I loved the movie, but it always bothered me that it deviated away from the generation 1 series. Things such as the reduction in voltron-like transformers, The "autobot city", etc.
I was very young when it came out, and so much differed from the series that I was almost disturbed by it - namely the finality of death, which was always glossed over in the series (such as, yeah we were all thrown into the lava, but we still live...)
my thoughts are that I want money
my actions then are to gain in dishonest ways
See,I don't understand where you're comming from. This stage is the end all be all, as far as I'm concerned. Once you have committed wrong doing, what does it matter where you go from there? Again, if you have religious convictions, it's of your own accord.
I also didn't claim your argument was irrelevant.. I just meant that you were making a strong case until that point.
You had me until the last third. Your argument would have been stronger if you hadn't mentioned homosexuality, considering its lack of relevance to an illegal action against an innocent verses concenting adults (male homosexual urges shouldn't be any more dangerous or encouraging towards illegal activity than heterosexual urges.. Yes there are violators in both camps, but we must single them out). I understand the Christian swing, but there it is.
The problem is that the thought leads to action, action leads to habits, habits lead to attitudes, attitudes lead to character, character leads to destiny. Lust after children needs to be fixed at the thought level. We can't legislate that, and we shouldn't, so...
What you say about feed-back loops makes a lot of sence to me as an EE. Though I don't think your conclusion about destiny is as logical. If I had to make one up, I'd say: thoughts lead to desires (habbits), desires lead to attitudes (viewing their sexual prey as sluts who desire your gratifying "punishment"), attitude leads to character (possibly molding how you act, but in general, who you are), and only at the very end is action. Not all the steps are always present (such as with initial experimentation with masterbation). The key difference is that once action is taken, all the damage is done.
I agree with you in that I don't think violent sexual activities should really ever be _encouraged_. Obviously it's unwise to indulge in fantacies about your work-place. There is strong practical reason for why you should never date at your work place.. Should fanticizing about your students be any less stupid?
I respect that you say regions should have the right to evict undesirable elements, provided the offenders have the right to move. I remember Hero's Quest III or some such beast where there was this society based around honor.. And if you were caught committing a non-violent crime, your punishment meant a declaration of a lack of honor - that was it.. Of course the practical side effect is that nobody would sell to you. I always thought that mentality was kind of cool, though largely impractical.
Still the horrors of 1984 lead me to dislike any sort of thought police. Pre-emptive action such as this is a pandora's box that we don't want to open. If some cunning spam causes me to inadvertantly open a porn-web site that's been flagged by some watch group, my life could silently be ruined.
Several of my Jewish friends are almost induced into a traumatic state when considering certain Nazi material. I think "making me sick" is an order of magnitude less severe... Yet, Nazi advocates in America are not Jailed (provided they do not act).
Therein lies the entire point of freedom of speech. Mob rule is based around popular self riteousness. You present an idiological danger to us, so we will stamp you out. We believe it's common sence that you committed this appauling crime so damn waiting for the trial where you have a chance at being acquited, we're going to kill you tonight!!
Music can induce us into a frenzied, less safe state for driving. Alcohol can lead us into abuse. Cocain can destroy our brain. Depictions of immoral sexuality can "whet" our desire and bring us to action.. These are all truths. (If you have value in the teachings of Christianity, (even from a non-christian point of view) the response was to pluck our your eye if it causes you to consider bad deeds). The responsibility is in the individual, and not for the society to simply remove every possible temptation.
An over-weight person that removes all food-temptation will explode and splurge when given the opportunity. Those people that allow temptations to be at hand at least have the opportunity to moderate their discipline, and make life bearable.
Sexual offenders (as far as I understand it) are tainted for life. It's their responsibility to seek help / restraint, or our responsibilty to distance them when they're caught actually doing wrong. But slowly taking away stimulous, such as moderate-level drugs, or hard-core pr0n only attacks the symptom, not the problem.
I haven't used it yet (except to download and type out the quick examples). Things I've noticed that I'm not crazy about:
I haven't found a decent debugging mode for it yet. It mimics perl in many ways, but -d isn't the same.
They use "begin / end" instead of the uniform {}. This pisses me off because of lack of emacs / vi matching.
Numbers are all objects, which hints at slower performance. In fact, performance is said to be above that of python, but one can deduce it as being slower than perl.
It is said to have a much more convinient C / C++ API, but that additionally suggests that it'll have additional layers of abstraction, meaning slower interface code (pure speculation). I have the same issue with the Perl6 direction.
It's supports multi-threading even if the OS doesn't, which obviously requires interpreter threads. Depending on how they do this, it could be a negative. (additional checks per ruby-op)
It uses mark-and-sweep memory, which is great for memory leaks, but my initial impression is that it'll be slower than reference counting (since I believe it requires wasteful periodic passes through memory.. Probably through one of it's interpreter threads).
Being a perl advocate, I have no room to speak on this, but some of the syntax seems odd - making use of punctuation marks, etc.
It's heavily OOP, and that isn't always the best solution to problems. Granted, it's useful for things like x.length, but sometimes you want to just length( @{ $some_gloal_name } ) to get the job done. I'll have delve deeper to see how well they copied the TMTOWTDI philosophy.
They made a nice attempt to duplicate perl's interpolating strings through the use of "xxxx #{var_name} xxxxx", which I definately like better than python's c-like method: "xxxxx %s xxxxx" % var_name. Since if I wanted the latter I could just use prints. Still, I can see the extra characters geting annoying. (though there might be a compiler speed-up, since fewer variations need be accounted for).
One of my favorite features of perl is it's code's searchability.. Want to find a function, search on "sub xxxx". Want to find a variable: "$xxx". (Though mangled perl variables can be a pain-sometimes). If nothing else, it's a key for emacs to color on (which remarkably aids reading code). C, Java, Python, and now ruby give this up. (Note: ruby does use $ and @, but only for globals / member-vars, which only has minimal usage. Local's are prefix-less).
