Oh yeah, and since that introductory page stupidly doesn't link back to any other pages on the site, and the root page of the domain is less than helpful for finding the bulk of material on that site here is the link to the main site for anybody who wants to read more...
Well, a tech-independent approach to it is to breastfeed your kids (or have their mom do it) to pass antibodies on from the mother, giving the kid an automatic tolerance to many diseases without having to keep them completely absent from the body. Aside from that, while keeping good hygine is commendable so as to not foster whole colonies of microbes around you, overdoing is just as harmful: I've got barefoot most of my life, went frog-hunting in filthy swamp-water as a boy, don't sanitize anything (by which I mean antibacterial disinfectants and such), don't take antibiotics unless I'm being hit with something *really* nasty...
In general, just by doing nothing special I keep a constant mild exposure to various bugs out there that might do me in if caught in large doses unexpected, and as such my immune system is generally able to learn to cope with them in these mild exposures without being completely overwhelmed. It's the same idea behind 'immunization', which should really be called something more like 'acclimitization'. As such, while I am not immune to things like the common cold or influenza, and in fact carry them when they're going around and can spread them to others, I myself almost never suffer the pronounced effects of those diseases.
Same way Europeans exploring America, long before they ever settled here, passed diseases they weren't even presently suffering from on to the native populations just by being there and breathing on them. The native populations, having no exposure to any such diseases, quickly succame to them, while Europeans and their descendents to this day walk around barely noticing the things that wiped out most of the population of this continent.
But to answer your question, if we *do* manage to get genetic engineering or nanotech down to an exact enough science to safely augment our own immune systems, then I think it's a great idea. I certainly won't be having it done to myself until it's well tested, but if some people want to be earlier adopters, I say let 'em. It's not going to hurt me that some people have stronger or weaker immune systems, unless they react by putting more pressure on the microbes with all their sanitizers and antibiotics and wind up selectively breeding for something that'll kill me too.
defeating viruses before they get too mutated to contain
Do you honestly expect that we will *ever* be able to "defeat" viruses, or contagious disease in general (bacteria et al)? That's a war that can never be won. The microbes predate us by ages, and some of them got together to form into things like us because it was for their benefit; and if we get too out of line and keep trying to wipe them out, all we'll do is selectively breed them to be better and killing us. They breed faster, adapt faster, and can survive in a greater range of climates than ever we can. They will always outlast us.
Our only hope is to make *ourselves* more tolerant of them. Consider: the human immune system is one of the greater ones on the planet right now, and we're just crawling with bugs compared to things like cats or dogs, who need to be mostly sterile or else they'll die; their immune systems focus on keeping them clean of parasites, ours just makes sure they don't get out of hand. Certain reptiles have even us beat in that department, and they're veritable disease bags by comparison. Tolerance of non-lethal parasites is the only successful strategy here: tightening down the screws will only breed for more lethal ones.
(Replace "microbes" and "people" with "individuals" and "governments" and you might have some political commentary there, too).
Most people expect a browser to display html, download files, handle multimedia content (flash at a minimum), make use of cookies and have the associated management tools for the cookies, have javascript support and associated management tools and options (e.g. disallow sites from opening popups, but have a little icon so you can enable for a certain site), have java support with associated options, have tabbed browsing with associated options for all links (e.g. open in new window vs open in new tab), etc, etc.
A browser is a platform upon which many types of applications can be built, that handles a variety of very different content and executable code. And it's all supposed to be so user-configurable that even if someone has cookies and javascript disabled, the application is supposed to be functional. And it's supposed to look good no matter what the font settings or resolution on the local system.
This is why web applications and web browsers are complicated. If you really want a browser to just "browse," get netscape 3 or lynx or something.
This is also why the WWW is such a huge mess today. It was designed to be a method of rendering hypertext markup over the Internet, and has slowly grown into this "platform" mess that it is today. If it had been approached from a "platform" standpoint in the first place, I imagine it would be structured a lot differently...
- The "browser" would be basically a network-aware file browser; quite a lot like Windows Explorer / Internet Explorer in that manner. This is one thing that I can honestly give MS some credit for; displaying (at least certain) documents inline, rather than always opening them in another program, is a Good Thing. -The "browser" would make use of plug-in modules to display different kinds of content in-line (instead of double-clicking something in your file browser and having it open somewhere else, that something shows up *in* the browser). The OSX Finder works in a similar manner, though I don't believe it uses plugins to render the inline content, and it only does so in column mode, not just the content alone in a window. - If some content (like HTML) has embedded content (like a JPEG), be able to call on another module to display that content inline as appropriate. - If you point the browser at an executable, like a Java applet, then your computer will try to run that executable. If you've got a JVM module (wherein your Java setting would be kept), Java applets would run. If you're on a Mac,.exe files won't. No embedding executables into documents! Documents are not programs, and programs don't belong in document. - On the same note, Javascript as it is would not exist. You'd point your browser at, or be linked to, a *Javascript file*, which would execute via a Javascript interpreter module (wherein your Javascript settings would be kept), and probably pull up some HTML files and so on and so forth to give you your interactive "web application". Programs/scripts can call on and manipulate documents just fine, but documents running programs is where problematic things like ActiveX come from. - The browser itself would be aware that some things in some content reference other content or programs, and have settings for what to do about tabs, new windows, etc.
In the end result you could have something that functions a lot like the web does today, but is implemented far more elegantly. A standard interface for such a variety of content and code over the Internet, implemented explicitly as a replacement for your file browser (like Konqueror or Explorer do), preferably keeping the old methods of browsing available too (in OSX, my OS of choice, I'd love to just see the icon view function as an inline "web" view using WebCore when pointed at something that's not a folder).
THAT would be a true "platform". What we have today is a loose amalgamation of standards half-cobbled together with no rhyme or reason, desperately trying to move forward while maintaining backward compatib
I think you're correct that the gravitic/acceleration/etc effects through a wormhole are independent of the motion of the ends relative to each other, but I don't think it would work as an impedance both directions as you are saying.
Perhaps a better example to illustrate the 'leak' of gravity and other effects I'm talking about would be a more terrestrial scenario. Say you're standing on Earth in a nice, perfectly flat parking lot with two door-shaped ends of a wormhole nearby. You're looking through one end and out the other end at your friend. You toss a ball to your friend through the wormhole and it follows a parabolic arc across the bridges space, since gravity on both ends is essentially identical.
Then your friend steps aside and tilts his end of it down so you're now looking at the pavement. Shouldn't you then also fall "down" toward that pavement through your end? Gravity should reach across the wormhole. If that other end is put on a centrifuge and spun up to 1G of acceleration, and you're looking "down" (or "out" from the centrifuge) through the wormhole, shouldn't you be pulled that way too? After all, acceleration and gravity are *identical* forces, otherwise indistinguishable.
And the forces, of course, must be equal and opposite. If your end of the wormhole sucks, then the other must blow, so to speak. If the acceleration is great enough to cause relativistic effects, then the gravity shear is going to be pretty steep across the wormhole, but one direction is still "up" (the end accelerating less) and the other is "down" (the end accelerating more). Plus, since time would appear to move more slowly, light would be red-shifted, there would seem to be less kinetic energy in the atmosphere and thus things would seem colder, pressures would seem lower...
And interestingly, though it seems that the hotter, higher-pressure air would blow "down" the gravity shear to the cooler low-pressure area, soon the pressures would equalize and you'd end up with any warmer air in the "lower" (more accelerated) areas "rising" across the wormhole to the "higher" (less accelerated) areas, just like you do with a body of air in a normal gravity well. If you had a wormhole lying horizontally on the Earth's surface, looking "down" it into a space station under high gravity or acceleration, it'd be just like drilling a very, very big hole in the ground: a lot of air would flow down there and create higher pressures at the bottom, enough to counter the force of gravity and keep more air from "falling in".
The question that now hovers in my mind is how these forces affect the apparatus sustaining the wormhole. If you hung one end in orbit around Earth and sent the other near a black hole, would the one in orbit come crashing down or flying away, depending on its facing? I'm trying to think of a terrestrial analog: if you placed two ends of a small wormhole (and by "end" I'm meaning the generating apparatus), horizontally in the earlier parking lot, one facing down and one facing up (presuming one-sided entryways), and stood on the up-facing side, standing (through the wormhole) on the segment of parking lot under the other, down-facing end, then grabbed the apparatus (say it's lightweight enough to lift), pushed off the pavement and lifted your end of the wormhole over your head, and stepped out the other end... wait, how did the other end get lifted? Does applying a force to one end apply a force to the other end? That only makes sense of the apparatuses are quantum-entangled... which actually seems like a similar proposition to a wormhole, linking two fields in space together.
