Ndi

We could be an unobserved side-effect of a simulation of Earth of Universe. It's much more interesting and useful to run a high-speed simulation of the Universe to predict changes and dynamics.

Insects that stay on water? Unless I'm mixing it up, you can touch water with your finger and if you are really, really soft you don't get wet. You can make a lightweight pin "float" on surface tension of the water. it has to be perfectly parallel to the surface, otherwise it breaks the tension and sinks.

It worked for Stalin. True, he sent 20 million not 20 thousand, but hey.

Human/nature. Me and you. That's not really an argument. You say that a game can be with or without goal, with or without balance, thus we are in a game? Games do nothing more than to replicate reality as we perceive it - as the familiarity does wonders. No game is based on nothing. This is a looping argument as everything we have is based on out observations and experience. It's like saying that we create a simulation of life in a 2-d environment so the 2D humans have 2D games, thus they are in a game. They have no idea where they are, nor can they find out because they don't know where they are nor do they understand what is a game to us. By my definition, a game is designed to be entertaining ("GAME"). This is why is don't like people who oppose single player cheats, but that's a different issue. If it was meant to be as realistic as possible, it's a sim. If it was supposed to be fun, it's a game. How we know what the intended purpose of this computer was is beyond me and I suspect beyond everyone as we have nothing to compare to.

Not only ignorance, I believe this is cached behavior. Some people actually listen for 4 minutes, get an idea then zealot it all the way regardless. Every time these people hear "genetic" "stem" "embrio" they immediately work against it as if it was the same damn thing. I could see the frown upon hearing the words themselves, way before the sentences, let alone ideas was finished. Besides, what's this "public opinion" doing in the research? How many of these people understand what this is? How can you have a movement of people of such magnitude when not that many people know what the heck they are doing? I understand public opinion on widespread issues, like abortion. But medical procedures? Genetics? This reminds me of political parties. Someone objects to a law or procedure and then millions agree for some odd reason. I'm sure there are a lot of people that object to words or because of other people's position. This is not public opinion IMO.

I agree, bio-engineered life is more deadly but *it is containable*. You can do all experiments behind several filters, sealed doors, heck, you can instantly burn everything if needed be. However, other experiments depend on prone-to-failure magnetic fields - that's more dangerous IMO.

This is endless. Political correctness is about things that are considered generally offensive - not about personal views. If you venture into this area you allow for things that are more than complex. What I mean is - if one can declare that something is offensive and everyone is to obey then we have a problem. What if i say I'm not OK with people calling me "user" on the forum? Would I be able to protest to "happy holidays users"? Should I be able to demand "Happy holidays Users and Ndi"? Makes no sense. In this particular case, I guess the joke matters. It could be interpreted as personal I guess.

Dreams have their function to relieve stress and grin on problems that your mind is battling. If you could indeed take full control of your dreams my bet is there are going to be problems - like those that pop when you are unable to dream.

Wouldn't everyone firing at once also fire those responsible for memory? I'm just doing an analogy here - but if it's anything like an low-force EMP in a computer - just to induce, not fry - it would also cause unwanted writes to memory. I have no idea how much exposure memory needs to be written but if a sustained 100% burst would be achieved you'd probably lose all memory in addition to the ability to have thoughts.

a) until some civilization doesn't simulate because they evolved differently. b) because of overheads. In order to run a simulation at 1 GHz you need a 2 GHz host that computes all the physics for you. (numbers are exaggerated, you need billion times more to compute physics down to particles). So the host running it would be running at least 4 (if it's aware of the child) or at least 3+ if not. They don't span forever, and given the fact that we need massive computers for a simple particle - the computations exceed loads of limits. Don't mistake simulation and emulation. Remember - do not mistake the sim that walks around thump up its pants doing nothing. They are a bunch of pixels. We have a spinal chord, hundreds of muscles, interact and think, study particles and experiment with unset rules - someone can't just cheat and emulate the result, we check stuff along the way. You actually need to run every spec of dust. Optimized, yes, but still. We don't currently have the processing power to simulate a single person's one sense, let alone billions with all their senses running. Billions of computers running simulations? Unlikely. There is such a thing as minimum data density.

