Faster-than-light travel does not cause causality violation for the simple reason that Bob is never in Alice's past, not matter what the Minkowski diagram says. However, Bob can experience Alice's past while Alice is in the future. That does not really cause a causality violation problem, it's just that Bob can't observe Alice directly because Alice is in a different reference frame. But they could certainly exchange FTL messages.
Actually, it's all in the PDF paper he published, which can be reached from the 1st link. The energy to manipulate the quantum vacuum in order to shrink the extra dimension and enlarge the spacetime is about the mass of Jupiter. Propulsion is achieved by altering the quantum vacuum, which means altering the cosmological constant in general relativity terms.
One little joke that can be made in this case is this one: if the laws of the universe do not allow you to do a certain thing, then alter the laws of the universe!!! this is certainly what it is, because it alters locally the cosmological constant.
Complex and intricate instruction sets like the 80x86 made the development of languages, compilers and programs much more difficult. If you had to battle your way through near/far pointers and program overlays in the 80s/90s, you wouldn't say that.
The Mac did not have competition in the form of PC compatibles to drive its development around, and Atari/Amiga did not have the resources to further develop their platforms.
If IBM had chosen the 68000, and assuming PC clones were allowed, we would have stable 32 bit OSes around 1990, instead of 2000.
the choice of IBM to use the 8086 CPU. It set back the computer industry several years. The PC would now be at least 2 generations ahead if IBM did not use the retarded 8086 design.
Obviously, IBM did not believe in personal computers and thought they were gimmicks.
We need to be actively involved in the affairs of the world.
Let's hope your involvement does not cause the involvement of other superpowers.
WW1 and WW2 just called and want us to promote democracy across the world. Look at how nice Germany and Japan are now, they are 1st world nations.
There is a fundamental error in your comment. In WW1 and WW2, you were called to defend the world from the German and Japanese invading armies. Do you see any invading army, as we speak? I don't. Being involved in Iran is not the same as being involved in WW2.
This is where Iraq will be in 70 years, too.
Assuming religion stops gripping so strongly the society, that is. Otherwise, you'll have to add another 0 to 70.
Lets go ahead and seal the deal on the rest of the radical Islamic middle east.
...and cause WW3 in the mean time, because you messed up with Chinese and Russian affairs as well.
But we do what we must and which we deem best, and are forced to worry about the consequences later.
Not a very reassuring statement. Mature people always think of the consequences.
If we were we would taken all the oil fields for ourselves.
Didn't you do exactly that with Iraq? the French oil contracts stopped, the Americans oil contracts started.
You forget history, my friend; among all the "dictators" of history, the USA is a teddy bear.
USA is not a dictatorship. It is a imperialist force, exactly like ancient Rome.
The human mind solves new problems and creates new solutions by applying pattern matching to the old problems and solutions. With pattern matching, the brain creates an analogy, which is expanded and turned into a new idea.
For example:
1) animals fear fire. 2) animals bother me. 3) I can use fire to keep animals away from me.
From then one, the brain has the pattern of 'using one thing to achieve another thing'. This pattern can be used in a wide variety of situations, including formulating the idea of relativity. If you read the history of Physics, you will see many things discovered before Einstein published his works concerning the nature of the universe, light, electricity, gravity etc.
And of course, you have to have in mind that Einstein had a problem to solve which motivated him. It's problem solving (i.e. experiences must maximize our survival) that leads to constructs like the brain.
The human brain is simply a pattern matching engine designed to find the most appropriate response in order to maximize survival.
The average adult brain contains a huge database of experiences stored in a format that it is easily retrievable when signals arrive from the external triggers. When such a signal or signals appear on the brain, the brain does a pattern matching on the database, and produces an output. The output is a response or responses that are transmitted to the body so as that the entity reacts positively or negatively to the current event.
The same principle can easily be replicated on a computer, and it is simply a matter of data organization for efficient retrieval.
Now that you say that, here is a crazy idea: instead of making the PC faster, why not make the player slower? isn't there a drug that can slow down perception? a video game running slowly will seem like being fast under those conditions.
You conflate the power of functional composition with functional pureness - LISP is not pure, yet it exhibits all the advantages of functional programming languages.
Functional programming can exist in object-oriented or procedural code. It's only the pure functional programming that creates the issues the GP post talk about (which seems to continuously escape the academics).
In Java, finalizers run in random order, and therefore cause a great problem for resource management. C++'s deterministic destruction is much better for resource management.
The overall Java performance is lower than the performance of the same C++ program though, due to the following reasons:
1) excessive run-time casting. C++ templates are a great win over Java generics. 2) calling a method on an interface is an order of magnitude slower than vtable calls. 3) Java consumes way more memory (the simplest widget, for example, consumes over 1K).
The article does not have any arguments regarding technology and/or economics. It's just politics. and the kind of politics that America has been disliked for: "we are morally superior to the others, so we have the right to do it".
And judging from the author's name, he may have a particular interest against another religion.
1) Some data like movies can suffer a certain degree of data loss. But some other data (code, for example) can not. How precise is this new storage technique?
2) what is the performance? can we use it as main memory? or it is to replace hard disks?
...so what we have here is a faster algorithm, not a faster programming language.
LISP is better than C for other reasons, not speed...
By the way, why some Slashdot pages are not rendered correctly by Firefox 3 on Windows XP (SP3)? I have to select the text with ctrl+A to see the header of each post.
