also, economics 101: if you want to recover your money from a bad investment, you DO NOT raise the price. you lower it. you sell it to the first jerk that show up, then "Take The Money and Run".
That theory applies to most of us, but in advanced Econ 748 - Economics for Cartels - we learn that it the previous economic principles are only valid when you fail to properly legislate yourself a revenue stream and business model.
That's idiotic. Of course we should be trying to cure any disease, and by invoking Godwin, suggesting that curing autism is similar to what Hitler did is possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And just because it was a bad idea in X-men, doesn't mean it translates to reality.
Should we halt all further study on any genetic disease now because it could lead to Heroes like super-powers? Clearly curing Huntington's and Down's syndromes would be tantamount to genocide as well...
Look, the fact that you've put together a coherent post clearly means you are a highly functioning autistic, but you of all people should know that there are autistics much much worse off than you. Also note, that this is not a neonatal treatment, if the child is minorly autistic it the cost and risk of genetic treatment might not be called for. And besides, maybe if Einstein weren't autistic his name would be mentioned with Michaelangelo or Mozart instead of Newton and Galileo.
I've been wondering about that. Why the hell hasn't myspace done so already? It's a no brainer, (wait - did I just answer my question?) sell indie music for whatever the artist wants to charge, with a minimum price to cover bandwidth, and take a 20-80% cut.
The only danger is the guy who misrepresents the music as original - but I'm sure that NewsCorp's lawyers can find a clever way of shielding them from liability - after all the responsibility should lie on the seller to verify that he has the right to sell it.
Not only that, but if such a system were in place I might actually look into it. Any rating, ranking scheme would become more credible if people were actually paying for stuff. For instance - I like band A, what other music do people who buy band A pay for?
Apparently the argument isn't as transparent as the Economist says, (or maybe I'm just a bit tin-foilly today) but Jobs is a PR genius. If comes out against DRM, maybe he gets the French off his back, knowing full well that the RIAA will never allow him to sell non-DRM music. He's counting on not having to switch in a heart-beat. This way, he not only gets to look like "a champion of consumer rights," but also gets to maintain his lock in.
Apple would be fine without DRM, but the are better off with it - and even better with it while saying the don't want it.
I use my iPod at work, and I find that when I'm walking around with my earbuds in I am more likely to run into someone than otherwise. It's surprising how much you use auditory cues without even realizing it. The eyes simply aren't sufficient all the time - I can only make mine point in one direction at a time - whereas my ears are omni-directional.
Note, that I'm not stupid enough to walk around public streets with listening to my iPod, much less cross them.
Sorry, replying to myself - but I just realized what you were talking about. I think you were referring to the addition of t-butyl mercaptan, the odorant that gives gas its characteristic smell. While this greatly reduced the number of accidental deaths attributable to natural gas, it may have also reduced the number of suicides with this method because it just doesn't smell very good. However, I stand by my statement that suicidal people are pretty resourceful, and if there was an overall drop in suicides, my hunch is that it is a case of correlation, not causation.
T-butyl mercaptan was first added in the late 30s, when immediately before WWII and the womens movement gathered steam. If there was an overall drop in suicides, I'd attribute it to the fact that women, those most likely to utilized this method of suicide, felt more empowered, and were thus less likely to commit suicide at all.
Ummm - there isn't (much) CO in the gas until you burn it, and you can't remove the C without pumping straight H2 (bad idea). Nor can you make CH4 or anything else that functions as a fuel not an asphiyxiant.
On a more interesting note sticking your head in the oven may have been the preferred way for women to commit suicide, but the psychology of gender being what it is we don't even like to kill ourselves the same way. Women tend to commit passive suicide (pills, asphyxiation, etc. - exception cut wrists) while men prefer active suicide (hanging, shooting, jumping, etc.) So, while saftening the heating gas (if it were possible) might decrease suicides in housewives (unlikely, since someone trying to kill themselves tends to be pretty resourceful), it would do little to decrease suicides in men.
