Note: if you're planning to run your giant robot on Linux, be sure to select a strong password for the root account. Preferably something not a dictionary word, and for the love of God make it longer than two letters. Otherwise Ritsuko's gonna pwnz j00.
Personally my only problem with software patents is the length. I think that an 18-36 month patent is reasonable but anything over that is not.
I'd agree with that. Technology moves so very fast in the software sector that the duration of patents, which is fine for normal inventions, is far too long. If it was a whole lot shorter, then software patents become reasonable. If you invent a cool new algorithm to solve problem x, you can monopolise it for maybe two years, muscle in on the market if you like, license it to M$ for a fortune if you prefer... but after that it's free for all. That would be fair. But keeping it proprietary for years on end is bad for progress, and contrary to what patents were supposed to be about.
How about the idea of a stable wormhole between two points in space? Those are still debated as possible within the rules we know.
Theoretically possible, but if so, then they also allow time travel.
So, as we approach the speed of light "what if" part of the problem is the light all around the ship that is passing in all directions? I think it might even be part of the problem. So, as a ship approaches the speed of light around the nose of the ship you start to see light or specific shifts (probably red shifts at first) in light. Then, when the ship passes the speed of light there is a large FLASH and the ship is actually ahead of it's "visible" location. I would even propose that it would leave an almost ranbow like "after image" of itself.
Just not the case, I'm afraid. It hasn't been done with a starship yet, but we've accelerated electrons in particle accelerators to quite enormous kinetic energies and everything happens entirely in accordance with special relativity. If Newtonian mechanics still held, then electrons in the LEP at CERN would have been moving at well in excess of lightspeed.
The problem we have with FTL travel is that as you get faster, you get more and more kinetic energy, and since E=mc^2 you also increase in mass, and therefore become harder and harder to accelerate further. The energy requirements go up asymptotically towards infinity at the speed of light. That's why we can increase the power of a particle accelerator as much as we like, we still won't get much change in the speed of the particles.
Hypotheses like wormholes or hyperspace generally involve cutting the traveller out of spacetime at point A and pasting them back in at point B, without ever moving through the intervening space - thus we get around lightspeed. But then there's no reason why they shouldn't paste back in at a point in spacetime 'before' they left...
Exceeding c (speed of light in vacuum) would involve all sorts of disruption to our understanding of space and time;
God forbid someone would prove that we don't actually know everything. That would be a big blow to the pride.
One of the things that gets disrupted if velocities > c are allowed is causality. Effects can precede causes. A faster than light spacecraft is a time machine, with all that implies. If you're prepared to countenance time travel, then feel free to include the possibility of FTL space voyages in your worldview. Here's a sniper rifle and a picture of great-grandad aged seven, good luck and may the Force be with you.
Personally, I don't think time travel is possible. It just leads to too many paradoxes; if time travel were possible, it seems to me that the universe should be very, very different to what it is. To begin with, it should be chock-full of time travellers from the distant future where all the stars have gone out, coming back here to cadge energy off us...
Funny, but... if a year is defined as the time taken for the Earth to traverse the full circuit around the Sun, then it's 100 years according to any observer.
The Earth has circled the Sun 100 times since Einstein published On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. For people moving along with the Earth, this has been a period of some 3,155,760,000 seconds, while for an observer travelling on a round-trip at near lightspeed and just returning now to the Earth it has perhaps been a period of only 86,400 seconds... but both observers will have counted exactly 100 orbits of the Earth around the Sun in that period.
If the US Justice Department can coordinate such an effort among 11 different nations and justice systems, why can't we find Osama Bin Laden?
As long as we're looking for Osama bin Laden, we have a valid pretext for continuing our agenda of social control. 'We need these extra powers to protect ourselves from terrorists. We mustn't be too squeamish about civil liberties. After all, Osama bin Laden is still out there.' Once we actually catch Osama bin Laden we suddenly have a problem. People will ask: 'Doesn't that mean the war is over?' That undermines the entire project.
Therefore it's better to have a token search for Osama that occasionally turns up a suitably lunatic Arab whom we can market to the press as The Al-Qaeda Nth-In-Command, and meanwhile go ahead with the police state project and the Middle Eastern Imperial Oil Hegemony plan.
If you take that away, what are they going to do with those 5 hours? They might just wake up and realize how much they are being crapped on by our economic and legal systems. They might decide that there is a small group of people at the top who are responsible.
And that television has for too long been the opiate of the masses, and that they now have nothing to lose but their chains...
