Personally, I'm still worried about abiogenesis myself. I don't think god waved a magic wand though.
And while I have no trouble with evolution per se, I don't think that when we finally answer the questions on how it works, that it will even be close to any theories yet proposed. Something funky is going on.
That's real good advice, especially when not 3 sentences later you're telling him to use them as if they were some crass job-hunting mechanism. Get to know them, pretend to be friends, so you can use them. Haha.
Wonder what the difference in pollution is, between sending a disc in meatspace, on a truck, vs. multicasting out a few electrons worth of a movie is?
That is, supposing the telecom (originally typo'd this as "telecon"... freudian slip?) industry hadn't defrauded us competely, by charging us for first-class broadband while continuing to deliver third-world, 1970s technology...
All managers, even Bloomberg have employees who have downtime, it's inevitable. Whether it's just natural, or times whether they're slightly less competent I can't say.
"The workplace is not an appropriate place for games," Bloomberg said. "It's a place where you've got to do the job that you're getting paid for."
I'd cut him a little more slack, if I didn't know a few bosses just like him that managed things so poorly there was plenty of downtime. Of course, I suppose uber-capitalists like himself would say that whenever that occurs you're supposed to clock out so you can save the company your wages...
Every single thing I've ever read has indicated that there is no such thing as "absolute time", and for that matter no base unit of time which is further indivisible. My whole thought experiment relies on time being invariant, and the universe's particulate matter being rearranged to a pattern that matched one seen previously, which itself isn't some fancy timewarp or what have you.
I was just trying to point out that there's at least one more way of looking at the situation before you trot out all the scifi cliches of time travel. It does have many flaws, one of which is the only decent example insists I contrive a supernatural being who does nothing but manage time travel-like scenarios. A natural phenomenon that causes the same effect seems absurd, even to me.
Some people actually do suggest that radical changes can and do occur across a single generation, even before the classic feedback mechanisms would come into play. Sometimes I wonder if they're not onto something.
I think the Home Depot example is a bad one because you can still get 2x4s for other places. (Anyone still know what a lumber yard is?!?) Also a 2x4 from a lumber yard is compatible with a 2x4 from home depot. Thus you are not tied to Home Depot for your 2x4 needs. This is because 2x4s comply to an open standard. That is, everyone who makes 2x4s makes them roughly the same size. (Though interestingly enough a 2x4 is actually more like 1 1/2x3 1/2)
That's exactly why it's the perfect example. Because you can get linux anywhere. That was my whole point. You're not tied to Redhat, or Novell, or whoever. If you install Redhat Enterprise Linux on everything, do you think IBM will turn down the support contract, once Redhat is gone, or vice versa? And there are 1000 companies out there besides those two, who could manage it also. Instead, they'd rather stay with something (windows) that if microsoft does go belly up, will be dead and gone? WTF is the sense in that? They obselete their OSs every few years anyway, regardless if you have some custom vertical app that cost $250,000 to develop that will only run on the old version, period. With linux, you can still get backported patches, critical bug fixes and whatnot.
It's a nobrainer. Unfortunately, that's also the description of those who are in charge.
Re:VCR theory reduces to 'cannot change the past'!
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
·
· Score: 1
I'm not saying that it's a tape at all. Rather that time continues to flow normally, but god has reset the entire universe, with a small exception. Maybe he continues to reset it, but Marty doesn't see his original parents, just duplicates (duplicate universe too) over and over. It's not the same part of the tape, but a new part that looks like the old.
I find it strange that many people seem not to grasp that. Of course, I have to postulate some sort of metatime, and a supernatural being (phenomenon?) with the ability to rearrange the universe down to the the tiniest particle, just to arrive at this. But my point is that just because it looks like time travel, doesn't even really make it such.
Failure as far as you should be concerned in the IT world. You can't continue to support your VAX or Alpha machines. When SGI gets bought or merges, your legacy IRIX on MIPS machines will equally be unsupported.
So, stay with Microsoft even though its size doesn't correlate with longevity and that its products are pieces of shit?
Or use something that is open, that someone will always be able to support for you, and which in the meantime just works?
This is less problematic in the sense that we don't have causality violations (he's not in the past of our universe, but in another universe that looks like our past).
But it's still a hell of alot to deal with on the conservation issues. As soon as Marty leaves in his Delorean, something of equal mass needs to arrive here in our universe (assuming conservation applies on a per universe basis). The choreography of all these alternate Martys traveling to parallel dimenions all simultaneously is difficult to swallow.
If conservation only applies on to the multiverse as a whole, things become even trickier. What keeps us from importing all of the infinite Martys to our own universe, or for that matter all of the matter/energy period, until those universes are empty, and ours has infinite mass?
