And yet Spiderman 3 was the best-selling of the whole franchise, and Peter Parker was very ambiguous in that flick.
Not at all. He was the victim of a villainous alien suite. That is not nearly the same thing as being a real anti-hero. His real character never changed. He is still one of the more goody-two-shoes heroes ever invented. Nice try though.
I was reading the comments and it just hit me: everyone commenting is missing the elephant in the room. Yeah sure, there is some problem with the process making sure the correct sites are taken down, but WHAT THE FUCK IS DHS DOING CHASING CHILD PORN PEDDLERS?
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't that the FBI's jurisdiction? I was working under some sort of obviously fucked up thinking that DHS was protecting us from, oh I don't know,....FUCKING TERRORISTS. You know, the guys with bombs and anthrax who want to kill us in droves. Does DHS have so much free time on their hands that they are chasing common criminals to kill time? (Rhetoric, I think this question has sort of answered itself..)
If any DHS personel happens to be reading this, please pass this on to the people running your little knitting bee: Hey DHS, you fucking nazi retards....FOCUS ON THE GUYS WITH THE ASSAULT RIFLES WHO WANT TO BUY DIRTY BOMBS.
Being that radiation and high energy particles are such a problem is space travel in general, this is going to have to be a problem that we solve before we go too far. Simply lining all future space missions in 2 foot thick lead shields is not really an option, so magnetic shielding or similar technology will have to be developed.
As an aside, I wonder if the creating a large magnetic field for the purpose of deflecting harmful particles would also have the side effect of acting like a solar sail? Seems like a very useful side effect...
Also, Hollywood is made up of many people and a number of differing interests. You can't speak of Hollywood as a collective whole any more than you can speak of Silicone Valley as a cohesive entity. Even the MPAA is run by a group of studios, who don't always see eye to eye on how things should be done.
"And of course, it's worth repeating for the thousandth time on this "kill switch" topic: what the administration wants isn't some button to push, but the legal authority to tell various players (service providers, carriers, software/service operators, etc) that they must immediately honor requests to change what they're doing in an emergency."
Give me a realistic scenario where killing the US portion internet is a justified and/or useful action. Yeah, I don't think so. Has the government asked for a way to kill all phone service? How about a way to kill all television service? This is about small minded idiots who want power. There is no reason for such an act other than to try to keep a angry population from rising up and lynching every politician in sight.
The day that the government gets the power to kill the Internet is the day we should start the great revolt.
"While I think that standing in front of a 'computer' and waving my hands looking retarded isn't the best way to interface with a machine, it would get folks off the couch and at least moving more than their fingers. "
...which would probably be a net decrease in productivity, unfortunately. While I think getting people up and moving around more would be healthy, I don't know how efficient it would be to introduce large limb moments to work flow. Here is my thinking as to why:
Musicians are privy to a little secret, in order to get fast and fluid with your fingers, you try to move them as little as possible. Its easier and faster to move small muscle groups than larger ones. Fencers try to move from the wrist, and not from the elbow or shoulder. So, while its cool looking to see tom cruse waving his arms all over the place, it would probably be really tiring and slow.
Not that this will keep a virtual projected ui scheme from working, it just will probably end up being exactly what you see from Hollywood.
Because Obama is not the dictator of the United States but must faithfully execute[1] the laws passed by the Congress when they are within the power of Congress to regulate. As it happens, Congress has the explicit power to determine what happens to captures[2] during a time of war.
You make an excellent point. The president has very few powers. But it brings up and interesting point of accountability: If the congress is responsible for holding prisoners at GitMo, couldn't they be individually charged with conspiring to unlawfully detain people? The director of the FBI (if he was inclined to) could close GitMo by sending FBI agents to scoop up all the members of congress who voted to keep GitMo open, since it would fall under federal jurisdiction to prosecute. They could probably be charged with a hole slew of charges designed to jail kidnappers and human traffickers.
It would unleash and unholy shitstorm in DC for a good 6 months, but it would get GitMo closed.
This is probably the real problem: The people in the military don't really want to let their catches go. I am guessing that the people in Gitmo are die-hard enemies of the US that simply cannot be charged with anything because of lack of evidence. Everyone knows that they are probably nasty characters, but there is no legal justification to hold them.
