If you travel 50 light years distant at the speed of light, It takes 50 years with respect to a stationary observer. However, if you're the one doing the travelling, the trip is intantaneous, and also from your perspective, (while you're travelling), you've not travelled any distance. It would be like you've magically transferred from one place to another intantaneously. This is all because of the effects of relativity. However, practially speaking you cannot go AT the speed of light, you can only approach the speed of light. Even with this you could travel incredible distances in a lifetime, because the distances in your frame of reference would contract. There would be a long period of time (probably about 10-20 year) where you would be accelerating (at 1 or 2 G), and an equally long period of time while you were decellerating.
From the travellers perspective, they see that because the distance has shrunk, they're able to travel between the two very distant points in a lifetime. From an observers perspective, the traveller is able to do this because his 'clocks' all run super slow.
No, G.P. is correct. As you approach the speed of light, distances along the line of travel contract. At the speed of light, you're trip is instantaneous, but to you, you've not gone anywhere, even though to the guy standing still, you've travelled 50 light years distant (or event 6 billion light years, but then the observer on earth wouldn't be around any more, whould he?).
The really interesting trips occur when you're travelling very near the speed of light, not at the speed of light.
In summary: Moving yardsticks shrink in the direction of motion. Moving clocks run slow.
At the speed of light, Clock stops, Distance across the universe is 0 (All stars compress into a plane )
It will take a few centuries before the religous conservatives warm up to this idea. But I agree, our intelligence will be used to create 'better' species of animals and to improve the human genome as well.
Evolution is still at work. But instead of diverging, our gene pool has been converging for tens of thousands of years
The human gene pool may have been converging for most of our existance, but I would have to say that in light of modern medical advances the human gene pool is now rapidly diversifying. Because of excellent health care, most people survive and are capable of producing offspring. Because of this, mutant genes that normally would not get passed on to subsequent generations are retained in the population. Also because of the large number of humans in the world today, there are more opportunities for mutations to exist. The human gene pool is now diversifying.
With today's health care, however, there is very little selective pressure. Without this, the human race will not evolve in the traditional sense. It may tend to 'devolve' a bit, because inferior genes remain in the population. (Detrimental mutations are much more common then beneficial mutations.) It's not that the best genes won't survive, it's just that they will be relatively less prevalent in the overall population.
Should a group of humans decide to establish a colony on Mars, it very well may be that after a millenium, the earh population and mars population would be noticably different. Especially if there is some selective pressure that tends to kill off people with/without certain genes.
As for some biological disaster wiping out the earth's human population, I' seriously doubt that will happen. It may kill off 99% of us, but there would still be plenty of survivors.
Except that your $300 system can't run for 6 hours on batteries, requires a stable voltage source, doesn't include much for software (maybe just XP-home), and would doubtfuly be as rugged as this thing.
One of the key items here is LOW POWER!! Put in an x86 CPU and that's pretty much gone, unless you're talking like a 386 or 486.
I'll bet your right about it using an ARM chip. I'ld bet it's one of Sharp's chips. The chip has an onboard LCD driver, although it's limited to a 1024x640 resolution, if i recall. It's also got PS/2 compatible ports, serial ports, USB ports, and probably enough flash for a bios of some sort. In effect, all you'ld need to add is some sort of memory, and some supporting components to build a thoroughly usable PC.
I'm sorry, but I didn't see anything in the pictures that would convince me that it was a Windows OS I was looking at.
Cows are pretty dumb. But, yes, with pigs, you might have problems with following the dumb rule. Chickens, turkeys, other poultry and fish and reptiles shouldn't cause you any problems.
Great. But you'll still have to buy that motherboard to put your dual core chips in. Oh, look here. I see that the Intel motherboard is $400 more than one for the Opteron....
I believe one of the reasons AMD is able to create superior processors is because they don't crank out nearly the volume that intel does.