How would you like it if the world Invaded (and I use that word deliberatly) YOUR town, shutting it down for a week, potentaly destroying a large part of it and making the residents lives hell?
Ooh, I'd hate that. I'd hate it so much that if the G8 turned up in my town I'd go and protest about it, to make sure they didn't come around again. Those sort of people aren't welcome round here...
Heh. A few years ago, back at uni, I was in need of a textbook on nuclear physics. I head into the bookstore to get it, find it, pick it up, no problem. While in there, I browse around a bit.
I'd been playing Alpha Centauri at the time, and heavily referenced in the Datalinks are Sun Tzu's Art of War and Machiavelli's The Prince. Both these are, it turns out, small and inexpensive. Into the basket with them. While I'm standing there at the politics section I notice that the Communist Manifesto is similarly small and inexpensive. Why not? A classic studentish impulse buy.
So there I am, at the counter, paying for my books with my card, when it occurs to me that I can probably expect a knock at the door at 3am for this... I'm still amazed I never got questioned about it at all:-)
That's not really much of a neologism, though. 'Hey, this CD's really good - you should have a listen some time.' I've heard 'listen' being used as a noun in that sense for years.
I've given up saying "Britain is getting oppressive" and now just say "I want to go somewhere with lots of space and nicer weather" and people smile and say "yes, what a lovely idea."
This is Britain. It's like how we'll moan about the rotten service at the restaurant to everyone but the waiter - grousing about the country becoming a police state is pretty much the same thing. You moan privately, but never actually do anything. But when it's the weather that's driving you to consider emigration, well, that's perfectly OK.
So we're coming to the day when cheap intercontinental ballistic missiles will be available to all. Thank you to Jeff and all the
wealthy amateur space enthusiasts.
You sound unhappy about this. Not following the Second Amendment through to its logical conclusion, are we, sir?
And, gawd demmit, why won't thar gawd-damn gub'mint let me buy mah plew-toe-nyum, huh?
But they'll be great at tracking DHL/AirBorne and of course flipping burgers;-)
Nah. Americans won't be building laptops, but they'll be programming them, first and foremost with DRM software to protect the music and moves that other Americans produce to load onto those laptops. And, of course, rather than flipping burgers Americans will specialise in the high-speed pizza delivery that all these hackers and media darlings need to keep going.
This is all about three pages into one of your geek set texts. You've clearly been neglecting your studies:-)
Any realistic near tern transition to digital only would need to have cheap, (less than $100), widely available converter boxes to receive the new-new-fangled DIGITAL signal and convert it to analog for old sets.
Digital TV boxes in the UK can now be had for about £30. The moment it looks like analogue TV is seriously likely to be switched off, the same will happen over there.
I definately remember reading stuff on the BBC site about how in the begining they at least got some funding from the education departement by including stuff that was considered eductaional.
Sounds like the same sort of scam The Young Ones used to pull. By getting some band or other to perform halfway through every episode, they got money as a variety show, rather than a comedy. It seemed rather odd to have Motorhead play a gig at random in the living room of a grotty student house, or Madness finishing their set down the pub just as the gang arrived, but there you go...
If anything, this place is pretty right-wing. Hackers tend towards anarchism and libertarianism; most of the politics I've seen here, and indeed in this discussion, have been along the lines that government should get the hell out of our lives as much as possible.
Slashdotters, it seems, would rather take their chances with the terrorists than entrust more power to central government. That seems quite a right-wing notion to me; the left tends to prefer government intervention to solve social problems.
British system (with which I'm most familiar), where they don't even get to vote for their head of state, and there isn't a builtin system of checks and balances
You know, it's funny. But I could have sworn that Tony Blair was elected and that, not only did he have to answer to a parliment but that he had to do it once a week on live television.
It happened that way a while back: Margaret Thatcher never lost an election, but was thrown out of office by her own party and replaced by John Major. The same fate is very likely to await Mr Blair.
Tony Blair isn't the head of state. He's the Prime Minister. The head of state is Mrs. E. Windsor.
Moreover, Tony Blair wasn't elected by the British people. A majority of voters in the Sedgefield constituency voted for Tony Blair; everywhere else people voted for different people. Blair is Prime Minister because the Labour party, of which he is the leader, holds a majority of the seats in Parliament. It is quite possible - and indeed very probable - that at some time in the next couple of years the Labour party will vote to remove Blair as its leader and install somebody else, probably Gordon Brown. If this were to happen then Blair would no longer be Prime Minister, and this can all happen without the public's input.
