No, I have heard mdmkolbe's explanation before. His explanation allegedly works regardless of what method you use to travel or communicate FTL because his explanation is concerned about where-when are spacetime now-here and now-there at the moment of communication. Under S. Relativity.
So much I understand. I just can't believe it is not an artifact of perception. Relativity of simultaneity doesn't actually change the order of events, only their simultaneity. Two events that are simultaneous for an observer might not be simultaneous for another one and such.
Firstly however, I don't totally trust S.Relativity. I know it's well tested but wasn't it already superseded by General Relativity?
All the explanations I've heard about FTL==Time-travel involve transference of information between objects in different inertial frames, either directly or indirectly. I can't quite shake the feeling there's something we are doing wrong.
Actually you ARE right, but only from a certain point of view. Firstly, you are right that thermoelectric materials take heat away, and thus cool down whatever they are attached to.
The critical point here is that merely cooling down is not enough for a heat sink. The heat sink has to be cooled down FAST. Faster than it's heat source is heating it. Thermoelectrics just can't turn heat into electricity fast enough to let a heat sink do it's job.
So it's not really a matter of thermoelectrics heating up heat sinks, they don't heat them up, they in fact cool them down, what is heating up the heat sink is the heat source (say a CPU or a power engine).
The problem is that no thermoelectric so far can transform heat intro electricity faster than a CPU turns electricity into heat.
Weird, I don't think Google is the epitome of evil. All their technology offerings have sticky strings attached and are geared towards data mining you. But a) There's plenty of worse monsters out there (like facebook, MS, ORACLE). b) There's still a lot of good stuff coming out from them. Things like Go and SPDY. c) They are a good influence in the Internet. They do much more good than harm as far as I'm concerned.
I, however, don't use neither gmail nor chorme nor search, nor android.
I have already said this but I don't believe in yours or anyone's magical ability to detect puppet accounts. Bayesian matching of styles comes close but I'd have to get the data myself and see your source code before accepting such proofs.
Also I dunno what "New Account" you are talking about, I have seen this Soulskill before (his name reminds me of Castlevania so it sticks) and yes I have seen him bashing Google before although I don't remember VS plugs. Incidentally I only noticed his username because some AC was accusing him of Google bashing (which I know it's you [/sarcasm])
Regardless, if what the article complains about it's true, it is true regardless of the intentions of the submitter. Your ad-hominem only stresses your bad intentions.
Unless they weren't trying to buy Slashdot specifically, but some other aspect of Geeknet. So they might understand SourceForge and want to use it in their jobs business, but disregard Slashdot and integrate it into their news division.
Example, ORACLE --some say-- acquired Sun Microsystems for Java, in which case acquiring MySQL was just a nice bonus. If you think ORACLE was interested in MySQL too, there still OpenOffice, on which they were clearly not interested and yet acquired anyway.
Ok if you are so close to people from Dice I think it's only fair to ask this question: What is Dice expecting from acquiring Slashdot? Seriously, go ask them just that and bring it back. We can discuss it later.
Excuse me as I re-post what I already asked elsewhere in this article:
I don't see how FTL traveling implicates time travel. "Apparent" time travel i understand. But don't really see how it affects causality.
Let's say my sun explodes and I go to a nearby system 2 light years away at twice c. Once there I will warn everybody that the closest star is going nova in a year. Now let's say you want to prevent me from delivering these news. You look up to the sky and see my planet. Obviously it is still there isn't it? So you take my warp ship and try to go to my planet. By the time you get there you are only going to find a 2 years old cloud of hot gas.
If you travel at 4 c you will find a 1.5 years old gas cloud. Travel at 8 c to find a 1.25 years old gas cloud. Travel there at 16 c to find a 1.175 years old cloud.
Travel as fast as you want. You shouldn't ever get earlier than a year after my departure let alone prevent it. Now, it could be that someone find out about this and tries to intercept you by going there at twice your speed. They'll get there before you and it will surely take you by surprise but that's still not time travel from your point of view.
They say so but I don't understand how FTL traveling is paradoxical and I don't understand how FTL traveling implicates time travel.
"Apparent" time travel i understand. But don't really see how it affects causality.