It's an 8-liter engine, making the quad setup a) necessary - each bank needs a turbo, but also b) expected - each turbo is on a 2 liter bank, which is just about right for the expected capacity for a turbo - 1.8-2.2 You can have the same setup for a V12, with a turbo on each 3-cylinder bank - it's been done before - it's the capacity that bothers me. You'll get one heck of a drag car but it's unlikely it will set any speed record. Edit: It's not pushed all the way yet. You can expect improvements on the engine if they want to.

I know. We're Sims ver 612! They finally fixed that simspeak but apparently the free will subroutines are still buggy. Heck, judging by MY free time we might be in. Any of you recall stepping into oblivion when exiting the screen? [sorry about the off-topic]

Statistically we are most likely to be an unobserved life form. If technology goes to a point where we have the power to run such complex simulations then we'll most likely be running other simulations for loads of time before. By the point when someone allocates such power to running a sim, the tech advance would have probably passed us by so we are in a side task. When we could simulate bacteria from the tech point of view we used that power to sim chemical reactions, design engines and other tasks way before bacteria growth become a game. Besides we're really, really boring. To such a civilization we're below ants, much below apes as we can't sim apes. By the time they reached such a level we're insignificant. Who runs ant simulations for thousands of generations with complete physics? I believe we're no fun, eat loads of memory and power so whatever is hard, smelly, sweaty, predictable and requires loads of resources is unlikely to be a game. We could be a sim project of a student who stepped out to lunch. We'll get a TerminateProcess when he gets back and hits a key to return to his Parallel Universe Conglomerate Editor.

You could have just said ABMBO and the meaning would have been clear

Not likely to be done because it's not efficient. An optimal capacity per cylinder is roughly 500 cmc. Meaning you get long life and prosperity from 2L inline 4, 3 liter-ish V6, 4 liter V8 and so on. A V12 is likely to be around 6L and 4 turbos would mean a turbo for each 1.5 liter. There's a reason 1.5 engines don't come in turbo too often. The point is that if the engine is too small, the backpressure created by the turbo is kinda high. You have a lower efficiency than a 2.0 engine with a turbo. Also, the engine needs to spin the turbine at a decent RPM, so the turbo needs to be spinning decently at around 2500-3000 RPM, meaning that by 5000 it's already near peak, at 6000-7000 it no longer delivers as it should, acting as a restriction. A turbo that is larger can move more air and can be more efficient, but needs more pressure to work. For a V12 the better setup would be a twin turbo, each on each 3 liter bank. The turbos are quite large and can serve, but they take time to spool, so turbo lag is an issue. If you really want to design a quad turbo setup, look at cascading turbines or try to make it a twin turbo per bank, with a smaller turbo that spins at 1500, faster, and delivers up to 3000, giving the larger one time to spin and deliver over that. You can achieve that by wastegates/blowoffs and maybe electric valves. A good place to start is the Porsche 911 biturbo, I understand it uses a cascading setup (not sure though) You should look at the 12 cylinder as two in-line 6 engines and try to maximize those. In practice, a V has two intakes and two exhausts so you can use that to your advantage.

Indeed. You should, since it's not a rotary engine - a rotary engine ... well, rotates. Just kidding, it'll never be called Wankel. Sorry, not a Mazda fan. My car is a V6. However, Wiki says I'd say so. I'd drive one for various reasons. Main reason being upgrading the engines to the best I could find - effectively allowing me to deliver 1000 HP in a maneuver. You'd need something along the lines of a 5000 cmc kompressor or similar just to keep in line with me to 100 km/hour. Your gas car would be in excess of 100.000E to do that, mine would be some 10% of that price (20% with upgrades). Oh and a solar panel for those short (and now free) trips to work. Hey, free trips to work. In a dragster. Do *you* see a problem?

