What everyone seems to gloss over is that this universal speed limit is only that nothing can travel (in a vacuum) as fast as light in a vacuum (everyone always says "faster than light," but that's not what Einstein's work said... it's "as fast as" not "faster than"--- i.e. Einstein's theories do not forbid hypothetical particles that are always traveling faster than light... even if tachyon's haven't been discovered... even if they don't exist, his theories don't forbid them).
Actually he said both. What Einstein said was that nothing can travel faster than light, and nothing with mass can travel as fast as light. If anything travels faster than light, even mere information, then causality can be violated (cause A can appear after affect B from some reference frames) and causality is one of the base assumptions of relativity, and it's preserving it that results in all of the relativistic equations. And for mass to travel only as fast as light, it requires infinite energy. Faster than light for massful particles is right out.:P
But light itself will travel faster than light in a vacuum through some other medium (idk what that is... read about it years ago).
That's true, but it's another phase vs group velocity situation, where the information-carrying capacity of light is still limited to c.
But I think you're right about the causality violation... pretty sure that won't break.
I agree, but only because it's such a basic assumption and the universe would be so weird if it wasn't true. Then again, time being the same for everyone seemed like a basic assumption on Newton's part, and the universe is pretty weird as a result of that being untrue. It's funny that in physics, things like "causes come before effects according to all observers" have to be stated assumptions, and are open to disproving.
Well this is definitely beyond my knowledge, but my understanding is that hidden variables weren't "discarded out of hand", they were one of the major theories for explaining this phenomenon and the one favored by Einstein, but there was subsequent experimental and theoretical evidence that there can't be.
"RAMBUS is not a memory, it is a memory system including controller, bus, interface, protocol and memory. One day all computers will (have to) be built like this, hopefully without royalties going to Rambus."
"Like this" to me refers to the very generic description of a fully integrated (in the sense of 'designed together' not 'integrated on a piece of silicon) memory system. A straightforward statement on the direction the industry was going. That's very different from saying "all computers will have to use rambus technology, hopefully without paying rambus royalties." Thinking in terms of a memory system is not a patentable invention.
As far as I'm concerned, Rambus invented the memory in your computer about 20 years ago and only now is turning a profit on their investment.
DRAM was already headed in the direction of DDR regardless of what rambus did -- double pumping data was so obvious all the CPU makers were already doing it.
As far as I'm concerned, the only thing rambus invented was a terrible memory for PCs (though decent for embedded apps) that they failed to ram down the industry's throat, and only now are they being payed back for the memory makers' retribution in the form of illegal business practices.
You should dig into the details of the case in depth, more than what you've read on slashdot. RAMBUS did do some shady things, but let us not forget that all the major memory makers plead guilty to price fixing and collusion. Some of their executives went to jail.
No, I don't forget what assholes the DRAM manufacturers were, but it doesn't change one bit what Rambus did either and the OP's summary of rambus' actions is completely correct.
Perhaps it is likely that RAMBUS was not really welcome on JEDEC because the major memory makers knew their patents applied to the technology and wanted to avoid paying royalties.
They didn't apply until rambus changed them in the middle of the JEDEC discussions. "Welcome" or not they were there and did not disclose their patents as required. You'd think that if rambus was on the level and wanted to make sure their royalties were paid, they would have mentioned their patents. But then jedec might not have used that technology, and what good would that do rambus? "Perhaps" (in the same sense as "I imagine") the memory makers knew about the patent; it's 100% certain that rambus did and yet said nothing.
Whatever the truth is, RAMBUS is not a patent troll by any means. They do real R&D to develop legit memory technologies, which is legitimately licensed by manufacturers. And in fact without the use of techniques RAMBUS pioneered, we would not have DDR/DDR2/DDR3.
Oh PLEASE. Chip-to-chip interfaces were already using both edges of the clock and it was obvious DRAM was heading the same way, the "techniques" for doing so were already well established. If not for rambus, we'd still have DDR and successors, because that's what jedec was going for despite rambus' contribution to the committee, which was nothing.