Your solution really only moves the problem a level. Someone could be found who will disagree with anything, so the onus is on the person who decides whether something is controversial or not. In some cases controversy is clear and should be treated from a balanced point of view (your Israel-Palestine example). In other cases the controversy is obvious, should be mentioned, but is not worthy of a dissenting editor, for example evolution, and then there are even more convoluted cases like global warming. Whomever decides who and how many editors a global warming article has, gets to choose the slant.
The problem is that the music industry is a prestige career. Most musicians who have a label aren't interested in getting by, they are prepared to starve for their art, until they make it huge.
The RIAA gives you a path to make it huge, it's not guaranteed, and will cost you your soul, but hey, they show you the way.
I think this is changing, and myspace etc. are playing a major role. Once a few bands do make it huge without a label, I think we'll start to see the end of the RIAA as we know it. The labels are publicity machines. If you can convince a label to promote you, you're in good shape, it isn't quite as clear what needs to happen for you to be a breakout success on your own.
Someone else was referring to the labels as lending institutions, which is interesting. It is true that they will front a band some cash, but what they giveth with one hand, and taketh away with the other.
The labels used to have three major roles: production, distribution, and promotion. Now they are promoters and possibly the worst lending institution in the world.
Ugg, Normally I'm all for slamming big pharma - as a matter of fact let me do that now. I think that the fact that pharma spends more on advertising than R&D (which is true, in spite of GP's shilling comment) is shameful, and that neither consumers, doctors, legislators, nor shareholders should put up with it. And while this may seem like the perfect time to also take a dig at the patent structure - which is badly in need of reform - I don't think the monopoly meme is entirely appropriate here.
While it is true that each pharma company holds a monopoly on the drugs it invents, pharma is in no way a monopolized industry. If dumping money into R&D were so effective another pharma company with the same outrageous profits could do 5x more research, relying solely on academic journals to spread the word, and clean up with their vastly more and superior drugs. Unfortunately, pharma doesn't think (maybe rightly so) that an investment in R&D translates 1:1 into profit. Where, on the other hand, they seem to think (probably erroneously) that an investment in advertising translates more effectively into revenue.
Personally, I think that the solution involves regulating what, when, and how pharma can advertise, and severely regulating the way pharma's sales reps interact with doctors. But hey, as long as they can afford the good lobbiests, none of this will happen, so maybe we really ought to start with some decent lobbying reform.
I don't know if you're trolling or not, but since you've been modded so highly someone needs to correct these horrible mis-statements.
First, you have the antacid chemistry precisely backwards. The active part is the hydroxide. You know the part that isn't an acid... as in antacid. The aluminum is there in the Mylanta because they wanted a stable liquid formulation, which hyroxides usually aren't. Aluminum hydroxide is an insoluble salt, and very stable on the shelf, until it reacts with your stomach acids neutraling them.
Second, the "active" part of the concrete is the silicate. The calcium and aluminum are there because when they hydrate in the presence of sulfates (the gypsum) they act as binders. A binder is undeniably useful, but alternatively we could line our streets with mined chunks of silicate and if would be similar to concrete. The only reason we need the binders is so that we can grind it up for easy transport, slurry it for easy application, and it will still be hard like silicate when all is said and done.
The most efficient type of vertical axis windmill is called a Darrieus wind turbine. There is one big problem this type of windmill, it isn't self-starting. This means if it ever stops spinning, it has to be manually restarted. There is a way around this, you can add what is essentially a 55 gallon drum cut in half to the top, (a Savonius wind turbine ) which is another type of windmill, but it will significantly increase your drag - lowering your efficiency.
BTW I'm surprised at the quality of all the windmill and wind-turbine wikipedia articles.
Running a cooling technology from energy generated from the windmill would likely be very inefficient.
I'd guess that the windmill is optimized to create a pressure differential. The area with the lowest pressure expands and cools to below the dew point. Sounds interesting.
I'm guessing it is the one who has no understanding of relativity.
There is no preferred reference frame. If Observer A says event 1 and event 2 are simultaneous he's right. If observer B says event 2 happens before event 1 he is also right.
I'm done with this, if you wish to remain willfully ignorant you are free to do so - I'd ask that you not make yourself look like an idiot by spouting off horrible misrepresentations of physics, but I fear that is a lost cause. If you want to know how the universe actually works read up on relativity. A Brief History of Time is a solid read, even if you're incapable of understanding mathematics as well as physics.
