Agreed. But that's kind of my point. It's easy to wonder why light has to be bounded by a maximum speed because we can easily ask "why not faster"? For me it makes it clearer that there are fundamental aspects of physics/reality at work here to keep in mind that it's really the ratio of the smallest distance to the shortest time.

Yes, you do then have to ask "why is there a smallest distance" and "why is there a shortest time", but at least for these questions, I have an answer I can live with: because there has to be a separation between cause and effect, so there has to be a shortest time in between which two things can happen. If the time that it takes for an electric field to propogate a magnetic field and vice versa, which has no time component as far as I remember in the equations governing how this happens, has nothing limiting it to happening with a shorter time duration between the cause and the effect (which I believe is true, at least according to electromegnetic theory), then this is the shortest time.

A similar argument can be applied to explaining why there is a shortest distance.

So basically, for me, it is more directly meaningful to think of there being a smallest possible time increment (because there *must be*, otherwise zeno's paradox and all that), and a shortest possible distance (once again because there *must be*, for the same reason), than to think of there being a limit to the speed of light, which otherwise logically I can't understand, except in the terms that I described in this and in my prior post.

If it's path curved, even infinitesimally, then it would miss us, wouldn't it? Unless you're saying that it curves one direction and then back again in a crazy squiggle pattern, somehow always re-aiming directly at us. Which doesn't sound remotely plausable.

Why is the force of gravity pulling these electron/positron pairs away from Earth? Why is there any net effect at all? Is there "more stuff" on average on the other side of that supernova than on this side?

Correspondingly, if a supernova were to happen here and direct photons in the other direction, would the light get there "faster"? If not, why not? Why is the net drag caused by gravity always away from the direction that the light is travelling?

Sorry if this is a double-post, Slashdot eats my comments sometimes, I swear.

In this explanation, why is there a net gravitational pull away from Earth? In those brief moments where the photons disassociate into electron/positron pairs, why are they pulled in any direction in particular? Why are they more likely to be pulled in a direction that slows them down rather than speeding them up?

You're playing games with words. Viscosity is "a measure of its resistance to gradual deformation by shear stress or tensile stress, due to friction between neighboring particles that are moving at different velocities". How could any part of that definition have anything to do with light?

Or do you intend viscosity to mean "a force which slows down photons"? In which case your sentence is "Space-Time could have a non-zero force which slows down photons, and slow down photons", in which case you aren't really saying anything other than, "something could be causing these photons to slow down", which isn't actually saying an explanation at all given that the whole question is *why* these photons appear to be slowing down.

In my conception (which may be flawed; I came to this conclusion after university physics classes that I didn't always understand as well as I should have, and these were 20+ years ago), the speed of light is governed by "the rate at which things can happen".

Electromagnetic waves propogate because a changing electric field produces a changing magnetic field which produces a changing electric field, etc. For reasons that I can't remember these changing fields occur in a slightly offset position each time, so that the fields move through space as they create each other.

If causes and effects could occur at an infinite rate, the waves would move infinitely fast; but since there always has to be a time gap between a cause and an effect, there is a fixed upper bounds for the rate at which these fields can produce each other.

There is also a fixed lower bounds on the minimum offset that can occur between the electric and magnetic fields.

So what you have is essentially effects occurring as quickly as possible over distances as small as possible. The ratio of the smallest possible time between a cause and an effect, and the smallest possible distance between an electric field and the magnetic field it produces and vice versa is ... the speed of light.

So why can't light go faster than c? Two reasons really: a) things "can't happen" faster than the cause-effect relationship of a magnetic field producing an electric field, and vice-versa; and b) distances between an electric field and the magnetic field it produces, and vice-versa, can't be smaller.

I vaguely remember that this is related to one of the cool aspects of Calculus - the ability to take the ratio of an infinitesimally small number to another infinitesimally small number, each expressed as a limit approaching zero, and get a calculatable, real number result.

In this case, if you take the limit as distance approaches zero, divided by time as it approaches zero, you get the speed of light - the ratio of two infinitesimally small numbers (the smallest unit of distance over the smallest unit of time).

Anyway that's how I explain it to myself.

In my experience, telecommuters as a whole are only a fraction as productive as in-office workers. Notice I said as a whole - there is the rare telecommuter who is more productive. But most are not. So I completely understand corporate policy that lights fires under telecommuters' butts. It's what I would do if I were the boss.

