Isn't a bit strange that you start your post with "turn around the argument", then agree totally with the person you're fighting? I guess at least someone has turned his argument about:-)
Yet it seems to be that these days the Russians have all the vision and none of the money. Meanwhile you guys, (the US) have all the money and no vision.
How about spending a few hundred million dollars on building a orbital solar power station, that should repay its buildning costs 10 times over? Americans would laugh at such a proposal, meanwhile ther're a dozen detailed enginering examples in Russia.
How about bringing back one single nickle/iron asteriod from the belt (or closer!). It will cost a few billion dollars, but the revenues are potentially 1000 times that. Again, the Russians will probably have everything worked out down to the type of bolts to use...
Back in 1988, I bought Chess Master 2000 for the Amiga as a present to my father.
I played it quite a lot of times, and became very impressed. So, I made a bet with my father for $10.000 (no less), that by New Years Eve 2000, a computer program would beat the current human world champion of chess, using tournament rules.
I haven't reminded him of the bet (yet)... After all, I make lots more money than he does, don't want to impoverish the dear old guy:-)
Conclusion: The age of human chess is near its end. It will fall before the might of brute force calculation, just as Nine Men's Morris did in 1996 (spoiler: the game is a draw). Maybe we feeble humans should learn to concentrate on the things we do well. Such as anything having to do with emotions and pleasure.
...hardly anybody uses the old British billion definition any more
Phfft. Hardly anyone except every nation.neq. UK or US. Million, milliard, billion, billiard, trillion, trilliard. This has the wanted property that eg. a trillion is 1,000,000^3, and so a xllion has x*6 zeros. This is not true in the american system.
Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Färöarna, France, Germany and most of UK. Those are the ones I am 100% sure of. The ones I think use the European system (but am not totally sure of) is: All the rest of Europe, all of Africa, all of Asia except Australia and New Zeeland (?), most of South America.
It's just like the way the americans are refusing to accept SI units, when every other country uses them. But I guess, if it's the American Way, it is the Right Way. And if we refuse to admit this, the USA will be happy to bomb us into submission:-)
Burt, "tacking" means altering course in a sailing vessel. You probably ment "taking". I wouldn't have mentioned it except it's the fourth time I saw you do it.
Just a friendly correction.
Re:At What Cost? -- Why waste trees?
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 1
Why the plant? Cut out the middle man and hose the cows up directly. Cows fart *huge* volumes of methane...
But today's gigahertz machines are able to [keep up with an A500], which is why Amigas are finally fading away even among the diehards.
The second I read this, I performed a test. I grabbed the browser and yanked it violently back and forth (serveral windows behind it). It looked like I got about 3 updates per second. This computer runs at 900MHz, the A500 runs at 7 MHz and I would get >15 updates per second with the same number of windows. A500 is still ahead, but not for long... Windows will pass it in another 5 years.
Yes, I realise the Amiga was displaying vastly less challenging programs in four color graphics at 620x256, but that's not the point here. The point is that speed and responsivness are an important part of the user experience.
The only computer that has awed we more than the Amiga is the old SGI Onyx back at the U. No matter what you did to it, the UI would animate fluidly at max frame rate.. It wasn't really very fast compared to some of the other computers on campus, but it felt like a true super computer.
['Foundation' type galaxy]... billions of inhabitable planets, all uninhabited and just waiting for us to colonize them.
You never read his latter days sequels, did you? It turned out that there was a perfectly good reason those planets were lacking higher life. Robots, following the first law to its extremes rampaged throughout the galaxy, killing all higher life.
I have ADSL from BoStream, and I get >2Mbps (actual measured throughput) and a single static IP, for about $30 a month. Though I expect the throughput do drop as this ISP becomes more popular.
Oh yes, "UFO: Enemy unknown" for the Amiga... One of the most played game on my A4000:-)
The very first time I completed it, I did so in a spectacular manner. I sent a bunch of scouts ahead, leaving people behind every so often to maintain sol relationships all the way. When I finally faced the big SOB, I could finish it with a single blaster shot, *from the entrance*. 5 right angle turns, one of them vertical and *smack*: Elerium-induced nuclear fusion right in the brain sack!
