Hrmmmm...no, technically, if something has a non-zero probability of ocurring, and there are an infinite number of chances for it to occur, it will eventually occur (and will, in fact, occur an infinite number of times, seeing as how x% * infinity is still an infinite number).
If your chance of getting an orange is 0, you will get an infinite number of apples and 0 oranges. But if it's anything greater than 0 -- anything at all -- you will end up with an infinite number of apples and an infinite number of oranges. By definition.
But it's been my anecdotal experience that unless there's a real, justifiable reason for the code rewrite, then it's usually not worth it. Something like taking a client/server application and making it a web application requires a rewrite as a matter of course, for instance, but otherwise the costs and time tend to outweigh the benefits.
Sure, a code rewrite allows you to remove bad architectural assumptions and dump the cruft, but it also introduces the possibility of an exponentially higher number of bugs. So you've dumped a fair amount of developer work in the rewrite, and then it needs to be followed up with an even more massive amount of QA work. And, if you're actually making sweeping architectural changes, chances are very high that the new architecture will pose some unforeseen problems of it's own.
I'm not saying a code rewrite is never a good thing, but, IMHO, it's not something that should be done just because "this code is nasty" or "language X is cooler". If you can't think of a reason as to why a rewrite should be done, then it shouldn't.
Here's a few hints for the next Vampire game. I hope you take them to heart.
Don't have NPCs that are so flamingly stupid that they'll spend all their blood on buffs the moment a rat looks on them wrong, and then frenzy from the lack of blood and attack you.
If the Big Bad Guy can only be defeated by the non-descript bone lying in the corner, a _hint_ would be a nice idea.
If the main character absolutely must have a love interest, please have more than five minutes pass between him meeting her and him professing his everlasting love to her.
For God's sake, don't make it another (bad) Diablo clone.
It's not like there's going to be a VB7, y'know. Since VB is proprietary, and it's owner isn't interested in continuing it, of course it will go the way of the dodo.
The natural progression is to migrate from VB to VB.Net, but since the step from VB.Net to C# is so tiny, most people, it seems, aren't even going to bother with VB.Net.
Every year we get someone pontificating on the death of adventure games. It really gets tiresome. If only we could get some 'FACT: Adventure games are dying' trolls to liven things up...but they seem to all be scared away by the color scheme here.
Anyways, adventure games aren't dying. Text adventure games may be dead (commercially), but they live on thanks to the goodly number of tools that people can use to make their own (the most widely known being the Z-machine, which has interpreters on just about everything under the sun). In fact, I'd say that the best of the recent releases are far superior to anything that Infocom produced. Examples: Anchorhead (Lovecraftian), Christminster (Detective), and Spider and Web (Espionage). But, yes, commercially, text adventure is more or less dead.
Adventure is still going strong, though. You've still got classic adventures like The Longest Journey and Syberia, and you also have the "new" set of adventures (which tend to involve shooting things repeatedly in between the puzzles), such as the Resident Evil series, which, last I checked, seemed to be doing quite well. But even putting that aside, more and more games are now becoming adventure games mixed with something else. Every time you're playing a FPS and you encounter an obstacle that can't be overcome by force, they've taken a page from the adventure genre (many bosses fall into this category). Every time you're in an RPG, and you have to do deliver object A to point B, or convince NPC to agree with you...that's the adventure genre again. And you'll find that games that contain those sorts of puzzles tend to be much better received than games that don't (which would you rather play: Half-Life, or Quake II? Baldur's Gate or Pool of Radiance (the remake, not the original)).
The thing with ads is that they're not meant for conscious consumption.
True, to a point, but advertisers don't seem to be going for brand reinforcement on the web. If they were, the clickthrough rate of an ad would be irrelevant. As it is, the larger advertisers pay only for clickthroughs (or pay a much higher rate for a clickthrough).
Which is odd. The clickthrough rate of a TV ad is 0, but no one seems to have a problem with that. But there it is. If the purpose of banner ads was brand building, no one would care if you consciously read the ad, just like no one cares if you consciously watch the commercial.
As for Outpost.com, it did brand-build, in the same way that Boo.com did -- as a What-Not-To-Do. The original Outpost.com is no longer around. There was no reason given to people to go to their site, so no one did, so they folded.
