What's your objection to time travel? Hawking's speculations appear valid to me.
Hawking is not speculating. He actually believes (as does Kip Thorne, his Caltech buddy of wormhole fame) that relativity allows time travel. He is wrong. The spacetime of relativity is frozen from the infinite past to the infinite future, by definition. Everybody who is a true physicist with two neurons between the ears knows that. Nothing can move in spacetime. It is abstract. Hawking is full blown crackpots.
Newton was a crackpot because he stood on the shoulders of greater crackpots than himself. We stand on his shoulders and therefore ought to be less crackpotty than he. Learning from the mistakes of those who came before us is an integral part of science. Newton came before us.
Well I guess the little guy sitting in Newton's chair did not learn much from the giants who came before him. Newton would never believe in time travel. He was much smarter than that.
I wonder if it would "cheapen" our view of Newton by releasing these documents
Newton would be considered a crackpot and a nut by the scientific community if he were alive today. And who inherited Newton's chair? A believer in time travel. I wonder who is the greater crackpot.
Of course authors, pundits, and visionaries continue to make fortunes rolling out countless new methodologies and writing books proving they are right.
They are not new methodologies. They are just variants of the same old tired methodology, the algorithm. For a completely different non-algorithmic solution, take a look at the The Silver Bullet and Project COSA
Will super-specialization of software development teams help the industry to push out better software faster?
The answer is a resounding no. The problem is not how to manage or organize teams. The problem is in the way we develop software. We are doing it wrong. The solution requires a fundamental change in the way we program our computers. In my opinion, the main reason that software is so unreliable and so hard to develop has to do with a custom that is as old as the computer: the practice of using the algorithm as the basis for software construction. I believe that moving to a pure signal-based, synchronous software model will result in at least an order of magnitude improvement in both reliability and productivity.
Currently there exist hundreds of programming languages, operating systems and development tools competing against one another, not counting custom proprietary technologies. A veritable tower of Babel. Worse, the complexity of many of the tools is often greater than that of the applications themselves. Becoming proficient in their use often requires years of training and experience. This is a sign of the chronic immaturity of the software industry. Software engineering will not come of age until a single software construction and execution model is universally adopted. More on this at The Silver Bullet.
A 60 miles per gallon Hummer would be cool. Don't hold your breath, though. Just dreaming. But, joking aside, would it be possible to develop a 60 miles per gallon Hummer with comparable performance, using current or future Hybrid technology?
SETI isn't just looking for Extraterrestrial life, it's looking for advanced Extraterrestrial civilizations.
Maybe SETI is looking in all the wrong places. Maybe the evidence of intelligent alien life is right in front of us and we casually dismiss it as something else. It is not easy to see something if your assumptions have already led you to conclude that it is not there.
'to show how ridiculous a property-rights system in outer space would be if it were based solely on claims unsubstantiated by any actual possession.'
Even actual possession does not give you a right to anything. Someone else may come along and kick your sorry ass off the land (or your space rock), as history has shown time and time again. These planets and stars have been around for billions of years, how can any Johnny-come-lately dare think any of it should belong to him?
No wonder. This is the guy who believes in time travel. Here's an excerpt from his site:
Since we can't change the way the universe began, the question of whether time travel is possible, is one of whether we can subsequently make space-time so warped, that one can go back to the past. I think this is an important subject for research, but one has to be careful not to be labeled a crank. If one made a research grant application to work on time travel, it would be dismissed immediately. No government agency could afford to be seen to be spending public money, on anything as way out as time travel. Instead, one has to use technical terms, like closed time like curves, which are code for time travel. Although this lecture is partly about time travel, I felt I had to give it the scientifically more respectable title, Space and Time warps. Yet, it is a very serious question. Since General relativity can permit time travel, does it allow it in our universe? And if not, why not.
The truth is that relativity does not allow time travel for the simple reason that nothing can move in spacetime by definition. Talk about crackpottery! And the guy is the most celebrated living physicist in the world! And sitting in Newton's chair no less. Go figure.
I've written this before but it's worth repeating. The only IP laws we should have are trademark and plagiarism laws.