Rambus may not be a perfect example of a patent troll who just buys up other patents, but their behavior of sitting quietly on their patents until years later when products that violate them are ubiquitous then suddenly leaping up and crying foul matches the rest. "Patent submariner" is almost as bad as "patent troll" to me. They're both flagrant abuses of the patent system.
They didn't do as much quality R&D as you may think they did, either. It was Intel who actually did most of the work on figuring out how to make rdram actually work.
Then the memory makers showed they could be even bigger assholes, and got their just deserts. Again, why this should improve my opinion of rambus, I don't know, because it doesn't change anything they did.
Yeah I don't know how people keep getting an "anti-technology" theme from Avatar when science and technology unequivocally saved the day, and the scientists were the good guys without ever abandoning science or technology.
It's not like Avatar was a complex movie, but I guess some people, thinking they already knew everything about it, decided to simplify it even further in their heads.
RAMBUS *spit* used deception to get a global DRAM standard encumbered by their bullshit submarine patent.
The Dramurai fought back with price fixing and collusion to lock RAMBUS out of the market.
They both suck, and the only outcome I'd be happy with is one where they both lose. Don't ask me to explain it rationally, but I'd have even been happier with one where only RAMBUS loses. I guess I just hate the patent bullshit they pulled and what they tried to do with the DRAM market more than what Samsung et al tried to do.
Amusing specious reasoning. Is this how botters think? That being good or just having lots of free time are the same as cheating, so they should be able to cheat too? I'm picturing someone who was angry at getting their ass kicked in elementary school soccer games, and even angrier that they couldn't even the odds by using their hands, or similar such humiliations.
An analogy that is perfectly accurate is no longer an analogy.
Coin-flipping works just fine as an analog of the random collapse of the waveform and the correlation between the two particles.
Does it make any significant difference that the coin isn't in a superposition prior to being flipped, as far as understanding why you don't actually learn anything by observing the coin after flipping it?
Before the aforementioned time arrives, I flip the the particles on my end. I now "Know" what the state of the particles on the other end will be, even though the other side couldn't possibly send me that information *after* they've checked the states, at that speed. Isn't that information in and of itself, which arrives faster than light?
No, it's information that arrived with the entangled particle itself.
See, the knowledge that whatever state you eventually observe in your particles the other side will see the opposite, is something that you knew as soon as you created the entangled particles.
In this formulation it's no more mysterious or "instant" communication than if you each chose one of two closed bags, one containing a red marble and the other containing black. When you open your bag, you "instantly" know what color marble the other person has. But that information was not transferred from them to you, it was something you already knew and just had to correlate with your actual marble color. No communication between you is possible via these marble bags.
(I'm reaching here, I know)
It's okay, it's weird, and I'm not pretending I fully understand everything here. This is the "spooky action at a distance" that Einstein didn't like. But what's ultimately fascinating about it to me is that it seems as though in the universe it is possible for things to happen faster-than-light, as long as it can't actually affect the outcome of anything. Einstein didn't like FTL action because it could break causality... how weird that FTL is fine as long as it can't!
There's no way that someone with a 5k+ gear score (that means decked out in t9 raiding gear or better) should be barely pulling 1k dps.
Something doesn't add up here.
Once you've written a bot to behave at all sanely inside an instance, giving it the ability to use a near-optimal DPS rotation should be pretty trivial, and it seems like there'd be every incentive to make the bot do maximum dps and thus increase the rate of badge farming. Why would you make your bot do the "minimum possible"? I guess maybe if they were hunters they could save slightly on ammo costs, but that still seems like a bad tradeoff for making the run last longer.
But you miss the point of Progress Quest. It's a satire of modern rpgs. What happens if you remove all the boring parts of modern mmorpgs? You end up with Progress Quest.
Maybe this is what you meant, but Progress Quest is what you get if you get rid of all the non-boring parts. It's literally what you'd get if you replaced the interaction with the game with a bot. Sure it's satire of the pointless grinding in mmorpgs, but is progress quest actually any more fun? No, it's less fun. And this person literally turned WoW into Progress Quest.