That's the whole point, we don't have to play causality loop insanity. Marty was born, no one remembers it. He's now interacting with duplicates of his parents, not the originals. He doesn't pop out of existence himself, because altering things as they are now has no bearing on the past... he did not travel in time. It just looks like he did.
Yeh, but we want to keep Marty, while still having some substitute particles around for whatever Marty's mass was 30 years ago. Maybe a doorknob, or carbon dioxide floating through the air. Hard to say, exactly...
It is pretty pointy-haired after all. You don't say "Home Depot" may go out of business in 5 years, and then use it as a reason that you will no longer be able to buy 2x4s.
It's open, anything can be compiled for the version you use, even if there are no versions. Lack of a upgrade treadmill means your apps are safe, even if you have to use 2.6.x linux for the next 20 years. Computers always used we that static, at least until stupid people started using them.
Open source. If push comes to shove, hire a person or two to fix what needs to be fixed, even if Torvalds is gored to death by angry reindeer. Or more likely, as yours wouldn't be the only company that needs this, the costs can be spread out among lots of different companies, probably in the form of a vendor appearing to take over.
It's commodity parts people. Ford might go out of business, but we're always going to be able to buy parts to fix the engine and transmission. Linux is like that too. Microsoft is the one to be worried about, not because they will somehow die next year (I pray every night though), but because if they somehow did, we'd *ALL* be shit out of luck.
That anyone can spin things in such a way contrary to reality is incredible.
Just a thought exercise. I dislike having to always regurgitate everyone else's ideas, like to think of my own sometime, even if they are pretty dumb.
I'm not sure conversation of energy is my first worry though, not in the strictest sense. Mass worries me more. Does the god fill in the missing particles that was Marty with something that won't be missed from some far corner of the universe? Now, I know that mass and energy are convertible to each other, especially in something as outlandish as all of this, so it's kind of a nitpick on my part. I wonder just how much energy (besides the mass of Marty/Delorean) would be needed to roll the clock back 30 years, if it's calculable.
The real killer is probably information entropy though. The "snapshot" itself isn't allowed, even if you postulate a god sitting in a metaverse/metatime playing with the Universe on his VCR.
Crazy as he is, a few of his ideas aren't completely off the wall. He's probably pretty close to understanding space, as it were, I think. Though even if right, there are implications there that are plain scary.
Still, I rate this kook factor 9.2 out of a possible 10.
My voting history so far:
Baldrson, the flaming K5/usenet racist: 7.91 Timecube man: 9.4 Some guy I worked with at a temp job, claimed he was the Patriarch of New Hyperboria: 9.6
And what if these events occur, but aren't time travel at all? For the sake of the argument, assume you have the powers of a god, and sit outside the universe. As it plays out, you take a snapshot of the universe as it is in 1955. You save this. You let it play forward til 1985... then, you pause the VCR.
You do your little god thing, rearranging everything in the universe as it should be according to your snapshot, with a few exceptions... Marty and the Delorean. He didn't travel back in time, though, to him it can look like nothing else. But by the metatime clock that you the god uses, time has rolled on as it always has, only the universe was partially reset once or twice. I like this interpretation better, because you don't have to play mindfuck games with it.
I can install as many version of as many browsers as I like, all on the same machine.
Except for IE. Why? Because! It's part of the operating system, you can't install WFW3.11 and NT 4.0 at the same time, can you?
Sure, I bet that many professionals can afford to have a computer for each version that matters. I can't.
As for web snobbery, I don't belong to the faction that thinks that if it "works for 90% of the web, it's good enough". I'm building my site according to web standards that at least two standards-compliant browsers work with. Strangely, when I check other standards-compliant browsers, they seem to work too. But I'm supposed to modify it for mouth-breathers who think the "big E icon is teh intarweb" ? Give me a break.
Flash may be the future for big commercial sites. But for a hobbyist, it costs too damn much. SVG can be coded in notepad if you really insist on it, and there are great free tools too like Inkscape. SVG works, or soon will work, in all graphical browsers. Even if it doesn't work in a particular operating system component.
If anyone wants to see just what is possible with SVG, email me for a beta account on my website, or follow my homepage to a description of the idea.
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Personally, I'm still worried about abiogenesis myself. I don't think god waved a magic wand though.
And while I have no trouble with evolution per se, I don't think that when we finally answer the questions on how it works, that it will even be close to any theories yet proposed. Something funky is going on.
Sure, other OSs, linux and BSD and what not, are a little less secure. But there's "a little less secure" and then there's "made by Microsoft".
Get to know individuals as human beings.