Intellectual property laws exist only because we have a slavery system. Our livelihood depends on working for others so we can pay our taxes. The reason that we have to work for others is that 99% of people have been deprived of an inheritance in the wealth of the land. Income property is owned by a few and the state. The others are slaves. Artists, programmers and inventors depend on their work to make a living. Can we blame them for seeking protection? We all depend on our labor because we are all slaves. So now we are swimming in a ocean of IP laws and contradicting rules that take away our remaining liberties, one by one.
Let's face it, if you cannot put a fence around it or put chains on it, it does not belong to you. Makes no difference whether it is ideas, writing, software, music or what have you. Once you've released it, like the air, it belongs to nobody and everybody.
Intellectual property owners (such as Microsoft and the music industry) will fight freedom with everything they've got. Right now they have two formidable weapons: IP laws and powerful police states to enforce them. But those who yearn to be free also have a formidable weapon, the internet.
The internet and other communication technologies (e.g., file sharing systems) are the first major kinks in the armor of a sick system. As technology progresses, the system will eventually collapse. What will happen to a slave-based economy when robots and advanced artificial intelligences replace everybody, i. e., when human labor, knowledge and expertise become worthless?
And don't think for a minute this won't happen in your lifetime. The internet is the latest giant leap in human communication. Before that came mass telecommunication technologies and before that was the movable press. If history is any indication, we can expect a giant leap in technological progress and scientific knowledge. In fact, it is happening before our very eyes.
We should all demand a system where everybody is guaranteed income property (i.e., land), a piece of the pie, an estate if you will. There is plenty for everybody.
Communism confiscates all property and enslaves everybody. Capitalism gives property to a few and enslaves the rest. It's sad. The land should not be divided for a price. It should be an inheritance for us and our children and their children. It's the only way to guarantee freedom and a truly free market in a world where human labor is about to go the way of the dinosaurs. Demand liberty! Nothing less.
I want some of that you are smoking. It seems to be quite good.
Do you always start an argument with ridicule? Not a harbinger of honest motives, I would say.
What you are advocating is that we become a subsistence farmers society, or what, is our plot of land going to feed us in autopilot mode or what?
Why would a distribution of land to families lead to subsistence farming, pray tell? Would farming technology be any different than it is now, just because ownership has changed hands. There is no reason that the new owners cannot lease their lands to others if their want to. They just should not be allowed to sell it, as this would eventually lead to the same conditions of slavery that we see now, with the land in the hands of a few robber barons. The land should not be divided for a price. It should be an inheritance. Even the lease duration should be limited to, say forty years, so as to guaranteee the next generation an inheritance.
We can choses what we want to do for a living (horror of horrors, we have to work to obtain life necesities. Point us out to your golden age when this did not happen).
It makes no difference where you go. This is the genius of the new slave system. Whereever you go, you must work for someone else for a living and pay your taxes. True liberty is when you don't have to work for someone else if you so choose.
But somehow, in your dope induced haze we are slaves and the machines are out to get us.
You are worse than a slave. You are an ignorant slave, slaving away under the illusion of being free. I can't stand it when politicians try to get votes by promising jobs to the people. The threat of unemployment is precisely why you are slaves. They can hold the threat above your head as a way to motivate you to work for them, like the good little slave that you are.
Outsourcing is a problem only because we have a slavery system. Our livelihood depends on working for others so we can pay our taxes. The reason that we have to work for others is that 99% of people have been deprived of an inheritance in the wealth of the land. Income property is owned by a few and the state. The others are slaves. Artists, programmers and inventors depend on their work to make a living. Can we blame them? We all depend on our labor because we are all slaves. So now we are swimming in a ocean of laws and rules that take away our remaining liberties, one by one.
Let's face it, if you cannot put a fence around it or put chains on it, it does not belong to you. Makes no difference whether it is ideas, writings, software, music or what have you. Once you've released it, like the air, it belongs to nobody and everybody.
Intellectual property owners (such as Microsoft and the music industry) will fight freedom with everything they've got. Right now they have two formidable weapons: IP laws and powerful police states to enforce them. But those who yearn to be free also have a formidable weapon, the internet.
