Indeed, and without even bothering to posit a way for these to interact, which physicists would generally find impossible based on current understanding. In thirty years, "current understanding" will be obsolete. When subspace was first described, nobody had given much thought to the possibility that we lived in a three-dimensional (plus time) brane in an extradimensional space. Nobody can really say that we won't find a way to interact with that extradimensional space.
Imagine, for example, two objects whose force of attraction to each other can be varied according to an electrical signal. Now suppose that this attractive force, when stymied in our brane, causes the brane to bend. If, for example, the brane exists in a fluid, the brane's bending would cause waves in that fluid. Or perhaps movement of the brane causes another kind of wave, similar the way movement of an electrical charge causes an electromagnetic wave.
That's just one idea. Someone else with think of others.
No, they use computer data to direct matter in the creation of new patterns of matter. In several episodes of DS9, and throughout Voyager, replicators are described as energy-to-matter conversion devices. In this context, a pattern is to a replicator what a pattern is to today's looms: A program describing how something is structured.
Saying we will is certainly within the bounds of science fiction, but this is a discussion of bad physics in that science fiction. No counterpoint exists without a point, and all points invite counterpoints. And any criticism of science fiction must be done with exposure to the fact that things that are impossible today may not be impossible tomorrow. That hope is the basis of science fiction's appeal.
Eh? It was my understanding that people got jobs that they had the education to do adequately well at, not that people's education needs to be dictated by their ultimate job.
Economics aside, America isn't supposed to be a class-based society.
In a culture that equates income with success, if there's no money in research, then the people involved in research are almost by necessity unsuccessful.
Movies plots glorify crime. And television glorifies law enforcement, even bad behavior in law enforcement. Let's see, there's Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order, Special Victims Unit, some other L&O franchise I've only seen a couple episodes in, The Shield, The Closer, and God knows how many others I haven't heard of.
I liked the original L&O because it felt realistic, and the characters seemed to have professional integrity. Criminal Intent and SVU's main characters frequently screw with their suspects' heads. The episodes I've seen of The Shield had stark instances of nonprofessional (and outright illegal) conduct on behalf of the police. The Closer circles back to highlighting good conduct in the main characters, and sprinkles in the odd comedic episode.
You ever wonder where the "We'll trust them, they're the government" mentality comes from?
Yikes. Reading over this, I sound a bit paranoid. I suppose my irritation comes from having too many family members who are willing to write a political party free pass, and drank deeply of the dominant political machine of the last seven years.
Simultaneity of communications across interstellar distances. Point. Though they posit another medium outside what some physicists today would term our "brane". It's conceivable that waves in that medium would not have the same maximum velocity as in our brane. In ST:TNG, they do give an upward limit to the velocity of those waves, by mentioning it would take a certain number of years for their subspace communications to reach their home galaxy. (This was the episode with the introduction of the Traveler...I forget its name.)
Replicators. 3D printers that don't require physical contact, and rely on an energy-to-matter conversion mechanism. We can currently convert matter to energy under certain limited circumstances. Who's to say we won't figure out how to do the reverse at some point in the distant future?
However, single-homed transporters seem the least likely to me. I can see teleportation devices (ala Niven's stepping booths, and even stepping plates) somewhere in the distant future, but rebuilding a physical pattern from data from thousands of kilometers, and in an uncontrolled environment?
Well, I can't say that would be impossible...but it would require serious calculations dependent on intimate knowledge of atmospheric conditions and any other material between the emitter and where materialization is supposed to take place.
I see all fuss about programming. easy. don't what the is parallel It's I see all fuss about programming. easy. don't what the is parallel It's I hereby propose that execution is in order for out of order speech.
TFA said 180 meters**2 of livable space. I have no intuitive feel for that, so I did some quick conversion: that's about three 18-wheeler trailers. -- Ooops! I meant cubed, not squared. And I am assuming the standard trailer is about 20ft long. That was bizarre...I wondered if Slashdot had added a comment-editing feature until I realized he'd changed his signature to match.
How is two-stroke engine repair any more usefull than electronics repair? In an agrarian culture, a two-stroke engine can perform useful work.
Frankly, though, I like OLPC. While I'm not sure it will benefit poor African children much more than giving laptops to middle-schoolers in Seattle, it will still provide some benefits to its target demographic.
Better still, for me, it's inspired tech companies to design similar devices for rich countries, meaning I might have a competent, cheap mobile platform in my future.
