Now that is actually a useful metric! I like it. Of course it would vary based on the cost of gas, the cost of electricity, and so forth. But hey you could make some reasonable assumptions, apply them country-wide, and you could at least meaningfully compare the values even if you had to adjust them for your local conditions to know how much you're really going to spend.
I mean, does battery use not mean energy ?
No it does, that's why they had to invent some conversion scheme between grid power and gasoline. It involves a lot of assumptions about where your power comes from that may be reasonable for a 'national average' but probably won't apply to your specific case.
How about miles per pound of carbon dioxide emission?
Because while I do want to reduce CO2 emissions, I do not want that to be the sole metric. Plus that could have all kinds of side effects, like an engine that somehow stored the CO2 but as a result released 4x that amount of sulfur compounds would be bad. How would you deal with electricity from wind farms? Would you count the carbon cost of making the windmill, and how would you amortize that over all the cars using that power and the number of miles driven? Would you do the same thing with the carbon cost of making the vehicle?
Or, or in addition, miles per PRIMARY unit of energy input?
What, you mean like if you're burning coal to get your electricity, you measure in miles-per-pound-of-coal? That makes things really hard to compare...
I'm supposed to believe that, in 2 years of hybrid development, you've developed a production vehicle that will get almost *5 TIMES* the gas mileage of Toyota's hybrid model (that they've been developing and improving on for over 12 years)?
No, you're supposed to read the summary at the very least and understand that it's talking about an EPA-established conversion from electricity usage to equivalent gasoline consumption for EVs. Regardless of the particulars of the method, it's no surprise that this number would be much higher for something running purely off an electric motor vs. the Prius which is using its ICE most of the time even for short trips.
So if a guy drives every day back and forth to work, less than 40 miles, he's only using the plug-in electricity. But the GM exec's aren't counting that electricity he's using, only his actual gasoline used on occasional longer trips, towards the "Miles Per Gallon" rating. I guess GM thinks that people don't pay for their electricity, and that electricity doesn't come from power plants that burn fossil fuels too.
According to GM, I guess if I never go on longer trips, my Volt will be getting infinity miles per gallon.
No, Smartiac, they are counting the electricity you use. The value is only for short trips that solely use electricity. It isn't infinity because they are in fact trying to account for that electricity, but put it in terms of the standard MPG. That conversion metric has a whole host of problems with it, but it isn't ludicrous on its face. EVs are extremely efficient, and power plant electricity generation is extremely efficient compared to the ICEs in automobiles. So whatever reasonable conversion you come up with, that's probably in the ballpark.
The MPG will be much lower for longer trips because there they actually have to burn actual gas. But even that is 50mpg (again using the EPA guidelines which aren't perfect for normal cars either).
Then I guess we could argue matters of degree: do we get bigger benefit from space-related research or, say, stem-cell research, investing in social programs or basic education.
Yes. This is the correct place for the debate to be.
And I'd have to say 'I don't know, so let's find a way to invest in all of them, and hopefully reduce the need for investment in the digging ditches/filling them in, etc.'
Agreed. And from that standpoint, $50mil seems like a pittance compared to the totality of our government's investment. I'd like to see more, and more for all the things you mentioned previously, and less, say, corn subsidies where megalo-corps grow tons of excess corn and then let it rot.
However, I think this statement goes a little far. FTL travel almost certainly implies time travel, but relativity only makes a preferred frame seemingly unnecessary given current observations. It doesn't rule out a preferred frame altogether.
Relativity is predicated on the assumption that there is no preferred reference frame. It is because of that assumption that many of the laws of Relativity are required to ensure that it is the case. If there was a preferred reference frame such that the laws of physics only had to apply to it, but causality could be broken elsewhere, then the Theory of Relativity would be very different.
Also, violating causality is a good reason to be suspicious of a phenomenon, but I don't think it deserves the "impossible" label.
It's impossible in the Relativistic Universe. It is always possible that Relativity is wrong, and that its assumptions are wrong. Hell, Newton was wrong about his basic and seemingly safe assumption that time was the same for all observers (and I hear he was even smart enough to recognize he was making that assumption and write it down). Maybe causality can be broken. The implications for physics would be profound.