So if the guy only wants to do raids and doesn't care about leveling and getting equipments, why should he waste his time?
But dungeons and raids are how you get equipment! And they're just grinds of another fashion. If you can't have any fun leveling and doing dungeons while leveling, odds are you aren't going to have any fun raiding. And I didn't even see him mention what he did other than run bots. He has 80s, why did he not set the bots aside and start running raids? Why would he quit because he can't run bots, rather than simply say "I'm not going to level any new characters"?
The upshot is that if they won't play the game without bots, then they were playing the wrong game. And now they've stopped, and good riddance.
Yeah, it *is* the same stuff as always, it's only the distance that changed. It was theorized that the particles could *not* remain entangled for nearly that distance -- that makes all the difference.
It makes a huge difference as far as practical quantum communication channels -- which are "merely" secure channels where any attempt to eavesdrop on the sub-light information stream can be detected -- but zero difference as far as the theory of whether or not it can be used for FTL info transfer, which still remains a big "no".
The particles, once they reach their destination, will be under constant observation. When I want to send a signal, I make the particles on my end "react" in a pulse-width-modulation fashion, like Morse code. Their corresponding particle pairs on the other end will "untangle" at the same rate, but instantaneously.
The reason this doesn't work is that for the person on the other end to detect that the particle in their possession has become untangled, they have to interact with it which would destroy any entanglement were there to have been any. In other words, there is no way for them to tell the difference between the waveform collapsing because you made it collapse versus them making it collapse by checking to see if you made it collapse.
The only thing they know is that there is a correlation between whatever state they observe in the post-collapse particle and your particle... but they knew about that correlation when you gave them their particle to carry away with them at sub-light speed in the first place. All actual information was carried with the particles themselves at sub-light speeds.
Those links from the google search can provide more explanations, too. Suffice to say that all known methods of using quantum entanglement -- whether for communication, or "teleportation" -- involve things moving at sub-light speeds.
Bah, that's the same stuff as always. Yes the other half of the entangled pair changes instantaneously, but you still can't use that to send information. You'll notice that in the next paragraph they discuss actual applications and it's the usual quantum crypto-channel stuff where you can use entanglement to detect eavesdroppers. Nothing about actual FTL information transmission, because this is the same ol' entanglement as every other link on google describes.
Maths. You are doing them wrong. The point of light will not travel 1 light year in one second. It will travel Pi light years in one second as it traces out a half circle with a radius of one light year. If you meant to indicate the linear difference, that is also wrong, it would have been 2 light years.
Reading: You're doing it wrong.
They did not say he was rotating the light source by pi radians. They said they were rotating the source so that it struck a point 1 light year from the original. The arc-length -- or linear distance, either way -- was in the statement of the problem. If you want to do maths, then you can work your way backwards to the total angular displacement and angular velocity. Your answer will be different depending on whether they meant a circular wall or a flat wall, but either way the statement of 1 year of displacement is not wrong and cannot be wrong.
Lisa! In this house we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics!
But yeah, you're right in one sense, but in another, when all most people know about Relativity* is that you can't go faster than light, it makes sense to at least mention that when you're describing an FTL effect that you aren't talking about up-ending physics and that these scientists aren't crackpots.
* On the one hand, wah wah the level of education, on the other, it's kinda amazing in a historical sense that 'normal' people are even aware of physics at that level in even the most vague of ways.
Uh... do you have any links to these "cracks in the wall"? Because the first couple pages of search results all just show the standard descriptions about why quantum entanglement isn't FTL communication...
Can we replicate this and add information to the current to transport information faster than the speed of light? (The real problem.)
Well I'm going to say no simply based on the fact that they are claiming no physical laws are being broken and that Special Relativity is not violated, since super-luminal information transfer = time travel = causality violation = impossible in SR. This not the first time this effect has been proposed and it has apparently been studied in labs, so if it was a possible way to transmit information, it seems they would have probably figured that out by now and at least some aspect of SR (perhaps causality!) would have to be scrapped.
