Actually Nikola Tesla hypothesized that there was another component of EM radiation, Longitudinally Propagating EM Radiation... He stated that this radiation would not be limited to the speed of light
Well, Nikola Tesla was good on some occasions and quite a nutter on others. Like this one.
We assume they would be using radio communication, or that they'd bother with a high-power laser. What if their communication is completely different. Like, something we haven't even considered to be a possibility yet, even in SciFi
I think you're wrong, mainly because I consider the posibility of a new discovery of the order of magnitude of say, electromagnetic radiation, to be very remote.
Just because variation in wealth can be caused by variation in talent, does not mean that it always is, or even that it usually is. In the real world, variation in wealth is more often caused by factors like inheritance and the golden rule: them with the gold make the rules.
Read The Emporer's New Mind, by Roger Penrose. It's impossible to make a conscious machine.
You mean, Penrose thinks it's impossible to make a conscious machine.
If you think your brain is a conscious machine, then you're wrong.
That is a locical concusion from "It's impossible to make a conscious machine", therefor the premise must be wrong, since the only other alternative is an explanation of the human mind that involves ghosts, spooks, spirit, phologiston, soul, or some such unscientific, ill-defined nonsense.
Leibniz pointed this out 400 years ago. If you could make a conscious machine, you could look into it and see two parts pushing on each other and you could point to it and say "that's a thought." But you can't, and never will.
Whyever not? I can write a chess-playing computer program, step through it in a debugger, see two variables pushing on each other, and say "that's a chess move decision". It's alll just electrons, but it's also a decision. Where is the imposiblity?
This guy, who benefitted professionally to a huge extent from the existence of manned spaceflight programs, now has the nerve to turn around and bite the hand that (probably quite literally) fed him.
So, you're saying that he sould act like a good American politician: Bite down on his free thought and stay bought.
Re: "c", I am sure you have heard of the possibility of creating/traveling through wormholes. Again, the "c" barrier and "no way to overcome it, but the above" is all based on *current* knowledge of physics.
Wormhole shmurmhole. You do know that travelling faster than light, however you do it, is the same thing as time travel (for some observers, effects occuring before the causes), and thus has insurmountable paradoxes. That is an experimental result that has been confirmed any number of ways, and any theoretical advance would also have to account for it.
If you don't know your general relativity, go back to school, it was old physics in 1920.
I'll say it again - basing your argument on wishfull thinking is a bad idea.
The exponential nature of tech growth implies that we are like apes to a civilization even 100 years ahead of us,
Many of the key results of the 20th century involve the limits of what we can do. Godel incompleteness, and the speed of light to name two big ones. There is no indication at all that any civilisation, no matter how advanced, will be able to overcome the lightspeed problem and make us look like ants.
technology to visit the entire universe at will ("c"restrictions from the current physics knowledge notwithstanding).
You want the lightspeed thing to go away, don't you? Unfortunately wanting counts for nothing, and there's not a shred of evidence for that, and plenty against. Even given nigh-infinite knowledge, physical limits are physical limits.
Many, including me, believe that within about 100 years, a civilization like our would have the technology to visit the entire universe at will
It's entirely possible that a civilisation like our will, in 100 years, have A-bombed, bio-plauged, chemically poisoned or just polluted itself back to the early stone age. Or worse, wiped itself out entirely. I'm all for progress, but dude, go easy on the prozac.
One, in theory, brushed metal is supposed to be reserved for applications that mimic real world objects.
And when should applications mimic real-world objects? I personally don't think that they should ever have that aim. It's just too static and confining a UI metaphor.
Ever used a piece of music software called rebirth? It's nigh-unuable because of slavish emulation of lots of tiny real-world knobs, which are OK when turned with fingers, but impossible with a mouse.
Re:Putting Mono, .Net and all that into perspectiv
on
Ars Technica Tours Mono
·
· Score: 2, Informative
.Net was and imho still is - to a large extent - a joke. What MS did was rename the.obj files from all their developement stuff to.net
You don't know the first thing about it, do you?
Go read.
NET langages compile to plaform-independant bytecode. Shure it's ripping off Java, but it shows good taste in plagarism.
Shouldn't there be something in Google that identifies certain sites and more reliable than others rather than basing rank solely on links?
There is "something in Google that identifies certain sites as more reliable than others", and it is the pagerank algorythym, and it's based on a mass democratic survey of actual web pages. Barring google hacks, this is a good thing.
Perhaps you want "someone" not "something", but what if you don't agree with them? Frankly that's the part of problem with conventional media - biased, corporate-bought, dumbed-down pundits acting as gatekeepers.
I use flash media now for most of my portable storage. It's virtually indestructable (in everyday, carry it in my pocket use)
My USB flash drive once got accidentally sucked up into the vacuum cleaner. That didn't affect it at all.
