Hehe, funnily enough some people found necessary to defend your comment by saying that by changing the period of revolution of the Earth around the Sun you'd also change the duration of the day. Some people out here just can't help but try to prove wrong at all costs people who just proved someone wrong;-)
Sorry to nitpick again, but you really need a coffee and some refresher in classical mechanics.
lol, why do people on Slashdot insist so much on claiming with so much confidence that I'm wrong when I'm not?
From here : "Another proposed solution is to detonate a series of smaller nuclear devices alongside the asteroid, far enough away as to not fracture the object. Providing this was done far enough in advance, the relatively small forces from any number of nuclear blasts could be enough to alter the object's trajectory enough to avoid an impact. This is a form of nuclear pulse propulsion."
That means pushing an asteroid away by using the shockwave of an explosion as I described in the comment you replied to. Basically what you're telling me is that if the earth was let's say some floating flat thing in space and that a nuke exploded near it, it wouldn't push it away because it's not ejecting any mass.
By the way, I was talking about detonating nukes outside the atmosphere, thus you can do it above Mt McKinley it still won't change a thing to the sidereal day. As for your example you were right but only because the atmosphere would absorb the rest of the explosion's impact.
Well OK, I was mainly thinking about the sidereal day, which really is what varies in our leap-second problem, but yeah, you're right, you're pedantically right;-)
both the Earth's rotation and its revolution around the sun can be manipulated by ejecting mass at a chosen time.
Firing nukes isn't about ejecting mass, it's about using the blast of the detonation to propel yourself by reaction of the shock waves with the surface, and since no matter where the nuke detonates the force it will have on the surface of Earth will converge towards the center of the Earth, the Earth's rotational speed cannot be affected, and therefore the sidereal day couldn't possibly change.
Now as for the day length as we observe it, it would change if the period of revolution around the Sun changed, but I'm fairly confident that the person who wrote the comment I was replying to didn't mean to suggest making the Earth go faster around the Sun in order to make days shorter.
We could just fire off some nukes every six months or year to control the orbital speed of the earth around the sun.
Congratulations, you completely failed to understand the fundamental difference between a day and a year! A feat accomplished by few to this day!
What defines the day is the rotation speed of the Earth around itself, not the orbital speed around the Sun. Besides, as some other people pointed out, this whole leap second thing is irregular, or if you prefer, one step forward, one step back, because the speed of rotation of the Earth varies slightly.
I propose that we add another year every 5 million years.
Brilliant, this way in 2,502,007 we'll celebrate Christmas on the beach or around a forest fire! Not to mention the generations of people who'll have midnight happening in the middle of the day.
How about going the other way... leap microseconds. Many times during the day. Then nobody will hardly notice.
Actually it sounds like a good idea. As someone else suggested, the difference due to leap seconds is so small that only atomic clocks are precise enough to need to take them into account. And since we're all synced on atomic clocks anyways we could just make that happen transparently upstream.
If violent games lead to violent kids, then why has there been no upswing of violence in that demographic since the advent of violent games? Violence has actually declined
Well while the evolution of violence doesn't prove that violent video games made people more violent, it doesn't disprove it either, unlike what you seem to suggest, as violent video games could have very well participated to increasing violence, while for unrelated reasons crime would have dropped. In other words, this doesn't prove anything at all.
That's what I think misleads people, even well educated ones, when it comes to statistics. We tend to think intuitively that a statistic most likely signifies something (for example thinking that a drop in the number of arrests by the police means that less crimes are committed, as it really doesn't mean much at all) as we really can't say it does. Politicians love to exploit this.
Everything to the side of the car looks stretched and skewed.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but it's not the side that's distorted, it's the lower part of the image, just like the projection of a map. I think for it to look right they should project their "map" onto a sphere.
Yeah well, if we're talking about the companies mentioned in TFS we can be legitimately worried about that, indeed, but in the hypothetical case I described, then that wouldn't happen.
Look at what you're saying, "Nothing to worry about, our government would never lie, our corporations are honest."
Quit putting words in my mouth you fudophile communist hippie. I'm not saying the government is to be trusted, I'm just saying, it doesn't have to be trusted, you can make sure that things are government-proof, but you're not even thinking about such things, all you wanna do is whine about how the government and corporations are crooked and evil by nature. You just seem to enjoy fatalism and unnecessary cynicism a bit too much.