It is sort of like arresting Al Cappone. You know you have someone who belongs behind bars, but the rules of the game say you cannot hang on to him without a conviction. Of course, they need to be released, simply for moral reasons, but this doesn't change the fact that the military people who grabbed them want to keep them out of circulation because they think it makes the world a safer place.
The irony is that to make the world a BETTER place it, probably needs to be a less safe place. The right road isn't the easy road.
Why is this even a issue? I can go buy a cell phone jammer from any number of places, and they are nto that expensive. If you really want to keep cell phones out of prisions, just put a jammer in each prison. If the phoes don't work, it really doesn't matter if anyone has them.
To laugh as a sociopath is gunned down by the firing squad seems to place you squarely on the same path as he.
Yes, you are totally right, laughing at the irony of a dangerous murderer dying by their own hand will obviously set me on the same road as they were on. It will be but a scant few days before I start contemplating murdering unarmed civilians because I feel dis-empowered.
Whos to say that with the right justification you might not find yourself in his place, in the name of eliminating others like him?
I think what you are trying to say in some clumsy way, is that I might adopt a 'ends justifies the means' attitude, similar to the very person I laughed at. If you read the prior sentence a few times, I hope the ridiculousness of your thesis becomes clear.
Why would I need special justification to want to kill a attempted mass murderer? I haven't been the victim of a terrorist bombing or anything similar, but I wouldn't hesitate to pull the trigger on Hitler, Stalin, Pol-Pot or just some second rate suicide bomber. I suppose by some freakish yardstick of 'unconditional free love of everything', that makes me a bad person. I would sleep pretty darn well at night if I could do something that would save the lives of a few dozen people. Hell, it would probably be the best thing I ever did.
I suppose you would advocate 'just wishful hoping and love' to cure cancer. It doesn't work that way. A good surgeon cuts out the damaged tissue and kills it before it can kill the patient. Am I advocating killing people who might become dangerous? Nope. Am I suggesting that killing is anything but a last resort? Nope. But don't expect me to feel human empathy for someone who is not behaving in a humane fashion.
I know that/. is full of cynical and borderline paranoids, but really. Think about this for a second...
There there is probably one state IT guy that this got dumped on. Being that he is a state employee in IT, he probably has plenty of other shit to do, and picking through 25k email is a huge time sink. It will need to be evaluated, because a Governor could be, in theory, privy to sensitive material. So, he will probably catch hell if a missed sensitive e-mail goes out, especially in light of the whole wiki leaks thing.
In addition, there is probably a clause that says personal mail doesn't have to be released, and so he has to pick through this idiot woman's mad rambling about pointless shit that shouldn't be on a state mail server anyway. I don't envy the people who have to pick through all the e-mail that is out there when information requests come in.
But in general/., don't be so quick to see a conspiracy, when idiocy and ineptitude are so much more likely.
Really? Is this where we are now? I am supposed to be upset that a sociopath that is trying to maim and kill other people dies by their own ineptitude? Most people are upset by injustice in the world. Riots have been touched off on occasion when the criminal justice system fails to deliver a verdict that aligns with the populist concept of what would be just. When a story like this pops up, it resonates with people because the 'victim' experiences true justice, inflicting on themselves the very same fate that they would have perpetrated on others.
You can write this off as an hateful attempt at demonizing the enemy, but that just stinks of an irrational bleeding heart idealism. This person was trying to murder random civilians because they didn't want to try to reason with the government. Fuck them, their death isn't sad, its a public service.
I don't buy that all life is precious bullshit. There are a few people who who the world is simply a better place without. Deal with it.
as they also could lead to large-scale privacy concerns decades down the road, since you know the various Traffic Management Authorities would jump head over heals for the ability to see real-time position of all cars on the expressway.
Nothing says that a system like this would have to inform other cars of who you are, just that you are there. And as far as that goes, if you aren't broadcasting some sort of unique id to traffic control systems, they would only know you are say, a car traveling north at 20mph. How is this a problem?
QoS is a great idea when you know it is being used, and why. The reason we are having this debate in politics right now is that it is being applied without consent, without being announced. When Comcast starts downgrading your service without informing you because you tried to surf a competitor's website, there are problems.
There's a pesky thing that the US and a few other countries (those with space programs, and those who wanted to play nice with the US, Russia, and China) have ratified named the "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies", or simply "Space Treaty". One of the major points of it is the agreement that no one will militarize space.
good thing nobody has ever broken a treaty before, whew!
