100 years ago, we didn't know how to produce anything like a laser, or how to split or fuse atomic nuclei on demand
We're still pretty crap at the last two. If we knew how to fuse nuclei on demand we'd be doing it right now, and if we knew how to split (and more importantly stop splitting) nuclei on demand we wouldn't still be hosing down reactor cores at Fukushima.
We know how to bang some rocks together and make them get a bit hot. Beyond that, we don't know much.
going to the stars will make many of the things we squabble over seem rather minor in comparison.
Yes, just like going to the Moon made the last quarter of the 20th century entirely war-free.
Mind you, since building a starship means, by definition, building a large, extremely energetic kinetic missile steered by bored people in a small can who might get extremely pissed off and not consider themselves "Earthlings" after a few generations... that would make our other troubles seem rather minor.
That's why you're better off building fully self contained permanently habitable stationary colonies every couple months along the path.
So you'll need to accelerate to interstellar cruising speed and decelerate to orbital capture every couple of months (assuming that there are mass points accessible within that timeframe; dwarf stars maybe?) That's a lot of reaction mass. Ouch.
Look up, for example, the work of Alcubierre, Van Den Broek, and others.
Yes, those would be the applications of General Relativity that require "exotic matter", which doesn't actually exist in our universe. If we had fairy dust we could also build a theoretically plausible Peter Pan Drive, if we had some fairies.
Also consider that warp (on a small scale) is what makes gravitational lensing possible.
Of course the dirty little secret of GR is that Einstein never considered it his final theory or even a fully satisfactory one - but after 1915, his program of building a classical relativistic theory of unified force fields increasingly diverged from where quantum mechanics was headed, and his deep disagreements with Bohr and other QM gurus are well-documented.
Everyone likes to remember Einstein as "the genius" who invented relativity - and pretend that he both invented E=MC^2 and that this led to the atomic bomb - yet pure Einsteinian relativity did not produce Quantum Electrodynamics (which really DID make atomic fission weapons possible) and in fact the failure of classical unification suggests that the foundations of GR (and by extension, SR, because GR was necessary to make SR compatible with gravity) are likely flawed, or at the very best, incomplete.
Many of the best minds have tried to make GR compatible with QED and failed. John Wheeler, for example. String Theory was our last, best hope for making sense of the incompatibility, but that seems to be rapidly falling out of fashion now as "not even wrong". So on the one hand we have the "beauty and simplicity" of Einstein's geometrical approach, and his SR is considered beyond debate - yet his later development of SR appears to lead into nothing but dead ends. So perhaps it wasn't strictly correct itself?
We "know" that SR is "absolutely correct", but we also know that it doesn't account for gravity without GR, and we also know that GR doesn't account for electromagnetism, let alone the strong and weak forces - and that things like parity violation in the strong force and the microwave background radiation ought to raise serious questions about whether the anisotropy of spacetime and the relativity of velocity addition are as fundamental principles as they appear at the local, electromagnetic level. Or whether Lorentz' ideas about the contraction being merely a local illusion of a global, absolute "ether frame" process might not have some validity.
But that's not something people like to talk about. In science, we like our unassailable saintly intellectual heroes, regardless of whether they were entirely self-consistent.
+++ this. I've been trying to argue exactly this point for a while now.
Even 40-some years after Apollo, our ideas of "the space frontier" are still based on pop-culture mashups of the heyday of Elizabethan and Napoleonic sea-colonisation by way of the post-Civil War American West and the dogfighting scenes from World War II. Real space is not like that, and the #1 stupid idea in the pop-space zeitgeist is "we'll have to go to other plants because Earth will become uninhabitable".
No, short of a supernova, it won't. And if we lose Sol, we're screwed because of special relativity - sub-lightspeed travel takes centuries, there is no warp drive, so we'd have to build generation-ships which would need to operate in a less resource-rich environment than any conceivably polluted Earth short of total vaporisation.
