Its just that they'll be fighting with robots and lasers and rockets and the threat of nuclear bombs and information over the internet.
I agree totally with the fade away thing. In information theory terms its society or rather societies control state entering a state of high entropy. We're already there, we're in the plane, the pilots dead there's no one at the controls, and the controls are locked.
As for skills, I'm an inventor - that means broad skill base, Jack of all trades, information jackdaw. I know a lot of the technologies needed to set up manufacture of silicon chips, could build a primitive plane out of wood and fabric, can throw in some rocket science, robotics, survivalist skills, computer engineering, basic machining and construction and general engineering. Given enough time and a few resources I could probably even set up a primitive nuclear program to build a reactor or even an atomic bomb. More useful for post apocalyptic survival might be that I am working on EMP shielding and have some (obsolete) skills in electronic repair, and considerable knowledge of autonomous machines.
The real problem for me though is that the project I am working on just might end up being the cause of the apocalypse (self aware machines) - in that case the main abilities I will probably need are concealment & hiding, and running from rampaging mobs..
I grew up in a rural environment. The basic thing you need for farming in a non-mechanised environment is lots and lots of muscle power. Especially for ploughing the fields. If we also didn't have burden animals like heavy horses or oxen (big cows) - things would get incredibly difficult incredibly quickly, and every farm would need hundreds of people just to do the basic work. Even then it would be pretty marginal if they could make enough food just to support themselves to survive. In the time before mechanisation those beasts of heavy burden were often worth more than the lives of people - simply because they were so important for making enough food for society to survive. Hunting gathering works but only with incredibly low population levels, go above that level and you rapidly start to run out of animals. A better solution might be the coast and fishing - but you can bet that a lot of others will be thinking of that too.
The real solution for farming is to fix the mechanised equipment and use that. That takes a little more than blacksmithing, say to convert a modern machine to run without its complex electronics would be pretty difficult. - the kind of thing that needs a good engineer and tinkerer. Making replacement parts is more difficult, especially if you don't have a local machine shop with lathes and milling machines and so on. And a bigger problem than the machines themselves is getting or making - or trading enough fuel for them to run. A lot of modern machines would need conversion to run on primitive fuels, and might have reduced lifespan..
Oops shatter another common delusion - on food, there are no 'unlimited' stockpiles of cans out there. For most foods and goods there's no more than a months margin in the current food supply, probably less than that. (Thanks to 'Just In Time' stock-holding.) Back in the cold war days I'm pretty sure some governments used to keep big emergency food supplies, but such things are very expensive to maintain and I don't think they really exist any more. FEMA has some but they're pretty limited, and there are stock-piles of emergency army rations - but they could not feed large numbers of people for more than a few days or weeks. Food is priority number one.
Ur... no. Your democratic style decentralised society will be ripe for conquest by those ruled despotically and hierarchically by kings and queens. The sharp point always beats the 'decentralised' surface.. After an apocalypse society will begin reforming in the way it always does, around armies and war.
Sorry you heard it from someone who got it wrong. The Roman punishment was to kill nine in ten in a regiment leaving one- the tenth man alive. (It was described as being one of the severest punishments and leaving 9 out of 10 alive wouldn't be that severe.)
Gaming, today its a really complicated market and I don't think anyone knows where its going. - - Apple and Android absolutely vast potential market, but very complex to market in, low margins and tight constraints (esp with Apple). Many companies in this market go bankrupt. - XBox One & PS4 traditional high end gaming machines. In current tough market high prices make sales slow. XBOX One is the obvious real reason for Direct X 12. - XBox 360 & PS3 still major competitors with much wider user base than new consoles. Slowing of advancement cycle means there is a smaller gap between these and the new machines than in previous generations. - PC Windows, in long term decline but still a pretty large market. Still technology pinnacle for games development. Big problem is extreme diversity in PC market with a wide range of software and hardware specifications, vast numbers of machines at lower end of market, extremely high costs at top end. Windows XP still very widespread especially in developing & third world markets. Long stream of bad decisions by Microsoft are not improving the platforms future.
- PC Linux. Still the up and coming PC games development platform, funny thing is that I remember people saying that 10 or 15 years ago. Still perceived as a hobbyists or computer geeks OS. - Steam Box. Very interesting, especially if Steam OS can run natively on standard hardware. - Mac. Still the future up and coming games development platform. People have been saying that for a long time but the success of the I-machines has given the Mac platform a large boost. Still has problems with being perceived as high end, high costs, high margins. IOS can run on PC's and Windows can be made to run on modern Macs so the separation between Macs and PC's has reduced considerably. - Hey that's not all, there are other players like the small Linux based consoles, and NVidea's thing and there are many small new players. A fundamental change in the hardware industry means that now even fairly tiny companies can develop their own custom hardware. - The Raspberry Pi is only an early example at one end of the range, things like advanced FPGA's, SOS and IP cores mean that we really don't know what we will see in the future but it has the potential to be 'amazing'. My own project / company is just art the start of developing a series of custom CPU's intended for running Advanced AI, and Strong AI systems.