Radio and newspaper ads, on the other hand, seem to be very big on information. Outside of the Wall Street Journal, which seems very big on brand building, if I see an ad in a newspaper or hear one on the radio, it is for something very specific: It's not "Shop at Target", it's "Target's having a three-day sale this weekend; all electronics 20% off!" Not really the same kind of ads as are on TV at all, which is actually pretty interesting.
What you'll need: Pen and paper, and lots of objects (at least one for every room).
What to do: Drop an object in the first room, which we'll call room #1. Make a note of what object you dropped in room #1 (let's say it's a sword). Put a '1' on the paper, with eight lines coming out at the compass points. Pick one at random (let's say north) and go that way.
You'll be in another room, which we'll call room 2. Drop another object (say, a bell), and make a note. Put a '2' on the paper, with eight lines coming out at the compass points. Finally, put a little '2' next to the line from room 1 you used to get here (in this case, north). You now know that going north from room 1 leads to room 2. Pick another direction (say, north again), and continue.
If you end up in a room without an object, it's a new room, and you repeat the instructions above. If it's a room containing an object you dropped, then you just need to make a note on the appropriate line from the old room. Pretty soon, you'll have the whole maze mapped.
Unless the thief comes by and picks up some of your objects. That'll mess you up. I recommend killing him first.
It's that they're often just not very informative. Too many banner ads seem to have been designed by marketers under the premise that if they get a mysterious hook set up, people will follow their ad to learn more. But that's not the way people work, either on-line or off.
Consider a TV commercial that showed, say, a cannon firing hamsters at the letters "outpost.com", with no explanation of who or what outpost.com actually was. The thing would fail, and fail miserably (and, in fact, has). But advertisers seem fixated that the same setup will work on the web, for some reason. At least 90% of the banner ads I see are setup like a hook (such as, "Looking for a new job?") rather than giving info (such as "Monster.com: Over three bazillion ad postings")
If more banner ads were informative -- giving me info on who the ad was for, where it would take me, and why I should be interested -- I bet they'd have a higher clickthrough rate. That's what Google's ads do. It's got nothing to do with whether the ad is graphical or not...until the ads start getting intrusive, at which point people are actively suppressing them.
Interestingly enough, Gamespot detects whether or not you have Flash installed. If you don't have Flash installed, you get a simple image ad and a "Click here to continue" link.
I'd be interested. Probably not interested enough to pay for the service, but still.
But it seems that you'd have a huge performance problem you'd have to work around. Search engines work by indexing the words as-is. Since you can't do that with a regexp search, I can't see any way that you could have a regexp search engine that didn't have to scan every page for every new search.
DO NOT GET A CONTRACT WITH BALLY'S. IT IS NOT A CONTRACT BUT A LOAN. I GOT SUCKERED.
This is true. When you join a Bally's, you have to pay a fee -- this fee can be several hundred to several thousand dollars, depending upon where you live. Bally's will quite happily finance you the money to pay this fee over three years, at some pretty-bad-but-not-terrible interest rate. Your dues may be only, say, $15 a month, but you're paying an extra $50 a month on that original loan.
Depending upon your contract, you can get out of the loan if you can show "proof" that you moved more than x miles (most likely 24) away from the nearest Bally's. So contact your Aunt Gertrude (who you trust), get her permission to send a credit card statement to her, and use that as proof that you've moved.
However, Bally's is more or less nice, and if you travel a lot, it's good to always have one nearby most of the time. If you search on eBay, you'll find many people auctioning off their Bally's memberships, which is a deal -- you pay the transfer fee ($100), and whatever you bid on the auction, and you don't have to worry about Bally's loan. On the gripping hand, a membership can only be transferred once, so you won't be able to auction it off yourself.
No, seriously. It's not made for multi-user access. Use SQL Server, which is easy enough for Microsofties to translate over to (SQL Server 2000's table design now looks almost exactly like Access'). Or use MySQL or PostGres, if you don't want to shell out bucks. Boom. No more multi-user issues.