And there's more, but you get the idea. Collusion to ruin people's lives when they run afoul of admins, corrupt editors doing and getting favors from the head honcho himself, pet pages that end up with incorrect information, speculation, or specious reasoning, and a general air of arrogance and groupthink reinforcing an internal idea that they can do no wrong. You missed a few, such as product placement pages and ancient "This page doesn't conform to {{?}} standards" tags. That, and obscure fields get limited attention.
Why bother, seriously? Because the breadth of material covered in Wikipedia is unparalleled, as is the timeliness of information in many fields of interest. And it's a hell of a lot more compact than a 100 lb encyclopedia set, and cheaper to boot.
I thought he was referring to compilers, not make. But I don't get how he figures compilers have anything to do with thread count; I'm only aware of a couple cases where that's controlled my anything but how the application is coded.
My family was the longest in a chain of owners of a BBS that ran from 1987 until January or February of this year. From about 1993 on, we used Worldgroup (The DOS version; The Windows version was useless for us.) as the accounting and auth package for a dial-up ISP.
Up until about 2004, dial-up access was offered by way of a Galactibox packed with Galacticards connected to 33.6Kbps and 56Kbps modems. (At its peak, Cyberspace BBS had around forty serial modems connected through that tentacled monster...Too bad most of the connections were people scripting Tele-Arena.) Around 1997, we added a terminal server to get more lines and offer a purely-digital connection (on our side, though one or two customers did pay for ISDN service.).
As a kid, I learned you could crash Vircom's TCP/IP stack by trying to play Quake across a couple 33.6 connections into the same Worldgroup box. Crutch and I ended up dialing directly into each other after that, until my parents got ISDN. (When was the last time someone called you a Low-Ping Bastard?:-) )
So they're all on a contiguous bus, or is there an arbitrating node at the center?
Multi-tap busses have their own problems (ISTR hearing about FSB speed limits on Intel multi-processor and early multi-core machines.), but that mini-node would guarantee each CPU to be two hops from any other.
In a way, it does; UPS pays the tolls, and the toll costs get passed on to their customers. But the analogy still breaks down, because packets (UPS trucks) don't incur individual tolls. Perhaps they should? It would simplify accounting, provide a direct relationship between capacity and profit, and encourage the development of alternate routes. (Wasn't path resiliency one of the goals of the Internet in the first place?)
It's hard to derive an accurate analogy from Internet business; The Internet is uncharted territory in everything from legal grounds to business practices.
The kind of AI it would need to effect this would be horrendous, and probably suck more juice than they really want the hardware sucking. That's ridiculous. Bounds checking is common programming practice. A simple pre-failure feedback mechanism (i.e., if signal strength is reduced beyond a factor of X, where X is a remotely-set register, cease command and signal error.) would prevent a variety of issues.
Software need not be complicated to detect when measurable parameters fall outside of acceptable bounds. Certainly, you don't want to spend energy continuously polling external inputs, but that's what interrupts are for. Or even silicon, if you're sufficiently confident you know all the parameters you want to protect for this mission.
Here's a better analogy. A certain toll road is a convenient way to transport goods between points A and B. UPS carries goods for hundreds of clients, but Amazon.com has recently increased their shipment of product through UPS in a way that leads UPS to send many more trucks across the toll road.
The toll road's owner, in an effort to remain price-competitive with other routes, has been neglecting upgrading toll road capacity in favor of keeping prices low. Now, because their roads are choked with UPS trucks, and because raising toll amounts will lead to loss of traffic to other routes, the toll road owner demands that Amazon.com directly subsidize their shipment traffic across the toll road.
There are a few possible solutions. First, Amazon.com could pay the subsidies. Second, Amazon.com could ensure their traffic doesn't cross that toll road. (E.g. air freight.) Third, the toll road could take out a loan or two to build up its capacity, and pay off the loan by raising rates.
The first option would mean the BBC would pay subsidies to individual broadband providers. The second option would require the BBC to find another way to push their content to potential customers. (I.e. move into video on cell phones and the like.) The third option would mean raising rates charged to customers, at least until the loan is paid off.
In a way, this is the result competition working too well. Broadband providers are so desperate to avoid raising prices for their end consumer, they're trying to find other ways to subsidize their costs. Obviously, in many cases, there isn't much current competition. (Let's see...I can choose between DSL and cable, both of whom have monopolies for their respective site access physical layer.) However, they're probably trying to prevent the ISP market from opening up to offer a new kind of competition. (Oops...I forgot I could also choose to connect my computer to the Internet via a phone...)