I don't fully understand what they're talking about, but it sounds like a similar phenomenon to group velocity, in which some aspect of the wavefront can be said to be traveling faster than light, but nevertheless real photons and information cannot.
Who's to say which is the more satisfying way to play? Maybe someone should release an MMO where it's ALL bots, and the fun is had by watching your AI compete and evolve amongst the other AI.
Yeah, they should. That would be a cool game. And then all the folks who find bot-making to be the most satisfying challenge can go play that game where bot-making is the actual point of the game. If what they want to do is program AIs, why aren't they playing any of the many games for which programming AIs is what the games is about? Or any of the many games where bots are accepted, like FPSes dating all the way back to the original Quake?
You might as well say that some people like to play by finding bugs in the server authentication code, hacking other people's accounts, stealing all their stuff and selling it for real-world money, and taking their credit card to boot. Who's to say which is the more satisfying way to play?
Who gives a fuck which is more "satisfying"? One is the way the game is supposed to be played, the other is not. It might be "satisfying" to bribe the referee, but it's against the rules. Don't like it? Play a game where bribery is an acceptable strategy!
Slashdot Mirror
What everyone seems to gloss over is that this universal speed limit is only that nothing can travel (in a vacuum) as fast as light in a vacuum (everyone always says "faster than light," but that's not what Einstein's work said... it's "as fast as" not "faster than"--- i.e. Einstein's theories do not forbid hypothetical particles that are always traveling faster than light... even if tachyon's haven't been discovered... even if they don't exist, his theories don't forbid them).
Actually he said both. What Einstein said was that nothing can travel faster than light, and nothing with mass can travel as fast as light. If anything travels faster than light, even mere information, then causality can be violated (cause A can appear after affect B from some reference frames) and causality is one of the base assumptions of relativity, and it's preserving it that results in all of the relativistic equations. And for mass to travel only as fast as light, it requires infinite energy. Faster than light for massful particles is right out. :P
But light itself will travel faster than light in a vacuum through some other medium (idk what that is... read about it years ago).
That's true, but it's another phase vs group velocity situation, where the information-carrying capacity of light is still limited to c.
But I think you're right about the causality violation... pretty sure that won't break.
I agree, but only because it's such a basic assumption and the universe would be so weird if it wasn't true. Then again, time being the same for everyone seemed like a basic assumption on Newton's part, and the universe is pretty weird as a result of that being untrue. It's funny that in physics, things like "causes come before effects according to all observers" have to be stated assumptions, and are open to disproving.
Well this is definitely beyond my knowledge, but my understanding is that hidden variables weren't "discarded out of hand", they were one of the major theories for explaining this phenomenon and the one favored by Einstein, but there was subsequent experimental and theoretical evidence that there can't be.
"RAMBUS is not a memory, it is a memory system including controller, bus, interface, protocol and memory. One day all computers will (have to) be built like this, hopefully without royalties going to Rambus."
"Like this" to me refers to the very generic description of a fully integrated (in the sense of 'designed together' not 'integrated on a piece of silicon) memory system. A straightforward statement on the direction the industry was going. That's very different from saying "all computers will have to use rambus technology, hopefully without paying rambus royalties." Thinking in terms of a memory system is not a patentable invention.
As far as I'm concerned, Rambus invented the memory in your computer about 20 years ago and only now is turning a profit on their investment.
DRAM was already headed in the direction of DDR regardless of what rambus did -- double pumping data was so obvious all the CPU makers were already doing it.
As far as I'm concerned, the only thing rambus invented was a terrible memory for PCs (though decent for embedded apps) that they failed to ram down the industry's throat, and only now are they being payed back for the memory makers' retribution in the form of illegal business practices.
You should dig into the details of the case in depth, more than what you've read on slashdot. RAMBUS did do some shady things, but let us not forget that all the major memory makers plead guilty to price fixing and collusion. Some of their executives went to jail.
