Unfortunately, there are numerous technical problems that make Ringworlds problematic, as Niven tried to address in later books. The Ring requires active stabilization, day and night cycles can only be crudely simulated, etc. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the structural material itself would have to have the tensile strength of the strong nuclear force just to hold together...
Dyson Spheres actually make a lot more sense than Ringworlds. Any civilization capable of making a Ringworld would most likely be able to make a Dyson Sphere.
by Kevin Rose at 9pm, May 1st, 2007 in Digg Website
Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts...
In building and shaping the site I've always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We've always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
As has already been pointed out, it was a deposition about a sexual harassment case, so questions about an individuals sex life was indeed relevant. But more importantly, it's not for the WITNESS to decide if a question is relevant or not. That's for the judge. If Clinton's lawyers didn't think it was relevant, they should have objected. The fact that YOU think it wasn't relevant, or that HE did, doesn't give him leave to lie about it. The whole point of the rule of law is that individuals are not above it.
Well it sounds like you're hinting more at a belief in quantum decoherence, which is certainly an viewpoint gaining popularity lately, but which I'm not really convinced by. (Not that I could understand it fully anyway.)
That's beside the point. It "happens" to the extent that you suggest that the "collapse" is simply some convention whereby we can treat the result classically as the effects of QM are now within experimental uncertainty. You said "Anything that might be effected by the "collapse" of the state vector and is complex enough that you have to treat it classically is an "observer"." Again, measuring apparatus would fall within this definition, and yet clearly they aren't observers.
Yes, some idiots bungled the handling of the recount procedure. That's irrelevant to my question about how controlling the SoS website for a few days after the election changes anything about the election count itself. But don't let annoying questions of fact get in the way of your conspiracy theories. Be honest -- your opinion is already decided regardless of whether or not Republicans controlled the SoS website.
Umm, even if this is true, so what? Let's say the Republican conspiracy controlled the Ohio Secretary of State website. How does this help them steal the Ohio electoral votes? It doesn't change thc actual vote counting. What, was the Secretary of State and his web staff desperately trying to get the "real" vote totals out, only to have the Republicans put fake numbers on the website? These people had no other media access other than their own website? Where are they now?
If that were true, then the measuring appartus, would cause a collapse. But it doesn't, as shown by putting certain detectors behind other detectors. That's the biggest problem with the Copenhagen Interpretation: an undefined measurement process that converts probability functions into non-probabilistic measurements. What constitutes measurement? It's not clear.
No, you're still not quite getting it. Causality is only appearing to be violated because you're using the light-cone construct to dictate causality. You're pre-defining that causality is events ordered in a certain way inside the light cone, so naturally anything that's FTL could create a situation where the events appear out of order in the light cone. But if there really is FTL communication, then *that* is really the "causality cone", and no matter how things may appear in the light cone, causality is not really violated.
I've had arguments with physics profs about this before who didn't get it either.:) It's simply a matter of semantics; people instinctively think causality violation is a bad thing, but when you realize the causality being discussed is really a pre-defined property that depends on the speed of light BEING the speed of causality, then the fact there are FTL things causing things "faster than causality" is not nearly so disturbing. Terms like "locality" and "realism" have similar problems; often they have mental connotations that go beyond their formal definitions.
Ugh. I hate it when people say something like the above -- even physicists -- because they don't realize they've accidentally stumbled into a tautology. Faster-than-light travel does *NOT* imply going backwards in time or reverse causality. It only means that it *LOOKS* like reverse causality. Many people get wrapped up into thinking this means causality violation, but this is because they're already defined the light cone in advance as causality! Then it only logically follows that anything faster-than-light would violate causality as it appears inside the light cone.
As an ex-physics major who never really could grasp the mathematics behind modern physics, I'll try to explain in simple terms.
Basically, Quantum Mechanics describes the behavior of atoms and smaller particles really really well. It does this by basically saying that particles behave according to certain probabilities determined by their properties. Furthermore, QM says some properties are related such that if you know precisely one property (by measuring it), a corresponding property becomes completely unknowable (and thus random).