To pick the winners and losers from all that you will need precognition, balls of steel, and a helping of luck. I guess that is why so many of the big players are floundering. My guess is that the market is so big now that most of them could win (still be in business in 10 years).
Its like a few years ago Microsoft seemed t lose some inner core of competence on all kinds of fronts. Firstly there was vista now Windows 8. Next there is Word and Office where the Older versions are more competent, easier to use with better features and less vapourware. Then there is Explorer - at the moment I am still struggling through with 11 but it is a disaster that is struggling with even the most mainstream web pages - the other day even Outlook/Hotmail complained about the browser being non-compliant and recommended a switch to an alternative. Then there is Media player which in the last couple of years had gone downhill steeply - basic things like interface design and basic player logic. Microsoft definitely has serious problems.
No I would say that the education system is terrible for the truly gifted child, often forcing them into a box and holding them back to the point where they give up. Where do those most gifted children end up, if their parents are rich and or they are lucky they do rise to the top. The ones who fall through drop out long before they ever hit university, and are probably lucky if thy end up flipping burgers. The ones who aren't turn to drugs or crime or drink or whatever or just spend their whole lives hiding away from society. I was one of those 'gifted' children and was given pretty much zero help - and I would describe the school system as a soul crushing prison for people like me. Its only a matter of how you escape and when. It pretty much destroyed me and I crashed and burned and spent the first 10 years of my working life on benefits and work programs. So yes if there had been a gifted program for me my life would have been totally different, and I know its the same for a lot of other people like me.
No, if you know and accept General Relativity you think you know what gravity is. General Relativity is not the only theory of gravity, general relativity makes predictions that are wrong, general relativity is only one interpretation of relativistic mechanics and there are others.. In particular GR fails for the physics of black holes for instance predicting that they should appear as externally massless or that at least the normal behaviour of gravity should totally break down. General Relativity fails in other ways - it predicts that the universe has no FTL Simultaneity but this has consequences - it makes a nonsense of astronomy (no distances between the stars) & 'proves' that the universe doesn't exist (except the Earth), and or is young (ie general relativity is the only scientific theory that currently supports creationism). GR is perfect at STL speeds but as it stands falls apart completely at FTL speeds.
I can put it much more simply, at its height over many years the Iraq occupation cost the USA an average of some $10 billion PER month - in direct costs alone. That works out at an average of $120 billion per year - just think what NASA could do with just that kind of money - from one year less in Iraq.
What was the final outcome of that war? anything good? anything of value? Is the middle east any a better place for it? Does the world like or respect America or the west more now than before? Who really benefited from that war?, Al Qaeda got an immense boost and lost a major enemy in the region, a lot of defence contractors got a little richer, we got some more oil. A lot of US soldiers and a lot more Iraqis died and.. it all seems a bit pointless to me.
NDA's can apply to an agreement whether the person knows about it or not. (At least here in the UK) People have been prosecuted or threatened with prosecution here for simply spreading gossip on Twitter that inadvertently crossed the line of some hidden NDA. The most pernicious kind of NDA puts knowledge of the agreement itself into the document so the parties are not even allowed to say that there is an NDA.
But is it disallowed to tell them before the settlement, when the agreement comes into effect?
Lawyers don't believe in physics so it probably is - or at least that's the way these things seem to be worded. How can you not tell someone if they already know? (Crazy!)
America has/ is a variable pitch civilisation. If you are rich it is the (best of the) first world, for the middle class its like the 2nd world (the old Soviet countries), for the poor its rather more like the third world. (No money = no/poor healthcare, no/poor education, poor food, no/poor housing, not much hope.)
We learned Standard ML in university, and my main complaint about it wasn't the weirdness of it or the impurity of the functional model, it was the fact that we were asked to do the complete task within the language. I never understood why they expected a full interactive program in FP, when instead they could have had a lightweight application layer in non-functional code that called stateless functions as required in order to manipulate and update its stateful data. Since the early days of computing, the ideal of programming was to be able to just tie prewritten blocks together to perform arbitrary functions, and every generation someone touts this idea as the next big thing, coming this year, but it never takes off. One of the reasons libraries can be such a pain to work with is because the internal stateful processing is unpredictable. Ban state, and the problem goes away, no?
I understand what you are talking about here, libraries create hidden functional layers that can create errors that can be difficult or next to impossible to track down or correct - after all the error isn't in your code, maybe not even in the library directly. In reality though getting rid of state is virtually impossible, at the end of the day state is how computers work.