Are wormholes really nothing more than quantum-entangled... space?
Right, that is what I intended in my original post. Not that you are "moving space" which is a non-sequitur, but that the particular quirk or pattern of space is changing - that 'this part' bends over to 'that part', is changing, that you are making it so 'this other part' now bends over to 'that part. You are "moving" space the same way you are "moving" the blanket - the very notion of being able to 'fold' space like that implies another space-like metric aside from that of space itself.
Lets take 'motion' out of the equation entirely. The point I was making about relativistic speeds is that, in different parts of space, depending on acceleration (including distance to a gravity well), time passes at different rates. On a spacestation orbiting near a black hole, clocks turn much more slowly than clocks in open space (from an 'objective' standpoint, that is; since the people in the spacestation are also aging more slowly, they see the clocks moving as normal).
But what if you had a door-sized wormhole that you can clearly look through, running from that spacestation to another one in open space far away. Would the people on the open-space end of the wormhole look through, and see the clock on the near-black-hole station turning more slowly? If so, then it seems all sorts of other effects would pass across the wormhole as a consequence; it'd almost be like making an extremely steep gravity shear. Which would actually make a lot of sense; the people in open space would suddenly, through the wormhole, be very close to a black hole. Since the effects of gravity are identical to the effects of acceleration, it seems then that in this case, putting one end of a wormhole on Earth and sending the other away and back at relativistic speeds would be like creating a new gravity well on Earth, reaching out through the wormhole.
Or alternatively, do the people in the open-space station see clocks on the other side moving at the same rate as their own? That implies that just having the wormhole connected is creating some sort of causal dissonance; that the people in open space, 'moving into the future' faster than those on the spacestation near the black hole, are looking through the wormhole back in time to the earlier time on other station, which is lagging behind their time.
Every time anyone speaks of wormholes and relativity they seem to assume the latter scenario. I'm beginning to think the former is more likely. Of course, with the former scenario, as soon as you have the wormhole open and the effects (pressure, temperature, gravity differences) level out, since 'gravity' is 'leaking' out the wormhole to the other end, the timeframes will synch up too. And as far as I understand it, by current theories you don't 'open up' a wormhole to somewhere else, you build the wormhole ends together and then separate them, so any changes in gravity/acceleration between the two ends would be gradual and even; as a ship with one end accelerated at human-bearable speeds, human-bearable effects would be felt through the other end of the wormhole while it accelerates. If a station with one end of a wormhole approaches a human-bearable distance to a black hole, then human-bearable effects will be felt through the other end while it's there.
I understand the strangeness of having a little twist of space, a wormhole, "attached" to some physical object, and I don't have a good explanation for that either; but consider that that twist of space, if it is "stationary", must be stationary *to* something. After all, the Earth is flying around the sun which is flying through the galaxy... if we made a wormhole here on Earth wouldn't it suddenly go flying off into space at incredible rates? Intuitively, the answer would appear to be no, because our frame of reference is the Earth, and there is absolute frame of reference (according to "everybody" - I have questions about that which have never been satisfactorily answered) that we are moving relative to . ..
But why is the wormhole 'bound' to the Earth? I'd think it much more likely to be 'bound' to whatever is creating or "opening" it. In which case, moving that thing would move that end of the wormhole.
Either way, I don't see why you find the latter analysis preferable to the former on such grounds, because the latter also assumes that one can move the end of a wormhole by moving the apparatus that's creating it.
Re:"Advanced Hunt-and-Peck" works
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Blank Keyboard
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· Score: 1
Yeah i do the same (typing without a keyboard).. although im probably screwed up because i cant really talk or understand people.. i type/read way faster than i can talk/hear.. and i cant write at all, i'm always thinking of letters way ahead of what im writing and i make tons of mistakes and i forget how to spell words.. so what i do is type with my "air keyboard" and once im "typing" i suddenly can spell the word im trying to write heh
Sounds a bit austistic/aspergers type... in-person communication throws a lot of us off, but many are extremely eloquent in written communication. It's the social feedback element of it, I think; you're not getting a response as you type, you type and then you get a response and then you type more... in person, as soon as you open your mouth the other person is saying something just by the manner in which they're listening to you.
i noticed though, my wrists never bother me but everyone i know who types a lot using the correct method is always complaining about wrist ache.. how are your wrists?
Fine, in general; sometimes, depending on where I'm working (keyboard placement relative to desk edge, and hardness of the desk itself), the parts of my wrists which contact the desk most get a bit sore. But I don't get wrist cramps from typing itself. That's what I meant that it's painful for me to hold my wrists still, fingers on the home row, and try to touch-type; it's just an unnatural contortion. Maybe it's cause I've got big hands and broad shoulders; I imagine a smaller person could sit like that much more comfortably.
On a related note: what's your take on the original "huge" Xbox controllers? I rather liked them... other controllers are all too small....
I've always wished someone could build a variable keyboard, since I read about something similar in one of the old Foundation books.
You've basically got a touch-sensitive display, which is thus capable of reconfiguring its "keys" and such at whim - except this control board is also capable of extruding its surface, to give tactile feedback. You could implement sliders bars on the control board (by moving the bumps) for volume or whatnot, leave an empty square off to one side for a trackpad / graphics tablet, etc. Individual apps could present you with their own customized control interfaces.
The hard part is just coming up with the tactile element of this device. As a touch screen it's easily doable today, but the lack of tactile feedback would destroy people's typing speeds.
"Advanced Hunt-and-Peck" works
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Blank Keyboard
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· Score: 1
I can vouch for this style. I never formally learned to type, and absolutely hated forced typing classes in grade school. I got my own computer at 10 years old (I'm 23 next month), and just started "hunt-and-peck"ing. At my prime I had a 140 peak, 100 sustained wpm. That was using the old, ADB Apple Extended Keyboards, which sound very similar to this "Model M" people keep speaking of - a very solid, sturdy keyboard with nice resistance and a loud *clack* when pressed. Now that I wind up using a variety of significantly smaller keyboards, all of different sizes (the iMac keyboard I use primarily here at work, various laptop keyboards, my Apple Pro Keyboard at home that I'm too cheap to replace), I can tell that my typing speed has significantly dropped, though lay people still say I'm "really fast" when they see me go at it (I don't know what it is exactly now).
I don't look at the keyboard when I type. I use all of my fingers, not just my index fingers. My index fingers actually rest on F and J like they "should", but [checking now] my pinky fingers on left-shift and return, thumbs on the spacebar and my middle and ring fingers on W & E (left) and I & O.
That's just when resting waiting to type, though; my wrists roll about, and my hands slide up and down and left and right over the keyboard. I find it painful to my (large) hands to try to keep my fingers scrunched together over the home row, wrists still and just reach with the "appropriate" fingers. I notice now, it seems that my left hand does more of the main typing work, probably so my right hand is free to reach for the arrows, number pad, mouse, or other such non-letter functions, at a moment's notice; but all the while, my right hand is still hitting a good number of keys, just with fewer fingers (my pinky doesn't seem to do much, other than hit return; then again, my left pinky doesn't do much other than shift).
I can type in the air without even having a keyboard present, and "feel" in my mind exactly where every key is. But the same finger doesn't always hit every key; basically, whichever finger is closest will hit whichever key is needed. Y, G, H, and B get hit by either hand a lot, though in this sentence since I was placing commas between them with my right hand, my left hand hit them all. I believe this variability is why my typing speed has often exceeded even trained typists and secretaries.
An analogy just occurred to me. Apparently, English language classes in Germany teach only a strict, Oxford (IIRC) subset of English (I believe I read this fact on Slashdot, so who knows if it's true). This "English", while fully comprehensible to native English speakers, does not allow nearly the same versatility of language as naturally learned English does: the example I remember was something like "Alex comes" (implicitly, to where the speaker is) is a valid sentence, but not "Here Alex comes", "Alex is coming", "Alex comes here", etc. Those who learned the language naturally have such a greater versatility with it and ability to adapt it to their needs than those who learned it as a rigid set of rules.