You're totally wrong here. Since about 1999, AMD has generally done a better job of designing its processors. The logic design of their chips is better. They are able do more calculations at a given clock rate than Intel. Intel's manufacturing technology probably exceeds that of AMD by a bit because Intel is a much larger company and is able to devote more effort to improving it than AMD can. I'm sure both companies do a fine job of quality control. Whether or not a processor is manufactured in large volumes doesn't affect the processors performance one bit. However, large volumes and the corresponding large profits allow companies like intel to invest more in technology to design and produce improved processors.
Being that's the only way you can go with AMD right now - paying twice as much (if not more) for their dual core chips compared to Intels.
Since AMD's dual core processors slip nicely into existing socket 940 boards, with just a bios change, and Intel's dual core chips require a board designed for them, it's quite likely that lesser cost of Intel's solution is totally offset by the increased board and supporting circuitry costs. I think AMD knows this, which is why they believe the higher prices are justified. AMD scores a big advantage by designing their dual core processors to be pin compatible with the single core parts. The price differential that the dual core AMD chips command is icing on the cake for AMD.
I've read some reviews comparing AMD and Intel dual core chips, but I got the feeling that much of the testing was not all that well done. I don't believe that most of the applications they ran to test the performance will be the type of applications that these chips will be running. I see rendering and mpeg encoding being big apps for these. I'll wait and see before coming to an opinion on whose chips are better performers.
My first TV was branded a Philips. But, under the covers, it was all Samsung. It lasted for about a dozen years, not bad considering how inexpensive it was. Hardly anybody in the U.S. would have even heard of the Samsung brand back then.
Also Sony USED to be good. Now they just build things as cheaply as possible. The headphones they supply with their players sound like crap.
Well, the thing is that macro evolution comes about over a very long period of time (millions, tens of millions of years) by a series of very small changes, micro-evolution.
Suppose you take a car, and make a small change every 10 years. over 1000 years you'ld have made just 100 changes. Over a million years you'ld have made 100,000 changes. Over 10 million years you'ld have made 1 million changes. What are the chances you'ld recognize this car as having 'evolved' from the original after so many changes?
Having pairs of genes, and the concept of 'dominant' and 'recessive' genes also facilitates more substantial, but less frequent evolutionary changes.
Regarding the creation myth in Genesis, it's completely unimportant to Judeo-Christian beliefs.
Actually, this is incorrect theologically for many denominations. The idea of 'salvation through Jesus Christ' is based on the concept that man is in need of salvation. And this is based on the original sin of Adam and Eve. If they didn't exist, then no original sin, and no need for the salvation through Jesus Christ. Ooops.
It may not be very important to typical Judeo-Chrisian believers, but without this, the whole theological basis of some of these denominations would be in need of a major overhaul.
I don't think our moderator knows that because of restrictive french laws heavily taxing cars with engines larger than that of a motorcycle, the cars over there tend to be quite small.
Sounds familiar. I also had the same type of problem with tape drives on a system a number of
years back. Extremely slow, very unreliable. It would take 1/2 hour to back up 20 Megabytes of disk.
And chances were, the backup would be no good.
AMD says it's doing good with it's 90nm yields, but I'm kind of doubting that myself. The pricing of these new dual cores seems to be high enough to want to restrict sales volumes, which indicates to me that they don't yet have huge volumes of these to sell.
Of course I could be wrong. For the systems that these things will be used in, memory costs will probably dominate. The fact that the dual core opterons require no specialized support chips (unlike intel's solution) means that AMD can grab some of this money that would normally go to the makers of the support chip. Also, being a new chip, you want to maximize your profits, so you sell the first few to those that absolutely have to have them at high prices. Later you reduce prices (and profit margins ) a bit, sell some more, and so on, until it really hits the mass market.
Still, these chips aren't clocked as fast as they might have been. This, says AMD, is due to thermal power considerations. It may be that they weren't able to clock the chips quite as fast as they really were expecting, meaning the manufacturing process isn't quite where it should be.
All we need are some DIPS and we've got some heavy duty crunching!