The internet and other communication technologies (e.g., file sharing systems) are the first major kinks in the armor of a sick system. As technology progresses, the system will eventually collapse. What will happen to a slave-based economy when robots and advanced artificial intelligences replace everybody, i. e., when human labor, knowledge and expertise become worthless? It will be orders of magnitude worse than outsourcing.
And don't think for a minute this won't happen in your lifetime. The internet is the latest giant leap in human communication. Before that came mass telecommunication technologies and before that was the movable press. If history is any indication, we can expect a giant leap in technological progress and scientific knowledge. In fact, it is happening before our very eyes.
We should all demand a system where everybody is guaranteed income property, a piece of the pie, an estate if you will. There is plenty for everybody.
Communism confiscates all property and enslaves everybody. Capitalism gives property to a few and enslaves the rest. It's sad. The land should not be divided for a price. It should be an inheritance for us and our children and their children. It's the only way to guarantee freedom and a truly free market in a world where human labor is about to go the way of the dinosaurs. Demand liberty! Nothing less.
There are problems that don't work well on clusters, but rocket on a proper supercomputer.
True. Highly sequential algorithms fall in this category. The problem is that the switching speed of processors will soon run against a natural barrier. On the other hand, we will continue to add new nodes to our parallel superclusters long after the barrier is reached and supercomputing is stopped right in its tracks.
Don't see this as bad news... it's a sign that we're winning.
Right. The Cray folks have just realized that they are about to go the way of buggy whip and the slide rule. They don't like it one bit. They can only complain by making a lot of noise. But it won't work. When you're extinct, there is no coming back.
Artificial Development is developing a simulation of the human cortex. They could use this thing. They need all the processing power they can get their hands on.
May I inquire.. er... how you got into that or failing that, how does one interpret the symbolism?
Thanks. I am still in the process of interpreting the symbolism. BTW, the Bible talks about a lot more than just the brain. For example, it talks about DNA and the four nucleotides (first part of the book of Ezekiel) and the double helix (the wheel within a wheel). It even talks about physics (e.g., the aether and its constituents). Yes, relativists, there is an aether and it consists of photons (Seraphim, the burning ones) of which there are four types. But this is neither the place nor the time.
You are speaking as though NASA is a company that gets profit. NASA is a government agency and so nothing is "lucrative" for them, all the money they get they spend on research/equipment.
You don't think NASA's employees, mamagement and contractors profit from government funding? Try cutting NASA's funding and see the resulting outcry. Space exploration is a huge industry. Heck, government itself is a profit making industry, the most lucrative of them all.
The problem with SETI fanatics is that they assume that aliens are using primitive EM waves to communicate. If EM waves were the only way to communicate, we would be bombarded with intelligent signals from all directions. I have a little advice for SETI. Aliens can communicate instantly using their knowledge of the non-local nature of the universe. Get a clue.
It would have been better if they did. They have a better system. They take your money (grants, educational research funding, etc...) without asking. Evolutionists have monopolized the educational systems of the western world, meaning that they get all the money they need from the government. They essentially steal it.
I get a positive Crackpot Index just from this three line posting of his. And that's without even taking a shot at that "God gave us the secret to AI" website. I think my calculator might run out of digits...
"UCLA is reporting progress on the quantum computing front by announcing success in controlling the spin of a single electron using an ordinary transistor."
How does that constitute progress in quantum computing? I have been hearing about progress in quantum computing for a long time now. Sounds like a bunch of people who are afraid to lose their government grants and funding.
I can't wait for the day when quantum computing is revealed for what it is, a silly hoax and a fraud.
Actually according to anarchist ideology "all private property is theft" including buildings, land, machinery, etc.
In a deep sense, I agree. The earth has been around for billions of years before humans showed up. Nobody can claim ownership rights to the land. However, for the sake of getting along, I think the land should be divided, not for a price, but for an inheritance for us, our children and their children. After all, we are territorial animals.
Slashdot Mirror
What's your objection to time travel? Hawking's speculations appear valid to me.
Hawking is not speculating. He actually believes (as does Kip Thorne, his Caltech buddy of wormhole fame) that relativity allows time travel. He is wrong. The spacetime of relativity is frozen from the infinite past to the infinite future, by definition. Everybody who is a true physicist with two neurons between the ears knows that. Nothing can move in spacetime. It is abstract. Hawking is full blown crackpots.