Let's say my sun explodes and I go to a nearby system 2 light years away at twice c. Once there I will warn everybody that the closest star is going nova in a year. Now let's say you want to prevent me from delivering these news. You look up to the sky and see my planet. Obviously it is still there isn't it? So you take my warp ship and try to go to my planet. By the time you get there you are only going to find a 2 years old cloud of hot gas.
If you travel at 4 c you will find a 1.5 years old gas cloud. Travel at 8 c to find a 1.25 years old gas cloud. Travel there at 16 c to find a 1.175 years old cloud.
Travel as fast as you want. You shouldn't ever get earlier than a year after my departure let alone prevent it. Now, it could be that someone find out about this and tries to intercept you by going there at twice your speed. They'll get there before you and it will surely take you by surprise but that's still not time travel from your point of view.
The thing is that Wikipedia is terrified of been in a position of being a primary source. They have made it a religion to have external citations because that way they can pass the blame of being wrong to the source. Which doesn't really except them from the burden of being wrong, but in their mind, if they can share the blame it's alright.
Since when was it necessary to scoope into the most intimate corners of your mind to simply show you an ad? And why do you need to know my browsing history to register if I clicked an ad or viewed an a banner?
This tracking issue has gone completely over the board. How difficult could it be to simply be an advertisement network? Why do they also have to become our very own big brother?
Meh, Gnome 3 doesn't ooze innovation, although it does show to be very open to innovation. It's very obvious that that they are trying to do the right thing. They just aren't very good at it. I'm a user, by the way, for nearly two of years now. Their desktop is very modern. Not exactly innovative since pretty much every feature has been implemented elsewhere, usually better. But at least it's modern.
I really want Gnome 3 to be good but I have little faith in the Gnome team itself, I hope the community can keep them in check. I would love nothing more than they listening to us their users instead of keeping on trying to lure Apple users.
The main disadvantage is the old "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link". Let's say Diaspora becomes at least as popular as OpenID. As you know, OpenID's problem is a lack of identity consumers, not identity providers, in fact many large business including Google offer OpenID services. Therefore it's only natural that Facebook will offer Diaspora servies, in fact it's incredibly easy for them to simply provide a Diasspora API their existing profiles, meaning Facebook can become, overnight, the largest Diaspora pod.
Of course your facebook profile will be tightly integrated with your Diaspora profile, it's actually a very convenient feature for users.
Now, as a Diaspora user, I can make public comments about games and movies, but keep political ones only for friends and family. My family is on Diaspora too, through facebook. Facebook thus can report everything I share with my family to the CIA/FBI/TSA so the next time I have to unfortunately venture into the "Land of the Free Home of the Brave" I can be properly hassled, scanned, molested and denied entrance into your delightful country for being an ethnic terrorist..
Ok so I make sure to never friend anyone who uses facebook for their Diaspora pods, I'm safe now right? Not quite. For simplicity purposes, posts and profile sections can be made either "Public", "Friends-only" and "Friend of a Friend".
"Friend of a Friend" is the most useful one, it's the one that puts the "network" in "social networks". FOAF is the one you want to post about parties and family vacations. Not public but still shareable with your immediate friends and their families. But how do you know your friends are as strict on banning Facebook users from their firend list?
Worse yet, FOAF can only be enforced Friend-side. I have made my disdain of facebook obvious enough, but ANY Diaspora pod can be just as bad, if not worse so. Since my friends are going to be using random Diaspora providers, I have little hope of controlling their FOAF policies.
It doesn't even have to be an "evil" pod provider. A compromised one is just as bad. And even if my friends all use "good" pod providers which enforce FOAF policies correctly. If they have friends using compromised service providers, my night club exploits will again become available to the highest bidder (very likely including facebook and google anyway).
Don't get me wrong. I still think it is a step above using facebook. I would still rather have a Diaspora profile than a facebook one. But the main advice about things you don't public is still valid. Don't post it online.
Even if IS about the Music. Consider that if the an is an audiophile, he could have amassed a collection worth tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands dollars. His iTunes collection might seriosuly be considered an asset worth inheriting.
What THE FUCK could possible be the point of the Poincaré conjecture anyway? From a pathfinding point of view it seems obvious that any ring can be compacted into a point in any sphere like object. Could you explain it in terms a software engineer could understand?
As a matter of fact I use duckduckgo. Obviously I read about Arch. I've been reading about it for months, probably over a year. From that I gather there are two things that Arch users constantly talking about. 1) that you learn more about Linux, which is a bogus claim*. 2) About pacman.
