Should't we know the exact distance to the pulsar, in order to account for relativistic effects? or we just do bo care about the pulsar's actual position and we only care about the light from the pulsar coming to us?
GPS on Earth takes into account relativity in order to have a good precision, because satellites above Earth are in a different reference frame.
Most of the cast in that movie spoke with an British accent, except Costner. It was rather awful. His acting was ok, but a single American accent between British accents did a lot to ruin the suspension of disbelief.
It was so strange that the hero spoke with an American accent that in the movie "Men In Tights", Robin Hood says: "unlike other Robin Hoods, I can speak with a British accent".
The British accent brings an aristocratic aura to the speaker. I think that is why it is chosen.
We know that water waves are composed of watr molecules, heat waves are composed of air moledcules and electromagnetic waves are composed of electrons or photons.
The Amiga was a lot more powerful than the most powerful PC of the time in one department: graphics blitting. Amiga scrollers regularly had multiparallax scrolling with multiple sprites at 60 frames per second. It wasn't until the first video cards with custom chips that the PC could do such games.
That's not a good way to built a custom computer. You don't want to compete on features the current machines offer, you have to go beyond that.
You know what would sell? a machine with thousands of cores, that is able to do real time ray tracing in decent speeds, as well as natural voice recognition and synthesis and a programming language that could easily program all those cores.
Let's say that tomorrow, a company releases such a machine for, let's say, $10000, and the only program that runs on it is a 3d game with mind blowing never seen before graphics, thanks to ray tracing. Wouldn't you save money to buy it? slap a PC emulator on it so as that existing Windows and Linux programs run, and you are good to go.
If the Amiga inventors in the 80s thought like we are thinking today, the Amiga would have a 80286 cpu, graphics that were a little better than EGA, and a DOS clone for the OS. It would never have been the jaw-dropping machine it was.
The Amiga was quantum leap in graphics and sound, for home computers, in the 80s, thanks to its custom chips.
If a new Amiga was to be in todays world, it would have to be an equal quantum leap as it was in the 80s.
And, in order to be that, it would need:
-real time raytaced graphics at 60 frames per second. -natural voice synthersizer. -natural voice command. -thousands of CPU cores. -a special multicore version of the C language. -a truly advanced O/S that ditched the concept of filesystem and went with a database.
Now that would be a quantum leap! if they could price it at around $5000-$10000, as the original Amiga costed (roughly adjusted for inflation), it would be a new era for computers, just like when the original came to existence!
Why would you need a bank or some other entity to supervise the transfer? there is no supervision when you give bills or coins to your buddy, so there is also no need for supervision in the case of electronic transfer.
Counterfeiting will be a major issue for the underground economy. Printing money like crazy will devalue the currency, bringing huge inflation to the underground economy. Pretty soon, bills will only be good for blowing one's nose only.
A digital cash device can be a transmitter as well as a receiver. With a small baterry, a small calculator-like monochrome screen, a surface that can accept light to charge the battery, a small calculator-like keyboard, and a small transmitter/receiver, you can easily lend your digital money to your buddy by simply connecting the two cards over the air, selecting 'transfer', entering the amount and pressing Enter. Calculators with these capabilities exist for over 30 years now, and slapping a small transmitter/receiver and some cryptography circuits on them is trivial.
Regarding the criminals keeping the cash around, they would only be able to do business with other criminals. Counterfeting would then become a standard practice, and so the remaining cash will quickly lose ther value. Banks would not accept the counterfeit money, and regularly exchanging cash for digital credits would quickly raise suspicions. If they use a foreign currency, they would have to import it, but the exchanging at the banks would stil be a problem for them, because they would have to prove the foreign cash was legally made.
Finally, I do no see why the homeless could not get such a digital cash card. If they can count coins and paper money, they could certainly use a calculator.
A digital payment system could be made as anonymous as you can make it to be. It could be a simple electronic chip, holding some cryptography algorithms, keys, and the amount of cash you have, without other data, or it could contain a fully featured O/S with wifi and mobile network support that tracks your every movement all the time, in realtime.
We, as citizens, should demand a digital cashless system that is like the first one mentioned above: a simple card with just only the amount of money on it, some cryptographic functions and nothing else.
It would be a shame to not go down that route, which has so any advantages, like not bothering with change, not carrying money, saving resources by not printing money, avoiding tax evasion, etc.