Slashdot Mirror
Faster-than-light travel does not cause causality violation for the simple reason that Bob is never in Alice's past, not matter what the Minkowski diagram says. However, Bob can experience Alice's past while Alice is in the future. That does not really cause a causality violation problem, it's just that Bob can't observe Alice directly because Alice is in a different reference frame. But they could certainly exchange FTL messages.
Actually, it's all in the PDF paper he published, which can be reached from the 1st link. The energy to manipulate the quantum vacuum in order to shrink the extra dimension and enlarge the spacetime is about the mass of Jupiter. Propulsion is achieved by altering the quantum vacuum, which means altering the cosmological constant in general relativity terms.
One little joke that can be made in this case is this one: if the laws of the universe do not allow you to do a certain thing, then alter the laws of the universe!!! this is certainly what it is, because it alters locally the cosmological constant.
Complex and intricate instruction sets like the 80x86 made the development of languages, compilers and programs much more difficult. If you had to battle your way through near/far pointers and program overlays in the 80s/90s, you wouldn't say that.
The Mac did not have competition in the form of PC compatibles to drive its development around, and Atari/Amiga did not have the resources to further develop their platforms.
If IBM had chosen the 68000, and assuming PC clones were allowed, we would have stable 32 bit OSes around 1990, instead of 2000.
Not really. In the Mac world, there were no PC compatibles to drive the development of the platform.
the choice of IBM to use the 8086 CPU. It set back the computer industry several years. The PC would now be at least 2 generations ahead if IBM did not use the retarded 8086 design.
Obviously, IBM did not believe in personal computers and thought they were gimmicks.
Let's hope your involvement does not cause the involvement of other superpowers.
There is a fundamental error in your comment. In WW1 and WW2, you were called to defend the world from the German and Japanese invading armies. Do you see any invading army, as we speak? I don't. Being involved in Iran is not the same as being involved in WW2.
Assuming religion stops gripping so strongly the society, that is. Otherwise, you'll have to add another 0 to 70.
Not a very reassuring statement. Mature people always think of the consequences.
Didn't you do exactly that with Iraq? the French oil contracts stopped, the Americans oil contracts started.
USA is not a dictatorship. It is a imperialist force, exactly like ancient Rome.
Fixed that for you.
...just plan flight paths that do not cross bird migration routes. Nature has its own planes, we should respect them.
And when the school year is over, the books are passed to the younger students. Only when the material is updated, students will get new books.
Why? what right do you have to be there?
Actually, you don't have any right to be there...
The human mind solves new problems and creates new solutions by applying pattern matching to the old problems and solutions. With pattern matching, the brain creates an analogy, which is expanded and turned into a new idea.
For example:
1) animals fear fire.
2) animals bother me.
3) I can use fire to keep animals away from me.
From then one, the brain has the pattern of 'using one thing to achieve another thing'. This pattern can be used in a wide variety of situations, including formulating the idea of relativity. If you read the history of Physics, you will see many things discovered before Einstein published his works concerning the nature of the universe, light, electricity, gravity etc.
And of course, you have to have in mind that Einstein had a problem to solve which motivated him. It's problem solving (i.e. experiences must maximize our survival) that leads to constructs like the brain.
The human brain is simply a pattern matching engine designed to find the most appropriate response in order to maximize survival.
The average adult brain contains a huge database of experiences stored in a format that it is easily retrievable when signals arrive from the external triggers. When such a signal or signals appear on the brain, the brain does a pattern matching on the database, and produces an output. The output is a response or responses that are transmitted to the body so as that the entity reacts positively or negatively to the current event.
The same principle can easily be replicated on a computer, and it is simply a matter of data organization for efficient retrieval.
Can't you buy one of the other consoles?
Now that you say that, here is a crazy idea: instead of making the PC faster, why not make the player slower? isn't there a drug that can slow down perception? a video game running slowly will seem like being fast under those conditions.
You conflate the power of functional composition with functional pureness - LISP is not pure, yet it exhibits all the advantages of functional programming languages.
Functional programming can exist in object-oriented or procedural code. It's only the pure functional programming that creates the issues the GP post talk about (which seems to continuously escape the academics).
Except if the computer drove the flying car...
In Java, finalizers run in random order, and therefore cause a great problem for resource management. C++'s deterministic destruction is much better for resource management.
You know, unmanaged programming languages can have garbage collection too.
The overall Java performance is lower than the performance of the same C++ program though, due to the following reasons:
1) excessive run-time casting. C++ templates are a great win over Java generics.
2) calling a method on an interface is an order of magnitude slower than vtable calls.
3) Java consumes way more memory (the simplest widget, for example, consumes over 1K).
Since the card has 4 GB of RAM, it will occupy the whole 32-bit process memory space, leaving no memory for normal RAM.
This card requires 64-bit Windows, except if the drivers use segmented memory.
If you replace everything in a machine, it's a brand new machine. I don't see any paradox.
The article does not have any arguments regarding technology and/or economics. It's just politics. and the kind of politics that America has been disliked for: "we are morally superior to the others, so we have the right to do it".
And judging from the author's name, he may have a particular interest against another religion.
Some questions arise:
1) Some data like movies can suffer a certain degree of data loss. But some other data (code, for example) can not. How precise is this new storage technique?
2) what is the performance? can we use it as main memory? or it is to replace hard disks?
...so what we have here is a faster algorithm, not a faster programming language.
LISP is better than C for other reasons, not speed...
By the way, why some Slashdot pages are not rendered correctly by Firefox 3 on Windows XP (SP3)? I have to select the text with ctrl+A to see the header of each post.