Things like Warp Drives are ways to get around the limitations of Relativity without it having to be "wrong" in the hypothetical universe. But it doesn't work.
Grandfather paradoxes are (IMHO) the only reason to doubt the possibility of breaking causality, and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics eliminates these paradoxes.
I'm going to wait until we unify QM and GR before I agree with that. It isn't clear to me at all that having a loop in causality in your spacetime graph would necessarily mean you have a separate outcome from some quantum waveform collapse such that you are in a different universe at the "end" of the loop vs the "beginning". There is nothing in Relativity (obviously) that would require that to be the case, and there wouldn't be a "end" or "beginning" either.
I'm also going to wait until we have some reason to actually prefer the many world interpretation over others before I agree with that. Just because it would be convenient for solving time travel paradoxes in a universe where FTL travel is possible doesn't mean its actually true. Seems more likely (as in agrees with current best theory) that time travel (and thus FTL) is simply impossible.
Remember, the reason the broken window fallacy is a fallacy is that it assumes that breaking a window and having to fix it is the only thing that gets the money moving and thus you're making things better by breaking the window. The observation that this money could have been spent on new development with equal or greater effect on the economy is what nullifies it.
Investing in space tourism is investing in cheap access to space. That's not anything like digging ditches just so you can fill them in, or breaking a window so you have to fix it, or going to war so you have to spend tons of money blowing things and people up. It's more like (though not exactly like) the U.S. highway system. A public works project that had a huge economic benefit.
If that were true, quantum entanglement would break causality.
Not it wouldn't, because nothing is traveling faster than c in entanglement, not even information. In fact, it is exactly for the reason I'm describing that demonstrates why quantum entanglement can't be used to send information. Nor can any effect resulting from the entanglement being collapsed on the "other end" be distinguishable from it collapsing on your end. There is no possibility of breaking causality.
However macroscopic-you traveling FTL most definitely involves transferring mass and information and thus causality can be broken.
Actually, what we perceive as causality is a symptom, not the cause. Hence it's an illegal assumption that time travel would _have_ to occur every time local effects shift (for lack of a better word) between two points in space faster than it would take a photon to traverse.
Actually, causality is one of the basic assumptions of Relativity. That's how Einstein ended up arriving at the conclusion that nothing can travel faster than light. He assumed causality was inviolate, and he assumed that c was constant for all observers. It was the latter notion that led to the idea that different observers could see things happening at different times. And this led to the notion that if one could travel faster than c, some observer would see effect happen before cause, violating causality.
And I didn't say time travel necessarily had to happen in any particular instance of FTL. I said FTL necessarily allows for time travel. Which, if you look, every reference agrees with.
I think most people here, including possibly myself, already know about relativistic effects, there is no need to preach. The whole discussion was _not_ based on the idea of actually accelerating any quantity of matter to causality-breaking, faster-than-light speeds to begin with. There is simply no propulsion system that can do that. What we may be able to build, however, is a system that achieves the same effect by bending spacetime in a very neat way. This is what SciFi nerds call FTL. It's a theoretical system with theoretical properties. But _if_ it works, it's not a time machine simply because it teleports matter between two points "faster" than it would take a ray of light to do so.
Yes I understand that and I thought I was pretty clear in stating that I was not referring to an object accelerated past c. Any method of travel which appears to be super-luminal to any observer breaks causality. The poster was suggesting a method where some observer would agree that you traveled FTL, yet because you didn't "really" go FTL you get around Einstein's conclusion. That simply isn't true.
Energy-wise, accelerating anything to c is impossible. Causality-wise, going faster than c by any method is impossible. I'm a Sci-Fi nerd, and hey it's neat to think about warp driving letting you get FTL without actually having to accelerate to make it seem semi-plausible. Nevertheless, even though it doesn't work that way in Star Trek, warp drive allows time travel.
In order for it to really work, we need more than just warp drive. We also need to violate Relativity. Either causality is not inviolate, and time travel is really possible, or some other assumption of Relativity is broken. That's always possible, sure, but in a Relativistic universe, FTL == Time Travel. Seriously, look it up.
Oops, my second link to the page with nice graphs was hidden in a period. The explanation on that page uses instantaneous communication as its example for clarity and simplicity, but all you really need to do is break out of the light cone and you can potentially break causality with time travel.
