and this attitude has even won a few converts from the technically more competent.
This is what worries me most about Apple's shiny lockdown fascism - that it's winning converts from hackers who should - and DO - know better.
Like their influence on Gnome and Ubuntu.
"You shouldn't have to change anything! No really, you only need one window manager. No, you can't change the defaults. No, that's not an option. No, we're talking that app away from you. No, we're not going to let you see that..."
I've had conversations with programmers who have experienced something like a religious conversion from Apple's approach and now really really believe that non-configurable single-use applications are the way to go. Because computers will 'always be too hard for the general public' and so they're just giving up and walking away from the idea of configurable, user-modifiable, generative software. Lock all that scary stuff away. No choices.
It frustrates me because on one level these people are quite correct: computers *are* too hard to use. But I think lockdown is the wrong answer. The true solution, I believe, is that we still haven't put *enough* control in the hands of users. We need better programming languages, simpler and more expressive ones, and a focus on integrating data, so that users have the tools to construct their own applications, rather than this 'application' focus which solves the integration problem by restricting users to a single task.
See, right now writing a GUI app is an insane nightmare of complexity. I believe that's because we're doing it wrong. So wrong it hurts. GUIs should be a matter of just writing some descriptions (in a declarative language, NOT a 'click and drag' tool - that's lockdown) - and letting the system build the wiring. We need a focus on dataflow, not code flow. But we didn't build declarative languages, is our problem. We built C++, which is the wrong answer to every conceivable question. So we've lost a generation of programming language research.
And of course, these opinions of mine, though passionately held, are both controversial and not really provable, so... all I can do is shrug and wince and hope at some point the Net wakes up before we lock ourselves into oblivion.
You clearly want a computer. Buy a computer. A tablet is not a computer.
Yes, it is. But it's a deliberately crippled computer.
The problem is that if they become wildly popular, crippled devices are likely to proliferate and push general-purpose devices to the margins. And then it will become the norm and the expectation that 'normal', law-abiding people Just Don't Modify their devices. Because that would be weird, geeky and wrong, and probably illegal. Why do you need the ability to change your system? You scary person, that's not a 'right', it's a 'privilege' you haven't paid for!
And when that happens, when the social centre of gravity changes, anyone who wants to do the right thing (control the machine rather than be controlled by the machine) has a problem.
Social networking is about the walled garden, and the security it gives you in terms of who you're talking to.
The underlying problem is one of anonymity and the Internet, and finding a way to verify identity without a walled garden. If Google is looking at innovating, they need to find a compelling way to bridge the anonymity gap.
I agree that social networking is about verifiable identity, but disagree that it is or should be about the walled garden. Current social networks ARE walled gardens, and that's a huge net negative for me.
What frustrates me hugely is that we've had email identity-verification proposals like SPF for years now and always people say 'meh that's useless it doesn't stop spam'. But it's not about spam (bulk of mail received from strangers). It's about identity (knowing that someone who sends to you is who they say they are). The second is FAR more important than the first. And we've had OpenID, and who uses that beyond LiveJournal and Blogger?
Facebook and Twitter give us an identity, an aggregator, and a content generator, and a simple web-based interface to all three. But we should be able to do this without requiring a centralised proprietary routing hub. For crying out loud, isn't this EXACTLY what RSS was invented for? Why didn't it work?
Everyone knows that there is a slight asymmetry tending towards particles rather than anti-particles. It's common sense. It's the reason why the universe exists as matter rather thant antimatter.
Do we? I thought maybe they were exactly equal, and there'd been a huge bang when matter and antimatter annihilated themselves and we were a tiny local cluster of matter bits which got missed.
*** and let's not talk too much about WW2 and how come that one was a 'good' war for conservatives and liberals alike despite it involving cosying up to Stalin. Or the Cold War, which immediately involved demonising Uncle Joe in almost the same breath as he was being lauded in WW2, and by the same people, because that war was also good and noble despite flirting with the destruction of all civilisation and propping up dictatorships in 'free' countries.
