Re:The next James Bond as well!
on
The Hobbit On Hold
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No, he has style in the books and sophisticated tastes and is cool at least in his state of mind. He's also handsome and has dark hair. Purely in terms of the look I think Brosnan actually came closest and Craig is furthest. Brosnan just had terrible scripts (with the exception of GoldenEye although that's still far from the best)!
Yes he is the worst. He looks like a builder. He just needs the builder's bum!
I hope the Hobbit does get made, but only if it's good. I'm getting sick of great stories being harvested to make a quickly churned out crap film (and don't even get me started on remakes!). The LOTR films were almost perfect I thought though so if it's close to them I can't wait! I don't know how they got the world to appear so similar to how I had imagined it when reading the books.
It's these people that do bad things and hide behind privacy while publicly judging others that are the problem
but who's to decide what is "bad"? It ends up being the government and the less privacy individuals have, the more power the government has over them. That's fine so long as the governments laws are ethical and fair (in the eyes of the people) but many would argue that is already not entirely the case. I don't buy this "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" crap the brainwashed masses seem to be spouting.
If you totally remove all privacy then you need to have a small government allowing lots of individual freedom and ideally a reduction in the number of laws. It seems to me the world is moving the opposite way towards governments with more and more power making bigger and bigger numbers of more and more restrictive laws. You end up with an Orwellian society where everyone is a criminal and anyone who is an inconvenience can be made to disappear...
I must be getting tired, because I read that as "Dell Defect Turning 2.2GHz CPU Into 1000GHz CPU?"!
I thought wow I want one of those, then I read on and thought it was some bug working out the processor usage as a percentage of 1000GHz even though it was running at full speed, then I realised what an idiot I was being!
I'm by no means an expert on this stuff but I think the time travel / causality argument is also a consequence of Einstein's equations. In special relativity he states time slows down for a moving body by a factor of sqrt(1 - (v/c)^2) compared to a stationary observer, so the moving body is effectively travelling into the future for all velocities less than c. Travelling into the future shouldn't violate causality though.
The problem is if you plug a value greater than c into the velocity. Then (v/c)^2 becomes bigger than 1 resulting in an apparently negative passage of time for the moving body - hence apparent time travel into the past. The thing is its hard to see how the equation is useful for those values when it also predicts increasing mass approaching infinity at the speed of light. If special relativity does hold true up to the speed of light then it does prevent a craft accelerating past it. If it doesn't hold true, then the negative time factor presumably also won't necessarily apply - preserving causality? I don't know whether general relativity sheds any more light on this. I doubt it.
Also don't they also realize that they are potentially criminalizing a whole generation?
Probably - it's another step towards a police state. You keep making new laws until everyone is guilty of some crime or other, then when the authorities don't like someone's behaviour or opinions or just don't like them they can make them disappear.
Add in a healthy dose of spin that the tabloids and masses lap up chanting "if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear", job done.
</tinfoil hat> although in the UK under Labour it gets more like this by the day...
Among other things, Foxconn produces the Mac mini, the iPod and the iPhone for Apple Inc.; Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.; various orders for American computer manufacturers Dell and Hewlett-Packard; the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo;the Xbox 360 for Microsoft, cell phones for Motorola, and the Amazon Kindle.[2][3] [4]
Bottom line.. if you like electronic devices, you have to go some way to avoid Foxconn. Apple is known for its secrecy, but we documented evidence that Apple was involved in this intimidation in anyway, you have to assume that Foxconn, and only Foxconn is responsible.
Uhhh yeah, that's why I use Nokia for my phones, Creative for my audio and MP3 player, AMD for my CPUs, NVidia for my chipsets, my PC for gaming.... All IMHO more pleasing, in many cases better performing and in some ways more stylish to own and use than any of the above. OK so for the majority of my PC gaming I've gotta use Windoze but presumably Foxconn weren't involved in that. I wouldn't call any of the above "having to go some way" - I just used my personal preference and sense of taste.
These practises sound like pure evil! Still, I never did like Apple....
...Call me when Raven are making HeXen III! I loved HeXen 2, all that dirty stained glass and plants etc, very cool atmosphere for its time. The Heretic games and Arx Fatalis (although good) never quite matched it for me.
Regarding Wolfenstein I thought Return to Castle Wolfenstein was OK, but not one of my favourites. This one sounds like it's got some interesting new ideas though.