If you've got forms or reports or what have you in Access, translate all the data to some other database anyways, and then use linked tables. You'll save yourself so much heartache. If this database has updateable data, you may have to worry about concurrency issues, but it'll be piddly compared to "every user but one is locked out".
You won't sleep. No, really. Don't kid yourself that "the wife will take care of everything". Expect to have to do at least one night feeding with a bottle (or, if you're not going to give the baby a bottle at all, helping the wife by diapering, fetching things, etc).
Even after the baby's grown a bit, don't assume that you can watch her and work at the same time. It won't work very well.
Contrary to all the jokes, in-laws are a godsend. If your mother-in-law wants to come over to help, and she's not some sort of psychopathic murderer, take her up on it. An extra pair of hands really makes a difference.
Also, before the baby comes, you and your wife should talk about her working after the baby comes: yes, or no? If yes, how long until she goes back to work, and how will the baby be cared for?
There are plenty of books on this subject; even a few that are dad-specific. Take a look at Amazon.
You have two choices when it comes to the guy in the hangar:
1) Kill him. (Or, knock him out. Even if you use a non-lethal weapon, like the electric prod or tranquilizer darts, it goes on exactly as if you had killed him.)
2) Kill whats-her-face.
If you kill the guy, you get congratulated on a job well done. If you kill whats-her-face, the computer nerd will send you a message asking if you're crazy, but saying he's going to cover it up. Story proceeds the same way in either case. It makes absolutely no change to the plot.
(If you don't kill whats-her-face on the 747, you meet her in the subway after leaving Paul's apartment (where you get another chance to kill her), she taunts you in the cell, and you have to kill her to get out of the UN building. But eventually you do have to kill her.)
Actually, although in the first play-through, it seems like Deus Ex has a lot of depth, it's really very shallow. I'm not saying it's bad -- it's a great game -- but it doesn't really allow freedom of choice, either.
There are three endings, true, but you can get any of them from the last map. Nothing previously done in the game affects this.
Everything else in the game plays out exactly the same. Sure, Paul may or may not die, or you may or may not save the helicopter pilot, etc, but none of that has any effect on the game itself -- it plays through exactly the same way.
Where have I heard of that before? Somewhere...somewhere I've heard about a Java lib that provides components that are platform-dependant. Hrmmm. Ponder ponder.
1)...something that you should ask a lawyer and not 10,000 IANALs. 2)...something that could be answered by Google in seconds. 3)...an obvious attempt at getting free market research. 4)...just plain stupid.
Unfortunately, I know absolutely nada about Netrek, but, hey, I just wanted to express a positive opinion about an Ask Slashdot. For once.
One of the finite values that the collapsing mass produces is a value for energy which is greater than the E = mc^2 of the mass of the rest of the universe combined.
Go ahead and back this one up. C'mon, gimme a cite. In the meantime, I have a time cube and some immortality rings to sell you.
Good job on splitting your reply into two posts. That's truly evidence of good thinking and planning.
As to Scientific American: Who the hell cares? If you have a perpetual motion machine, and you can demonstrate it, and it's replicable, then all the naysayers will come around, or be laughed at themselves. Same thing with every other physical 'law' that's been overturned. But...until you get that proof, expect to be laughed at and called a fraud, since you're filling the same shoes as the last ten thousand frauds who thought they had a perpetual motion machine, as well. As humans, we get this thing called "learning from past experience".
As for the formula: that's funny. I was going to use the 'will run their mouths on subjects they know nothing about' to describe you.
First: It's pretty obvious that a star compressing into a black hole does not release an infinite amount of energy:
1) Stars compressing to a black hole release some percentage of energy as heat. 2) Any non-zero percentage of an infinite amount is an infinite amount. 3) Stars have collapsed into black holes already. 4) An infinite amount of heat subsequently failed to wash through the universe.
The amount of energy released by stars collapsing into black holes has been theoretically examined, and while large, is certainly not infinite.
Second: You can't say anything about what happens within the event horizon for sure, so trying to use any formula on anything going on within it is pointless, whereas (gasp, shock) if you use the event horizon for the radius, the numbers actually seem to make sense.
Way to not read the article, as he mentions atoms specifically in the first class of perpetual motion machine -- the entirely possible kind that does not produce excess energy.