This Wofram thing is interesting but from the demo is not really that much further towards a true AI. - The real problem is in creating a dynamic operator that can articulate all the functions needed and remain stable - and is reliable enough to run for years without crashing. It has exactly the same problem that libraries and other components do things that the programmer cannot predict or control. In many or most cases for Strong AI the underlying nasty is the Heap management system or sometimes the CPU stack - it is code at the lowest level that causes the biggest problems. In the end with the project I am working on the solution was to go even below machine code level to a custom hardware base - so my programming language is Verilog. These days its sometimes almost easier to design a custom hardware solution than a software one. Performance can be an issue but the solution then is to buy a faster chip. If you head towards the top of the range though things do get very expensive - the most expensive FPGA's on the market cost more than $10,000 - per chip!
Besides all the innumerable other problems with space elevators, at the end of the day they don't actually get you into orbit unless you go right up to the top - a 50,000 km (ish) journey. At 200 Km/h 50,000 km will take 10 days for each trip up and that will also severely limit the elevators total mass capability. Anyway the problem here is that to reach a stable orbit at lower altitudes requires huge sideways speeds, space elevators cant provide any of that sideways motion.
Closely related but even more serious is that due to conservation of momentum the vertical upward translation of a space elevator car creates a negative (backwards) lateral force on the elevator cable. (ribbon string?) This creates at two really big problems. Firstly the sideways force adds extra dynamic tension creating problems for stability with the car and increasing the overall load so requiring a stronger cable. Secondly and more importantly the sideways force pushes the whole structure backwards tending to destabilise its orbit and actually push it out of orbit. - And the great irony here is that the only solution ends up being a rocket attached to the counterweight - one almost equal in power to the rocket that would be needed to deliver the cargo to geosynchronous orbit directly from the ground. No elevators are almost COMPLETELY useless.
As for orbital rings, yes some of the technology looks formidable but they are at least easier than elevators and should have much better ability to deliver heavy cargos to Earth orbit - ie they might actually work. There are plenty of other ideas that are probably even better - like the idea of the Loftstrom loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . However at the end of the day the best solution is simply bigger and better rockets - say using gas core closed cycle nuclear rocket engines. A ship using these could get to orbit with one stage, deliver heavy cargo's then use retro braking to return to Earth - making it fully reusable, far cheaper, far safer, and vastly more capable than current tech. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... When you look at the kinds of rockets needed to get (anything substantial) out to the other planets or to most asteroids anything other than nuclear rockets is simply a joke - getting into Earth orbit is the easy bit.
I am not saying that time is not real merely that the part that is real is point like, the rest is treated as an abstract dimension. It is quite acceptable in Newton to plot a graph of motion against time and in fact many units (like speed) depend on division by time but it is always understood that the time line itself is an abstract thing - extracted from reality. That's the way I was taught it in school. Think of the face of a clock, the circle represents a part of the abstract time line but the hands only point to one point which represents physical time.
I am well aware there is no proof for my Strong AI theory - that is why it is virtually impossible to get funding or research money, however a working machine should change that once demonstrated.
As for forking - you are actually correct and if two completely identical systems ran in exact lockstep and were fed identical inputs and noise they would continue to remain identical. In effect the two would begin and remain as the same single system. However this level of determinism is inside the system and would not rule out free will - free will is actually an emergent feature of the system. (It would be like a person having two identical brains) In practice the design would prohibit any two systems from being identical, the inputs would not be identical, the internal noise signature would not be identical, close order feedback would not be identical. The machine is designed to partly self evolve and this process introduces a certain level of randomness and would be unique to each individual machine.
Sorry I disagree, Newton uses time as a purely abstract notional concept. In Newton there is a single reality and a single time that is physically real, and the past and future are merely extrapolations from that point. General Relativity is fundamentally different in that the overall structure of space is 4 dimensional and the past and future co-exist directly with the present. As for wormholes - firstly to enter a wormhole you must cross over an event horizon which itself is an FTL barrier. Also the way wormhole bridges behave depends on the geometry of the FTL space. In General Relativity there is no restriction so the two ends can go anywhere in time or space, but in restricted FTL type models the bridges can only connect to regions in the same time and may not be able to exist at all.
Would it help if I mentioned that my books included a book of Einstein's writings including his papers on relativity. (haven't read them recently) Plus Wikipedia is actually pretty good on physics, it is not a primary source but is at least as authoritative as most physics books, better written, and generally contains less errors.