I don't sell sick stuff like Marilyn Manson or cop-killer rap, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of..... Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer CDs. Why is no one buying CDs?
Can't imagine, mate. No death metal, no cop-killer rap, lots of Christian music - why, yours should be the most popular record store in town!
I think there's a much simpler explanation of why he's so attached to Rose... She's his Mother.
OK, that triggers two major responses in me and I'm not quite sure how to react.
1: The Doctor is not half-human on his mother's side. He was taking the piss when he said that. If that was true it would be the worst atrocity in SF since midichlorians.
2: 'Are you my mummy?' AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm thinking espionage. You can smuggle your secret spied data around, even past a full cavity search...
Note: if you're planning to run your giant robot on Linux, be sure to select a strong password for the root account. Preferably something not a dictionary word, and for the love of God make it longer than two letters. Otherwise Ritsuko's gonna pwnz j00.
I'd agree with that. Technology moves so very fast in the software sector that the duration of patents, which is fine for normal inventions, is far too long. If it was a whole lot shorter, then software patents become reasonable. If you invent a cool new algorithm to solve problem x, you can monopolise it for maybe two years, muscle in on the market if you like, license it to M$ for a fortune if you prefer... but after that it's free for all. That would be fair. But keeping it proprietary for years on end is bad for progress, and contrary to what patents were supposed to be about.
Fine, unless your name's Dr Black, you're in the billiard room and you've just seriously upset Col. Mustard.
Theoretically possible, but if so, then they also allow time travel.
So, as we approach the speed of light "what if" part of the problem is the light all around the ship that is passing in all directions? I think it might even be part of the problem. So, as a ship approaches the speed of light around the nose of the ship you start to see light or specific shifts (probably red shifts at first) in light. Then, when the ship passes the speed of light there is a large FLASH and the ship is actually ahead of it's "visible" location. I would even propose that it would leave an almost ranbow like "after image" of itself.
Just not the case, I'm afraid. It hasn't been done with a starship yet, but we've accelerated electrons in particle accelerators to quite enormous kinetic energies and everything happens entirely in accordance with special relativity. If Newtonian mechanics still held, then electrons in the LEP at CERN would have been moving at well in excess of lightspeed.
The problem we have with FTL travel is that as you get faster, you get more and more kinetic energy, and since E=mc^2 you also increase in mass, and therefore become harder and harder to accelerate further. The energy requirements go up asymptotically towards infinity at the speed of light. That's why we can increase the power of a particle accelerator as much as we like, we still won't get much change in the speed of the particles.
Hypotheses like wormholes or hyperspace generally involve cutting the traveller out of spacetime at point A and pasting them back in at point B, without ever moving through the intervening space - thus we get around lightspeed. But then there's no reason why they shouldn't paste back in at a point in spacetime 'before' they left...
God forbid someone would prove that we don't actually know everything. That would be a big blow to the pride.
One of the things that gets disrupted if velocities > c are allowed is causality. Effects can precede causes. A faster than light spacecraft is a time machine, with all that implies. If you're prepared to countenance time travel, then feel free to include the possibility of FTL space voyages in your worldview. Here's a sniper rifle and a picture of great-grandad aged seven, good luck and may the Force be with you.
Personally, I don't think time travel is possible. It just leads to too many paradoxes; if time travel were possible, it seems to me that the universe should be very, very different to what it is. To begin with, it should be chock-full of time travellers from the distant future where all the stars have gone out, coming back here to cadge energy off us...
Funny, but... if a year is defined as the time taken for the Earth to traverse the full circuit around the Sun, then it's 100 years according to any observer.
The Earth has circled the Sun 100 times since Einstein published On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. For people moving along with the Earth, this has been a period of some 3,155,760,000 seconds, while for an observer travelling on a round-trip at near lightspeed and just returning now to the Earth it has perhaps been a period of only 86,400 seconds... but both observers will have counted exactly 100 orbits of the Earth around the Sun in that period.
As long as we're looking for Osama bin Laden, we have a valid pretext for continuing our agenda of social control. 'We need these extra powers to protect ourselves from terrorists. We mustn't be too squeamish about civil liberties. After all, Osama bin Laden is still out there.' Once we actually catch Osama bin Laden we suddenly have a problem. People will ask: 'Doesn't that mean the war is over?' That undermines the entire project.
Therefore it's better to have a token search for Osama that occasionally turns up a suitably lunatic Arab whom we can market to the press as The Al-Qaeda Nth-In-Command, and meanwhile go ahead with the police state project and the Middle Eastern Imperial Oil Hegemony plan.
