No, you are wrong, they really have no mass. They DO have momentum though (and therefore energy), and that is the important thing. The relevant equation has been stated before: E^2 = c^2 p^2 + m^2 c^4
And from quantum mechanics, p = h / lambda (Plank's constant divided by wavelength, the result being a vector in the direction of propogation), tells you what the momentum is for a given photon wavelength.
If photons had mass (even 'relativistic' mass), they could not travel at the speed of light. And the symmetries would be different, none of the equations would work out properly (the polarization formulas, for example, would fail completely).
The rest mass MUST be zero, if photons travel at the speed of light, otherwise the relativistic mass (gamma * m) would be infinite (since gamma approaches infinity as velocity -> c).
The reason why gravity is affected by photons (and vice versa) is because the coupling is between the curvature and the mass-energy tensor, and the mass-energy tensor (as the name implies) contains more than just the mass.
So, while photons have some of the properties of massive objects, they also have some significant differences.
But there isn't any point in any nations helping each other anymore. If you find yourself on the USA's ENEMY list, then allies won't help. If you had a mightily impressive list of allies you might be able to avoid a full-scale war, but then the best you could hope for still involves the occasional precision bomb coming in very fast from high altitude.
And of course the whole point of developing this weapon is so that the USA doesn't need allies, either.
If you look closer, you will see the Bill Gates has been selling off Microsoft stock like crazy over the last couple of years. Does he know something the rest of us don't?
Err, maybe he'd prefer to take his billions in salary rather than dividends?;) Maybe he's investing in media companies and needs the cash? Maybe he's been blackmailed by the FBI into giving them shares, in exchange for not releasing their photographs of him engaging in wild sex, alone in his server room? How the f*ck should I know?
In other words the United States will be able, using aircraft based on its own territory, to strike at individual targets without warning and without the need for foreign bases.
The only reason there are no 'global law enforcement' databases about all of us is the sheer incompetence and beaurocracy of the public/government institutions...
... And the fact that not all nations have the same ideas on privacy and information as the USA....
Hmm, don't you think there is any room for some kind of overall principle here? Like, if you are nice to people, and they are nice to you, then you might end up happier?
There are plenty of situations I can think of where one could break the law and get away with it. But (if it is a sensible law) people generally don't. Do you have any comprehension as to why that is?
I agree completely, and I suspect MS know this too. They would do anything in their power to stop that happening. Say, giving away software (and even hardware?) to the 20% of people who might consider using linux.
Alternatively, if linux use gets large enough that a significant number of MS customers want interoperability with Linux - and MS cave in to their customer's demands - that itself would probably ultimately kill MS (with two-way interoperability, the barrier to changing to Linux is reduced to practically zero).
The real fight though is not between Linux and Microsoft. It is about control. Control of the hardware, control of the software, ability for a 'comsumer' to modify their own equipment, ultimately, the ability for citizens to be able to be able to perform arbitrary computations. This must be enshrined as a universal right of Man, as the alternative is too horrible to comprehend.
Surely, in a society based on free and open exchange of information, open source/free software will ultimately 'prevail', if only because it is surely a much more efficient utilization of resources. Of course, I'm not including 'monopoly leverage' as a resource here, so take this with a grain of salt....
But MS has never really competed in a mature free market. Well, there are surely some contempoary examples but I suspect that they are markets where MS is losing money by the bucket load.
BillG was in the almost unique position of being able to structure the industry around Microsoft, rather than the more conventional case of fitting into an existing market. ie, the market that MS has a monopoly in was largely created by MS itself. Now, undoubtably if MS did not create the market, someone else would have. Overall, I think MS's contribution to the computer industry (the parts that might have turned out different if MS did not exist) are overwhelmingly negative. But, it cannot be denied that MS has had a huge influence on the computer industry, to the extent of essentially dominating most areas.
I agree that BillG is clearly very good at what he does (good at marketing, thuggery, knifing people in the back, whatever you want to call it). But he was incredibly lucky to be born at exactly the time he was, or he would not have been able to do it.
But rather, I would argue (from what I have seen of the US, I am neither resident nor citizen there) that citizenship is not dying. Citizenship (in the sense of national/civic responsibility via the Government) is still alive and flourishing. Unfortunately nowdays the interests of the Government and the interests of business are so interwined that the primary means of expressing citizenship is to be a consumer.