Keep working mate, in some years you may have a SimCity beater!
Re:Distinguish between Modelling and Emulation....
on
Simulating Societies
·
· Score: 1
...this author may think he explains ethnic genocide in Rwanda, but never points out that his logic fails miserable in places like Switzerland, Brazil, Mexico, Russia...
But I think he does! Switzerland doesn't behave the same way, because their parameters aren't set the same.
The variables per person, (from the extremely fluffy description in the article) are in this case, General Discontent, Ethnic Hate and I guess Fear of Police.
"Ethnic Hate" goes up everetime you see a green/blue person in your neighborhood.. "Fear of Police" goes up everytime you see a police nearby. It isn't mentioned, but I guess that police go to neighborhods with many killings, and killings occur when "Ethnic Hate" is large enough and there are blue/green people nearby, and "Fear of Police" is low enough.
I don't really get how they calculate the general "Discontent".
Now, these variables apply differently to different persons. Basically each person has a constant (or two) saying how influenceable this person is by this variable. For instance, I am 0.0% influenceable by "Ethnic Hostility" (I wish. sadly, there are still some ugly places inside me where I'm still a racist.) and 100% influencable by "Fear of Police" (which is even less true, 50% would be more like it).
Each person (dot in the pictures) has an individual Ethnic-Hate-suspectabilty and Fear-of-Police-suspectability. In Rwanda, the general Fear-of-Police-suspectability was very low, and Ethnic-Hate-suspectability was high. In Switzerland, Ethnic-Hate-suspectability is low (but always present! Those damn Italians...), while Fear-of-Police-suspectability is very high.
I was struck by the utter lack of empathy in this thread. Suppose *you*, say, broke a leg. Immediately you were fired from your job and put in house arrest. Then your old work mates went into lengthy discussions about wether they should give you a Aibo or a real dog to console you, while shunning you utterly?
... This is why the Intel architecture beat Macintosh in the 80's, because to play most games you had to have an Intel/Microsoft machine.
I totally agree, of course you would choose the stunning CGA 4 color 4ps stutter of _King's Quest 1(2)_ over the deadening b/w static screens of _The Fool's Errand_ any day. And both of these games are naturally superior to such games as:
Amegas, Arkanoid, Awesome
Barbarian, Battle Squadron, Black Crypt, Budokan
Chuck Rock
Deuteros, Defender of the Crown, Dune
Emerald Mine, EMotion, Eye of the Beholder
FA18 Interceptor
Giana Sisters, Golden Axe, Gravity Force
Hybris
IK+, The Immortal, It Came From the Desert
James Pond, Jumping Jackson (with a top 10,000 list!)
Katakis, Kick Off
Lotus Challenge, Lemmings! 1/2/3
Marble Madness
Ninja Spirit, Nuclear War, NetHack of course!
Operation Wolf, Obliterator
Populous, Prince of Persia
Qwak
R-Type, Rainbow Islands, Rocket Ranger
Shadow of the Beast, SimCity, Speedball, Super Cars, Stunt Car Racer!!
Turrican, Test Drive
Utopia?
Vampires Empire was slightly fun
Wings, Wings of Fury
Xenon(2)
Y... Eh, eh....
Zynaps, Zak McKracken
Just a few of the best of the top of my head (slight web support:-). I cheated slightly, since I allowed the year 1990 (there where so many great games that year!)
Yes, I'm very sure they would laugh right along with Hitler, too. I saw not a shread of irony in the original post so I was obviously horrified. Note that I said "this must be a troll but...". Still, I just couldn't let it rest, which - I guess - makes it a very sucessful troll, if it is one.
PS. Learn to spell. "You are" -> "you're". And learn grammar. " less defective than yours is".
So the very radiation/fan noise that destroys you is also a source of succour?
Prolonging your years beyond measure while bringing horrible pain and mutilation...
