So my question is really, "is the nonzero vacuum energy part of the overall-zero energy balance of the Universe (as in the various inflationary theories)? Or does it require some other explanation?"
Now that is a good question:) IIRC the vacuum energy comes from quantum field theory and the Uncertainty Principle - since any field can be treated as an infinite array of harmonic oscillators and everything can be represented as fields in QFT, you get a non-zero default energy from "empty" space since the lowest energy level of the harmonic oscillator is 1/2 h-bar.
Alternatively, since virtual particles can be created from nothing via the energy-time uncertainty relation, empty space is constantly seething with these particles, giving it a non-zero energy density again.
I think these are actually both saying the same thing but in different ways, but the exact details of QFT weren't something I did a lot of at university, so I can't give you a better explanaition. Anyway, yes, the Casimir effect has been proven experimentally, and does seem to be a way to extract the "zero-point" energy of the vacuum, although it is such a minute amount that the size of the plates would have to be very big, or you'd need a lot of them.
So really, after all that I haven't answered the original question at all have I? Damn:) I think that this is one of those things which might require a deeper understanding of physics than we currently have, incorporating relativistic and quantum mechanical effects as it does. Anyway, feel free to mail me if you want, this topic will die soon...
Please understand that I don't mean to be obnoxious when I say this, but it is my understanding that there is no mathematical requirement for a Calibi-Yau space to have a specific curvature (positive negative or zero).
Looking back at my post I can see how it sort of implies that, but that's not what I meant. Oh well, my poor writing skills are to blame there I suppose. Yes, the "extra" dimensions themselves are compactified into a Calibi-Yau space, but there is no requirement as of yet for that space as a whole to be curved - it is my understanding that there are a very large number of possible Calibi-Yau spaces which can be formed from compactification - selecting the correct one so that the Universe as we see it is produced is one of the major challenges of superstring theory, and one which might have to what for an underlying principle to be discovered.
Anyway, I was going to E-mail you about this but you don't have an address, so you might not get this. If you do, feel free to mail be about it. Thanks:)
As far as I can remember (and I'm too lazy to find my cosmology lecture notes), inflation was originally proposed by Alan Guth, then Linde sorted out some of the maths to make it work properly . ..
Doh! My poor memory there:) Yes, Guth did come up with the first idea and Linde then worked on it. Linde also came up with the idea of "chaotic inflation" whereby there is a kind of underlying "meta-Universe" in which chaotic effects constantly cause inflation to occur within small parts of it. Due to the speed of inflation preventing information from travelling outside of a given area, inhabitents of each inflated area would perceive that area as being the whole "Universe", just as we do.
More importantly, inflation theory *does* predict a flat universe, but this isn't necessarily the same as one with zero cosmological constant.
No, but IIRC current experimental constraints upon the cosmological constants place it as being no greater than 10^-120, which is a very small number indeed. Hence even if there is a cosmological constant, it's effects will be minimal and a flat universe will be equivalent to a matter density of omega = 1.
Anyway, sorry for the errors, it's been over a year since I studied relativity, and you know how easy it is to forget the little things:)
And apparently there is such thing as a "Free Lunch" ( as in beer ). We don't have to pay back the Big Bang with a Big Crunch.
The thing about this is that the Universe is a "free lunch". The positive energy of the Universe from all of its matter in whatever form is exactly balanced out by the negative energy from the potential energy of the gravitational force, and so the net energy of the Universe is zero.
Since the Universe has a net energy of zero, from the time-energy uncertainty relation h-bar >= E * t then the Universe could have been created from nothing and still exist forever without violating quantum mechanical principles. So in that repsect it truly is a "free lunch" and the question of its end is irrelevant.
Well, IIRC the cosmological constant has to be no greater than 10^-120 from current experimental evidence, which is the tighest constaint on a physical constant in physics. I'd say it was zero, but OTOH it stills needs a proven theoretical explanaition before it can truly be laid to rest.
I've read the book and done some research into superstrings, and the answer is no. The micro dimesions called for by superstring theory are curved, but in their own separate dimensions rather than in the 4 macroscopic dimensions of "normal" spacetime. The current thinking is that these microscopic dimensions form what is mathematically known as a Calibi-Yau space, which is next to impossible to visualise without being a 6-dimension being, whereas current cosmological evidence says that the macroscopic dimensions are flat. The two have distinct curvature due to their differences in size.
The problem here is that they are talking about the curvature of four dimensional space time.