The number 6465776579 consists of 4 55 666 777 9 All in the 5-9 range, heavy on 6 and 7. Put your hand over the keyboard, most likely the numpad. You'll notice the fingers hanging over 7, 8, 9, thumb over 4 and 5. He hit the numpad three-four times, typing three 6, three 7, twice the 5 and once 4 and an additional odd nine. Or a wiggle motion, explaining the interleaving of numbers and the crescendo <low to high>. IMO, it's a number. No code. As for the hacking, none of the people I know that can hack into a machine l33t wr173. I doubt there's a hex code in there. Edit: P.S. You lose squat if you reinstall. You lose if you format. Also, Who's planning on a reinstall? Clean out the script kiddie and fix it. Also, a message for the owner/author of the article in the screenshot and whoever agrees with him/her. Antivirus products are designed to remove known viruses and try and rush to the help if one is detected but has not deleted data yet. They can't make decisions in your place. They don't know what to do any more than you do. They can't help it if you download and run. Even the best products and patches are useless if incompetently configured. Security is a sum of the firewalls/tools/AV and the competence of the user. It can't go over 100%, but it can go under.

Autopilot is fine but it sometimes malfunctions. A few years ago, I used to go to school every morning. On a Saturday, I woke up around 8 o'clock (same time with school) and went for some bread. Started thinking about stuff and the next think I knew i was in front of my school. I thought "WTH?". Same trip, every morning, same hour, same weather, same everything, the autopilot did what it did best - took me to school. Only thing was, school was some 3 km away, bread was ~70m. Some things work just fine on auto, some don't, see married people blindness or whatever it's called. When you live in the same area for very long you see things in various orders until you've basically "seen'em'all'. This prevents you from finding things in plain view because the brain shilds them away as "supposed to be there". At other times I search by picturing the target and looking for matches (such as being sure I left my mobile phone facing down as I usually do - yet I didn't). Because I'm looking for that image I pass over the phone repeatedly and sometimes endlessly until I decide to pause and search actively (scanning each object). It's funny afterwards when I think of the little men in my head chatting while I'm searching: - There it is! The phone! - No, you idiot, we're looking for THIS (shows the picture of the object facing down) - Awwwwww.... (after finding it) - Idiot (Guy 1 smacks the guy with the picture behind the head)

I also believe he's referring to the Wankel engine. In which case, check here for an advantage/disadvantage analysis in a clean, simple manner. The race for engine power at affordable prices pushed for some odd technologies. More valves per cylinder, forced air induction, injection, Honda's VTEC(Variable Timing, electronic cams), variable combustion chambers (I believe it's also in Honda's implementation) which vary compression, and so on. Some take the good path forward and push engine by implementing technology over the design (Honda's VTEC allows for 160-190 HP from a 1.6L naturally aspirated engine, over the previously mentioned 100 HP/liter), others dust off old technologies. The Wankel engine was used in cars before (source?) but was dumped for other reasons - smoking, gas guzzling, etc. It still can deliver more power because it's more solid (less moving parts) and can rev higher with lower tech, meaning you can get more off the same liter capacity but the efficiency means that you usually get less kilometers off a liter of gas in the tank. New catalyst tech allows for tolerable smoke but on the market the Wankels failed - people opt more for a TDI (less reliable, but has warranty, more economical) over the Wankel (more reliable, company wins. More gas, you lose). They are smoother in power delivery but then again if you want smooth you get a V engine (V6+balance, V8, etc). Also, V engines (and other non-linear designs) are also smaller for the delivered power and the gain was not enough. I have serious doubts about marketing such an engine. The big plus is reliability, but you can get an engine to run 250.000-300.000 km nowadays with zero maintenance (minus consumables) which for a city dweller can mean 20 years. How much more reliable can you get? So the short answer is no, the Wankel is not better than the good'ol engine in your car. And since there is resistance to new technology (spare parts, qualified personnel, etc) it's unlikely we'll see those. If you really want something to look up at it's the electric engine. Past it's battery issue, newer motors can deliver power in a controlled manner and have so many advantages they would replace gas cars in a blink of an eye: * Power is safer to use * EMotors are more controllable, you get full torque at any RPM, including that 60 RPM you get when starting from a full stop. * EMotors don't idle, consuming power; They don't start with a starter and stop controlled by electronics. * EMotors can recover power during braking * EMotors are more efficient. MUCH more. * EMotors can be oversized with little penalty. You could have 4 250 HP motors under the hood and drive with 10% power (100HP). In emergencies you can drain the batteries and have 1000HP at the wheels * EMotors don't require complex gearing to allow for idling, clever designs need no transmission, engine(s) can be mounted on the wheels. * EMotors can spin safely to 20.000 RPM, some even higher, so 2 gears or no gears is OK. Some hi-tech motors can go 150.000 without shaking themselves apart. * EMotors don't require that many liquids, so many moving parts, precise spark/valve timing and complex servos to control power for anti-skid, assistance, etc. * Electric power can be stored in buffers (capacitors) for emergency overdrives. I could go on forever. A town car, a speedster and the torque of an off-roader are all there. The record for the best acceleration is in the engine(s) of an electric car. It's just that you have to charge it for every other run.