No, I don't forget what assholes the DRAM manufacturers were, but it doesn't change one bit what Rambus did either and the OP's summary of rambus' actions is completely correct.
Perhaps it is likely that RAMBUS was not really welcome on JEDEC because the major memory makers knew their patents applied to the technology and wanted to avoid paying royalties.
They didn't apply until rambus changed them in the middle of the JEDEC discussions. "Welcome" or not they were there and did not disclose their patents as required. You'd think that if rambus was on the level and wanted to make sure their royalties were paid, they would have mentioned their patents. But then jedec might not have used that technology, and what good would that do rambus? "Perhaps" (in the same sense as "I imagine") the memory makers knew about the patent; it's 100% certain that rambus did and yet said nothing.
Whatever the truth is, RAMBUS is not a patent troll by any means. They do real R&D to develop legit memory technologies, which is legitimately licensed by manufacturers. And in fact without the use of techniques RAMBUS pioneered, we would not have DDR/DDR2/DDR3.
Oh PLEASE. Chip-to-chip interfaces were already using both edges of the clock and it was obvious DRAM was heading the same way, the "techniques" for doing so were already well established. If not for rambus, we'd still have DDR and successors, because that's what jedec was going for despite rambus' contribution to the committee, which was nothing.
Rambus may not be a perfect example of a patent troll who just buys up other patents, but their behavior of sitting quietly on their patents until years later when products that violate them are ubiquitous then suddenly leaping up and crying foul matches the rest. "Patent submariner" is almost as bad as "patent troll" to me. They're both flagrant abuses of the patent system.
They didn't do as much quality R&D as you may think they did, either. It was Intel who actually did most of the work on figuring out how to make rdram actually work.
Then the memory makers showed they could be even bigger assholes, and got their just deserts. Again, why this should improve my opinion of rambus, I don't know, because it doesn't change anything they did.
Yeah I don't know how people keep getting an "anti-technology" theme from Avatar when science and technology unequivocally saved the day, and the scientists were the good guys without ever abandoning science or technology.
It's not like Avatar was a complex movie, but I guess some people, thinking they already knew everything about it, decided to simplify it even further in their heads.
RAMBUS *spit* used deception to get a global DRAM standard encumbered by their bullshit submarine patent.
The Dramurai fought back with price fixing and collusion to lock RAMBUS out of the market.
They both suck, and the only outcome I'd be happy with is one where they both lose. Don't ask me to explain it rationally, but I'd have even been happier with one where only RAMBUS loses. I guess I just hate the patent bullshit they pulled and what they tried to do with the DRAM market more than what Samsung et al tried to do.
Tamdiu discendum est, quamdiu vivas...
And today I learned what this Latin phrase means! =D
Amusing specious reasoning. Is this how botters think? That being good or just having lots of free time are the same as cheating, so they should be able to cheat too? I'm picturing someone who was angry at getting their ass kicked in elementary school soccer games, and even angrier that they couldn't even the odds by using their hands, or similar such humiliations.
An analogy that is perfectly accurate is no longer an analogy.
Coin-flipping works just fine as an analog of the random collapse of the waveform and the correlation between the two particles.
Does it make any significant difference that the coin isn't in a superposition prior to being flipped, as far as understanding why you don't actually learn anything by observing the coin after flipping it?
Before the aforementioned time arrives, I flip the the particles on my end. I now "Know" what the state of the particles on the other end will be, even though the other side couldn't possibly send me that information *after* they've checked the states, at that speed.
Isn't that information in and of itself, which arrives faster than light?
No, it's information that arrived with the entangled particle itself.
See, the knowledge that whatever state you eventually observe in your particles the other side will see the opposite, is something that you knew as soon as you created the entangled particles.
In this formulation it's no more mysterious or "instant" communication than if you each chose one of two closed bags, one containing a red marble and the other containing black. When you open your bag, you "instantly" know what color marble the other person has. But that information was not transferred from them to you, it was something you already knew and just had to correlate with your actual marble color. No communication between you is possible via these marble bags.