I'm definately going to try it out. I dabbled with Python for a while, but couldn't find a compelling reason to move over (poor use of anonymous functions, couldn't find a way to functionalize 'use strict', etc ). I'm expecting a similar final result with ruby, but you never know.
Lastly, I don't believe it's as tried and true as Perl. Ignoring for a moment it's small but growing size 3rd party support compared to CPAN, it was a devil for us to convince our bosses to continue doing web development purely in Perl (as opposed to the more popular but less coder friendly servlets). A good manager would most likely not entrust their clientelle to such a bleeding edge technology. Perl's been on most every platform that I've ever heard of (still waiting for palm). It is the epitomy of robustness as far as I'm concerned. The only times I've ever core'd had to do with c-libraries (which you can _always_ avoid; even if it means resorting to IPC). I'd trust perl-code to c-code any day (assuming you had actual developers on the job). Still ruby's defintaely got future potential.. The trick is how do they differentiate themselves today so that they can grow into tomorrow. They're not defining their own niche, they're piggy-backing existing ones.
What they could do to really bolster acceptance is provide porting scripts fom raw perl. They seem to mimic enough of the rough syntax (like reg-ex, qq(..), etc), so it's bound to be possible. Due to the divergent memory archetectures, it's doubtful that XS code could be ported though. Perhaps if anybody ever used swig, otoh.:)
I saw a lot in Ruby that I heard Larry refer to in Perl6. Namely: OOing the data-types, providing a clean C-interface, consoldating datatypes, etc. So I think it's fair game to steal back from. At least Larry recognizes it; obviously stating his bias. I get the feeling that his cozy job is dependant on the longevity of Perl. If a branch like Ruby could steal the show (considering it is the closest I've ever seen to perl), Larry might be in for some stiff competition.
-Michael
Note: I welcome corrections.. I'm still learning Ruby / Python. Just don't mess with my Perl.;)
I'm curious if anyone has ever worked with ligament-based motors; basically simulating the arm by having a ball-join with dozens or hundreds of fibrous "ligaments" or tendons. A computer could control which fibers to pull in order to achieve semi-universal motion.
Of course one of the biggest limiting factors would be a highly limited range of motion, but unlike the human arm, it's possible for this configuration to be locking (through the use of worm drives for the wheels tugging on each ligament.
The main reason I bring this up is because the space shuttle's robotic arm was mentioned, which I don't believe requires continuous circular motion.
Course I'm still waiting for the mechanical tenticles with whip-like mobility, and the strength of locking steel. Still sci-fi I guess.
-Michael
Re:Fundemental theory about light
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The book is by Brian Greene, not Tom Greene. Perhaps I should qualify, from memory, and then specify when I'm leaving the book as a source of reference.
You seem to have gotten some mistake impressions from Greene's book, though
Well, the event-horizon stuff isn't in the book; that's for sure. (At least not for anything other than classical black-holes).
But I don't think that really distorts the content too much (assuming that I'm wrong, which I'm not convinced that I am).
-Michael
Re:Artificial Black Holes
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The key being classically speaking. I tend to champion string theory which suggests that there are no such point-like singularies. Among other things, it gets rid of the paradoxes when combining gravitational relativity to quantum physics. My Information comes from "The Elegant Universe" by Tom Green. So take that as you will.
I believe that how they capture photons in the first place.
No, it's definitely not a gravitational effect..
Never mentioned gravity. Einstein showed that all forces are indistinguishable, and string theory suggests that at the right temperature and pressure, they are litterally the same force.
Each force that is attractive to another paticle has an event horizon, provided that repulsive forces do not counter it. Gravity is obvious, but charge is the same, assuming they are attractive. Likewise with the nuclear force (at least the strong one; I don't really understand the weak nuclear force, though it's been tied into electro-magnetism).
As for a lack of ability to escape the event horizon. There is already a strong belief that quantum particles radiate away from the horizon through quantum fluxuation (black-body radiation). On a smaller scale, the fluxuations are significantly more likely to have a profound affect.
String theory doesn't really say much on this topic, so I'm really just speaking out of my hat.
Actually, string theory suggests that there fundamentally aren't such things as particles, just strings.
Particle does not necessarily denote shape.. Singularity would be the correct term for classical quantum particles.
Additionally, there are branches of string theory that suggest the existence of multi-dimensional undulating blobs. I believe M-theory takes care of all of this, so a multi-dimensional vibrating particle would probably be the best generic description.
From the book, mass was really just a side effect that is completely cancelled out in the case of bosons. Whether they're initially massless or massive is just a frame of reference; duals like the wound and unwound string.
-Michael
Re:light stopped? Or destroyed and re-emitted...
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Well, first of all this is speculation into the realm of sci-fi.. We have no technology even close to what it might take, so all we can do is look at new discoveries and contemplate the possibilities.
In this case for example.. What we seem to have is the ability to "capture" the quantum states (mainly the wave-front) of a volley of photons inside the spins of gaseous atoms. Essentially this sounds like taking a picture of the macro-scopic cloud of light, then reanimating it. Well, to my mind that's a building block towards teleportation of any type. In this case it's really only a time-shifting. But the fact that the information was reproduced amid the regular quantum fluxuations is astounding enough for my imagination to go active.
In my comment, I even went so far as to discount amplification of the information signal (which essentially rules out almost any form of analysis, which would include information dessimation that would otherwise violate Hisenburg's principle). The "signal" in my mind was such a photographic plate as this gaseous stop-light. That this concept could ever be applied to anything other than light is pure speculation - albeit a fun one.
Anyway, my REAL point: what about heisenberg's uncertainty principle? As the photon slows shouldn't it's position become more and more indeterminable? And when it stops, how do they know where it is?
Except that we're not dealing with a single photon, but a sea of photons. The only times we've ever been able to monitor single photons is when they've collided with a photo-cell. We could say, yup, there it was at that moment in time in that exact place, but good luck finding that particular photon ever again.
-Michael
Re:Artificial Black Holes
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Even an electron has an event horizon, when the radius is small enough.. I believe that how they capture photons in the first place. Isamov's black-body radiation probably explains how the photons escape.