This got modded up as interesting? Yeesh. I don't even know where to start.
What proof of perpetual motion would physicists accept? The answer to that question is this: none.
Not true. You build a machine that operates forever, and it works, and it can be reproduced...well, then, you would've rewritten physics. Rewriting physics, you see, happens every once in awhile. Newton, Gauss, Einstein -- someone comes along and provides a better way things work. And, here's the thing: if they can show that they're right, they'll be accepted. The reason perpetual motion inventors are ridiculed isn't that physicists have some secret cabal out to discredit them, it's that none of them have ever worked.
Should anyone ever succeed, I don't think paying back the mocking will be high on their list of priorities -- I would rather go for cashing in the big, fat checks.
I don't know of any other law of physics that everyone accepts to an infinite number of decimal places without question...Instead of mocking inventors - physicists would do well to spend their time trying to find out if there are any bugs in the algorithms nature uses to calculate energy.
The universe is not an Intel Pentium CPU. It doesn't do floating point arithmetic, and applying ideas like decimal points and algorithms to it is kind of silly.
The laws of physics predict that when a star collapses to a singularity during the formation of a black hole that an infinite amount of energy is released. Is this a problem?
Well, geewillickers! Why hasn't anyone ever seen this before? You must be right! Whole fields of science will be revisited now that you've pointed out...oh, wait. Except a star collapsing to a singularity doesn't release an infinite amount of energy (a singularity has infinite density, not infinite mass). Nevermind.
That you won't have a problem because you already have a firewall, and port 135 is already blocked.
That is, if you're any decent at being the head of IT for a company. Otherwise, you'll use it as an excuse to inflate your budget to "deal with the problem".
Slashdot Mirror
Hrmmmm...no, technically, if something has a non-zero probability of ocurring, and there are an infinite number of chances for it to occur, it will eventually occur (and will, in fact, occur an infinite number of times, seeing as how x% * infinity is still an infinite number).
If your chance of getting an orange is 0, you will get an infinite number of apples and 0 oranges. But if it's anything greater than 0 -- anything at all -- you will end up with an infinite number of apples and an infinite number of oranges. By definition.
But it's been my anecdotal experience that unless there's a real, justifiable reason for the code rewrite, then it's usually not worth it. Something like taking a client/server application and making it a web application requires a rewrite as a matter of course, for instance, but otherwise the costs and time tend to outweigh the benefits.
Sure, a code rewrite allows you to remove bad architectural assumptions and dump the cruft, but it also introduces the possibility of an exponentially higher number of bugs. So you've dumped a fair amount of developer work in the rewrite, and then it needs to be followed up with an even more massive amount of QA work. And, if you're actually making sweeping architectural changes, chances are very high that the new architecture will pose some unforeseen problems of it's own.
I'm not saying a code rewrite is never a good thing, but, IMHO, it's not something that should be done just because "this code is nasty" or "language X is cooler". If you can't think of a reason as to why a rewrite should be done, then it shouldn't.
Here's a few hints for the next Vampire game. I hope you take them to heart.
Don't have NPCs that are so flamingly stupid that they'll spend all their blood on buffs the moment a rat looks on them wrong, and then frenzy from the lack of blood and attack you.
If the Big Bad Guy can only be defeated by the non-descript bone lying in the corner, a _hint_ would be a nice idea.
If the main character absolutely must have a love interest, please have more than five minutes pass between him meeting her and him professing his everlasting love to her.
For God's sake, don't make it another (bad) Diablo clone.
Come on. If you're going to do it, you have to do it proper:
FACT: Visual Basic is dying. Netcraft has recently confirmed what we've all known for some time: that Visual Basic is dying.
Recent studies...yadda yadda
It's not like there's going to be a VB7, y'know. Since VB is proprietary, and it's owner isn't interested in continuing it, of course it will go the way of the dodo.
The natural progression is to migrate from VB to VB.Net, but since the step from VB.Net to C# is so tiny, most people, it seems, aren't even going to bother with VB.Net.
I'm a diabetic, and the sugariness has caused my blood sugar to skyrocket! I...need...insulin...quic...