I'm not a standard AI researcher, I have been working on Strong AI for 2 decades and am actually working on building the real thing. The theory from the 60's and 70's was mostly correct but the computers back then were very very slow and only had tiny amounts of memory. For the machine I am working on I am looking at a custom hardware platform (in FPGA) with a data bandwidth of between 1 to 10 billion operations per second and about 10 gigabytes of memory. That would be difficult even 5 or 10 years ago, and nearly impossible any further back. That is the main reason why traditional AI failed. : )
Oh dear! The way we operate Turing machines they mostly do behave as deterministic devices but just go and try injecting a little noise into the system, even the tiniest amounts - they certainly do not behave as deterministic devices then. In fact if you try to calculate the size of a computers potential state space it is so large that it is effectively infinite (maybe ~10^10^10^10^10) yet the actual physical state at any one time will only be a few points within that space and this ratio means that computers are theoretically potentially among the most chaotic least predictable things in the universe.
Ok the simple truth is that if you could observe free will completely then it would be fully deterministic - just as a computer would be fully deterministic if you could know and understand every atomic part of its functionality and operation. In practice neither is true. Computers do mostly behave deterministically because every part of the design is constrained by strict rules - but even so computers crash or make mistakes every day. And here is the crucial point, in any sufficiently complex system there are always 'bugs' or errors or noise - and these are a side effect that indicates a limit to absolute determinism.
Any sufficiently complex system is not completely deterministic and this includes the brain and mind - the argument that the classical universe is not fully deterministic is merely an extension of this argument. If an observer existed with infinite sensory power and memory and intelligence then it could probably mark the classical universe as completely fully deterministic - however such an observer is itself impossible. The classical argument fails precisely because it fails to look at the nature of the required observer.
As for General Relativity I only used the word 'implies'. General Relativity only implies a fixed past and future because the dimension of time is described as physically real and this means that the past and future have an actual physical existence. (4D space time) This is only one interpretation and even then the past and future can only be reached by crossing an FTL barrier.
As for my sources, New Scientist (from many years ago and more recently), Isaac Asimov's science extrapolation books, standard physics textbooks and places like Wikipedia. As for AI/computing, I have been interested in the field for almost 30 years and am pretty widely read. A useful starting point is Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind." or lookup 'Artificial Consciousness' in Wikipedia.
This is why the scientific study of the 'psychic' is probably the most controversial and 'dangerous' area that science has ever touched. Imagine if science had discovered that the psychic was real then used reductionism to reduce it all to first principles and logic and ultimately physics. It would literally be the end for religion, the death of mysticism and a direct confrontation against the nature of 'God'. Even worse imagine that 'God' becomes a technology - created and manipulated in the lab, used to build machines, an everyday commodity. Arthur C Clark's phrase "Any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic." becomes a cry to war for both sides, for the side of science and rationality, and for the religious and traditionalists- especially for fundamentalist religion.
An interesting conspiracy theory is that a group of scientists discovered the whole thing in the 1950's but were then banned from publishing it because it was so confrontational..
As it is classical physics had already ruled out the possibility of free will centuries ago, and QM only inserted a bunch of dice-rolling that could give the illusion of it. For free will to actually exist we must assume some sort of non-physical "soul" that can manipulate the outcome of the dice.
Have to disagree with you there, by the definition that I know that free will is a Turing Machine classical physics certainly doesn't stop it or rule it out.. It is only General Relativity with its fixed past and potentially fixed future that really disallows free will, but then if General Relativity is correct the universe basically doesn't exist anyway so the question is pretty moot.:)
Or a fifth one that General Relativity is incorrect and the universe follows an FTL model. In this case the present exists and so is fixed but the past does not literally exist (except as the integrated information state of the present) and so is basically flexible, as is the state of the future. Bells theorem does not apply to FTL theories anyway because they can go beyond local (STL) variables to absolute contexts - .
I have been working on an FTL model for ten years and it actually puts quantum mechanics as the only part of physics that actually exists - it locks relativistic space time to the quantum scale (4D at quantum scales, 3D at classical scales) - and it unifies FTL and quantum mechanics and relativity together into a single system. One problem is that C does not simply remain a simple constant but becomes a complex variable with directionality and complex multiple values in different contexts, one result of this is that the sharp division between FTL and STL physics is broken and our physics is actually a mixture of STL and FTL behaviour. (for FTL objects C is a minimum and limits at zero velocity) Another bigger problem is that the model breaks current algebra (using permutation) and this leaves it with a lot of broken mathematical wiring. The whole thing is based on the ridiculously simple equation 1 x -1 = -1 = i.. numbers simply need to contain internal superposition to make imaginary numbers work.. One interesting example is that zero is redefined as an imaginary number - and all imaginary numbers can be summed as zero - which redefines all photons as (imaginary mass) tachyons and reduces all EM waves to FTL behaviour of particles. There are obviously still many open problems and the work is only half finished. . .
Slashdot Mirror
Its just that they'll be fighting with robots and lasers and rockets and the threat of nuclear bombs and information over the internet.
I agree totally with the fade away thing. In information theory terms its society or rather societies control state entering a state of high entropy. We're already there, we're in the plane, the pilots dead there's no one at the controls, and the controls are locked.