While the theory worked fine matherically, many people didn't like this idea of a random universe, and proposed that in reality, particles really do have certain precise, exact properties -- we just don't know what they are, and QM is just telling us mathematically we can't know what they all are at once. But they are 'really' still there, just 'hidden'.
However, physicists later devised an experiment to test this. Two particles can be created who we know in advance have, say, one with a spin polarized in one direction and a one with a spin polarized in an euqla but opposte direction. However, we can't know in advance which one is spinning which way. If we measure one of them, then we know the spin of the other. QM says that the spins are essentially random, and only become determined once we measure one of them. A 'hidden variable' theory, on the other hand, says that each particular really has a spin up or down in advance... we just don't know what it is.
But through a complicated experimental setup, physicists can basically create a situation where particles of a particular spin can sometimes get through to our measuring device and sometimes they can't. The math is rather complicated, but if the particles actually have a spin in advance, the numbers work out one way, and if it's truly just as QM says, they work out another. It turns out QM was correct; the particles are really behave as if they are indeterminate, rather than having a 'hidden' variable.
Of course, many physicists still do not like this. Thus new theories were devised to explain this behavior. One of the most popular ideas was to say that, well, if what they call 'local' hidden variables (as described above) didn't work, then perhaps there are 'non-local' hidden variables; that is, properties that exist outside of the particles themselves that can explain the QM results. In this way, while the particles are acting as if they had indeterminate values, they are really being dictacted by other, determinate ones that somehow exist outside the particles themselves.
It turns out the new experiment pretty much blew a big hole in those nonlocal hidden variable theories as well, just as the original experiment demolished local hidden variables. Now, there are still other ways to say the universe isn't really as indeterminate as QM says, without using nonlocal hidden variables, but those alternative theories have other implications that are hard to accept, such as parallel universes, faster-than-light information exchange, etc. In the end, it could be that QM is correct -- particles really do have indeterminate properties until they are measured -- but that itself carries its own philosophical baggage that's difficult for many to swallow.
The update to Defender of the Crown already came out a few years ago. IMHO, it largely sucked. I only played it a couple of times before putting it back into the box. I never did get the hang of the 'cinematic' swordfighting controls.
Virtually all of Cinemaware's games could have been listed, but DotC and Wings are probably two of the best examples. Rocket Ranger and It Came From the Desert are also heartily recommended.
The list in the quoted article does have some glaring ommissions. Dungeon Master was the first 3D realtime action CRPG, and I think the Amiga version was superior to both the ST and PC versions. Also woth mentioning are Populus and Artic Fox, which I think really shined in the Amiga versions. Finally, there is Faery Tale Adventure, which I think was one of the best isometic action CRPGs ever, irrespective of platform.
>The majority of congresspeople are not, and have never been, lawyers.
Actually, a quick google search will turn up statistics that from 1937-1968, the perentage of lawyers in the House ranged from 55% to 59%, and in the Senate 57% to 74%. So at one time, the majority of them were indeed lawyers. The trend has been downward; in 1999, 43% of all Congress were lawyers. As of last year (again according to google), 36% of the House were lawyers and 53% of the Senate, or 39% overall.
>The second amendment does not apply to normal citizens. It applies to organized militias.
Right, and the fourteenth amendment doesn't apply to racial segregation. After all, Plessy v. Ferguson established that. Oh wait... the Supreme Court later said they were wrong, and overturned that.
So don't base your view of the Second Amendment on one bad court decision that will someday be overturned. Read it yourself, and study the intent of the people who wrote it. The argument that it's meant to apply to millitias is faulty. Of ALL the Bill of Rights, it would be the one right that wouldn't grant rights to citizens or states. Rather odd, don't you think? The draft versions of the amendment and the amendments from state constitutions it was based on didn't include the militia language. Reading the records of the debate, it's clear the creators intended it to grant citizens the right to bear arms, period.