That the Sun has a slightly decreased output does not mean Earth would be cooler. In fact, it might make some areas of Earth hotter, while making other areas of Earth cooler.
Maybe Chicago is too hot for this time of year, compared to all previous years, but perhaps this change is local, and perhaps another place,that was hot this time of year is actually cooler now.
And all this could be the result of the Sun's slightly decreased output, that has altered Earth's delicate balance in unpredictable ways.
TOS was an exceptionally good scifi series, when it comes to televised scifi. In 1966, when computers at home, mobile telephony, tablets, etc were unheard of, and when most of the world did not even have television, there comes a show that;
-shows people working on computer screens, by touching them. -have mobile communicators. -people work on a computer network -computer accepting voice commands
Let's also not forget warp drive, teleportation, antigravity, and the first ever interracial kiss on TV.
That was groundbreaking, wasn't it?
Fast forward 40 years later, and much of what ST showed has been implemented in one form or another. We have networked computers, mobile computers, communicators, tablets, and interacial relationships are aplenty every day on TV.
So, what this new movie offers us over the old one, from a scifi perspective? nothing at all.
Not only that, but as an action movie, it is rather lame. The plot holes are as big as Kirk's ego, and all the consistence the old universe had had gone out of the window.
To me, that means one thing only: it was a bad movie.
Did it make a huge profit? yes, it did. But that does not mean anything. The movie audience has been brainwashed with so many bad movies the last 20 years, that they do not know what a good movie is any more. They will watch any shit thrown at them, if they get their entertainment fix. The general audience watches Big Brother, America's Most Wanted and every MTV teenage trash series. For them, STXI may have been even intellectual, but that does not mean it was a good film.
The current technology is more than enough to create a market without paper and coin money. Replacing cash with an electronic card would benefit to the environment and, above all, eliminate tax evasion.
As for the privacy concerns, an electronic payment system should only track the amount of money being transfered, not any details on the goods purchased. But I seriously doubt companies will bypass this huge chance for realtime surveying of customers' habits.
Are you a Star Blazers fan? I am. Are you also a Star Trek fan?
Do you remember the episode "best of both worlds" from TNG? they used the deflector dish as a giant beam weapon, much like the Wave Motion Gun. The deflector dish was unusable for some period of time after the firing, just like the Wave Motion Gun!
I could almost hear Riker give the order: 'NINE...EIGHT...SEVEN...SIX...FIVE...FOUR...THREE...TWO...ONE...ZERO...WAVE MOTION GUN, FIRE!'
You are so correct. Nuclear energy is as safe as you make it to be.
Sadly, the case of how the military treats safety reveals a very thorny problem with the private sector: while the military, i.e. the public sector, has the highest standards of safety, regardless of the cost, the private sector has the same level of safety only if it is profitable enough.
The situation in Japan was created because a private company did not think a tsunami would ever hit those reactors. They were warned by the government that they should take stronger safety measures because Japan frequently has bigger than 7 Richter earthquakes, but the company chose to do nothing.
This kind of problem would never happen to the military, because they put safety above profits. Or profits brought by the safety over profits by ignoring safety.
Denying that the skyscrapers were brought down by the airliners is stupid, but it is not stupid to think that the event was helped, if not directly organized, by the industrial and military complex in order to create a new enemy to help boost the business and American dominance over the globe.
Do you know the 'Project For New American Century'? it is a right-wing think tank where its central idea in the year 2000 was that America needed a new Perl Harbor event to use as the basis for expanding its military presence worldwide. A year after that, kaboom, America has its 2nd Perl Harbor, and right after that, some major war campaigns.
Then the compiler could error any time it saw a situation where the variable could be (or was) handed a value outside those boundaries.
While what you propose seems a sensible solution, there is no algorithm to solve all cases. The problem is undecidable. If there was such an algorithm, it would be possible to get the result of a computation by examining it and not running it. See the 'halting problem' for more details.
Slashdot Mirror
You can always have a 2nd account on Facebook, with your real credentials, but without any friends or contacts or messages.
The violation of terms of service is when you have an account with a name other than yours.
Should't we know the exact distance to the pulsar, in order to account for relativistic effects? or we just do bo care about the pulsar's actual position and we only care about the light from the pulsar coming to us?
GPS on Earth takes into account relativity in order to have a good precision, because satellites above Earth are in a different reference frame.
Most of the cast in that movie spoke with an British accent, except Costner. It was rather awful. His acting was ok, but a single American accent between British accents did a lot to ruin the suspension of disbelief.
