've only stopped reading two sci-fi/fantasy books that I purchased in my life, and this one I managed to get to page 138 before I hit that realization of: "Why am I reading this?" The writing was poor, stilted...it almost felt like the author sent it to editing, and the editor told him it was boring and stilted, so the author throws in a one sentence, poorly dropped "hook" at the end of chapters. The characters were terrible with no development, no interesting emotion (not because it wasn't possible within the book's story, but because the author didn't, apparently, know how to bring it out).
And to top it all off the revelation (no pun intended) at the end was a hack job and had a glaring plot hole which made it seem ridiculous that you could've read all these pages just for a kludge of an ending. (I skipped to various points in the book, 10 pages in the middle, the last 15 pages just to see what the back cover was talking about).
So I'll never touch another book by Alastair Reynolds, but that's just one man's opinion.
You know, for a game based on imagination, it's a little bit like staring at someone else's naked great-grandmother. Too much information. I imagine they do this not just to sell more books to their devoted fans, but to compete with the computerized MMORPGs and their skill systems that more people are becoming devoted fans of.
Many times when I played DnD, it was just walking around the schoolyard with a couple friends while I gave the storyline and the others filled in the blanks with their actions. It was fun to write up characters at night with the items, etc., but in the end, the adventures were as great or as small as the people's imaginations. (Not criticising the "I attack the darkness" type players out there at all...just saying that there's a lot of info available, and I personally don't find most of it necessary or even useful.)
The whole "You have the potential to commit a crime thing" hearkens back to Orwell's 1984 and the Thought Police.
IMHO I think the ESRB made a mistake changing the rating because of someone else. You're going after the wrong target - like the RIAA trying to sue the companies that allow filesharing, rather than the actual people committing the crime of sharing copyrighted music.
We need a couple things in this country:
1) Bartering 2) Alternative Fuel
Take away money and oil, and what does greed have left to fester upon?
Hellooo? He was on vacation having found the best canoe route from Africa using Google Maps. Like, oh my god, do I need to explain absolutely everything to you?
Okay, you got me. And I almost changed the i to a y but decided against it at the last minute....
Google can afford the fees to have their search engine prominently placed on certain browsers. What they should be considering is taking the open source engine or Firefox and branding their own Google Browser. Not everyone's heard of Firefox or even Mozilla (go ahead, ask around your company), but I remember a pigmy from the outback approached me once, spear in hand, while I was dying from thirst, lost in the desert, and asked why I didn't just use Google Maps before I came to Australia?
Perhaps greed doesn't work as well in larger, more open societies where cooperation is the basis of survival of the species, rather than singling oneself out as "king". With things being more social (many people communicating), it's easier to survive in a group than it is to fight it out on your own, possibly standing against a group or many groups. Of course, if you can get a bunch of greedy people together to form their own group, that might work out, but in practice greed isn't a lasting group trait.
I can see it now: "Oh, you're still using the 128K chip? How unfortunate. Most of the people in this neighborhood have the 256. Well, perhaps we'll see you at the community tea party, but I really don't think we will. Good day."
Perhaps mistakenly, I rate Slashdot's boards somewhat higher on the objectivity scale than the MMO boards. But point taken. I'll just use the postal service from now on so my input seems less objectionable.;-)
I think patch day the servers were down all day, but thats to be expected.
It's funny what people get used to. In the original EQ, patches were just a few hours in the morning, one day a week, unless something went wrong (which generally didn't happen, despite what the boards say).
In Horizons, another MMORPG, database lag was so bad that you could pick up an item and not see it in inventory for 10 minutes. You could run through an area full of monsters and not see one by the time you were through, because the client couldn't build them fast enough.
If you're shovelling out $15/month for a service, about what you pay for cheap telephone service, you'd expect it to work when you wanted it to work. Like I said, it's funny what people lower their expectations to.
I grew up on Nantucket and somehow I think that 2 hour ferry ride (1 hour if you take the "fast ferry catamaran" these days at twice the price) would be much more interesting if there was some neato scenery involved, even if it was just gigantic windmills. Things is, hurricanes aren't uncommon up there, so I wonder how secure 200 foot tall windmills could be made - enough to resist 90 mph winds and ferocious oceans? Ah engineering...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but magic works against the undead as well and, as we know, magic is generally just misunderstood science. Swing away.
The aether articles on Wikipedia from the poster below have alot of information. I knew the Aether was generally dismissed because of the Morley light experiment, but I always thought it was dismissed for the wrong reason. Nice to know that, even though I wouldn't really call what I'm thinking of particulate, there's still some thought going into the possibility that the universe is actually something, instead of a bunch of nothing with some space dust (ie, planets, stars, etc).
:-)
I think the term "fabric of spacetime" or "continuum" from Star Trek shows is a little closer to the terminology, but again, fabric sort of denotes two dimensions, as if you can tear it. It'd be a bit like an ant in the middle of a fishbowl trying to "tear" the water.