Having an FTL drive doesn't mean it's a time machine. The actual method of travel is important here.
Yes actually FTL does mean you have a time machine, and the method of travel doesn't really matter. It's not like a Back to the Future time where you can arbitrarily go backwards and forwards as far as you want, it's limited to past-only and by how far and fast you can actually travel and how fast your non-superluminal spaceships can travel. But from some observer's reference frame you will have traveled back in time and broken causality by arriving at your destination before you left, simply by moving faster than c relative to them.
And if you incorporate a second FTL journey, it's actually possible to arrive at your starting point before you left according to all reference frames.
Note that it does not depend on Lorentz Transformation of the super-luminal traveler/communication. The mechanism isn't important. That observers in normal, relativistic reference frames see you traveling faster than c is what is important. If you can do that, you can go back in time.
Whether or not time flows differently for the travelers (relative to the galactic frame of reference) depends entirely on the details of this technology that we do not yet have access to.
Time may pass differently for the travelers relative to some reference frame, but remember there are no privileged reference frames in Relativity. You can break causality if you go FTL relative to any reference frame, and if you aren't traveling FTL with respect to any reference frame, then you can't really be said to be traveling FTL can you?
"all the time" isn't mutually exclusive with "awesome". Meteor impacts are happening in the universe all the time, but are awesome.
But you're right, it was unfair of the author to assume everyone would think this was awesome, not accounting for the large populations of prats out there.
Right, people won't pay for online news. I remember people saying something similar about WSJ Online. "How stupid, people will just get their news free from somewhere else!" Guess who's profitable. Even if you argue that it's a matter of demographic differences
It's not demographics, it's content. WSJ has content you can't get anywhere else. Fox News is one of dozens and dozens of links off Google News covering the exact same story -- often with the exact same words because it just came from the AP. You think people will pay for the exact same thing only just occasionally with the fox news slant? If they want that so badly, they'll watch it on TV.
Besides, what does he lose for each one that won't? Oh right, nothing.
LOL, are you mental? He loses visitors and thus ad revenue, the thing that's making foxnews.com profitable today. But hey you know this is only the most basic aspect of the business. I'm sure your right despite not even recognizing that.
Correction... YOU don't care, and you're offended at the idea. But you are nobody. Businesses like Amazon may be offended too, but they do care
Yes, I, the consumer don't care about a business's desire for greater profit. The subject of what you were replying to was charging consumers for access to foxnews.com. Consumers aren't going to do that, because they are used to getting foxnews.com for free and a lot of its utility stems from that. "Oh I need another subscription?" Yeah that's going to fly in the same environment where newspapers are tanking because nobody thinks they are worth the money.
7 TeV is the energy of one proton, and that's the value I was talking about. My "calculation" was just a conversion between two units of energy. Yeah I didn't accurately represent the power of the entire LHC beam. I guess that's misleading, if you thought that was the point, rather than some yucks and an observation about how much energy a TeV really is.
No, that's incorrect. The typical Faux News viewer will believe exactly what Rupert & Co. tell them to believe. If they could think for themselves then they would at least occasionally view other news sources (and with internet access that would include an occasional non-U.S. news source).
Er, yeah, that only goes so far. They might believe whatever Fox News says about Iraq, or about Obama's health care plan, or whatever other distant thing. But when Fox News tells them "you can afford to pay for access to foxnews.com!" the rubber will hit the road and they're going to be looking at their bank account, their mortgage, and their odds of keeping their job another week and say "No way."
Oh so you noticed he said "old margins of profitability" not just "profitability" too, eh?
Yeah, I bet Murdoch would like to have his "old margins" where all it took was to buy up a couple papers in an area to give you an effective monopoly, and there wasn't a hundred sources of the same information all competing for eyeballs.
"It has a huge and loyal and profitable [web] audience already," he said." wait, didn't you jst say it wasn't and that's why you are going to start charging?
Yeah. Apparently what he's saying is that foxnews.com is already profitable, but he's just not happy with the margins, so he's going to have to start charging people.
Well guess what? Nobody gives a shit that you're profitable but not as much as you'd like to be. Right now any company or division that's in the black should be counting their blessings, not talking about gouging their users so they can relive the Glory Days. Those days are gone!