Newton was a crackpot because he stood on the shoulders of greater crackpots than himself. We stand on his shoulders and therefore ought to be less crackpotty than he. Learning from the mistakes of those who came before us is an integral part of science. Newton came before us.
Well I guess the little guy sitting in Newton's chair did not learn much from the giants who came before him. Newton would never believe in time travel. He was much smarter than that.
I wonder if it would "cheapen" our view of Newton by releasing these documents
Newton would be considered a crackpot and a nut by the scientific community if he were alive today. And who inherited Newton's chair? A believer in time travel. I wonder who is the greater crackpot.
Of course authors, pundits, and visionaries continue to make fortunes rolling out countless new methodologies and writing books proving they are right.
They are not new methodologies. They are just variants of the same old tired methodology, the algorithm. For a completely different non-algorithmic solution, take a look at the The Silver Bullet and Project COSA
Will super-specialization of software development teams help the industry to push out better software faster?
The answer is a resounding no. The problem is not how to manage or organize teams. The problem is in the way we develop software. We are doing it wrong. The solution requires a fundamental change in the way we program our computers. In my opinion, the main reason that software is so unreliable and so hard to develop has to do with a custom that is as old as the computer: the practice of using the algorithm as the basis for software construction. I believe that moving to a pure signal-based, synchronous software model will result in at least an order of magnitude improvement in both reliability and productivity.
Currently there exist hundreds of programming languages, operating systems and development tools competing against one another, not counting custom proprietary technologies. A veritable tower of Babel. Worse, the complexity of many of the tools is often greater than that of the applications themselves. Becoming proficient in their use often requires years of training and experience. This is a sign of the chronic immaturity of the software industry. Software engineering will not come of age until a single software construction and execution model is universally adopted. More on this at The Silver Bullet.
A 60 miles per gallon Hummer would be cool. Don't hold your breath, though. Just dreaming. But, joking aside, would it be possible to develop a 60 miles per gallon Hummer with comparable performance, using current or future Hybrid technology?
SETI isn't just looking for Extraterrestrial life, it's looking for advanced Extraterrestrial civilizations.
Maybe SETI is looking in all the wrong places. Maybe the evidence of intelligent alien life is right in front of us and we casually dismiss it as something else. It is not easy to see something if your assumptions have already led you to conclude that it is not there.
'to show how ridiculous a property-rights system in outer space would be if it were based solely on claims unsubstantiated by any actual possession.'
Even actual possession does not give you a right to anything. Someone else may come along and kick your sorry ass off the land (or your space rock), as history has shown time and time again. These planets and stars have been around for billions of years, how can any Johnny-come-lately dare think any of it should belong to him?
IBM has no intentions of using patents against Linux.
It's more than just a good will gesture. It is also fear of possible backlash from the Linux nation, as the author put it.
No wonder. This is the guy who believes in time travel. Here's an excerpt from his site:
Since we can't change the way the universe began, the question of whether time travel is possible, is one of whether we can subsequently make space-time so warped, that one can go back to the past. I think this is an important subject for research, but one has to be careful not to be labeled a crank. If one made a research grant application to work on time travel, it would be dismissed immediately. No government agency could afford to be seen to be spending public money, on anything as way out as time travel. Instead, one has to use technical terms, like closed time like curves, which are code for time travel. Although this lecture is partly about time travel, I felt I had to give it the scientifically more respectable title, Space and Time warps. Yet, it is a very serious question. Since General relativity can permit time travel, does it allow it in our universe? And if not, why not.
The truth is that relativity does not allow time travel for the simple reason that nothing can move in spacetime by definition. Talk about crackpottery! And the guy is the most celebrated living physicist in the world! And sitting in Newton's chair no less. Go figure.
I've written this before but it's worth repeating. The only IP laws we should have are trademark and plagiarism laws.