The same people who railed against the Patriot Act and the War on Drugs are falling over themselves to tell everyone who is even slightly cynical about this blatant Government job-creation scheme that they're a Nazi Fox News viewer
Well yes. If you were paying attention during the '00s you'd have noticed that those same people were also criticising the Dubya regime for not creating jobs, and his supporters for being Nazi Fox News viewers. So they didn't change their position at all.
Jobs are good, wars are bad. That's the liberal stance (*) (**) and it hasn't changed.
* with the exception of the centre-right so-called 'liberals' (the Clintonites) who fell all over themselves to support W's illegal war in 2003 because they were terrified of being seen as unpatriotic ** those same centre-right 'liberals' were also behind Clinton invading Yugoslavia in 1999, which was also unsanctioned by the UN but somehow he got away with it because NATO was behind him. But that one was also a shonky war for exactly the same reasons as Iraq and the left wing of the left wing (like Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader) *were* criticising it. IIRC.
If Star Trek taught ME anything it's that in space there are only two dimensions, nebulas are only a couple of hundred yards across, all video codecs are instantly compatible, and if you die in an MMORPG you die in real life.
Actually, there's lots of proof that consciousness is something entirely larger thane material existence, and not just a different way of looking at it. It's just that a lot of folks working in psychology, medicine and computational biology aren't taught about the evidence for psi, esp and related weirdness - there's a taboo about it.
The book Irreducible Mind collects a lot of the best mind-blowing research from the last 150 years into stuff that just does not fit the materialist paradigm. Includes a chapter on AI (somewhat outdated IMO but still interesting as it is written by an AI researcher).
My impression of this is that I think dualism doesn't work and we have to have a monist framework - but that framework has to be MENTALIST (idealist) monist, not physicalist. The body and the physical universe must be a projection of mind-stuff, not the other way around, because minds quite patently CAN exist outside bodies and there's a whole mind-universe out there which simply does not correlate to the physical universe, but rather transcends it.
This opens a can of works, but it's the only explanation which fits the data. And it also makes sense of why there are a lot of philosophical schools throughout history which have started from the otherwise absurd position of 'mind is prior to matter'.
This still leaves us puzzled, but at least now we understand a bit more about why we're puzzled. What are the physics of mind-stuff? I dunno for sure, but I think they're much closer to the physics of information than that of matter. Mind-stuff can exist in multiple places at once; the very notion of 'place' is a physical abstraction, which can be modelled as information (as virtual worlds teach us). Likewise with time. At best the physical universe is some kind of simulation, or sandbox environment, nested within a much larger, more 'real' shared-mental level. Our individual mindspaces are I think sort of like pocket universes within this larger shared universe - like locally-hosted shards of a MMO world. Certain people can train their minds to access the shared mindspace directly, and that's how we get psi/esp/mediumship. But the shared mindspace is BIG and it's full of very confusing information which does not map into our physical experience, so many mediums report very odd stuff. It's as if you showed Google or World of Warcraft to a medieval peasant - they'd come away with very strange ideas about what's really going on.
The potential of exploring 'irreducible mind' is huge, but the biggest problem is that there is this massive stigma against it from the materialist-monist camp who believe mental monism is patently absurd. Yes it is, IF you a priori believe a materialist-monist viewpoint. Not if you don't.
Materialist monism is like logging into World of Warcraft and believing that the virtual world in front of your simulated eyes is by definition 'real' and that all the servers which run it MUST be built out of VR constructs. At one level that's correct, but believing that that's all there is will lead to confusion. Yes, things exist in our 'physical' (simulation) world, but their existence comes from a higher level. You'll never map the WoW codebase just by poking at the behaviour of mobs, though you MIGHT well be able to do behaviourist psychology on those entities and come close to working out how they behave. But there will exist a whole level of structuring reality which is simply inaccessible to those running with 'user-level privileges' in the VR world. The true nature of WoW is that it is a construct of information, not 3D physical reality, and the information flows can bypass what appears to be local physics.