Why is this a problem? Sure, it's impossible for us to visualise it, but mathematically it's no problem at all for anyone armed with the relevant techniques. The fourth dimension is a concept that's a century old, and has invaded the Western world's thinking in many ways. Just think of Picasso - a lot of his pictures were attempts to visualise things from the perspective of a 4-dimensional being.
Anyway, with the current superstring theories of physics there are a lot more than 4 dimensions - there are 10, 11 or 26 dimensions in this case depending on whether you're talking about basic superstrings, hetoric superstrings or M-theory. And again, these are impossible to visualise but easy to deal with mathematically.
And yeah, it's all very neat, and I'm just glad that physics is comprehensible enough that we can even attempt to understand it, let alone so that we can argue about it in places like/.:)
Since inflation theory (originally proposed by Linde in 1985 IIRC) predicts (well, demands might be a better term) that the cosmological constant be equal to zero, this is a victory for this theory, albeit one that practically everyone involved in cosmology expected a long time ago. But the question still remains, why is the Universe flat?
According to our current estimates of the density of matter in the Universe, the curvature of the Universe should be negative (producing a hyperbolic, "saddle"-like shape), producing a Universe where expansion continues forever and the Universe eventually dies from "heat death" as thermal equilibrium is acheived throughout the entire Universe.
But this measured value is out by a factor of 100 from the necessary value for the Universe to be flat (referred to as omega by cosmologists). Where is the missing 99% of the mass of the Universe? The point of this study is that the data is inconsistent with a lot of the more "exotic" models of this missing mass - topological defects, WIMPs and so on. But the data is consistent with the so-called "cold dark matter" models, which includes things like black holes which could be everywhere but are too dark for us to see.
Of course this is just one study, and the whole question is still open in a scientific sense. But this does provide some good evidence for inflationary theory as well as some additional data for cosmologists working on where the "missing mass" of the Universe is.
Yeah, the TB-303 can produce some truly amazing sounds, especially with a little bit of effects magic slapped on afterwards. I'm mainly into acid techno stuff, and some of the 303 sounds on that are truly unbelievable, covering a lot of the aural spectrum from bassy growls to soft pad-type sounds to metallic rings.
The trouble is, they are a complete nightmare to program and use. My old housemate had one, and I used to spend a fair bit of time playing with it, but it takes a long time just to get used to the step mode way of entering rhythms and then trying to tweak the filter and accent. Saying that though, I think the accent feature of the 303 is why it has lasted so well - it's quite different from most synths - the decay on the accent is unique AFAIK.
Hmmm... I don't know. I agree with you in principle, but there *are* certain events that we look back on and see as fairly large changes. I would argue that the Industrial Revolution, for example, is pretty similar to the 'Internet Revolution'. It's a dramatic change that, while not occurring overnight, still changes society dramatically in a brief period.
Sure, but again I think it's a matter of perspective. What we call the Industrial Revolution was really made up of lots of separate inventions and changes - steam power, mechanical looms, the building of railroads etc. To those living in those times each change would in of itself have seemed to be a "revolution" rather than the homogenous series of events we consider it to be today.
Similarly, the Internet Revolution has been and will be a series of steps - first the original ARPANET and E-mail, then the Web and hypertext, now maybe the increased multimedia and "interactivity" (notice the quotes there:) ). Even the author talks about steps within a revolution.
So whilst I agree it is possible to pick a certain series of "revolutions" and emcompass them within a grander revolution, I still hold that it is possible to talk of change as being a series of small steps making progressively more changes. Of course, it's a lot more complex than that really, but this is/. rather than real life:)
His premise this round is that a growing number of people in the world -- especially the people reading this -- are present at one of the greatest technological events ever. They're on the Internet Edge, right on the boundary between the past and an enormous array of changes being driven by the rise of networked computing.
True, sort of, but people living in every age where there is progress can claim that they are on the "edge" of a revolution. Looked at from a distance, the small peaks average out into a smooth, exponential curve marching ever upwards. To claim that the internet is more revolutionary than the internal combustion engine, the harnissing of electricity or even the first person to make a tool from stone is a conceit it is easy to fall into - that events happening now are somehow different from those that happened before.
This is understandable - after all, we're the ones living in those events and we see the changes as they occur all around us, and so they seem sweeping and important. But in a hundred years time people will look back at the "internet revolution" and compare it to the "far bigger" changes occuring to them and their society. It's all a matter of perspective.
The fact is that every significant breakthrough brings about changes in the way that society functions. It's just that the internet is the new technology that's happening now - in twenty years time it could be nanotechnology - which of course will make the internet revolution look small:)
I sincerely hope that you're trolling in this post and you aren't at all serious!