Light travels at different speeds in different mediums (due to permiability and permittivity values), so in a very slow probagation medium, it's possible that quntum particles get a boost in the sizes of their event horizons.
Of course this has little to do with the capture of other _atoms_ which is what initiates the common concept of a massive black hole.
It might be possible to pack so much energy into a quark that it's event horizon could capture another fermion. But of course it would be so "hot" that it would break through just about anything.
In theory, you could boost a particle with enough photons simultaneously that it becomes another particle (along the lines of string theory). It's the same basic idea of atom-smashers. If you were to find a big enough quantum particle, then it would have rest energy sufficient to maintain a suitible event-horizon withtout being too hot. Unfortunately the only way we currently know to give a particle enough energy is through larger and more expensive colliders.
Perhaps a focused "stop-light" could provide enough simultaneous photonic energy that the target quantum particles will rematerialize into something larger just long enough to collect neighboring particles in a mini-black hole.. Don't worry though, the most likely result will be a decay of that macro-particle in short order.
Quantum physics doesn't lend much room for ultra-massive particles. BUT, string theory suggests that all particles are inherently massive (a plank-mass - the wieght of a grain of salt) and that through vibration of 11 different dimentions their apparent mass is reduced in several discrete levels.
My idea is this. Take a massive spherical chamber filled with high a temperature gas that will act as this light-trajectory-storage medium. Shine bright light radially inward with the "store" light turned on... The light at the center will be dimmed and ultimately too low an intensity to wreck havoc. Then after sufficient time and energy is stored in this huge volume of now super-highly energetic particles. Trigger the light's release. Since the wave-front is stored, it should reproduce the original direction of the light and thus flash the center with energies approaching if not exceeding atom-smashers.
The high temperature gas will help obsorbe any reactions that might occur since their expansion should be minimized.
-Michael
Re:but you couldn't transport it
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Unless you can use optical fibers to transport the read-out laserbeam. Now this would be interesting, if you could maybe put this inside an optical router?
That was pretty much what I was trying to say.. The problem I had was that it's not too different than a black-box hard drive that stores an email and then sends it out on the internet then deletes the message.. The only difference would be that you'd garuntee it's deletion once it was sent.
However if this is fast enough, it still might have applications in the routing world.
-Michael
Re:Fundemental theory about light
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But uhh yeah, like has been said, velocity is a measure involving time. My stupid way of thinking is velocity measures the change of everything else, xyz, in fixed positions of time. So would moving in time measure (eg) zyt, in fixed positions of x?
I recommend "the elegent universe" by Tom Green. He very beautifully discrbes Einsteins relativity and multi-dimentionality in lay-terms and with lots of colorful analogies.
Essentially time can be thought of as the interval of a regular periodic event (such as a frictionless bouncing ball or pendulum.. or even a photon bouncing between two mirrors). The trick is that the event is periodic with respect to a single frame of reference. A man on a space-ship flying past you will observe a seperate period in your time-piece.
Light has a fixed velocity and is timeless in free space because it has almost no mass (there's still debate about whether it's truely massless) and thus can not "Do anything" that would be measurable (such as the position of a ball reflecting light to the observer). As the author suggested, by traveling diagonally across the foot-ball field, you're traveling in two dimensions. The hypotenus is the traveled path, and the sine or cosine is the observed path and velocity from either the point of view of time or any of the spacial dimentions. Its simple geometry.
However, when the light's wavefront interacts with neighboring atoms, they are achieving some sort of event that is non-instantaneous.. If they pass into an electron's event horizon and contribute to it's energy, that takes time. Likewise when they radiate out of the electron and continue along some new path (scattering), or reconstitute their original form (transparency).
There is massive speculation that the wave-nature of light (and all material for that matter) is such that the photon really travels all possible directions and interacts with all material proportionately (evidenced by single-photon refraction patterns). Thus the more matter nearby, the more interaction, thus the more timeable events, thus the more traveling through time, thus the less traveling through space, thus the slower apparent probagation of light through a non-vacume.
The "stop-light" above quite possibly is such a time machine for light where it travels sole-ly through time (or any of the other hypothesized micro-dimensions) until it's released. There is nothing totally radical about this, since this happens whenever a fermion captures a photon for an extended duration. The bizzarness is in the exact replication later on.
I wonder if this could also be used for holography
Better yet, it could be used for read-once messages. Albeit bulky and not as cool as flash-paper, or exploding sun-glasses.:) At first glance, I can concieve of doing with this as people have hypothized about quantum computers.. Send encryption keys that can only be read once down a fiber line, etc. The stumbling block I see here is that only the gas medium holds this property.. Transmittion down the fiber is still subject to existing hackability. But perhaps a short-distance "secure" channel of gas could be used?
Maybe not..:)
-Michael
Re:light stopped? Or destroyed and re-emitted...
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In order to reproduce your inner-most quantum states (e.g. the electrical synapses currently coursing through your system), you'd have to flash every particle some-how. Whenever you detect a particle, you disturb it significantly.
It seems to me that the only way you could teleport would be to 'flash' the host, then radiate their profile. It _might_ be possible to analyze the profile so as to reproduce multiple targets. But my belief is that the discretization of this profile information would render it useless. Additionally, analog amps / splitters could quite possibly introduce disturbences which would defore the target.
I still don't think teleportation will ever be practical for life-forms, but it might work for the simple transport of raw minerals (with pure substances). Perhaps, for example, you could energize the minned metal on the moon into a super-plasmic or photonic state which could be tunnelled. Alternatively the wave-properties in cooled matter might be of more use - Instead of super-heating, perhaps super-cooling is what is necessary. Course in either manner, the atomic structure is disrupted, so the usefulness is minimized.
Heck it would be useful just to condence matter to alleviate gravitational weight for greater space-transport.
It seems to me that the photons are not physically stopped.. In fact there is little physical difference between this and regular obsorbtion of light by matter.