As for skills, I'm an inventor - that means broad skill base, Jack of all trades, information jackdaw. I know a lot of the technologies needed to set up manufacture of silicon chips, could build a primitive plane out of wood and fabric, can throw in some rocket science, robotics, survivalist skills, computer engineering, basic machining and construction and general engineering. Given enough time and a few resources I could probably even set up a primitive nuclear program to build a reactor or even an atomic bomb. More useful for post apocalyptic survival might be that I am working on EMP shielding and have some (obsolete) skills in electronic repair, and considerable knowledge of autonomous machines.
The real problem for me though is that the project I am working on just might end up being the cause of the apocalypse (self aware machines) - in that case the main abilities I will probably need are concealment & hiding, and running from rampaging mobs..
I grew up in a rural environment. The basic thing you need for farming in a non-mechanised environment is lots and lots of muscle power. Especially for ploughing the fields. If we also didn't have burden animals like heavy horses or oxen (big cows) - things would get incredibly difficult incredibly quickly, and every farm would need hundreds of people just to do the basic work. Even then it would be pretty marginal if they could make enough food just to support themselves to survive. In the time before mechanisation those beasts of heavy burden were often worth more than the lives of people - simply because they were so important for making enough food for society to survive.
Hunting gathering works but only with incredibly low population levels, go above that level and you rapidly start to run out of animals. A better solution might be the coast and fishing - but you can bet that a lot of others will be thinking of that too.
The real solution for farming is to fix the mechanised equipment and use that. That takes a little more than blacksmithing, say to convert a modern machine to run without its complex electronics would be pretty difficult. - the kind of thing that needs a good engineer and tinkerer. Making replacement parts is more difficult, especially if you don't have a local machine shop with lathes and milling machines and so on. And a bigger problem than the machines themselves is getting or making - or trading enough fuel for them to run. A lot of modern machines would need conversion to run on primitive fuels, and might have reduced lifespan..
Oops shatter another common delusion - on food, there are no 'unlimited' stockpiles of cans out there. For most foods and goods there's no more than a months margin in the current food supply, probably less than that. (Thanks to 'Just In Time' stock-holding.) Back in the cold war days I'm pretty sure some governments used to keep big emergency food supplies, but such things are very expensive to maintain and I don't think they really exist any more. FEMA has some but they're pretty limited, and there are stock-piles of emergency army rations - but they could not feed large numbers of people for more than a few days or weeks. Food is priority number one.
Ur... no. Your democratic style decentralised society will be ripe for conquest by those ruled despotically and hierarchically by kings and queens. The sharp point always beats the 'decentralised' surface.. After an apocalypse society will begin reforming in the way it always does, around armies and war.
Sorry you heard it from someone who got it wrong. The Roman punishment was to kill nine in ten in a regiment leaving one- the tenth man alive. (It was described as being one of the severest punishments and leaving 9 out of 10 alive wouldn't be that severe.)
Gaming, today its a really complicated market and I don't think anyone knows where its going. -
- Apple and Android absolutely vast potential market, but very complex to market in, low margins and tight constraints (esp with Apple). Many companies in this market go bankrupt.
- XBox One & PS4 traditional high end gaming machines. In current tough market high prices make sales slow. XBOX One is the obvious real reason for Direct X 12.
- XBox 360 & PS3 still major competitors with much wider user base than new consoles. Slowing of advancement cycle means there is a smaller gap between these and the new machines than in previous generations.
- PC Windows, in long term decline but still a pretty large market. Still technology pinnacle for games development. Big problem is extreme diversity in PC market with a wide range of software and hardware specifications, vast numbers of machines at lower end of market, extremely high costs at top end. Windows XP still very widespread especially in developing & third world markets. Long stream of bad decisions by Microsoft are not improving the platforms future.
- PC Linux. Still the up and coming PC games development platform, funny thing is that I remember people saying that 10 or 15 years ago. Still perceived as a hobbyists or computer geeks OS.
- Steam Box. Very interesting, especially if Steam OS can run natively on standard hardware.
- Mac. Still the future up and coming games development platform. People have been saying that for a long time but the success of the I-machines has given the Mac platform a large boost. Still has problems with being perceived as high end, high costs, high margins. IOS can run on PC's and Windows can be made to run on modern Macs so the separation between Macs and PC's has reduced considerably.
- Hey that's not all, there are other players like the small Linux based consoles, and NVidea's thing and there are many small new players. A fundamental change in the hardware industry means that now even fairly tiny companies can develop their own custom hardware. - The Raspberry Pi is only an early example at one end of the range, things like advanced FPGA's, SOS and IP cores mean that we really don't know what we will see in the future but it has the potential to be 'amazing'. My own project / company is just art the start of developing a series of custom CPU's intended for running Advanced AI, and Strong AI systems.