Okay, well, I was trolling, but it's an opinion I've heard many times before and still gets my goat. And yes, I'm a huge dance music fan, and I do write it myself (well, try anyway) so I'm not a complete bigot. Although the techno nazi is still alive and kicking where I live:)
Especially in detroit, stuff coming out from Underground Resistance, Planet E, Transmat and Metroplex are as close to undiscovered genius as you can get, involving a great deal of raw creativity and expression.
Agreed - I've got Juan Atkin's MasterMix Vol 1. here at work on MP3, and a few bits of Detroit at home - Jeff Mills, Fumiya Tanaka etc. Personally I'm more of a hard techno and acid techno fan, but I like it all. And there is some amazing stuff being produced nowadays, a hell of a lot more creative than simple 4 to the floor stuff.
And, having tried to write some of this stuff myself I can agree that it's a lot more difficult than it looks - you need a solid understanding of how synths work and how music is made to get anything decent. And my personal opinion is that dance music as a whole is far closer musically to "classical" music than anything else we hear today. After all, most guitar-based bands have a fairly simple structure - a drummer, 2 leads, 1 bass and a vocalist (or variations on this theme) whereas dance music can have dozens of separate layers built up on top each other.
There are rumors of a follow-up series to the lost cities of gold (they still had 6 to find:), and a movie being made out of Ulysses 31..
Excellent - those cartoons haven't been bettered from what I see of kid's cartoons in the last few years. I remember Ulysses 31 fondly - it had an eerie feel to it (apart from Nono the robot - ugh) that was only equalled by the original Moomins. And the lost cities were great as well - interesting story and nice ideas.
I am actually pondering buying rights of one of them, in a couple years if what I'm doing right now works out as expected.
Now that would be a great idea - if you ever do then post it here on/. - I'm sure you'll get loads of takers for them. And I do remember the title songs as well, but I won't even try and post them here:)
And as for Pokemon, hey, it's not as bad as people make out IMHO. It's not art, but neither was Inspector Gadget really:)
By adding new features I mean things like adding object orientation to the language core, rather than new packages, which is quite straightfoward. Whew, my karma's taking a beating here - maybe I should stop saying what I think:)
To only look at Perl as a scripting language is to discount a lot of good and well implemented features in Perl.
No, Perl was originally designed with a purpose in mind, and as with all projects, when it is taken beyond that purpose things start to get messy. If you want something more than a scripting language then you need to find something designed for that purpose, rather than a useful tool that has been pushed beyond its limits.
I have used VB, C/C++, Python, RPG, COBOL, and Perl and I have not seen a language that wraps everything I need for systems administration and reporting, etc into one powerful package.
Powerful, maybe, but elegant? Not really. Perl unfortunately wasn't initially designed to have a consistant mechanism for adding new features, and as such they have been added in a rather ad hoc manner. There's no reason why it shouldn't have the same features but in a more consistant manner.
Perl is difficult to learn for anyone used to a different language with a more regular syntax, and this surely puts people off. Compare this with Python, which may not be quite as powerful, but has a consistant feel about it where new features can easily be added. Something like this is what Perl needs - consistancy and power together at last.
Am I the only one who thinks that the Perl team are trying too hard to make Perl all things to all programmers? I mean, Perl was designed to do simple scripting and text processing tasks, which it does well, but each new release sees some new "feature" tacked on to the end of the language without any real care over whether it is actually required or not.
Perl was never designed to handle classes, threading, lvalue subroutines and so on. I can understand the need for Unicode support - this is in keeping with the whole "Practical Exraction and Report Language" thing, but the rest seems unnecessary for what Perl should be. And unfortunately, Larry Wall et al., haven't never considered these issues in the first place, have added them to the language with little or no care or elegance.
What Perl needs is a bit of a rethink - go back to the core of what it is supposed to do and make sure that it does that as easily as possible. It doesn't need object orientation or threading - they are extraneous and bloated. Unfortunately, at the rate Perl's bloat is increasing, it'll soon be the Visual Basic of the *nix world, with plenty of "cool features" that nobody needs.
Meaning, what does a completely commercial company like Micro~1 hope to gain from setting up such a server ? Makes me wonder...
A lot of experiance in setting up an extremely large web-based DB with a potentially large user base. I'm sure they'll be trying out new stuff, and it makes great PR to claim that Win2K can run all this stuff. Plus, it's just great PR in general.