I don't have any credit cards. [...] And you'd be surprised at what I could find out about you from your social security number. [...]
Why are you playing my game. To help me prove a point? Thanks, I tell you "create FUD about this and that, you fudophile" and you just go at it. You'd do anything for some good FUD now, wouldn't you?
Duh. I was just reading about paraphilias and here's one that should have made it to the list : "Fudophilia : sexual arousal from hearing or creating FUD".
Seriously, it's like you guys really love FUD, I mean look at what you just said, it's like you didn't even think for a second about what could be done to prevent the abuses you're talking about, you're just going "OMG this is what's gonna happen if we do that" as if there was no way to prevent that. You just start imagining scenarios in which, in our case, data is as unprotected as possible and that the most evil person/group of persons you can imagine tries to exploit it, and then far-fetching the whole thing to apply it to something that would never happen in the first place. And not even for a second do you try to think up ways to prevent such abuses.
Your points are so ridiculous yet you just do see it, just try to apply that type of thinking to storing credit card numbers, entire bank accounts and social security numbers on computer systems and you'll see you'd get even better FUD out of it, the only problem being you'd know none of those FUDdy things happened.
Really though, listen to yourself, fudophilia makes your sound like a whiny drama queen.
I don't think so. While I agree that what's good for Linux is good for Apple, I don't think that Linux and Mac OS X are in direct concurrence. Simply because Mac owners will most of the time prefer Mac OS X, and that PC owners will rather move to Linux. I don't think that Apple will ever have a huge PC/laptop market share, mainly because of how particular what it sells is, although things are changing (mainly regarding the hardware incompatibility, now that Apple has moved to the x86 architecture).
MS would win a lot of fans if they made OS releases they used the same or less resources instead of massive bloatware
That's quite a thought-provoking comment, actually. Basically the business plan so far was to make more bloated an OS to make hardware go obsolete faster and make users buy the new OS and new hardware. But now the hardware can't catch up anymore, despite complying with Moore's law, just look at laptop CPU speeds, they haven't increased a lot during the last 5 years. So since the hardware cannot keep up with the bloatedness of the new OS, people don't consider the hardware obsolete anymore because there's nothing better in their price range, therefore they can't afford/don't want to put up with moving on to the new OS, and so the business model collapses.
Not to mention the free unbloated alternatives, because everybody knows that today's Ubuntu is a lot more grand-mother friendly than 10 years ago's Slackware to the point we can say that Ubuntu is comparably as grand-mother friendly as Windows.
I do too think it's cool, and the search for genes that might pose a health risk sounds like something great for public health. I don't know what it would implicate, but I suppose it might tell you how likely you are to have a certain type of cancer/cardiovascular disease/alzheimer and allow you to stay on the look-out for what you're the most likely to have.
Actually I hope one day (within the next 20 years) gene sequencing for health purposes will be made systematically for health purposes and stored in a super-high security database that other branches of the government/law enforcement couldn't get to, except of course via a special warrant emitted by a judge. If you think about it, it's not that unfeasible, even now. If there are about 4 million new-borns every year in the USA, and that performing sequencing really costs $1000 (but we can safely assume it actually costs less), then it would cost $4 billion a year, which makes it almost affordable (although probably not worth it, and surely not going to happen anytime soon).
It only works if the video is sufficiently aliased tho, because if the video contains no aliasing (that is, properly filtered so that no frequency components high than half the Nyquist frequency are aliased back under half the Nyquist frequency) then you can't do that, can you?
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe, funnily enough some people found necessary to defend your comment by saying that by changing the period of revolution of the Earth around the Sun you'd also change the duration of the day. Some people out here just can't help but try to prove wrong at all costs people who just proved someone wrong ;-)
Sorry to nitpick again, but you really need a coffee and some refresher in classical mechanics.
lol, why do people on Slashdot insist so much on claiming with so much confidence that I'm wrong when I'm not?
From here : "Another proposed solution is to detonate a series of smaller nuclear devices alongside the asteroid, far enough away as to not fracture the object. Providing this was done far enough in advance, the relatively small forces from any number of nuclear blasts could be enough to alter the object's trajectory enough to avoid an impact. This is a form of nuclear pulse propulsion."