The main difference seems to be that instead of giving wrought energy to the electrons / nucleus, they're exclusively affecting the spin (???). Supposedly this means that the wave-front is captured instead of just a raw packet of energy. Normally an atom obsorbs a photon, then at a later time ejects either it, or some combination of photonic energy in random directions (kind of like scattering). But what I believe is happening here is that the wave-front is reconstituted by possibily analogously gyroscopic-inertial forces (I know it's not really spin, but never truely understood it) in the exact same direction.
So basically it's no different than your common everyday sun-light off a white tee-shirt sort of event except that there's no scattering, and you can use a trigger instead of random quantum fluxuations for the retransmittion.
As a final response to your statement, since the light isn't actually stopped, it isn't "heavier", much like the undetectible additional mass of an atom when it obsorbs photons. Beyond that, the slowing of matter makes it lighter, rather than heavier (according to the theory of relativity and the lorenz factor).
In the case of Rama, I would definately recommend people read the book before watching the movie. If we're lucky, then state-of-the-art graphics should prove to be an expidition. The complaint that the movie might ruin one's imagination is halfway offset by the several pictures within the books. I'm curious to see what was so awe inspiring about "New York City". But I can't wait to see the cynlindrical sea; Just imagine sitting on a boat with an entire ocean above and all around you, including waves...
Interesting.. I know that I have tenitis, and I never understood where it came from. All my friends listened to really loud rock music, but tended to have much higher auditory pickup than me. Consequently, after being in front of a monitor literally all day for weeks on end, I'd go to bed with incredible ear-aches.
Do you think you could find some medical reports on this topic?
I can't tell if I'm supposed to laugh or be appauled.. cell phone radiation is to hat-based radiation as Nuclear reactor expent Uranium is to burnt firewood.
Radiant heat is the bombarding of fast moving molecules against the edges of a surface; using convection heat (through atomic vibration) to warm it's center. The other passes high frequency "particles" that mostly pass completely through the material, statistically colliding with random modules beneath the surface. Even materials like lead can only reduce the penitration depth.
Our skin (and to some degree our skull) is our outer shield. But they're not immune to high frequency or nuclear radiation. What's more, our eyes have almost no protection.
Hense the danger..
I've always been an advocate of head-sets (even with low frequency chordless phones). Sure they might give you kidney cancer, but I'd rather dialisis than blindness / loss of brain tissue.
there is a slight difference between a 250 W microwave oven and a 0.6 W cell phone
Yes, but the food in a microwave is much further away.. Intensity Falls off with 1/x^2 (because of the spherical expansion). Assuming a 6-inch radius to the center of an oven and 1-inch from phone to eye, you have 36 times the intensity.. Roughly equiv to a 36W oven. Additionally, how often do you cook "eyeballs" for several minutes at a time at 36W? The study suggests that they're affected much more severely than say raw steak.
Incidently, I got into this sort of conversation with a friend, and I didn't know the exact frequency ranges for cell phones nor ovens. I know the chordless phones are around 2.4GHZ. I heard rumors that ovens are around 2.7GHZ or something like that, even though the microwave spectrum runs up to like 30GHZ or so.
I don't see how we're "handing" anything over.. Has OpenGL been conquored by nVida or 3Dfx? So long as you have an open API, the specifics of how someone implements it doesn't fundamentally affect you. Yes, MS might put feature bloat that we become depend on exclusively their products; but they'll just open themselves up for further anti-trust litigation.
Further, I really only see ASIC's as stepping stones towards development. Isn't the GeForce a full blown processor? This is most likely because of the large volumes..
Rapid switching FPGA could very well be revolutionary, since you'd have one or two pieces of hardware that are reprogrammed for their environment on the fly. But that's vapor-wear at this point. FPGA is (to my understanding) primarily for proof-of concept, or getting something out the door.
I suppose you can think of it like CISC. I've never really thought of it that way - I'm sure the nVida GeForce has an instruction set. I think of it more like the SGI / Amiga way of doing things. You have a very basic general purpose CPU, and then have optimized hardware to perform all the regular and other-wise complex tasks. I mentioned OS simply because they're among the most common operations a program does (even though it may not necessarily be that complex).
As for the question about making word run faster.. This entire discussion assumes an underlying desire to ever increase the speed of processing; and specifically the potential limits of More's law - namely continuing human ingenuity.
Note, there are all sorts of problems with hardware based operation, but so long as we have API's like OpenGL, POSIX, MFC, etc, then we don't have to worry about the specifics of how it's implemented. Is the latest kernel hardware accelerated? Who cares from a developer's point of view.
Ok, so what happens when we hit a practical mile-stone? Will faster general purpose CPU's achieve such a limit that it costs 10 times as much to achieve 10% performance gain?
Here are the alternatives. Get away from pipelining (which is a hack that facilitates ever-increasing clock-speeds).. Return to optimized and specialized adders / multiplers, etc. Now that we make things in parallel with 2 - 4 adders, simply produce CPU's with 24 adders, each with no inter-vening pipeline buffers.. The number of transistors significantly goes down for each adder, and through the use high conductive materials (such as diamond) you can achieve large surface area chips. (This assumes that you take on the reverse of existing P4's.. You have the control log and memory interfaces running at 10GHZ while your adder runs at say 100MHZ, which each gate switching with nearly 1/20GHZ probagation delay)
Step two is even more obvious. Specialized hardware.. In the video world, we have only to compare software OpenGL to hardware OpenGL. specialized hardware is monumental because it's the ultimate parallel algorithm. Those algorithms such as MFC, or possibly even OS calls could be hardware controlled.. Granted it makes upgrades a lot harder, but don't we find ourselves spending the money on new video cards every year and a half now? How often does someone upgrade winNT? It already costs $150 for the OS upgrade, what's an additional $50 for the PCI / adaptive AGP card?
To facilitate smoother transitions, I think that FPGA or ASICS might have a popularity explosion. As far as I know, they're still manufactured with huge gate-widths.. Bring an ASICs into the "10GHZ" range, and you have the potential for incredible performance.
In fact, the CPU as we know it might fade away into the anals of history over time. A return to cartraiges perhaps?
Slashdot Mirror
I loved the movie, but it always bothered me that it deviated away from the generation 1 series. Things such as the reduction in voltron-like transformers, The "autobot city", etc.