If new avenues of competition open up, then their lack of investment in infrastructure will be their downfall. Going back to the toll road analogy, someone would see the opportunity to make money in an alternate transportation system, and our jammed toll road will have to deal with another avenue of competition.
It would be nice if the remote software were able to reject commands deemed likely to cause mission failure.
But now I'm torn between references to "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" (too obvious) and the Cardassian OS O'Brien had to deal with on DS9. (Almost too obscure.)
Dreamhost is awesome, except for their shared hosting. PHP-as-CGI doesn't hold up well to a Slashdotting, as I ruefully discovered. I could move Rosetta Code back to a Dreamhost account under its current load, but the spike I got in January threw pringle's load average north of 150-200.
Are these continued announcements of huge support from large OEMs an indication of a new era? It's an indication that OEMs believe that the open source and free software communities have enough clout to have major impacts on business markets in computer technologies. In most markets, if a proprietary software company angers technology consumers to a sufficient degree, enough members of these communities band together to provide a workable alternative. Mozilla aside, witness the results of MySQL, Apache and the KHTML team. MySQL and Apache have a huge market penetrations, and KHTML is now preinstalled on every Mac, as part of Safari. There are more examples, but those are the most obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine, for example, two objects whose force of attraction to each other can be varied according to an electrical signal. Now suppose that this attractive force, when stymied in our brane, causes the brane to bend. If, for example, the brane exists in a fluid, the brane's bending would cause waves in that fluid. Or perhaps movement of the brane causes another kind of wave, similar the way movement of an electrical charge causes an electromagnetic wave.
That's just one idea. Someone else with think of others. No, they use computer data to direct matter in the creation of new patterns of matter. In several episodes of DS9, and throughout Voyager, replicators are described as energy-to-matter conversion devices. In this context, a pattern is to a replicator what a pattern is to today's looms: A program describing how something is structured. Saying we will is certainly within the bounds of science fiction, but this is a discussion of bad physics in that science fiction. No counterpoint exists without a point, and all points invite counterpoints. And any criticism of science fiction must be done with exposure to the fact that things that are impossible today may not be impossible tomorrow. That hope is the basis of science fiction's appeal.
Past the first or second, yes.
God Bless Google, slowly but surely destroying awareness of unit conversion and significant figures.
Eh? It was my understanding that people got jobs that they had the education to do adequately well at, not that people's education needs to be dictated by their ultimate job.
Economics aside, America isn't supposed to be a class-based society.
In a culture that equates income with success, if there's no money in research, then the people involved in research are almost by necessity unsuccessful.
I liked the original L&O because it felt realistic, and the characters seemed to have professional integrity. Criminal Intent and SVU's main characters frequently screw with their suspects' heads. The episodes I've seen of The Shield had stark instances of nonprofessional (and outright illegal) conduct on behalf of the police. The Closer circles back to highlighting good conduct in the main characters, and sprinkles in the odd comedic episode.
You ever wonder where the "We'll trust them, they're the government" mentality comes from?
Yikes. Reading over this, I sound a bit paranoid. I suppose my irritation comes from having too many family members who are willing to write a political party free pass, and drank deeply of the dominant political machine of the last seven years.
However, single-homed transporters seem the least likely to me. I can see teleportation devices (ala Niven's stepping booths, and even stepping plates) somewhere in the distant future, but rebuilding a physical pattern from data from thousands of kilometers, and in an uncontrolled environment?
Well, I can't say that would be impossible...but it would require serious calculations dependent on intimate knowledge of atmospheric conditions and any other material between the emitter and where materialization is supposed to take place.
I see all fuss about programming. easy. don't what the is parallel It's I hereby propose that execution is in order for out of order speech.
--
Ooops! I meant cubed, not squared. And I am assuming the standard trailer is about 20ft long. That was bizarre...I wondered if Slashdot had added a comment-editing feature until I realized he'd changed his signature to match.
Frankly, though, I like OLPC. While I'm not sure it will benefit poor African children much more than giving laptops to middle-schoolers in Seattle, it will still provide some benefits to its target demographic.
Better still, for me, it's inspired tech companies to design similar devices for rich countries, meaning I might have a competent, cheap mobile platform in my future.
I'm on 14.4Kbps dial-up, you insensitive clod.
And that's no joke. Noisy phone lines suck. It could be worse; I could have been on an OLPC machine in Africa.
