Slashdot Mirror


User: hasdikarlsam

hasdikarlsam's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
220
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 220

  1. Re:i have always wondered, never got an answer... on MIT Slows Down Speed of Light In New Game · · Score: 1

    The speed of light in a medium, such as air, however.. is not.

  2. Re:Big Bang is not against the Bible on US House Science Committee Member: Evolution Is a Lie From Hell · · Score: 1

    Aha, someone is wrong! Even if they died a while ago. Let me correct that.

    The big bang theory suggests there's a finite amount of past, but that doesn't mean the universe "was created a finite time ago". Time itself is part of the universe; it's a dimension, which only differs from the other three in how you calculate distances in space-time. (It's r^2 = x^2 + y^2 + z^2 - t^2, not plus as you might expect)

    This is literally the only difference between time and space.

    At this point you may be asking where causality comes from. Ah, but that's a different question, you see. If you're very curious, I would suggest reading The Clockwork Rocket (fiction, *very* well made, set in a universe where it's plus instead of minus..), or visiting http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=1257 if you'd rather hear directly about this universe.

    tl;dr: People tend to conflate time (causality) and time (the dimension). This works well enough for normal life, but not well enough for border conditions such as, oh, the big bang. Or some laboratory experiments. The universe is bounded in time, but that doesn't mean it was created anymore than the existence of a north pole lets you ask what is north of the north pole. "Why does the universe exist" is a valid question, but not one that can be solved by adding a creator, and one that would apply just as well to an eternal universe.

  3. Re:As someone with a race-to-the bottom Dell lapto on New Apple MacBook Pro Reviewed · · Score: 1

    The screen is a sticking point for me.

    I want a 1920x1080 (or 1920x1200 or higher, but that seems like wishful thinking) screen, and I want it in a 15.6" or smaller form factor.

    Apple won't give me that, so I won't go to apple. Otherwise I would.

  4. Re:The fine print. on 1Gbps Wi-Fi Coming Soon To a Billion Devices · · Score: 1

    Actually, I'm getting ~200Mb/s from 802.11n. It does happen.. if you're lucky, and pick the right card/AP combination.

    (Intel 4965 and DAP-2553, for the curious)

  5. Re:Egypt Goes Dark on Egypt Goes Dark As Last ISP Pulls Plug · · Score: 1

    The light gets shut down, and it goes dark?

    That's.. poetic, I guess, but it's not irony.

  6. Re:Troll summary on Comics Code Dead · · Score: 1

    Princess Mononoke?

    Do tell. I expect that was an amusing scene, unless the kids started crying enough to ruin your enjoyment. It could be worse, though - I sat through the same situation, with *Ghost in the Shell*.

    For kids. Right.

  7. Re:Wait for dual core on When Should I Buy an Android Tablet? · · Score: 1

    That's silly. There's nothing in Honeycomb that would require a dual-core CPU.

    It may be that it'd run faster on a dual-core (doh?), but I'm not sure how you would even go about making an open-source OS that would genuinely fail to run on single-core machines. Not to forget that it's actually running Linux, which definitely has no such restrictions..

  8. Re:Quantum Encryption on The Clock Is Ticking On Encryption · · Score: 1

    So you check the answer and, if it's wrong, try again until it isn't.

    The probabilistic correctness isn't an issue except in toy problems, especially as you could in the limit just repeat the operation until the chance of it going wrong is less than the chance of the operator going wrong.

  9. Re:somebody should kill the bastard on A Third of World's Spam From One Russian Man · · Score: 1

    Once the expected future time cost of a spammer exceeds a human lifetime, it becomes possible to consider killing him.

    This guy costs probably several hundred lifetimes a year.

    Any questions?

  10. Re:Antivirus? on AVG 2011 Update Causes Widespread Problems For 64-Bit Windows · · Score: 1

    By that logic there's no difference to swimming in shark-infested and jellyfish-infested waters - you could die in either one, so who cares that the sharks are roughly a thousand times less likely to attack you?