The Theory of Relativity does not say anything about time travel, and about travelling faster than light it proves nothing, that's why it's called "theory".
General Relativity does say something about time travel - it says that it is theoretically possible. The most obvious method is using wormholes and time dilation, but you can also acheive a similar effect using a sufficiently large rotating cylindrical mass - a cosmic string comes to mind. The mass of the cylinder drags spacetime around itself so that the time axis is swapped with one of the spatial ones, and time travel becomes possible. Of course, this is incredibly dangerous, but possible in theory.
And tachyons aren't forbidden by relativity IIRC. At zero energy they have infinite velocity, and as they gain energy they slow down, asymptotically approaching the speed of light from the other side. A tachyon can never become a tardion and vice versa, but both can exist under relativity. Tachyons are probably going to be ruled out by quantum effects however - superstring theory is free from the need for them.
I know it's been said before, but the thing about aliens is, well, they're alien. The thing with such predictions like the Drake equation is that they are biased to towards Earth-type life ie. planet based. If on the other hand you can assume that life is possible in any number of alternative configurations, with the only real criterion being a minimum level of complexity, then you allow for life to exist in all kinds of bizarre forms.
I can't remember the name, but one of the short stories in Stephen Baxter's book Vacuum Diagrams is about a life form that arises out of mathematical logic trees creating using quantum effects - truly strange and well worth a read if you're into hard SF.
Quite what information is transmitted back-to-base over this link is unclear, although it's a safe bet they're tracking their slave^W customers' viewing habits.
Well, actually the point of it is supposed to be for the E-mail and interactive stuff IIRC, since you can't upload over the satellite dish. Of course, they might be sending stuff over it apart from that, but our Digibox was disconnected from the phone for long periods at a time without a problem...
How does the European Convention on Human Rights affect this? IIRC it's been signed into law here in the UK, but I'm not sure what effects it has on the situation. I think Article 10 is the important one, and Articles 17 and 18 as well, but our DNS server is down here at I can't provide a better link or look at it. Thanks.
They read the Daily Mail, a newspaper that is so sensationalist and narrow minded that it seems unable to post any other frontpage story apart from 'Justice Being Done' and the 'Waste of Taxpayers Money'
Agreed. There's a fake TV program at TV Go Home where people are stranded on a desert island with no news except for the Daily Mail, and it takes the piss out of the bigoted trash that it produces on a daily basis. IMHO it is the single worst paper in this country since it attempts to be a "serious" paper whilst being full of the most BS ever.
Britain is a nation of winging penny pinchers. The average man in the street reads the Daily Mail, has 2.2 children and gets a new car every year or so. He lives in his shoebox house and doesn't think that the matter of censorship really has any effect to him.
True, but also not true. It depends on what part of society you're talking about. The younger generation is a lot less like this, and change will come slowly (as ever) when these people who have grown up with things like the net eventually get into positions where things can change. However, the national apathy will most likely prevent anything radical from happening - expect a slow osmosis of change at best.
I think that Rob et al. are making some changes to the Slash code in order to allow for some anti-spam measures. The reason I think is that April 20 is coming up, the anniversary of Columbine, and it threatens to become a complete spam-fest. The account being pushed to -2 on all posts is one way of quickly "removing" a lot of spam - there's also a maximum no. of posts per day based on IP address in place now as well.
We are an envious, unimaginative, reactive, bigotted, bitter society. We do not reward success; rather we punish it. We do not understand ideas of freedom and self-expression, but we attack their proponents bitterly.
Well, having lived in the UK all of my life I know where you're coming from with this rant, but I think you're overstating it, and I definitely think you're bitter about something;)
What you're describing does exist certainly, it's what is affectionately known as "Middle England". But it's not all of the country by any means, and to say it is isn't fair to the many people who aren't like that. Britian has a problem with people like this, but so does practically every country in the Western world.
The unfortunate thing about Britain is the general apathy which we have. There are very few people who are willing to do something about issues (whatever they may be), and people don't care about things which don't directly affect them. This is probably the worst thing we have as a nation, and the reason why things like this occur.
In short, you are bitter, boring, suspicious, reactive, a sheep, and a hypocrite. You are also, sad to say, pretty stupid. Most importantly, you never let your lack of knowledge on a particular subject cloud your judgement.
Okay, this is just over the top, a rediculous generalisation and all round flamebait. Not everyone is the same, and not everyone is like this. It certainly doesn't help any when stereotypes like this are brought out.