They are so good because they only need to go for about 100-200 Km. Actually, if it lasts for more, it's sent back to the manufacturer - for further pushing. You can have a three liter engine in several ways, depending on the stresses on the materials: Ford: 3L V6 - 150 HP, mean time between rebuilds/repairs: 250.000 Km. Theoretical 3L turbo: 300-400 HP, mean time between rebuilds: <100.000 Km. Turbo engines that are pushed high need rebuild kits for turbos and engine every 60.000 Km. F1: 3L turbo (variant) - 900 Hp, mean time between rebuilds: 300-500 Km. Also, they are a *lot* more expensive, since more power generates more heat, you need better cooling, better oiling, better everything. Stresses build up on materials a lot closet to melting point, thus less resilient. In theory you could pump whatever you need out of whatever engine, limited by efficiency alone. Higher RPMs require better balance in the engine, more expensive springs/valves/whatever, but 3 times the RPM means 3 times the has and oxygen, which translates in three times the power. It's not really that complicated as long as you are not the engineer that has to keep pistons at near melting point. You can push your own engine at typically twice+ the power, but the heat is your enemy - it was never designed to conduct and dissipate that much heat so it heats locally passing the piston heads melting point, destroying them. That's why powerful turbo kits also come with replacement heads and/or better cooling. Some have intercoolers, oil coolers, supplemental cooling, bigger radiators, more powerful pumps and so on. Older F1 engines were 3000 cmc (3l) and developed around 900 HP. Newer limitations are for 2500 and they "dropped" to 750 HP. This is from memory. But the rule of thumb is (and it's not really disputed) is: the more power off a liter of capacity, the more the repairs and the more sensitive the engine. That's why your long life vehicle has around 50 HP/liter, sportier, more expensive cars have some 75 with 100 at the very high end. Above that they become unreliable, need loads of maintenance and are generally unpopular as "bad cars".

Five hours? *cough* It can be done, but take breaks to allow your eyes to adjust, muscles to stretch and so on. It's good for you. Nothing fancy, just walk around the chair a bit. Last time I did that I played HL2 in stereo vision beginning-to-end. I have no idea when I stopped blinking or how often I blinked, but when the game was over and I did finally blink I cursed for minutes. Another fun stuff was me playing Q2 (I believe) in an Internet/Game cafe with friends (who owned it) so long (with breaks) that when I left and went downstairs my brain was so into-it that for a moment there I saw the world around me go in zig-zag up and down- exactly like the game does when you go downstairs - the screen shakes in a sawtooth movement. Funny, but not repeatable. Incredible how we get sucked into these buggers.

