The ladder is not moving at an infinite velocity because the equations that govern the movement of mechanical bodies are not the same as those that apply to beams of light intersecting walls. This is why I gave the example I did instead of the example you did.
The intersection of the beam of light with the wall is not a physical object. It's not even a photon (although your perception of where the beam strikes the wall is guided by photons). This intersection point can indeed move faster than the speed of light.
Here's an example of "moving faster than light" that you can do at home. Take a laser pointer and a ball and point the laser directly towards the center of the ball. You get a point of light on the surface. Now rotate the laser pointer until the beam is just tangent to the ball, so that point slides along the ball's surface and then jumps off of it. If you rotate at a constant velocity, you can prove using calculus that the velocity of the point of light on the ball's surface goes to infinity as the beam becomes tangent.
How is this possible? Simply because the point of light is not a physical object. So there is no relativity violation here.
My personal experience is just the opposite. I ship almost everything from Amazon using the free "slow boat to China" method, and I've gotten orders delivered the next day or the day after quite often. If it takes 4-5 days I'm surprised. It really helps that they have warehouses around the country.
That said, it's interesting to hear your thumbs-up appraisal of Amazon Prime. I've considered the free trial just to see what it's like. So far I'm resisting it - I'm afraid it would lead to a lot of impulse buys.
This might be a troll, but I think you've been unfairly moderated.
The problem with electronic voting is not inherently a party-specific problem, but rather one of trusting the system. Democracy is an institution which exists only because people believe in it. (Minor digression: this is sort of like money, which works because people agree that the pieces of paper and electronic bits represent stored value.) Right now, Republicans have the Presidency and both houses of Congress, so any lack of trust in voting is going to be concentrated on the Democrat side, but the source of distrust is bound to switch when the Democrats start winning some elections. (You can tell right here that I don't agree that there's election-rigging going on...)
The really dangerous thing about e-voting is not necessarily that it can be rigged, but that people believe it can and is being rigged. This belief is absolutely poisonous to democracy. In the U.S. it's pretty clear that e-voting has gotten off to a shitty start, and it's quite possible this means that it simply can't work, even if all the trust problems were magically solved tomorrow. Regaining public trust would take much longer.
It's not entirely irresponsible at all. We don't even know what the problems of the future will be that we caused! Take a look historically at the problems people thought they were creating for future generations — almost all wrong. Let's worry about how pollution affects us today and let the future worry about itself.
I see you're missing the point, which is that without validating the data, it's easy to spoof the data structure. So what's the point of checking something that can so easily be spoofed?
So here's something I'm honestly curious about that maybe you could answer: Why did weather forecasting recently go from 5-day or 7-day forecasts to 10-day? Did we get better at prediction, or did we just get more tolerant of error? This change just happened in the past couple of years
Especially since tsunamis aren't caused by weather.
Speaking of which, maybe the Japanese ought to be trying to forecast seismic phenomena 30 years out instead of weather? Aren't earthquakes a bigger problem for them? I realize seismic forecasting is a pretty inexact science, but so is weather (or even climate) forecasting.
If you're 100x as likely to blow up on the way up or burn up on the way down than to have your space station smashed by space junk, it's not worth worrying about the space junk.
So the solution to the space junk problem is less reliable rockets?
I don't know for a fact if 56%/44% is accurate, but I know there's an imbalance. It might be that severe. The key datum for demographic projections is female fertility, so fewer women can have a severe impact on the size of the next population cohort. China will certainly be seeing some much slower future growth.
Next question: Is this good for China? Ask me again in 20 years.
Slashdot Mirror
If Google flags sites for using Javascript, then they'd better make sure http://google.com/ is flagged!
The ladder is not moving at an infinite velocity because the equations that govern the movement of mechanical bodies are not the same as those that apply to beams of light intersecting walls. This is why I gave the example I did instead of the example you did.
The intersection of the beam of light with the wall is not a physical object. It's not even a photon (although your perception of where the beam strikes the wall is guided by photons). This intersection point can indeed move faster than the speed of light.
Here's an example of "moving faster than light" that you can do at home. Take a laser pointer and a ball and point the laser directly towards the center of the ball. You get a point of light on the surface. Now rotate the laser pointer until the beam is just tangent to the ball, so that point slides along the ball's surface and then jumps off of it. If you rotate at a constant velocity, you can prove using calculus that the velocity of the point of light on the ball's surface goes to infinity as the beam becomes tangent.