Although most ICs use higher density packaging these days (LQFP, SOIC, PLCC, etc.), and you'ld probably also need a mobo, capacitors, resistors, inductors, and a good power supply.
Unless the proper infrastructure is put in place to photograph people who have in fact verified their identity through other means, adding a picture to the credit card would not increase the security of the card. Otherwise someone could easily send a picture claiming to be someone else if this weren't done.
So, to provide enhanced security with a picture would cost a lot of money. It's not the cost of putting the picture on the card, it's the cost of verifying that the picture matches who the card says it is.
Exactly. Having your SSN on your checks is a very, very bad idea. You're just asking for identity theft. If you're one of those few who've been foolish enough to do this, my advice is to get new checks without the SSN on them ASAP, and destroy
your existing checks.
Basically so big brother can watch for illegal activities, like money laundering. Large transactions throw up a red flag to government officials. I believe banks are required to report these to the government. I'm not sure what the trigger amount is.
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From the travellers perspective, they see that because the distance has shrunk, they're able to travel between the two very distant points in a lifetime. From an observers perspective, the traveller is able to do this because his 'clocks' all run super slow.
Oops, my mistake. That should also be moving metersticks that shrink in the direction of motion.
The really interesting trips occur when you're travelling very near the speed of light, not at the speed of light.
In summary: Moving yardsticks shrink in the direction of motion. Moving clocks run slow. At the speed of light, Clock stops, Distance across the universe is 0 (All stars compress into a plane )
It will take a few centuries before the religous conservatives warm up to this idea. But I agree, our intelligence will be used to create 'better' species of animals and to improve the human genome as well.
Longer lifespan Improved resistance to viri ( esp. common cold) Less aggressiveness, more social Better eyesight, hearing, sense of smell
Evolution is still at work. But instead of diverging, our gene pool has been converging for tens of thousands of years
The human gene pool may have been converging for most of our existance, but I would have to say that in light of modern medical advances the human gene pool is now rapidly diversifying. Because of excellent health care, most people survive and are capable of producing offspring. Because of this, mutant genes that normally would not get passed on to subsequent generations are retained in the population. Also because of the large number of humans in the world today, there are more opportunities for mutations to exist. The human gene pool is now diversifying.
With today's health care, however, there is very little selective pressure. Without this, the human race will not evolve in the traditional sense. It may tend to 'devolve' a bit, because inferior genes remain in the population. (Detrimental mutations are much more common then beneficial mutations.) It's not that the best genes won't survive, it's just that they will be relatively less prevalent in the overall population.
Should a group of humans decide to establish a colony on Mars, it very well may be that after a millenium, the earh population and mars population would be noticably different. Especially if there is some selective pressure that tends to kill off people with/without certain genes.
As for some biological disaster wiping out the earth's human population, I' seriously doubt that will happen. It may kill off 99% of us, but there would still be plenty of survivors.
An article referenced somewhere below indicated the device is using an Intel XScale chip (ARM based), not a Sharp chip.
One of the key items here is LOW POWER!! Put in an x86 CPU and that's pretty much gone, unless you're talking like a 386 or 486.
I'm sorry, but I didn't see anything in the pictures that would convince me that it was a Windows OS I was looking at.
Cows are pretty dumb. But, yes, with pigs, you might have problems with following the dumb rule. Chickens, turkeys, other poultry and fish and reptiles shouldn't cause you any problems.
Great. But you'll still have to buy that motherboard to put your dual core chips in. Oh, look here. I see that the Intel motherboard is $400 more than one for the Opteron....
You're totally wrong here. Since about 1999, AMD has generally done a better job of designing its processors. The logic design of their chips is better. They are able do more calculations at a given clock rate than Intel. Intel's manufacturing technology probably exceeds that of AMD by a bit because Intel is a much larger company and is able to devote more effort to improving it than AMD can. I'm sure both companies do a fine job of quality control. Whether or not a processor is manufactured in large volumes doesn't affect the processors performance one bit. However, large volumes and the corresponding large profits allow companies like intel to invest more in technology to design and produce improved processors.
