Thursday? So actually the world will be destroyed by the Vogons... Just checked: December 21, 2012 is a Friday. So it clearly won't be the day of doom.
BTW, I've found the true interpretation of the Mayan calendar: 2012-12-21 will the release date of DNF.
Producing antimatter with current technology costs much more energy than you can get out, and even with perfect technology, it would cost exactly the same energy as you get back when using it, so it could at best be used as energy storage, but not as energy source.
Not that we could produce any significant amount of antimatter with current technology anyway.
I don't think the tree huggers will like nuclear reactors either, so it's probably safe to just ignore them. Even if you find a sort of power plant they like, you'll have no way to transport the energy, because the power lines will certainly cause lots of electric smog...
But doesn't the energy of a supernova come out of the gravitational energy, after the nuclear pressure disappears because the star's normal fusion ends?
Well, it doesn't say we will run out of Uranium in the Earth, it says we will run out of Uranium ready to deploy (at least that's what I get from the summary). In other words, we are using it up faster than we are digging it out and enriching it.
Of course when getting into physics at atomar scale, then there simply is no well-defined surface, no matter which dimension, due to quantum mechanics.
And to get the power to imagine a Lamborghini, I'll have to eat. So imagining a Lamborghini costs me something. I for some reason I ever cannot afford to buy new power (in the form of food) or get it otherwise, I'll very soon be not able to imagine a Lamborghini any more. And no, just imagining food will not suffice, I need real food. The same of course will be true for the processing power of whatever virtual reality the future might bring. Ultimately it will be built out of real materials and need real energy.
If trusts could last forever, more and more of the world's resources would be tied up in trusts with narrow aims and the eventually all the world would be divided between trustees and beneficiaries.
Coroporations can last forever, and they definitively tie up resources, and also have very narrow aims.
Even a virtual reality needs energy, and your body needs energy (i.e. food) even if your mind is immersed in a virtual reality. Moreover, processing power will continue to need real hardware, which needs materials. As long as food is scarce, and energy is scarce, and materials are scarce, there's always something you'll have to pay for. Maybe it will not be hard to create that Lamborghini in the virtual reality. However who knows what you'll have to pay for the processor time needed to simulate it.
So maybe a better solution would be to have a complete scan of your body's structure after your death, preserved in some well-protected data base, to be re-instantiated into matter at the time this is possible. Yes, the amount of data would be huge, but it's much easier to keep data undamaged than it is to keep bodies undamaged.
I don't think there are many games released for the Sun platform. And those that exist probably run just as well with Linux on a normal PC. No need for expensive hardware. And BTW, what's that "outside" you are speaking of?:-)
The actual visual content is discrete: It consists of a finite number of neurons firing a certain sequence of pulses. While the information comes indeed from 2D images in the eyes, that's not the visual content. The visual content is the activity of the neurons.
The surface of a sphere, which is what would see even if you could see all sides at once, is two dimensional.
Given that the sphere is, by definition, the surface of a ball, I wonder what the surface of a sphere is meant to be? It may be the border of the sphere according to the topology of the 3D space it is embedded in, in which case it's the sphere itself again. Or it may be the border of the sphere in its own topology, in which case it's the empty set because a sphere simply has no border (you cannot fall off the border of the world).
Whatever it is, it will certainly (again) not replace whatever was in use before, but the waterfall process. Every method always is intended to replace the waterfall process. If the waterfall process survived so many alternate methods, it must be really good!
Comments are a sign of bad code. That's because the more comments you have, the more errors you have in your comments. Uncommented programs have zero errors in comments, which points to excellent code.
Thinking more about it, if we restrict ourselves to the unit circle, squaring a complex number is a continuous map from the circle on itself, which maps two opposite points of the circle to the same point. Now topologically, the pairs of opposing points of the n-sphere are equivalent to the n-dimensional projective space. The 1-dimensional projective space is topologically equivalent to the circle, so the continuous map is no problem. However, the two-dimensional projective space is not equivalent to a sphere. You can map it to a sphere if you map a whole straight line (i.e. for the original ball, a whole great circle, e.g. the equator) to a single point. To make that map, you can put a half-diameter sphere onto the equatorial plane of the original one, and then most diameters starting at a point on the original sphere cut the smaller sphere twice: once in the south pole (which is in the center of the original sphere) and then once more, which gives the image point. The diameters for the equatorial point pairs however only touch the south pole of the smaller sphere; all those pairs are then mapped to this single point. The result is continuous, but not any more 2 to 1 (since all the infinitely many points of the equator are mapped to the south pole). After that you can "blow up" the smaller sphere to the original size. Note that this map is continuous (the preimage of an open set is open; if the open set contains the south pole, the preimage contains the whole equator), however its "reverse" isn't (images of open sets don't need to be open; if the set contains part of the equator, the south pole is in the image, but is at the border of the image set).
I now think you can't make a map of a sphere onto itself which is both strictly 2 to 1 and continuous. I'm not completely sure, but I think whenever you have a 2-to-1 map of the sphere onto itself, it should be possible to apply a continuous bijection that moves those points to the opposite places of the sphere, so we end up in the situation described above, where it doesn't seem to work.
Of course a true mathematical proof (or disproof if I'm wrong) would be nice.
Ever tried the "Magic Eye" pictures? There's exactly zero visual cues. Unless you manage to look at the image so that the left-eye and right-eye see it with a certain displacement (so different parts of the picture now match), you see not a single trace of the 3D figure hidden in it). The only depth information that is there is the displacement.
Slashdot Mirror
Thursday? So actually the world will be destroyed by the Vogons ...
Just checked: December 21, 2012 is a Friday. So it clearly won't be the day of doom.