I speak as someone who was a telecommuter at one time. I have a very hard time believing that the factors that made it difficult to be productive for me are not common for everyone. There are more distractions at home. There is a natural tendency to spread the work over a larger period of time because you can, and because the aforementioned distractions make that appealing. And that leads to habitually intending to "do more work later" but not getting to it because the day runs out. It must happen to alot of people. It happened to me.

Then there's the physical disassociation from the people you work with, which reduces communication effectiveness and tends to turn what would be small roadblocks into big ones. Not to mention having an impact on morale as you miss out on the spirit of comeraderie that often plays a role in office dynamics.

I am generalizing my explanation for what causes the ineffectiveness of telecommuters, but I am sure the factors are different for everyone. Regardless, in my expereience working with people who work from home (or worse, from far away), in the vast majority of cases, they produce at a much slower rate than I would expect from someone working in the office.

If you're one of the 5% of telecommuters who can be as or more effective as you would be in the office, then I guess it does suck when that option is taken away from you because the other 95% can't hack it.

Then there are people who are just as ineffective in the office as they are at home. I guess they'd be OK working at home too, but those people, I'd rather show the door than accepting their mediocre output, even if they can do it from home.

40 is not a magical number, as you seem to be implying. Some people can work more hours than that, indefinitely, and still be productive.

Please make sure not to apply for a job where I work OK? We have enough people working the bare minimum as it is. I try to keep them off my team but it's a never ending battle ...

I enjoy working with people who have a desire to do good work and like what they do enough to work more than 40 hours if that's what's called for, when that's what's called for. People who walk out the door when there is still work to be done because jobs are "a dime a dozen" are not people I want to work with.

I also enjoy working with people who prioritize work appropriately and have lives out of work. And those people typically are reasonable and realize that sometimes more than 40 is part of the job, just as the rest of us are reasonable and realize that working excessive hours on a continual basis is not cool either.

But people who only want to do the minimum necessary just to get paid? They can stay away. Far away.

I remember the 90's too and I don't remember any of that.

The race to 1 GHz were heady, optimistic days, and I don't recall anyone thinking that once we got there, it would all be over.

So I call bullshit on your post.

The moment you begin a sentence with "Liberals" or "Conservatives" is the moment I stop reading. If you can't think on a higher plane than that kind of pointless labelling, then your comments are not interesting and will be ignored.

And yes, I literally stopped reading at the first word of your sentence (OK actually I read "Liberals are always", so I guess I read three).

Nobody cares what you say, coward. Go away and let the adults have a discussion.

What's with you and deliberately misinterpreting what others say?

The person you responded to at least tried to lay out an argument in a coherent fashion. Your post - not so much.

I think you missed the point.

The point is that people "vote with their dollars and their feet" is not a good argument in this case.

People "vote with their dollars and their feet" means that people make their choices known through actions other than voting on the issue. But the person you replied to is pointing that "voting with dollars and feet" does not legitimize the contested activity, just like "voting with your feet" that having to pay for garbage removal is too onerous and demonstrating that by dumping your trash inappropriately does not legitimize that activity.

In other words, just because people prefer an alternative and would take that alternative when nothing else prevents them from doing so, does not legitimize that alternative.

As for the debate at hand, I think I fall on the side of the cab companies; but I think that these new services have definitely put them on notice. We have the technology to make them irrelevant, so they'd better improve or die. Regulations may prevent cab alternatives from operating now but that can and will change ...

Agreed. I've said it before and I'll say it again: significant performance increases in the x86 world are a thing of the past.

There simply isn't enough money in the market chasing higher performance to make the development cost of faster chips worth the investment.

This is actually an opportunity for AMD. I expect it costs AMD less to catch up to Intel than it costs Intel to push to faster speeds, and since Intel isn't being paid anymore to get faster, AMD can, like the slow and steady tortoise, gradually catch up to Intel. I believe it will take a couple more years, but if AMD survives that long, I believe that it will have achieved near performance parity with Intel by then.

And then neither company's offerings will get much faster, forever thereafter, until there is some new kind of 'killer app' that demands increased CPU speeds that people are willing to pay for (could happen anytime; but the way things are going, with everyone moving to mobile phones and pads, I think we're in for a relatively long haul of form factor and power usage dominating the marketable characteristics of CPUs).

I believe Intel will continue to hold a power advantage over AMD for a long time though, but AMD will gradually narrow that gap as well.

The thing is, AMD will be fighting Intel for a stagnating/shrinking CPU market, and more than likely AMD won't increase its margins significantly during this process, it will just reduce Intel's margins. Not really good news for either company, but worse for Intel.