If I have a long stick and you hold the other end of it and I thrust my end towards you, you will instantly faster than the speed of light feel it at your end.
Although it's a neat idea as a thought experiment with an infinitely rigid stick, in reality the effect cannot be faster than the speed of light as the force you apply accerlerates the molecules at the end closest to your hand first, which in turn apply an increased force against the next molecules along and so on until the force has propogated through the whole stick to the other end. As it's essentially forces accelerating masses, they must still obey special relativity and cannot move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.
Ummmm I'd call Alan Wake a pretty big issue. I'm running Win2k and find even XP too bloated so I find the idea of running Vista pretty abhorrent and then there's all the DRM etc... but I really REALLY want to play that game on PC if it's ever out in the not too distant future (and not massively toned down to the lowest common denominator of performance - the consoles it will be on, like Deus Ex Invisible War was).
Yeah, might help if the retelling was actually any good! OK, in some rare cases a remake has improved upon the original, but when it's just a total shameless cash-in, riding completely on the concepts and name of the original and the new film seriously sucks then it's very, very bad. You've got to hand it to these companies though, they're sure getting good at making a quick buck as easily as possible. Remake == no risk. Maximum profit for minimum effort. Forget creativity.
Don't some old programs written in Visual C++ 6 use a runtime library, MSVCRT.dll?
Just because a program is calling procedures in shared libraries, doesn't mean it isn't in machine code. You can sometimes choose whether libraries should be statically or dynamically linked.
Bond: How fast does it go? Goodhead: It can go up to 20Gs, but that would be fatal. 3Gs is equivalent to take-off pressure. Most people pass out at 7. Bond: You make a great saleswoman. Goodhead: You don't have to worry. This is what we call a chicken switch. You just keep your finger on that button and the moment the pressure gets too much for you, release the button and the power's cut off. Bond: Just like that?! Goodhead: Oh come on Mr Bond, a 70 year old can take 3Gs! Bond: Well the trouble is there's never a 70 year old around when you need one...
not reporting any of these cases is considered a crime, for which the company could be heavily fined or even closed down and it's managers jailed.
I got told on a Money Laundering course in the UK that individual employees, rather than their managers, can be held responsible for failing to report suspicious activity, and jailed for up to 14 years!
Somewhat harsh, I thought.
As I understand it, the effects of relativity happen so as all observers see the speed of light as being the same, regardless of their reference point. That's the basis of special relativity though and I don't know much about general relativity - the bit that deals with gravitation.
However, if time slows down for a traveller locally - he'll see the rest of the universe as passing by much quicker as a result - hence from his point of view, his journey time is greatly reduced.
It's modded funny but he has a point. Scratching and some live mixing techniques are made much more intuitive and "hands-on" than can be achieved with CDs. Sure, you can write software to simulate these effects up to a point - but it really isn't the same - and where's the fun in that? Mixing with decks in front of a live audience looks a lot better.
A copy living on the moon would cease being you as soon as either one of you experienced anything
Or would the one that stayed at home cease being you at that point and you would become the copy on the moon?
The fact that we can ask such a question and cannot determine a unique answer shows that we cannot say with any confidence that someone's consciousness could actually be transferred to a copy of their body.
Even if you can call consciousness an illusion, it still exists if only in the form of a unique point of view (i mean POV in the literal sense) at an instant in time.
Just because "you"'re not around to challenge the copy, it doesn't necessarily follow that from your point of view you became the copy. You might just as easily have become a different person, or a whale, or an armchair, or nothing at all - the point is there's no way of knowing - all we know currently is that your memories would live on in the new copy. From your point of view you might never experience life as that copy.
It's quite right, as others pointed out, that you can't prove you are the same "you" as you were in the past - all you have is the memories of the mind you seem to occupy at this instant in time. I would say that this is the crux of the problem. If we can't even say with any certainty if this continuity exists or not - how can we make sure that continuity is preserved?
...and the existence of that continuity does matter otherwise there's no point in performing selfish actions or indeed doing anything in life - why bother when you don't know if you will still be the same person ten minutes, or a nanosecond, from now?
That's simply not true. Some repulsively unattractive people may never find a mate; similarly, extremely shy people. So unless they choose to donate their sperm / eggs, they'll never contribute to the gene pool.
In theory over millennia this should favour evolution towards more aesthetically and physically attractive humans who are also more confident and sociable.
People always tend to assume evolution is about those that survive - whilst that helps the important issue is whether they ever breed or not.