What if the first amendment said, for example, "A well regulated media, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to freedom of speech, and of the press, shall not be infringed." Would you say that the framers therefor meant that such freedom only applies to a well-regulated media, and thus the government can infringe all they like on free speech and press outside of the traditional media establishment? And that the government had the power to regulate said media establishment? Come on.
I specifically did not want to "upgrade" to Vista any time soon. Previously Microsoft had indicated DX10 support on XP, so I did not buy Vista, and I didn't get a good video card because I figured I had to upgrade to a DX10 video card shortly. But now it turns out that I have to buy a new card anyway, and if I get a DX10 card and want to use DX10, I'll actually have to get Vista.
I've never been a big Microsoft hater... for example, when they stopped suppporting Windows 95, Windows 2000, and so on previously I thought they were well-timed. But I do not think this is particularly a good decision. Will it spur more people to upgrade to Vista? Maybe, but I think there will be a lot of pressure on game developers to develop primarily DX9 games, with maybe some extra DX10 options. But the subset of even high-end gamers who have both Vista AND a DX10 graphics card is going to be the minority for the next few years.
While I'm sure there are some "universal principles" that all sentient beings could hopefully agree upon as objectively moral, there's no doubt that genetics and evolution shape some of our moral behaviors. Consider for example an alien intelligent species who evolved from primative ancestors whose females were only in heat one day a year. In such a circumstance, it's imperatie for males to breed during this time for the species to survive. The males body is flooded with an overwhelming drive to breed the fertile females. Now there may be many ways this situation can be handled intelligently, but one can easily imagine a society which evolved where rape was allowed on those days as a biological imperative. In their morality, rape under such circumstances is justified; in ours, while we may sympathize with their situation, we might conclude that one alien male forcing itself on an unwilling alien female was still immoral, even in desperate circumstances.
Anyway, it seems much of the 'criticism' are actually points of interest that I already conceded but do not find decisive. Yes, it may be better to generate the energy elsewhere. The same is true for the other alternatives. But that doesn't really solve the problem of replacing fossil fuels in vehicles. The decisive issue which I pointed out, and which is not resolved, is whether compressing air and releasing it is more efficient than charging batteries or producing hydrogen. I don't see any evidence either way, but my instinct says no, it's not. It may be better than producing ethanol, but that's another very controversial topic.
The thing is there isn't just a lot of compressed air lying around. Thanks to thermodynamics, it costs more to compress the air than what we get out of it when we uncompress it. And it's probably oil or coal burning plants that compress the air. So this isn't solving anything. The reason gasoline is so useful is that it's already been made by nature, so we can get energy out without putting very much energy in.
So that only leaves compressed air as a useful energy storage device, and I have to suspect that the other alternatives (hydrogen, fuel cells, electric) do better in that department.
Yes, there are a lot of good MMOG blogs and such out there. However, if you're looking for another print magazine, we still have Massive Online Gamer:
http://www.beckett.com/beckettMOG/default.osi
Computer Games Magazine was originally known as Strategy Plus, and then changed its name to Computer Games Strategy Plus, before reinventing itself as the new Computer Games fairly recently. Next to Computer Gaming World, it's certainly been my favorite computer games magazine and it will be missed. I'm also disappointed that yet another MMOG-focused magazine, Massive, will be ceasing publication as well.
Ancient telescopes were essentially spyglasses or binoculars, allowing one to see a great distance. And it's true that there is some evidence that arabs used such devices to study the stars even earlier. But it's generally regarded that the first telescopes in the modern sense appeared around 1600, and you've probably heard of Galileo, who made his own telescope in 1609 and then founded the modern science of astronomy via his observations.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, there are numerous technical problems that make Ringworlds problematic, as Niven tried to address in later books. The Ring requires active stabilization, day and night cycles can only be crudely simulated, etc. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the structural material itself would have to have the tensile strength of the strong nuclear force just to hold together...