Damn, I think it's beginning to happen to me too, after buying that Shuttle SV24, the PS2, the new video and the flashy cellphone... I guess we'll be Gollum together, at least.
Each of your points is false (point by point retrobution available by answering this message.)
If you really mean what you're saying you're the next Stalin/Hitler/Pol Pot/Idi Amin (hey, Idi liked cannibalism to, wish he gets to chew on you in hell), hope to Dog you never go into politics!
1) Cows have an even number of legs. 2) Cows have forelegs and two back legs, equalling six legs. 3) Six is an odd amount of legs for a cow. 4) By 1 and 3 cows have both an even number of legs and an odd number of legs. 5) The only number that is both odd and even is infinity.
Cows have an infinite number of legs. QED.
Re:Respected?
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The time machine variations I have seen (ie. massive rotating cylinder, toroid black hole and a few more) only allow you to travel back in time to the moment the machine was set up - and only forward until the time it is dismantled.
It all has to do with creating closed time-like loops, loosely a path through space that allows you to return to the same position at an earlier time. Want to go back further, go around another time. Want to go forward, loop in the other direction. In other words, the 'machine' itself does not move through time. Only you do, by following specific paths around it.
Most time machine conecpts involves extremely dense objects (think neutron star matter or singularities) moving at sizeable fractions of the speed of light. I wonder exactly how much power those lasers of his generate?!
On the subject of forking universes, paradoxes etc., my understanding (IANAP, IAAP-groupie) is that there can be only one time line, which must be consistent. When you apply quantum mechanics to a system with closed time-like loops, the probability wave functions sum to zero for any events which would be paradoxical. So, you can't kill gramps. Think 12 Monkeys.
Oh, and some believe (about 50/50 among those I have spoken to) that the probability waves will sum to infinity for all non-paradoxical events, creating infinite energy densities and blowing up any time machine even as it forms. Hopefully not taking the city/planet/universe with it.
Photons may not have a rest mass, but they do have an energy. When a photon 'leaves' the black hole, it's energy is lowered to zero. By E=hf this means the frequency is also zero, ie. the photon has flat-lined.
Interestingly enough this would seem to mean that if the zero energy photons falls into another black hole, it would be 'revived', allowing communication between the interiors of two black holes...
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't a bit strange that you start your post with "turn around the argument", then agree totally with the person you're fighting? I guess at least someone has turned his argument about :-)
Yet it seems to be that these days the Russians have all the vision and none of the money. Meanwhile you guys, (the US) have all the money and no vision.
How about spending a few hundred million dollars on building a orbital solar power station, that should repay its buildning costs 10 times over? Americans would laugh at such a proposal, meanwhile ther're a dozen detailed enginering examples in Russia.
How about bringing back one single nickle/iron asteriod from the belt (or closer!). It will cost a few billion dollars, but the revenues are potentially 1000 times that. Again, the Russians will probably have everything worked out down to the type of bolts to use...
Back in 1988, I bought Chess Master 2000 for the Amiga as a present to my father.
I played it quite a lot of times, and became very impressed. So, I made a bet with my father for $10.000 (no less), that by New Years Eve 2000, a computer program would beat the current human world champion of chess, using tournament rules.
I haven't reminded him of the bet (yet)... After all, I make lots more money than he does, don't want to impoverish the dear old guy :-)
Conclusion: The age of human chess is near its end. It will fall before the might of brute force calculation, just as Nine Men's Morris did in 1996 (spoiler: the game is a draw). Maybe we feeble humans should learn to concentrate on the things we do well. Such as anything having to do with emotions and pleasure.
Phfft. Hardly anyone except every nation .neq. UK or US. Million, milliard, billion, billiard, trillion, trilliard. This has the wanted property that eg. a trillion is 1,000,000^3, and so a xllion has x*6 zeros. This is not true in the american system.
Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Färöarna, France, Germany and most of UK. Those are the ones I am 100% sure of. The ones I think use the European system (but am not totally sure of) is: All the rest of Europe, all of Africa, all of Asia except Australia and New Zeeland (?), most of South America.