This is news for nerds after all so I would have thought these issues would be of great concern to some of us!
Get a TV card and the DivX codec and wonder no more!
I always tell myself I'm gonna compress the films (movies) and program(me)s further later and burn 'em to CD or save up for a DVD writer... or delete 'em when I've watched 'em, but I never do and all my hard drives are almost always 90% full or worse.
I don't want a 20GB microdrive but give me a 2TB hard drive any day! I also wish motherboards would start supporting the higher RAID levels (was it 5 or 6 that used hamming codes providing both redundancy and improved performance?).
That would be US quadrillion.
It's only a measly 8,559 UK billion gallons - or more usefully, 7,127 UK billion Imperial gallons.:P
Hope this helps!
With regard to the search for Martian life - I hope they're taking adequate precautions to prevent contamination with microbes from Earth.
Admittedly this is half off topic as this didn't entirely keep working but my bizarrely recurring bad luck with this deserves mentioning. I bought a second hand P120 laptop a few years ago which worked great until I dropped it once - this bust the floppy drive. I eventually found a firm in the US that could sell me a replacement drive - after shipping to the UK it cost almost as much as I paid for the laptop. Plus the staff at the bank had never heard of a wire transfer before and accidentally paid the firm for it twice!
It gets worse as upon picking up the new drive from Goods In at work, it slipped out of my fingers and fell to the ground. Next the tiny unique ribbon connector that was used to connect up the drive wore out due to the amount of fiddling I'd had to do, and to this day I never found a replacement.
What I did find at one point was an external laptop floppy drive which had a plug that matched an undocumented port on the side of the laptop. No sooner had I tried that out than the laptop started smoking and the plastic casing above the port melted slightly and dipped down. Obviously not compatible then. The laptop still works ok - though there are some bad sectors on the hard drive and I can never reinstall the OS as it won't boot off a floppy. Not that I need it anymore, my latest mobile phone does more than that piece of crap!
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No, he has style in the books and sophisticated tastes and is cool at least in his state of mind. He's also handsome and has dark hair. Purely in terms of the look I think Brosnan actually came closest and Craig is furthest. Brosnan just had terrible scripts (with the exception of GoldenEye although that's still far from the best)!
Yes he is the worst. He looks like a builder. He just needs the builder's bum! I hope the Hobbit does get made, but only if it's good. I'm getting sick of great stories being harvested to make a quickly churned out crap film (and don't even get me started on remakes!). The LOTR films were almost perfect I thought though so if it's close to them I can't wait! I don't know how they got the world to appear so similar to how I had imagined it when reading the books.
It's these people that do bad things and hide behind privacy while publicly judging others that are the problem
but who's to decide what is "bad"? It ends up being the government and the less privacy individuals have, the more power the government has over them. That's fine so long as the governments laws are ethical and fair (in the eyes of the people) but many would argue that is already not entirely the case. I don't buy this "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" crap the brainwashed masses seem to be spouting.
If you totally remove all privacy then you need to have a small government allowing lots of individual freedom and ideally a reduction in the number of laws. It seems to me the world is moving the opposite way towards governments with more and more power making bigger and bigger numbers of more and more restrictive laws. You end up with an Orwellian society where everyone is a criminal and anyone who is an inconvenience can be made to disappear...
</tinfoilhat>
I must be getting tired, because I read that as "Dell Defect Turning 2.2GHz CPU Into 1000GHz CPU?"! I thought wow I want one of those, then I read on and thought it was some bug working out the processor usage as a percentage of 1000GHz even though it was running at full speed, then I realised what an idiot I was being!
I'm by no means an expert on this stuff but I think the time travel / causality argument is also a consequence of Einstein's equations. In special relativity he states time slows down for a moving body by a factor of sqrt(1 - (v/c)^2) compared to a stationary observer, so the moving body is effectively travelling into the future for all velocities less than c. Travelling into the future shouldn't violate causality though. The problem is if you plug a value greater than c into the velocity. Then (v/c)^2 becomes bigger than 1 resulting in an apparently negative passage of time for the moving body - hence apparent time travel into the past. The thing is its hard to see how the equation is useful for those values when it also predicts increasing mass approaching infinity at the speed of light. If special relativity does hold true up to the speed of light then it does prevent a craft accelerating past it. If it doesn't hold true, then the negative time factor presumably also won't necessarily apply - preserving causality? I don't know whether general relativity sheds any more light on this. I doubt it.