I'll bet I could type faster than and touch typist if we both had one hand tied behind our backs:-)
I know someone who built what looks, in the dark or not right up in your face, like a real functioning lightsaber. A good many of them actually, he pulls them out at renaissance faires after hours to entertain the guilds with lightsaber duels. They're basically real swords lined with side-luminous fiberoptics, and a laser (or at least a strong, colored light source) shining into one end of the fiber. You wouldn't even need to use swords properly to make them... a transparent plastic tube (hard acrylic like they build marine exhibits ala Sea World out of) would probably work better, twist the two lines of fiberoptics down the center, and let the lens effect of the plastic tubing "fill in" the space in the middle.
The problem with the segmented plastic lightsabers you can buy is (A) they're weak as fuck and you can't fight with them, (B) you can see the segmenting and it's clearly soft plastic between!
Re:"Negative Energy" a conceptual mistake?
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Wormholes Unstable (BBC)
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· Score: 4, Interesting
That was an intelligent answer, but I think you may have misunderstood the nature of my question, and as such have not entirely answered it.
I was not claiming that a negative charge was negative energy, or asking for clarification about that. I was analogizing the potential energy due to charge (electrostatic force) with the potential energy of a mass (gravity). An electron and proton, ignoring gravity, have a certain amount of potential energy relative to one another just because of their charges; that is to say, if released, they would move closer together and gain velocity, and kinetic energy. A hypothetical particle identical to an electron but with a greater charge would have *more* potential energy relative to that proton, as the attraction between them would be stronger, even though their masses are the same, so it's pretty clear that the attraction due to charge counts as "potential energy" the same as attraction due to mass.
But now, take the potential energy due to charge (again, ignoring gravity) of two electrons. As the charge of a proton and and an electron are equal but opposite, is the potential energy between them (ignoring gravity) not the same? Or would you say an electron has a negative potential energy (even considering gravity now) to another electron, since they would repel one another? In that case, the "positive" and "negative" differences of energy seem only to apply to potential, not kinetic, energy, and refer only to the direction of the force applied relative to another body.
Furthermore, in the case of electrical charges, that attraction or repulsion is relative to not only the strength but the sign of charge of another body, in which case, how do you know that this exotic matter with negative mass, while it may have negative (repulsive) potential energy to positive mass, does not have positive (attractive) potential energy to other exotic matter? After all, we know that likes attract with positive masses, so it stands to reason that likes would attract with negative masses as well.
Has anyone ever made or discovered particles of this "exotic matter" and measured the relative attraction of them to each other? I imagine for the extremely short lifespans you claim for it, it would be difficult to do such an experiment, especially here amongst all this positive mass, and especially to isolate the effects of gravity from electric and nuclear forces.
This is a common area that seems conceptually vague amongst every physicist I've personally spoken with and most of the ones I've read. Einstein seemed to clarify it best in his personal layman's version of relativity. People speak of the "size" of particles, and of "matter", as nebulous concepts separate from the force-fields which define the characteristics of those particles. For example, when pressed to define "volume" as an independent quality of a particle, as when people say "atoms are mostly empty space", most people, even physics professors, I speak to fail to give any definition.
Is it the size of an atom the radius of its outermost valence level? By that definition the entireity of space inside that valence shell IS the atom and is therefore not empty. So, scratch that idea, the space of the atom is only filled by the particles it's made out of and the rest is empty. Ok - what's the volume of an electron, or a proton? It's not clear how that should be defined - by it's mass? By its charge? How do you measure volume in units of mass or charge? Do you measure the volume by the extent that the strong nuclear force keeps other particles (of regular, non-antimatter at least) from overlapping that pointin space?
What is the extend or nature of something devoid of any of its force-fields? Can you run into an empty shell with no mass, charge, or nuclear forces? What exactly would you be running into? People say atoms are mostly empty space - I say everything is nothing but space, and none of it is empty.
From recollection, Einstein spoke in his laymen's book on relativity about an a c
What if you built your wormhole, set the two ends 10 meters apart on Earth, then sent one end far away under extreme acceleration and back to Earth again, so that the end you sent away is "younger" than the stationary end, and has (from the perspective of anyone traveling with the sent-away end) raced, say, a hundred years into the future in a (subjective) decade.
Looking back through the sent-away end (if it could function like just some sort of window), did the travelers see time on Earth near the stationary end pass at the same rate as them, i.e. on the other side of the wormhole, as viewed from the sent-away end, only a decade has passed? If that is the case, then couldn't they just step through the wormhole when it gets back to Earth, and come out 10 meters away and 90 years in the past? If people 300 years after the sent-away end returned, stepped through the sent-away end back 10 meters and 90 years, then walked 10 meters over to the sent-away end again, could they not do this three times and go back 270 years? (At which point the local-time sent-away end is far out in space and not available to be stepped into again).
Basically, with such a construction you could always come back in time to the creation of the wormhole, jumping back in increments of whatever the age difference due to relativistic effects is. And with that ability, you get all your staples of temporal paradoxes possible. If next year we build this thing, the sent-away end returns in 110 years with a 100 year differential, and then one of my psycho descendants 200 years from now jumps back twice and kills me before I have any kids... there's your grandfather paradox.
Although there is the alternate possibility which would disallow this... those who travelled with the sent-away end, looking back, saw time on Earth pass by at an accelerated rate, everything running fast-forward (faster as they on the ship accelerate more), likely blue-shifted, extra bright/hot, probably a pressure differential due to relative temperature differences (if both ends are in atmosphere)... in effect, the people on the ship looking back see everything speed up and all forces amplified, so time runs fast-forward and light and heat explode out of the wormhole; while those on Earth looking through the wormhole at those on the ship see everything slow down, forces diminish, things cool off, lights darken and redshift, as air is sucked through the wormhole into the ship.
When the ship returns to Earth and becomes stationary relative to the other end of the wormhole, the effects normalize, but to both the people on Earth and the people on the ship, 100 years worth of events have passed on Earth, and 10 years of events have passed on the ship. But to the people on Earth, those ten years on the ship stretched out slowly over 100 years of viewing time, and to those on the ship, those 100 years on Earth exploded past in a decade. The wormhole ends stay synched in the same timeframe, not permitting time travel that way, and offering the interesting prospect of viewing relativity at play.
I'm not sure myself which is the correct scenario. Any physicists care to comment?
This isn't exactly a response to your post, but more a question for this entire thread... but you seem like you may be a physicist or at least well versed enough in the mathematics thereof to be able to do "back-of-the-envelope calculations" about it, so maybe you can answer this question for me.
Why is it assumed that because something has negative mass - which I would define as "the quality of being repelled from, rather than attracted to, ordinary positive mass" - it has negative *energy*? Likewise, why is it assumed that any energy (such as vacuum energy) translates directly into positive mass?
I've always viewed it similarly to charge. Both mass and charge are a form of potential energy. An electron and a proton have the same amount of electrical potential energy as one another, only differing in the nature of that potential relative to other charges (whether it repels or attracts a positive or negative charge). But does a proton then have "positive" potential energy and an electron have "negative" potential energy? If the answer to that is no, then why does something with "negative" mass have to have "negative" energy? Is a space filled with a negative charge "less than empty vacuum"?
I'm well aware of e=mc^2 of course, and why that would lead to a negative value for e if you have a negative value for m. But given that physics traditionally deals with only positive values for m, wouldn't e=|m|c^2 (using the absolute value of m, instead of just m) return the same results for all physics thus far, dealing with positive mass, without the counterintuitive "less than nothing" idea of "negative energy" if ever we managed to produce something with negative mass?
Anakin/Vader was the "Chosen One". He returned balance to the Force. First, by eliminating all the Jedi but Obi-wan and Yoda, and all the Sith but Sidious and himself; and then, by killing both Obi-wan and Sidious, while Yoda died of old age and Vader died of his wounds. Thus, both the Jedi and the Sith were destroyed and the conflict between Light and Dark sides settled.
Where Luke is important is not that he is the "Chosen One" who would restore balance to the Force - he IS the restored balance in the Force! Trained by Obi-wan and Yoda, tempted by Sidious and Vader, and then freed of all of them, left with the strength and passion of the Dark Side that almost drove him to become a Sith at the end of RotJ, but with the control and resolve of a Jedi, and the ability to temper those emotions when necessary.
It actually reminds me a lot of the Vulcans and Klingons of Star Trek. The Vulcans are ostensibly the "good guys" on the side of reason and order; the Klingons are ostensibly the "bad guys" on the side of emotion and chaos. But throughout the series it's pretty obvious that the Vulcan's suppression of emotion is not such a great thing, and anyone can easily see how the Klingons' lack of reason is less than ideal. In that series humans are supposed to represent the "happy medium", people who embrace both emotions and reason and can control the both as needed.