Ok, if information travels from point A to point B faster than were possible with light, then that information is traveling superluminally. It doesn't matter if no physical particle actually moved, the information still has.
Your clock example is telling, you don't incorporate relativistic effects, which is necessary to understand how superluminal = timetravel.
Imagine we have three clocks and synchronize them. Clock A1 stays in LA, Clock A2 travels to DC, where it remains, and clock B is traveling so that when it reads 0.00 it is over DC traveling away from LA. Note that clocks A1 and A2 will always be in agreement because they are not moving relative to one another.
A1 and A2 agree that a bomb went off (event 1) at 0.00. A1 sends a signal instantaneously to A2. When A2 receives this message it broadcasts via radio a confirmation. This confirmation is event 2.
Now some calculations. Since observer B is moving at 0.8c the Lotentz Factor is 2.236. Now, LA and DC are approximately 4000km apart. If we use the following coordinates x=0 for DC, and x=-4E6 (meters) for LA we find that according to observer B who is at DC traveling at 0.8c event 1 happens at 2.236*[0-(0.8c*-4E6)/c^2] = 0.0238s and event 2 happens at 0.00. It should be clear that if observer B could send a message instantaneously to LA after event 2 it would get there 0.0238 seconds before event 1 occurred. This is time travel and a causality violation.
I know you aren't making anything up, but you are misunderstanding sci-fi to be real physics. You might claim to not have anything to understand, but you are misunderstanding plenty.
Ok, so Mr. Hawking says, "if you can travel faster than light, the theory of relativity implies you can also travel back in time." Would you consider instantaneous to be faster than, slower than, or equal to the speed of light? If such a thing were possible it might appear to an observer moving with the information that he is moving at sub-light speed. But it would appear to an observer stationary with respect to the event to be superluminal (and they'd both be right).
If instantaneous is in fact faster than the speed of light, and traveling faster than the speed of light allows time travel, then doesn't it make sense that if you can send information faster than the speed of light you can also send information back in time?
The whole point of relativity is that time isn't absolute - it is relative. If observer Jack Bauer in LA sees a bomb go off, and sends an instantaneously (faster than c) to DC observer B traveling away from DC at relativistic speed would see DC receive the message before the bomb went off (and he'd be no less correct than Jack). If observer B sees DC get the message that a bomb went off and can send information instantaneously he could send a message back to Jack, even before Jack sent the original message.
This is a big part of why our current understanding of physics precludes superluminal travel and communication; if you allow superluminal communication you allow causality violations.
Now, I don't know what game you're talking about, and now that I've gone ahead and looked it up, if you want to refute me you'll have to find a reputable source. If you don't understand, either re-read the Hawking excerpt, or find another authoritative source.
Alright, you are forcing me to do the unthinkable on slashdot (the nuclear response if you will,) I'm going to quote and site a source.
I'm looking at my copy of A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. It seems that I've generally F'd up the simultaneity issue. But that isn't really the interesting portion. He does however equate faster than light travel with time travel. I'm going to quote a portion of chapter ten now.
...What most of these authors don't seem to realize is that if you can travel faster than light, the theory of relativity implies you can also travel back in time, as the following limerick says:
There was a young lady of Wight Who traveled much faster than light. She departed one day, In a relative way, Add arrived on the previous night.
The point is that the theory of relativity says that there is no unique measure of time that all observers will agree on. Rather, each observer has his or her own measure of time. If it is possible fr a rocket traveling below the speed of light to get from event A (say, the final of the 100-meter rave of the Olympic Games in 2012) to event B (say the opening of the 100,004th meeting of the Congress of Alpha Centauri), then all observers will agree that event A happened before event B according to their times. Suppose, however, that the spaceship have to travel faster than light to carry the news of the race to the Congress. Then observers moving at different speeds can disagree about whether event A occurred before B or vice versa. According to the time of an observer who is at rest with respect to the earth, it may be that the Congress opened after the race. Thus this observer would think that a spaceship could get from A to B in time if only it could ignore the speed-of-light speed limit. However, to an observer at Alpha Centauri moving away from earth at nearly the speed of light, it would appear that event B, the opening of the Congress, would occur before event A, the 100-meter race. The theory of relativity says that the laws of physics appear the same to observers moving at different speeds.