Dyson Spheres actually make a lot more sense than Ringworlds. Any civilization capable of making a Ringworld would most likely be able to make a Dyson Sphere.
What sort of crazy measurement is that? In God-given units, that's it's 90.1934642 square furlongs or 144,309.543 square rods.
As has already been pointed out, it was a deposition about a sexual harassment case, so questions about an individuals sex life was indeed relevant. But more importantly, it's not for the WITNESS to decide if a question is relevant or not. That's for the judge. If Clinton's lawyers didn't think it was relevant, they should have objected. The fact that YOU think it wasn't relevant, or that HE did, doesn't give him leave to lie about it. The whole point of the rule of law is that individuals are not above it.
Well it sounds like you're hinting more at a belief in quantum decoherence, which is certainly an viewpoint gaining popularity lately, but which I'm not really convinced by. (Not that I could understand it fully anyway.)
That's beside the point. It "happens" to the extent that you suggest that the "collapse" is simply some convention whereby we can treat the result classically as the effects of QM are now within experimental uncertainty. You said "Anything that might be effected by the "collapse" of the state vector and is complex enough that you have to treat it classically is an "observer"." Again, measuring apparatus would fall within this definition, and yet clearly they aren't observers.
Yes, some idiots bungled the handling of the recount procedure. That's irrelevant to my question about how controlling the SoS website for a few days after the election changes anything about the election count itself. But don't let annoying questions of fact get in the way of your conspiracy theories. Be honest -- your opinion is already decided regardless of whether or not Republicans controlled the SoS website.
Umm, even if this is true, so what? Let's say the Republican conspiracy controlled the Ohio Secretary of State website. How does this help them steal the Ohio electoral votes? It doesn't change thc actual vote counting. What, was the Secretary of State and his web staff desperately trying to get the "real" vote totals out, only to have the Republicans put fake numbers on the website? These people had no other media access other than their own website? Where are they now?
If that were true, then the measuring appartus, would cause a collapse. But it doesn't, as shown by putting certain detectors behind other detectors. That's the biggest problem with the Copenhagen Interpretation: an undefined measurement process that converts probability functions into non-probabilistic measurements. What constitutes measurement? It's not clear.
No, you're still not quite getting it. Causality is only appearing to be violated because you're using the light-cone construct to dictate causality. You're pre-defining that causality is events ordered in a certain way inside the light cone, so naturally anything that's FTL could create a situation where the events appear out of order in the light cone. But if there really is FTL communication, then *that* is really the "causality cone", and no matter how things may appear in the light cone, causality is not really violated.
:) It's simply a matter of semantics; people instinctively think causality violation is a bad thing, but when you realize the causality being discussed is really a pre-defined property that depends on the speed of light BEING the speed of causality, then the fact there are FTL things causing things "faster than causality" is not nearly so disturbing. Terms like "locality" and "realism" have similar problems; often they have mental connotations that go beyond their formal definitions.
I've had arguments with physics profs about this before who didn't get it either.
Ugh. I hate it when people say something like the above -- even physicists -- because they don't realize they've accidentally stumbled into a tautology. Faster-than-light travel does *NOT* imply going backwards in time or reverse causality. It only means that it *LOOKS* like reverse causality. Many people get wrapped up into thinking this means causality violation, but this is because they're already defined the light cone in advance as causality! Then it only logically follows that anything faster-than-light would violate causality as it appears inside the light cone.
As an ex-physics major who never really could grasp the mathematics behind modern physics, I'll try to explain in simple terms.
Basically, Quantum Mechanics describes the behavior of atoms and smaller particles really really well. It does this by basically saying that particles behave according to certain probabilities determined by their properties. Furthermore, QM says some properties are related such that if you know precisely one property (by measuring it), a corresponding property becomes completely unknowable (and thus random).
