I wouldn't worry about AI, at least for a very long time. We are not going to see it in an electronic digital computer.

Oh, you'll be able to fool me; you could probably do that now. But real free will in a machine, that is simply a complex array of electric switches? Don't get your hopes up.

Or fear, actually, instead of hope...

"I think that they'd actually be worse than the retreads, for the most part."

Why would you think that? Based on what the establishment has told you about them? By the time we are even aware of them, the narrative seems to be already set.

And yes, I knew you meant Bernie. Speaking of him specifically, as a conservative, I'd vote for him over any current Dem and most of the current Republicans. Those people are exactly the same; a vote for them is saying you love things just the way they are.

What we need is a really good politician. Bill Clinton was a decent politician, and Reagan was pretty good.

Those are about the only two I can think of in my lifetime that were good at the job of being a politician.

But you really can't guarantee that it won't taint groundwater for 10,000 years. We sure can't post a sign that will last that long.

The fact is, the only thing that can be done with the existing waste is to burn it up in a reactor. Supposedly, it can be got down to around 300 years, which we could then deal with.

We have no choice, and the people who still debate whether or not we should build new reactors are just uninformed. Or I am.

"warpgate technology"

Eh? How so?

They are tricking you. We could get by with the 2 parties if the primaries weren't so totally screwed up.

But even so, We sometimes come close to getting a real person.

Last time, 2 that come to mind are Herman Cain and Newt. You know good and well that Cain was not part of the big money establishment. Which is why he had to be destroyed.

Newt, on the other hand, was in like Flint at one time, but wouldn't play ball, so they used him against Clinton and then ran him out of town on a rail. Then, he has the nerve to almost come back in 2012 and win Georgia. They fixed him good this time didn't they...

We get good people (well at least not already bought and paid for) in all the time. They just don't last long.

That's not entirely true.

There are always a few candidates early in the mix that are not retread copies. It's just that they are always destroyed early, I guess before you noticed that they were running.

We have a few that are 'independents' this year; hell even one on the Democrat side, which you don't see too often lately.

Right, from an outside perspective. But from the traveler's perspective, they pass right through without even noticing the event horizon.

I remember reading something that said roughly, that as you approach a singularity, that absolute time slows. In other words, it takes the lifetime of the universe for something to actually fall into the singularity. Which makes you wonder then, how there could be a singularity in the first place

I think AC has you, at least in one sense; time approaches zero at the singularity, not at the event horizon.

Not sure if that makes a difference to the outside observer though.

I get where you're coming from, but we do need people to understand how computers work. For too many people, they are magic black boxes.

But, some people really can't get it at all. I wouldn't want to punish kids with a course where they have no chance of doing well, just to make myself feel better about my socialness.

If the class was sufficiently basic (no pun intended), it would probably be fine. There are people that are just awful at math, and yet they were able to pass grade school math classes.

I see we are going to disagree on the subject.

You have a nice day, and I hope to speak with you again.

You can't meet yourself. There are ships going 2c right now, relative to our reference frame. I'm talking about automobiles on the surface of a planet about 20 billion light years from Earth. (And if there are no cars there then is a boulder moving away from us at 2c.)

If you actually make a ship or particle go 1c or faster, then the causality thing is academic in any case, because you used infinite power to get to infinite mass and are literally everywhere at once, thus destroying the universe.

There's no speed limit on space (or gravity or time for that matter). In this context, space has nothing to do with distance. If (big if), you could artificially expand and contract space and carry yourself around within it, relativity would be still be satisfied from all reference frames. Another term for a 'warp drive' would be a dimensional drive.

Outrunning and then intercepting your own reflected light or radio messages from the past is no big deal. That's how we are going to get all the lost Dr. Who episodes back; fly out enough light years, tune in, and then press record on the starship's dvr. :)

People seem to think that an FTL drive would mean that relativity was wrong. It's false dichotomy. That's all I was getting at.

"You can't travel faster than the speed of light where you are."

No. Nor reasonably even approach it. Obviously the trick would be to travel faster than light from the reference of your destination.

I'm taking 'time machine' to mean traveling backwards in time. Building a time machine to travel 'forward' through time would be trivial. My truck actually does that. If I were to take it near a black hole that would boost the time travel quite a bit.

Space is not time, time is not gravity, gravity is not space. They are 'made out of' the same thing, but they are not the same.

You're getting caught up in causality in thinking that travel faster than c could take you back in time. There's no such thing as negative distance, time, or gravity. (Oh I know I should never say 'no such thing' but within this conversation, there is no such thing.)

Wouldn't that be nice.

But it's more like users have a hard time describing dialogs and the screen; they just want you to see it yourself, and tell them what to click.

PS
Heh, I agree with a +5 insightful and get downmodded to 0. That makes sense...

"ansibles"

Hey, I love thought experiments and speculation as much as the next guy, but that is a fictional device without even an idea as to how it would work.

I'm also not sure what a contraction factor of 2 means, I assume you mean Lorentz contraction, but I don't know what 'speed' that would be. It really doesn't matter though, for the thought experiment of 2 FTL ships passing; anything over c will do. And I assure you I would never try to dis' special relativity.

Two ships pass each other, let's say each is going twice the speed of light relative to a nearby, relatively stationary 3rd observer. They are going to pass each other at 4c, although neither would be aware of the other of course.

No message can viably be sent between the two, at least not using EM radiation, or anything else I can think of.

But I suppose, if ship 1 knew where ship 2 was going to be ahead of time, they could broadcast their message to that empty space, knowing ship 2 would run into it. That would be a damned difficult message to both receive and decode, but let's say it is broadcast in such a way that a simple message could be decoded.

But you still didn't receive my message until after I sent it, and even after I passed you. You would not have seen me pass you, although you may have seen disrupted incident radiation as my 'light wake'. And if we stopped to talk, then you would get my message long after you saw me.

If you stick to real world science, with the exception of a machine that carries itself and occupants within a local bubble of spacetime, then you won't come up with any causality issues.

And time travel is certainly allowed; we are travelling through time right now. It can even be sped up or slowed down, but travelling backwards through time would be the same as travelling backwards through space. I can't even wrap my head around that.

Yep, I was fooling with Macs when the Quadra was a badass machine.

My company gives out Motorola Droids to nobodys with company phones. My manager wants to be able to facetime me, which is how I got an iPhone a couple of months ago. You have to be a manager and ask to get an iPhone, since they cost so much more.

Is that fact the fault of my username also?