How would a medieval peasant, jacked into WoW via sufficiently advanced VR, try to grasp this concept? They might come up with terms like 'astral plane' or 'subtle matter' to describe the idea that there exists some kind of 'more real' reality which controls the simulation. Our kn
Tell me the last time a politician voted on something they saw as political suicide?
You mean, voted for something which the majority of their constituents have expressly told them is not their will and are angry enough to vote against? That would be failing to be a democratic representative, so I don't see the problem. "X needs to be done but I can't do it because most people don't want me to" is a feature, not a bug of democracies.
If you really want your elected leaders to vote their "conscience" regardless of whether most of the people are against it... then you want to live in a dictatorship, not a democracy.
A far bigger problem is politicians in states with free elections voting against the supposed will of the majority (or sizeable minority) of their electorate and yet it NOT being political suicide - the majority keeps returning them to power. How does that happen?
This is because the average person probably isn't thinking much farther ahead than what he'll have for lunch tomorrow. By the time he realizes he won't have anything for lunch tomorrow he's no longer in a position to do anything about it.
And the ones who do think a little further ahead than tomorrow's lunch are called 'fundamentalist', 'extremist', 'bigot', 'political' and other nasty names, while the short-term thinkers are praised as 'pragmatic', 'flexible', 'productive', 'just get-it-done sort of guys'.
the 3D director's cut where Jake and Neytiri plug their hair together in the love scene {ooooh!}
We jacked, straight across..... Ordinarily I get the raw material in a studio situation, filtered through several million dollars' worth of baffles, and I don't even have to see the artist. The stuff we get out to the consumer, you see, has been structured, balanced, turned into art. There are still people naive enough to assume that they'll actually enjoy jacking straight across with someone they love. I think most teenagers try it, once. Certainly it's easy enough to do; Radio Shack will sell you the box and the trodes and the cables. But me, I'd never done it. And now that I think about it, I'm not so sure I can explain why. Or that I even want to try.
I do know why I did it with Lise, sat down beside her on my Mexican futon and snapped the optic lead into the socket on the spine, the smooth dorsal ridge, of the exoskeleton. It was high up, at the base of her neck, hidden by her dark hair.
Does the MPEG-LA have a legal right to use violent force to further their agenda?
Um, yes? Because they outsource that to the legal system, which outsources it to the police, which outsources it to the private security companies who run private prisons. But Western governments are just one violence provider out of many (criminal gangs and private militaries are eager to step into this role), and not necessarily the worst.
If patents - and hence violent force - weren't involved we wouldn't be having this conversation. MPEG-LA would merely be an annoyance to be coded around. But we can't code around them because they have the right to bring in men with guns. The fact that those men with guns happen to work for an organisation called 'government' rather than 'Las Vegas or Russian Mafia' merely means that they have at least SOME standards of niceness they have to uphold.
Now if governments didn't exist but patents still did, we'd be in the exact same situation if not worse. The violence would still be there but would be outsourced to a private provider of kicking-your-doors-in-at-2am (like Wackenhut or Group 4) rather than a government one. And the patent law giving them the right to do this would be more like a maze of private contracts - or let's see, the negotiations over ACTA - all secret and proprietary, rather than at least being somewhat open.
There are some things governments do which are thug-like. Oddly enough, the more it outsources contract-making and contract-enforcing to the private sector - where it can hide in 'commercial secrecy' darkness - more thuggish the behaviour appears.
So let's make both our governments AND our corporations less thuggish by making both their doings more transparent to the people, and remove the right of both of them to hide in shadows and bring in men with guns.
That means shutting down the patent system, opening up secret trade treaties, and stopping funding the huge military-industrial business. The less guns in the world, the less men with guns to knock on your door.
>>My question is, what actually is the total amount of energy required to actually hold any object at height, indefinitely, in a gravitational field?
None. My monitor sitting on my desk is doing quite well without me having to constantly expend energy to lift it. And there you were saying anti-gravity machines were impossible!
If we could develop some sort of gravitational lensing, it should be possible to float an object indefinitely. I think.