It was so strange that the hero spoke with an American accent that in the movie "Men In Tights", Robin Hood says: "unlike other Robin Hoods, I can speak with a British accent".
The British accent brings an aristocratic aura to the speaker. I think that is why it is chosen.
And tell them you do not have much time for Facebook, since you prefer other activities.
The good side: it allows private corporations to do things like this.
The bad side: it puts money in the hands of the few.
We know that water waves are composed of watr molecules, heat waves are composed of air moledcules and electromagnetic waves are composed of electrons or photons.
What is a quantum particle wave composed of?
Perhaps you are not aware of the fact that many big names of Orthodox Christianity have said that there are no other worlds like Earth.
The Amiga was a lot more powerful than the most powerful PC of the time in one department: graphics blitting. Amiga scrollers regularly had multiparallax scrolling with multiple sprites at 60 frames per second. It wasn't until the first video cards with custom chips that the PC could do such games.
That's not a good way to built a custom computer. You don't want to compete on features the current machines offer, you have to go beyond that.
You know what would sell? a machine with thousands of cores, that is able to do real time ray tracing in decent speeds, as well as natural voice recognition and synthesis and a programming language that could easily program all those cores.
Let's say that tomorrow, a company releases such a machine for, let's say, $10000, and the only program that runs on it is a 3d game with mind blowing never seen before graphics, thanks to ray tracing. Wouldn't you save money to buy it? slap a PC emulator on it so as that existing Windows and Linux programs run, and you are good to go.
If the Amiga inventors in the 80s thought like we are thinking today, the Amiga would have a 80286 cpu, graphics that were a little better than EGA, and a DOS clone for the OS. It would never have been the jaw-dropping machine it was.
Indeed.
The Amiga was quantum leap in graphics and sound, for home computers, in the 80s, thanks to its custom chips.
If a new Amiga was to be in todays world, it would have to be an equal quantum leap as it was in the 80s.
And, in order to be that, it would need:
-real time raytaced graphics at 60 frames per second.
-natural voice synthersizer.
-natural voice command.
-thousands of CPU cores.
-a special multicore version of the C language.
-a truly advanced O/S that ditched the concept of filesystem and went with a database.
Now that would be a quantum leap! if they could price it at around $5000-$10000, as the original Amiga costed (roughly adjusted for inflation), it would be a new era for computers, just like when the original came to existence!
Why would you need a bank or some other entity to supervise the transfer? there is no supervision when you give bills or coins to your buddy, so there is also no need for supervision in the case of electronic transfer.
Counterfeiting will be a major issue for the underground economy. Printing money like crazy will devalue the currency, bringing huge inflation to the underground economy. Pretty soon, bills will only be good for blowing one's nose only.
So why connect the TV to the internet, when we know that it can open the door to Orwellian surveillance?
Your allegations are unfounded.
A digital cash device can be a transmitter as well as a receiver. With a small baterry, a small calculator-like monochrome screen, a surface that can accept light to charge the battery, a small calculator-like keyboard, and a small transmitter/receiver, you can easily lend your digital money to your buddy by simply connecting the two cards over the air, selecting 'transfer', entering the amount and pressing Enter. Calculators with these capabilities exist for over 30 years now, and slapping a small transmitter/receiver and some cryptography circuits on them is trivial.
Regarding the criminals keeping the cash around, they would only be able to do business with other criminals. Counterfeting would then become a standard practice, and so the remaining cash will quickly lose ther value. Banks would not accept the counterfeit money, and regularly exchanging cash for digital credits would quickly raise suspicions. If they use a foreign currency, they would have to import it, but the exchanging at the banks would stil be a problem for them, because they would have to prove the foreign cash was legally made.
Finally, I do no see why the homeless could not get such a digital cash card. If they can count coins and paper money, they could certainly use a calculator.
A government that worked for its people and not against them would certainly choose such an anonymous system.
The problem is not that an anonymous digital paying system cannot be done. It is that we do not have real democracy.
A digital payment system could be made as anonymous as you can make it to be. It could be a simple electronic chip, holding some cryptography algorithms, keys, and the amount of cash you have, without other data, or it could contain a fully featured O/S with wifi and mobile network support that tracks your every movement all the time, in realtime.
We, as citizens, should demand a digital cashless system that is like the first one mentioned above: a simple card with just only the amount of money on it, some cryptographic functions and nothing else.