<gasps, chokes, dies>
Every year we get someone pontificating on the death of adventure games. It really gets tiresome. If only we could get some 'FACT: Adventure games are dying' trolls to liven things up...but they seem to all be scared away by the color scheme here.
Anyways, adventure games aren't dying. Text adventure games may be dead (commercially), but they live on thanks to the goodly number of tools that people can use to make their own (the most widely known being the Z-machine, which has interpreters on just about everything under the sun). In fact, I'd say that the best of the recent releases are far superior to anything that Infocom produced. Examples: Anchorhead (Lovecraftian), Christminster (Detective), and Spider and Web (Espionage). But, yes, commercially, text adventure is more or less dead.
Adventure is still going strong, though. You've still got classic adventures like The Longest Journey and Syberia, and you also have the "new" set of adventures (which tend to involve shooting things repeatedly in between the puzzles), such as the Resident Evil series, which, last I checked, seemed to be doing quite well. But even putting that aside, more and more games are now becoming adventure games mixed with something else. Every time you're playing a FPS and you encounter an obstacle that can't be overcome by force, they've taken a page from the adventure genre (many bosses fall into this category). Every time you're in an RPG, and you have to do deliver object A to point B, or convince NPC to agree with you...that's the adventure genre again. And you'll find that games that contain those sorts of puzzles tend to be much better received than games that don't (which would you rather play: Half-Life, or Quake II? Baldur's Gate or Pool of Radiance (the remake, not the original)).
The thing with ads is that they're not meant for conscious consumption.
True, to a point, but advertisers don't seem to be going for brand reinforcement on the web. If they were, the clickthrough rate of an ad would be irrelevant. As it is, the larger advertisers pay only for clickthroughs (or pay a much higher rate for a clickthrough).
Which is odd. The clickthrough rate of a TV ad is 0, but no one seems to have a problem with that. But there it is. If the purpose of banner ads was brand building, no one would care if you consciously read the ad, just like no one cares if you consciously watch the commercial.
As for Outpost.com, it did brand-build, in the same way that Boo.com did -- as a What-Not-To-Do. The original Outpost.com is no longer around. There was no reason given to people to go to their site, so no one did, so they folded.
Radio and newspaper ads, on the other hand, seem to be very big on information. Outside of the Wall Street Journal, which seems very big on brand building, if I see an ad in a newspaper or hear one on the radio, it is for something very specific: It's not "Shop at Target", it's "Target's having a three-day sale this weekend; all electronics 20% off!" Not really the same kind of ads as are on TV at all, which is actually pretty interesting.
To map a maze of twisty passages, all alike:
What you'll need: Pen and paper, and lots of objects (at least one for every room).
What to do: Drop an object in the first room, which we'll call room #1. Make a note of what object you dropped in room #1 (let's say it's a sword). Put a '1' on the paper, with eight lines coming out at the compass points. Pick one at random (let's say north) and go that way.
You'll be in another room, which we'll call room 2. Drop another object (say, a bell), and make a note. Put a '2' on the paper, with eight lines coming out at the compass points. Finally, put a little '2' next to the line from room 1 you used to get here (in this case, north). You now know that going north from room 1 leads to room 2. Pick another direction (say, north again), and continue.
If you end up in a room without an object, it's a new room, and you repeat the instructions above. If it's a room containing an object you dropped, then you just need to make a note on the appropriate line from the old room. Pretty soon, you'll have the whole maze mapped.
Unless the thief comes by and picks up some of your objects. That'll mess you up. I recommend killing him first.
It's that they're often just not very informative. Too many banner ads seem to have been designed by marketers under the premise that if they get a mysterious hook set up, people will follow their ad to learn more. But that's not the way people work, either on-line or off.
Consider a TV commercial that showed, say, a cannon firing hamsters at the letters "outpost.com", with no explanation of who or what outpost.com actually was. The thing would fail, and fail miserably (and, in fact, has). But advertisers seem fixated that the same setup will work on the web, for some reason. At least 90% of the banner ads I see are setup like a hook (such as, "Looking for a new job?") rather than giving info (such as "Monster.com: Over three bazillion ad postings")
If more banner ads were informative -- giving me info on who the ad was for, where it would take me, and why I should be interested -- I bet they'd have a higher clickthrough rate. That's what Google's ads do. It's got nothing to do with whether the ad is graphical or not...until the ads start getting intrusive, at which point people are actively suppressing them.