Intellectual property laws exist only because we have a slavery system. Our livelihood depends on working for others so we can pay our taxes. The reason that we have to work for others is that 99% of people have been deprived of an inheritance in the wealth of the land. Income property is owned by a few and the state. The others are slaves. Artists, programmers and inventors depend on their work to make a living. Can we blame them for seeking protection? We all depend on our labor because we are all slaves. So now we are swimming in a ocean of IP laws and contradicting rules that take away our remaining liberties, one by one.
Let's face it, if you cannot put a fence around it or put chains on it, it does not belong to you. Makes no difference whether it is ideas, writing, software, music or what have you. Once you've released it, like the air, it belongs to nobody and everybody.
Intellectual property owners (such as Microsoft and the music industry) will fight freedom with everything they've got. Right now they have two formidable weapons: IP laws and powerful police states to enforce them. But those who yearn to be free also have a formidable weapon, the internet.
The internet and other communication technologies (e.g., file sharing systems) are the first major kinks in the armor of a sick system. As technology progresses, the system will eventually collapse. What will happen to a slave-based economy when robots and advanced artificial intelligences replace everybody, i. e., when human labor, knowledge and expertise become worthless?
And don't think for a minute this won't happen in your lifetime. The internet is the latest giant leap in human communication. Before that came mass telecommunication technologies and before that was the movable press. If history is any indication, we can expect a giant leap in technological progress and scientific knowledge. In fact, it is happening before our very eyes.
We should all demand a system where everybody is guaranteed income property (i.e., land), a piece of the pie, an estate if you will. There is plenty for everybody.
Communism confiscates all property and enslaves everybody. Capitalism gives property to a few and enslaves the rest. It's sad. The land should not be divided for a price. It should be an inheritance for us and our children and their children. It's the only way to guarantee freedom and a truly free market in a world where human labor is about to go the way of the dinosaurs. Demand liberty! Nothing less.
I want some of that you are smoking. It seems to be quite good.
Do you always start an argument with ridicule? Not a harbinger of honest motives, I would say.
What you are advocating is that we become a subsistence farmers society, or what, is our plot of land going to feed us in autopilot mode or what?
Why would a distribution of land to families lead to subsistence farming, pray tell? Would farming technology be any different than it is now, just because ownership has changed hands. There is no reason that the new owners cannot lease their lands to others if their want to. They just should not be allowed to sell it, as this would eventually lead to the same conditions of slavery that we see now, with the land in the hands of a few robber barons. The land should not be divided for a price. It should be an inheritance. Even the lease duration should be limited to, say forty years, so as to guaranteee the next generation an inheritance.
We can choses what we want to do for a living (horror of horrors, we have to work to obtain life necesities. Point us out to your golden age when this did not happen).
It makes no difference where you go. This is the genius of the new slave system. Whereever you go, you must work for someone else for a living and pay your taxes. True liberty is when you don't have to work for someone else if you so choose.
But somehow, in your dope induced haze we are slaves and the machines are out to get us.
You are worse than a slave. You are an ignorant slave, slaving away under the illusion of being free. I can't stand it when politicians try to get votes by promising jobs to the people. The threat of unemployment is precisely why you are slaves. They can hold the threat above your head as a way to motivate you to work for them, like the good little slave that you are.
Outsourcing is a problem only because we have a slavery system. Our livelihood depends on working for others so we can pay our taxes. The reason that we have to work for others is that 99% of people have been deprived of an inheritance in the wealth of the land. Income property is owned by a few and the state. The others are slaves. Artists, programmers and inventors depend on their work to make a living. Can we blame them? We all depend on our labor because we are all slaves. So now we are swimming in a ocean of laws and rules that take away our remaining liberties, one by one.
Let's face it, if you cannot put a fence around it or put chains on it, it does not belong to you. Makes no difference whether it is ideas, writings, software, music or what have you. Once you've released it, like the air, it belongs to nobody and everybody.
Intellectual property owners (such as Microsoft and the music industry) will fight freedom with everything they've got. Right now they have two formidable weapons: IP laws and powerful police states to enforce them. But those who yearn to be free also have a formidable weapon, the internet.
The internet and other communication technologies (e.g., file sharing systems) are the first major kinks in the armor of a sick system. As technology progresses, the system will eventually collapse. What will happen to a slave-based economy when robots and advanced artificial intelligences replace everybody, i. e., when human labor, knowledge and expertise become worthless? It will be orders of magnitude worse than outsourcing.