Every day there are people wasting the precious gift of life, drinking, shooting up, shooting
Just who are you to determine/define waste of any life (other than your own)?
and who are they to choose to end the lives of those they shoot or otherwise destroy?
Also don't they also realize that they are potentially criminalizing a whole generation?
Probably - it's another step towards a police state. You keep making new laws until everyone is guilty of some crime or other, then when the authorities don't like someone's behaviour or opinions or just don't like them they can make them disappear.
Add in a healthy dose of spin that the tabloids and masses lap up chanting "if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear", job done.
</tinfoil hat> although in the UK under Labour it gets more like this by the day...
Among other things, Foxconn produces the Mac mini, the iPod and the iPhone for Apple Inc.; Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.; various orders for American computer manufacturers Dell and Hewlett-Packard; the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo;the Xbox 360 for Microsoft, cell phones for Motorola, and the Amazon Kindle.[2][3] [4] Bottom line.. if you like electronic devices, you have to go some way to avoid Foxconn. Apple is known for its secrecy, but we documented evidence that Apple was involved in this intimidation in anyway, you have to assume that Foxconn, and only Foxconn is responsible.
Uhhh yeah, that's why I use Nokia for my phones, Creative for my audio and MP3 player, AMD for my CPUs, NVidia for my chipsets, my PC for gaming.... All IMHO more pleasing, in many cases better performing and in some ways more stylish to own and use than any of the above. OK so for the majority of my PC gaming I've gotta use Windoze but presumably Foxconn weren't involved in that. I wouldn't call any of the above "having to go some way" - I just used my personal preference and sense of taste.
These practises sound like pure evil! Still, I never did like Apple....
...Call me when Raven are making HeXen III! I loved HeXen 2, all that dirty stained glass and plants etc, very cool atmosphere for its time. The Heretic games and Arx Fatalis (although good) never quite matched it for me.
Regarding Wolfenstein I thought Return to Castle Wolfenstein was OK, but not one of my favourites. This one sounds like it's got some interesting new ideas though.
If I have a long stick and you hold the other end of it and I thrust my end towards you, you will instantly faster than the speed of light feel it at your end.
Although it's a neat idea as a thought experiment with an infinitely rigid stick, in reality the effect cannot be faster than the speed of light as the force you apply accerlerates the molecules at the end closest to your hand first, which in turn apply an increased force against the next molecules along and so on until the force has propogated through the whole stick to the other end. As it's essentially forces accelerating masses, they must still obey special relativity and cannot move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.
Ummmm I'd call Alan Wake a pretty big issue. I'm running Win2k and find even XP too bloated so I find the idea of running Vista pretty abhorrent and then there's all the DRM etc... but I really REALLY want to play that game on PC if it's ever out in the not too distant future (and not massively toned down to the lowest common denominator of performance - the consoles it will be on, like Deus Ex Invisible War was).
Yeah, might help if the retelling was actually any good! OK, in some rare cases a remake has improved upon the original, but when it's just a total shameless cash-in, riding completely on the concepts and name of the original and the new film seriously sucks then it's very, very bad. You've got to hand it to these companies though, they're sure getting good at making a quick buck as easily as possible. Remake == no risk. Maximum profit for minimum effort. Forget creativity.
Don't some old programs written in Visual C++ 6 use a runtime library, MSVCRT.dll?
Just because a program is calling procedures in shared libraries, doesn't mean it isn't in machine code. You can sometimes choose whether libraries should be statically or dynamically linked.
Bond: How fast does it go?
Goodhead: It can go up to 20Gs, but that would be fatal. 3Gs is equivalent to take-off pressure. Most people pass out at 7.
Bond: You make a great saleswoman.
Goodhead: You don't have to worry. This is what we call a chicken switch. You just keep your finger on that button and the moment the pressure gets too much for you, release the button and the power's cut off.
Bond: Just like that?!
Goodhead: Oh come on Mr Bond, a 70 year old can take 3Gs!
Bond: Well the trouble is there's never a 70 year old around when you need one...
not reporting any of these cases is considered a crime, for which the company could be heavily fined or even closed down and it's managers jailed.
I got told on a Money Laundering course in the UK that individual employees, rather than their managers, can be held responsible for failing to report suspicious activity, and jailed for up to 14 years!
Somewhat harsh, I thought.