And I agree with you wholeheartedly: the themes of this movie, first of Anakin and his unsuccessful struggle to find a path between the extremes of the Jedi and the Sith, and then of Luke and his successul mediation of those extremes, are extremely powerful and touching themes that are common to any person's existence. We are all surrounded by polar choices, few as extreme as these fictional examples, but nevertheless every person must at times mediate disagreements between their reason and their emotions, their personal faith and their agreement with society, the freedom of their actions and the consent of others...
As the old addage says, "all things in moderation", and as we all must struggle to find a suitable moderation between extremes, a well-implemented and convincing portrayal of these themes on an epics scale can be touching to anyone. Unfortunately, it seems that Lucas has failed to implement his story in such a convincing way. I am happy to hold in my mind an abridged version of the tale, and allow my own imagination to fill in the details in more acceptable ways. Perhaps someday this story will be told again, and better; either the Star Wars saga itself or another saga which tells the same essential tale. I certainly hope so.
There are no natural rights. Rights are bestowed upon by a governmental authority.
You've got that backwards. Naturally, every person has the (legal, if not material) power to do whatever they please. Governments are composed of people, artificial entities created specifically to combine material powers in order to curb other people's powers for some supposed greater good. What powers are not curbed by the government are your "rights", i.e. those actions that are not held to be wrong by the government, and thus OK (or "right") to do. If it's not explicitly said to be wrong (illegal), then it is within your rights.
Governments did not create people and endow them with certain rights; people created governments and endowed them with the power to curb others peoples' powers for some collective good. The power of a government derives from people, not vice versa.
Sometimes it's a small number of powerful people, who together (as "the government") curb the power of large numbers of other people; other times, it's many people curbing the powers of a few. In both cases the result can be good or bad, but in both cases, the power wielded by "government" ultimately derives from some set of people.
As for "pursuit of happiness", I'm aware that that's not explicitly stated in the Constitution (and it would be an awfully imprecise way to say it, so that's a good thing). I meant that as illustration that this point of view (government derives power from the people, not vice versa) was held by the founders of our government. As for what is in the Constitution, I refer you to the 10th Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
One last bit...
The constitution grants the federal government the explicit power to regulate copyrights. That is what this is all about.
Here's how that works, start to finish: 1) In the beginning, the people can do what they want, including copy things. 2) The people allow their government to limit that right to copy. 3) Government limits that right to copy with copyright law. 4) The Fair Use doctrine limits what copyright law can limit. 5) What's acts of copying are not made explicitly illegal by law (those allowed under the Fair Use doctrine) remains as your legal RIGHTS.
The mindset you exhibit is why many of the founders did not want to enumerate any rights in the Constitution, and they were only later tacked on in the Bill of Rights. They felt that whatever was not explicitly disallowed was within your rights, and that if they said "these are your rights", people would think exclusively instead of inclusively and believe those rights were ALL of their rights, instead of just a representative sample of specially protected, very important rights.
I believe such exclusive thinking in the general public (including lawmakers and lawyers) is why, as other responses to me said, the term "right" now means in legalese a specifically enumerated thing that the govt says you can do, and not as is commonly (and correctly) meant, anything that you are not expressly forbidden from doing.
Perhaps this is being nitpicky, but it's worth pointing outh that "Fair Use" (and parody for that matter) are not "rights," per se. Only authors/creators of the work (not the public) are granted rights under the Copyright Act.
Incorrect. The right to copy some form of media is included in the natural rights we are all given (under "pursuit of happiness" if nothing else). Remember, the Bill of Rights is not an enumeration of all your rights, it's a list of specifically protected examples - but in general, ANY power not granted to the govt by federal or state constitutions are reserved to YOU, or rather we, the people.
Copyright law is such a specifically granted power that LIMITS people's natural right to {whatever makes you happy}, in regards to the copying of certain media. The Fair Use doctrine is a limit on those copyright laws, and as such, what you are allowed to do through fair use is just exercise your natural right to do what makes you happy - and be that making a backup copy of a DVD, that's just fine.
The Fair Use doctrine effectively says, "the law specifically does not disallow these actions, so they are still within your rights." The double negative leaves you with your default positive rights.
We don't need any more tools to spy. We need some fucking national legislation to curb the uncontrolled police state that exists inside the corporations of the world.
This is getting a bit off topic and political/philosophical, but this type of thing is why I've been advocating a system of law that holds all officially organized groups of people - government bodies, corporations, unions, same difference - to the same rules and standards. When we've got global corporations with as many people as some states or even nations, why shouldn't they be held to the same code of conduct as those states and nations? Give them the same benefits, require of them the same responsibilities. Historically, government bodies don't behave much differently than for-profit corporations anyway...
My apologies if this is less than coherent, but I'm not in the best headspace right now...
Convergence is good in the sense, as you said, of everything just working together and not having to deal with mixing and matching and fine tuning your solutions. That is what customers want, and I agree, it's a Good Thing.
What is bad is the way that MS and most everybody else has been going about it: the approach of "everybody wants their word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software to work together, so we'll make an integrated wp/ss/presentation combo package!" This encourages too much interdependency on specific other products, vendor lock-in to whoever makes your preferred end-to-end solution, and compromise in the quality of the individual parts of the integrated package. That's a Bad Thing.
The right way to go about convergence is similar to the old (and sadly failed) document-centric computing approaches like Apple's OpenDoc, or the unix "pipe" concept, and the associated staples of both of the above: standard, free and open formats and protocols and specific tools that do one thing extremely well.
So in a sense, what you're saying is spot on: it's not the one box that does it all that we need, it's the one network that'll make all out boxes work together. But the "network" doesn't have to be just the internet, and all our "boxes" don't have to be separate physical devices. I still want my general purpose computer. Hell, I want a general computer the size of a small PDA that doubles as a cell-phone-alike (ala VoIP). I don't want a thousand special-purpose little devices, I want one device to which to which can add and change functions and have it all Just Work. And I want my data and my processing power to rest primarily with me, and not rely on some remote network to function properly.
The "network" isn't the necessarily the Internet, it's the protocols and formats that let things like the Internet work. The "boxes" don't have to be literal separate devices but any specific components (either hardware or software) that operate together over those protocols without caring what each other are.
It's great that this type of interoperation can scale to remote inter-device levels too, and allow us to take advantage of remote services, but that's not the key factor. The key factor is the protocols and formats. They are the core of integration and "convergence", and they could work just as well in a single box as over the network.
In the history of computing, the death of the document-centric computing concept (where a vast array of different, specialized tools all work together seamlessly as though your whole OS was one application), and the associated stagnation of standardized file formats, has got to be one of the saddest events that I have witnessed.
People think MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite are great because "it all just works together". We were once promised that our entire computers would function like that (again, only now in the graphical environment too). It was companies like MS and Adobe, who refused to support document-centric paradigms (lest people not be locked in to using *their* entire suite when they could mix and match their own just as easily), that saw the efforts of those promises stillborn.
This is the distinction (once again) between freedom of the CODE (that is to say, that code itself carried rights and freedoms itself that people cannot infringe upon) and freedom of the DEVELOPER (that is to say, the developer has rights and freedoms that no code license presumes to infringe upon).
If there were no laws regarding copyright or other intellectual property, you'd effectively have all code released under public domain, to which the BSD license is very similar. That is absolute developer freedom. Person A releases some source code; Person B is free to modify that code and not release the changes; but anybody else can still use the code Person A released! Person B hasn't taken that code away from anyone.
The GPL is actually a very restrictive license in the sense that it imposes many responsibilities on people to assure that the CODE, in all of its changing forms and permutations, always remains free, at the sacrifice of some developers' freedoms (or rather, at an additional responsibility to developers). That is, not just the code that was released is still free to use, but that anything based on that code must also be free to use - it pulls MORE code into free availability, giving OTHER people more code; but in doing so, it limits what some developers can do with that code (limits their freedoms), since they may not otherwise be able or allowed to do what is required to use the GPL'd code.
To use a very loose political metaphor: BSD or public domain licenses are like anarchy (freedom of the individual from imposed responsibility); GPL type licenses are like communism (freedom of the product via imposed responsibility). Both have admirable goals in mind, and both have their flaws. Pick your poison.
Konqueror uses the KHTML rendered, which is the basis of OSX's WebCore, which is what Safari uses for its renderer. These updates to Safari (or WebCore really) should eventually make their way back to KHTML and thus Konqueror, which will run on your Linux flavor of choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... ROOT servers... an entire thread about XXX.... there's gotta be a joke in there somewhere I just can't for the life of me find it...