Anyway, interesting thoughts, glad there are others that have the same ideas. Just like chimps.
As an armchair physicist, the concept of energy in the nothingness of space is interesting to me. My crackpot guess is that all matter is just a complex ripple of whatever the universe is made of. Where you see a vaccuum, it's really just "flat" matter. The planets (as an easy example) are sort of twists and molds in the material of the universe. It's a bit hard to picture in three dimensions, but take a block of jello (or for the tried and true geeks, a 10x10 gelatinous cube) as the universe, and the imperfections inside (more dense areas, less dense areas, churned areas, etc) represent the planets and stars.
:-)
It sort of makes sense in terms of gravity as well - you can "stretch" this material to some extent (sort of like winding up taffy to make a piece of candy) and that essentially makes the trip from point A to B take a shorter amount of time (because the effective time between A and B is the same, but since they are now farther apart, you get there "faster", ie, gravitational pull).
Not saying it makes sense, but it's fun to think about.
...is going to need some more bubble gum.
Sure, but where's the human compassion? We're the evolutionary equivalent to a Chevy Suburban in a petting zoo. Can't we survive without taking everything down on the way?
Not to be a wet blanket on the whole "Survival of the human race" thing, but are we worth it? It seems that just about every other creature on this planet lives in harmony with each other and nature in general. Humans overpopulate, pave over, and drain natural resources. We're not in the cycle of nature, it seems, and given that, how can we expect to survive long term, unless we either drastically change our way of living and our approach towards nature, or just keep spreading out, like Mr. Smith's analogy of a virus.
Just seems that humans aren't playing by the rules - we grow in population out of proportion to what the environment can withstand. Great for our survival over other species in the short term, but bad for our survival in the long term, as nothing can sustain us for very long.
Go into space? I guess...but to what end? Whose end?
Lymond01: 1450
CmdrTaco: 1500*
Zonk: 1240
*Pyschopharm User
Wife is always telling me to get a cable organizer for the monitor, mouse, keyboard, network, and tower. This aspire is basically an all-in-one that's slightly portable if you want to move it to the kitchen table. One cable (power). Aesthetically pleasing. I wonder if that's who they're marketing to....(husbands of interior designing wives).
Someone replied: "Ever heard of Adobe Acrobat? That's what it's for." I'd like to say they missed the point of the question, which isn't just edits to a document. What I think the poster, and myself, are searching for is a web-based document server that tracks who's working on what, when. So if I decide I'm going to work on the Abstract of a paper, I go online, download it, and work on it. Let Word or whatever track my exact edits.
When another user decides to edit it, they'll see that it's "checked out" and that they should work on something else, or contact me to continue with my edits. This avoids people working on the same document. Version control. It doesn't have to be complex to the end user, but I think the behind-the-scenes work for tracking uploads and downloads, different document piles, etc, would be extensive.
You dug your own septic system, didn't you?
Clearly games are a priority for some and not all of us have to save for 6 months to justify a $20 purchase.
We're Americans! Absurdly well-to-do, wasteful to the point of our own extinction. But no one ELSE is going to take us down!
Then how can it be possible to run a problem-free Windows installation simply by following a handful of common-sense pointers ?
Just had a fully patched, Windows Fire-walled, Sophos Antivirused, IPSec-filtered WinXP SP2 box get hacked (lots of free french films). User uses Thunderbird for email. I'm still scratching my head about that one.
I don't imagine it's designed to block emissions of light from within anyway, just turns outside light away. So if you're holding a flashlight, or happen to have body heat, it'll likely be seen.
The people voicing their opinion over things like this, remind us and our representatives that we are aware and unhappy about the path we are taking. You always need opposing viewpoints so you can see the matter more clearly yourself. If we didn't raise a stink about the NSA records, then it's just another step where the government said, "Well, the people were fine with it, so let's move on to the next step."
As an easier example, my internal jury is still out on abortion rights - it's a tough topic. Murder? Responsibility? Women's rights? At the moment, I'd like the right for women to choose. But because others have been railing against it for so long, I've come to accept that it's not that simple. While I'm still for choice, I'm strongly for personal responsibility in the matter (abstinence, protection, adoption, and even acceptance of the child if need be).
Not to nit-pick: But NSA doesn't conduct military ops; it can only "recommend" that the Pentagon take out Qwest.
Actually, it would have the CIA send in an undercover agent to create dissent amongst the vice presidents, eventually allowing their angst to trickle down to the ranks, where in-fighting will eventually become a coup attempt, resulting in the instability of Qwest's stock, causing the company to eventually declare Chapter 11, where its equipment will be bought out by a cooperating company, and its employees put to pasture.
Probably.
