"Fetch!"
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."
77 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2013
"Hey Chat GPT! Read to me "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone!"
"Absolutely, but due to copyright laws I must paraphrase and not read back to you verbatim.
Which author's style would you like me to use?"
"I'd like you to read it to me in the style of Frank Herbert."
"OK, here is Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in the style of Frank Herbert."
"A beginning is a very delicate time. Know then, that is is the year 1991..."
Maybe time doesn't progress at a linear rate and time itself progressed faster nearer to the dawn of the universe? We'd see this as things happening "earlier than they should have done".
Perhaps the galaxies took the normal amount of time to form but just look like they formed "too early" due to time at that point running at an accelerated rate? The heartbeat of the universe starting off fast when the universe is more compact, then slowing down as spacetime expands? Maybe the pressure or surface tension of the same amount of planck units existing in a smaller volume of infinite spacetime?
So as spacetime expands and stretches at a faster and faster rate, time is effectively stretched out and "slowing down" now compared to billions of year ago? We wouldn't notice - time would seem to be running the same as it ever did in our present - but it'll be a constant changing throughout the life of the universe?
I expect to be shot down in flames as there's probably lots of evidence to disprove this, but I thought it was a nice idea. :)
TLDR: Maybe what we see as X amount of years years back then is compressed from our perspective.
Would seem like a no brainer to verify against a secondary key like the IMEI (unless that's able to be spoofed) or other unique key like the phone serial number, or multiple keys linked to the device. That's better than just relying on the telephone number.
The telephone number will stay the same but the other keys will change and can be used to detect a change of device or user.
Seems daft to just rely on the phone number being kosher.
Here's a hypothetical situation:
Farmer Giles and Farmer Jones both supply a 3rd party chain of shops with cheese "Cheese 4 U". "Cheese 4 U" sells cheese from multiple farmers. Farmers Giles and Jones also have their own chains of farm cheese shops, from which they sell their own cheese exclusively. Competition in the cheese market is healthy.
Both farmers open up a channel of communication: "Hey, if we both agree to stop supplying our competitor with cheese, they'll have no choice but to close, and we can carve up their cheese re-selling business between us."
"Hey, that does sound like a great idea. Isn't it anti-competitive though?"
"Don't worry. We'll pull the plug on cheese supply first, then give it a couple of months and you can pull your supply of cheese. You can state that due to certain factors (obviously contributed to by our cessation of cheese supply, but you be creative there) you're also ceasing cheese supply to the company.
It'll have no choice but to go belly up and we can move in for the kill!! The high-street cheese market will be ours for the taking and we can get rid of our competitor in the cheese supply market."
"What about the competition watchdog?"
"Don't worry about them, this will totally go under the radar. Nobody likes them anyway! It's a fool-proof plan! Do you fancy some cheese-on-toast?"
:)
Proof then that clingfilm (and/or filler foam) is an absolute necessity in future space exploration for fixing hull breaches from micrometeorites, clumsy Jedi Knights etc.
And if it looks like your space craft is doomed to vaccuum, head off to the galley immediately and totally wrap yourself up in clingfilm.
Just be careful if you've been eating beans or onions.
Wouldn't the ability to hive off and hide certain properties of a particle under a proverbial quantum carpet (at least for a short time) be great for developing anti-gravity, FTL travel, ignoring inertia to prevent pilot squish during extreme changes in vector etc.?
Reality would have to catch up eventually (hopefully with a dose of amnesia) as you recombined the force with the particle, but by then it would be too late and your hypothetical interstellar spaceship would already be at Alpha Centauri...
I would expect that after examining the blueprints for Truecrypt the auditors will find a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port.
It'll be two metres wide, but it'll lead directly to the main reactor!
For a new name I'd suggest "Heidi"..something.. as Truecrypt is designed to, er, Heidi stuff.
"Darling, pass me the red ochre will you?"
"That's it! I warned you before! You've ALWAYS got to be the one with the red ochre in his hand.
I turn away to make sure the kids are ok, and then when I look back you've jumped up and drawn another antelope, or a mammoth.
I wish you'd just make up your mind and put the red ochre down on the stone where it belongs!"
Maybe towards the beginning of a universe time runs faster. As the universe expands time slows down, like the spring of a watch. Or maybe it's not a given that time runs at the same speed throughout the universe, and those galaxies are contained in a bubble where time intrinsically moves at a different rate?
Or perhaps that area of the universe is a cold spot where matter froze out of the soup earlier than the rest of the universe.
"You need a light year's thickness of lead to have a reasonable chance of stopping a particular neutrino."
Thus, if neutrinos do not materialise, it proves that there must indeed be a light-year's thickness of lead between the exploding star and us.
"How can this be?" I hear you cry. "We cannot detect such a large amount of lead, therefore it cannot exist!"
That's why I've just invented "Dark Lead" (tm).
It doesn't interact with anything apart from neutrinos, is totally invisible, and isn't very good for use as lead flashing as the rain tends to run straight through it, ruining ceilings and carpets.
Our company switched from Dell to Acer quite a few years back, for one particular batch of purchases.
We got stung quite badly on that one.
The initial prices were good. We had a couple of DOA machines.. we could cope with that.
However: We soon found out that the machines were running hot and power hungry CPU's. Not too bad in and of itself, but the machines started dying like flies down the line due to the totally inadequate ventilation of the pc's. At least that's what we think it was, mostly. Maybe the motherboards were just sub-par.
The ones that still worked were hampered by slow hard drives, slow non-Intel chipsets and slow onboard graphics.
The failure rate swung it for us though.
We've steered well clear of Acer ever since we bought that batch.
Perhaps other companies and corporations also have memories as long as ours :)
Has anyone looked at animal rights issues concerned with covering tanks with hundreds and hundreds of invisible kittens, and the usage of said kittens in a live combat environment?
Yes, the kittens may make the tank invisible. However, I don't think enough research has been carried out into the difference in protective capabilities between invisible kittens and other forms of ablative armour.
Just because a population stayed behind, it doesn't mean to say that they are any less evolved.
The populations that migrated out and the populations that stayed behind may have responded to evolutionary pressures and mutations in some ways that would be similar while in other ways uniquely different.
If there was no pressure to evolve, then perhaps you could argue differently, but I think we can agree that over the last tens of thousands of years there's been plenty of pressure for humanity to evolve, wherever the population has been located.
I don't mean to disparage the accomplishment of humans migrating out of Africa, but I noticed the line about humans "managing" to cross the Sahara.
Given that the Sahara turned to desert in very recent history, it perhaps would not have been the barrier to migration 60-100,000 years ago that we see today.