Heck, even *if* the Earth got supernova'd, we'd probably be better off just putting some sunshields on a space station and hiding behind one of the outer planets than trying to make a trek between stars. At least then we'd have solar radiation and a temperature differential as a free power source. (Though I haven't run the numbers on that, could be wrong.)
Gaius Julius, is that you? Quit messing around with your Mediterranean anti-piracy campaign and that Egyptian girlfriend of yours and get back to being Vice President of Marketing with the Seventh Sales Legion in Paris.
And don't you dare try to bill that surprise visit to the head office in Rome as "travel expenses".
- completely rearchitecting their security and network
- completely reimplementing their security and network
- physically moving the servers
- redeploying this worldwide
You forgot:
* deploying mirrorshades razorgirls to the BAMA Sprawl to hunt the console cowboys who cracked their ICE * impersonating the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority * burning Chrome
Because browsers allow 3rd party Javascript to run as if it were 1st party.
But why does even "1st party" Javascript have the ability to cause a program to be run or installed on your computer? My computer isn't a DOM document.
The smaller the societies, the more violent and more convulsive their schisms.
"They told me a city at the bottom of the ocean populated entirely by paranoid sociopaths would fracture into civil war, so you know what I did? I set them on fire. With bees." -- Andrew Ryan.
Will anyone who thinks our government is working for us speak up?
They already have, and loudly. Everyone who votes for one of the two mainstream parties thinks this, or they'd be voicing their displeasure by voting for a third party. That's why third parties exist. The fact that third parties don't get elected means that the majority of US voters don't, in fact, feel enough of a disconnect with the Democrats or Republicans to actually vote them out.
It's pleasant to think that your views about the unrepresentativeness of mainstream US elected government are widespread and the majority - but the facts don't seem to actually bear this out.
The majority actually do think their government is working for them - when their party is in power - and are quite happy to turn a blind eye to any abuses of the rights of the other 49% of Americans. The other party is of course committing the most horrible atrocities since Hitler, and creating the biggest constitutional crises since Julius Ceasar crossed the Rubicon, and the other 49% of voters are all evil, stupid, deluded sheep who adhere to a morally corrupt and self-contradictory political philosophy - but their party and supporters are entirely composed of hard-working, honest, shining crusaders for political reform who arrived at all their political positions from first principles derived from the Law of Identity.
The minority party supporters laugh at this, because they know that it's really only their party who are honest shining crusaders and 99% of the voters who are deluded and philosophically bankrupt.
Linus' specialty is in managing the kernel development process, not the finer points of English. Besides, I think everyday everyone gets confused with the finer lines between ethics, morals and character. if we didn't, we wouldn't be human.
I don't know, "ethics" is a pretty unambiguous idea to me. It's not being evil, and being evil is most definitely not any kind of private thing.
It's about as far from "private" as it's possible to get. I really don't get where he's coming from at all.
1. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. 2. Energy and momentum are conserved. 3. Every new technology must have an article by somebody talking about how it's going to ruin everything.
So if I take a lesson from you, I shouldn't take a lesson from you, but then that would mean that I should take a lesson from you which means... DOES NOT COMPUTE... * smoke *
Slashdot Mirror
is a nut...isn't necessarily too strange to be believed.
Erm, which of those two is it?
100 years ago, we didn't know how to produce anything like a laser, or how to split or fuse atomic nuclei on demand
We're still pretty crap at the last two. If we knew how to fuse nuclei on demand we'd be doing it right now, and if we knew how to split (and more importantly stop splitting) nuclei on demand we wouldn't still be hosing down reactor cores at Fukushima.
We know how to bang some rocks together and make them get a bit hot. Beyond that, we don't know much.
Unbuntu will never hit that target if they continue to push that Unity stuff down the throat of their user base.
Yep, and they might start an interstellar war if they send Unity to Alpha Centauri.
going to the stars will make many of the things we squabble over seem rather minor in comparison.
Yes, just like going to the Moon made the last quarter of the 20th century entirely war-free.