It's just like the way the americans are refusing to accept SI units, when every other country uses them. But I guess, if it's the American Way, it is the Right Way. And if we refuse to admit this, the USA will be happy to bomb us into submission :-)
Burt, "tacking" means altering course in a sailing vessel. You probably ment "taking". I wouldn't have mentioned it except it's the fourth time I saw you do it. Just a friendly correction.
Why the plant? Cut out the middle man and hose the cows up directly. Cows fart *huge* volumes of methane...
But today's gigahertz machines are able to [keep up with an A500], which is why Amigas are finally fading away even among the diehards.
The second I read this, I performed a test. I grabbed the browser and yanked it violently back and forth (serveral windows behind it). It looked like I got about 3 updates per second. This computer runs at 900MHz, the A500 runs at 7 MHz and I would get >15 updates per second with the same number of windows. A500 is still ahead, but not for long... Windows will pass it in another 5 years.
Yes, I realise the Amiga was displaying vastly less challenging programs in four color graphics at 620x256, but that's not the point here. The point is that speed and responsivness are an important part of the user experience.
The only computer that has awed we more than the Amiga is the old SGI Onyx back at the U. No matter what you did to it, the UI would animate fluidly at max frame rate.. It wasn't really very fast compared to some of the other computers on campus, but it felt like a true super computer.
Careful, he is probably talking about you. :-)
[Pile of radioactive dust ending] ...did you get to see the finale if you did that, with the brain saying, "Uhhh we actually come in peace"?
Oh yes. Which seemed quite odd to me, considering ve should be a smoking pile of radioactive dust at the time.
About losses, some died, but I kinda figured this was the grand finale, so...
['Foundation' type galaxy]... billions of inhabitable planets, all uninhabited and just waiting for us to colonize them.
You never read his latter days sequels, did you? It turned out that there was a perfectly good reason those planets were lacking higher life. Robots, following the first law to its extremes rampaged throughout the galaxy, killing all higher life.
Hear, hear.
I have ADSL from BoStream, and I get >2Mbps (actual measured throughput) and a single static IP, for about $30 a month. Though I expect the throughput do drop as this ISP becomes more popular.
Oh yes, "UFO: Enemy unknown" for the Amiga... One of the most played game on my A4000 :-)
The very first time I completed it, I did so in a spectacular manner. I sent a bunch of scouts ahead, leaving people behind every so often to maintain sol relationships all the way. When I finally faced the big SOB, I could finish it with a single blaster shot, *from the entrance*. 5 right angle turns, one of them vertical and *smack*: Elerium-induced nuclear fusion right in the brain sack!
Keep working mate, in some years you may have a SimCity beater!
But I think he does! Switzerland doesn't behave the same way, because their parameters aren't set the same.
The variables per person, (from the extremely fluffy description in the article) are in this case, General Discontent, Ethnic Hate and I guess Fear of Police.
"Ethnic Hate" goes up everetime you see a green/blue person in your neighborhood.. "Fear of Police" goes up everytime you see a police nearby. It isn't mentioned, but I guess that police go to neighborhods with many killings, and killings occur when "Ethnic Hate" is large enough and there are blue/green people nearby, and "Fear of Police" is low enough.
I don't really get how they calculate the general "Discontent".
Now, these variables apply differently to different persons. Basically each person has a constant (or two) saying how influenceable this person is by this variable. For instance, I am 0.0% influenceable by "Ethnic Hostility" (I wish. sadly, there are still some ugly places inside me where I'm still a racist.) and 100% influencable by "Fear of Police" (which is even less true, 50% would be more like it).
Each person (dot in the pictures) has an individual Ethnic-Hate-suspectabilty and Fear-of-Police-suspectability. In Rwanda, the general Fear-of-Police-suspectability was very low, and Ethnic-Hate-suspectability was high. In Switzerland, Ethnic-Hate-suspectability is low (but always present! Those damn Italians...), while Fear-of-Police-suspectability is very high.