Not necessarily true, if you were sufficiently deluded the reasoning might go something like "well, I know it ought to work, I obviously havn't got the details quite right yet... but since it will work very soon I might as well pretend that the device is working now, which will keep the investors happy".
Yes, that is absolutely true, there is no exemption in the DMCA for reverse-engineering for the purposes of accessibility. If you are blind and the DRM on your new operating system doesn't explicitly allow you to transfer the contents of an e-book to a Braille or audio device, then you are screwed.
This in in contrast Australian version. which I know for sure allows such reverse-engineering, and the European version, which I am pretty sure allows it.
On one hand, the algorithms to do proper WiFi security certainly exist, and would be no more expensive to implement than what we ended up with (probably cheaper in fact, since the algorithms would be 'off the shelf' of the crypto literature).
But we end up with these stupid deliberately crippled algorithms because law enforcement and government security are paranoid about not being able to read everyone's mail, and hold enough sway to dictate what will and will not become stanard.
How long are we going to have to wait for this to change? Will some rebel write a good WiFi protocol suite in the meantime? And if so, will the above-mentioned powers be able to stop it?
The biggest market for content security is expected to be corporations, government agencies and hospitals who need to keep sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands. But so far, it's the media companies that have made most noise about DRM.
No way! corporations (large ones with technical & financial ability anyway) and governments, and hopefully Hospitals, will the be last to utilize this. They all realize that it WILL be crackable, by any government or corp with the facilities to reverse engineer the hardware & software. The DMCA & similar laws now in force in many other countries, only prevents the 'little people' from the ability to utilize the crack themselves.
I remember an article from a while back in, I think Dr Dobbs (I'm not sure though, it might have been some other mag), were some part of NT to do with, IIRC, controlling or selecting device drivers. The executable part contained a small prolog interpreter followed by the program. I'll dig out the article later if I have time, but I'm sure I have the gist of it right.
Huh? Perhaps some recent parts of windows are written in C#, but do you really think they ported N-million lines of C, C++, (and a handful of Prolog I believe) to C# ? That would be an absolutely collossal effort!
Does C# even have the capability for writing an operating system (I'm thinking VM management, drivers etc) ?
Yes, but do you believe that MS actually use themselves, the software that they sell?
eg, I believe they have their own source control system that is rather different (and presumably, much better - it would want to be!) than the one they sell. The compiler they use to compile the OS is (or at least, used to be) rather different to VC.
Obviously, they don't use windows much either, otherwise all their employees would be sick to death of it crashing all the time;-)
It will be a long time (maybe never?) before this becomes a viable technology for a space shuttle though. Even the more immediate goal, of a cheap launcher for small satellites, is decades away. NASA were completely correct to discount it.
Extrapolating from the vast quantity (99%?) of copyrighted books that are no longer in print, I would not be surprised at all.
There is a finite number of movies that can be marketed at any one time. Unless everyone stops actually making new movies, and the distributors just cycle around existing moves in re-releases and 'special editions', it is absolutely inevitable that the vast majority will fall by the wayside.
I am too cynical to believe that the MPAA etc would be altruistic enough to provide a repository of old movies that have little liklihood of producing profit. Now maybe in the future the cost of providing these movies in some downloadable format (obviously it would be DRM encumbered) might get close enough to zero that it does happen. But I am not going to hold my breath.
But, what about the existing stock of movies that will never make it to DVD? A vast amount of trash, but surely there are some fogotten gems in there too. Will they be simply lost once the last film copy disintegrates?
For a more speculative example, suppose that 3D televisions become a reality in the future (quite plausible actually). Then, today's 2D movies would have the same appeal as black & white movies do to us (read: practically none). A historian might be interested, but a historian can't legally transfer the movies from the old, fragile media, and if at some stage in the future all of this palladium/'secure' audio/video path etc shit happens it might not even be technically possible to copy (or even view) without knowing the encryption keys (which might not be possible to extract non-destructively). If the MPAA is not interested because there is no money in it for them (and they would also object people having access to movies that are out of copyright, just on principle), then the historian is fscked.
Already, a lot of old film/photographs/books have been lost because the media has simply decayed away. We now have a historic opportunity to eliminate this from ever happening again (at least for digital works), but by encumbering the storage format with silly encryption schemes and DRM, we are putting ourselves in the position where the only body that can legally (and maybe even technically) maintain a repository are also among the biggest thugs and monopolists on the planet. I don't think our cultural history is safe at all.