Slashdot Mirror
So my question is really, "is the nonzero vacuum energy part of the overall-zero energy balance of the Universe (as in the various inflationary theories)? Or does it require some other explanation?"
Now that is a good question :) IIRC the vacuum energy comes from quantum field theory and the Uncertainty Principle - since any field can be treated as an infinite array of harmonic oscillators and everything can be represented as fields in QFT, you get a non-zero default energy from "empty" space since the lowest energy level of the harmonic oscillator is 1/2 h-bar.
Alternatively, since virtual particles can be created from nothing via the energy-time uncertainty relation, empty space is constantly seething with these particles, giving it a non-zero energy density again.
I think these are actually both saying the same thing but in different ways, but the exact details of QFT weren't something I did a lot of at university, so I can't give you a better explanaition. Anyway, yes, the Casimir effect has been proven experimentally, and does seem to be a way to extract the "zero-point" energy of the vacuum, although it is such a minute amount that the size of the plates would have to be very big, or you'd need a lot of them.
So really, after all that I haven't answered the original question at all have I? Damn :) I think that this is one of those things which might require a deeper understanding of physics than we currently have, incorporating relativistic and quantum mechanical effects as it does. Anyway, feel free to mail me if you want, this topic will die soon...
Please understand that I don't mean to be obnoxious when I say this, but it is my understanding that there is no mathematical requirement for a Calibi-Yau space to have a specific curvature (positive negative or zero).
Looking back at my post I can see how it sort of implies that, but that's not what I meant. Oh well, my poor writing skills are to blame there I suppose. Yes, the "extra" dimensions themselves are compactified into a Calibi-Yau space, but there is no requirement as of yet for that space as a whole to be curved - it is my understanding that there are a very large number of possible Calibi-Yau spaces which can be formed from compactification - selecting the correct one so that the Universe as we see it is produced is one of the major challenges of superstring theory, and one which might have to what for an underlying principle to be discovered.
Anyway, I was going to E-mail you about this but you don't have an address, so you might not get this. If you do, feel free to mail be about it. Thanks :)
As far as I can remember (and I'm too lazy to find my cosmology lecture notes), inflation was originally proposed by Alan Guth, then Linde sorted out some of the maths to make it work properly . . .
Doh! My poor memory there :) Yes, Guth did come up with the first idea and Linde then worked on it. Linde also came up with the idea of "chaotic inflation" whereby there is a kind of underlying "meta-Universe" in which chaotic effects constantly cause inflation to occur within small parts of it. Due to the speed of inflation preventing information from travelling outside of a given area, inhabitents of each inflated area would perceive that area as being the whole "Universe", just as we do.
More importantly, inflation theory *does* predict a flat universe, but this isn't necessarily the same as one with zero cosmological constant.
No, but IIRC current experimental constraints upon the cosmological constants place it as being no greater than 10^-120, which is a very small number indeed. Hence even if there is a cosmological constant, it's effects will be minimal and a flat universe will be equivalent to a matter density of omega = 1.
Anyway, sorry for the errors, it's been over a year since I studied relativity, and you know how easy it is to forget the little things :)
And apparently there is such thing as a "Free Lunch" ( as in beer ). We don't have to pay back the Big Bang with a Big Crunch.
The thing about this is that the Universe is a "free lunch". The positive energy of the Universe from all of its matter in whatever form is exactly balanced out by the negative energy from the potential energy of the gravitational force, and so the net energy of the Universe is zero.
Since the Universe has a net energy of zero, from the time-energy uncertainty relation h-bar >= E * t then the Universe could have been created from nothing and still exist forever without violating quantum mechanical principles. So in that repsect it truly is a "free lunch" and the question of its end is irrelevant.
Well, IIRC the cosmological constant has to be no greater than 10^-120 from current experimental evidence, which is the tighest constaint on a physical constant in physics. I'd say it was zero, but OTOH it stills needs a proven theoretical explanaition before it can truly be laid to rest.
I've read the book and done some research into superstrings, and the answer is no. The micro dimesions called for by superstring theory are curved, but in their own separate dimensions rather than in the 4 macroscopic dimensions of "normal" spacetime. The current thinking is that these microscopic dimensions form what is mathematically known as a Calibi-Yau space, which is next to impossible to visualise without being a 6-dimension being, whereas current cosmological evidence says that the macroscopic dimensions are flat. The two have distinct curvature due to their differences in size.
The problem here is that they are talking about the curvature of four dimensional space time.