To pick the winners and losers from all that you will need precognition, balls of steel, and a helping of luck. I guess that is why so many of the big players are floundering. My guess is that the market is so big now that most of them could win (still be in business in 10 years).
Is Windows 9 out yet? is it out yet? !!! Gods I hope 9 follows the pattern and is miles better than 8...
Its like a few years ago Microsoft seemed t lose some inner core of competence on all kinds of fronts. Firstly there was vista now Windows 8. Next there is Word and Office where the Older versions are more competent, easier to use with better features and less vapourware. Then there is Explorer - at the moment I am still struggling through with 11 but it is a disaster that is struggling with even the most mainstream web pages - the other day even Outlook/Hotmail complained about the browser being non-compliant and recommended a switch to an alternative. Then there is Media player which in the last couple of years had gone downhill steeply - basic things like interface design and basic player logic. Microsoft definitely has serious problems.
No I would say that the education system is terrible for the truly gifted child, often forcing them into a box and holding them back to the point where they give up. Where do those most gifted children end up, if their parents are rich and or they are lucky they do rise to the top. The ones who fall through drop out long before they ever hit university, and are probably lucky if thy end up flipping burgers. The ones who aren't turn to drugs or crime or drink or whatever or just spend their whole lives hiding away from society.
I was one of those 'gifted' children and was given pretty much zero help - and I would describe the school system as a soul crushing prison for people like me. Its only a matter of how you escape and when. It pretty much destroyed me and I crashed and burned and spent the first 10 years of my working life on benefits and work programs. So yes if there had been a gifted program for me my life would have been totally different, and I know its the same for a lot of other people like me.
At UK prices its $8.13 per US Gallon. I always thought ours was the most expensive..
After all, schools are basically prisons to keep the kids locked up while their parents are at work. .. :D
No, if you know and accept General Relativity you think you know what gravity is. General Relativity is not the only theory of gravity, general relativity makes predictions that are wrong, general relativity is only one interpretation of relativistic mechanics and there are others..
In particular GR fails for the physics of black holes for instance predicting that they should appear as externally massless or that at least the normal behaviour of gravity should totally break down. General Relativity fails in other ways - it predicts that the universe has no FTL Simultaneity but this has consequences - it makes a nonsense of astronomy (no distances between the stars) & 'proves' that the universe doesn't exist (except the Earth), and or is young (ie general relativity is the only scientific theory that currently supports creationism).
GR is perfect at STL speeds but as it stands falls apart completely at FTL speeds.
I can put it much more simply, at its height over many years the Iraq occupation cost the USA an average of some $10 billion PER month - in direct costs alone. That works out at an average of $120 billion per year - just think what NASA could do with just that kind of money - from one year less in Iraq.
What was the final outcome of that war? anything good? anything of value? Is the middle east any a better place for it? Does the world like or respect America or the west more now than before? Who really benefited from that war?, Al Qaeda got an immense boost and lost a major enemy in the region, a lot of defence contractors got a little richer, we got some more oil. A lot of US soldiers and a lot more Iraqis died and .. it all seems a bit pointless to me.
NDA's can apply to an agreement whether the person knows about it or not. (At least here in the UK) People have been prosecuted or threatened with prosecution here for simply spreading gossip on Twitter that inadvertently crossed the line of some hidden NDA. The most pernicious kind of NDA puts knowledge of the agreement itself into the document so the parties are not even allowed to say that there is an NDA.
But is it disallowed to tell them before the settlement, when the agreement comes into effect?
Lawyers don't believe in physics so it probably is - or at least that's the way these things seem to be worded. How can you not tell someone if they already know? (Crazy!)
America has/ is a variable pitch civilisation. If you are rich it is the (best of the) first world, for the middle class its like the 2nd world (the old Soviet countries), for the poor its rather more like the third world. (No money = no/poor healthcare, no/poor education, poor food, no/poor housing, not much hope.)
Non-disclosure agreement = criminal with money pays victim to cover up crime.
We learned Standard ML in university, and my main complaint about it wasn't the weirdness of it or the impurity of the functional model, it was the fact that we were asked to do the complete task within the language. I never understood why they expected a full interactive program in FP, when instead they could have had a lightweight application layer in non-functional code that called stateless functions as required in order to manipulate and update its stateful data. Since the early days of computing, the ideal of programming was to be able to just tie prewritten blocks together to perform arbitrary functions, and every generation someone touts this idea as the next big thing, coming this year, but it never takes off. One of the reasons libraries can be such a pain to work with is because the internal stateful processing is unpredictable. Ban state, and the problem goes away, no?
I understand what you are talking about here, libraries create hidden functional layers that can create errors that can be difficult or next to impossible to track down or correct - after all the error isn't in your code, maybe not even in the library directly. In reality though getting rid of state is virtually impossible, at the end of the day state is how computers work.
