They'll start putting streaming ads in the middle of the page, correction songs?

This is a meaningless assertion. What units would you use to describe the "rate" or "time" flow? Images like "moving through time" or "time flowing" implicitly assume an independent time-like dimension.

In reality what all these analogies characterize is not time, but things we might use as a clock. The passage of a water molecule down a clear, straight section of stream can be used to mark out a certain length of time from any starting point in time. It's not in any way *like* time, any more than a pendulum is like time. It's just a way of measuring a certain length of time against a fixed extent of space (in this case the arc of the pendulum rather than a length of stream).

Because not being able to tell us is a data point as well.

Yes, it's the switches that go. Either they stop switching, or they double click on their own. That's the only reason I've replaced mice other than upgrading from ball mice to optical, and from PS/2 to USB.

I've wondered about using a very high speed flip-flops, or on a simpler thing, a SR latch with both inputs on, and sampling the output. I remember some cryptographically secure RNGs doing this in lieu of a radium-painted chip.

The purpose of the government is to implement and regulate broadcast standards. It is the government's job to make them turn down the volume.

What is needed is are seed inputs. When a key is hit, get a super-accurate clock sample of it, hash it with MD5 [1], and toss it in the pool. Mouse movements, similar. If the computer is idle, this won't help much, but while it is in use, it should help provide enough unpredictable data to be up to par for security purposes. I'm sure there are other inputs that can be hashed over time and the hashed bits tossed in. Of course, the RNG from the chip can be easily tossed in as well. The good thing is that the most random factor "wins" in this case.

[1]: MD5 has its issues, but it is being used in this case as a bit blender, so hash collisions can happen, and not really matter. It would be wise to move to a newer algorithm like SHA-1024 or SHA-3, for more bits though.

Trust but verify is important, but chips are incredibly hard to know if a random source is truly random, as opposed to, say the output of a clock AES encrypted, so that it appears random.

Best thing to do is have the chip be part of the RNG, but not the only part, so another random source will provide enough unpredictability to keep thing secure.

I think the reason people only visit their mailbox weekly (or less) is because they get so little valuable mail so there's not much for theives to steal. The only bill I get in the mail these days is my property tax bill from the county (I wish they'd move to electronic delivery, it would save them money (which ultimately saves *me* money), but it can be looked up online by anyone that knows my address, so I'm not sure why someone would want to steal it. The rest of my bills get paid electornically or mailed to my electronic bill pay service (Paytrust).

"I learned my lesson well. You see, you can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself". - John Fogerty

So how do you get your Christmas cards?

It's sounds like the AC's problem to me, if the "vast majority" of his bosses are 'vindictive arseholes' then either he's really unlucky, or there's something about him that brings out the 'vindictive arsehole' in people. My guess is that the AC is a young male and as such will generally have problems with any authority figure. OTOH he has a point, I'm not going to light up a joint in the bosses office any day soon.

"And if you keep doing that for a hundred years, where would you end up?"

In the middle of a dire shortage of energy and resources.

I think this post and its replies are becoming bigger than they deserve to be... Of course a Dyson sphere is actually more plausible than faster-than-light travel, and by an extremely considerable margin. That doesn't make it plausible, however, and I personally - and this is obviously just a personal opinion - think that no culture would, or could, build one. It seems prohibitively expensive, and it would be very unstable and require constant maintanence. It would also become quite severely irradiated shortly after it was constructed, and since it would be emitting almost constantly in the IR (both back in and to the outside universe) would be slowly cooking the inside of it. Etc. etc. etc.

Obviously you're right; Dyson spheres present what I personally believe is an insurmountable problem to engineering, resource management, resource collection, maintenance, and so forth, but they're still basically problems of engineering and resources, not necessarily physics. Faster-than-light travel, on the other hand, presents what is as certain as we can be an insurmountable physical problem, and all the clever solutions of GR (such as maximally-extended Schwarzschilds providing wormholes, or Alcubierre-type distortions of spacetime) can't help that, because so far as I'm aware, none of them are actually physical. If nothing else, building wormholes out of Schwarzschild involves assuming that the entire universe is, always has been, and always will be, a single maximally-extended Schwarzschild (which is self-evidently false); a realistic Penrose diagram of a real black hole looks very different indeed. Meanwhile, getting FTL from an Alcubierre-type solution involves your ship being a "test mass" (so having no influence on the geometry), and infinitely far from any other gravitating source, neither of which is plausible. Compounding this, both the wormhole and Alcubierre solutions require basically the judicious use of something that would act as a dark energy, but under our control. Which is even less plausible.

So of course you're right. I dont' feel either is realistic, and I do feel that specifically looking for Dyson spheres in preference to simply looking for radio emissions, is probably not going to be helpful. (Furthermore, curiously IR-hot systems that are invisible in visible and higher will be picked up anyway, and will be studied more closely. We have a lot of surveys going on in the IR; it's far more useful than visible.) As you say, this is my own feelings, but ultimately (if you can overlook the unpleasant way I put some of them forward here, which I apologise for) they are at least founded on a level of reason. Of course that reason can be wrong, and can be challenged. I just think I'm right. ;)

Ahh! So it's meant to mean we can't prove or disprove spiritual claims by looking at merely physical evidence?