Several points: How can you tell a moon nuke launch from a satellite launch? They are going to look pretty much like a big rocket being shot into space. Second, how are you going to track a incoming moon nuke? If you can make fighters in the atmosphere stealthy, why can't you make stealth cruse missiles, stealth satellites, or stealth MiRVs? EM falls off with the square of the distance, so watching 'stealthy' things on 'radar' that are coming from vast distances through a medium filled with far more EM radiation and noise than in the atmosphere could be 'tricky'.
Combine that with the fact that I don't have to vaporize a moon installation to kill everyone, I just need to put a few stress fractures to vent all the air into space, and that there is no reason not to fire a ridiculously overkill 300 megaton warhead and I am pretty sure that MAD is still on the table.
I remember seeing warnings on DVDs several years ago (mid 00's ish) claiming that the funds from piracy directly fed into organised crime and terrorist organisations (even though the vast majority of "piracy" by that point was in the form of downloads).
So, if rather than buy a pirated movie, I were to go download it, I would be depriving terrorists and organized crime money? Sounds like a solid argument for filesharing to me!
Why is it that every time some crazy fucker blows up himself and a whole bunch of innocent people he turns out to be a Muslim.
This a good thing: when most other religions blow up a bomb and kill innocent people, they aren't considerate enough to include themselves in the blast.
Plenty of other religious people are killing in the name of 'god'. It isn't a 'Muslim' thing.
Dude, I thought at the end of 2 that they were going to go with a "you idiot, they're still in the matrix, the solution to people not being able to handle it was just to fool them into thinking they had escaped so they'd stop fighting it" approach.
I always thought the most awesome ending for the trilogy would be if they showed the architect and the oracle talking at the end of the film, and then do a slow fade to a shot of Neo still in his little cocoon, plugged into the matrix, implying that the whole adventure was just a simulation and another level of control. It would have been an awesomely black ending that would have made up for all the goofiness in the second and third film.
Doesn't General Relativity postulate that an object with mass would acquire infinite mass and require infinite energy to travel at the speed of light? Therefor not a possibility. I'm not saying its possible, I'm just saying if it magically happened the object wouldn't experience time. I wonder if "stuff" with no mass experience time. Just something to wonder about, I don't think there is any evidence to suggest massless "stuff" degrades.
If you add momentum to an object, it adds energy to an object. energy has mass (E=mc^2 or in this case m=c^2/e) so, you have added mass to the object. The object is now more massive, and resists acceleration more than before. As you keep making it go faster, it takes more and more energy to make it go faster. This is why you cannot have something with mass reach the speed of light, because it takes an infinite amount of energy. You are in effect 'dragging' all the energy you previously imparted on the object.
Note that you can get infinitely close to the speed of light, with vast amounts of energy, though. But, as you acquire all this mass, it starts to dilate space/time. If you had a an infinite amount of energy to impart on an object, it would turn into a black hole at some point when the energy you put in added enough mass to cross the Schwartzchild radius for the object, and then your experiment would be pretty much finished. The object inside the fast moving black hole is turned into a quantum foam where space/time doesn't really make sense so I suppose that you could say that infinitely dilated space/time doesn't experience time...
In relation to what? The Sun? Galactic center? Other galaxies? Your question is a valid one, but the way you frame it, it sounds like the thinking of 100 years ago, when the theory was based on things suspended in 'Aether'. Ultimately, the answers to all of those speeds is, it almost doesn't matter because unless you are really really far away from something, the speeds are inconsequential compared to the speed of light.
Does that combined speed cause a time dialation effect (even a tiny one) on Earth?
Any amount of mass dilates space/time to some degree. Momentum mass is equivalent to rest mass, so imparting momentum on an object will increase it's dilation of time. Again, unless we are talking about really insane speeds (say 10% the speed of light or more), the amount of time dilation that an object creats is also inconsequential. The cup of water question is an interesting one, btw. Water becomes denser when cold or frozen, but the energy you added to the water to heat it is also part of the system (e=mc^2), so if the cup is sealed so that no steam can escape, there is actually more mass in a hot cup of water, and thus more time dilation. Again though, a cup of water is so inconsequential in mass that it really doesn't matter. I think that the entire earth's mass dilates time by something like 1/1 billionth of a second on the earth's surface, and the earth is almost forgettable too, in relativistic terms.
