Recent content by justsomeguy

Well the paper is interesting, I'll have to take more time later to read it more carefully, but closing remarks contain this paragraph which is 'worrying' for lack of a better term. If two observers are disagreeing on what direction time is flowing, that seems to indicate that they are...

Right, sorry. Complex/imaginary. I haven't had time to look at the paper yet.

There is nothing in SR or GR that says that FTL is impossible, or even that time travel is impossible. That's not the right way to think about the problem. What they say is that nothing with mass can go *exactly* the speed of light (doing so leads to infinite energy) and in SR, the reason you...

I think this is only (practically) true if the travelers traverse normal spacetime and can share information with observers during the journey; that's what I'm trying to nail down. Would there be repercussions for causality if instantaneous travel were possible? The closest I've found is...

I am going to avoid the jargon as much as possible, I just don't want the system to be open to too many "why didn't they" or "what if" scenarios when it comes to that particular problem. That's where the question about the wormholes/jumpgates comes from. Everything I've been able to find so...

After reading about everything I can find on the subject while researching for a story, I've come to the conclusion that wormholes (or "jump" drives or gates) are the only potential "class" of FTL mechanisms which are even remotely (not a problem for fiction) plausible while also not opening the...

An evaluation can change each time it is executed, that's what it means. Assignments, barring external influence, do not change their value (their evaluation). Perhaps it's too subtle of a difference to get into. That is what awk *does*. That is its purpose. All input to awk is...

It is not "assigning" it to $0, it's reevaluating $0. I explained a few posts back, it's just some ugly awk idiom. Some people use it out of habit because they don't know what it does. Those who understand what it's doing only use it as a sort of shortcut to demonstrate their command of awk...

Lenovo's are good. Been a thinkpad fan for many years, you can't go wrong with them.

a 12v 4Ah "what?"

Measuring one tells you the state of both.

I will probably start keeping track of the gibberish as you pointed out. I mainly wanted to draw attention to the fact that honestly answering those questions will likely make your accounts less secure -- not more -- to anyone else following the thread. I might not be able to guess your 64...

I'm a serious coder. Not desktop support or a dilettante if that's what you mean. I've done everything from tiny websites to huge multiuser n-tier enterprise apps shoveling millions of dollars a day around. For a while I was writing EM (RF and IR) simulation management software for a fortune...

Also 42 years of protection on average isn't quite right. That's the average duration a schoolbuilding lasts. Unless they are not getting installed except in new schools, they will last significantly less time -- 42 years less whatever the average age of a school is. From a practical...

You are basically correct. Watts tell you how fast water is flowing out of the faucet, watt-hours tell you how long that faucet is left on. You need the faucet open a minimum amount in order to fill your container as fast or faster than it's leaking (being consumed by a load). To get into...