That means pushing an asteroid away by using the shockwave of an explosion as I described in the comment you replied to. Basically what you're telling me is that if the earth was let's say some floating flat thing in space and that a nuke exploded near it, it wouldn't push it away because it's not ejecting any mass.
By the way, I was talking about detonating nukes outside the atmosphere, thus you can do it above Mt McKinley it still won't change a thing to the sidereal day. As for your example you were right but only because the atmosphere would absorb the rest of the explosion's impact.
I in advance accept your apology.
Now, all we need are the space elevators.
And all we need is to calculate how many billions of tons they should weight so that it'd do the trick ;-)
Oh OK, nice to know. By the way, you've got a typo in your signature.
Well OK, I was mainly thinking about the sidereal day, which really is what varies in our leap-second problem, but yeah, you're right, you're pedantically right ;-)
both the Earth's rotation and its revolution around the sun can be manipulated by ejecting mass at a chosen time.
Firing nukes isn't about ejecting mass, it's about using the blast of the detonation to propel yourself by reaction of the shock waves with the surface, and since no matter where the nuke detonates the force it will have on the surface of Earth will converge towards the center of the Earth, the Earth's rotational speed cannot be affected, and therefore the sidereal day couldn't possibly change.
Now as for the day length as we observe it, it would change if the period of revolution around the Sun changed, but I'm fairly confident that the person who wrote the comment I was replying to didn't mean to suggest making the Earth go faster around the Sun in order to make days shorter.
Congratulations, you ruined a funny, absurd joke.
Don't forget hilarious and priceless (that's a sarcasm).
We could just fire off some nukes every six months or year to control the orbital speed of the earth around the sun.
Congratulations, you completely failed to understand the fundamental difference between a day and a year! A feat accomplished by few to this day!
What defines the day is the rotation speed of the Earth around itself, not the orbital speed around the Sun. Besides, as some other people pointed out, this whole leap second thing is irregular, or if you prefer, one step forward, one step back, because the speed of rotation of the Earth varies slightly.
I propose that we add another year every 5 million years.
Brilliant, this way in 2,502,007 we'll celebrate Christmas on the beach or around a forest fire! Not to mention the generations of people who'll have midnight happening in the middle of the day.
Of course, we'll all be dead by 1012 so it won't make much of a difference either way.
999 AD just called, they want you and their obscure medieval new millennium fears back.
How about going the other way... leap microseconds. Many times during the day. Then nobody will hardly notice.
Actually it sounds like a good idea. As someone else suggested, the difference due to leap seconds is so small that only atomic clocks are precise enough to need to take them into account. And since we're all synced on atomic clocks anyways we could just make that happen transparently upstream.
If violent games lead to violent kids, then why has there been no upswing of violence in that demographic since the advent of violent games? Violence has actually declined
Well while the evolution of violence doesn't prove that violent video games made people more violent, it doesn't disprove it either, unlike what you seem to suggest, as violent video games could have very well participated to increasing violence, while for unrelated reasons crime would have dropped. In other words, this doesn't prove anything at all.
That's what I think misleads people, even well educated ones, when it comes to statistics. We tend to think intuitively that a statistic most likely signifies something (for example thinking that a drop in the number of arrests by the police means that less crimes are committed, as it really doesn't mean much at all) as we really can't say it does. Politicians love to exploit this.
Everything to the side of the car looks stretched and skewed.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but it's not the side that's distorted, it's the lower part of the image, just like the projection of a map. I think for it to look right they should project their "map" onto a sphere.
I haven't been there since 2002. I take it you can avoid that by going to Canada and crossing the border?
How exactly is this different to what the US does to foreign visitors?
They do that? How come I've never been fingerprinted then?
The singularity is just about strong AI. The singularity is about being able to create a greater than human intelligence
I know all that, thanks.
of which a neural interface is a key first step.
No. Strong AI is about.. *artificial* intelligence! That's what the fuck AI stands for. Nothing to do with the human brain.
Whatever, hippie.
Yeah well, if we're talking about the companies mentioned in TFS we can be legitimately worried about that, indeed, but in the hypothetical case I described, then that wouldn't happen.
Look at what you're saying, "Nothing to worry about, our government would never lie, our corporations are honest."