This has been well tested by experiment and is likely to remain a feature even if we find a more advanced theory to replace relativity. Thus, the moving observer would say that if faster-than-light travel is possible, it should be possible to get from event B, the opening of The Congress, to event A, the 100-meter race. If one went slightly faster, one could even get back before the race and place a bet on it in the sure knowledge that one would win.
It may be that to compare Goldwater to Bush is evil in this thread, or anywhere for that matter, (mostly because it makes Bush look like an idiot and a corrupter of his party), and I promise I'll stop... Just as soon as the republicans stop proclaiming themselves to be fiscally conservative, and stop calling themselves the party of Lincoln.
I hope you weren't under the impression that I actually thought there were similarities between Goldwater and todays neocons, I was just replying, possibly a bit heavy-handedly, to someone who was claiming that Bushes politics are attempting to "Starve the Beast."
Right, because Bush is a republican in the school of Barry Goldwater...
All you have to do is look at the Department Homeland Security to see how little Bush cares about small government.
The tax cuts exist for only one reason, so that Bush can pander to the fiscal conservatives - you know the ones that aren't so much for conservative government fiscal policy as they are conservative with their personal finances. In other words the same people who would have stopped voting Republican post-Reagan had the government not kept handing them money.
Ok, I'm not an expert at this, so what I say may very well be wrong, but I'll give it a shot.
How do you define present, or more to the point now or instantaneous? It may sound like a stupid question, but it's a tad tricky when you worry about relativity. I think that it is generally thought that something is happening now when light traveling from the event reaches the observer.
Which means that if you send information faster than the speed of light, that information gets there before the event actually happened. In other words, you sent the info back in time.
Mind you, this is all "as I understand it," and I'd love to have someone more knowledgeable throw their hat into the discussion.
Your right, the speed of information is limited to c, because as far as we know all information requires a carrier - and, as far as we know, the fastest carrier is light. As I understand it sending information at speeds greater than the speed of light would violate causality.
Imagine that there is a bomb in LA that just went off. Jack Bauer finds a way to make his PDA use quantum entanglement to tell this to Washington before they would be able to detect the event any other way. If some horrendous female actor, err, computer analyst found a way to disarm the bomb before Washington would receive a signal traveling at c from LA and transmit the data back it could get there before either the bomb went off or Jack sent the first message.
Of course if the bomb never went off Jack would have never sent the first message, and the universe would implode. But it would probably get good ratings - so all is well.
Someone please correct any injustices I've just done to physics.
Slashdot Mirror
That theory applies to most of us, but in advanced Econ 748 - Economics for Cartels - we learn that it the previous economic principles are only valid when you fail to properly legislate yourself a revenue stream and business model.
That's idiotic. Of course we should be trying to cure any disease, and by invoking Godwin, suggesting that curing autism is similar to what Hitler did is possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And just because it was a bad idea in X-men, doesn't mean it translates to reality.
Should we halt all further study on any genetic disease now because it could lead to Heroes like super-powers? Clearly curing Huntington's and Down's syndromes would be tantamount to genocide as well...
Look, the fact that you've put together a coherent post clearly means you are a highly functioning autistic, but you of all people should know that there are autistics much much worse off than you. Also note, that this is not a neonatal treatment, if the child is minorly autistic it the cost and risk of genetic treatment might not be called for. And besides, maybe if Einstein weren't autistic his name would be mentioned with Michaelangelo or Mozart instead of Newton and Galileo.
No no no, that's the relative computer they are working on down the hall.
They don't get along well at all...
I've been wondering about that. Why the hell hasn't myspace done so already? It's a no brainer, (wait - did I just answer my question?) sell indie music for whatever the artist wants to charge, with a minimum price to cover bandwidth, and take a 20-80% cut.