I was very young when it came out, and so much differed from the series that I was almost disturbed by it - namely the finality of death, which was always glossed over in the series (such as, yeah we were all thrown into the lava, but we still live...)
-Michael
my thoughts are that I want money
my actions then are to gain in dishonest ways
See,I don't understand where you're comming from. This stage is the end all be all, as far as I'm concerned. Once you have committed wrong doing, what does it matter where you go from there? Again, if you have religious convictions, it's of your own accord.
I also didn't claim your argument was irrelevant.. I just meant that you were making a strong case until that point.
-Michael
You had me until the last third. Your argument would have been stronger if you hadn't mentioned homosexuality, considering its lack of relevance to an illegal action against an innocent verses concenting adults (male homosexual urges shouldn't be any more dangerous or encouraging towards illegal activity than heterosexual urges.. Yes there are violators in both camps, but we must single them out). I understand the Christian swing, but there it is.
The problem is that the thought leads to action, action leads to habits, habits lead to attitudes, attitudes lead to character, character leads to destiny. Lust after children needs to be fixed at the thought level. We can't legislate that, and we shouldn't, so...
What you say about feed-back loops makes a lot of sence to me as an EE. Though I don't think your conclusion about destiny is as logical. If I had to make one up, I'd say: thoughts lead to desires (habbits), desires lead to attitudes (viewing their sexual prey as sluts who desire your gratifying "punishment"), attitude leads to character (possibly molding how you act, but in general, who you are), and only at the very end is action. Not all the steps are always present (such as with initial experimentation with masterbation). The key difference is that once action is taken, all the damage is done.
I agree with you in that I don't think violent sexual activities should really ever be _encouraged_. Obviously it's unwise to indulge in fantacies about your work-place. There is strong practical reason for why you should never date at your work place.. Should fanticizing about your students be any less stupid?
I respect that you say regions should have the right to evict undesirable elements, provided the offenders have the right to move. I remember Hero's Quest III or some such beast where there was this society based around honor.. And if you were caught committing a non-violent crime, your punishment meant a declaration of a lack of honor - that was it.. Of course the practical side effect is that nobody would sell to you. I always thought that mentality was kind of cool, though largely impractical.
Still the horrors of 1984 lead me to dislike any sort of thought police. Pre-emptive action such as this is a pandora's box that we don't want to open. If some cunning spam causes me to inadvertantly open a porn-web site that's been flagged by some watch group, my life could silently be ruined.
-Michael
Several of my Jewish friends are almost induced into a traumatic state when considering certain Nazi material. I think "making me sick" is an order of magnitude less severe... Yet, Nazi advocates in America are not Jailed (provided they do not act).
Therein lies the entire point of freedom of speech. Mob rule is based around popular self riteousness. You present an idiological danger to us, so we will stamp you out. We believe it's common sence that you committed this appauling crime so damn waiting for the trial where you have a chance at being acquited, we're going to kill you tonight!!
Music can induce us into a frenzied, less safe state for driving. Alcohol can lead us into abuse. Cocain can destroy our brain. Depictions of immoral sexuality can "whet" our desire and bring us to action.. These are all truths. (If you have value in the teachings of Christianity, (even from a non-christian point of view) the response was to pluck our your eye if it causes you to consider bad deeds). The responsibility is in the individual, and not for the society to simply remove every possible temptation.
An over-weight person that removes all food-temptation will explode and splurge when given the opportunity. Those people that allow temptations to be at hand at least have the opportunity to moderate their discipline, and make life bearable.
Sexual offenders (as far as I understand it) are tainted for life. It's their responsibility to seek help / restraint, or our responsibilty to distance them when they're caught actually doing wrong. But slowly taking away stimulous, such as moderate-level drugs, or hard-core pr0n only attacks the symptom, not the problem.
-Michael
I haven't used it yet (except to download and type out the quick examples). Things I've noticed that I'm not crazy about:
:)
;)
I haven't found a decent debugging mode for it yet. It mimics perl in many ways, but -d isn't the same.
They use "begin / end" instead of the uniform {}. This pisses me off because of lack of emacs / vi matching.
Numbers are all objects, which hints at slower performance. In fact, performance is said to be above that of python, but one can deduce it as being slower than perl.
It is said to have a much more convinient C / C++ API, but that additionally suggests that it'll have additional layers of abstraction, meaning slower interface code (pure speculation). I have the same issue with the Perl6 direction.
It's supports multi-threading even if the OS doesn't, which obviously requires interpreter threads. Depending on how they do this, it could be a negative. (additional checks per ruby-op)
It uses mark-and-sweep memory, which is great for memory leaks, but my initial impression is that it'll be slower than reference counting (since I believe it requires wasteful periodic passes through memory.. Probably through one of it's interpreter threads).
Being a perl advocate, I have no room to speak on this, but some of the syntax seems odd - making use of punctuation marks, etc.
It's heavily OOP, and that isn't always the best solution to problems. Granted, it's useful for things like x.length, but sometimes you want to just length( @{ $some_gloal_name } ) to get the job done. I'll have delve deeper to see how well they copied the TMTOWTDI philosophy.
They made a nice attempt to duplicate perl's interpolating strings through the use of "xxxx #{var_name} xxxxx", which I definately like better than python's c-like method: "xxxxx %s xxxxx" % var_name. Since if I wanted the latter I could just use prints. Still, I can see the extra characters geting annoying. (though there might be a compiler speed-up, since fewer variations need be accounted for).
One of my favorite features of perl is it's code's searchability.. Want to find a function, search on "sub xxxx". Want to find a variable: "$xxx". (Though mangled perl variables can be a pain-sometimes). If nothing else, it's a key for emacs to color on (which remarkably aids reading code). C, Java, Python, and now ruby give this up. (Note: ruby does use $ and @, but only for globals / member-vars, which only has minimal usage. Local's are prefix-less).
I'm definately going to try it out. I dabbled with Python for a while, but couldn't find a compelling reason to move over (poor use of anonymous functions, couldn't find a way to functionalize 'use strict', etc ). I'm expecting a similar final result with ruby, but you never know.