And don't think for a minute this won't happen in your lifetime. The internet is the latest giant leap in human communication. Before that came mass telecommunication technologies and before that was the movable press. If history is any indication, we can expect a giant leap in technological progress and scientific knowledge. In fact, it is happening before our very eyes.
We should all demand a system where everybody is guaranteed income property, a piece of the pie, an estate if you will. There is plenty for everybody.
Communism confiscates all property and enslaves everybody. Capitalism gives property to a few and enslaves the rest. It's sad. The land should not be divided for a price. It should be an inheritance for us and our children and their children. It's the only way to guarantee freedom and a truly free market in a world where human labor is about to go the way of the dinosaurs. Demand liberty! Nothing less.
There are problems that don't work well on clusters, but rocket on a proper supercomputer.
True. Highly sequential algorithms fall in this category. The problem is that the switching speed of processors will soon run against a natural barrier. On the other hand, we will continue to add new nodes to our parallel superclusters long after the barrier is reached and supercomputing is stopped right in its tracks.
Don't see this as bad news... it's a sign that we're winning.
Right. The Cray folks have just realized that they are about to go the way of buggy whip and the slide rule. They don't like it one bit. They can only complain by making a lot of noise. But it won't work. When you're extinct, there is no coming back.
Artificial Development is developing a simulation of the human cortex. They could use this thing. They need all the processing power they can get their hands on.
May I inquire.. er... how you got into that or failing that, how does one interpret the symbolism?
Thanks. I am still in the process of interpreting the symbolism. BTW, the Bible talks about a lot more than just the brain. For example, it talks about DNA and the four nucleotides (first part of the book of Ezekiel) and the double helix (the wheel within a wheel). It even talks about physics (e.g., the aether and its constituents). Yes, relativists, there is an aether and it consists of photons (Seraphim, the burning ones) of which there are four types. But this is neither the place nor the time.
You are speaking as though NASA is a company that gets profit. NASA is a government agency and so nothing is "lucrative" for them, all the money they get they spend on research/equipment.
You don't think NASA's employees, mamagement and contractors profit from government funding? Try cutting NASA's funding and see the resulting outcry. Space exploration is a huge industry. Heck, government itself is a profit making industry, the most lucrative of them all.
'the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure'
There is lot more money to be made from the taxpayer from pursuing human space flights. Robots are much cheaper and not nearly as lucrative to NASA.
The problem with SETI fanatics is that they assume that aliens are using primitive EM waves to communicate. If EM waves were the only way to communicate, we would be bombarded with intelligent signals from all directions. I have a little advice for SETI. Aliens can communicate instantly using their knowledge of the non-local nature of the universe. Get a clue.
At least evolutionists dont ask me for money.
It would have been better if they did. They have a better system. They take your money (grants, educational research funding, etc...) without asking. Evolutionists have monopolized the educational systems of the western world, meaning that they get all the money they need from the government. They essentially steal it.
Add another bonus point for the Darwinians/evolutionists.
How is this a bonus point for Darwinians/evolutionists? Amazing to what dishonest lengths evolutionists will go to promote their religion.
I get a positive Crackpot Index just from this three line posting of his. And that's without even taking a shot at that "God gave us the secret to AI" website. I think my calculator might run out of digits...
Your opinion matters to me because...
"UCLA is reporting progress on the quantum computing front by announcing success in controlling the spin of a single electron using an ordinary transistor."
How does that constitute progress in quantum computing? I have been hearing about progress in quantum computing for a long time now. Sounds like a bunch of people who are afraid to lose their government grants and funding.
I can't wait for the day when quantum computing is revealed for what it is, a silly hoax and a fraud.
Actually according to anarchist ideology "all private property is theft" including buildings, land, machinery, etc.
In a deep sense, I agree. The earth has been around for billions of years before humans showed up. Nobody can claim ownership rights to the land. However, for the sake of getting along, I think the land should be divided, not for a price, but for an inheritance for us, our children and their children. After all, we are territorial animals.