Are you sure it's zero energy cost? What about compressive strain on the structure of the material?
Your desk is constantly experiencing an acceleration of 9.87 m/s/s toward the ground. Yet it's not moving. So all those clever little inter-molecular bonds holding its stuff together must be constantly generating an equal and opposite upward force to counteract the force of gravity, mustn't they? Action and reaction and all that. They must just whip it out of their invisible pockets.
Oh sure you could say 'gravity isn't a force, it's spacetime curvature' but in the Newtonian limit that's saying nothing; the maths is the same. And outside Einstein's abandoned UFT, nobody's claiming that electrostatic bonds between atoms are also spatial curvature.
Seems like quite a lot of force is occuring to me. Just because we don't see anything moving at our scale doesn't mean stuff isn't happening.
If you're looking for a way to measure the incremental energy that would be produced as the object were to fall through the pair of wormholes you mention, it's simply mass * gravity * height (in this case, distance between wormholes). The real trick would be extracting energy from that system.
You mean it requires something more complicated than chucking a rock into the lower wormhole, watching while it pops out of the top wormhole and goes zzzzzzwwwwwHHOOOOOM!!! and then grabbing it?
Slashdot Mirror
and this attitude has even won a few converts from the technically more competent.
This is what worries me most about Apple's shiny lockdown fascism - that it's winning converts from hackers who should - and DO - know better.
Like their influence on Gnome and Ubuntu.
"You shouldn't have to change anything! No really, you only need one window manager. No, you can't change the defaults. No, that's not an option. No, we're talking that app away from you. No, we're not going to let you see that..."
I've had conversations with programmers who have experienced something like a religious conversion from Apple's approach and now really really believe that non-configurable single-use applications are the way to go. Because computers will 'always be too hard for the general public' and so they're just giving up and walking away from the idea of configurable, user-modifiable, generative software. Lock all that scary stuff away. No choices.
It frustrates me because on one level these people are quite correct: computers *are* too hard to use. But I think lockdown is the wrong answer. The true solution, I believe, is that we still haven't put *enough* control in the hands of users. We need better programming languages, simpler and more expressive ones, and a focus on integrating data, so that users have the tools to construct their own applications, rather than this 'application' focus which solves the integration problem by restricting users to a single task.
See, right now writing a GUI app is an insane nightmare of complexity. I believe that's because we're doing it wrong. So wrong it hurts. GUIs should be a matter of just writing some descriptions (in a declarative language, NOT a 'click and drag' tool - that's lockdown) - and letting the system build the wiring. We need a focus on dataflow, not code flow. But we didn't build declarative languages, is our problem. We built C++, which is the wrong answer to every conceivable question. So we've lost a generation of programming language research.
And of course, these opinions of mine, though passionately held, are both controversial and not really provable, so... all I can do is shrug and wince and hope at some point the Net wakes up before we lock ourselves into oblivion.
You clearly want a computer. Buy a computer. A tablet is not a computer.
Yes, it is. But it's a deliberately crippled computer.
The problem is that if they become wildly popular, crippled devices are likely to proliferate and push general-purpose devices to the margins. And then it will become the norm and the expectation that 'normal', law-abiding people Just Don't Modify their devices. Because that would be weird, geeky and wrong, and probably illegal. Why do you need the ability to change your system? You scary person, that's not a 'right', it's a 'privilege' you haven't paid for!
And when that happens, when the social centre of gravity changes, anyone who wants to do the right thing (control the machine rather than be controlled by the machine) has a problem.
Social networking is about the walled garden, and the security it gives you in terms of who you're talking to.
The underlying problem is one of anonymity and the Internet, and finding a way to verify identity without a walled garden. If Google is looking at innovating, they need to find a compelling way to bridge the anonymity gap.
I agree that social networking is about verifiable identity, but disagree that it is or should be about the walled garden. Current social networks ARE walled gardens, and that's a huge net negative for me.