Good point. I had forgotten that trafficing hard dru^W^Wweapons of mass destructi^W^W^W^Wcircumvention tools was illegal.
But the software itself isn't illegal (or is it, by some other clause?), only trafficing it. So you can write the software but you cannot give it to anyone.
What an absurdity!
I wonder, how explicit can you make the instructions on how to write such a do-it-yourself program without hitting the DMCA? Convert the program into a song, perhaps? Write it on a t-shirt? (Yes I know all this and more has been done already for decss.)
After an intense research effort to reverse engineer the reader, the museum manage to copy the "Die Hard 15: Die Harder Still" DVD onto a modern storage device. They then play the movie in a continuous loop as an exhibit in the museum.
Unfortunately, they are then sued by the MPAA, for violations of the SHDMCA (Second Half of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act), for breaking an access control mechanism protecting a previously-copyrighted work. The museum's entire collection is sold for scrap to pay the legal expenses.
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And from quantum mechanics, p = h / lambda (Plank's constant divided by wavelength, the result being a vector in the direction of propogation), tells you what the momentum is for a given photon wavelength.
If photons had mass (even 'relativistic' mass), they could not travel at the speed of light. And the symmetries would be different, none of the equations would work out properly (the polarization formulas, for example, would fail completely).
The rest mass MUST be zero, if photons travel at the speed of light, otherwise the relativistic mass (gamma * m) would be infinite (since gamma approaches infinity as velocity -> c).
The reason why gravity is affected by photons (and vice versa) is because the coupling is between the curvature and the mass-energy tensor, and the mass-energy tensor (as the name implies) contains more than just the mass.
So, while photons have some of the properties of massive objects, they also have some significant differences.
And of course the whole point of developing this weapon is so that the USA doesn't need allies, either.
Err, maybe he'd prefer to take his billions in salary rather than dividends? ;) Maybe he's investing in media companies and needs the cash? Maybe he's been blackmailed by the FBI into giving them shares, in exchange for not releasing their photographs of him engaging in wild sex, alone in his server room? How the f*ck should I know?
More to the point, what do you think he knows?
Allies? We don't need no steeking allies!
There are plenty of situations I can think of where one could break the law and get away with it. But (if it is a sensible law) people generally don't. Do you have any comprehension as to why that is?
And how exactly is a list of recent transactions on MS shares supposed to support your comment?
Alternatively, if linux use gets large enough that a significant number of MS customers want interoperability with Linux - and MS cave in to their customer's demands - that itself would probably ultimately kill MS (with two-way interoperability, the barrier to changing to Linux is reduced to practically zero).
The real fight though is not between Linux and Microsoft. It is about control. Control of the hardware, control of the software, ability for a 'comsumer' to modify their own equipment, ultimately, the ability for citizens to be able to be able to perform arbitrary computations. This must be enshrined as a universal right of Man, as the alternative is too horrible to comprehend.
Surely, in a society based on free and open exchange of information, open source/free software will ultimately 'prevail', if only because it is surely a much more efficient utilization of resources. Of course, I'm not including 'monopoly leverage' as a resource here, so take this with a grain of salt....
BillG was in the almost unique position of being able to structure the industry around Microsoft, rather than the more conventional case of fitting into an existing market. ie, the market that MS has a monopoly in was largely created by MS itself. Now, undoubtably if MS did not create the market, someone else would have. Overall, I think MS's contribution to the computer industry (the parts that might have turned out different if MS did not exist) are overwhelmingly negative. But, it cannot be denied that MS has had a huge influence on the computer industry, to the extent of essentially dominating most areas.
I agree that BillG is clearly very good at what he does (good at marketing, thuggery, knifing people in the back, whatever you want to call it). But he was incredibly lucky to be born at exactly the time he was, or he would not have been able to do it.
But if the GUI crashes on one virtual terminal, can you switch to another to kill it and restart it?
But rather, I would argue (from what I have seen of the US, I am neither resident nor citizen there) that citizenship is not dying. Citizenship (in the sense of national/civic responsibility via the Government) is still alive and flourishing. Unfortunately nowdays the interests of the Government and the interests of business are so interwined that the primary means of expressing citizenship is to be a consumer.
Not necessarily true, if you were sufficiently deluded the reasoning might go something like "well, I know it ought to work, I obviously havn't got the details quite right yet... but since it will work very soon I might as well pretend that the device is working now, which will keep the investors happy".