The only danger is the guy who misrepresents the music as original - but I'm sure that NewsCorp's lawyers can find a clever way of shielding them from liability - after all the responsibility should lie on the seller to verify that he has the right to sell it.
Not only that, but if such a system were in place I might actually look into it. Any rating, ranking scheme would become more credible if people were actually paying for stuff. For instance - I like band A, what other music do people who buy band A pay for?
Apparently the argument isn't as transparent as the Economist says, (or maybe I'm just a bit tin-foilly today) but Jobs is a PR genius. If comes out against DRM, maybe he gets the French off his back, knowing full well that the RIAA will never allow him to sell non-DRM music. He's counting on not having to switch in a heart-beat. This way, he not only gets to look like "a champion of consumer rights," but also gets to maintain his lock in.
Apple would be fine without DRM, but the are better off with it - and even better with it while saying the don't want it.
I use my iPod at work, and I find that when I'm walking around with my earbuds in I am more likely to run into someone than otherwise. It's surprising how much you use auditory cues without even realizing it. The eyes simply aren't sufficient all the time - I can only make mine point in one direction at a time - whereas my ears are omni-directional.
Note, that I'm not stupid enough to walk around public streets with listening to my iPod, much less cross them.
Sorry, replying to myself - but I just realized what you were talking about. I think you were referring to the addition of t-butyl mercaptan, the odorant that gives gas its characteristic smell. While this greatly reduced the number of accidental deaths attributable to natural gas, it may have also reduced the number of suicides with this method because it just doesn't smell very good. However, I stand by my statement that suicidal people are pretty resourceful, and if there was an overall drop in suicides, my hunch is that it is a case of correlation, not causation.
T-butyl mercaptan was first added in the late 30s, when immediately before WWII and the womens movement gathered steam. If there was an overall drop in suicides, I'd attribute it to the fact that women, those most likely to utilized this method of suicide, felt more empowered, and were thus less likely to commit suicide at all.
Ummm - there isn't (much) CO in the gas until you burn it, and you can't remove the C without pumping straight H2 (bad idea). Nor can you make CH4 or anything else that functions as a fuel not an asphiyxiant.
On a more interesting note sticking your head in the oven may have been the preferred way for women to commit suicide, but the psychology of gender being what it is we don't even like to kill ourselves the same way. Women tend to commit passive suicide (pills, asphyxiation, etc. - exception cut wrists) while men prefer active suicide (hanging, shooting, jumping, etc.) So, while saftening the heating gas (if it were possible) might decrease suicides in housewives (unlikely, since someone trying to kill themselves tends to be pretty resourceful), it would do little to decrease suicides in men.
Your solution really only moves the problem a level. Someone could be found who will disagree with anything, so the onus is on the person who decides whether something is controversial or not. In some cases controversy is clear and should be treated from a balanced point of view (your Israel-Palestine example). In other cases the controversy is obvious, should be mentioned, but is not worthy of a dissenting editor, for example evolution, and then there are even more convoluted cases like global warming. Whomever decides who and how many editors a global warming article has, gets to choose the slant.
If you donate them to goodwill you can write off $33.00/CD on your taxes.
The problem is that the music industry is a prestige career. Most musicians who have a label aren't interested in getting by, they are prepared to starve for their art, until they make it huge.
The RIAA gives you a path to make it huge, it's not guaranteed, and will cost you your soul, but hey, they show you the way.
I think this is changing, and myspace etc. are playing a major role. Once a few bands do make it huge without a label, I think we'll start to see the end of the RIAA as we know it. The labels are publicity machines. If you can convince a label to promote you, you're in good shape, it isn't quite as clear what needs to happen for you to be a breakout success on your own.
Someone else was referring to the labels as lending institutions, which is interesting. It is true that they will front a band some cash, but what they giveth with one hand, and taketh away with the other.
The labels used to have three major roles: production, distribution, and promotion. Now they are promoters and possibly the worst lending institution in the world.
That is not true
Ugg, Normally I'm all for slamming big pharma - as a matter of fact let me do that now. I think that the fact that pharma spends more on advertising than R&D (which is true, in spite of GP's shilling comment) is shameful, and that neither consumers, doctors, legislators, nor shareholders should put up with it. And while this may seem like the perfect time to also take a dig at the patent structure - which is badly in need of reform - I don't think the monopoly meme is entirely appropriate here.