I thought he was referring to compilers, not make. But I don't get how he figures compilers have anything to do with thread count; I'm only aware of a couple cases where that's controlled my anything but how the application is coded.
My family was the longest in a chain of owners of a BBS that ran from 1987 until January or February of this year. From about 1993 on, we used Worldgroup (The DOS version; The Windows version was useless for us.) as the accounting and auth package for a dial-up ISP.
:-) )
Up until about 2004, dial-up access was offered by way of a Galactibox packed with Galacticards connected to 33.6Kbps and 56Kbps modems. (At its peak, Cyberspace BBS had around forty serial modems connected through that tentacled monster...Too bad most of the connections were people scripting Tele-Arena.) Around 1997, we added a terminal server to get more lines and offer a purely-digital connection (on our side, though one or two customers did pay for ISDN service.).
As a kid, I learned you could crash Vircom's TCP/IP stack by trying to play Quake across a couple 33.6 connections into the same Worldgroup box. Crutch and I ended up dialing directly into each other after that, until my parents got ISDN. (When was the last time someone called you a Low-Ping Bastard?
So they're all on a contiguous bus, or is there an arbitrating node at the center?
Multi-tap busses have their own problems (ISTR hearing about FSB speed limits on Intel multi-processor and early multi-core machines.), but that mini-node would guarantee each CPU to be two hops from any other.
(Not my field either...)
In a way, it does; UPS pays the tolls, and the toll costs get passed on to their customers. But the analogy still breaks down, because packets (UPS trucks) don't incur individual tolls. Perhaps they should? It would simplify accounting, provide a direct relationship between capacity and profit, and encourage the development of alternate routes. (Wasn't path resiliency one of the goals of the Internet in the first place?)
It's hard to derive an accurate analogy from Internet business; The Internet is uncharted territory in everything from legal grounds to business practices.
In that case, I would agree with you. :-)
Software need not be complicated to detect when measurable parameters fall outside of acceptable bounds. Certainly, you don't want to spend energy continuously polling external inputs, but that's what interrupts are for. Or even silicon, if you're sufficiently confident you know all the parameters you want to protect for this mission.
Here's a better analogy. A certain toll road is a convenient way to transport goods between points A and B. UPS carries goods for hundreds of clients, but Amazon.com has recently increased their shipment of product through UPS in a way that leads UPS to send many more trucks across the toll road.
The toll road's owner, in an effort to remain price-competitive with other routes, has been neglecting upgrading toll road capacity in favor of keeping prices low. Now, because their roads are choked with UPS trucks, and because raising toll amounts will lead to loss of traffic to other routes, the toll road owner demands that Amazon.com directly subsidize their shipment traffic across the toll road.
There are a few possible solutions. First, Amazon.com could pay the subsidies. Second, Amazon.com could ensure their traffic doesn't cross that toll road. (E.g. air freight.) Third, the toll road could take out a loan or two to build up its capacity, and pay off the loan by raising rates.
The first option would mean the BBC would pay subsidies to individual broadband providers. The second option would require the BBC to find another way to push their content to potential customers. (I.e. move into video on cell phones and the like.) The third option would mean raising rates charged to customers, at least until the loan is paid off.
In a way, this is the result competition working too well. Broadband providers are so desperate to avoid raising prices for their end consumer, they're trying to find other ways to subsidize their costs. Obviously, in many cases, there isn't much current competition. (Let's see...I can choose between DSL and cable, both of whom have monopolies for their respective site access physical layer.) However, they're probably trying to prevent the ISP market from opening up to offer a new kind of competition. (Oops...I forgot I could also choose to connect my computer to the Internet via a phone...)
If new avenues of competition open up, then their lack of investment in infrastructure will be their downfall. Going back to the toll road analogy, someone would see the opportunity to make money in an alternate transportation system, and our jammed toll road will have to deal with another avenue of competition.
In the ST:TNG episode Relics, Scotty criticized Geordie for giving Picard accurate repair time estimates.
It would be nice if the remote software were able to reject commands deemed likely to cause mission failure.
But now I'm torn between references to "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" (too obvious) and the Cardassian OS O'Brien had to deal with on DS9. (Almost too obscure.)
I wasn't the one to originally bring up Dreamhost...
Dreamhost is awesome, except for their shared hosting. PHP-as-CGI doesn't hold up well to a Slashdotting, as I ruefully discovered. I could move Rosetta Code back to a Dreamhost account under its current load, but the spike I got in January threw pringle's load average north of 150-200.