Why is this a problem? Sure, it's impossible for us to visualise it, but mathematically it's no problem at all for anyone armed with the relevant techniques. The fourth dimension is a concept that's a century old, and has invaded the Western world's thinking in many ways. Just think of Picasso - a lot of his pictures were attempts to visualise things from the perspective of a 4-dimensional being.
Anyway, with the current superstring theories of physics there are a lot more than 4 dimensions - there are 10, 11 or 26 dimensions in this case depending on whether you're talking about basic superstrings, hetoric superstrings or M-theory. And again, these are impossible to visualise but easy to deal with mathematically.
And yeah, it's all very neat, and I'm just glad that physics is comprehensible enough that we can even attempt to understand it, let alone so that we can argue about it in places like /. :)
Since inflation theory (originally proposed by Linde in 1985 IIRC) predicts (well, demands might be a better term) that the cosmological constant be equal to zero, this is a victory for this theory, albeit one that practically everyone involved in cosmology expected a long time ago. But the question still remains, why is the Universe flat?
According to our current estimates of the density of matter in the Universe, the curvature of the Universe should be negative (producing a hyperbolic, "saddle"-like shape), producing a Universe where expansion continues forever and the Universe eventually dies from "heat death" as thermal equilibrium is acheived throughout the entire Universe.
But this measured value is out by a factor of 100 from the necessary value for the Universe to be flat (referred to as omega by cosmologists). Where is the missing 99% of the mass of the Universe? The point of this study is that the data is inconsistent with a lot of the more "exotic" models of this missing mass - topological defects, WIMPs and so on. But the data is consistent with the so-called "cold dark matter" models, which includes things like black holes which could be everywhere but are too dark for us to see.
Of course this is just one study, and the whole question is still open in a scientific sense. But this does provide some good evidence for inflationary theory as well as some additional data for cosmologists working on where the "missing mass" of the Universe is.
Yeah, the TB-303 can produce some truly amazing sounds, especially with a little bit of effects magic slapped on afterwards. I'm mainly into acid techno stuff, and some of the 303 sounds on that are truly unbelievable, covering a lot of the aural spectrum from bassy growls to soft pad-type sounds to metallic rings.
The trouble is, they are a complete nightmare to program and use. My old housemate had one, and I used to spend a fair bit of time playing with it, but it takes a long time just to get used to the step mode way of entering rhythms and then trying to tweak the filter and accent. Saying that though, I think the accent feature of the 303 is why it has lasted so well - it's quite different from most synths - the decay on the accent is unique AFAIK.
Hmmm... I don't know. I agree with you in principle, but there *are* certain events that we look back on and see as fairly large changes. I would argue that the Industrial Revolution, for example, is pretty similar to the 'Internet Revolution'. It's a dramatic change that, while not occurring overnight, still changes society dramatically in a brief period.
Sure, but again I think it's a matter of perspective. What we call the Industrial Revolution was really made up of lots of separate inventions and changes - steam power, mechanical looms, the building of railroads etc. To those living in those times each change would in of itself have seemed to be a "revolution" rather than the homogenous series of events we consider it to be today.
Similarly, the Internet Revolution has been and will be a series of steps - first the original ARPANET and E-mail, then the Web and hypertext, now maybe the increased multimedia and "interactivity" (notice the quotes there :) ). Even the author talks about steps within a revolution.
So whilst I agree it is possible to pick a certain series of "revolutions" and emcompass them within a grander revolution, I still hold that it is possible to talk of change as being a series of small steps making progressively more changes. Of course, it's a lot more complex than that really, but this is /. rather than real life :)
His premise this round is that a growing number of people in the world -- especially the people reading this -- are present at one of the greatest technological events ever. They're on the Internet Edge, right on the boundary between the past and an enormous array of changes being driven by the rise of networked computing.
True, sort of, but people living in every age where there is progress can claim that they are on the "edge" of a revolution. Looked at from a distance, the small peaks average out into a smooth, exponential curve marching ever upwards. To claim that the internet is more revolutionary than the internal combustion engine, the harnissing of electricity or even the first person to make a tool from stone is a conceit it is easy to fall into - that events happening now are somehow different from those that happened before.
This is understandable - after all, we're the ones living in those events and we see the changes as they occur all around us, and so they seem sweeping and important. But in a hundred years time people will look back at the "internet revolution" and compare it to the "far bigger" changes occuring to them and their society. It's all a matter of perspective.
The fact is that every significant breakthrough brings about changes in the way that society functions. It's just that the internet is the new technology that's happening now - in twenty years time it could be nanotechnology - which of course will make the internet revolution look small :)
I sincerely hope that you're trolling in this post and you aren't at all serious!