Mind you, since building a starship means, by definition, building a large, extremely energetic kinetic missile steered by bored people in a small can who might get extremely pissed off and not consider themselves "Earthlings" after a few generations... that would make our other troubles seem rather minor.
That's why you're better off building fully self contained permanently habitable stationary colonies every couple months along the path.
So you'll need to accelerate to interstellar cruising speed and decelerate to orbital capture every couple of months (assuming that there are mass points accessible within that timeframe; dwarf stars maybe?) That's a lot of reaction mass. Ouch.
Look up, for example, the work of Alcubierre, Van Den Broek, and others.
Yes, those would be the applications of General Relativity that require "exotic matter", which doesn't actually exist in our universe. If we had fairy dust we could also build a theoretically plausible Peter Pan Drive, if we had some fairies.
Also consider that warp (on a small scale) is what makes gravitational lensing possible.
Fun science fact: even in Newtonian gravity light beams are deflected by gravity wells (just with a slightly different deflection to what General Relativity predicts), so gravitational lensing in itself is not a particularly good example of GR-type spacetime warping.
Of course the dirty little secret of GR is that Einstein never considered it his final theory or even a fully satisfactory one - but after 1915, his program of building a classical relativistic theory of unified force fields increasingly diverged from where quantum mechanics was headed, and his deep disagreements with Bohr and other QM gurus are well-documented.
Everyone likes to remember Einstein as "the genius" who invented relativity - and pretend that he both invented E=MC^2 and that this led to the atomic bomb - yet pure Einsteinian relativity did not produce Quantum Electrodynamics (which really DID make atomic fission weapons possible) and in fact the failure of classical unification suggests that the foundations of GR (and by extension, SR, because GR was necessary to make SR compatible with gravity) are likely flawed, or at the very best, incomplete.
Many of the best minds have tried to make GR compatible with QED and failed. John Wheeler, for example. String Theory was our last, best hope for making sense of the incompatibility, but that seems to be rapidly falling out of fashion now as "not even wrong". So on the one hand we have the "beauty and simplicity" of Einstein's geometrical approach, and his SR is considered beyond debate - yet his later development of SR appears to lead into nothing but dead ends. So perhaps it wasn't strictly correct itself?
We "know" that SR is "absolutely correct", but we also know that it doesn't account for gravity without GR, and we also know that GR doesn't account for electromagnetism, let alone the strong and weak forces - and that things like parity violation in the strong force and the microwave background radiation ought to raise serious questions about whether the anisotropy of spacetime and the relativity of velocity addition are as fundamental principles as they appear at the local, electromagnetic level. Or whether Lorentz' ideas about the contraction being merely a local illusion of a global, absolute "ether frame" process might not have some validity.
But that's not something people like to talk about. In science, we like our unassailable saintly intellectual heroes, regardless of whether they were entirely self-consistent.
+++ this. I've been trying to argue exactly this point for a while now.
Even 40-some years after Apollo, our ideas of "the space frontier" are still based on pop-culture mashups of the heyday of Elizabethan and Napoleonic sea-colonisation by way of the post-Civil War American West and the dogfighting scenes from World War II. Real space is not like that, and the #1 stupid idea in the pop-space zeitgeist is "we'll have to go to other plants because Earth will become uninhabitable".
No, short of a supernova, it won't. And if we lose Sol, we're screwed because of special relativity - sub-lightspeed travel takes centuries, there is no warp drive, so we'd have to build generation-ships which would need to operate in a less resource-rich environment than any conceivably polluted Earth short of total vaporisation.
Heck, even *if* the Earth got supernova'd, we'd probably be better off just putting some sunshields on a space station and hiding behind one of the outer planets than trying to make a trek between stars. At least then we'd have solar radiation and a temperature differential as a free power source. (Though I haven't run the numbers on that, could be wrong.)
In the Age of Enlightenment, this involved funding the highly intelligent to go make use of that intelligence.