If the universe is expanding in the sense that there is more space between all particles (this was how it was explained to me: that with each passing moment the distance between all particles increases as the fabric of space-time slowly expands) wouldn't the speed of light be slowly increasing (or decreasing) as well. Would a lightyear 600 years ago be the same as it is now?
The speed of light is a constant. If you travel at 99% the speed of light, and shine a flashlight beam in the direction you travel, the photons will still be traveling at the speed of light. Not 199% light speed (your speed+light speed) and not 1% light speed (Light speed - your speed). Space/time itself can bunch up into 'dense' and 'sparse' regions, but the rate of travel through the density of space/time remains a constant. So, the density of the universe might be changing, but the speed of light won't.
I am not sure what your 'global question here is. It seems like you have a basic understanding of things, but haven't gotten serious enough to look at the math of relativity and cosmology. (To be fair, it is really ugly...). Yes, we don't know exactly how far away Betelguese is, because measuring those kind of distances is tricky and hard to confirm. The way they do it is by boot strapping. They know the distance to the sun, using that, you can work out short distances via parallax shift. You can determine apparent brightness vs. actual brightness of special kinds of stars that are near by, and make assumptions about how far they are by how they appear to you. That gets you further out, and so forth.
If you take a rubber band that is 1 meter long and stretch it, does that change the length of a meter? Of course not. If the space between particles grew as the universe grew, wouldn't that make everything in the universe grow at the same speed as the universe expanded? That would make it appear to people in the universe that nothing was growing, but that everything was becoming less dense. A better way to think of it is that space/time is expanding, and everything in it is just getting farther apart on a global scale.
Well it looks like Duke Nukem Forever WILL release before Half Life 2 Episode 3.
It will never happen. If they say the game will come out on say, March 16th, this just means the end of the world will happen on March 15th. (Beware the Ides of March, Caesar...)
Gearbox is going to bring about the end of the world by releasing this game. The Universe just doesn't want it to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet Spiderman 3 was the best-selling of the whole franchise, and Peter Parker was very ambiguous in that flick.
Not at all. He was the victim of a villainous alien suite. That is not nearly the same thing as being a real anti-hero. His real character never changed. He is still one of the more goody-two-shoes heroes ever invented. Nice try though.
I think he was taking about sexually. ZING!
I was reading the comments and it just hit me: everyone commenting is missing the elephant in the room. Yeah sure, there is some problem with the process making sure the correct sites are taken down, but WHAT THE FUCK IS DHS DOING CHASING CHILD PORN PEDDLERS?
....FUCKING TERRORISTS. You know, the guys with bombs and anthrax who want to kill us in droves. Does DHS have so much free time on their hands that they are chasing common criminals to kill time? (Rhetoric, I think this question has sort of answered itself..)
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't that the FBI's jurisdiction? I was working under some sort of obviously fucked up thinking that DHS was protecting us from, oh I don't know,
If any DHS personel happens to be reading this, please pass this on to the people running your little knitting bee: Hey DHS, you fucking nazi retards....FOCUS ON THE GUYS WITH THE ASSAULT RIFLES WHO WANT TO BUY DIRTY BOMBS.
Being that radiation and high energy particles are such a problem is space travel in general, this is going to have to be a problem that we solve before we go too far. Simply lining all future space missions in 2 foot thick lead shields is not really an option, so magnetic shielding or similar technology will have to be developed. As an aside, I wonder if the creating a large magnetic field for the purpose of deflecting harmful particles would also have the side effect of acting like a solar sail? Seems like a very useful side effect...
Also, Hollywood is made up of many people and a number of differing interests. You can't speak of Hollywood as a collective whole any more than you can speak of Silicone Valley as a cohesive entity. Even the MPAA is run by a group of studios, who don't always see eye to eye on how things should be done.
Google on the other hand...
"And of course, it's worth repeating for the thousandth time on this "kill switch" topic: what the administration wants isn't some button to push, but the legal authority to tell various players (service providers, carriers, software/service operators, etc) that they must immediately honor requests to change what they're doing in an emergency."
Give me a realistic scenario where killing the US portion internet is a justified and/or useful action. Yeah, I don't think so. Has the government asked for a way to kill all phone service? How about a way to kill all television service? This is about small minded idiots who want power. There is no reason for such an act other than to try to keep a angry population from rising up and lynching every politician in sight.