Oh yeah, and since that introductory page stupidly doesn't link back to any other pages on the site, and the root page of the domain is less than helpful for finding the bulk of material on that site here is the link to the main site for anybody who wants to read more...
... if reading my email every morning is an addiction, what's the difference between "addiction" and "daily routine"
Maybe there is none..
Well, a tech-independent approach to it is to breastfeed your kids (or have their mom do it) to pass antibodies on from the mother, giving the kid an automatic tolerance to many diseases without having to keep them completely absent from the body. Aside from that, while keeping good hygine is commendable so as to not foster whole colonies of microbes around you, overdoing is just as harmful: I've got barefoot most of my life, went frog-hunting in filthy swamp-water as a boy, don't sanitize anything (by which I mean antibacterial disinfectants and such), don't take antibiotics unless I'm being hit with something *really* nasty...
In general, just by doing nothing special I keep a constant mild exposure to various bugs out there that might do me in if caught in large doses unexpected, and as such my immune system is generally able to learn to cope with them in these mild exposures without being completely overwhelmed. It's the same idea behind 'immunization', which should really be called something more like 'acclimitization'. As such, while I am not immune to things like the common cold or influenza, and in fact carry them when they're going around and can spread them to others, I myself almost never suffer the pronounced effects of those diseases.
Same way Europeans exploring America, long before they ever settled here, passed diseases they weren't even presently suffering from on to the native populations just by being there and breathing on them. The native populations, having no exposure to any such diseases, quickly succame to them, while Europeans and their descendents to this day walk around barely noticing the things that wiped out most of the population of this continent.
But to answer your question, if we *do* manage to get genetic engineering or nanotech down to an exact enough science to safely augment our own immune systems, then I think it's a great idea. I certainly won't be having it done to myself until it's well tested, but if some people want to be earlier adopters, I say let 'em. It's not going to hurt me that some people have stronger or weaker immune systems, unless they react by putting more pressure on the microbes with all their sanitizers and antibiotics and wind up selectively breeding for something that'll kill me too.
defeating viruses before they get too mutated to contain
Do you honestly expect that we will *ever* be able to "defeat" viruses, or contagious disease in general (bacteria et al)? That's a war that can never be won. The microbes predate us by ages, and some of them got together to form into things like us because it was for their benefit; and if we get too out of line and keep trying to wipe them out, all we'll do is selectively breed them to be better and killing us. They breed faster, adapt faster, and can survive in a greater range of climates than ever we can. They will always outlast us.
Our only hope is to make *ourselves* more tolerant of them. Consider: the human immune system is one of the greater ones on the planet right now, and we're just crawling with bugs compared to things like cats or dogs, who need to be mostly sterile or else they'll die; their immune systems focus on keeping them clean of parasites, ours just makes sure they don't get out of hand. Certain reptiles have even us beat in that department, and they're veritable disease bags by comparison. Tolerance of non-lethal parasites is the only successful strategy here: tightening down the screws will only breed for more lethal ones.
(Replace "microbes" and "people" with "individuals" and "governments" and you might have some political commentary there, too).
Most people expect a browser to display html, download files, handle multimedia content (flash at a minimum), make use of cookies and have the associated management tools for the cookies, have javascript support and associated management tools and options (e.g. disallow sites from opening popups, but have a little icon so you can enable for a certain site), have java support with associated options, have tabbed browsing with associated options for all links (e.g. open in new window vs open in new tab), etc, etc.
.exe files won't. No embedding executables into documents! Documents are not programs, and programs don't belong in document.
A browser is a platform upon which many types of applications can be built, that handles a variety of very different content and executable code. And it's all supposed to be so user-configurable that even if someone has cookies and javascript disabled, the application is supposed to be functional. And it's supposed to look good no matter what the font settings or resolution on the local system.
This is why web applications and web browsers are complicated. If you really want a browser to just "browse," get netscape 3 or lynx or something.
This is also why the WWW is such a huge mess today. It was designed to be a method of rendering hypertext markup over the Internet, and has slowly grown into this "platform" mess that it is today. If it had been approached from a "platform" standpoint in the first place, I imagine it would be structured a lot differently...
- The "browser" would be basically a network-aware file browser; quite a lot like Windows Explorer / Internet Explorer in that manner. This is one thing that I can honestly give MS some credit for; displaying (at least certain) documents inline, rather than always opening them in another program, is a Good Thing.
-The "browser" would make use of plug-in modules to display different kinds of content in-line (instead of double-clicking something in your file browser and having it open somewhere else, that something shows up *in* the browser). The OSX Finder works in a similar manner, though I don't believe it uses plugins to render the inline content, and it only does so in column mode, not just the content alone in a window.
- If some content (like HTML) has embedded content (like a JPEG), be able to call on another module to display that content inline as appropriate.
- If you point the browser at an executable, like a Java applet, then your computer will try to run that executable. If you've got a JVM module (wherein your Java setting would be kept), Java applets would run. If you're on a Mac,
- On the same note, Javascript as it is would not exist. You'd point your browser at, or be linked to, a *Javascript file*, which would execute via a Javascript interpreter module (wherein your Javascript settings would be kept), and probably pull up some HTML files and so on and so forth to give you your interactive "web application". Programs/scripts can call on and manipulate documents just fine, but documents running programs is where problematic things like ActiveX come from.
- The browser itself would be aware that some things in some content reference other content or programs, and have settings for what to do about tabs, new windows, etc.
In the end result you could have something that functions a lot like the web does today, but is implemented far more elegantly. A standard interface for such a variety of content and code over the Internet, implemented explicitly as a replacement for your file browser (like Konqueror or Explorer do), preferably keeping the old methods of browsing available too (in OSX, my OS of choice, I'd love to just see the icon view function as an inline "web" view using WebCore when pointed at something that's not a folder).
THAT would be a true "platform". What we have today is a loose amalgamation of standards half-cobbled together with no rhyme or reason, desperately trying to move forward while maintaining backward compatib
I think you're correct that the gravitic/acceleration/etc effects through a wormhole are independent of the motion of the ends relative to each other, but I don't think it would work as an impedance both directions as you are saying.
Perhaps a better example to illustrate the 'leak' of gravity and other effects I'm talking about would be a more terrestrial scenario. Say you're standing on Earth in a nice, perfectly flat parking lot with two door-shaped ends of a wormhole nearby. You're looking through one end and out the other end at your friend. You toss a ball to your friend through the wormhole and it follows a parabolic arc across the bridges space, since gravity on both ends is essentially identical.
Then your friend steps aside and tilts his end of it down so you're now looking at the pavement. Shouldn't you then also fall "down" toward that pavement through your end? Gravity should reach across the wormhole. If that other end is put on a centrifuge and spun up to 1G of acceleration, and you're looking "down" (or "out" from the centrifuge) through the wormhole, shouldn't you be pulled that way too? After all, acceleration and gravity are *identical* forces, otherwise indistinguishable.
And the forces, of course, must be equal and opposite. If your end of the wormhole sucks, then the other must blow, so to speak. If the acceleration is great enough to cause relativistic effects, then the gravity shear is going to be pretty steep across the wormhole, but one direction is still "up" (the end accelerating less) and the other is "down" (the end accelerating more). Plus, since time would appear to move more slowly, light would be red-shifted, there would seem to be less kinetic energy in the atmosphere and thus things would seem colder, pressures would seem lower...
And interestingly, though it seems that the hotter, higher-pressure air would blow "down" the gravity shear to the cooler low-pressure area, soon the pressures would equalize and you'd end up with any warmer air in the "lower" (more accelerated) areas "rising" across the wormhole to the "higher" (less accelerated) areas, just like you do with a body of air in a normal gravity well. If you had a wormhole lying horizontally on the Earth's surface, looking "down" it into a space station under high gravity or acceleration, it'd be just like drilling a very, very big hole in the ground: a lot of air would flow down there and create higher pressures at the bottom, enough to counter the force of gravity and keep more air from "falling in".
The question that now hovers in my mind is how these forces affect the apparatus sustaining the wormhole. If you hung one end in orbit around Earth and sent the other near a black hole, would the one in orbit come crashing down or flying away, depending on its facing? I'm trying to think of a terrestrial analog: if you placed two ends of a small wormhole (and by "end" I'm meaning the generating apparatus), horizontally in the earlier parking lot, one facing down and one facing up (presuming one-sided entryways), and stood on the up-facing side, standing (through the wormhole) on the segment of parking lot under the other, down-facing end, then grabbed the apparatus (say it's lightweight enough to lift), pushed off the pavement and lifted your end of the wormhole over your head, and stepped out the other end... wait, how did the other end get lifted? Does applying a force to one end apply a force to the other end? That only makes sense of the apparatuses are quantum-entangled... which actually seems like a similar proposition to a wormhole, linking two fields in space together.
