Mr Skeptic

Not really, that's why I said it is one of the most fatal flaws. Just to give a nicely discouraging example, people have been wanting to fly for thousands of years before someone up and invented an airplane. And then ~60 years later we landed on the moon. The first step is always the hardest, and I think that's roughly where you are. There's various programming languages and they have a larger vocabulary than just NAND, they have addition, multiplication, and many other such things. They can then be turned into computer code. However, they don't have things like "emotion" in their vocabulary, and you'd have to define it with the vocabulary it has. If you could do that one bit you'd probably get a Nobel prize for it.

It depends on what you mean. Would a clock run slower? If so, what can you compare your clock with to say it is running slower? I don't think it's absurd. I more or less have been thinking of it like that myself, since I don't understand curved spacetime but I do understand denser media. But then I'm not sure if that analogy works when talking about stuff other than light; do particles refract in denser media too? Odds are there are many many things that you might mean, and you don't know which. If you can put an equation to it you will know exactly what you mean. Alternately, if you describe it in enough detail that only one equation would fit your description, that works too.

I don't see the difference really. Are you saying that there is some "processes of storing and retrieving information from a memory medium" that does not require materials/energy? If so, why ever would you believe that and can you give an example of one? Sure, you can make an abstract algorithm for it, but can you implement without materials? If you can't implement it without materials, it doesn't really work without materials now does it.

Global warming will increase rainfall overall, but also decrease it in some areas, so there will be more desert and more flooding. One way warming can decrease rainfall is by killing vegetation. What plants do is trade water for CO2 via their stomata (so that increasing CO2 decreases their water needs). In doing so, they draw water from the soil or stored from a long ago rain, and let it evaporate (they need to have wet parts exposed to air to get CO2). This evaporated water will probably fall again as rain elsewhere. Without the plants much of that water would instead be runoff or go down to an aquifer, so that it would not evaporate and not fall as rain. In other words, there will be less rain downwind of deserts, which I'm sure is no surprise when it's put like that. As to desertification, some places are arid but not desert. Increasing their temperatures will increase the water needs of all plants in the area, which could eventually kill some of them off. Absent the plants, wind can blow away the topsoil, so that the plants that are left now have little water and less nutrients. Keep it going and you end up with a desert (but not like a proper desert with a desert ecosystem, more like a barren wasteland).

And how is that different than Einstein's curved spacetimes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity

What I'm saying is that: 1) Information can be stored in a material form. (eg ink on paper) 2) In every existing example of information being stored, that information is stored directly or indirectly in a material form. To clarify this, information can be stored within other information (eg within the abstract concept of a Turing machine), but neither the abstract storage form nor the information it stores can exist without some material form to encode it. 3) By material form I mean something that contains energy, be it photons, electrons, atoms, or some other energy-containing form. This is because we seem to be talking about materialism (which includes energy), rather than a distinction between matter and energy. Which of these do you disagree with, and why? In particular, can you give an example of information that is not stored materially?

Your idea sounds rather like General Relativity. I can't say much other than that, because I don't know GR past the general ideas.

And both are made of materials

Ah, I'm afraid your idea suffers from one of the most fatal of flaws -- you don't actually have anything. OK, so you do have a vague outline. But to actually make this work, you need to eventually put it into computer code. You'll have to define the terms you use since the computer knows only 1 and 0, and not just define them like a dictionary but in terms a computer can understand. It will have to end up as 1's, 0's, and the NAND operator (or equivalent), no more, no less. Same with the instructions. Because of the vagueness it is impossible to tell whether any within the set of all possible interpretations of what you have said would actually work. I'd guess that several would work but that you don't know any of them.

Does that change? I'd imagine it would be more likely for the concentration to change, than its absorption as a physical property. If that is what you mean, then all you need is to find the change in concentration of rhodopsin, and use the Beer-Lambert equation to find the absorption.

If that is the case, would he not have proved that a UTM must be capable of lying or refusing to answer a question (as otherwise it could not be a UTM)?

Yeah, they're not listening to you, and being very rude about it. I suspect it is largely due to the signal-to-noise ratio in that thread. You're just lumped in with one of the many other crazies from the thread, and they're responding to you as such. My suggestion would be to start a new thread topic yourself, so that you have a good clean start, and your well-reasoned and well-written arguments are nicely visible and all together, and you don't start behind a pile of crazies to be confused with you.