All he's going to do is alienate foxnews.com viewers who are feeling the crunch more than Murdoch is. When he loses those eyeballs and advertisers won't pay as much and suddenly foxnews is in the red again, what is he going to do? Jack up the subscription price hoping that'll help?
It always kinda amuses* me to remember that 7 TeV is equal to ~1 microJoule. So this incredibly massive and complicated machine is required just to reach energies that are a million times less than what I can get by flicking my pinky finger. Though they do put all that energy into a single subatomic particle and carefully guide them into hitting each other right in front of their detectors, while every time I try to flick a proton with my finger I end up hitting a ton of them and they go flying off every which way, so I guess we still need the LHC.
I loved Defender too. Defender actually inspired me to get into programming. I wanted to make a game that cool someday. That never happened, but I've turned my hobby into a lifelong career that I still love, after doing it for 25 years.
In high school I wrote a Defender clone. I don't think it was as cool, but it was close imo.:) The downside was that I didn't have a working Defender cart anymore so i couldn't go back to 'the source'. I got some things right like the alien abductors turning into the super-fast and evil mutants when they'd capture a human (and the human dying a pixely death if you accidentally shot them or killed the alien too high up so they fell too far), but other than that I was mostly making up enemies. And hand-made VGA graphics!
Funny to think that back in the day, something like that could be a career-launching game. Thinking of trying to "clone" most games made these days makes the mind boggle.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly!! Another unit we could use $$ per mile ?
Now that is actually a useful metric! I like it. Of course it would vary based on the cost of gas, the cost of electricity, and so forth. But hey you could make some reasonable assumptions, apply them country-wide, and you could at least meaningfully compare the values even if you had to adjust them for your local conditions to know how much you're really going to spend.
I mean, does battery use not mean energy ?
No it does, that's why they had to invent some conversion scheme between grid power and gasoline. It involves a lot of assumptions about where your power comes from that may be reasonable for a 'national average' but probably won't apply to your specific case.
How about miles per pound of carbon dioxide emission?
Because while I do want to reduce CO2 emissions, I do not want that to be the sole metric. Plus that could have all kinds of side effects, like an engine that somehow stored the CO2 but as a result released 4x that amount of sulfur compounds would be bad. How would you deal with electricity from wind farms? Would you count the carbon cost of making the windmill, and how would you amortize that over all the cars using that power and the number of miles driven? Would you do the same thing with the carbon cost of making the vehicle?
Or, or in addition, miles per PRIMARY unit of energy input?
What, you mean like if you're burning coal to get your electricity, you measure in miles-per-pound-of-coal? That makes things really hard to compare...
I'm supposed to believe that, in 2 years of hybrid development, you've developed a production vehicle that will get almost *5 TIMES* the gas mileage of Toyota's hybrid model (that they've been developing and improving on for over 12 years)?
No, you're supposed to read the summary at the very least and understand that it's talking about an EPA-established conversion from electricity usage to equivalent gasoline consumption for EVs. Regardless of the particulars of the method, it's no surprise that this number would be much higher for something running purely off an electric motor vs. the Prius which is using its ICE most of the time even for short trips.
So if a guy drives every day back and forth to work, less than 40 miles, he's only using the plug-in electricity. But the GM exec's aren't counting that electricity he's using, only his actual gasoline used on occasional longer trips, towards the "Miles Per Gallon" rating. I guess GM thinks that people don't pay for their electricity, and that electricity doesn't come from power plants that burn fossil fuels too.
According to GM, I guess if I never go on longer trips, my Volt will be getting infinity miles per gallon.
No, Smartiac, they are counting the electricity you use. The value is only for short trips that solely use electricity. It isn't infinity because they are in fact trying to account for that electricity, but put it in terms of the standard MPG. That conversion metric has a whole host of problems with it, but it isn't ludicrous on its face. EVs are extremely efficient, and power plant electricity generation is extremely efficient compared to the ICEs in automobiles. So whatever reasonable conversion you come up with, that's probably in the ballpark.
The MPG will be much lower for longer trips because there they actually have to burn actual gas. But even that is 50mpg (again using the EPA guidelines which aren't perfect for normal cars either).
This will come in really handy all those times I have too much to drink and need to get back to my Secret Moon Base.