The day that the government gets the power to kill the Internet is the day we should start the great revolt.
"While I think that standing in front of a 'computer' and waving my hands looking retarded isn't the best way to interface with a machine, it would get folks off the couch and at least moving more than their fingers. "
...which would probably be a net decrease in productivity, unfortunately. While I think getting people up and moving around more would be healthy, I don't know how efficient it would be to introduce large limb moments to work flow. Here is my thinking as to why:
Musicians are privy to a little secret, in order to get fast and fluid with your fingers, you try to move them as little as possible. Its easier and faster to move small muscle groups than larger ones. Fencers try to move from the wrist, and not from the elbow or shoulder. So, while its cool looking to see tom cruse waving his arms all over the place, it would probably be really tiring and slow.
Not that this will keep a virtual projected ui scheme from working, it just will probably end up being exactly what you see from Hollywood.
Because Obama is not the dictator of the United States but must faithfully execute[1] the laws passed by the Congress when they are within the power of Congress to regulate. As it happens, Congress has the explicit power to determine what happens to captures[2] during a time of war.
You make an excellent point. The president has very few powers. But it brings up and interesting point of accountability: If the congress is responsible for holding prisoners at GitMo, couldn't they be individually charged with conspiring to unlawfully detain people? The director of the FBI (if he was inclined to) could close GitMo by sending FBI agents to scoop up all the members of congress who voted to keep GitMo open, since it would fall under federal jurisdiction to prosecute. They could probably be charged with a hole slew of charges designed to jail kidnappers and human traffickers.
It would unleash and unholy shitstorm in DC for a good 6 months, but it would get GitMo closed.
This is probably the real problem: The people in the military don't really want to let their catches go. I am guessing that the people in Gitmo are die-hard enemies of the US that simply cannot be charged with anything because of lack of evidence. Everyone knows that they are probably nasty characters, but there is no legal justification to hold them.
It is sort of like arresting Al Cappone. You know you have someone who belongs behind bars, but the rules of the game say you cannot hang on to him without a conviction. Of course, they need to be released, simply for moral reasons, but this doesn't change the fact that the military people who grabbed them want to keep them out of circulation because they think it makes the world a safer place.
The irony is that to make the world a BETTER place it, probably needs to be a less safe place. The right road isn't the easy road.
Pics or it didn't explode....
Why is this even a issue? I can go buy a cell phone jammer from any number of places, and they are nto that expensive. If you really want to keep cell phones out of prisions, just put a jammer in each prison. If the phoes don't work, it really doesn't matter if anyone has them.
Porn wants to be sticky, information wants to be free...
To laugh as a sociopath is gunned down by the firing squad seems to place you squarely on the same path as he.
Yes, you are totally right, laughing at the irony of a dangerous murderer dying by their own hand will obviously set me on the same road as they were on. It will be but a scant few days before I start contemplating murdering unarmed civilians because I feel dis-empowered.
Whos to say that with the right justification you might not find yourself in his place, in the name of eliminating others like him?
I think what you are trying to say in some clumsy way, is that I might adopt a 'ends justifies the means' attitude, similar to the very person I laughed at. If you read the prior sentence a few times, I hope the ridiculousness of your thesis becomes clear.
Why would I need special justification to want to kill a attempted mass murderer? I haven't been the victim of a terrorist bombing or anything similar, but I wouldn't hesitate to pull the trigger on Hitler, Stalin, Pol-Pot or just some second rate suicide bomber. I suppose by some freakish yardstick of 'unconditional free love of everything', that makes me a bad person. I would sleep pretty darn well at night if I could do something that would save the lives of a few dozen people. Hell, it would probably be the best thing I ever did.
I suppose you would advocate 'just wishful hoping and love' to cure cancer. It doesn't work that way. A good surgeon cuts out the damaged tissue and kills it before it can kill the patient. Am I advocating killing people who might become dangerous? Nope. Am I suggesting that killing is anything but a last resort? Nope. But don't expect me to feel human empathy for someone who is not behaving in a humane fashion.
I know that /. is full of cynical and borderline paranoids, but really. Think about this for a second...
/., don't be so quick to see a conspiracy, when idiocy and ineptitude are so much more likely.