Interestingly enough, Gamespot detects whether or not you have Flash installed. If you don't have Flash installed, you get a simple image ad and a "Click here to continue" link.
Much preferable.
I'd be interested. Probably not interested enough to pay for the service, but still.
But it seems that you'd have a huge performance problem you'd have to work around. Search engines work by indexing the words as-is. Since you can't do that with a regexp search, I can't see any way that you could have a regexp search engine that didn't have to scan every page for every new search.
Three nuns are sitting on a bench when a flasher comes by and flashes them.
Well, the first nun has a stroke.
The second nun also has a stroke.
The third nun, though, couldn't reach.
DO NOT GET A CONTRACT WITH BALLY'S. IT IS NOT A CONTRACT BUT A LOAN. I GOT SUCKERED.
This is true. When you join a Bally's, you have to pay a fee -- this fee can be several hundred to several thousand dollars, depending upon where you live. Bally's will quite happily finance you the money to pay this fee over three years, at some pretty-bad-but-not-terrible interest rate. Your dues may be only, say, $15 a month, but you're paying an extra $50 a month on that original loan.
Depending upon your contract, you can get out of the loan if you can show "proof" that you moved more than x miles (most likely 24) away from the nearest Bally's. So contact your Aunt Gertrude (who you trust), get her permission to send a credit card statement to her, and use that as proof that you've moved.
However, Bally's is more or less nice, and if you travel a lot, it's good to always have one nearby most of the time. If you search on eBay, you'll find many people auctioning off their Bally's memberships, which is a deal -- you pay the transfer fee ($100), and whatever you bid on the auction, and you don't have to worry about Bally's loan. On the gripping hand, a membership can only be transferred once, so you won't be able to auction it off yourself.
Don't use Access.
No, seriously. It's not made for multi-user access. Use SQL Server, which is easy enough for Microsofties to translate over to (SQL Server 2000's table design now looks almost exactly like Access'). Or use MySQL or PostGres, if you don't want to shell out bucks. Boom. No more multi-user issues.
If you've got forms or reports or what have you in Access, translate all the data to some other database anyways, and then use linked tables. You'll save yourself so much heartache. If this database has updateable data, you may have to worry about concurrency issues, but it'll be piddly compared to "every user but one is locked out".
You won't sleep. No, really. Don't kid yourself that "the wife will take care of everything". Expect to have to do at least one night feeding with a bottle (or, if you're not going to give the baby a bottle at all, helping the wife by diapering, fetching things, etc).
Even after the baby's grown a bit, don't assume that you can watch her and work at the same time. It won't work very well.
Contrary to all the jokes, in-laws are a godsend. If your mother-in-law wants to come over to help, and she's not some sort of psychopathic murderer, take her up on it. An extra pair of hands really makes a difference.
Also, before the baby comes, you and your wife should talk about her working after the baby comes: yes, or no? If yes, how long until she goes back to work, and how will the baby be cared for?
There are plenty of books on this subject; even a few that are dad-specific. Take a look at Amazon.
You have two choices when it comes to the guy in the hangar:
1) Kill him. (Or, knock him out. Even if you use a non-lethal weapon, like the electric prod or tranquilizer darts, it goes on exactly as if you had killed him.)
2) Kill whats-her-face.
If you kill the guy, you get congratulated on a job well done. If you kill whats-her-face, the computer nerd will send you a message asking if you're crazy, but saying he's going to cover it up. Story proceeds the same way in either case. It makes absolutely no change to the plot.
(If you don't kill whats-her-face on the 747, you meet her in the subway after leaving Paul's apartment (where you get another chance to kill her), she taunts you in the cell, and you have to kill her to get out of the UN building. But eventually you do have to kill her.)
Actually, although in the first play-through, it seems like Deus Ex has a lot of depth, it's really very shallow. I'm not saying it's bad -- it's a great game -- but it doesn't really allow freedom of choice, either.