As I understand it, the effects of relativity happen so as all observers see the speed of light as being the same, regardless of their reference point. That's the basis of special relativity though and I don't know much about general relativity - the bit that deals with gravitation.
However, if time slows down for a traveller locally - he'll see the rest of the universe as passing by much quicker as a result - hence from his point of view, his journey time is greatly reduced.
It's modded funny but he has a point. Scratching and some live mixing techniques are made much more intuitive and "hands-on" than can be achieved with CDs. Sure, you can write software to simulate these effects up to a point - but it really isn't the same - and where's the fun in that? Mixing with decks in front of a live audience looks a lot better.
Well, duh!!
"This baby's off the scale!".
"Sarcasm detector, oh that's a REALLY useful invention!"
BOOM!
A copy living on the moon would cease being you as soon as either one of you experienced anything
Or would the one that stayed at home cease being you at that point and you would become the copy on the moon?
The fact that we can ask such a question and cannot determine a unique answer shows that we cannot say with any confidence that someone's consciousness could actually be transferred to a copy of their body.
Even if you can call consciousness an illusion, it still exists if only in the form of a unique point of view (i mean POV in the literal sense) at an instant in time.
Just because "you"'re not around to challenge the copy, it doesn't necessarily follow that from your point of view you became the copy. You might just as easily have become a different person, or a whale, or an armchair, or nothing at all - the point is there's no way of knowing - all we know currently is that your memories would live on in the new copy. From your point of view you might never experience life as that copy.
It's quite right, as others pointed out, that you can't prove you are the same "you" as you were in the past - all you have is the memories of the mind you seem to occupy at this instant in time. I would say that this is the crux of the problem. If we can't even say with any certainty if this continuity exists or not - how can we make sure that continuity is preserved?
...and the existence of that continuity does matter otherwise there's no point in performing selfish actions or indeed doing anything in life - why bother when you don't know if you will still be the same person ten minutes, or a nanosecond, from now?
and anybody that chooses to can breed.
That's simply not true. Some repulsively unattractive people may never find a mate; similarly, extremely shy people. So unless they choose to donate their sperm / eggs, they'll never contribute to the gene pool.
In theory over millennia this should favour evolution towards more aesthetically and physically attractive humans who are also more confident and sociable.
People always tend to assume evolution is about those that survive - whilst that helps the important issue is whether they ever breed or not.
This is news for nerds after all so I would have thought these issues would be of great concern to some of us!
Get a TV card and the DivX codec and wonder no more! I always tell myself I'm gonna compress the films (movies) and program(me)s further later and burn 'em to CD or save up for a DVD writer ... or delete 'em when I've watched 'em, but I never do and all my hard drives are almost always 90% full or worse.
I don't want a 20GB microdrive but give me a 2TB hard drive any day! I also wish motherboards would start supporting the higher RAID levels (was it 5 or 6 that used hamming codes providing both redundancy and improved performance?).
That would be US quadrillion. It's only a measly 8,559 UK billion gallons - or more usefully, 7,127 UK billion Imperial gallons. :P
Hope this helps!
With regard to the search for Martian life - I hope they're taking adequate precautions to prevent contamination with microbes from Earth.
Chief Wiggum: Fat Tony is a cancer on this fair city! He is the cancer and I am the... uhhh... What cures cancer?
Admittedly this is half off topic as this didn't entirely keep working but my bizarrely recurring bad luck with this deserves mentioning.
I bought a second hand P120 laptop a few years ago which worked great until I dropped it once - this bust the floppy drive. I eventually found a firm in the US that could sell me a replacement drive - after shipping to the UK it cost almost as much as I paid for the laptop. Plus the staff at the bank had never heard of a wire transfer before and accidentally paid the firm for it twice!
It gets worse as upon picking up the new drive from Goods In at work, it slipped out of my fingers and fell to the ground. Next the tiny unique ribbon connector that was used to connect up the drive wore out due to the amount of fiddling I'd had to do, and to this day I never found a replacement.
What I did find at one point was an external laptop floppy drive which had a plug that matched an undocumented port on the side of the laptop. No sooner had I tried that out than the laptop started smoking and the plastic casing above the port melted slightly and dipped down. Obviously not compatible then. The laptop still works ok - though there are some bad sectors on the hard drive and I can never reinstall the OS as it won't boot off a floppy. Not that I need it anymore, my latest mobile phone does more than that piece of crap!