While the theory worked fine matherically, many people didn't like this idea of a random universe, and proposed that in reality, particles really do have certain precise, exact properties -- we just don't know what they are, and QM is just telling us mathematically we can't know what they all are at once. But they are 'really' still there, just 'hidden'.
However, physicists later devised an experiment to test this. Two particles can be created who we know in advance have, say, one with a spin polarized in one direction and a one with a spin polarized in an euqla but opposte direction. However, we can't know in advance which one is spinning which way. If we measure one of them, then we know the spin of the other. QM says that the spins are essentially random, and only become determined once we measure one of them. A 'hidden variable' theory, on the other hand, says that each particular really has a spin up or down in advance... we just don't know what it is.
But through a complicated experimental setup, physicists can basically create a situation where particles of a particular spin can sometimes get through to our measuring device and sometimes they can't. The math is rather complicated, but if the particles actually have a spin in advance, the numbers work out one way, and if it's truly just as QM says, they work out another. It turns out QM was correct; the particles are really behave as if they are indeterminate, rather than having a 'hidden' variable.
Of course, many physicists still do not like this. Thus new theories were devised to explain this behavior. One of the most popular ideas was to say that, well, if what they call 'local' hidden variables (as described above) didn't work, then perhaps there are 'non-local' hidden variables; that is, properties that exist outside of the particles themselves that can explain the QM results. In this way, while the particles are acting as if they had indeterminate values, they are really being dictacted by other, determinate ones that somehow exist outside the particles themselves.
It turns out the new experiment pretty much blew a big hole in those nonlocal hidden variable theories as well, just as the original experiment demolished local hidden variables. Now, there are still other ways to say the universe isn't really as indeterminate as QM says, without using nonlocal hidden variables, but those alternative theories have other implications that are hard to accept, such as parallel universes, faster-than-light information exchange, etc. In the end, it could be that QM is correct -- particles really do have indeterminate properties until they are measured -- but that itself carries its own philosophical baggage that's difficult for many to swallow.
The update to Defender of the Crown already came out a few years ago. IMHO, it largely sucked. I only played it a couple of times before putting it back into the box. I never did get the hang of the 'cinematic' swordfighting controls.
Virtually all of Cinemaware's games could have been listed, but DotC and Wings are probably two of the best examples. Rocket Ranger and It Came From the Desert are also heartily recommended.
The list in the quoted article does have some glaring ommissions. Dungeon Master was the first 3D realtime action CRPG, and I think the Amiga version was superior to both the ST and PC versions. Also woth mentioning are Populus and Artic Fox, which I think really shined in the Amiga versions. Finally, there is Faery Tale Adventure, which I think was one of the best isometic action CRPGs ever, irrespective of platform.
>The majority of congresspeople are not, and have never been, lawyers.
Actually, a quick google search will turn up statistics that from 1937-1968, the perentage of lawyers in the House ranged from 55% to 59%, and in the Senate 57% to 74%. So at one time, the majority of them were indeed lawyers. The trend has been downward; in 1999, 43% of all Congress were lawyers. As of last year (again according to google), 36% of the House were lawyers and 53% of the Senate, or 39% overall.
A variation on that joke goes instead:
The visitor, getting into the swing of things, yells out, "19!"
The room is dead quiet.
The visitor turns to the host and asks, "What, isn't 19 funny?"
And the host replies, "Yeah, but not the way you tell it..."
>The second amendment does not apply to normal citizens. It applies to organized militias.
Right, and the fourteenth amendment doesn't apply to racial segregation. After all, Plessy v. Ferguson established that. Oh wait... the Supreme Court later said they were wrong, and overturned that.
So don't base your view of the Second Amendment on one bad court decision that will someday be overturned. Read it yourself, and study the intent of the people who wrote it. The argument that it's meant to apply to millitias is faulty. Of ALL the Bill of Rights, it would be the one right that wouldn't grant rights to citizens or states. Rather odd, don't you think? The draft versions of the amendment and the amendments from state constitutions it was based on didn't include the militia language. Reading the records of the debate, it's clear the creators intended it to grant citizens the right to bear arms, period.