It's pacman, pacman, pacman all over the place. Arch users can't stop talking about pacman and they are in love with it, and that's fine. But you can't blame me for getting the impression that pacman is the selling point of Arch when that's what users talk about all the time. So i though I should give it a look, and I did and was unimpressed.
I mean, it's alright, but it's the same as apt or rpm, just another centralized package manager. While I know it is my responsibility to look up things it is also your responsibility to advertise and get hype about things you love if you want other people to pay them a look.
* I feel like I have to defend this statement. Arch users claim that Arch teaches you about Linux but that's not exactly true. It teaches you about Arch Linux, not just any Linux. Learning Arch Linux won't *necessarily* help you fixing problems in Gentoo, Ubuntu or fedora.
Actually his argument is on track (pun intended) he just forgot about the idea of failsafe measures.
Your idea that you could do whatever you wanted as long a you "own" the road gets complicated by the fact that, just like roads are public resources, the Internet is a public resource too. No one would care if you have access to military grade encrypted communication systems if you only used them in your "private Internet" and no, a VPN is not a private Internet.
User im_thatoneguy is right, giving up some freedoms is convenient somehow however you should be sure to put failsafe measures. For instance, instead of traffic police regulating speed limits, we could have mandated that cars simply couldn't go over certain speeds.
However what if you are being pursued by thugs? What if there's an accident that requires you to drive faster? What if there is a medical emergency? (in order of increased realism but all valid examples)
The point is that it's all right to have limiters as long as you can get them out when you need them. The problem with the war on general computing is that it's a war against the ability of users to run whatever they want in their computer. In other words it is not about limiting machines, it's about controlling people.
Debian has ideology and a huge community, fedora has corporate clout, ubuntu has support, Linux Mint has "like ubuntu but not batshit insane" what has Arch to offer?
If the only thing new about Arch is it's package manager then you better give me an awesome sales pitch because I'm sick of centralized servers. The thing I want to see succeed most than anything is a distro based on Zero Install or something like it. What good is arch for?
Actually I have lost most of the faith I could have in the Gnome Team, Gnome users still can make a difference. As you say, extensions fix a lot of warts. The only reason I have faith in the future of Gnome is because of users. The team on the other hand has poor aesthetics, not bad just too plain, and they have poor sense of usability. And yes it's bad. They have VERY little sense of usability. The technology is so so, kinda on the bad side but not terrible. Gnome 3 crashes much more than Gnome 2 but it's still usable if you know how to fix it (change tty, login, killall gnome-shell). Good enough for me, not good enough for Grandma.
Sure I can let chance dictate my kids' personality, but I'm pretty sure high IQ, no heart diseases and not having metal problems are objectively good don't you think?
This is a basic feature of Runaway Capitalism (People please, don't shut down your brains yet). When I say Capitalism I'm talking about the very core of the idea of building capital. Using your gains to further your gains to further your gains to further your gains. This economic system cannot result in anything but a single unbeatable corporation owning life and limb and first born sons just like in feudalism.
Our antitrust laws have managed to shove that future for a while but we already have oligopolies controlling almost all markets. We NEED to put breaks on this, lest we end up in one of those dystopian situations we keep telling ourselves that are only fiction. This is NOT AGAINST WESTERN TRADITION. We already have public education and other public services. As designer babies become a reality we must ensure this service is available to everybody. This is just another argument in favor of public health. If better, more intelligent humans are restricted to the rich the consequences will be disastrous.
For reference just look at Canada. Already people there are healthier physically AND economically, and happier too. If they provide GE services for the general public they will be --as a nation-- smarter than Americans.
If you don't have to very observant to spot that trend it doesn't follow then that the GP is very observant, unless you know this for external reasons.
That aside, whenever something can be abused it will be abused and it's only natural to ask how every new technology will be abused. That you find it "irrational, whiney, or worse" is your personal opinion.
Wel basically it's a display server, like X11/X.org, except it's optimized to run locally, unlike X11/X.org which has it's origins in networked environments and tries its best to work either locally or remotely.
Except that X has been tinkered to work for desktop systems for so long that there little of that network oriented code left around, yet W, or Wayland, tries to get rid of that aspect completely.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I have heard mdmkolbe's explanation before. His explanation allegedly works regardless of what method you use to travel or communicate FTL because his explanation is concerned about where-when are spacetime now-here and now-there at the moment of communication. Under S. Relativity.