If we are in a computer simulation then our perception of statistics is generated by the computer thus unable to rely on it. You are also assuming that whatever computer runs us has such a concept as simulation/game/whatever. Also, if we are in a computer game, computer reality of in the friggin MSPaint we wouldn't know. We define what we see as reality and it's what reality is to us. If we define it as a game, it's a game to us. It might as well be the screensaver someone left open and it evolved overnight. This is the new look at the old question - what is yellow. We see colors and are taught it's called Yellow. Should we see through someone else's eyes, would it be Magenta? How can you tell what happens in someone's brain?

I thought the brain stored information in a lossy, fading, round robin style. * lossy: you never remember everything on a page, you retain certain things you are interested. For example, you remember who was the main character, but not every line nor the page number. Retaining the storyline and some quotes is NOT storing the book. In order to estimate the book in bytes you have to be able to reproduce it by heart, every letter, every sign, every page number. * fading: while it keeps a vivid image for the first few seconds, it fades retaining important parts then fades away to a point where you remember seeing the page but the page itself is generated to look like it. It's why "you remember it differently" after a while * Round Robin: Newer info is stored in full while similar info is summed up once new data arrives. When you come back from a vacation, you have a by hour memory. As time passes, the vacation is compressed, with details being forgotten and only centerpoints are left, then only important stuff and at the end - eventually the whole thing is just a spike on a graph. That's how you can have an year's access graphs in 200K. Once the week has passed, only per-day is stored because you can only view things from the present backwards. Also, estimating a book as kb stored is bad. You read the book, then burn it. You take a text document and type everything you remember about it. It will be down to two-three pages. What you remember, not what you can deduce back. You'll be surprised. Also, a page is basically <1Kb, a book, even a large one, is 200-400K in uncompressed format. No books are hundred of Mb in size. Also, computer compression removes the human component, there is absolutely no point in comparing them - LZ stores repeated letters in words: e.g. google = g1 o2 g1 l1 e1 > then dictionary base store G as a, o as b, etc. Compressed, google would be a 2b a c d. It makes no sense to a human since it's binary data and math. All being considered, the thought that we store a few megs is likely wrong. We learn a lot during a lifetime and even though many are automated and take other routes. On the other hand, just because video takes up huge amounts of data on a computer does nothing to show how much it takes in memory because we store vectorized objects (a human jumping > a few bytes for human, a few bytes for jumping, then clothes color, face and a few other details since we sum up stuff in a lossy format). So it's not impossible to have everything in a few hundred Mb. If we stored everything then re-watching the tape would yield no other data. Even memory freaks can't tell the number of hairs on a person's head in a video. The info is there, it gets processed but not stored. There is no parralel between the 4 Gb of data on a DVD and the space it takes up in the brain. E.g.: film a flower growing. The DVD is full, yet all we have is "a flower grows for 2 hours. It's a red rose. It has a green side and it grows. 5 thorns". That's just about it.

A third party DNS lookup (dnsstuff.com I believe) got the same error. I can't remember the error code now but i am quite sure it was: The requested name is valid and was found in the database, but it does not have the correct associated data being resolved for. (11004) The server was inaccessible the whole afternoon right after I got some internal error in a php that complained that it can't connect to localhost. 11211 I believe. I can't remember a blasted phone number but i can remember an error code and a port I saw today noonish? Drat.

He might have an old USB or a misconfigured USB. Older USB go to 1.5 MBPS and 12 MBPS, with the WiLAN card pumping 11 MBPS easy (they go higher). USB 2.0 has a raw data rate at 480Mbps, way more than you'll ever need. It's trickier to configure, but it'll get there. Make sure you have USB 2.0 (shows as "enhanced" or 2.0 USB - consult your MB docs and install needed drivers - it's not native on most OSs and you can't tell the difference). Also, it doesn't have to be external. Some cards fit into any slot without using it (dummy slots) and hook up internally to an USB pin connector in the motherboard so for all intents and purposes it's internal. I had a Bluetooth card like that. If not, you can look for a PCMCIA converter. Wireless cards come in this format by the truckload and work just fine. Even an USB-to-PCMCIA (if any) could clean things up as your computer will see it as a normal card.