While it is true that each pharma company holds a monopoly on the drugs it invents, pharma is in no way a monopolized industry. If dumping money into R&D were so effective another pharma company with the same outrageous profits could do 5x more research, relying solely on academic journals to spread the word, and clean up with their vastly more and superior drugs. Unfortunately, pharma doesn't think (maybe rightly so) that an investment in R&D translates 1:1 into profit. Where, on the other hand, they seem to think (probably erroneously) that an investment in advertising translates more effectively into revenue.
Personally, I think that the solution involves regulating what, when, and how pharma can advertise, and severely regulating the way pharma's sales reps interact with doctors. But hey, as long as they can afford the good lobbiests, none of this will happen, so maybe we really ought to start with some decent lobbying reform.
I don't know if you're trolling or not, but since you've been modded so highly someone needs to correct these horrible mis-statements.
First, you have the antacid chemistry precisely backwards. The active part is the hydroxide. You know the part that isn't an acid... as in antacid. The aluminum is there in the Mylanta because they wanted a stable liquid formulation, which hyroxides usually aren't. Aluminum hydroxide is an insoluble salt, and very stable on the shelf, until it reacts with your stomach acids neutraling them.
Second, the "active" part of the concrete is the silicate. The calcium and aluminum are there because when they hydrate in the presence of sulfates (the gypsum) they act as binders. A binder is undeniably useful, but alternatively we could line our streets with mined chunks of silicate and if would be similar to concrete. The only reason we need the binders is so that we can grind it up for easy transport, slurry it for easy application, and it will still be hard like silicate when all is said and done.
The most efficient type of vertical axis windmill is called a Darrieus wind turbine. There is one big problem this type of windmill, it isn't self-starting. This means if it ever stops spinning, it has to be manually restarted. There is a way around this, you can add what is essentially a 55 gallon drum cut in half to the top, (a Savonius wind turbine ) which is another type of windmill, but it will significantly increase your drag - lowering your efficiency.
BTW I'm surprised at the quality of all the windmill and wind-turbine wikipedia articles.
Running a cooling technology from energy generated from the windmill would likely be very inefficient.
I'd guess that the windmill is optimized to create a pressure differential. The area with the lowest pressure expands and cools to below the dew point. Sounds interesting.
Well, one of us it thick.
I'm guessing it is the one who has no understanding of relativity.
There is no preferred reference frame. If Observer A says event 1 and event 2 are simultaneous he's right. If observer B says event 2 happens before event 1 he is also right.
I'm done with this, if you wish to remain willfully ignorant you are free to do so - I'd ask that you not make yourself look like an idiot by spouting off horrible misrepresentations of physics, but I fear that is a lost cause. If you want to know how the universe actually works read up on relativity. A Brief History of Time is a solid read, even if you're incapable of understanding mathematics as well as physics.
Ok, if information travels from point A to point B faster than were possible with light, then that information is traveling superluminally. It doesn't matter if no physical particle actually moved, the information still has.
Your clock example is telling, you don't incorporate relativistic effects, which is necessary to understand how superluminal = timetravel.
Imagine we have three clocks and synchronize them. Clock A1 stays in LA, Clock A2 travels to DC, where it remains, and clock B is traveling so that when it reads 0.00 it is over DC traveling away from LA. Note that clocks A1 and A2 will always be in agreement because they are not moving relative to one another.
A1 and A2 agree that a bomb went off (event 1) at 0.00. A1 sends a signal instantaneously to A2. When A2 receives this message it broadcasts via radio a confirmation. This confirmation is event 2.
Now some calculations. Since observer B is moving at 0.8c the Lotentz Factor is 2.236. Now, LA and DC are approximately 4000km apart. If we use the following coordinates x=0 for DC, and x=-4E6 (meters) for LA we find that according to observer B who is at DC traveling at 0.8c event 1 happens at 2.236*[0-(0.8c*-4E6)/c^2] = 0.0238s and event 2 happens at 0.00. It should be clear that if observer B could send a message instantaneously to LA after event 2 it would get there 0.0238 seconds before event 1 occurred. This is time travel and a causality violation.