Yes, and after the Manhattan Project, it involved funding the highly intelligent to not make use of that intelligence.
Gaius Julius, is that you? Quit messing around with your Mediterranean anti-piracy campaign and that Egyptian girlfriend of yours and get back to being Vice President of Marketing with the Seventh Sales Legion in Paris.
And don't you dare try to bill that surprise visit to the head office in Rome as "travel expenses".
And here I thought this might be about Feynman's work on quantum electrodynamics.
Look at what they're doing here:
- completely rearchitecting their security and network
- completely reimplementing their security and network
- physically moving the servers
- redeploying this worldwide
You forgot:
* deploying mirrorshades razorgirls to the BAMA Sprawl to hunt the console cowboys who cracked their ICE
* impersonating the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority
* burning Chrome
I love living in the squalid cyberfuture.
Because browsers allow 3rd party Javascript to run as if it were 1st party.
But why does even "1st party" Javascript have the ability to cause a program to be run or installed on your computer? My computer isn't a DOM document.
I don't recall agreeing to the change from "Netizen" to "Consumer"...
We're all Netizumers here in the postironical metacyberversespace Two Point Oh, chummer.
Jack another microsoft into my cortical socket, would you?
The smaller the societies, the more violent and more convulsive their schisms.
"They told me a city at the bottom of the ocean populated entirely by paranoid sociopaths would fracture into civil war, so you know what I did? I set them on fire. With bees." -- Andrew Ryan.
Will anyone who thinks our government is working for us speak up?
They already have, and loudly. Everyone who votes for one of the two mainstream parties thinks this, or they'd be voicing their displeasure by voting for a third party. That's why third parties exist. The fact that third parties don't get elected means that the majority of US voters don't, in fact, feel enough of a disconnect with the Democrats or Republicans to actually vote them out.
It's pleasant to think that your views about the unrepresentativeness of mainstream US elected government are widespread and the majority - but the facts don't seem to actually bear this out.
The majority actually do think their government is working for them - when their party is in power - and are quite happy to turn a blind eye to any abuses of the rights of the other 49% of Americans. The other party is of course committing the most horrible atrocities since Hitler, and creating the biggest constitutional crises since Julius Ceasar crossed the Rubicon, and the other 49% of voters are all evil, stupid, deluded sheep who adhere to a morally corrupt and self-contradictory political philosophy - but their party and supporters are entirely composed of hard-working, honest, shining crusaders for political reform who arrived at all their political positions from first principles derived from the Law of Identity.
The minority party supporters laugh at this, because they know that it's really only their party who are honest shining crusaders and 99% of the voters who are deluded and philosophically bankrupt.
rargh. You should look at Inform 7.
You write your code as a story and then the compiler separates your explanation into documentation and the code into a compiled program.
If that lights your fire, you should look at .
The compiler is written in a variant of Web, too.
Linus' specialty is in managing the kernel development process, not the finer points of English. Besides, I think everyday everyone gets confused with the finer lines between ethics, morals and character. if we didn't, we wouldn't be human.
I don't know, "ethics" is a pretty unambiguous idea to me. It's not being evil, and being evil is most definitely not any kind of private thing.
It's about as far from "private" as it's possible to get. I really don't get where he's coming from at all.
Fundamental laws of physics:
1. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
2. Energy and momentum are conserved.
3. Every new technology must have an article by somebody talking about how it's going to ruin everything.
4. If it doesn't make sense, a quantum did it.
+1 ideologically correct.
Bobby Tables, VP of Network Security, Sony.
So if I take a lesson from you, I shouldn't take a lesson from you, but then that would mean that I should take a lesson from you which means... DOES NOT COMPUTE... * smoke *
I'll go with "True".
ThirdToLastPass: It's the antepenultimate.
I use this thing called my brain to store passwords.
I tried that too, but then this happened.
if you were the only person on earth nothing could possibly be unethical.
The whales might beg to differ.