This Wofram thing is interesting but from the demo is not really that much further towards a true AI. - The real problem is in creating a dynamic operator that can articulate all the functions needed and remain stable - and is reliable enough to run for years without crashing. It has exactly the same problem that libraries and other components do things that the programmer cannot predict or control. In many or most cases for Strong AI the underlying nasty is the Heap management system or sometimes the CPU stack - it is code at the lowest level that causes the biggest problems.
In the end with the project I am working on the solution was to go even below machine code level to a custom hardware base - so my programming language is Verilog. These days its sometimes almost easier to design a custom hardware solution than a software one. Performance can be an issue but the solution then is to buy a faster chip. If you head towards the top of the range though things do get very expensive - the most expensive FPGA's on the market cost more than $10,000 - per chip!
I actually have discovered the secret to life the universe and everything. You would be amazed at how close you just came... : )
Besides all the innumerable other problems with space elevators, at the end of the day they don't actually get you into orbit unless you go right up to the top - a 50,000 km (ish) journey. At 200 Km/h 50,000 km will take 10 days for each trip up and that will also severely limit the elevators total mass capability. Anyway the problem here is that to reach a stable orbit at lower altitudes requires huge sideways speeds, space elevators cant provide any of that sideways motion.
Closely related but even more serious is that due to conservation of momentum the vertical upward translation of a space elevator car creates a negative (backwards) lateral force on the elevator cable. (ribbon string?) This creates at two really big problems. Firstly the sideways force adds extra dynamic tension creating problems for stability with the car and increasing the overall load so requiring a stronger cable. Secondly and more importantly the sideways force pushes the whole structure backwards tending to destabilise its orbit and actually push it out of orbit. - And the great irony here is that the only solution ends up being a rocket attached to the counterweight - one almost equal in power to the rocket that would be needed to deliver the cargo to geosynchronous orbit directly from the ground. No elevators are almost COMPLETELY useless.
As for orbital rings, yes some of the technology looks formidable but they are at least easier than elevators and should have much better ability to deliver heavy cargos to Earth orbit - ie they might actually work. There are plenty of other ideas that are probably even better - like the idea of the Loftstrom loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .
However at the end of the day the best solution is simply bigger and better rockets - say using gas core closed cycle nuclear rocket engines. A ship using these could get to orbit with one stage, deliver heavy cargo's then use retro braking to return to Earth - making it fully reusable, far cheaper, far safer, and vastly more capable than current tech. -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
When you look at the kinds of rockets needed to get (anything substantial) out to the other planets or to most asteroids anything other than nuclear rockets is simply a joke - getting into Earth orbit is the easy bit.
I am not saying that time is not real merely that the part that is real is point like, the rest is treated as an abstract dimension. It is quite acceptable in Newton to plot a graph of motion against time and in fact many units (like speed) depend on division by time but it is always understood that the time line itself is an abstract thing - extracted from reality. That's the way I was taught it in school. Think of the face of a clock, the circle represents a part of the abstract time line but the hands only point to one point which represents physical time.
I am well aware there is no proof for my Strong AI theory - that is why it is virtually impossible to get funding or research money, however a working machine should change that once demonstrated.
As for forking - you are actually correct and if two completely identical systems ran in exact lockstep and were fed identical inputs and noise they would continue to remain identical. In effect the two would begin and remain as the same single system. However this level of determinism is inside the system and would not rule out free will - free will is actually an emergent feature of the system. (It would be like a person having two identical brains)
In practice the design would prohibit any two systems from being identical, the inputs would not be identical, the internal noise signature would not be identical, close order feedback would not be identical. The machine is designed to partly self evolve and this process introduces a certain level of randomness and would be unique to each individual machine.
Sorry I disagree, Newton uses time as a purely abstract notional concept. In Newton there is a single reality and a single time that is physically real, and the past and future are merely extrapolations from that point. General Relativity is fundamentally different in that the overall structure of space is 4 dimensional and the past and future co-exist directly with the present.
As for wormholes - firstly to enter a wormhole you must cross over an event horizon which itself is an FTL barrier. Also the way wormhole bridges behave depends on the geometry of the FTL space. In General Relativity there is no restriction so the two ends can go anywhere in time or space, but in restricted FTL type models the bridges can only connect to regions in the same time and may not be able to exist at all.
Would it help if I mentioned that my books included a book of Einstein's writings including his papers on relativity. (haven't read them recently) Plus Wikipedia is actually pretty good on physics, it is not a primary source but is at least as authoritative as most physics books, better written, and generally contains less errors.