Maybe you could just ask one of your chemist friends? Or a colleague's chemist friend?

Current theory suggests that such a black hole would be smaller than a proton, and evaporate within a fraction of a second. However, it would probably be necessary to understand quantum-compatible gravity to know for sure.

The nice thing about using liquid N2 is that it is non-toxic and all noticeable traces of it will be gone as soon as you ventilate, unlike bug spray. Using CO2 is probably even better since it can be sprinkled as a solid, and since a smaller concentration is needed to kill and it will kill quicker (the CO2 displaces O2 in the blood). Using CO would be a very bad idea as you might kill your neighbors or yourself. Also some of it may stay longer than you'd think in a porous substance or poorly ventilated spaces, and while that wouldn't matter with a non-toxic gas. for CO it would.

Certainly, the instructions are conceptual and abstract. Also, they don't exist as anything other than a concept and don't function unless there is something to execute the instructions. A conceptual Turing machine can conceptually solve problems, but to actually do so it has to be built in some form or another. To actually work, they need a material existence. That existence can be silicon, mechanical, mental, various forms would work, but it has to be in material form to actually function.

Am I the only one disgusted that the yearly deficit is being referred to as "the deficit"? The only direction that is going is up up up, right?

Well, the funding has to come from somewhere. While it is true that they could make themselves a corporation that earns its own pay, so could anyone else -- and everyone else already has a head start in that. By being as a corporation but with a giant money sink that is funding a country, they would be at a disadvantage compared to other corporations that invest in themselves. I suppose it could be done like with the corporations earning money for their shareholders, but then our government has huge debts not a bunch of capital to invest. And even worse, it is nearly unavoidable that the government is going to legislate itself some advantages. This would crush competition. Also note that even if it didn't eliminate competition, it wouldn't increase any efficiency -- they'd simply take the job someone else could be doing, spending the money someone else could be investing. In fact, I suppose we could consider that the government already does run a corporation, all of us, and we pay our shareholder the government a portion of our profits. However, I think that it would certainly do something with our culture of spending, if they had to make that much effort to earn their money. Or, they could just keep spending it all and let it crash on the heads of whoever gets elected next.

The Muslims, of course. Is there any other society who's principles are based on a loving and infinite God? They worship the Abrahmic God, who is loving and infinite, and they have their laws based on that. Most other societies are based on secular laws (like the US). http://en.wikipedia....gion_comparison

So, try making a computer without materials then, and tell me how far you get. And these instruction sets you speak of, don't actually exist... what actually exists is the configuration of electrons in a pattern that matches the instruction sets. Electrons are no less real than the ink on a book, and no less material. And if making a computer without materials is too hard for you, feel free to instead store some information without materials. Even one bit will do. But you don't know how to store even one bit of information without materials, do you?

Well if you heat it up and press it onto leather, I think that would result in the image being imprinted on the leather.

You do realize that assigning the money, not spending it as assigned, is what messes with the budget? The money will be spent as it was assigned to be spent, and those who assigned it are the ones responsible for the spending.

Well there's also the nuclear powered rockets. Rather than burning propellant, they heat it up using a fission reactor. Such engines have been built and tested, and are more efficient than the best chemical rockets -- but also much heavier. The limit for these is not how hot the fuel burns like in chemical rockets, but how hot you can heat your fuel without melting your engine. A few designs like the nuclear lightbulb could make for very good rockets, although I don't think that design has been tested. But if it could be made it would be a good heavy lift vehicle that actually was recyclable. As for getting off the earth cheaply, I think the best would be a launch loop, which could toss stuff into space very cheaply and in bulk, and powered by a terrestrial power source (coal, nuclear, solar, whatever floats your boat). It's not a rocket though, so the things it lobs into space would have to have their own propulsion if they want to go anywhere other than their trajectory. As for getting to another star, I think the most realistic is Project Longshot, though I guess 100 years for reaching the nearest star is still a bit longer than you might want to spend on a spaceship.

So people are going to use anti-bullying laws, to bully people?

Yeah, non-citizens voting would be problematic. Sure, it would be nice to ask their opinion on things, but not allow them to directly make demands. Though I wouldn't be opposed to making a bunch of them citizens if they're decent people. This I think is the problem, some want to make them citizens but can't so they try to at least make them citizen-like.