What frustrates me hugely is that we've had email identity-verification proposals like SPF for years now and always people say 'meh that's useless it doesn't stop spam'. But it's not about spam (bulk of mail received from strangers). It's about identity (knowing that someone who sends to you is who they say they are). The second is FAR more important than the first. And we've had OpenID, and who uses that beyond LiveJournal and Blogger?
Facebook and Twitter give us an identity, an aggregator, and a content generator, and a simple web-based interface to all three. But we should be able to do this without requiring a centralised proprietary routing hub. For crying out loud, isn't this EXACTLY what RSS was invented for? Why didn't it work?
Everyone knows that there is a slight asymmetry tending towards particles rather than anti-particles. It's common sense. It's the reason why the universe exists as matter rather thant antimatter.
Do we? I thought maybe they were exactly equal, and there'd been a huge bang when matter and antimatter annihilated themselves and we were a tiny local cluster of matter bits which got missed.
*** and let's not talk too much about WW2 and how come that one was a 'good' war for conservatives and liberals alike despite it involving cosying up to Stalin. Or the Cold War, which immediately involved demonising Uncle Joe in almost the same breath as he was being lauded in WW2, and by the same people, because that war was also good and noble despite flirting with the destruction of all civilisation and propping up dictatorships in 'free' countries.
The same people who railed against the Patriot Act and the War on Drugs are falling over themselves to tell everyone who is even slightly cynical about this blatant Government job-creation scheme that they're a Nazi Fox News viewer
Well yes. If you were paying attention during the '00s you'd have noticed that those same people were also criticising the Dubya regime for not creating jobs, and his supporters for being Nazi Fox News viewers. So they didn't change their position at all.
Jobs are good, wars are bad. That's the liberal stance (*) (**) and it hasn't changed.
* with the exception of the centre-right so-called 'liberals' (the Clintonites) who fell all over themselves to support W's illegal war in 2003 because they were terrified of being seen as unpatriotic
** those same centre-right 'liberals' were also behind Clinton invading Yugoslavia in 1999, which was also unsanctioned by the UN but somehow he got away with it because NATO was behind him. But that one was also a shonky war for exactly the same reasons as Iraq and the left wing of the left wing (like Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader) *were* criticising it. IIRC.
What's going to happen when the computer professionals shrug?
The Internet will be choked with spam and Windows will be full of computer viruses?
Oh... hmmm..
Who *is* Bill Galts?
Windows 7 though, that's a bit different. It appears that MS has really given us a reason to move on from XP,
Yes, it's called 'pulling the plug on security fixes'.
Can't argue with that virus gun pointed at your head! That's what I call a significant value proposition.
If Star Trek taught ME anything it's that in space there are only two dimensions, nebulas are only a couple of hundred yards across, all video codecs are instantly compatible, and if you die in an MMORPG you die in real life.
where 'close approach' means a distance of 1.6 light years.
Is 1-2 ly really considered a 'close approach' between stars? If so we're practically touching Proxima Centauri at only 4.2 ly.
At least one damn; that's the Planck quantum of empathy, right?
"The question is why would developers want to expand their market share among the non-technical users? "
Because non-technical users are domain experts, and they can add content to your system.
The trick is providing ways for non-technical domain experts to contribute that content without breaking the technical bits.
How does infinity times zero equal one?
Actually, there's lots of proof that consciousness is something entirely larger thane material existence, and not just a different way of looking at it. It's just that a lot of folks working in psychology, medicine and computational biology aren't taught about the evidence for psi, esp and related weirdness - there's a taboo about it.
The book Irreducible Mind collects a lot of the best mind-blowing research from the last 150 years into stuff that just does not fit the materialist paradigm. Includes a chapter on AI (somewhat outdated IMO but still interesting as it is written by an AI researcher).
My impression of this is that I think dualism doesn't work and we have to have a monist framework - but that framework has to be MENTALIST (idealist) monist, not physicalist. The body and the physical universe must be a projection of mind-stuff, not the other way around, because minds quite patently CAN exist outside bodies and there's a whole mind-universe out there which simply does not correlate to the physical universe, but rather transcends it.