I was struck by the utter lack of empathy in this thread. Suppose *you*, say, broke a leg. Immediately you were fired from your job and put in house arrest. Then your old work mates went into lengthy discussions about wether they should give you a Aibo or a real dog to console you, while shunning you utterly?
I totally agree, of course you would choose the stunning CGA 4 color 4ps stutter of _King's Quest 1(2)_ over the deadening b/w static screens of _The Fool's Errand_ any day. And both of these games are naturally superior to such games as:
Just a few of the best of the top of my head (slight web support :-). I cheated slightly, since I allowed the year 1990 (there where so many great games that year!)
Find great pictures of all these games here.
Yes, I'm very sure they would laugh right along with Hitler, too. I saw not a shread of irony in the original post so I was obviously horrified. Note that I said "this must be a troll but...". Still, I just couldn't let it rest, which - I guess - makes it a very sucessful troll, if it is one.
PS. Learn to spell. "You are" -> "you're". And learn grammar. " less defective than yours is".
So the very radiation/fan noise that destroys you is also a source of succour?
Prolonging your years beyond measure while bringing horrible pain and mutilation...
Damn, I think it's beginning to happen to me too, after buying that Shuttle SV24, the PS2, the new video and the flashy cellphone... I guess we'll be Gollum together, at least.
Yes, I antitrust MS. Implicitly.
Sorry, I just had to say that :-) Mod me down, please.
Sinister side note:
Someone else brought up the Fermi Paradox: Where the fuck are the aliens? (short version :-)
If
- creating a time machine is this easy
- creating a time machine will blow up the universe
then only the very first intelligent spieces will ever create a time machine (ie. we).Therefore we must be the first, and therefore our universe will cease to exist in a few months when the prototype is first used ;-)
This has got to be a troll...
Each of your points is false (point by point retrobution available by answering this message.)
If you really mean what you're saying you're the next Stalin/Hitler/Pol Pot/Idi Amin (hey, Idi liked cannibalism to, wish he gets to chew on you in hell), hope to Dog you never go into politics!
1) Cows have an even number of legs.
2) Cows have forelegs and two back legs, equalling six legs.
3) Six is an odd amount of legs for a cow.
4) By 1 and 3 cows have both an even number of legs and an odd number of legs.
5) The only number that is both odd and even is infinity.
Cows have an infinite number of legs. QED.
The time machine variations I have seen (ie. massive rotating cylinder, toroid black hole and a few more) only allow you to travel back in time to the moment the machine was set up - and only forward until the time it is dismantled.
It all has to do with creating closed time-like loops, loosely a path through space that allows you to return to the same position at an earlier time. Want to go back further, go around another time. Want to go forward, loop in the other direction. In other words, the 'machine' itself does not move through time. Only you do, by following specific paths around it.
Most time machine conecpts involves extremely dense objects (think neutron star matter or singularities) moving at sizeable fractions of the speed of light. I wonder exactly how much power those lasers of his generate?!
On the subject of forking universes, paradoxes etc., my understanding (IANAP, IAAP-groupie) is that there can be only one time line, which must be consistent. When you apply quantum mechanics to a system with closed time-like loops, the probability wave functions sum to zero for any events which would be paradoxical. So, you can't kill gramps. Think 12 Monkeys.
Oh, and some believe (about 50/50 among those I have spoken to) that the probability waves will sum to infinity for all non-paradoxical events, creating infinite energy densities and blowing up any time machine even as it forms. Hopefully not taking the city/planet/universe with it.
I looked for the "over my dead body" option, but couldn't find it, so I voted Neal. Apparently, most people agree with me.
Photons may not have a rest mass, but they do have an energy. When a photon 'leaves' the black hole, it's energy is lowered to zero. By E=hf this means the frequency is also zero, ie. the photon has flat-lined.
Interestingly enough this would seem to mean that if the zero energy photons falls into another black hole, it would be 'revived', allowing communication between the interiors of two black holes...