Okay, well, I was trolling, but it's an opinion I've heard many times before and still gets my goat. And yes, I'm a huge dance music fan, and I do write it myself (well, try anyway) so I'm not a complete bigot. Although the techno nazi is still alive and kicking where I live :)
Especially in detroit, stuff coming out from Underground Resistance, Planet E, Transmat and Metroplex are as close to undiscovered genius as you can get, involving a great deal of raw creativity and expression.
Agreed - I've got Juan Atkin's MasterMix Vol 1. here at work on MP3, and a few bits of Detroit at home - Jeff Mills, Fumiya Tanaka etc. Personally I'm more of a hard techno and acid techno fan, but I like it all. And there is some amazing stuff being produced nowadays, a hell of a lot more creative than simple 4 to the floor stuff.
And, having tried to write some of this stuff myself I can agree that it's a lot more difficult than it looks - you need a solid understanding of how synths work and how music is made to get anything decent. And my personal opinion is that dance music as a whole is far closer musically to "classical" music than anything else we hear today. After all, most guitar-based bands have a fairly simple structure - a drummer, 2 leads, 1 bass and a vocalist (or variations on this theme) whereas dance music can have dozens of separate layers built up on top each other.
There are rumors of a follow-up series to the lost cities of gold (they still had 6 to find :), and a movie being made out of Ulysses 31..
Excellent - those cartoons haven't been bettered from what I see of kid's cartoons in the last few years. I remember Ulysses 31 fondly - it had an eerie feel to it (apart from Nono the robot - ugh) that was only equalled by the original Moomins. And the lost cities were great as well - interesting story and nice ideas.
I am actually pondering buying rights of one of them, in a couple years if what I'm doing right now works out as expected.
Now that would be a great idea - if you ever do then post it here on /. - I'm sure you'll get loads of takers for them. And I do remember the title songs as well, but I won't even try and post them here :)
And as for Pokemon, hey, it's not as bad as people make out IMHO. It's not art, but neither was Inspector Gadget really :)
By adding new features I mean things like adding object orientation to the language core, rather than new packages, which is quite straightfoward. Whew, my karma's taking a beating here - maybe I should stop saying what I think :)
To only look at Perl as a scripting language is to discount a lot of good and well implemented features in Perl.
No, Perl was originally designed with a purpose in mind, and as with all projects, when it is taken beyond that purpose things start to get messy. If you want something more than a scripting language then you need to find something designed for that purpose, rather than a useful tool that has been pushed beyond its limits.
I have used VB, C/C++, Python, RPG, COBOL, and Perl and I have not seen a language that wraps everything I need for systems administration and reporting, etc into one powerful package.
Powerful, maybe, but elegant? Not really. Perl unfortunately wasn't initially designed to have a consistant mechanism for adding new features, and as such they have been added in a rather ad hoc manner. There's no reason why it shouldn't have the same features but in a more consistant manner.
Perl is difficult to learn for anyone used to a different language with a more regular syntax, and this surely puts people off. Compare this with Python, which may not be quite as powerful, but has a consistant feel about it where new features can easily be added. Something like this is what Perl needs - consistancy and power together at last.
Am I the only one who thinks that the Perl team are trying too hard to make Perl all things to all programmers? I mean, Perl was designed to do simple scripting and text processing tasks, which it does well, but each new release sees some new "feature" tacked on to the end of the language without any real care over whether it is actually required or not.
Perl was never designed to handle classes, threading, lvalue subroutines and so on. I can understand the need for Unicode support - this is in keeping with the whole "Practical Exraction and Report Language" thing, but the rest seems unnecessary for what Perl should be. And unfortunately, Larry Wall et al., haven't never considered these issues in the first place, have added them to the language with little or no care or elegance.
What Perl needs is a bit of a rethink - go back to the core of what it is supposed to do and make sure that it does that as easily as possible. It doesn't need object orientation or threading - they are extraneous and bloated. Unfortunately, at the rate Perl's bloat is increasing, it'll soon be the Visual Basic of the *nix world, with plenty of "cool features" that nobody needs.
Meaning, what does a completely commercial company like Micro~1 hope to gain from setting up such a server ? Makes me wonder ...
A lot of experiance in setting up an extremely large web-based DB with a potentially large user base. I'm sure they'll be trying out new stuff, and it makes great PR to claim that Win2K can run all this stuff. Plus, it's just great PR in general.
The Theory of Relativity does not say anything about time travel, and about travelling faster than light it proves nothing, that's why it's called "theory".
