and this could potentially be considered among one of the largest machines in the galaxy and is more precise than any other we have made.

pulsar clock i wouldn't consider a pulsar to be "small" and this uses the signal from multiple to be more accurate than an atomic clock.

given either enough time or distance anything not specifically prohibited by the laws of physics is happening somewhere.

if the universe were something like 10^10^100 light years across then there would be an exact duplicate of "you" somewhere in it. because there are only so many configurations and quantum states that a specific volume of space can take.

granted we don't believe our universe is that large, only i think about 10^26 light years., but given a universe that is large enough then some seemingly unlikely things could be happening in it somewhere.

it seems rather ironic that windmills don't work when it is windy.

by standing at the south pole and jumping you would be "less north"..

That is a perfect example, and i think it illustrates a few things.

For the CPU time started on the first tick of its clock, but the tick of that clock is still tied to a time dimension in its parent universe. the term "Before" still makes sense when describing the sequence of events as the power button is pressed and then the electrons race through the wires to cause that first tick of the clock. now the CPU may not have adequate terms to describe this or understand what a power button or electrons are, but it is readily apparent to us as outside observers.

Being stuck inside the CPU would have a very difficult time figuring out the mechanisms that drive it. however some of our theories of quantum mechanics allow for higher dimensions and for structures to exist outside of our universe. And we even have experiments set up to look for evidence of some of these structures. such as polarization in the cosmic background radiation. if our universe isn't the outermost layer and is a brane in a higher dimensional universe, such as some versions of quantum mechanics suggest, then time may exist in some form outside of our universe. how this time works may not be entirely recognizable to us, but saying "before the big bang" could still have some meaning.

maybe another example. if i travel to the south pole of the earth i can't go south any further. however i can still travel further away from the north pole by jumping. by jumping i may not be any further south, but i could be considered less north. so what is before the universe? i don't know, lets climb to the bottom and jump and see where we end up.

what you don't realize is that the AC in the GP only started posting these comments next week!

but because he is a non-divisible person and not a flock of starlings, or something like that, the posts are going back in time and being attached to random articles about quantum mechanics.

i like "The Cloud" mostly because you can play on peoples fears of what happens to their data when the cloud starts raining and send them into a panic.

it also helps that 51% Of People Think Stormy Weather Affects 'Cloud Computing'

i could do the same. not only that but i could often also tell who had originally trained that person because often part of the trainers style often leaked into their style.

i work at a university and we hire 100 level CS students. so we generally assumed they knew nothing and trained them from scratch.

Google owns a lot of fiber. something they might be able to provide to Sprint and TMobile that other MVNO's don't is some additional backbone internet bandwidth. if they ink the deal right, this could end up benefiting all 3 companies. Sprint and TMobile could get cheaper bandwidth and Google gets a last mile connection to more devices.

i like messing with Joe from "The windows corporation". last time he called i wasn't even sitting at a computer and tried to see how long i could play along with them. even described the event viewer screen to them from memory so they could verify i was on the right screen. Only hung up on them because i ran out of time and had to go somewhere.

you know you can hang up on them at any time. you don't have to listen to their sales pitch.

they have no qualms about intruding on your time and trying to sell something to you that you don't want, so just hang up on them.

what is wrong with biological life? it is self repairing/healing, self replicating, self adapting/evolving, and can learn on its own...

basically all the features that mechanical machines lack, that we would like it to have. it seems the current field of robotics is the dead end. we should be focusing on biological machines.

or it is because google forced it to watch cat videos

i agree we need a compromise. carpools should be banned, then at least you wouldn't have to worry about people drowning during their commutes.

but the bot operator isn't paying for it, why do they care how efficient it is? if it takes a week worth of cpu time to generate $150 that is still $150 of pure profit for them. at the same time they can probably also sell cycles on the instances they hijacked to spammers or some other group