Actually, come to think of it, the next portable storage technology may be USB, or a faster sucessor thereof. What will the portable medium look like? Doesn't matter, it can vary so long at it or the reader speaks USB. iPod, anyone?
I think support for lexical closures is planned for the CLR (I don't know about C#).
Yes it will. The whidbey whitepaper is online somewhere. The functionality will of course be in C#, since C# is the.NET crown jewel. C# 2.0 will have anonymous methods with "environment capture" of visible variables.
Lisp is and will always be a better functional language than Java/C# - the syntax is just better for it - but I take the point that it not the same thing as a dynamic language.
If the Lisp community ever got its act together and actually learned from Java/C#, they could produce a great response, something that combines the best of Java/C# and Lisp. But I doubt that's going to happen any time soon.
Possibly the ML/CAML/OOCAML/Haskel crowd would be more open to innovation.
Java and C# have more complete and better defined dynamic features than Lisp
Could you elaborate on that? It doesn't seem correct to me. Java/C# (at least in C# 1.0, the current version) do not have closures. Neither C# or java will ever have the code/data unity that Lisp has.
You can't teach anyone to be creative. You either are, or are not.
You can't teach anyone to be tall. You either are, or are not.
Have you ever tried looking at the world without a black-or-white dichotomy? There's some creativity in everyone. Compared to Leonardo Da Vinci, most of us are not very creative. Compared to a poodle, most of us are very creative indeed.
All programming language features are potentially dangerous. Operator overloading, however, 1) is a minefield - so many unobvious ways to shoot yourself in the foot 2) is hidden code. Reading it, it's not immediately obvious that the operator has been overrideen 3) is purely syntactic sugar. Anything that can be done with operator overloading can be done without it. For objects A and B, A += B; is directly equivalent to A.Add(B);
Thus operator overloading should be avoided unless you happen to be coding a class that is a mathematical entity, which actually has plus and minus defined on it - e.g. matrix, vector, complex number etc. How often does that happen?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Nikola Tesla hypothesized that there was another component of EM radiation, Longitudinally Propagating EM Radiation ... He stated that this radiation would not be limited to the speed of light
Well, Nikola Tesla was good on some occasions and quite a nutter on others. Like this one.
We assume they would be using radio communication, or that they'd bother with a high-power laser. What if their communication is completely different. Like, something we haven't even considered to be a possibility yet, even in SciFi
I think you're wrong, mainly because I consider the posibility of a new discovery of the order of magnitude of say, electromagnetic radiation, to be very remote.
In other words, what you see is all there is.
Most people have occation to type one handed. Whether it's because you have a phone in your hand, or otherwise :).
Mouse. You need to use the mouse.
Indeed. This looks a lot like 4GLs and application generators all over again.
You turn off your Accelerated Graphics Port? the one wherein the grapics card is seated? How does it work at all after that?
Just because variation in wealth can be caused by variation in talent, does not mean that it always is, or even that it usually is. In the real world, variation in wealth is more often caused by factors like inheritance and the golden rule: them with the gold make the rules.
Read The Emporer's New Mind, by Roger Penrose.
It's impossible to make a conscious machine.
You mean, Penrose thinks it's impossible to make a conscious machine.
If you think your brain is a conscious machine, then you're wrong.
That is a locical concusion from "It's impossible to make a conscious machine", therefor the premise must be wrong, since the only other alternative is an explanation of the human mind that involves ghosts, spooks, spirit, phologiston, soul, or some such unscientific, ill-defined nonsense.
Leibniz pointed this out 400 years ago. If you could make a conscious machine, you could look into it and see two parts pushing on each other and you could point to it and say "that's a thought." But you can't, and never will.
Whyever not? I can write a chess-playing computer program, step through it in a debugger, see two variables pushing on each other, and say "that's a chess move decision". It's alll just electrons, but it's also a decision. Where is the imposiblity?
This guy, who benefitted professionally to a huge extent from the existence of manned spaceflight programs, now has the nerve to turn around and bite the hand that (probably quite literally) fed him.
So, you're saying that he sould act like a good American politician: Bite down on his free thought and stay bought.
Re: "c", I am sure you have heard of the possibility of creating/traveling through wormholes. Again, the "c" barrier and "no way to overcome it, but the above" is all based on *current* knowledge of physics.
Wormhole shmurmhole. You do know that travelling faster than light, however you do it, is the same thing as time travel (for some observers, effects occuring before the causes), and thus has insurmountable paradoxes. That is an experimental result that has been confirmed any number of ways, and any theoretical advance would also have to account for it.
If you don't know your general relativity, go back to school, it was old physics in 1920.
I'll say it again - basing your argument on wishfull thinking is a bad idea.