General Relativity does say something about time travel - it says that it is theoretically possible. The most obvious method is using wormholes and time dilation, but you can also acheive a similar effect using a sufficiently large rotating cylindrical mass - a cosmic string comes to mind. The mass of the cylinder drags spacetime around itself so that the time axis is swapped with one of the spatial ones, and time travel becomes possible. Of course, this is incredibly dangerous, but possible in theory.
And tachyons aren't forbidden by relativity IIRC. At zero energy they have infinite velocity, and as they gain energy they slow down, asymptotically approaching the speed of light from the other side. A tachyon can never become a tardion and vice versa, but both can exist under relativity. Tachyons are probably going to be ruled out by quantum effects however - superstring theory is free from the need for them.
I know it's been said before, but the thing about aliens is, well, they're alien. The thing with such predictions like the Drake equation is that they are biased to towards Earth-type life ie. planet based. If on the other hand you can assume that life is possible in any number of alternative configurations, with the only real criterion being a minimum level of complexity, then you allow for life to exist in all kinds of bizarre forms.
I can't remember the name, but one of the short stories in Stephen Baxter's book Vacuum Diagrams is about a life form that arises out of mathematical logic trees creating using quantum effects - truly strange and well worth a read if you're into hard SF.
Quite what information is transmitted back-to-base over this link is unclear, although it's a safe bet they're tracking their slave^W customers' viewing habits.
Well, actually the point of it is supposed to be for the E-mail and interactive stuff IIRC, since you can't upload over the satellite dish. Of course, they might be sending stuff over it apart from that, but our Digibox was disconnected from the phone for long periods at a time without a problem...
No, the HOWTO is mine. You did E-mail me about it and I sent you a copy IIRC. Did you get it? If not, reply and I'll send it again.
How does the European Convention on Human Rights affect this? IIRC it's been signed into law here in the UK, but I'm not sure what effects it has on the situation. I think Article 10 is the important one, and Articles 17 and 18 as well, but our DNS server is down here at I can't provide a better link or look at it. Thanks.
They read the Daily Mail, a newspaper that is so sensationalist and narrow minded that it seems unable to post any other frontpage story apart from 'Justice Being Done' and the 'Waste of Taxpayers Money'
Agreed. There's a fake TV program at TV Go Home where people are stranded on a desert island with no news except for the Daily Mail, and it takes the piss out of the bigoted trash that it produces on a daily basis. IMHO it is the single worst paper in this country since it attempts to be a "serious" paper whilst being full of the most BS ever.
Britain is a nation of winging penny pinchers. The average man in the street reads the Daily Mail, has 2.2 children and gets a new car every year or so. He lives in his shoebox house and doesn't think that the matter of censorship really has any effect to him.
True, but also not true. It depends on what part of society you're talking about. The younger generation is a lot less like this, and change will come slowly (as ever) when these people who have grown up with things like the net eventually get into positions where things can change. However, the national apathy will most likely prevent anything radical from happening - expect a slow osmosis of change at best.
I think that Rob et al. are making some changes to the Slash code in order to allow for some anti-spam measures. The reason I think is that April 20 is coming up, the anniversary of Columbine, and it threatens to become a complete spam-fest. The account being pushed to -2 on all posts is one way of quickly "removing" a lot of spam - there's also a maximum no. of posts per day based on IP address in place now as well.
We are an envious, unimaginative, reactive, bigotted, bitter society. We do not reward success; rather we punish it. We do not understand ideas of freedom and self-expression, but we attack their proponents bitterly.
Well, having lived in the UK all of my life I know where you're coming from with this rant, but I think you're overstating it, and I definitely think you're bitter about something ;)
What you're describing does exist certainly, it's what is affectionately known as "Middle England". But it's not all of the country by any means, and to say it is isn't fair to the many people who aren't like that. Britian has a problem with people like this, but so does practically every country in the Western world.
The unfortunate thing about Britain is the general apathy which we have. There are very few people who are willing to do something about issues (whatever they may be), and people don't care about things which don't directly affect them. This is probably the worst thing we have as a nation, and the reason why things like this occur.
In short, you are bitter, boring, suspicious, reactive, a sheep, and a hypocrite. You are also, sad to say, pretty stupid. Most importantly, you never let your lack of knowledge on a particular subject cloud your judgement.
Okay, this is just over the top, a rediculous generalisation and all round flamebait. Not everyone is the same, and not everyone is like this. It certainly doesn't help any when stereotypes like this are brought out.