That's real good advice, especially when not 3 sentences later you're telling him to use them as if they were some crass job-hunting mechanism. Get to know them, pretend to be friends, so you can use them. Haha.
Autoporn? We were just talking about you on hulver.com earlier today...
Homeowner's association can only forbid dishes bigger than 1 meter, or the absolute height of any pole it needs to be on.
Landlord can only forbid it if there are no exclusive use areas.
And, since that's what the question is, that's a pretty fucking stupid thing to say.
Multicasting is different than either OTA broadcasting, or IP broadcasting.
That the truck runs the route regardless does not mean that it's a totally free action. Also, figure in the cost of making the plastic for the disc.
Like a primestar. Install it yourself, it's not so tough.
Recievers are cheap too, on ebay. Figure out where you'd want to point the dish, and get a reciever capable of decoding whichever bird it's aimed at.
Wonder what the difference in pollution is, between sending a disc in meatspace, on a truck, vs. multicasting out a few electrons worth of a movie is?
That is, supposing the telecom (originally typo'd this as "telecon"... freudian slip?) industry hadn't defrauded us competely, by charging us for first-class broadband while continuing to deliver third-world, 1970s technology...
All managers, even Bloomberg have employees who have downtime, it's inevitable. Whether it's just natural, or times whether they're slightly less competent I can't say.
"The workplace is not an appropriate place for games," Bloomberg said. "It's a place where you've got to do the job that you're getting paid for."
I'd cut him a little more slack, if I didn't know a few bosses just like him that managed things so poorly there was plenty of downtime. Of course, I suppose uber-capitalists like himself would say that whenever that occurs you're supposed to clock out so you can save the company your wages...
Every single thing I've ever read has indicated that there is no such thing as "absolute time", and for that matter no base unit of time which is further indivisible. My whole thought experiment relies on time being invariant, and the universe's particulate matter being rearranged to a pattern that matched one seen previously, which itself isn't some fancy timewarp or what have you.
I was just trying to point out that there's at least one more way of looking at the situation before you trot out all the scifi cliches of time travel. It does have many flaws, one of which is the only decent example insists I contrive a supernatural being who does nothing but manage time travel-like scenarios. A natural phenomenon that causes the same effect seems absurd, even to me.
Some people actually do suggest that radical changes can and do occur across a single generation, even before the classic feedback mechanisms would come into play. Sometimes I wonder if they're not onto something.
I think the Home Depot example is a bad one because you can still get 2x4s for other places. (Anyone still know what a lumber yard is?!?) Also a 2x4 from a lumber yard is compatible with a 2x4 from home depot. Thus you are not tied to Home Depot for your 2x4 needs. This is because 2x4s comply to an open standard. That is, everyone who makes 2x4s makes them roughly the same size. (Though interestingly enough a 2x4 is actually more like 1 1/2x3 1/2)
That's exactly why it's the perfect example. Because you can get linux anywhere. That was my whole point. You're not tied to Redhat, or Novell, or whoever. If you install Redhat Enterprise Linux on everything, do you think IBM will turn down the support contract, once Redhat is gone, or vice versa? And there are 1000 companies out there besides those two, who could manage it also. Instead, they'd rather stay with something (windows) that if microsoft does go belly up, will be dead and gone? WTF is the sense in that? They obselete their OSs every few years anyway, regardless if you have some custom vertical app that cost $250,000 to develop that will only run on the old version, period. With linux, you can still get backported patches, critical bug fixes and whatnot.
It's a nobrainer. Unfortunately, that's also the description of those who are in charge.
I'm not saying that it's a tape at all. Rather that time continues to flow normally, but god has reset the entire universe, with a small exception. Maybe he continues to reset it, but Marty doesn't see his original parents, just duplicates (duplicate universe too) over and over. It's not the same part of the tape, but a new part that looks like the old.
I find it strange that many people seem not to grasp that. Of course, I have to postulate some sort of metatime, and a supernatural being (phenomenon?) with the ability to rearrange the universe down to the the tiniest particle, just to arrive at this. But my point is that just because it looks like time travel, doesn't even really make it such.
Failure as far as you should be concerned in the IT world. You can't continue to support your VAX or Alpha machines. When SGI gets bought or merges, your legacy IRIX on MIPS machines will equally be unsupported.
So, stay with Microsoft even though its size doesn't correlate with longevity and that its products are pieces of shit?
Or use something that is open, that someone will always be able to support for you, and which in the meantime just works?
Many managers still don't like the word Unix because it implies more expensive staff.
They got what they paid for, didn't they?
This is less problematic in the sense that we don't have causality violations (he's not in the past of our universe, but in another universe that looks like our past).