(I'm reaching here, I know)
It's okay, it's weird, and I'm not pretending I fully understand everything here. This is the "spooky action at a distance" that Einstein didn't like. But what's ultimately fascinating about it to me is that it seems as though in the universe it is possible for things to happen faster-than-light, as long as it can't actually affect the outcome of anything. Einstein didn't like FTL action because it could break causality... how weird that FTL is fine as long as it can't!
There's no way that someone with a 5k+ gear score (that means decked out in t9 raiding gear or better) should be barely pulling 1k dps.
Something doesn't add up here.
Once you've written a bot to behave at all sanely inside an instance, giving it the ability to use a near-optimal DPS rotation should be pretty trivial, and it seems like there'd be every incentive to make the bot do maximum dps and thus increase the rate of badge farming. Why would you make your bot do the "minimum possible"? I guess maybe if they were hunters they could save slightly on ammo costs, but that still seems like a bad tradeoff for making the run last longer.
Now make an analogy using a cow, 5 bags of salt, and the Pacific Ocean. :)
A cow, 5 bags of salt, and the Pacific Ocean are in a car doing donuts...
Observing the entangled particle is like flipping the coin. If it comes up heads, you "instantly" know tails is down.
But you miss the point of Progress Quest. It's a satire of modern rpgs. What happens if you remove all the boring parts of modern mmorpgs? You end up with Progress Quest.
Maybe this is what you meant, but Progress Quest is what you get if you get rid of all the non-boring parts. It's literally what you'd get if you replaced the interaction with the game with a bot. Sure it's satire of the pointless grinding in mmorpgs, but is progress quest actually any more fun? No, it's less fun. And this person literally turned WoW into Progress Quest.
So if the guy only wants to do raids and doesn't care about leveling and getting equipments, why should he waste his time?
But dungeons and raids are how you get equipment! And they're just grinds of another fashion. If you can't have any fun leveling and doing dungeons while leveling, odds are you aren't going to have any fun raiding. And I didn't even see him mention what he did other than run bots. He has 80s, why did he not set the bots aside and start running raids? Why would he quit because he can't run bots, rather than simply say "I'm not going to level any new characters"?
The upshot is that if they won't play the game without bots, then they were playing the wrong game. And now they've stopped, and good riddance.
Yeah, it *is* the same stuff as always, it's only the distance that changed. It was theorized that the particles could *not* remain entangled for nearly that distance -- that makes all the difference.
It makes a huge difference as far as practical quantum communication channels -- which are "merely" secure channels where any attempt to eavesdrop on the sub-light information stream can be detected -- but zero difference as far as the theory of whether or not it can be used for FTL info transfer, which still remains a big "no".
The particles, once they reach their destination, will be under constant observation. When I want to send a signal, I make the particles on my end "react" in a pulse-width-modulation fashion, like Morse code. Their corresponding particle pairs on the other end will "untangle" at the same rate, but instantaneously.
The reason this doesn't work is that for the person on the other end to detect that the particle in their possession has become untangled, they have to interact with it which would destroy any entanglement were there to have been any. In other words, there is no way for them to tell the difference between the waveform collapsing because you made it collapse versus them making it collapse by checking to see if you made it collapse.
The only thing they know is that there is a correlation between whatever state they observe in the post-collapse particle and your particle... but they knew about that correlation when you gave them their particle to carry away with them at sub-light speed in the first place. All actual information was carried with the particles themselves at sub-light speeds.
Those links from the google search can provide more explanations, too. Suffice to say that all known methods of using quantum entanglement -- whether for communication, or "teleportation" -- involve things moving at sub-light speeds.
That was exactly my point. The fact that people have even heard of Relativity and the universal speed limit is pretty amazing as far as I'm concerned.