I know you aren't making anything up, but you are misunderstanding sci-fi to be real physics. You might claim to not have anything to understand, but you are misunderstanding plenty.
Ok, so Mr. Hawking says, "if you can travel faster than light, the theory of relativity implies you can also travel back in time." Would you consider instantaneous to be faster than, slower than, or equal to the speed of light? If such a thing were possible it might appear to an observer moving with the information that he is moving at sub-light speed. But it would appear to an observer stationary with respect to the event to be superluminal (and they'd both be right).
If instantaneous is in fact faster than the speed of light, and traveling faster than the speed of light allows time travel, then doesn't it make sense that if you can send information faster than the speed of light you can also send information back in time?
The whole point of relativity is that time isn't absolute - it is relative. If observer Jack Bauer in LA sees a bomb go off, and sends an instantaneously (faster than c) to DC observer B traveling away from DC at relativistic speed would see DC receive the message before the bomb went off (and he'd be no less correct than Jack). If observer B sees DC get the message that a bomb went off and can send information instantaneously he could send a message back to Jack, even before Jack sent the original message.
This is a big part of why our current understanding of physics precludes superluminal travel and communication; if you allow superluminal communication you allow causality violations.
Now, I don't know what game you're talking about, and now that I've gone ahead and looked it up, if you want to refute me you'll have to find a reputable source. If you don't understand, either re-read the Hawking excerpt, or find another authoritative source.
I'm looking at my copy of A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. It seems that I've generally F'd up the simultaneity issue. But that isn't really the interesting portion. He does however equate faster than light travel with time travel. I'm going to quote a portion of chapter ten now. There was a young lady of Wight
Who traveled much faster than light.
She departed one day,
In a relative way,
Add arrived on the previous night.
Bravo sir, and welcome to my friends list.
It may be that to compare Goldwater to Bush is evil in this thread, or anywhere for that matter, (mostly because it makes Bush look like an idiot and a corrupter of his party), and I promise I'll stop... Just as soon as the republicans stop proclaiming themselves to be fiscally conservative, and stop calling themselves the party of Lincoln.
I hope you weren't under the impression that I actually thought there were similarities between Goldwater and todays neocons, I was just replying, possibly a bit heavy-handedly, to someone who was claiming that Bushes politics are attempting to "Starve the Beast."
Right, because Bush is a republican in the school of Barry Goldwater...
All you have to do is look at the Department Homeland Security to see how little Bush cares about small government.
The tax cuts exist for only one reason, so that Bush can pander to the fiscal conservatives - you know the ones that aren't so much for conservative government fiscal policy as they are conservative with their personal finances. In other words the same people who would have stopped voting Republican post-Reagan had the government not kept handing them money.
Ok, I'm not an expert at this, so what I say may very well be wrong, but I'll give it a shot.
How do you define present, or more to the point now or instantaneous? It may sound like a stupid question, but it's a tad tricky when you worry about relativity. I think that it is generally thought that something is happening now when light traveling from the event reaches the observer.
Which means that if you send information faster than the speed of light, that information gets there before the event actually happened. In other words, you sent the info back in time.
Mind you, this is all "as I understand it," and I'd love to have someone more knowledgeable throw their hat into the discussion.
Yeah, but not if the F-14 is being piloted by Chuck Norris.
Your right, the speed of information is limited to c, because as far as we know all information requires a carrier - and, as far as we know, the fastest carrier is light. As I understand it sending information at speeds greater than the speed of light would violate causality.
Imagine that there is a bomb in LA that just went off. Jack Bauer finds a way to make his PDA use quantum entanglement to tell this to Washington before they would be able to detect the event any other way. If some horrendous female actor, err, computer analyst found a way to disarm the bomb before Washington would receive a signal traveling at c from LA and transmit the data back it could get there before either the bomb went off or Jack sent the first message.
Of course if the bomb never went off Jack would have never sent the first message, and the universe would implode. But it would probably get good ratings - so all is well.
Someone please correct any injustices I've just done to physics.