So much I understand. I just can't believe it is not an artifact of perception. Relativity of simultaneity doesn't actually change the order of events, only their simultaneity. Two events that are simultaneous for an observer might not be simultaneous for another one and such.
Firstly however, I don't totally trust S.Relativity. I know it's well tested but wasn't it already superseded by General Relativity?
All the explanations I've heard about FTL==Time-travel involve transference of information between objects in different inertial frames, either directly or indirectly. I can't quite shake the feeling there's something we are doing wrong.
Poor AC getting so mean comments.
Actually you ARE right, but only from a certain point of view. Firstly, you are right that thermoelectric materials take heat away, and thus cool down whatever they are attached to.
The critical point here is that merely cooling down is not enough for a heat sink. The heat sink has to be cooled down FAST. Faster than it's heat source is heating it. Thermoelectrics just can't turn heat into electricity fast enough to let a heat sink do it's job.
So it's not really a matter of thermoelectrics heating up heat sinks, they don't heat them up, they in fact cool them down, what is heating up the heat sink is the heat source (say a CPU or a power engine).
The problem is that no thermoelectric so far can transform heat intro electricity faster than a CPU turns electricity into heat.
Weird, I don't think Google is the epitome of evil. All their technology offerings have sticky strings attached and are geared towards data mining you. But
a) There's plenty of worse monsters out there (like facebook, MS, ORACLE).
b) There's still a lot of good stuff coming out from them. Things like Go and SPDY.
c) They are a good influence in the Internet. They do much more good than harm as far as I'm concerned.
I, however, don't use neither gmail nor chorme nor search, nor android.
Basically I'm ok with Google at a distance.
Not much considering your post.
I have already said this but I don't believe in yours or anyone's magical ability to detect puppet accounts. Bayesian matching of styles comes close but I'd have to get the data myself and see your source code before accepting such proofs.
Also I dunno what "New Account" you are talking about, I have seen this Soulskill before (his name reminds me of Castlevania so it sticks) and yes I have seen him bashing Google before although I don't remember VS plugs. Incidentally I only noticed his username because some AC was accusing him of Google bashing (which I know it's you [/sarcasm])
Regardless, if what the article complains about it's true, it is true regardless of the intentions of the submitter. Your ad-hominem only stresses your bad intentions.
Unless they weren't trying to buy Slashdot specifically, but some other aspect of Geeknet. So they might understand SourceForge and want to use it in their jobs business, but disregard Slashdot and integrate it into their news division.
Example, ORACLE --some say-- acquired Sun Microsystems for Java, in which case acquiring MySQL was just a nice bonus. If you think ORACLE was interested in MySQL too, there still OpenOffice, on which they were clearly not interested and yet acquired anyway.
Ok if you are so close to people from Dice I think it's only fair to ask this question: What is Dice expecting from acquiring Slashdot? Seriously, go ask them just that and bring it back. We can discuss it later.
Excuse me as I re-post what I already asked elsewhere in this article:
I don't see how FTL traveling implicates time travel. "Apparent" time travel i understand. But don't really see how it affects causality.
Let's say my sun explodes and I go to a nearby system 2 light years away at twice c. Once there I will warn everybody that the closest star is going nova in a year. Now let's say you want to prevent me from delivering these news. You look up to the sky and see my planet. Obviously it is still there isn't it? So you take my warp ship and try to go to my planet. By the time you get there you are only going to find a 2 years old cloud of hot gas.
If you travel at 4 c you will find a 1.5 years old gas cloud. Travel at 8 c to find a 1.25 years old gas cloud. Travel there at 16 c to find a 1.175 years old cloud.
Travel as fast as you want. You shouldn't ever get earlier than a year after my departure let alone prevent it. Now, it could be that someone find out about this and tries to intercept you by going there at twice your speed. They'll get there before you and it will surely take you by surprise but that's still not time travel from your point of view.
They say so but I don't understand how FTL traveling is paradoxical and I don't understand how FTL traveling implicates time travel.
"Apparent" time travel i understand. But don't really see how it affects causality.