Lastly, I don't believe it's as tried and true as Perl. Ignoring for a moment it's small but growing size 3rd party support compared to CPAN, it was a devil for us to convince our bosses to continue doing web development purely in Perl (as opposed to the more popular but less coder friendly servlets). A good manager would most likely not entrust their clientelle to such a bleeding edge technology. Perl's been on most every platform that I've ever heard of (still waiting for palm). It is the epitomy of robustness as far as I'm concerned. The only times I've ever core'd had to do with c-libraries (which you can _always_ avoid; even if it means resorting to IPC). I'd trust perl-code to c-code any day (assuming you had actual developers on the job). Still ruby's defintaely got future potential.. The trick is how do they differentiate themselves today so that they can grow into tomorrow. They're not defining their own niche, they're piggy-backing existing ones.
What they could do to really bolster acceptance is provide porting scripts fom raw perl. They seem to mimic enough of the rough syntax (like reg-ex, qq(..), etc), so it's bound to be possible. Due to the divergent memory archetectures, it's doubtful that XS code could be ported though. Perhaps if anybody ever used swig, otoh.
I saw a lot in Ruby that I heard Larry refer to in Perl6. Namely: OOing the data-types, providing a clean C-interface, consoldating datatypes, etc. So I think it's fair game to steal back from. At least Larry recognizes it; obviously stating his bias. I get the feeling that his cozy job is dependant on the longevity of Perl. If a branch like Ruby could steal the show (considering it is the closest I've ever seen to perl), Larry might be in for some stiff competition.
-Michael
Note: I welcome corrections.. I'm still learning Ruby / Python. Just don't mess with my Perl.
I wonder what it costs to look at the Windows source.)
For startes, the inability to ever code another OS again. (NDA's)
-Michael
I'm curious if anyone has ever worked with ligament-based motors; basically simulating the arm by having a ball-join with dozens or hundreds of fibrous "ligaments" or tendons. A computer could control which fibers to pull in order to achieve semi-universal motion.
Of course one of the biggest limiting factors would be a highly limited range of motion, but unlike the human arm, it's possible for this configuration to be locking (through the use of worm drives for the wheels tugging on each ligament.
The main reason I bring this up is because the space shuttle's robotic arm was mentioned, which I don't believe requires continuous circular motion.
Course I'm still waiting for the mechanical tenticles with whip-like mobility, and the strength of locking steel. Still sci-fi I guess.
-Michael
The book is by Brian Greene, not Tom Greene.
Perhaps I should qualify, from memory, and then specify when I'm leaving the book as a source of reference.
You seem to have gotten some mistake impressions from Greene's book, though
Well, the event-horizon stuff isn't in the book; that's for sure. (At least not for anything other than classical black-holes).
But I don't think that really distorts the content too much (assuming that I'm wrong, which I'm not convinced that I am).
-Michael
Untrue. Electrons don't have event horizons -- classically speaking, they're "naked singularities"
The key being classically speaking. I tend to champion string theory which suggests that there are no such point-like singularies. Among other things, it gets rid of the paradoxes when combining gravitational relativity to quantum physics. My Information comes from "The Elegant Universe" by Tom Green. So take that as you will.
I believe that how they capture photons in the first place.
No, it's definitely not a gravitational effect..
Never mentioned gravity. Einstein showed that all forces are indistinguishable, and string theory suggests that at the right temperature and pressure, they are litterally the same force.
Each force that is attractive to another paticle has an event horizon, provided that repulsive forces do not counter it. Gravity is obvious, but charge is the same, assuming they are attractive. Likewise with the nuclear force (at least the strong one; I don't really understand the weak nuclear force, though it's been tied into electro-magnetism).
As for a lack of ability to escape the event horizon. There is already a strong belief that quantum particles radiate away from the horizon through quantum fluxuation (black-body radiation). On a smaller scale, the fluxuations are significantly more likely to have a profound affect.
String theory doesn't really say much on this topic, so I'm really just speaking out of my hat.
Actually, string theory suggests that there fundamentally aren't such things as particles, just strings.
Particle does not necessarily denote shape.. Singularity would be the correct term for classical quantum particles.
Additionally, there are branches of string theory that suggest the existence of multi-dimensional undulating blobs. I believe M-theory takes care of all of this, so a multi-dimensional vibrating particle would probably be the best generic description.
From the book, mass was really just a side effect that is completely cancelled out in the case of bosons. Whether they're initially massless or massive is just a frame of reference; duals like the wound and unwound string.
-Michael
Well, first of all this is speculation into the realm of sci-fi.. We have no technology even close to what it might take, so all we can do is look at new discoveries and contemplate the possibilities.
In this case for example.. What we seem to have is the ability to "capture" the quantum states (mainly the wave-front) of a volley of photons inside the spins of gaseous atoms. Essentially this sounds like taking a picture of the macro-scopic cloud of light, then reanimating it. Well, to my mind that's a building block towards teleportation of any type. In this case it's really only a time-shifting. But the fact that the information was reproduced amid the regular quantum fluxuations is astounding enough for my imagination to go active.
In my comment, I even went so far as to discount amplification of the information signal (which essentially rules out almost any form of analysis, which would include information dessimation that would otherwise violate Hisenburg's principle). The "signal" in my mind was such a photographic plate as this gaseous stop-light. That this concept could ever be applied to anything other than light is pure speculation - albeit a fun one.
-Michael
Anyway, my REAL point: what about heisenberg's uncertainty principle? As the photon slows shouldn't it's position become more and more indeterminable? And when it stops, how do they know where it is?
Except that we're not dealing with a single photon, but a sea of photons. The only times we've ever been able to monitor single photons is when they've collided with a photo-cell. We could say, yup, there it was at that moment in time in that exact place, but good luck finding that particular photon ever again.
-Michael
Even an electron has an event horizon, when the radius is small enough.. I believe that how they capture photons in the first place. Isamov's black-body radiation probably explains how the photons escape.