This in in contrast Australian version. which I know for sure allows such reverse-engineering, and the European version, which I am pretty sure allows it.
But we end up with these stupid deliberately crippled algorithms because law enforcement and government security are paranoid about not being able to read everyone's mail, and hold enough sway to dictate what will and will not become stanard.
How long are we going to have to wait for this to change? Will some rebel write a good WiFi protocol suite in the meantime? And if so, will the above-mentioned powers be able to stop it?
However, I am not from the US, I guess things are different there...
Does this mean they had a psychological evaluation for everyone? Is this common in US schools? It is unthinkable where I come from!
No way! corporations (large ones with technical & financial ability anyway) and governments, and hopefully Hospitals, will the be last to utilize this. They all realize that it WILL be crackable, by any government or corp with the facilities to reverse engineer the hardware & software. The DMCA & similar laws now in force in many other countries, only prevents the 'little people' from the ability to utilize the crack themselves.
I remember an article from a while back in, I think Dr Dobbs (I'm not sure though, it might have been some other mag), were some part of NT to do with, IIRC, controlling or selecting device drivers. The executable part contained a small prolog interpreter followed by the program. I'll dig out the article later if I have time, but I'm sure I have the gist of it right.
Hmm, why is this post not marked 'redundant' ?
Does C# even have the capability for writing an operating system (I'm thinking VM management, drivers etc) ?
eg, I believe they have their own source control system that is rather different (and presumably, much better - it would want to be!) than the one they sell. The compiler they use to compile the OS is (or at least, used to be) rather different to VC.
Obviously, they don't use windows much either, otherwise all their employees would be sick to death of it crashing all the time ;-)
The first successful testflight of a scramjet engine occurred at the Woomera rocket range in Australia in 2002. project homepage
It will be a long time (maybe never?) before this becomes a viable technology for a space shuttle though. Even the more immediate goal, of a cheap launcher for small satellites, is decades away. NASA were completely correct to discount it.
There is a finite number of movies that can be marketed at any one time. Unless everyone stops actually making new movies, and the distributors just cycle around existing moves in re-releases and 'special editions', it is absolutely inevitable that the vast majority will fall by the wayside.
I am too cynical to believe that the MPAA etc would be altruistic enough to provide a repository of old movies that have little liklihood of producing profit. Now maybe in the future the cost of providing these movies in some downloadable format (obviously it would be DRM encumbered) might get close enough to zero that it does happen. But I am not going to hold my breath.
But, what about the existing stock of movies that will never make it to DVD? A vast amount of trash, but surely there are some fogotten gems in there too. Will they be simply lost once the last film copy disintegrates?
For a more speculative example, suppose that 3D televisions become a reality in the future (quite plausible actually). Then, today's 2D movies would have the same appeal as black & white movies do to us (read: practically none). A historian might be interested, but a historian can't legally transfer the movies from the old, fragile media, and if at some stage in the future all of this palladium/'secure' audio/video path etc shit happens it might not even be technically possible to copy (or even view) without knowing the encryption keys (which might not be possible to extract non-destructively). If the MPAA is not interested because there is no money in it for them (and they would also object people having access to movies that are out of copyright, just on principle), then the historian is fscked.
Already, a lot of old film/photographs/books have been lost because the media has simply decayed away. We now have a historic opportunity to eliminate this from ever happening again (at least for digital works), but by encumbering the storage format with silly encryption schemes and DRM, we are putting ourselves in the position where the only body that can legally (and maybe even technically) maintain a repository are also among the biggest thugs and monopolists on the planet. I don't think our cultural history is safe at all.
But the software itself isn't illegal (or is it, by some other clause?), only trafficing it. So you can write the software but you cannot give it to anyone.
What an absurdity!
I wonder, how explicit can you make the instructions on how to write such a do-it-yourself program without hitting the DMCA? Convert the program into a song, perhaps? Write it on a t-shirt? (Yes I know all this and more has been done already for decss.)
After an intense research effort to reverse engineer the reader, the museum manage to copy the "Die Hard 15: Die Harder Still" DVD onto a modern storage device. They then play the movie in a continuous loop as an exhibit in the museum.
Unfortunately, they are then sued by the MPAA, for violations of the SHDMCA (Second Half of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act), for breaking an access control mechanism protecting a previously-copyrighted work. The museum's entire collection is sold for scrap to pay the legal expenses.