Are wormholes really nothing more than quantum-entangled... space?
The really funny part is, the way you wrote that reads in my head with Peter's voice from The Family Guy...
Right, that is what I intended in my original post. Not that you are "moving space" which is a non-sequitur, but that the particular quirk or pattern of space is changing - that 'this part' bends over to 'that part', is changing, that you are making it so 'this other part' now bends over to 'that part. You are "moving" space the same way you are "moving" the blanket - the very notion of being able to 'fold' space like that implies another space-like metric aside from that of space itself.
Lets take 'motion' out of the equation entirely. The point I was making about relativistic speeds is that, in different parts of space, depending on acceleration (including distance to a gravity well), time passes at different rates. On a spacestation orbiting near a black hole, clocks turn much more slowly than clocks in open space (from an 'objective' standpoint, that is; since the people in the spacestation are also aging more slowly, they see the clocks moving as normal).
But what if you had a door-sized wormhole that you can clearly look through, running from that spacestation to another one in open space far away. Would the people on the open-space end of the wormhole look through, and see the clock on the near-black-hole station turning more slowly? If so, then it seems all sorts of other effects would pass across the wormhole as a consequence; it'd almost be like making an extremely steep gravity shear. Which would actually make a lot of sense; the people in open space would suddenly, through the wormhole, be very close to a black hole. Since the effects of gravity are identical to the effects of acceleration, it seems then that in this case, putting one end of a wormhole on Earth and sending the other away and back at relativistic speeds would be like creating a new gravity well on Earth, reaching out through the wormhole.
Or alternatively, do the people in the open-space station see clocks on the other side moving at the same rate as their own? That implies that just having the wormhole connected is creating some sort of causal dissonance; that the people in open space, 'moving into the future' faster than those on the spacestation near the black hole, are looking through the wormhole back in time to the earlier time on other station, which is lagging behind their time.
Every time anyone speaks of wormholes and relativity they seem to assume the latter scenario. I'm beginning to think the former is more likely. Of course, with the former scenario, as soon as you have the wormhole open and the effects (pressure, temperature, gravity differences) level out, since 'gravity' is 'leaking' out the wormhole to the other end, the timeframes will synch up too. And as far as I understand it, by current theories you don't 'open up' a wormhole to somewhere else, you build the wormhole ends together and then separate them, so any changes in gravity/acceleration between the two ends would be gradual and even; as a ship with one end accelerated at human-bearable speeds, human-bearable effects would be felt through the other end of the wormhole while it accelerates. If a station with one end of a wormhole approaches a human-bearable distance to a black hole, then human-bearable effects will be felt through the other end while it's there.
I understand the strangeness of having a little twist of space, a wormhole, "attached" to some physical object, and I don't have a good explanation for that either; but consider that that twist of space, if it is "stationary", must be stationary *to* something. After all, the Earth is flying around the sun which is flying through the galaxy... if we made a wormhole here on Earth wouldn't it suddenly go flying off into space at incredible rates? Intuitively, the answer would appear to be no, because our frame of reference is the Earth, and there is absolute frame of reference (according to "everybody" - I have questions about that which have never been satisfactorily answered) that we are moving relative to . . .
But why is the wormhole 'bound' to the Earth? I'd think it much more likely to be 'bound' to whatever is creating or "opening" it. In which case, moving that thing would move that end of the wormhole.
Either way, I don't see why you find the latter analysis preferable to the former on such grounds, because the latter also assumes that one can move the end of a wormhole by moving the apparatus that's creating it.
Yeah i do the same (typing without a keyboard).. although im probably screwed up because i cant really talk or understand people.. i type/read way faster than i can talk/hear.. and i cant write at all, i'm always thinking of letters way ahead of what im writing and i make tons of mistakes and i forget how to spell words.. so what i do is type with my "air keyboard" and once im "typing" i suddenly can spell the word im trying to write heh
Sounds a bit austistic/aspergers type... in-person communication throws a lot of us off, but many are extremely eloquent in written communication. It's the social feedback element of it, I think; you're not getting a response as you type, you type and then you get a response and then you type more... in person, as soon as you open your mouth the other person is saying something just by the manner in which they're listening to you.
i noticed though, my wrists never bother me but everyone i know who types a lot using the correct method is always complaining about wrist ache.. how are your wrists?
Fine, in general; sometimes, depending on where I'm working (keyboard placement relative to desk edge, and hardness of the desk itself), the parts of my wrists which contact the desk most get a bit sore. But I don't get wrist cramps from typing itself. That's what I meant that it's painful for me to hold my wrists still, fingers on the home row, and try to touch-type; it's just an unnatural contortion. Maybe it's cause I've got big hands and broad shoulders; I imagine a smaller person could sit like that much more comfortably.
On a related note: what's your take on the original "huge" Xbox controllers? I rather liked them... other controllers are all too small....
I've always wished someone could build a variable keyboard, since I read about something similar in one of the old Foundation books.
You've basically got a touch-sensitive display, which is thus capable of reconfiguring its "keys" and such at whim - except this control board is also capable of extruding its surface, to give tactile feedback. You could implement sliders bars on the control board (by moving the bumps) for volume or whatnot, leave an empty square off to one side for a trackpad / graphics tablet, etc. Individual apps could present you with their own customized control interfaces.
The hard part is just coming up with the tactile element of this device. As a touch screen it's easily doable today, but the lack of tactile feedback would destroy people's typing speeds.
I can vouch for this style. I never formally learned to type, and absolutely hated forced typing classes in grade school. I got my own computer at 10 years old (I'm 23 next month), and just started "hunt-and-peck"ing. At my prime I had a 140 peak, 100 sustained wpm. That was using the old, ADB Apple Extended Keyboards, which sound very similar to this "Model M" people keep speaking of - a very solid, sturdy keyboard with nice resistance and a loud *clack* when pressed. Now that I wind up using a variety of significantly smaller keyboards, all of different sizes (the iMac keyboard I use primarily here at work, various laptop keyboards, my Apple Pro Keyboard at home that I'm too cheap to replace), I can tell that my typing speed has significantly dropped, though lay people still say I'm "really fast" when they see me go at it (I don't know what it is exactly now).
:-)
I don't look at the keyboard when I type. I use all of my fingers, not just my index fingers. My index fingers actually rest on F and J like they "should", but [checking now] my pinky fingers on left-shift and return, thumbs on the spacebar and my middle and ring fingers on W & E (left) and I & O.
That's just when resting waiting to type, though; my wrists roll about, and my hands slide up and down and left and right over the keyboard. I find it painful to my (large) hands to try to keep my fingers scrunched together over the home row, wrists still and just reach with the "appropriate" fingers. I notice now, it seems that my left hand does more of the main typing work, probably so my right hand is free to reach for the arrows, number pad, mouse, or other such non-letter functions, at a moment's notice; but all the while, my right hand is still hitting a good number of keys, just with fewer fingers (my pinky doesn't seem to do much, other than hit return; then again, my left pinky doesn't do much other than shift).
I can type in the air without even having a keyboard present, and "feel" in my mind exactly where every key is. But the same finger doesn't always hit every key; basically, whichever finger is closest will hit whichever key is needed. Y, G, H, and B get hit by either hand a lot, though in this sentence since I was placing commas between them with my right hand, my left hand hit them all. I believe this variability is why my typing speed has often exceeded even trained typists and secretaries.
An analogy just occurred to me. Apparently, English language classes in Germany teach only a strict, Oxford (IIRC) subset of English (I believe I read this fact on Slashdot, so who knows if it's true). This "English", while fully comprehensible to native English speakers, does not allow nearly the same versatility of language as naturally learned English does: the example I remember was something like "Alex comes" (implicitly, to where the speaker is) is a valid sentence, but not "Here Alex comes", "Alex is coming", "Alex comes here", etc. Those who learned the language naturally have such a greater versatility with it and ability to adapt it to their needs than those who learned it as a rigid set of rules.