It would be a shame to not go down that route, which has so any advantages, like not bothering with change, not carrying money, saving resources by not printing money, avoiding tax evasion, etc.
That the Sun has a slightly decreased output does not mean Earth would be cooler. In fact, it might make some areas of Earth hotter, while making other areas of Earth cooler.
Maybe Chicago is too hot for this time of year, compared to all previous years, but perhaps this change is local, and perhaps another place,that was hot this time of year is actually cooler now.
And all this could be the result of the Sun's slightly decreased output, that has altered Earth's delicate balance in unpredictable ways.
Actually, they never were.
if democracy could change things, it would be outlawed.
TOS was an exceptionally good scifi series, when it comes to televised scifi. In 1966, when computers at home, mobile telephony, tablets, etc were unheard of, and when most of the world did not even have television, there comes a show that;
-shows people working on computer screens, by touching them.
-have mobile communicators.
-people work on a computer network
-computer accepting voice commands
Let's also not forget warp drive, teleportation, antigravity, and the first ever interracial kiss on TV.
That was groundbreaking, wasn't it?
Fast forward 40 years later, and much of what ST showed has been implemented in one form or another. We have networked computers, mobile computers, communicators, tablets, and interacial relationships are aplenty every day on TV.
So, what this new movie offers us over the old one, from a scifi perspective? nothing at all.
Not only that, but as an action movie, it is rather lame. The plot holes are as big as Kirk's ego, and all the consistence the old universe had had gone out of the window.
To me, that means one thing only: it was a bad movie.
Did it make a huge profit? yes, it did. But that does not mean anything. The movie audience has been brainwashed with so many bad movies the last 20 years, that they do not know what a good movie is any more. They will watch any shit thrown at them, if they get their entertainment fix. The general audience watches Big Brother, America's Most Wanted and every MTV teenage trash series. For them, STXI may have been even intellectual, but that does not mean it was a good film.
The current technology is more than enough to create a market without paper and coin money. Replacing cash with an electronic card would benefit to the environment and, above all, eliminate tax evasion.
As for the privacy concerns, an electronic payment system should only track the amount of money being transfered, not any details on the goods purchased. But I seriously doubt companies will bypass this huge chance for realtime surveying of customers' habits.
Ada did not fail at all. It is used for exactly what it was designed for: mission critical defense applications.
Ada was not designed for intranet or web or mobile or desktop applications, although it can do those things really well.
The correct answer to how the universe was created is "I do not know".
If you say anything else, I'll judge you as a moron. It's as simple as that.
Are you a Star Blazers fan? I am. Are you also a Star Trek fan?
Do you remember the episode "best of both worlds" from TNG? they used the deflector dish as a giant beam weapon, much like the Wave Motion Gun. The deflector dish was unusable for some period of time after the firing, just like the Wave Motion Gun!
I could almost hear Riker give the order: 'NINE...EIGHT...SEVEN...SIX...FIVE...FOUR...THREE...TWO...ONE...ZERO...WAVE MOTION GUN, FIRE!'
You are so correct. Nuclear energy is as safe as you make it to be.
Sadly, the case of how the military treats safety reveals a very thorny problem with the private sector: while the military, i.e. the public sector, has the highest standards of safety, regardless of the cost, the private sector has the same level of safety only if it is profitable enough.
The situation in Japan was created because a private company did not think a tsunami would ever hit those reactors. They were warned by the government that they should take stronger safety measures because Japan frequently has bigger than 7 Richter earthquakes, but the company chose to do nothing.
This kind of problem would never happen to the military, because they put safety above profits. Or profits brought by the safety over profits by ignoring safety.
Denying that the skyscrapers were brought down by the airliners is stupid, but it is not stupid to think that the event was helped, if not directly organized, by the industrial and military complex in order to create a new enemy to help boost the business and American dominance over the globe.
Do you know the 'Project For New American Century'? it is a right-wing think tank where its central idea in the year 2000 was that America needed a new Perl Harbor event to use as the basis for expanding its military presence worldwide. A year after that, kaboom, America has its 2nd Perl Harbor, and right after that, some major war campaigns.
Now that is a possible consipracy, isn't?
Then the compiler could error any time it saw a situation where the variable could be (or was) handed a value outside those boundaries.
While what you propose seems a sensible solution, there is no algorithm to solve all cases. The problem is undecidable. If there was such an algorithm, it would be possible to get the result of a computation by examining it and not running it. See the 'halting problem' for more details.