Since AMD's dual core processors slip nicely into existing socket 940 boards, with just a bios change, and Intel's dual core chips require a board designed for them, it's quite likely that lesser cost of Intel's solution is totally offset by the increased board and supporting circuitry costs. I think AMD knows this, which is why they believe the higher prices are justified. AMD scores a big advantage by designing their dual core processors to be pin compatible with the single core parts. The price differential that the dual core AMD chips command is icing on the cake for AMD.
I've read some reviews comparing AMD and Intel dual core chips, but I got the feeling that much of the testing was not all that well done. I don't believe that most of the applications they ran to test the performance will be the type of applications that these chips will be running. I see rendering and mpeg encoding being big apps for these. I'll wait and see before coming to an opinion on whose chips are better performers.
My first TV was branded a Philips. But, under the covers, it was all Samsung. It lasted for about a dozen years, not bad considering how inexpensive it was. Hardly anybody in the U.S. would have even heard of the Samsung brand back then.
Also Sony USED to be good. Now they just build things as cheaply as possible. The headphones they supply with their players sound like crap.
Suppose you take a car, and make a small change every 10 years. over 1000 years you'ld have made just 100 changes. Over a million years you'ld have made 100,000 changes. Over 10 million years you'ld have made 1 million changes. What are the chances you'ld recognize this car as having 'evolved' from the original after so many changes?
Having pairs of genes, and the concept of 'dominant' and 'recessive' genes also facilitates more substantial, but less frequent evolutionary changes.
Actually, this is incorrect theologically for many denominations. The idea of 'salvation through Jesus Christ' is based on the concept that man is in need of salvation. And this is based on the original sin of Adam and Eve. If they didn't exist, then no original sin, and no need for the salvation through Jesus Christ. Ooops.
It may not be very important to typical Judeo-Chrisian believers, but without this, the whole theological basis of some of these denominations would be in need of a major overhaul.
I don't think our moderator knows that because of restrictive french laws heavily taxing cars with engines larger than that of a motorcycle, the cars over there tend to be quite small.
One article stated that 35 cars could fit on the wing of this new Airbus. If those are french cars, I'm not impressed.
I use a wire wrap from a loaf of bread to attach my disk-cooling fan. Cost: My Time. ( The fan was from a discarded old PC )
Sounds familiar. I also had the same type of problem with tape drives on a system a number of years back. Extremely slow, very unreliable. It would take 1/2 hour to back up 20 Megabytes of disk. And chances were, the backup would be no good.
Of course I could be wrong. For the systems that these things will be used in, memory costs will probably dominate. The fact that the dual core opterons require no specialized support chips (unlike intel's solution) means that AMD can grab some of this money that would normally go to the makers of the support chip. Also, being a new chip, you want to maximize your profits, so you sell the first few to those that absolutely have to have them at high prices. Later you reduce prices (and profit margins ) a bit, sell some more, and so on, until it really hits the mass market.
Still, these chips aren't clocked as fast as they might have been. This, says AMD, is due to thermal power considerations. It may be that they weren't able to clock the chips quite as fast as they really were expecting, meaning the manufacturing process isn't quite where it should be.
All we need are some DIPS and we've got some heavy duty crunching!
Although most ICs use higher density packaging these days (LQFP, SOIC, PLCC, etc.), and you'ld probably also need a mobo, capacitors, resistors, inductors, and a good power supply.
So, to provide enhanced security with a picture would cost a lot of money. It's not the cost of putting the picture on the card, it's the cost of verifying that the picture matches who the card says it is.
Exactly. Having your SSN on your checks is a very, very bad idea. You're just asking for identity theft. If you're one of those few who've been foolish enough to do this, my advice is to get new checks without the SSN on them ASAP, and destroy your existing checks.
Basically so big brother can watch for illegal activities, like money laundering. Large transactions throw up a red flag to government officials. I believe banks are required to report these to the government. I'm not sure what the trigger amount is.