Light travels at different speeds in different mediums (due to permiability and permittivity values), so in a very slow probagation medium, it's possible that quntum particles get a boost in the sizes of their event horizons.
Of course this has little to do with the capture of other _atoms_ which is what initiates the common concept of a massive black hole.
It might be possible to pack so much energy into a quark that it's event horizon could capture another fermion. But of course it would be so "hot" that it would break through just about anything.
In theory, you could boost a particle with enough photons simultaneously that it becomes another particle (along the lines of string theory). It's the same basic idea of atom-smashers. If you were to find a big enough quantum particle, then it would have rest energy sufficient to maintain a suitible event-horizon withtout being too hot. Unfortunately the only way we currently know to give a particle enough energy is through larger and more expensive colliders.
Perhaps a focused "stop-light" could provide enough simultaneous photonic energy that the target quantum particles will rematerialize into something larger just long enough to collect neighboring particles in a mini-black hole.. Don't worry though, the most likely result will be a decay of that macro-particle in short order.
Quantum physics doesn't lend much room for ultra-massive particles. BUT, string theory suggests that all particles are inherently massive (a plank-mass - the wieght of a grain of salt) and that through vibration of 11 different dimentions their apparent mass is reduced in several discrete levels.
My idea is this. Take a massive spherical chamber filled with high a temperature gas that will act as this light-trajectory-storage medium. Shine bright light radially inward with the "store" light turned on... The light at the center will be dimmed and ultimately too low an intensity to wreck havoc. Then after sufficient time and energy is stored in this huge volume of now super-highly energetic particles. Trigger the light's release. Since the wave-front is stored, it should reproduce the original direction of the light and thus flash the center with energies approaching if not exceeding atom-smashers.
The high temperature gas will help obsorbe any reactions that might occur since their expansion should be minimized.
-Michael
Unless you can use optical fibers to transport the read-out laserbeam. Now this would be interesting, if you could maybe put this inside an optical router?
That was pretty much what I was trying to say.. The problem I had was that it's not too different than a black-box hard drive that stores an email and then sends it out on the internet then deletes the message.. The only difference would be that you'd garuntee it's deletion once it was sent.
However if this is fast enough, it still might have applications in the routing world.
-Michael
But uhh yeah, like has been said, velocity is a measure involving time. My stupid way of thinking is velocity measures the change of everything else, xyz, in fixed positions of time. So would moving in time measure (eg) zyt, in fixed positions of x?
I recommend "the elegent universe" by Tom Green. He very beautifully discrbes Einsteins relativity and multi-dimentionality in lay-terms and with lots of colorful analogies.
Essentially time can be thought of as the interval of a regular periodic event (such as a frictionless bouncing ball or pendulum.. or even a photon bouncing between two mirrors). The trick is that the event is periodic with respect to a single frame of reference. A man on a space-ship flying past you will observe a seperate period in your time-piece.
Light has a fixed velocity and is timeless in free space because it has almost no mass (there's still debate about whether it's truely massless) and thus can not "Do anything" that would be measurable (such as the position of a ball reflecting light to the observer). As the author suggested, by traveling diagonally across the foot-ball field, you're traveling in two dimensions. The hypotenus is the traveled path, and the sine or cosine is the observed path and velocity from either the point of view of time or any of the spacial dimentions. Its simple geometry.
However, when the light's wavefront interacts with neighboring atoms, they are achieving some sort of event that is non-instantaneous.. If they pass into an electron's event horizon and contribute to it's energy, that takes time. Likewise when they radiate out of the electron and continue along some new path (scattering), or reconstitute their original form (transparency).
There is massive speculation that the wave-nature of light (and all material for that matter) is such that the photon really travels all possible directions and interacts with all material proportionately (evidenced by single-photon refraction patterns). Thus the more matter nearby, the more interaction, thus the more timeable events, thus the more traveling through time, thus the less traveling through space, thus the slower apparent probagation of light through a non-vacume.
The "stop-light" above quite possibly is such a time machine for light where it travels sole-ly through time (or any of the other hypothesized micro-dimensions) until it's released. There is nothing totally radical about this, since this happens whenever a fermion captures a photon for an extended duration. The bizzarness is in the exact replication later on.
-Michael
I wonder if this could also be used for holography
:) At first glance, I can concieve of doing with this as people have hypothized about quantum computers.. Send encryption keys that can only be read once down a fiber line, etc. The stumbling block I see here is that only the gas medium holds this property.. Transmittion down the fiber is still subject to existing hackability. But perhaps a short-distance "secure" channel of gas could be used?
:)
Better yet, it could be used for read-once messages. Albeit bulky and not as cool as flash-paper, or exploding sun-glasses.
Maybe not..
-Michael
In order to reproduce your inner-most quantum states (e.g. the electrical synapses currently coursing through your system), you'd have to flash every particle some-how. Whenever you detect a particle, you disturb it significantly.
It seems to me that the only way you could teleport would be to 'flash' the host, then radiate their profile. It _might_ be possible to analyze the profile so as to reproduce multiple targets. But my belief is that the discretization of this profile information would render it useless. Additionally, analog amps / splitters could quite possibly introduce disturbences which would defore the target.
I still don't think teleportation will ever be practical for life-forms, but it might work for the simple transport of raw minerals (with pure substances). Perhaps, for example, you could energize the minned metal on the moon into a super-plasmic or photonic state which could be tunnelled. Alternatively the wave-properties in cooled matter might be of more use - Instead of super-heating, perhaps super-cooling is what is necessary. Course in either manner, the atomic structure is disrupted, so the usefulness is minimized.
Heck it would be useful just to condence matter to alleviate gravitational weight for greater space-transport.
Oh well, fun to brain-storm.
-Michael
When you stop light, you have to rename it heavy.
It seems to me that the photons are not physically stopped.. In fact there is little physical difference between this and regular obsorbtion of light by matter.