There there is probably one state IT guy that this got dumped on. Being that he is a state employee in IT, he probably has plenty of other shit to do, and picking through 25k email is a huge time sink. It will need to be evaluated, because a Governor could be, in theory, privy to sensitive material. So, he will probably catch hell if a missed sensitive e-mail goes out, especially in light of the whole wiki leaks thing.
In addition, there is probably a clause that says personal mail doesn't have to be released, and so he has to pick through this idiot woman's mad rambling about pointless shit that shouldn't be on a state mail server anyway. I don't envy the people who have to pick through all the e-mail that is out there when information requests come in.
But in general
Really? Is this where we are now? I am supposed to be upset that a sociopath that is trying to maim and kill other people dies by their own ineptitude? Most people are upset by injustice in the world. Riots have been touched off on occasion when the criminal justice system fails to deliver a verdict that aligns with the populist concept of what would be just. When a story like this pops up, it resonates with people because the 'victim' experiences true justice, inflicting on themselves the very same fate that they would have perpetrated on others.
You can write this off as an hateful attempt at demonizing the enemy, but that just stinks of an irrational bleeding heart idealism. This person was trying to murder random civilians because they didn't want to try to reason with the government. Fuck them, their death isn't sad, its a public service.
I don't buy that all life is precious bullshit. There are a few people who who the world is simply a better place without. Deal with it.
as they also could lead to large-scale privacy concerns decades down the road, since you know the various Traffic Management Authorities would jump head over heals for the ability to see real-time position of all cars on the expressway.
Nothing says that a system like this would have to inform other cars of who you are, just that you are there. And as far as that goes, if you aren't broadcasting some sort of unique id to traffic control systems, they would only know you are say, a car traveling north at 20mph. How is this a problem?
QoS is a great idea when you know it is being used, and why. The reason we are having this debate in politics right now is that it is being applied without consent, without being announced. When Comcast starts downgrading your service without informing you because you tried to surf a competitor's website, there are problems.
There's a pesky thing that the US and a few other countries (those with space programs, and those who wanted to play nice with the US, Russia, and China) have ratified named the "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies", or simply "Space Treaty". One of the major points of it is the agreement that no one will militarize space.
good thing nobody has ever broken a treaty before, whew!
Several points: How can you tell a moon nuke launch from a satellite launch? They are going to look pretty much like a big rocket being shot into space. Second, how are you going to track a incoming moon nuke? If you can make fighters in the atmosphere stealthy, why can't you make stealth cruse missiles, stealth satellites, or stealth MiRVs? EM falls off with the square of the distance, so watching 'stealthy' things on 'radar' that are coming from vast distances through a medium filled with far more EM radiation and noise than in the atmosphere could be 'tricky'.
Combine that with the fact that I don't have to vaporize a moon installation to kill everyone, I just need to put a few stress fractures to vent all the air into space, and that there is no reason not to fire a ridiculously overkill 300 megaton warhead and I am pretty sure that MAD is still on the table.
I remember seeing warnings on DVDs several years ago (mid 00's ish) claiming that the funds from piracy directly fed into organised crime and terrorist organisations (even though the vast majority of "piracy" by that point was in the form of downloads).
So, if rather than buy a pirated movie, I were to go download it, I would be depriving terrorists and organized crime money? Sounds like a solid argument for filesharing to me!
ROBIN, TO THE BAT-TORRENTS!
Why is it that every time some crazy fucker blows up himself and a whole bunch of innocent people he turns out to be a Muslim.
This a good thing: when most other religions blow up a bomb and kill innocent people, they aren't considerate enough to include themselves in the blast.
Plenty of other religious people are killing in the name of 'god'. It isn't a 'Muslim' thing.
Dude, I thought at the end of 2 that they were going to go with a "you idiot, they're still in the matrix, the solution to people not being able to handle it was just to fool them into thinking they had escaped so they'd stop fighting it" approach.
I always thought the most awesome ending for the trilogy would be if they showed the architect and the oracle talking at the end of the film, and then do a slow fade to a shot of Neo still in his little cocoon, plugged into the matrix, implying that the whole adventure was just a simulation and another level of control. It would have been an awesomely black ending that would have made up for all the goofiness in the second and third film.
PLEASE erase this post before someone from Hollywood reads it. PLEASE.