I'll bet I could type faster than and touch typist if we both had one hand tied behind our backs
I know someone who built what looks, in the dark or not right up in your face, like a real functioning lightsaber. A good many of them actually, he pulls them out at renaissance faires after hours to entertain the guilds with lightsaber duels. They're basically real swords lined with side-luminous fiberoptics, and a laser (or at least a strong, colored light source) shining into one end of the fiber. You wouldn't even need to use swords properly to make them... a transparent plastic tube (hard acrylic like they build marine exhibits ala Sea World out of) would probably work better, twist the two lines of fiberoptics down the center, and let the lens effect of the plastic tubing "fill in" the space in the middle.
The problem with the segmented plastic lightsabers you can buy is (A) they're weak as fuck and you can't fight with them, (B) you can see the segmenting and it's clearly soft plastic between!
That was an intelligent answer, but I think you may have misunderstood the nature of my question, and as such have not entirely answered it.
I was not claiming that a negative charge was negative energy, or asking for clarification about that. I was analogizing the potential energy due to charge (electrostatic force) with the potential energy of a mass (gravity). An electron and proton, ignoring gravity, have a certain amount of potential energy relative to one another just because of their charges; that is to say, if released, they would move closer together and gain velocity, and kinetic energy. A hypothetical particle identical to an electron but with a greater charge would have *more* potential energy relative to that proton, as the attraction between them would be stronger, even though their masses are the same, so it's pretty clear that the attraction due to charge counts as "potential energy" the same as attraction due to mass.
But now, take the potential energy due to charge (again, ignoring gravity) of two electrons. As the charge of a proton and and an electron are equal but opposite, is the potential energy between them (ignoring gravity) not the same? Or would you say an electron has a negative potential energy (even considering gravity now) to another electron, since they would repel one another? In that case, the "positive" and "negative" differences of energy seem only to apply to potential, not kinetic, energy, and refer only to the direction of the force applied relative to another body.
Furthermore, in the case of electrical charges, that attraction or repulsion is relative to not only the strength but the sign of charge of another body, in which case, how do you know that this exotic matter with negative mass, while it may have negative (repulsive) potential energy to positive mass, does not have positive (attractive) potential energy to other exotic matter? After all, we know that likes attract with positive masses, so it stands to reason that likes would attract with negative masses as well.
Has anyone ever made or discovered particles of this "exotic matter" and measured the relative attraction of them to each other? I imagine for the extremely short lifespans you claim for it, it would be difficult to do such an experiment, especially here amongst all this positive mass, and especially to isolate the effects of gravity from electric and nuclear forces.
This is a common area that seems conceptually vague amongst every physicist I've personally spoken with and most of the ones I've read. Einstein seemed to clarify it best in his personal layman's version of relativity. People speak of the "size" of particles, and of "matter", as nebulous concepts separate from the force-fields which define the characteristics of those particles. For example, when pressed to define "volume" as an independent quality of a particle, as when people say "atoms are mostly empty space", most people, even physics professors, I speak to fail to give any definition.
Is it the size of an atom the radius of its outermost valence level? By that definition the entireity of space inside that valence shell IS the atom and is therefore not empty. So, scratch that idea, the space of the atom is only filled by the particles it's made out of and the rest is empty. Ok - what's the volume of an electron, or a proton? It's not clear how that should be defined - by it's mass? By its charge? How do you measure volume in units of mass or charge? Do you measure the volume by the extent that the strong nuclear force keeps other particles (of regular, non-antimatter at least) from overlapping that pointin space?
What is the extend or nature of something devoid of any of its force-fields? Can you run into an empty shell with no mass, charge, or nuclear forces? What exactly would you be running into? People say atoms are mostly empty space - I say everything is nothing but space, and none of it is empty.
From recollection, Einstein spoke in his laymen's book on relativity about an a c
What if you built your wormhole, set the two ends 10 meters apart on Earth, then sent one end far away under extreme acceleration and back to Earth again, so that the end you sent away is "younger" than the stationary end, and has (from the perspective of anyone traveling with the sent-away end) raced, say, a hundred years into the future in a (subjective) decade.
Looking back through the sent-away end (if it could function like just some sort of window), did the travelers see time on Earth near the stationary end pass at the same rate as them, i.e. on the other side of the wormhole, as viewed from the sent-away end, only a decade has passed? If that is the case, then couldn't they just step through the wormhole when it gets back to Earth, and come out 10 meters away and 90 years in the past? If people 300 years after the sent-away end returned, stepped through the sent-away end back 10 meters and 90 years, then walked 10 meters over to the sent-away end again, could they not do this three times and go back 270 years? (At which point the local-time sent-away end is far out in space and not available to be stepped into again).
Basically, with such a construction you could always come back in time to the creation of the wormhole, jumping back in increments of whatever the age difference due to relativistic effects is. And with that ability, you get all your staples of temporal paradoxes possible. If next year we build this thing, the sent-away end returns in 110 years with a 100 year differential, and then one of my psycho descendants 200 years from now jumps back twice and kills me before I have any kids... there's your grandfather paradox.
Although there is the alternate possibility which would disallow this... those who travelled with the sent-away end, looking back, saw time on Earth pass by at an accelerated rate, everything running fast-forward (faster as they on the ship accelerate more), likely blue-shifted, extra bright/hot, probably a pressure differential due to relative temperature differences (if both ends are in atmosphere)... in effect, the people on the ship looking back see everything speed up and all forces amplified, so time runs fast-forward and light and heat explode out of the wormhole; while those on Earth looking through the wormhole at those on the ship see everything slow down, forces diminish, things cool off, lights darken and redshift, as air is sucked through the wormhole into the ship.
When the ship returns to Earth and becomes stationary relative to the other end of the wormhole, the effects normalize, but to both the people on Earth and the people on the ship, 100 years worth of events have passed on Earth, and 10 years of events have passed on the ship. But to the people on Earth, those ten years on the ship stretched out slowly over 100 years of viewing time, and to those on the ship, those 100 years on Earth exploded past in a decade. The wormhole ends stay synched in the same timeframe, not permitting time travel that way, and offering the interesting prospect of viewing relativity at play.
I'm not sure myself which is the correct scenario. Any physicists care to comment?
This isn't exactly a response to your post, but more a question for this entire thread... but you seem like you may be a physicist or at least well versed enough in the mathematics thereof to be able to do "back-of-the-envelope calculations" about it, so maybe you can answer this question for me.
Why is it assumed that because something has negative mass - which I would define as "the quality of being repelled from, rather than attracted to, ordinary positive mass" - it has negative *energy*? Likewise, why is it assumed that any energy (such as vacuum energy) translates directly into positive mass?
I've always viewed it similarly to charge. Both mass and charge are a form of potential energy. An electron and a proton have the same amount of electrical potential energy as one another, only differing in the nature of that potential relative to other charges (whether it repels or attracts a positive or negative charge). But does a proton then have "positive" potential energy and an electron have "negative" potential energy? If the answer to that is no, then why does something with "negative" mass have to have "negative" energy? Is a space filled with a negative charge "less than empty vacuum"?
I'm well aware of e=mc^2 of course, and why that would lead to a negative value for e if you have a negative value for m. But given that physics traditionally deals with only positive values for m, wouldn't e=|m|c^2 (using the absolute value of m, instead of just m) return the same results for all physics thus far, dealing with positive mass, without the counterintuitive "less than nothing" idea of "negative energy" if ever we managed to produce something with negative mass?
You've got it down precisely.
Anakin/Vader was the "Chosen One". He returned balance to the Force. First, by eliminating all the Jedi but Obi-wan and Yoda, and all the Sith but Sidious and himself; and then, by killing both Obi-wan and Sidious, while Yoda died of old age and Vader died of his wounds. Thus, both the Jedi and the Sith were destroyed and the conflict between Light and Dark sides settled.
Where Luke is important is not that he is the "Chosen One" who would restore balance to the Force - he IS the restored balance in the Force! Trained by Obi-wan and Yoda, tempted by Sidious and Vader, and then freed of all of them, left with the strength and passion of the Dark Side that almost drove him to become a Sith at the end of RotJ, but with the control and resolve of a Jedi, and the ability to temper those emotions when necessary.
It actually reminds me a lot of the Vulcans and Klingons of Star Trek. The Vulcans are ostensibly the "good guys" on the side of reason and order; the Klingons are ostensibly the "bad guys" on the side of emotion and chaos. But throughout the series it's pretty obvious that the Vulcan's suppression of emotion is not such a great thing, and anyone can easily see how the Klingons' lack of reason is less than ideal. In that series humans are supposed to represent the "happy medium", people who embrace both emotions and reason and can control the both as needed.