The main difference seems to be that instead of giving wrought energy to the electrons / nucleus, they're exclusively affecting the spin (???). Supposedly this means that the wave-front is captured instead of just a raw packet of energy. Normally an atom obsorbs a photon, then at a later time ejects either it, or some combination of photonic energy in random directions (kind of like scattering). But what I believe is happening here is that the wave-front is reconstituted by possibily analogously gyroscopic-inertial forces (I know it's not really spin, but never truely understood it) in the exact same direction.
So basically it's no different than your common everyday sun-light off a white tee-shirt sort of event except that there's no scattering, and you can use a trigger instead of random quantum fluxuations for the retransmittion.
As a final response to your statement, since the light isn't actually stopped, it isn't "heavier", much like the undetectible additional mass of an atom when it obsorbs photons. Beyond that, the slowing of matter makes it lighter, rather than heavier (according to the theory of relativity and the lorenz factor).
-Michael
Warning: Teaser
In the case of Rama, I would definately recommend people read the book before watching the movie. If we're lucky, then state-of-the-art graphics should prove to be an expidition. The complaint that the movie might ruin one's imagination is halfway offset by the several pictures within the books. I'm curious to see what was so awe inspiring about "New York City". But I can't wait to see the cynlindrical sea; Just imagine sitting on a boat with an entire ocean above and all around you, including waves...
-Michael
Interesting.. I know that I have tenitis, and I never understood where it came from. All my friends listened to really loud rock music, but tended to have much higher auditory pickup than me. Consequently, after being in front of a monitor literally all day for weeks on end, I'd go to bed with incredible ear-aches.
Do you think you could find some medical reports on this topic?
See my previous comment.
I can't tell if I'm supposed to laugh or be appauled.. cell phone radiation is to hat-based radiation as Nuclear reactor expent Uranium is to burnt firewood.
Radiant heat is the bombarding of fast moving molecules against the edges of a surface; using convection heat (through atomic vibration) to warm it's center. The other passes high frequency "particles" that mostly pass completely through the material, statistically colliding with random modules beneath the surface. Even materials like lead can only reduce the penitration depth.
Our skin (and to some degree our skull) is our outer shield. But they're not immune to high frequency or nuclear radiation. What's more, our eyes have almost no protection.
Hense the danger..
I've always been an advocate of head-sets (even with low frequency chordless phones). Sure they might give you kidney cancer, but I'd rather dialisis than blindness / loss of brain tissue.
-Michael
there is a slight difference between a 250 W microwave oven and a 0.6 W cell phone
Yes, but the food in a microwave is much further away.. Intensity Falls off with 1/x^2 (because of the spherical expansion). Assuming a 6-inch radius to the center of an oven and 1-inch from phone to eye, you have 36 times the intensity.. Roughly equiv to a 36W oven. Additionally, how often do you cook "eyeballs" for several minutes at a time at 36W? The study suggests that they're affected much more severely than say raw steak.
Incidently, I got into this sort of conversation with a friend, and I didn't know the exact frequency ranges for cell phones nor ovens. I know the chordless phones are around 2.4GHZ. I heard rumors that ovens are around 2.7GHZ or something like that, even though the microwave spectrum runs up to like 30GHZ or so.
-Michael
I don't see how we're "handing" anything over.. Has OpenGL been conquored by nVida or 3Dfx? So long as you have an open API, the specifics of how someone implements it doesn't fundamentally affect you. Yes, MS might put feature bloat that we become depend on exclusively their products; but they'll just open themselves up for further anti-trust litigation.
Further, I really only see ASIC's as stepping stones towards development. Isn't the GeForce a full blown processor? This is most likely because of the large volumes..
Rapid switching FPGA could very well be revolutionary, since you'd have one or two pieces of hardware that are reprogrammed for their environment on the fly. But that's vapor-wear at this point. FPGA is (to my understanding) primarily for proof-of concept, or getting something out the door.
-Michael
I suppose you can think of it like CISC. I've never really thought of it that way - I'm sure the nVida GeForce has an instruction set. I think of it more like the SGI / Amiga way of doing things. You have a very basic general purpose CPU, and then have optimized hardware to perform all the regular and other-wise complex tasks. I mentioned OS simply because they're among the most common operations a program does (even though it may not necessarily be that complex).
As for the question about making word run faster.. This entire discussion assumes an underlying desire to ever increase the speed of processing; and specifically the potential limits of More's law - namely continuing human ingenuity.
Note, there are all sorts of problems with hardware based operation, but so long as we have API's like OpenGL, POSIX, MFC, etc, then we don't have to worry about the specifics of how it's implemented. Is the latest kernel hardware accelerated? Who cares from a developer's point of view.
Ok, so what happens when we hit a practical mile-stone? Will faster general purpose CPU's achieve such a limit that it costs 10 times as much to achieve 10% performance gain?
Here are the alternatives. Get away from pipelining (which is a hack that facilitates ever-increasing clock-speeds).. Return to optimized and specialized adders / multiplers, etc. Now that we make things in parallel with 2 - 4 adders, simply produce CPU's with 24 adders, each with no inter-vening pipeline buffers.. The number of transistors significantly goes down for each adder, and through the use high conductive materials (such as diamond) you can achieve large surface area chips. (This assumes that you take on the reverse of existing P4's.. You have the control log and memory interfaces running at 10GHZ while your adder runs at say 100MHZ, which each gate switching with nearly 1/20GHZ probagation delay)
Step two is even more obvious. Specialized hardware.. In the video world, we have only to compare software OpenGL to hardware OpenGL. specialized hardware is monumental because it's the ultimate parallel algorithm. Those algorithms such as MFC, or possibly even OS calls could be hardware controlled.. Granted it makes upgrades a lot harder, but don't we find ourselves spending the money on new video cards every year and a half now? How often does someone upgrade winNT? It already costs $150 for the OS upgrade, what's an additional $50 for the PCI / adaptive AGP card?
To facilitate smoother transitions, I think that FPGA or ASICS might have a popularity explosion. As far as I know, they're still manufactured with huge gate-widths.. Bring an ASICs into the "10GHZ" range, and you have the potential for incredible performance.
In fact, the CPU as we know it might fade away into the anals of history over time. A return to cartraiges perhaps?
-Michael