And that television has for too long been the opiate of the masses, and that they now have nothing to lose but their chains...
Ooh, I'd hate that. I'd hate it so much that if the G8 turned up in my town I'd go and protest about it, to make sure they didn't come around again. Those sort of people aren't welcome round here...
Haven't read the news since August 2001, have we, sir?
I'd been playing Alpha Centauri at the time, and heavily referenced in the Datalinks are Sun Tzu's Art of War and Machiavelli's The Prince. Both these are, it turns out, small and inexpensive. Into the basket with them. While I'm standing there at the politics section I notice that the Communist Manifesto is similarly small and inexpensive. Why not? A classic studentish impulse buy.
So there I am, at the counter, paying for my books with my card, when it occurs to me that I can probably expect a knock at the door at 3am for this... I'm still amazed I never got questioned about it at all :-)
That's not really much of a neologism, though. 'Hey, this CD's really good - you should have a listen some time.' I've heard 'listen' being used as a noun in that sense for years.
This is Britain. It's like how we'll moan about the rotten service at the restaurant to everyone but the waiter - grousing about the country becoming a police state is pretty much the same thing. You moan privately, but never actually do anything. But when it's the weather that's driving you to consider emigration, well, that's perfectly OK.
Personally, I'm thinking maybe Ireland.
You sound unhappy about this. Not following the Second Amendment through to its logical conclusion, are we, sir?
And, gawd demmit, why won't thar gawd-damn gub'mint let me buy mah plew-toe-nyum, huh?
If you're innocent, you have nothing to hide and therefore don't need to encrypt things. Only terrorists need to use strong encryption.
And while I'm at it, why do you hate America, and won't somebody think of the children?
Nah. Americans won't be building laptops, but they'll be programming them, first and foremost with DRM software to protect the music and moves that other Americans produce to load onto those laptops. And, of course, rather than flipping burgers Americans will specialise in the high-speed pizza delivery that all these hackers and media darlings need to keep going.
This is all about three pages into one of your geek set texts. You've clearly been neglecting your studies :-)
Digital TV boxes in the UK can now be had for about £30. The moment it looks like analogue TV is seriously likely to be switched off, the same will happen over there.
I definately remember reading stuff on the BBC site about how in the begining they at least got some funding from the education departement by including stuff that was considered eductaional. Sounds like the same sort of scam The Young Ones used to pull. By getting some band or other to perform halfway through every episode, they got money as a variety show, rather than a comedy. It seemed rather odd to have Motorhead play a gig at random in the living room of a grotty student house, or Madness finishing their set down the pub just as the gang arrived, but there you go...
If they discovered FTL, they could have left tomorrow afternoon and arrived here in time for breakfast last Wednesday.
WTF?
If anything, this place is pretty right-wing. Hackers tend towards anarchism and libertarianism; most of the politics I've seen here, and indeed in this discussion, have been along the lines that government should get the hell out of our lives as much as possible.
Slashdotters, it seems, would rather take their chances with the terrorists than entrust more power to central government. That seems quite a right-wing notion to me; the left tends to prefer government intervention to solve social problems.
Careless. I actually did use 'preview', then added that first paragraph thinking I was at the end. d'oh!
You know, it's funny. But I could have sworn that Tony Blair was elected and that, not only did he have to answer to a parliment but that he had to do it once a week on live television.
It happened that way a while back: Margaret Thatcher never lost an election, but was thrown out of office by her own party and replaced by John Major. The same fate is very likely to await Mr Blair.
Tony Blair isn't the head of state. He's the Prime Minister. The head of state is Mrs. E. Windsor.
Moreover, Tony Blair wasn't elected by the British people. A majority of voters in the Sedgefield constituency voted for Tony Blair; everywhere else people voted for different people. Blair is Prime Minister because the Labour party, of which he is the leader, holds a majority of the seats in Parliament. It is quite possible - and indeed very probable - that at some time in the next couple of years the Labour party will vote to remove Blair as its leader and install somebody else, probably Gordon Brown. If this were to happen then Blair would no longer be Prime Minister, and this can all happen without the public's input.
Can't imagine, mate. No death metal, no cop-killer rap, lots of Christian music - why, yours should be the most popular record store in town!
OK, that triggers two major responses in me and I'm not quite sure how to react.
1: The Doctor is not half-human on his mother's side. He was taking the piss when he said that. If that was true it would be the worst atrocity in SF since midichlorians.
2: 'Are you my mummy?' AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!