This opens a can of works, but it's the only explanation which fits the data. And it also makes sense of why there are a lot of philosophical schools throughout history which have started from the otherwise absurd position of 'mind is prior to matter'.
This still leaves us puzzled, but at least now we understand a bit more about why we're puzzled. What are the physics of mind-stuff? I dunno for sure, but I think they're much closer to the physics of information than that of matter. Mind-stuff can exist in multiple places at once; the very notion of 'place' is a physical abstraction, which can be modelled as information (as virtual worlds teach us). Likewise with time. At best the physical universe is some kind of simulation, or sandbox environment, nested within a much larger, more 'real' shared-mental level. Our individual mindspaces are I think sort of like pocket universes within this larger shared universe - like locally-hosted shards of a MMO world. Certain people can train their minds to access the shared mindspace directly, and that's how we get psi/esp/mediumship. But the shared mindspace is BIG and it's full of very confusing information which does not map into our physical experience, so many mediums report very odd stuff. It's as if you showed Google or World of Warcraft to a medieval peasant - they'd come away with very strange ideas about what's really going on.
The potential of exploring 'irreducible mind' is huge, but the biggest problem is that there is this massive stigma against it from the materialist-monist camp who believe mental monism is patently absurd. Yes it is, IF you a priori believe a materialist-monist viewpoint. Not if you don't.
Materialist monism is like logging into World of Warcraft and believing that the virtual world in front of your simulated eyes is by definition 'real' and that all the servers which run it MUST be built out of VR constructs. At one level that's correct, but believing that that's all there is will lead to confusion. Yes, things exist in our 'physical' (simulation) world, but their existence comes from a higher level. You'll never map the WoW codebase just by poking at the behaviour of mobs, though you MIGHT well be able to do behaviourist psychology on those entities and come close to working out how they behave. But there will exist a whole level of structuring reality which is simply inaccessible to those running with 'user-level privileges' in the VR world. The true nature of WoW is that it is a construct of information, not 3D physical reality, and the information flows can bypass what appears to be local physics.
How would a medieval peasant, jacked into WoW via sufficiently advanced VR, try to grasp this concept? They might come up with terms like 'astral plane' or 'subtle matter' to describe the idea that there exists some kind of 'more real' reality which controls the simulation. Our kn
Then again, we're already driving around in steel coffins filled with gallons of explosively flammable liquid so there's not much left to lose.
And that's just the coffee.
wars in obscure places for no strategic interest or gain
Exactly! We should switch to wars in highly visible locations prosecuted for pure strategic self-interest and naked greed.
Tell me the last time a politician voted on something they saw as political suicide?
You mean, voted for something which the majority of their constituents have expressly told them is not their will and are angry enough to vote against? That would be failing to be a democratic representative, so I don't see the problem. "X needs to be done but I can't do it because most people don't want me to" is a feature, not a bug of democracies.
If you really want your elected leaders to vote their "conscience" regardless of whether most of the people are against it... then you want to live in a dictatorship, not a democracy.
A far bigger problem is politicians in states with free elections voting against the supposed will of the majority (or sizeable minority) of their electorate and yet it NOT being political suicide - the majority keeps returning them to power. How does that happen?
This is because the average person probably isn't thinking much farther ahead than what he'll have for lunch tomorrow. By the time he realizes he won't have anything for lunch tomorrow he's no longer in a position to do anything about it.
And the ones who do think a little further ahead than tomorrow's lunch are called 'fundamentalist', 'extremist', 'bigot', 'political' and other nasty names, while the short-term thinkers are praised as 'pragmatic', 'flexible', 'productive', 'just get-it-done sort of guys'.
the 3D director's cut where Jake and Neytiri plug their hair together in the love scene {ooooh!}
We jacked, straight across. ....
Ordinarily I get the raw material in a studio situation, filtered through several million dollars' worth of baffles, and I don't even have to see the artist. The stuff we get out to the consumer, you see, has been structured, balanced, turned into art. There are still people naive enough to assume that they'll actually enjoy jacking straight across with someone they love. I think most teenagers try it, once. Certainly it's easy enough to do; Radio Shack will sell you the box and the trodes and the cables. But me, I'd never done it. And now that I think about it, I'm not so sure I can explain why. Or that I even want to try.
