i don't mean frames not in sync with the vertical refresh, but occasions where an entire frame or two is skipped.

> Anything inconsistent, and not in sync is just plain dumb.

absolutely.

you should try programming in Flash some time.

seems like a physical simulation and a renderer could get the same job done.

hm. i guess the challenge must be in getting it to happen in realtime w/ portable hardware.

as this article points out it's not the number of frames per second that really matters:
it's the longest gap between subsequent frames which the eye picks up on.

you could cram 200 frames into the last 10th of a second, but if the other 0.9 seconds only has 1 frame, it'll feel like 1Hz.

i typically chart another metric next to traditional FPS which is 1 / (max inter-frame period in one second).

i'm speaking from experience.

this would have been in kickstart 1.1 or possibly even 1.0,
it was taken out of later editions of kickstart.

also it flashed very quickly, which perhaps might lead to some confusion as to whether it was real or not.
to get it to stay up for even a second i had to launch a bunch of background tasks to slow the whole machine down.

my favorite easter egg was in the early amiga 'rom' (kickstart) -
if you held down both shift keys, both ctrl keys, one of the function keys, then inserted a floppy disk,
the screen would briefly flash "the amiga - we made it, commodore fucked it up'.

IIRC their first title was an absolute chunk of crap for the Amiga, called "Brataccas".
even in 1986 i knew i deserved better.
the cover art was pretty cool tho.

they must have acquired some serious talent out of the demo scene to produce Shadow of the Beast and the others which followed on.

omg, ASL ?!

1) of course we don't know that. we're probably not even going to hit it, and it's probably not even made of rock. "swarms".

2) this is actually a great question. it combines ethics and science. there's obviously no easy answer here.
      if we knew the rest of the universe was barren of life, then the question goes away. but we don't.

3) yer missing the point. the point isn't to build a human empire or anything like that. there's no point in waiting for them to phone home.
      the point is that there's a _possibility_ that Earth is all she wrote for life in the galaxy, and we may be Earth's last spacefaring race.

4) i know i'm going to hell for replying to trolls, but your come-on was just so sweet i couldn't help myself.

> Perpetuating life in and of itself has no objective value.

sure, which is why i include "if you accept the principle that life is a good thing".
you may not, and that's fine.

i'm not proposing generation ships or any other sort of ship capable of transporting humans or anything more complex than extremely primitive organisms.
i'm talking about filling a basketball with primary producers like lichen, bacteria, and algae, and launching a few thousand of them into the galaxy.
guidance systems would be nice, too.

the cost of this would be a fraction of what we spend on say bailing out banks.

we humans may wipe ourselves out,
which from one point of view is just fine because we can't wipe out all terrestrial life.
however, it is quite conceivable that an extinction event could make us the last space-faring species this planet will ever see.
and if you accept the principle that 'life is a good thing',
then this implies that we have a moral imperative to get life itself off-planet and into the galaxy asap.
we should be building little bio-bombs full of spores, pollen, algae and other primary producers which are capable of handling
a few hundred years or millenia in interstellar space, and launching swarms of them to the top 200 closest planet-bearing stars.

somebody point me to kickstarter.

the experiment you describe is great alright,
but could be explained without entanglement etc, through the ever-unpopular hidden variables approach.
(or even by positing that interference is sensitive to polarization)

TFA describes something which i can't explain with hidden variables however.
(to do so would, i think, require Victor's decision to be based on how Alice and Bob measured, which is just as bad as entaglement)

along another tack, i wonder if we assume temporal de-localization for interference effects
then does entanglement go away ?

by that reasoning, revolution is never an option.

i'm w/ the good doctor,
but also my thinking is that we should raise our heads out of our shapely buttocks for a moment
and think about spreading life of any form, not only human, to the rest of the galaxy.
i'm a good science boy and have no doubt that there is life out there,
but so far there's no signs of anyone except us.
we're on the cusp of wiping ourselves out in one way or another,
and when we do it's by no means certain that this planet will ever again attain space-faring capability
before it gets eaten by the sun. given this, i think we have a huge moral imperative to send out
large numbers of cheap life-bearing probes into the galaxy. little infectious bombs.
primary producers wired to chill out until there's a reliable energy source, and then mutate like crazy.

you mean we tend to summarize the nature of a nation by its political structure rather than its economic ?
i think that's true. probably because the vast majority of nations have all been capitalist since forever.
in the case of actual totalitarianism tho it isn't really a valid distinction: the whole point is that it's a total system. eg for all practical purposes the government dictates the speed of light.

it's weird that with so many years of perspective people still refer to Soviet Russia as a communist system.
the primary political aspect of soviet russia was totalitarianism, not communism.
Stalin murdered 20 million russians, not counting deaths during the war.
he used enforced wide-scale mass-starvation as a weapon, for example.
that kind of terror is not a feature of communism, that's a feature of totalitarianism.
ditto china, ditto nazi germany.

for further reading, check out "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million" by Martin Amis, or "The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt.

thanks for the conceptualizations around large numbers.
for another example, one way to visualize 10^300 is that if you take a sphere the size of the universe (sphere of radius 14 billion light years) and then fill it with grains of sand, and then replace each of those grains of sand with an entire universe filled with grains of sand, and then replace each of those grains of sand with yet another universe of sand, you have about 10^300. by my estimate. this came up because i was pissed off at string theorists claiming that there are 10^500 different sets of laws of physics, which is just an absurd number to bring into a discussion about reality.