I've been using the DVR from Comcast for about 9 months now to record normal and HD channels. I don't have Tivo to compare to, but I will say that the recordings (and there are alot of them) are 100% every time. No white noise or lost signals, etc. The one gotcha is that it seems that if the system starts recording with it "off" (not powered down though), it sets it to mute. And so far, I haven't figured out a way to remove the mute without stopping the recording, turning it off again, then continuing the recording.
But the signal is always whatever is on the TV: if HD is goofy (which does happen - pixellation, etc), then the DVR recording will be goofy. I guess mileage is varying (how's your cooling?)
Read Alastair Reynolds if you'd like a similar far future premise with characters that are more than a half inch deep, and a writing style that won't leave you thinking you could easily have done a better job.
To show the variety of people's opinions, I recently picked up Mr. Reynold's Revelation Space. I've only stopped reading two sci-fi/fantasy books that I purchased in my life, and this one I managed to get to page 138 before I hit that realization of: "Why am I reading this?" The writing was poor, stilted...it almost felt like the author sent it to editing, and the editor told him it was boring and stilted, so the author throws in a one sentence, poorly dropped "hook" at the end of chapters. The characters were terrible with no development, no interesting emotion (not because it wasn't possible within the book's story, but because the author didn't, apparently, know how to bring it out).
And to top it all off the revelation (no pun intended) at the end was a hack job and had a glaring plot hole which made it seem ridiculous that you could've read all these pages just for a kludge of an ending. (I skipped to various points in the book, 10 pages in the middle, the last 15 pages just to see what the back cover was talking about).
So I'll never touch another book by Alastair Reynolds, but that's just one man's opinion.
You know, for a game based on imagination, it's a little bit like staring at someone else's naked great-grandmother. Too much information. I imagine they do this not just to sell more books to their devoted fans, but to compete with the computerized MMORPGs and their skill systems that more people are becoming devoted fans of.
Many times when I played DnD, it was just walking around the schoolyard with a couple friends while I gave the storyline and the others filled in the blanks with their actions. It was fun to write up characters at night with the items, etc., but in the end, the adventures were as great or as small as the people's imaginations. (Not criticising the "I attack the darkness" type players out there at all...just saying that there's a lot of info available, and I personally don't find most of it necessary or even useful.)
The whole "You have the potential to commit a crime thing" hearkens back to Orwell's 1984 and the Thought Police.
IMHO I think the ESRB made a mistake changing the rating because of someone else. You're going after the wrong target - like the RIAA trying to sue the companies that allow filesharing, rather than the actual people committing the crime of sharing copyrighted music.
We need a couple things in this country:
1) Bartering
2) Alternative Fuel
Take away money and oil, and what does greed have left to fester upon?
Hellooo? He was on vacation having found the best canoe route from Africa using Google Maps. Like, oh my god, do I need to explain absolutely everything to you?
Okay, you got me. And I almost changed the i to a y but decided against it at the last minute....
Google can afford the fees to have their search engine prominently placed on certain browsers. What they should be considering is taking the open source engine or Firefox and branding their own Google Browser. Not everyone's heard of Firefox or even Mozilla (go ahead, ask around your company), but I remember a pigmy from the outback approached me once, spear in hand, while I was dying from thirst, lost in the desert, and asked why I didn't just use Google Maps before I came to Australia?
Perhaps greed doesn't work as well in larger, more open societies where cooperation is the basis of survival of the species, rather than singling oneself out as "king". With things being more social (many people communicating), it's easier to survive in a group than it is to fight it out on your own, possibly standing against a group or many groups. Of course, if you can get a bunch of greedy people together to form their own group, that might work out, but in practice greed isn't a lasting group trait.
I can see it now: "Oh, you're still using the 128K chip? How unfortunate. Most of the people in this neighborhood have the 256. Well, perhaps we'll see you at the community tea party, but I really don't think we will. Good day."
Perhaps mistakenly, I rate Slashdot's boards somewhat higher on the objectivity scale than the MMO boards. But point taken. I'll just use the postal service from now on so my input seems less objectionable. ;-)
I think patch day the servers were down all day, but thats to be expected.
It's funny what people get used to. In the original EQ, patches were just a few hours in the morning, one day a week, unless something went wrong (which generally didn't happen, despite what the boards say).
In Horizons, another MMORPG, database lag was so bad that you could pick up an item and not see it in inventory for 10 minutes. You could run through an area full of monsters and not see one by the time you were through, because the client couldn't build them fast enough.
If you're shovelling out $15/month for a service, about what you pay for cheap telephone service, you'd expect it to work when you wanted it to work. Like I said, it's funny what people lower their expectations to.
No wonder Bush is still president (snap!)
I grew up on Nantucket and somehow I think that 2 hour ferry ride (1 hour if you take the "fast ferry catamaran" these days at twice the price) would be much more interesting if there was some neato scenery involved, even if it was just gigantic windmills. Things is, hurricanes aren't uncommon up there, so I wonder how secure 200 foot tall windmills could be made - enough to resist 90 mph winds and ferocious oceans? Ah engineering...