The "wah wah" was supposed to be you, lamenting that we need to explicitly state that the laws of physics aren't being broken. ;)
Bah, that's the same stuff as always. Yes the other half of the entangled pair changes instantaneously, but you still can't use that to send information. You'll notice that in the next paragraph they discuss actual applications and it's the usual quantum crypto-channel stuff where you can use entanglement to detect eavesdroppers. Nothing about actual FTL information transmission, because this is the same ol' entanglement as every other link on google describes.
You almost had my hopes up for a minute there. :(
Maths. You are doing them wrong. The point of light will not travel 1 light year in one second. It will travel Pi light years in one second as it traces out a half circle with a radius of one light year. If you meant to indicate the linear difference, that is also wrong, it would have been 2 light years.
Reading: You're doing it wrong.
They did not say he was rotating the light source by pi radians. They said they were rotating the source so that it struck a point 1 light year from the original. The arc-length -- or linear distance, either way -- was in the statement of the problem. If you want to do maths, then you can work your way backwards to the total angular displacement and angular velocity. Your answer will be different depending on whether they meant a circular wall or a flat wall, but either way the statement of 1 year of displacement is not wrong and cannot be wrong.
That's exactly the point. There are phenomenon which appear to be going FTL, but nothing real (including information) actually is.
Lisa! In this house we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics!
But yeah, you're right in one sense, but in another, when all most people know about Relativity* is that you can't go faster than light, it makes sense to at least mention that when you're describing an FTL effect that you aren't talking about up-ending physics and that these scientists aren't crackpots.
* On the one hand, wah wah the level of education, on the other, it's kinda amazing in a historical sense that 'normal' people are even aware of physics at that level in even the most vague of ways.
Uh... do you have any links to these "cracks in the wall"? Because the first couple pages of search results all just show the standard descriptions about why quantum entanglement isn't FTL communication...
A disco ball. Shine a light on a disco ball, and project those cool reflections onto a surface more than a few light-seconds away.
Yep. I like the analogy of pointing a laser pointer at the moon and wiggling it back and forth really fast.
Still no FTL movement or information transfer. Still no violation of GR or causality. Just another nice, attention-grabbing headline.
Yeah but even the summary explicitly says there's no violation of Einstein's theory, so what's yer point?
Can we replicate this and add information to the current to transport information faster than the speed of light? (The real problem.)
Well I'm going to say no simply based on the fact that they are claiming no physical laws are being broken and that Special Relativity is not violated, since super-luminal information transfer = time travel = causality violation = impossible in SR. This not the first time this effect has been proposed and it has apparently been studied in labs, so if it was a possible way to transmit information, it seems they would have probably figured that out by now and at least some aspect of SR (perhaps causality!) would have to be scrapped.
I don't fully understand what they're talking about, but it sounds like a similar phenomenon to group velocity, in which some aspect of the wavefront can be said to be traveling faster than light, but nevertheless real photons and information cannot.
Who's to say which is the more satisfying way to play? Maybe someone should release an MMO where it's ALL bots, and the fun is had by watching your AI compete and evolve amongst the other AI.
Yeah, they should. That would be a cool game. And then all the folks who find bot-making to be the most satisfying challenge can go play that game where bot-making is the actual point of the game. If what they want to do is program AIs, why aren't they playing any of the many games for which programming AIs is what the games is about? Or any of the many games where bots are accepted, like FPSes dating all the way back to the original Quake?
You might as well say that some people like to play by finding bugs in the server authentication code, hacking other people's accounts, stealing all their stuff and selling it for real-world money, and taking their credit card to boot. Who's to say which is the more satisfying way to play?
Who gives a fuck which is more "satisfying"? One is the way the game is supposed to be played, the other is not. It might be "satisfying" to bribe the referee, but it's against the rules. Don't like it? Play a game where bribery is an acceptable strategy!
How can you quit a game you weren't playing to begin with.
The funniest part is that they quit the game because they were going to be forced to actually play it themselves. :)
"What, PLAY the game? Fuck that shit, I'm out!"
Clearly, they should be playing progress quest. :)