Quit putting words in my mouth you fudophile communist hippie. I'm not saying the government is to be trusted, I'm just saying, it doesn't have to be trusted, you can make sure that things are government-proof, but you're not even thinking about such things, all you wanna do is whine about how the government and corporations are crooked and evil by nature. You just seem to enjoy fatalism and unnecessary cynicism a bit too much.
I don't have any credit cards. [...] And you'd be surprised at what I could find out about you from your social security number. [...]
Why are you playing my game. To help me prove a point? Thanks, I tell you "create FUD about this and that, you fudophile" and you just go at it. You'd do anything for some good FUD now, wouldn't you?
Duh. I was just reading about paraphilias and here's one that should have made it to the list : "Fudophilia : sexual arousal from hearing or creating FUD".
Seriously, it's like you guys really love FUD, I mean look at what you just said, it's like you didn't even think for a second about what could be done to prevent the abuses you're talking about, you're just going "OMG this is what's gonna happen if we do that" as if there was no way to prevent that. You just start imagining scenarios in which, in our case, data is as unprotected as possible and that the most evil person/group of persons you can imagine tries to exploit it, and then far-fetching the whole thing to apply it to something that would never happen in the first place. And not even for a second do you try to think up ways to prevent such abuses.
Your points are so ridiculous yet you just do see it, just try to apply that type of thinking to storing credit card numbers, entire bank accounts and social security numbers on computer systems and you'll see you'd get even better FUD out of it, the only problem being you'd know none of those FUDdy things happened.
Really though, listen to yourself, fudophilia makes your sound like a whiny drama queen.
Linux needs to keep an eye on Apple, too.
I don't think so. While I agree that what's good for Linux is good for Apple, I don't think that Linux and Mac OS X are in direct concurrence. Simply because Mac owners will most of the time prefer Mac OS X, and that PC owners will rather move to Linux. I don't think that Apple will ever have a huge PC/laptop market share, mainly because of how particular what it sells is, although things are changing (mainly regarding the hardware incompatibility, now that Apple has moved to the x86 architecture).
MS would win a lot of fans if they made OS releases they used the same or less resources instead of massive bloatware
That's quite a thought-provoking comment, actually. Basically the business plan so far was to make more bloated an OS to make hardware go obsolete faster and make users buy the new OS and new hardware. But now the hardware can't catch up anymore, despite complying with Moore's law, just look at laptop CPU speeds, they haven't increased a lot during the last 5 years. So since the hardware cannot keep up with the bloatedness of the new OS, people don't consider the hardware obsolete anymore because there's nothing better in their price range, therefore they can't afford/don't want to put up with moving on to the new OS, and so the business model collapses.
Not to mention the free unbloated alternatives, because everybody knows that today's Ubuntu is a lot more grand-mother friendly than 10 years ago's Slackware to the point we can say that Ubuntu is comparably as grand-mother friendly as Windows.
I do too think it's cool, and the search for genes that might pose a health risk sounds like something great for public health. I don't know what it would implicate, but I suppose it might tell you how likely you are to have a certain type of cancer/cardiovascular disease/alzheimer and allow you to stay on the look-out for what you're the most likely to have.
Actually I hope one day (within the next 20 years) gene sequencing for health purposes will be made systematically for health purposes and stored in a super-high security database that other branches of the government/law enforcement couldn't get to, except of course via a special warrant emitted by a judge. If you think about it, it's not that unfeasible, even now. If there are about 4 million new-borns every year in the USA, and that performing sequencing really costs $1000 (but we can safely assume it actually costs less), then it would cost $4 billion a year, which makes it almost affordable (although probably not worth it, and surely not going to happen anytime soon).
OK sorry maybe it's because I'm tired but I completely fail to understand what you said.
Perhaps, but video like that would look like an Atari 2600 game
Video like that, you mean, a video with no aliasing as I described??
with real object lighting converted to always color every pixel into which it was sampled exactly the same.
Errr.. what?
A rectangular dot moving around the screen, except for the tiniest variations in natural lighting at very small/brief scales of timespace.
I didn't get that one either...
It only works if the video is sufficiently aliased tho, because if the video contains no aliasing (that is, properly filtered so that no frequency components high than half the Nyquist frequency are aliased back under half the Nyquist frequency) then you can't do that, can you?