Oh look who's Mr. Responsible, not flying drunk!
Or are you telling me they have police checkpoints in orbit now? Fuck, I knew it was only a matter of time!
Then I guess we could argue matters of degree: do we get bigger benefit from space-related research or, say, stem-cell research, investing in social programs or basic education.
Yes. This is the correct place for the debate to be.
And I'd have to say 'I don't know, so let's find a way to invest in all of them, and hopefully reduce the need for investment in the digging ditches/filling them in, etc.'
Agreed. And from that standpoint, $50mil seems like a pittance compared to the totality of our government's investment. I'd like to see more, and more for all the things you mentioned previously, and less, say, corn subsidies where megalo-corps grow tons of excess corn and then let it rot.
However, I think this statement goes a little far. FTL travel almost certainly implies time travel, but relativity only makes a preferred frame seemingly unnecessary given current observations. It doesn't rule out a preferred frame altogether.
Relativity is predicated on the assumption that there is no preferred reference frame. It is because of that assumption that many of the laws of Relativity are required to ensure that it is the case. If there was a preferred reference frame such that the laws of physics only had to apply to it, but causality could be broken elsewhere, then the Theory of Relativity would be very different.
Also, violating causality is a good reason to be suspicious of a phenomenon, but I don't think it deserves the "impossible" label.
It's impossible in the Relativistic Universe. It is always possible that Relativity is wrong, and that its assumptions are wrong. Hell, Newton was wrong about his basic and seemingly safe assumption that time was the same for all observers (and I hear he was even smart enough to recognize he was making that assumption and write it down). Maybe causality can be broken. The implications for physics would be profound.
Things like Warp Drives are ways to get around the limitations of Relativity without it having to be "wrong" in the hypothetical universe. But it doesn't work.
Grandfather paradoxes are (IMHO) the only reason to doubt the possibility of breaking causality, and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics eliminates these paradoxes.
I'm going to wait until we unify QM and GR before I agree with that. It isn't clear to me at all that having a loop in causality in your spacetime graph would necessarily mean you have a separate outcome from some quantum waveform collapse such that you are in a different universe at the "end" of the loop vs the "beginning". There is nothing in Relativity (obviously) that would require that to be the case, and there wouldn't be a "end" or "beginning" either.
I'm also going to wait until we have some reason to actually prefer the many world interpretation over others before I agree with that. Just because it would be convenient for solving time travel paradoxes in a universe where FTL travel is possible doesn't mean its actually true. Seems more likely (as in agrees with current best theory) that time travel (and thus FTL) is simply impossible.
Remember, the reason the broken window fallacy is a fallacy is that it assumes that breaking a window and having to fix it is the only thing that gets the money moving and thus you're making things better by breaking the window. The observation that this money could have been spent on new development with equal or greater effect on the economy is what nullifies it.
Investing in space tourism is investing in cheap access to space. That's not anything like digging ditches just so you can fill them in, or breaking a window so you have to fix it, or going to war so you have to spend tons of money blowing things and people up. It's more like (though not exactly like) the U.S. highway system. A public works project that had a huge economic benefit.
If that were true, quantum entanglement would break causality.
Not it wouldn't, because nothing is traveling faster than c in entanglement, not even information. In fact, it is exactly for the reason I'm describing that demonstrates why quantum entanglement can't be used to send information. Nor can any effect resulting from the entanglement being collapsed on the "other end" be distinguishable from it collapsing on your end. There is no possibility of breaking causality.
However macroscopic-you traveling FTL most definitely involves transferring mass and information and thus causality can be broken.
Actually, what we perceive as causality is a symptom, not the cause. Hence it's an illegal assumption that time travel would _have_ to occur every time local effects shift (for lack of a better word) between two points in space faster than it would take a photon to traverse.
Actually, causality is one of the basic assumptions of Relativity. That's how Einstein ended up arriving at the conclusion that nothing can travel faster than light. He assumed causality was inviolate, and he assumed that c was constant for all observers. It was the latter notion that led to the idea that different observers could see things happening at different times. And this led to the notion that if one could travel faster than c, some observer would see effect happen before cause, violating causality.
And I didn't say time travel necessarily had to happen in any particular instance of FTL. I said FTL necessarily allows for time travel. Which, if you look, every reference agrees with.