The exponential nature of tech growth implies that we are like apes to a civilization even 100 years ahead of us,
Many of the key results of the 20th century involve the limits of what we can do. Godel incompleteness, and the speed of light to name two big ones. There is no indication at all that any civilisation, no matter how advanced, will be able to overcome the lightspeed problem and make us look like ants.
technology to visit the entire universe at will ("c"restrictions from the current physics knowledge notwithstanding).
You want the lightspeed thing to go away, don't you? Unfortunately wanting counts for nothing, and there's not a shred of evidence for that, and plenty against. Even given nigh-infinite knowledge, physical limits are physical limits.
Many, including me, believe that within about 100 years, a civilization like our would have the technology to visit the entire universe at will
It's entirely possible that a civilisation like our will, in 100 years, have A-bombed, bio-plauged, chemically poisoned or just polluted itself back to the early stone age. Or worse, wiped itself out entirely. I'm all for progress, but dude, go easy on the prozac.
People who have something to say, have a right to be heard.
Telemarketers and door-to-door preachers believe that they have something to say to me. I beg to differ.
I think this was the only question he was capable of answering.
But he didn't answer it. How many decibels is "very quiet" ?
...not entirely sure about this one, but didn't Paul Simon violate US/UN sanctions by recording his album Graceland in South Africa?
Maybe. But that album did a lot for Black South African music, so it wasn't a bad thing.
One, in theory, brushed metal is supposed to be reserved for applications that mimic real world objects.
And when should applications mimic real-world objects? I personally don't think that they should ever have that aim. It's just too static and confining a UI metaphor.
Ever used a piece of music software called rebirth? It's nigh-unuable because of slavish emulation of lots of tiny real-world knobs, which are OK when turned with fingers, but impossible with a mouse.
You don't know the first thing about it, do you? Go read.
NET langages compile to plaform-independant bytecode. Shure it's ripping off Java, but it shows good taste in plagarism.
Rather, sites that fit within a classification .... And to be clear, I don't imagine the "news channel" classification as being limited to...
You will always have to draw the line somewhere. That will always be an arbitrary, subjective and politically charged decision.
Shouldn't there be something in Google that identifies certain sites and more reliable than others rather than basing rank solely on links?
There is "something in Google that identifies certain sites as more reliable than others", and it is the pagerank algorythym, and it's based on a mass democratic survey of actual web pages. Barring google hacks, this is a good thing.
Perhaps you want "someone" not "something", but what if you don't agree with them? Frankly that's the part of problem with conventional media - biased, corporate-bought, dumbed-down pundits acting as gatekeepers.
I use flash media now for most of my portable storage. It's virtually indestructable (in everyday, carry it in my pocket use)
My USB flash drive once got accidentally sucked up into the vacuum cleaner. That didn't affect it at all.
Actually, come to think of it, the next portable storage technology may be USB, or a faster sucessor thereof. What will the portable medium look like? Doesn't matter, it can vary so long at it or the reader speaks USB. iPod, anyone?
I think support for lexical closures is planned for the CLR (I don't know about C#).
.NET crown jewel. C# 2.0 will have anonymous methods with "environment capture" of visible variables.
Yes it will. The whidbey whitepaper is online somewhere. The functionality will of course be in C#, since C# is the
Lisp is and will always be a better functional language than Java/C# - the syntax is just better for it - but I take the point that it not the same thing as a dynamic language.
If the Lisp community ever got its act together and actually learned from Java/C#, they could produce a great response, something that combines the best of Java/C# and Lisp. But I doubt that's going to happen any time soon.
Possibly the ML/CAML/OOCAML/Haskel crowd would be more open to innovation.
Java and C# have more complete and better defined dynamic features than Lisp
Could you elaborate on that? It doesn't seem correct to me. Java/C# (at least in C# 1.0, the current version) do not have closures. Neither C# or java will ever have the code/data unity that Lisp has.
You can't teach anyone to be creative. You either are, or are not.
You can't teach anyone to be tall. You either are, or are not.
Have you ever tried looking at the world without a black-or-white dichotomy? There's some creativity in everyone. Compared to Leonardo Da Vinci, most of us are not very creative. Compared to a poodle, most of us are very creative indeed.
Do a google search on "single-celled colony". There's your intermediate stage.
Evolution implies ... e.g. An ameba suddenly mutates into a multi-celled configuration. Or a giraffe suddenly develops gills (Emphasis added).
Rubbish. There's nothing sudden implied.
All programming language features are potentially dangerous. Operator overloading, however,
1) is a minefield - so many unobvious ways to shoot yourself in the foot
2) is hidden code. Reading it, it's not immediately obvious that the operator has been overrideen
3) is purely syntactic sugar. Anything that can be done with operator overloading can be done without it. For objects A and B, A += B; is directly equivalent to A.Add(B);
Thus operator overloading should be avoided unless you happen to be coding a class that is a mathematical entity, which actually has plus and minus defined on it - e.g. matrix, vector, complex number etc. How often does that happen?