I do know why I did it with Lise, sat down beside her on my Mexican futon and snapped the optic lead into the socket on the spine, the smooth dorsal ridge, of the exoskeleton. It was high up, at the base of her neck, hidden by her dark hair.
William Gibson, "The Winter Market", 1985.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter_Market
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/cyberpunk/burning_chrome.shtml#market
Best cyberpunk short story ever? It might just be.
Does the MPEG-LA have a legal right to use violent force to further their agenda?
Um, yes? Because they outsource that to the legal system, which outsources it to the police, which outsources it to the private security companies who run private prisons. But Western governments are just one violence provider out of many (criminal gangs and private militaries are eager to step into this role), and not necessarily the worst.
If patents - and hence violent force - weren't involved we wouldn't be having this conversation. MPEG-LA would merely be an annoyance to be coded around. But we can't code around them because they have the right to bring in men with guns. The fact that those men with guns happen to work for an organisation called 'government' rather than 'Las Vegas or Russian Mafia' merely means that they have at least SOME standards of niceness they have to uphold.
Now if governments didn't exist but patents still did, we'd be in the exact same situation if not worse. The violence would still be there but would be outsourced to a private provider of kicking-your-doors-in-at-2am (like Wackenhut or Group 4) rather than a government one. And the patent law giving them the right to do this would be more like a maze of private contracts - or let's see, the negotiations over ACTA - all secret and proprietary, rather than at least being somewhat open.
There are some things governments do which are thug-like. Oddly enough, the more it outsources contract-making and contract-enforcing to the private sector - where it can hide in 'commercial secrecy' darkness - more thuggish the behaviour appears.
So let's make both our governments AND our corporations less thuggish by making both their doings more transparent to the people, and remove the right of both of them to hide in shadows and bring in men with guns.
That means shutting down the patent system, opening up secret trade treaties, and stopping funding the huge military-industrial business. The less guns in the world, the less men with guns to knock on your door.
>>My question is, what actually is the total amount of energy required to actually hold any object at height, indefinitely, in a gravitational field?
None. My monitor sitting on my desk is doing quite well without me having to constantly expend energy to lift it. And there you were saying anti-gravity machines were impossible!
If we could develop some sort of gravitational lensing, it should be possible to float an object indefinitely. I think.
Are you sure it's zero energy cost? What about compressive strain on the structure of the material?
Your desk is constantly experiencing an acceleration of 9.87 m/s/s toward the ground. Yet it's not moving. So all those clever little inter-molecular bonds holding its stuff together must be constantly generating an equal and opposite upward force to counteract the force of gravity, mustn't they? Action and reaction and all that. They must just whip it out of their invisible pockets.
Oh sure you could say 'gravity isn't a force, it's spacetime curvature' but in the Newtonian limit that's saying nothing; the maths is the same. And outside Einstein's abandoned UFT, nobody's claiming that electrostatic bonds between atoms are also spatial curvature.
Seems like quite a lot of force is occuring to me. Just because we don't see anything moving at our scale doesn't mean stuff isn't happening.
My question is, what actually is the total amount of energy required to actually hold any object at height, indefinitely, in a gravitational field?
Zero of course. There's no work required unless the object is moving.
Then why does it cost fuel for a helicopter to hover?
If you're looking for a way to measure the incremental energy that would be produced as the object were to fall through the pair of wormholes you mention, it's simply mass * gravity * height (in this case, distance between wormholes). The real trick would be extracting energy from that system.
You mean it requires something more complicated than chucking a rock into the lower wormhole, watching while it pops out of the top wormhole and goes zzzzzzwwwwwHHOOOOOM!!! and then grabbing it?
Time is what you measure with a watch, and distance what you measure with a ruler?
Er, I meant of course 'an effect occurs AFTER its cause'. Or I will have being meaning to have already meant that.