There are three endings, true, but you can get any of them from the last map. Nothing previously done in the game affects this.
Everything else in the game plays out exactly the same. Sure, Paul may or may not die, or you may or may not save the helicopter pilot, etc, but none of that has any effect on the game itself -- it plays through exactly the same way.
Where have I heard of that before? Somewhere...somewhere I've heard about a Java lib that provides components that are platform-dependant. Hrmmm. Ponder ponder.
Oh yeah. AWT.
An Ask Slashdot that isn't...
...something that you should ask a lawyer and not 10,000 IANALs. ...something that could be answered by Google in seconds. ...an obvious attempt at getting free market research. ...just plain stupid.
1)
2)
3)
4)
Unfortunately, I know absolutely nada about Netrek, but, hey, I just wanted to express a positive opinion about an Ask Slashdot. For once.
One of the finite values that the collapsing mass produces is a value for energy which is greater than the E = mc^2 of the mass of the rest of the universe combined.
Go ahead and back this one up. C'mon, gimme a cite. In the meantime, I have a time cube and some immortality rings to sell you.
Good job on splitting your reply into two posts. That's truly evidence of good thinking and planning.
As to Scientific American: Who the hell cares? If you have a perpetual motion machine, and you can demonstrate it, and it's replicable, then all the naysayers will come around, or be laughed at themselves. Same thing with every other physical 'law' that's been overturned. But...until you get that proof, expect to be laughed at and called a fraud, since you're filling the same shoes as the last ten thousand frauds who thought they had a perpetual motion machine, as well. As humans, we get this thing called "learning from past experience".
As for the formula: that's funny. I was going to use the 'will run their mouths on subjects they know nothing about' to describe you.
First: It's pretty obvious that a star compressing into a black hole does not release an infinite amount of energy:
1) Stars compressing to a black hole release some percentage of energy as heat.
2) Any non-zero percentage of an infinite amount is an infinite amount.
3) Stars have collapsed into black holes already.
4) An infinite amount of heat subsequently failed to wash through the universe.
The amount of energy released by stars collapsing into black holes has been theoretically examined, and while large, is certainly not infinite.
Second: You can't say anything about what happens within the event horizon for sure, so trying to use any formula on anything going on within it is pointless, whereas (gasp, shock) if you use the event horizon for the radius, the numbers actually seem to make sense.
Way to not read the article, as he mentions atoms specifically in the first class of perpetual motion machine -- the entirely possible kind that does not produce excess energy.
This got modded up as interesting? Yeesh. I don't even know where to start.
What proof of perpetual motion would physicists accept? The answer to that question is this: none.
Not true. You build a machine that operates forever, and it works, and it can be reproduced...well, then, you would've rewritten physics. Rewriting physics, you see, happens every once in awhile. Newton, Gauss, Einstein -- someone comes along and provides a better way things work. And, here's the thing: if they can show that they're right, they'll be accepted. The reason perpetual motion inventors are ridiculed isn't that physicists have some secret cabal out to discredit them, it's that none of them have ever worked.
Should anyone ever succeed, I don't think paying back the mocking will be high on their list of priorities -- I would rather go for cashing in the big, fat checks.
I don't know of any other law of physics that everyone accepts to an infinite number of decimal places without question...Instead of mocking inventors - physicists would do well to spend their time trying to find out if there are any bugs in the algorithms nature uses to calculate energy.
The universe is not an Intel Pentium CPU. It doesn't do floating point arithmetic, and applying ideas like decimal points and algorithms to it is kind of silly.
The laws of physics predict that when a star collapses to a singularity during the formation of a black hole that an infinite amount of energy is released. Is this a problem?
Well, geewillickers! Why hasn't anyone ever seen this before? You must be right! Whole fields of science will be revisited now that you've pointed out...oh, wait. Except a star collapsing to a singularity doesn't release an infinite amount of energy (a singularity has infinite density, not infinite mass). Nevermind.
That you won't have a problem because you already have a firewall, and port 135 is already blocked.
That is, if you're any decent at being the head of IT for a company. Otherwise, you'll use it as an excuse to inflate your budget to "deal with the problem".