What if the first amendment said, for example, "A well regulated media, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to freedom of speech, and of the press, shall not be infringed." Would you say that the framers therefor meant that such freedom only applies to a well-regulated media, and thus the government can infringe all they like on free speech and press outside of the traditional media establishment? And that the government had the power to regulate said media establishment? Come on.
I specifically did not want to "upgrade" to Vista any time soon. Previously Microsoft had indicated DX10 support on XP, so I did not buy Vista, and I didn't get a good video card because I figured I had to upgrade to a DX10 video card shortly. But now it turns out that I have to buy a new card anyway, and if I get a DX10 card and want to use DX10, I'll actually have to get Vista.
I've never been a big Microsoft hater... for example, when they stopped suppporting Windows 95, Windows 2000, and so on previously I thought they were well-timed. But I do not think this is particularly a good decision. Will it spur more people to upgrade to Vista? Maybe, but I think there will be a lot of pressure on game developers to develop primarily DX9 games, with maybe some extra DX10 options. But the subset of even high-end gamers who have both Vista AND a DX10 graphics card is going to be the minority for the next few years.
While I'm sure there are some "universal principles" that all sentient beings could hopefully agree upon as objectively moral, there's no doubt that genetics and evolution shape some of our moral behaviors. Consider for example an alien intelligent species who evolved from primative ancestors whose females were only in heat one day a year. In such a circumstance, it's imperatie for males to breed during this time for the species to survive. The males body is flooded with an overwhelming drive to breed the fertile females. Now there may be many ways this situation can be handled intelligently, but one can easily imagine a society which evolved where rape was allowed on those days as a biological imperative. In their morality, rape under such circumstances is justified; in ours, while we may sympathize with their situation, we might conclude that one alien male forcing itself on an unwilling alien female was still immoral, even in desperate circumstances.
Wow, I can't believe I got troll-rated.
Anyway, it seems much of the 'criticism' are actually points of interest that I already conceded but do not find decisive. Yes, it may be better to generate the energy elsewhere. The same is true for the other alternatives. But that doesn't really solve the problem of replacing fossil fuels in vehicles. The decisive issue which I pointed out, and which is not resolved, is whether compressing air and releasing it is more efficient than charging batteries or producing hydrogen. I don't see any evidence either way, but my instinct says no, it's not. It may be better than producing ethanol, but that's another very controversial topic.
Terminal count abort. No launch.
The thing is there isn't just a lot of compressed air lying around. Thanks to thermodynamics, it costs more to compress the air than what we get out of it when we uncompress it. And it's probably oil or coal burning plants that compress the air. So this isn't solving anything. The reason gasoline is so useful is that it's already been made by nature, so we can get energy out without putting very much energy in. So that only leaves compressed air as a useful energy storage device, and I have to suspect that the other alternatives (hydrogen, fuel cells, electric) do better in that department.
Yes, there are a lot of good MMOG blogs and such out there. However, if you're looking for another print magazine, we still have Massive Online Gamer: http://www.beckett.com/beckettMOG/default.osi
Computer Games Magazine was originally known as Strategy Plus, and then changed its name to Computer Games Strategy Plus, before reinventing itself as the new Computer Games fairly recently. Next to Computer Gaming World, it's certainly been my favorite computer games magazine and it will be missed. I'm also disappointed that yet another MMOG-focused magazine, Massive, will be ceasing publication as well.
Ancient telescopes were essentially spyglasses or binoculars, allowing one to see a great distance. And it's true that there is some evidence that arabs used such devices to study the stars even earlier. But it's generally regarded that the first telescopes in the modern sense appeared around 1600, and you've probably heard of Galileo, who made his own telescope in 1609 and then founded the modern science of astronomy via his observations.
In _2001_ Dr. Floyd's daughter asks for a bush baby for her birthday. Thus showing that humans are just evolved apes.
Bruce