I think most people here, including possibly myself, already know about relativistic effects, there is no need to preach. The whole discussion was _not_ based on the idea of actually accelerating any quantity of matter to causality-breaking, faster-than-light speeds to begin with. There is simply no propulsion system that can do that. What we may be able to build, however, is a system that achieves the same effect by bending spacetime in a very neat way. This is what SciFi nerds call FTL. It's a theoretical system with theoretical properties. But _if_ it works, it's not a time machine simply because it teleports matter between two points "faster" than it would take a ray of light to do so.
Yes I understand that and I thought I was pretty clear in stating that I was not referring to an object accelerated past c. Any method of travel which appears to be super-luminal to any observer breaks causality. The poster was suggesting a method where some observer would agree that you traveled FTL, yet because you didn't "really" go FTL you get around Einstein's conclusion. That simply isn't true.
Energy-wise, accelerating anything to c is impossible. Causality-wise, going faster than c by any method is impossible. I'm a Sci-Fi nerd, and hey it's neat to think about warp driving letting you get FTL without actually having to accelerate to make it seem semi-plausible. Nevertheless, even though it doesn't work that way in Star Trek, warp drive allows time travel.
In order for it to really work, we need more than just warp drive. We also need to violate Relativity. Either causality is not inviolate, and time travel is really possible, or some other assumption of Relativity is broken. That's always possible, sure, but in a Relativistic universe, FTL == Time Travel. Seriously, look it up.
Oops, my second link to the page with nice graphs was hidden in a period. The explanation on that page uses instantaneous communication as its example for clarity and simplicity, but all you really need to do is break out of the light cone and you can potentially break causality with time travel.
Having an FTL drive doesn't mean it's a time machine. The actual method of travel is important here.
Yes actually FTL does mean you have a time machine, and the method of travel doesn't really matter. It's not like a Back to the Future time where you can arbitrarily go backwards and forwards as far as you want, it's limited to past-only and by how far and fast you can actually travel and how fast your non-superluminal spaceships can travel. But from some observer's reference frame you will have traveled back in time and broken causality by arriving at your destination before you left, simply by moving faster than c relative to them.
And if you incorporate a second FTL journey, it's actually possible to arrive at your starting point before you left according to all reference frames.
Here's an explanation. There's a nice explanation with graphs and everything .
Note that it does not depend on Lorentz Transformation of the super-luminal traveler/communication. The mechanism isn't important. That observers in normal, relativistic reference frames see you traveling faster than c is what is important. If you can do that, you can go back in time.
Whether or not time flows differently for the travelers (relative to the galactic frame of reference) depends entirely on the details of this technology that we do not yet have access to.
Time may pass differently for the travelers relative to some reference frame, but remember there are no privileged reference frames in Relativity. You can break causality if you go FTL relative to any reference frame, and if you aren't traveling FTL with respect to any reference frame, then you can't really be said to be traveling FTL can you?
Pirates have been replacing damaged or missing limbs with replacements made of wood for years!
And by using pirate methods it just goes to show how scientists from all fields are trying to reverse global warming.
"all the time" isn't mutually exclusive with "awesome". Meteor impacts are happening in the universe all the time, but are awesome.
But you're right, it was unfair of the author to assume everyone would think this was awesome, not accounting for the large populations of prats out there.
Right, people won't pay for online news. I remember people saying something similar about WSJ Online. "How stupid, people will just get their news free from somewhere else!" Guess who's profitable. Even if you argue that it's a matter of demographic differences
It's not demographics, it's content. WSJ has content you can't get anywhere else. Fox News is one of dozens and dozens of links off Google News covering the exact same story -- often with the exact same words because it just came from the AP. You think people will pay for the exact same thing only just occasionally with the fox news slant? If they want that so badly, they'll watch it on TV.
Besides, what does he lose for each one that won't? Oh right, nothing.
LOL, are you mental? He loses visitors and thus ad revenue, the thing that's making foxnews.com profitable today. But hey you know this is only the most basic aspect of the business. I'm sure your right despite not even recognizing that.