How is this possible? Simply because the point of light is not a physical object. So there is no relativity violation here.
You should do that on Father's Day, not the web's birthday, you insensitive clod!
Doesn't Shatner have this pretty well covered?
My personal experience is just the opposite. I ship almost everything from Amazon using the free "slow boat to China" method, and I've gotten orders delivered the next day or the day after quite often. If it takes 4-5 days I'm surprised. It really helps that they have warehouses around the country.
That said, it's interesting to hear your thumbs-up appraisal of Amazon Prime. I've considered the free trial just to see what it's like. So far I'm resisting it - I'm afraid it would lead to a lot of impulse buys.
I write my friends the old-fashioned way, too. I use pine.
This might be a troll, but I think you've been unfairly moderated.
The problem with electronic voting is not inherently a party-specific problem, but rather one of trusting the system. Democracy is an institution which exists only because people believe in it. (Minor digression: this is sort of like money, which works because people agree that the pieces of paper and electronic bits represent stored value.) Right now, Republicans have the Presidency and both houses of Congress, so any lack of trust in voting is going to be concentrated on the Democrat side, but the source of distrust is bound to switch when the Democrats start winning some elections. (You can tell right here that I don't agree that there's election-rigging going on...)
The really dangerous thing about e-voting is not necessarily that it can be rigged, but that people believe it can and is being rigged. This belief is absolutely poisonous to democracy. In the U.S. it's pretty clear that e-voting has gotten off to a shitty start, and it's quite possible this means that it simply can't work, even if all the trust problems were magically solved tomorrow. Regaining public trust would take much longer.
It's not entirely irresponsible at all. We don't even know what the problems of the future will be that we caused! Take a look historically at the problems people thought they were creating for future generations — almost all wrong. Let's worry about how pollution affects us today and let the future worry about itself.
Or they'll have developed pollution-eating bacteria and it'll cost about a nickel. We really don't know, do we?
I see you're missing the point, which is that without validating the data, it's easy to spoof the data structure. So what's the point of checking something that can so easily be spoofed?
Maybe I should change the subject to "RTFA, poster" — just for me.
Don't worry, IE7 will solve all of your problems.
[insert failed attempt to keep a straight face here]
So here's something I'm honestly curious about that maybe you could answer: Why did weather forecasting recently go from 5-day or 7-day forecasts to 10-day? Did we get better at prediction, or did we just get more tolerant of error? This change just happened in the past couple of years
Especially since tsunamis aren't caused by weather.
Speaking of which, maybe the Japanese ought to be trying to forecast seismic phenomena 30 years out instead of weather? Aren't earthquakes a bigger problem for them? I realize seismic forecasting is a pretty inexact science, but so is weather (or even climate) forecasting.
If you're 100x as likely to blow up on the way up or burn up on the way down than to have your space station smashed by space junk, it's not worth worrying about the space junk.
So the solution to the space junk problem is less reliable rockets?
Wait a second, do you know where you are? This is /., my friend, not some place to go wildly publishing your calm, rational ravings!
Let's also not forget that Einstein was one of the founders of quantum mechanics! He won his Nobel Prize for work on the photoelectric effect, which helped prove that light was quantized, not for anything he did with Relativity. Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
...it's full of germs!
Sure, everything runs in kernel space on Windows. It's a performance feature! [insert smiley of choice here]
...and if that doesn't work, just wait and eventually you'll quantum tunnel through her underwear!
All these physicists
Might be very clever, but they
Don't left-justify!
I don't know for a fact if 56%/44% is accurate, but I know there's an imbalance. It might be that severe. The key datum for demographic projections is female fertility, so fewer women can have a severe impact on the size of the next population cohort. China will certainly be seeing some much slower future growth.
Next question: Is this good for China? Ask me again in 20 years.
Not to mention the, ahem, One Child Policy....
As time goes by, supply and demand will dictate the price of this new technology.
Obviously true, but the supply curve is largely determined by production costs. So if production costs remain high, the price will not fall.
That said, the history of technology is encouraging in the sense that production costs often fall - a lot.