And I agree with you wholeheartedly: the themes of this movie, first of Anakin and his unsuccessful struggle to find a path between the extremes of the Jedi and the Sith, and then of Luke and his successul mediation of those extremes, are extremely powerful and touching themes that are common to any person's existence. We are all surrounded by polar choices, few as extreme as these fictional examples, but nevertheless every person must at times mediate disagreements between their reason and their emotions, their personal faith and their agreement with society, the freedom of their actions and the consent of others...
As the old addage says, "all things in moderation", and as we all must struggle to find a suitable moderation between extremes, a well-implemented and convincing portrayal of these themes on an epics scale can be touching to anyone. Unfortunately, it seems that Lucas has failed to implement his story in such a convincing way. I am happy to hold in my mind an abridged version of the tale, and allow my own imagination to fill in the details in more acceptable ways. Perhaps someday this story will be told again, and better; either the Star Wars saga itself or another saga which tells the same essential tale. I certainly hope so.
There are no natural rights. Rights are bestowed upon by a governmental authority.
You've got that backwards. Naturally, every person has the (legal, if not material) power to do whatever they please. Governments are composed of people, artificial entities created specifically to combine material powers in order to curb other people's powers for some supposed greater good. What powers are not curbed by the government are your "rights", i.e. those actions that are not held to be wrong by the government, and thus OK (or "right") to do. If it's not explicitly said to be wrong (illegal), then it is within your rights.
Governments did not create people and endow them with certain rights; people created governments and endowed them with the power to curb others peoples' powers for some collective good. The power of a government derives from people, not vice versa.
Sometimes it's a small number of powerful people, who together (as "the government") curb the power of large numbers of other people; other times, it's many people curbing the powers of a few. In both cases the result can be good or bad, but in both cases, the power wielded by "government" ultimately derives from some set of people.
As for "pursuit of happiness", I'm aware that that's not explicitly stated in the Constitution (and it would be an awfully imprecise way to say it, so that's a good thing). I meant that as illustration that this point of view (government derives power from the people, not vice versa) was held by the founders of our government. As for what is in the Constitution, I refer you to the 10th Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
One last bit...
The constitution grants the federal government the explicit power to regulate copyrights. That is what this is all about.
Here's how that works, start to finish:
1) In the beginning, the people can do what they want, including copy things.
2) The people allow their government to limit that right to copy.
3) Government limits that right to copy with copyright law.
4) The Fair Use doctrine limits what copyright law can limit.
5) What's acts of copying are not made explicitly illegal by law (those allowed under the Fair Use doctrine) remains as your legal RIGHTS.
The mindset you exhibit is why many of the founders did not want to enumerate any rights in the Constitution, and they were only later tacked on in the Bill of Rights. They felt that whatever was not explicitly disallowed was within your rights, and that if they said "these are your rights", people would think exclusively instead of inclusively and believe those rights were ALL of their rights, instead of just a representative sample of specially protected, very important rights.
I believe such exclusive thinking in the general public (including lawmakers and lawyers) is why, as other responses to me said, the term "right" now means in legalese a specifically enumerated thing that the govt says you can do, and not as is commonly (and correctly) meant, anything that you are not expressly forbidden from doing.
Perhaps this is being nitpicky, but it's worth pointing outh that "Fair Use" (and parody for that matter) are not "rights," per se. Only authors/creators of the work (not the public) are granted rights under the Copyright Act.
Incorrect. The right to copy some form of media is included in the natural rights we are all given (under "pursuit of happiness" if nothing else). Remember, the Bill of Rights is not an enumeration of all your rights, it's a list of specifically protected examples - but in general, ANY power not granted to the govt by federal or state constitutions are reserved to YOU, or rather we, the people.
Copyright law is such a specifically granted power that LIMITS people's natural right to {whatever makes you happy}, in regards to the copying of certain media. The Fair Use doctrine is a limit on those copyright laws, and as such, what you are allowed to do through fair use is just exercise your natural right to do what makes you happy - and be that making a backup copy of a DVD, that's just fine.
The Fair Use doctrine effectively says, "the law specifically does not disallow these actions, so they are still within your rights." The double negative leaves you with your default positive rights.
We don't need any more tools to spy. We need some fucking national legislation to curb the uncontrolled police state that exists inside the corporations of the world.
This is getting a bit off topic and political/philosophical, but this type of thing is why I've been advocating a system of law that holds all officially organized groups of people - government bodies, corporations, unions, same difference - to the same rules and standards. When we've got global corporations with as many people as some states or even nations, why shouldn't they be held to the same code of conduct as those states and nations? Give them the same benefits, require of them the same responsibilities. Historically, government bodies don't behave much differently than for-profit corporations anyway...
I want to know how they managed to take a screenshot of a kernel panic... ;-)
My apologies if this is less than coherent, but I'm not in the best headspace right now...
Convergence is good in the sense, as you said, of everything just working together and not having to deal with mixing and matching and fine tuning your solutions. That is what customers want, and I agree, it's a Good Thing.
What is bad is the way that MS and most everybody else has been going about it: the approach of "everybody wants their word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software to work together, so we'll make an integrated wp/ss/presentation combo package!" This encourages too much interdependency on specific other products, vendor lock-in to whoever makes your preferred end-to-end solution, and compromise in the quality of the individual parts of the integrated package. That's a Bad Thing.
The right way to go about convergence is similar to the old (and sadly failed) document-centric computing approaches like Apple's OpenDoc, or the unix "pipe" concept, and the associated staples of both of the above: standard, free and open formats and protocols and specific tools that do one thing extremely well.
So in a sense, what you're saying is spot on: it's not the one box that does it all that we need, it's the one network that'll make all out boxes work together. But the "network" doesn't have to be just the internet, and all our "boxes" don't have to be separate physical devices. I still want my general purpose computer. Hell, I want a general computer the size of a small PDA that doubles as a cell-phone-alike (ala VoIP). I don't want a thousand special-purpose little devices, I want one device to which to which can add and change functions and have it all Just Work. And I want my data and my processing power to rest primarily with me, and not rely on some remote network to function properly.
The "network" isn't the necessarily the Internet, it's the protocols and formats that let things like the Internet work. The "boxes" don't have to be literal separate devices but any specific components (either hardware or software) that operate together over those protocols without caring what each other are.
It's great that this type of interoperation can scale to remote inter-device levels too, and allow us to take advantage of remote services, but that's not the key factor. The key factor is the protocols and formats. They are the core of integration and "convergence", and they could work just as well in a single box as over the network.
In the history of computing, the death of the document-centric computing concept (where a vast array of different, specialized tools all work together seamlessly as though your whole OS was one application), and the associated stagnation of standardized file formats, has got to be one of the saddest events that I have witnessed.
People think MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite are great because "it all just works together". We were once promised that our entire computers would function like that (again, only now in the graphical environment too). It was companies like MS and Adobe, who refused to support document-centric paradigms (lest people not be locked in to using *their* entire suite when they could mix and match their own just as easily), that saw the efforts of those promises stillborn.
This is the distinction (once again) between freedom of the CODE (that is to say, that code itself carried rights and freedoms itself that people cannot infringe upon) and freedom of the DEVELOPER (that is to say, the developer has rights and freedoms that no code license presumes to infringe upon).
If there were no laws regarding copyright or other intellectual property, you'd effectively have all code released under public domain, to which the BSD license is very similar. That is absolute developer freedom. Person A releases some source code; Person B is free to modify that code and not release the changes; but anybody else can still use the code Person A released! Person B hasn't taken that code away from anyone.
The GPL is actually a very restrictive license in the sense that it imposes many responsibilities on people to assure that the CODE, in all of its changing forms and permutations, always remains free, at the sacrifice of some developers' freedoms (or rather, at an additional responsibility to developers). That is, not just the code that was released is still free to use, but that anything based on that code must also be free to use - it pulls MORE code into free availability, giving OTHER people more code; but in doing so, it limits what some developers can do with that code (limits their freedoms), since they may not otherwise be able or allowed to do what is required to use the GPL'd code.
To use a very loose political metaphor: BSD or public domain licenses are like anarchy (freedom of the individual from imposed responsibility); GPL type licenses are like communism (freedom of the product via imposed responsibility). Both have admirable goals in mind, and both have their flaws. Pick your poison.
Konqueror uses the KHTML rendered, which is the basis of OSX's WebCore, which is what Safari uses for its renderer. These updates to Safari (or WebCore really) should eventually make their way back to KHTML and thus Konqueror, which will run on your Linux flavor of choice.