Correction... YOU don't care, and you're offended at the idea. But you are nobody. Businesses like Amazon may be offended too, but they do care
Yes, I, the consumer don't care about a business's desire for greater profit. The subject of what you were replying to was charging consumers for access to foxnews.com. Consumers aren't going to do that, because they are used to getting foxnews.com for free and a lot of its utility stems from that. "Oh I need another subscription?" Yeah that's going to fly in the same environment where newspapers are tanking because nobody thinks they are worth the money.
Do try to pay attention, please?
7 TeV is the energy of one proton, and that's the value I was talking about. My "calculation" was just a conversion between two units of energy. Yeah I didn't accurately represent the power of the entire LHC beam. I guess that's misleading, if you thought that was the point, rather than some yucks and an observation about how much energy a TeV really is.
No, that's incorrect. The typical Faux News viewer will believe exactly what Rupert & Co. tell them to believe. If they could think for themselves then they would at least occasionally view other news sources (and with internet access that would include an occasional non-U.S. news source).
Er, yeah, that only goes so far. They might believe whatever Fox News says about Iraq, or about Obama's health care plan, or whatever other distant thing. But when Fox News tells them "you can afford to pay for access to foxnews.com!" the rubber will hit the road and they're going to be looking at their bank account, their mortgage, and their odds of keeping their job another week and say "No way."
What does Rupert Murdoch, of all people, know about Quality Journalism?
He knows it's expensive, which is why he doesn't pay for any.
Those old margins are gone. Sorry Rupert.
Oh so you noticed he said "old margins of profitability" not just "profitability" too, eh?
Yeah, I bet Murdoch would like to have his "old margins" where all it took was to buy up a couple papers in an area to give you an effective monopoly, and there wasn't a hundred sources of the same information all competing for eyeballs.
"It has a huge and loyal and profitable [web] audience already," he said." wait, didn't you jst say it wasn't and that's why you are going to start charging?
Yeah. Apparently what he's saying is that foxnews.com is already profitable, but he's just not happy with the margins, so he's going to have to start charging people.
Well guess what? Nobody gives a shit that you're profitable but not as much as you'd like to be. Right now any company or division that's in the black should be counting their blessings, not talking about gouging their users so they can relive the Glory Days. Those days are gone!
All he's going to do is alienate foxnews.com viewers who are feeling the crunch more than Murdoch is. When he loses those eyeballs and advertisers won't pay as much and suddenly foxnews is in the red again, what is he going to do? Jack up the subscription price hoping that'll help?
I, for one, welcome our newly cloned elephant overlord!
What can I say? I have a very large pinky (and of course I flick it very slowly).
It always kinda amuses* me to remember that 7 TeV is equal to ~1 microJoule. So this incredibly massive and complicated machine is required just to reach energies that are a million times less than what I can get by flicking my pinky finger. Though they do put all that energy into a single subatomic particle and carefully guide them into hitting each other right in front of their detectors, while every time I try to flick a proton with my finger I end up hitting a ton of them and they go flying off every which way, so I guess we still need the LHC.
* Yes I am easily amused, why do you ask?
It's amazing how much you learn about females that you really never even needed to know. Ever.
Also amazing is how there are so many things I'd like to remember but can't, while that kind of knowledge is impossible to forget.
Yeah, turns out there's all kinds of amazing opportunities hidden in our junk DNA. A cure for AIDS, and chances to Win Fabulous Prizes!
Only one that wasn't too bad was Zeldox.
It makes sense, seeing as it is made with the power of the Triforce of Wisdom.
The thing that's bothering me is that of all the big words in that summary, the only one I understood was "cervicovaginal".
I loved Defender too. Defender actually inspired me to get into programming. I wanted to make a game that cool someday. That never happened, but I've turned my hobby into a lifelong career that I still love, after doing it for 25 years.
In high school I wrote a Defender clone. I don't think it was as cool, but it was close imo. :) The downside was that I didn't have a working Defender cart anymore so i couldn't go back to 'the source'. I got some things right like the alien abductors turning into the super-fast and evil mutants when they'd capture a human (and the human dying a pixely death if you accidentally shot them or killed the alien too high up so they fell too far), but other than that I was mostly making up enemies. And hand-made VGA graphics!
Funny to think that back in the day, something like that could be a career-launching game. Thinking of trying to "clone" most games made these days makes the mind boggle.