BTW, I've found the true interpretation of the Mayan calendar: 2012-12-21 will the release date of DNF.
Well, if I can't survive anyway, I at least want to be in a place where I have a good view of the event. :-)
NASA astronauts are the only who ever visited the moon, so they certainly are best qualified to deal with Lunatics.
10 bytes per person?
So slashdotters breed slashdotters? Oh wait, slashdotters don't breed ...
Well, while everyone waits for the world to end on December 21, it will actually end on December 20, and no one will have expected that. :-)
Producing antimatter with current technology costs much more energy than you can get out, and even with perfect technology, it would cost exactly the same energy as you get back when using it, so it could at best be used as energy storage, but not as energy source.
Not that we could produce any significant amount of antimatter with current technology anyway.
I don't think the tree huggers will like nuclear reactors either, so it's probably safe to just ignore them. Even if you find a sort of power plant they like, you'll have no way to transport the energy, because the power lines will certainly cause lots of electric smog ...
Only one of the parallel worlds will end. In the others, we will experience the uranium shortage.
But doesn't the energy of a supernova come out of the gravitational energy, after the nuclear pressure disappears because the star's normal fusion ends?
Well, it doesn't say we will run out of Uranium in the Earth, it says we will run out of Uranium ready to deploy (at least that's what I get from the summary). In other words, we are using it up faster than we are digging it out and enriching it.
Of course when getting into physics at atomar scale, then there simply is no well-defined surface, no matter which dimension, due to quantum mechanics.
And to get the power to imagine a Lamborghini, I'll have to eat. So imagining a Lamborghini costs me something. I for some reason I ever cannot afford to buy new power (in the form of food) or get it otherwise, I'll very soon be not able to imagine a Lamborghini any more. And no, just imagining food will not suffice, I need real food.
The same of course will be true for the processing power of whatever virtual reality the future might bring. Ultimately it will be built out of real materials and need real energy.
However, the argument applies:
Coroporations can last forever, and they definitively tie up resources, and also have very narrow aims.
Even a virtual reality needs energy, and your body needs energy (i.e. food) even if your mind is immersed in a virtual reality. Moreover, processing power will continue to need real hardware, which needs materials. As long as food is scarce, and energy is scarce, and materials are scarce, there's always something you'll have to pay for. Maybe it will not be hard to create that Lamborghini in the virtual reality. However who knows what you'll have to pay for the processor time needed to simulate it.
So maybe a better solution would be to have a complete scan of your body's structure after your death, preserved in some well-protected data base, to be re-instantiated into matter at the time this is possible. Yes, the amount of data would be huge, but it's much easier to keep data undamaged than it is to keep bodies undamaged.
I don't think there are many games released for the Sun platform. And those that exist probably run just as well with Linux on a normal PC. No need for expensive hardware. :-)
And BTW, what's that "outside" you are speaking of?
The actual visual content is discrete: It consists of a finite number of neurons firing a certain sequence of pulses. While the information comes indeed from 2D images in the eyes, that's not the visual content. The visual content is the activity of the neurons.
Given that the sphere is, by definition, the surface of a ball, I wonder what the surface of a sphere is meant to be? It may be the border of the sphere according to the topology of the 3D space it is embedded in, in which case it's the sphere itself again. Or it may be the border of the sphere in its own topology, in which case it's the empty set because a sphere simply has no border (you cannot fall off the border of the world).
Can you compile a Linux kernel into 2048 bytes?
Whatever it is, it will certainly (again) not replace whatever was in use before, but the waterfall process. Every method always is intended to replace the waterfall process. If the waterfall process survived so many alternate methods, it must be really good!
Comments are a sign of bad code. That's because the more comments you have, the more errors you have in your comments. Uncommented programs have zero errors in comments, which points to excellent code.
Thinking more about it, if we restrict ourselves to the unit circle, squaring a complex number is a continuous map from the circle on itself, which maps two opposite points of the circle to the same point. Now topologically, the pairs of opposing points of the n-sphere are equivalent to the n-dimensional projective space. The 1-dimensional projective space is topologically equivalent to the circle, so the continuous map is no problem. However, the two-dimensional projective space is not equivalent to a sphere. You can map it to a sphere if you map a whole straight line (i.e. for the original ball, a whole great circle, e.g. the equator) to a single point. To make that map, you can put a half-diameter sphere onto the equatorial plane of the original one, and then most diameters starting at a point on the original sphere cut the smaller sphere twice: once in the south pole (which is in the center of the original sphere) and then once more, which gives the image point. The diameters for the equatorial point pairs however only touch the south pole of the smaller sphere; all those pairs are then mapped to this single point. The result is continuous, but not any more 2 to 1 (since all the infinitely many points of the equator are mapped to the south pole). After that you can "blow up" the smaller sphere to the original size. Note that this map is continuous (the preimage of an open set is open; if the open set contains the south pole, the preimage contains the whole equator), however its "reverse" isn't (images of open sets don't need to be open; if the set contains part of the equator, the south pole is in the image, but is at the border of the image set).
I now think you can't make a map of a sphere onto itself which is both strictly 2 to 1 and continuous. I'm not completely sure, but I think whenever you have a 2-to-1 map of the sphere onto itself, it should be possible to apply a continuous bijection that moves those points to the opposite places of the sphere, so we end up in the situation described above, where it doesn't seem to work.
Of course a true mathematical proof (or disproof if I'm wrong) would be nice.
Ever tried the "Magic Eye" pictures? There's exactly zero visual cues. Unless you manage to look at the image so that the left-eye and right-eye see it with a certain displacement (so different parts of the picture now match), you see not a single trace of the 3D figure hidden in it). The only depth information that is there is the displacement.
How do VHS wood screws differ from Betamax wood screws?