Let's say my sun explodes and I go to a nearby system 2 light years away at twice c. Once there I will warn everybody that the closest star is going nova in a year. Now let's say you want to prevent me from delivering these news. You look up to the sky and see my planet. Obviously it is still there isn't it? So you take my warp ship and try to go to my planet. By the time you get there you are only going to find a 2 years old cloud of hot gas.
If you travel at 4 c you will find a 1.5 years old gas cloud. Travel at 8 c to find a 1.25 years old gas cloud. Travel there at 16 c to find a 1.175 years old cloud.
Travel as fast as you want. You shouldn't ever get earlier than a year after my departure let alone prevent it. Now, it could be that someone find out about this and tries to intercept you by going there at twice your speed. They'll get there before you and it will surely take you by surprise but that's still not time travel from your point of view.
File a DMCA take down notice against your comment.
The thing is that Wikipedia is terrified of been in a position of being a primary source. They have made it a religion to have external citations because that way they can pass the blame of being wrong to the source. Which doesn't really except them from the burden of being wrong, but in their mind, if they can share the blame it's alright.
Since when was it necessary to scoope into the most intimate corners of your mind to simply show you an ad? And why do you need to know my browsing history to register if I clicked an ad or viewed an a banner?
This tracking issue has gone completely over the board. How difficult could it be to simply be an advertisement network? Why do they also have to become our very own big brother?
Meh, Gnome 3 doesn't ooze innovation, although it does show to be very open to innovation. It's very obvious that that they are trying to do the right thing. They just aren't very good at it. I'm a user, by the way, for nearly two of years now. Their desktop is very modern. Not exactly innovative since pretty much every feature has been implemented elsewhere, usually better. But at least it's modern.
I really want Gnome 3 to be good but I have little faith in the Gnome team itself, I hope the community can keep them in check. I would love nothing more than they listening to us their users instead of keeping on trying to lure Apple users.
That's not even the main disadvantage actually.
The main disadvantage is the old "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link". Let's say Diaspora becomes at least as popular as OpenID. As you know, OpenID's problem is a lack of identity consumers, not identity providers, in fact many large business including Google offer OpenID services. Therefore it's only natural that Facebook will offer Diaspora servies, in fact it's incredibly easy for them to simply provide a Diasspora API their existing profiles, meaning Facebook can become, overnight, the largest Diaspora pod.
Of course your facebook profile will be tightly integrated with your Diaspora profile, it's actually a very convenient feature for users.
Now, as a Diaspora user, I can make public comments about games and movies, but keep political ones only for friends and family. My family is on Diaspora too, through facebook. Facebook thus can report everything I share with my family to the CIA/FBI/TSA so the next time I have to unfortunately venture into the "Land of the Free Home of the Brave" I can be properly hassled, scanned, molested and denied entrance into your delightful country for being an ethnic terrorist..
Ok so I make sure to never friend anyone who uses facebook for their Diaspora pods, I'm safe now right? Not quite. For simplicity purposes, posts and profile sections can be made either "Public", "Friends-only" and "Friend of a Friend".
"Friend of a Friend" is the most useful one, it's the one that puts the "network" in "social networks". FOAF is the one you want to post about parties and family vacations. Not public but still shareable with your immediate friends and their families. But how do you know your friends are as strict on banning Facebook users from their firend list?
Worse yet, FOAF can only be enforced Friend-side. I have made my disdain of facebook obvious enough, but ANY Diaspora pod can be just as bad, if not worse so. Since my friends are going to be using random Diaspora providers, I have little hope of controlling their FOAF policies.
It doesn't even have to be an "evil" pod provider. A compromised one is just as bad. And even if my friends all use "good" pod providers which enforce FOAF policies correctly. If they have friends using compromised service providers, my night club exploits will again become available to the highest bidder (very likely including facebook and google anyway).
Don't get me wrong. I still think it is a step above using facebook. I would still rather have a Diaspora profile than a facebook one. But the main advice about things you don't public is still valid. Don't post it online.
Even if IS about the Music. Consider that if the an is an audiophile, he could have amassed a collection worth tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands dollars. His iTunes collection might seriosuly be considered an asset worth inheriting.
What THE FUCK could possible be the point of the Poincaré conjecture anyway? From a pathfinding point of view it seems obvious that any ring can be compacted into a point in any sphere like object. Could you explain it in terms a software engineer could understand?
As a matter of fact I use duckduckgo. Obviously I read about Arch. I've been reading about it for months, probably over a year. From that I gather there are two things that Arch users constantly talking about. 1) that you learn more about Linux, which is a bogus claim*. 2) About pacman.