Relax dude, Everybody knows that nobody in Hollywood is smart enough to know how to read,,,
Doesn't General Relativity postulate that an object with mass would acquire infinite mass and require infinite energy to travel at the speed of light? Therefor not a possibility. I'm not saying its possible, I'm just saying if it magically happened the object wouldn't experience time. I wonder if "stuff" with no mass experience time. Just something to wonder about, I don't think there is any evidence to suggest massless "stuff" degrades.
If you add momentum to an object, it adds energy to an object. energy has mass (E=mc^2 or in this case m=c^2/e) so, you have added mass to the object. The object is now more massive, and resists acceleration more than before. As you keep making it go faster, it takes more and more energy to make it go faster. This is why you cannot have something with mass reach the speed of light, because it takes an infinite amount of energy. You are in effect 'dragging' all the energy you previously imparted on the object.
Note that you can get infinitely close to the speed of light, with vast amounts of energy, though. But, as you acquire all this mass, it starts to dilate space/time. If you had a an infinite amount of energy to impart on an object, it would turn into a black hole at some point when the energy you put in added enough mass to cross the Schwartzchild radius for the object, and then your experiment would be pretty much finished. The object inside the fast moving black hole is turned into a quantum foam where space/time doesn't really make sense so I suppose that you could say that infinitely dilated space/time doesn't experience time...
How fast is the Earth moving through space?
In relation to what? The Sun? Galactic center? Other galaxies? Your question is a valid one, but the way you frame it, it sounds like the thinking of 100 years ago, when the theory was based on things suspended in 'Aether'. Ultimately, the answers to all of those speeds is, it almost doesn't matter because unless you are really really far away from something, the speeds are inconsequential compared to the speed of light.
Does that combined speed cause a time dialation effect (even a tiny one) on Earth?
Any amount of mass dilates space/time to some degree. Momentum mass is equivalent to rest mass, so imparting momentum on an object will increase it's dilation of time. Again, unless we are talking about really insane speeds (say 10% the speed of light or more), the amount of time dilation that an object creats is also inconsequential. The cup of water question is an interesting one, btw. Water becomes denser when cold or frozen, but the energy you added to the water to heat it is also part of the system (e=mc^2), so if the cup is sealed so that no steam can escape, there is actually more mass in a hot cup of water, and thus more time dilation. Again though, a cup of water is so inconsequential in mass that it really doesn't matter. I think that the entire earth's mass dilates time by something like 1/1 billionth of a second on the earth's surface, and the earth is almost forgettable too, in relativistic terms.
If the universe is expanding in the sense that there is more space between all particles (this was how it was explained to me: that with each passing moment the distance between all particles increases as the fabric of space-time slowly expands) wouldn't the speed of light be slowly increasing (or decreasing) as well. Would a lightyear 600 years ago be the same as it is now?
The speed of light is a constant. If you travel at 99% the speed of light, and shine a flashlight beam in the direction you travel, the photons will still be traveling at the speed of light. Not 199% light speed (your speed+light speed) and not 1% light speed (Light speed - your speed). Space/time itself can bunch up into 'dense' and 'sparse' regions, but the rate of travel through the density of space/time remains a constant. So, the density of the universe might be changing, but the speed of light won't.
I am not sure what your 'global question here is. It seems like you have a basic understanding of things, but haven't gotten serious enough to look at the math of relativity and cosmology. (To be fair, it is really ugly...). Yes, we don't know exactly how far away Betelguese is, because measuring those kind of distances is tricky and hard to confirm. The way they do it is by boot strapping. They know the distance to the sun, using that, you can work out short distances via parallax shift. You can determine apparent brightness vs. actual brightness of special kinds of stars that are near by, and make assumptions about how far they are by how they appear to you. That gets you further out, and so forth. If you take a rubber band that is 1 meter long and stretch it, does that change the length of a meter? Of course not. If the space between particles grew as the universe grew, wouldn't that make everything in the universe grow at the same speed as the universe expanded? That would make it appear to people in the universe that nothing was growing, but that everything was becoming less dense. A better way to think of it is that space/time is expanding, and everything in it is just getting farther apart on a global scale.
Well it looks like Duke Nukem Forever WILL release before Half Life 2 Episode 3.
It will never happen. If they say the game will come out on say, March 16th, this just means the end of the world will happen on March 15th. (Beware the Ides of March, Caesar...)
Gearbox is going to bring about the end of the world by releasing this game. The Universe just doesn't want it to happen.