    (I wanted to make an analogy with some kind of *safe* waters, but.. um... today's internet. Shark-infested it is.)

  11. Re:Misread the RFC on Google, Microsoft Cheat On Slow-Start — Should You? · · Score: 1

    As people keep saying, you *may* use this optional standard.. as a replacement for an older standard where startup is *even slower*.

    Odd how that goes.

  12. Re:Perhaps you should.. on The State of Linux IO Scheduling For the Desktop? · · Score: 1

    Are you quite sure that's actually Chrome? Slashdot's javascript does rather suck.

  13. Re:It sucks I agree on The State of Linux IO Scheduling For the Desktop? · · Score: 1

    This would be why we use extents rather than pure bitmaps, these days.

  14. Re:It sucks I agree on The State of Linux IO Scheduling For the Desktop? · · Score: 1

    Don't remind me. I still have nightmares of trying to implement rename() for a distributed filesystem.

  15. Re:Another source of savings: on Rube Goldberg and the Electrification of America · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Do you think this is a good or a bad thing? Why?

  16. Re:Again, the Android pod touch problem on Android Software Piracy Rampant · · Score: 1

    You don't need a data plan to use android market; it works fine on wifi. Just saying. ;)

    Though using an android without that is really missing the point. A pay-as-you-go data plan isn't that expensive, is it?

  17. Re:Indie scene is pretty neat... on Mega Man Designer Explains Japan's Waning Video Game Influence · · Score: 1

    And on the japanese side:

    Recettear
    Ever17
    Touhou

  18. Re:Why prices don't decrease on Why Broadband Prices Haven't Decreased · · Score: 1

    Ireland is supposed to have shitty internet connections (thanks mainly to the incumbent, Eircom) - so nowadays, I'm sitting on a fiber-optic 30/3 line.

    Which is still terrible compared to what I had in Norway a month ago, but I can live with it. ..what was my point? ...oh yeah. Schadenfreude.

  19. Re:I am not surprised. on Geocentrists Convene To Discuss How Galileo Was Wrong · · Score: 1

    Hardly. Quantum mechanics isn't non-deterministic at all; that's a common misconception. I won't go into the details here; you can read this if you want the details.

  20. Re:PayPal has done this forever on PayPal Withholding Indie Game Dev's €600,000 Account · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No, it's ridiculously lucrative behaviour.

  21. Re:I don't think aussies want to fork up that much on Aussie National Broadband Network Will Be Gigabit · · Score: 1

    You think Telstra would actually *do* that?

    What does their history show?

  22. Re:Not an accident on Just One Out of 16 Hybrids Pays Back In Gas Savings · · Score: 1

    And peak oil? That was a few years back, though thanks to the financial crisis it hasn't had much effect on oil prices yet.

    Oh boy, will this be fun.

  23. What are the costs like? on Average Cellphone Data Usage Is 145.8 MB Per Month · · Score: 1

    Over here in Norway, I've got a pay-as-you-go phone; zero subscription costs, but I pay for usage. Ignoring voice for the moment, that's at a rate of 10 øre (roughly 0.0165 US dollars) per MB of traffic. There are, of course, no caps; that would be silly.

    How does this chalk up to what you get elsewhere?

  24. Re:P!=NP on Knuth Plans 'Earthshaking Announcement' Wednesday · · Score: 1

    The laws themselves are deterministic, though..

    I wonder if Einstein would have been satisfied with MWI.

  25. Re:Something I was wondering on How To Destroy a Black Hole · · Score: 1

    For the first, it's a gradual process that's frankly more metaphorical than physical. There's no sudden jolt of any kind, and the usual laws of geometry stay in effect. Mostly.

    For the second, um.. well, you wouldn't get blasted apart by radiation *circling* the black hole, as there essentially is none. Good enough? ..blue-shifted radiation heading into it, though...