It's pacman, pacman, pacman all over the place. Arch users can't stop talking about pacman and they are in love with it, and that's fine. But you can't blame me for getting the impression that pacman is the selling point of Arch when that's what users talk about all the time. So i though I should give it a look, and I did and was unimpressed.
I mean, it's alright, but it's the same as apt or rpm, just another centralized package manager. While I know it is my responsibility to look up things it is also your responsibility to advertise and get hype about things you love if you want other people to pay them a look.
* I feel like I have to defend this statement. Arch users claim that Arch teaches you about Linux but that's not exactly true. It teaches you about Arch Linux, not just any Linux. Learning Arch Linux won't *necessarily* help you fixing problems in Gentoo, Ubuntu or fedora.
Immediately remembered about Tata Motors.
Actually his argument is on track (pun intended) he just forgot about the idea of failsafe measures.
Your idea that you could do whatever you wanted as long a you "own" the road gets complicated by the fact that, just like roads are public resources, the Internet is a public resource too. No one would care if you have access to military grade encrypted communication systems if you only used them in your "private Internet" and no, a VPN is not a private Internet.
User im_thatoneguy is right, giving up some freedoms is convenient somehow however you should be sure to put failsafe measures. For instance, instead of traffic police regulating speed limits, we could have mandated that cars simply couldn't go over certain speeds.
However what if you are being pursued by thugs? What if there's an accident that requires you to drive faster? What if there is a medical emergency? (in order of increased realism but all valid examples)
The point is that it's all right to have limiters as long as you can get them out when you need them. The problem with the war on general computing is that it's a war against the ability of users to run whatever they want in their computer. In other words it is not about limiting machines, it's about controlling people.
Debian has ideology and a huge community, fedora has corporate clout, ubuntu has support, Linux Mint has "like ubuntu but not batshit insane" what has Arch to offer?
If the only thing new about Arch is it's package manager then you better give me an awesome sales pitch because I'm sick of centralized servers. The thing I want to see succeed most than anything is a distro based on Zero Install or something like it. What good is arch for?
Actually I have lost most of the faith I could have in the Gnome Team, Gnome users still can make a difference. As you say, extensions fix a lot of warts. The only reason I have faith in the future of Gnome is because of users. The team on the other hand has poor aesthetics, not bad just too plain, and they have poor sense of usability. And yes it's bad. They have VERY little sense of usability. The technology is so so, kinda on the bad side but not terrible. Gnome 3 crashes much more than Gnome 2 but it's still usable if you know how to fix it (change tty, login, killall gnome-shell). Good enough for me, not good enough for Grandma.
Sure I can let chance dictate my kids' personality, but I'm pretty sure high IQ, no heart diseases and not having metal problems are objectively good don't you think?
This is a basic feature of Runaway Capitalism (People please, don't shut down your brains yet). When I say Capitalism I'm talking about the very core of the idea of building capital. Using your gains to further your gains to further your gains to further your gains. This economic system cannot result in anything but a single unbeatable corporation owning life and limb and first born sons just like in feudalism.
Our antitrust laws have managed to shove that future for a while but we already have oligopolies controlling almost all markets. We NEED to put breaks on this, lest we end up in one of those dystopian situations we keep telling ourselves that are only fiction. This is NOT AGAINST WESTERN TRADITION. We already have public education and other public services. As designer babies become a reality we must ensure this service is available to everybody. This is just another argument in favor of public health. If better, more intelligent humans are restricted to the rich the consequences will be disastrous.
For reference just look at Canada. Already people there are healthier physically AND economically, and happier too. If they provide GE services for the general public they will be --as a nation-- smarter than Americans.
If you don't have to very observant to spot that trend it doesn't follow then that the GP is very observant, unless you know this for external reasons.
That aside, whenever something can be abused it will be abused and it's only natural to ask how every new technology will be abused. That you find it "irrational, whiney, or worse" is your personal opinion.
Wel basically it's a display server, like X11/X.org, except it's optimized to run locally, unlike X11/X.org which has it's origins in networked environments and tries its best to work either locally or remotely.
Except that X has been tinkered to work for desktop systems for so long that there little of that network oriented code left around, yet W, or Wayland, tries to get rid of that aspect completely.