But it's still a hell of alot to deal with on the conservation issues. As soon as Marty leaves in his Delorean, something of equal mass needs to arrive here in our universe (assuming conservation applies on a per universe basis). The choreography of all these alternate Martys traveling to parallel dimenions all simultaneously is difficult to swallow.
If conservation only applies on to the multiverse as a whole, things become even trickier. What keeps us from importing all of the infinite Martys to our own universe, or for that matter all of the matter/energy period, until those universes are empty, and ours has infinite mass?
The fat lady has been following them around for a long time.
That's the whole point, we don't have to play causality loop insanity. Marty was born, no one remembers it. He's now interacting with duplicates of his parents, not the originals. He doesn't pop out of existence himself, because altering things as they are now has no bearing on the past... he did not travel in time. It just looks like he did.
Yeh, but we want to keep Marty, while still having some substitute particles around for whatever Marty's mass was 30 years ago. Maybe a doorknob, or carbon dioxide floating through the air. Hard to say, exactly...
It is pretty pointy-haired after all. You don't say "Home Depot" may go out of business in 5 years, and then use it as a reason that you will no longer be able to buy 2x4s.
It's open, anything can be compiled for the version you use, even if there are no versions. Lack of a upgrade treadmill means your apps are safe, even if you have to use 2.6.x linux for the next 20 years. Computers always used we that static, at least until stupid people started using them.
Open source. If push comes to shove, hire a person or two to fix what needs to be fixed, even if Torvalds is gored to death by angry reindeer. Or more likely, as yours wouldn't be the only company that needs this, the costs can be spread out among lots of different companies, probably in the form of a vendor appearing to take over.
It's commodity parts people. Ford might go out of business, but we're always going to be able to buy parts to fix the engine and transmission. Linux is like that too. Microsoft is the one to be worried about, not because they will somehow die next year (I pray every night though), but because if they somehow did, we'd *ALL* be shit out of luck.
That anyone can spin things in such a way contrary to reality is incredible.
Just a thought exercise. I dislike having to always regurgitate everyone else's ideas, like to think of my own sometime, even if they are pretty dumb.
I'm not sure conversation of energy is my first worry though, not in the strictest sense. Mass worries me more. Does the god fill in the missing particles that was Marty with something that won't be missed from some far corner of the universe? Now, I know that mass and energy are convertible to each other, especially in something as outlandish as all of this, so it's kind of a nitpick on my part. I wonder just how much energy (besides the mass of Marty/Delorean) would be needed to roll the clock back 30 years, if it's calculable.
The real killer is probably information entropy though. The "snapshot" itself isn't allowed, even if you postulate a god sitting in a metaverse/metatime playing with the Universe on his VCR.
Crazy as he is, a few of his ideas aren't completely off the wall. He's probably pretty close to understanding space, as it were, I think. Though even if right, there are implications there that are plain scary.
Still, I rate this kook factor 9.2 out of a possible 10.
My voting history so far:
Baldrson, the flaming K5/usenet racist: 7.91
Timecube man: 9.4
Some guy I worked with at a temp job, claimed he was the Patriarch of New Hyperboria: 9.6
And what if these events occur, but aren't time travel at all? For the sake of the argument, assume you have the powers of a god, and sit outside the universe. As it plays out, you take a snapshot of the universe as it is in 1955. You save this. You let it play forward til 1985... then, you pause the VCR.
You do your little god thing, rearranging everything in the universe as it should be according to your snapshot, with a few exceptions... Marty and the Delorean. He didn't travel back in time, though, to him it can look like nothing else. But by the metatime clock that you the god uses, time has rolled on as it always has, only the universe was partially reset once or twice. I like this interpretation better, because you don't have to play mindfuck games with it.
I can install as many version of as many browsers as I like, all on the same machine.
Except for IE. Why? Because! It's part of the operating system, you can't install WFW3.11 and NT 4.0 at the same time, can you?
Sure, I bet that many professionals can afford to have a computer for each version that matters. I can't.
As for web snobbery, I don't belong to the faction that thinks that if it "works for 90% of the web, it's good enough". I'm building my site according to web standards that at least two standards-compliant browsers work with. Strangely, when I check other standards-compliant browsers, they seem to work too. But I'm supposed to modify it for mouth-breathers who think the "big E icon is teh intarweb" ? Give me a break.
Flash may be the future for big commercial sites. But for a hobbyist, it costs too damn much. SVG can be coded in notepad if you really insist on it, and there are great free tools too like Inkscape. SVG works, or soon will work, in all graphical browsers. Even if it doesn't work in a particular operating system component.
If anyone wants to see just what is possible with SVG, email me for a beta account on my website, or follow my homepage to a description of the idea.