I'm not a standard AI researcher, I have been working on Strong AI for 2 decades and am actually working on building the real thing. The theory from the 60's and 70's was mostly correct but the computers back then were very very slow and only had tiny amounts of memory. For the machine I am working on I am looking at a custom hardware platform (in FPGA) with a data bandwidth of between 1 to 10 billion operations per second and about 10 gigabytes of memory. That would be difficult even 5 or 10 years ago, and nearly impossible any further back. That is the main reason why traditional AI failed. : )
Oh dear! The way we operate Turing machines they mostly do behave as deterministic devices but just go and try injecting a little noise into the system, even the tiniest amounts - they certainly do not behave as deterministic devices then. In fact if you try to calculate the size of a computers potential state space it is so large that it is effectively infinite (maybe ~10^10^10^10^10) yet the actual physical state at any one time will only be a few points within that space and this ratio means that computers are theoretically potentially among the most chaotic least predictable things in the universe.
Ok the simple truth is that if you could observe free will completely then it would be fully deterministic - just as a computer would be fully deterministic if you could know and understand every atomic part of its functionality and operation. In practice neither is true. Computers do mostly behave deterministically because every part of the design is constrained by strict rules - but even so computers crash or make mistakes every day. And here is the crucial point, in any sufficiently complex system there are always 'bugs' or errors or noise - and these are a side effect that indicates a limit to absolute determinism.
Any sufficiently complex system is not completely deterministic and this includes the brain and mind - the argument that the classical universe is not fully deterministic is merely an extension of this argument. If an observer existed with infinite sensory power and memory and intelligence then it could probably mark the classical universe as completely fully deterministic - however such an observer is itself impossible. The classical argument fails precisely because it fails to look at the nature of the required observer.
As for General Relativity I only used the word 'implies'. General Relativity only implies a fixed past and future because the dimension of time is described as physically real and this means that the past and future have an actual physical existence. (4D space time) This is only one interpretation and even then the past and future can only be reached by crossing an FTL barrier.
As for my sources, New Scientist (from many years ago and more recently), Isaac Asimov's science extrapolation books, standard physics textbooks and places like Wikipedia. As for AI/computing, I have been interested in the field for almost 30 years and am pretty widely read. A useful starting point is Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind." or lookup 'Artificial Consciousness' in Wikipedia.
This is why the scientific study of the 'psychic' is probably the most controversial and 'dangerous' area that science has ever touched. Imagine if science had discovered that the psychic was real then used reductionism to reduce it all to first principles and logic and ultimately physics. It would literally be the end for religion, the death of mysticism and a direct confrontation against the nature of 'God'. Even worse imagine that 'God' becomes a technology - created and manipulated in the lab, used to build machines, an everyday commodity. Arthur C Clark's phrase "Any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic." becomes a cry to war for both sides, for the side of science and rationality, and for the religious and traditionalists- especially for fundamentalist religion.
An interesting conspiracy theory is that a group of scientists discovered the whole thing in the 1950's but were then banned from publishing it because it was so confrontational..
As it is classical physics had already ruled out the possibility of free will centuries ago, and QM only inserted a bunch of dice-rolling that could give the illusion of it. For free will to actually exist we must assume some sort of non-physical "soul" that can manipulate the outcome of the dice.
Have to disagree with you there, by the definition that I know that free will is a Turing Machine classical physics certainly doesn't stop it or rule it out.. It is only General Relativity with its fixed past and potentially fixed future that really disallows free will, but then if General Relativity is correct the universe basically doesn't exist anyway so the question is pretty moot. :)
Or a fifth one that General Relativity is incorrect and the universe follows an FTL model. In this case the present exists and so is fixed but the past does not literally exist (except as the integrated information state of the present) and so is basically flexible, as is the state of the future. Bells theorem does not apply to FTL theories anyway because they can go beyond local (STL) variables to absolute contexts - .
I have been working on an FTL model for ten years and it actually puts quantum mechanics as the only part of physics that actually exists - it locks relativistic space time to the quantum scale (4D at quantum scales, 3D at classical scales) - and it unifies FTL and quantum mechanics and relativity together into a single system. One problem is that C does not simply remain a simple constant but becomes a complex variable with directionality and complex multiple values in different contexts, one result of this is that the sharp division between FTL and STL physics is broken and our physics is actually a mixture of STL and FTL behaviour. (for FTL objects C is a minimum and limits at zero velocity)
Another bigger problem is that the model breaks current algebra (using permutation) and this leaves it with a lot of broken mathematical wiring. The whole thing is based on the ridiculously simple equation 1 x -1 = -1 = i.. numbers simply need to contain internal superposition to make imaginary numbers work.. One interesting example is that zero is redefined as an imaginary number - and all imaginary numbers can be summed as zero - which redefines all photons as (imaginary mass) tachyons and reduces all EM waves to FTL behaviour of particles.
There are obviously still many open problems and the work is only half finished. . .