usenet weirdness

Not true. The PDP-8 I programmed in assembler to collect data for my Ph.D. project, didn't have an operating system.

I did have to key in the RIM loader - a short paper-tape reading program to program it to load the faster and longer paper-tape reading program that could read in my assembled code, but there wasn't any kind of operating system.

The single chip processors that I used from time to time later in my career didn't even need that. You wrote the program into programmable memory, and plugged it into the board, and away it went.

Modern computers do normally use large chunks of standardised software to save the programmers the tedious of looking after the routine house-keeping - I've got a Windows partition and Linux partition on this computer, but the Linux partition has hardly ever been used.

You may not know what I'm talking about, but as a hardware engineer I do know exactly how computers work, and I've designed backplanes for special purpose computing engines.

The arrogant idiocy is all yours.

I can understand why your employers would make sure that you didn't.

At least one computer manager wouldn't let me put a compiler into my work computer, so I had to do in Excel what would have been much easier in Fortran (or C if I'd ever got around to learning it properly).

Of course it doesn't hold a candle to special purpose hardware designed for the job, but it's a lot cheaper, and if you can spread it over enough parallel processors, it can usually be made fast enough.

You post s*it, and it gets snipped. You don't want to believe that it is s*it so you invent your own s*it to explain what what we are doing in a way that flatters your ego, even though it makes you look even more of an idiot.

I know you like to think so. Lying to yourself may be comforting, but it does make look even more idiotic.

Quoting: "for effects predicted by general AND special relativity. " Come on, trash. Have some dignity.

You may find that asserting that I'm dumb makes you feel better, but it's not a plausible claim.

But you think that every computer has to have an operating system. A Turing machine doesn't need that, and anybody who claims to have sat through five years of Computer Science needs to know that if they want to be believed. You are posing as programmer, but you don't even get to first base.

I know you're old and demented, but I'm writing in present time. But let it be: MOST software must be compatible with the operating system.

Sorry, trash, you definitely don't.

So a question "what do real clocks indicate" is a "s*it" for you? QED, trash.

You may find that asserting it isn't makes you better, but yes it is.

And you think that everybody who is criticizing your insane S*it has no knowledge, understanding or education. That's how The S*it is training its doggies.

I was once at a party in London with a bunch of old friends from Australia.

A statistician found a Concise Oxford Dictionary - which at about

It wasn't all that serious, but my wife - who wasn't there, though she knew all the people - used to find it quicker to ask me for a word when she was stuck in a cross-word rather than consult one of her cross-word dictionaries, of which she had several.

I once found out that I was the only person who had ever posted the word "albeit" on sci.electronics.design. I clearly read too many books when I was a kid.

The solar tides causes a significant fraction of the slow-down of the angular rotation of the Earth. That doesn't lead to a significant change of the orbit of the Earth because the orbital angular momentum of the Earth around the Sun is so much larger than that of the Moon around the Earth.

Indeed. So in spr he engages with all the nutters around, and in consequence doesn't have much of interest to say.

He has missed the opportunity to learn something here,

Jan

The francais was once the most international language, and the 18'th and 19'th centuries the science and the mathematics much belonged to the Lingua Franca, with regards to the bastardization of German and Dutch and Portuguese and other trade aspects of "pidgin tok".

These days there's quite much made of the "BASIC" English: British-American scientific industrial commercial.

Naive sorts of universalism and animism are also defensible, since by definition they fit, like Big Bang and Steady State both do.

Considering the roots of the word "re-lig-ion", it's about the ties that bind, whatever is as for making matters of belief.

Agnostics are religious, too, ....

There are some great accounts of organized religion besides accounts of disasters in their names, for example the non-profit hospital system in the United States that supported the medical needs almost universally as after the Sacred Heart and so on. Also the ideas of universal education after Comenius, the preservation of learning during the Dark Ages, and the quaint Amish and Mennonites and Friends' and Quaker's and their barn-raising and so on.

I like the teachings of the Christ and the Buddha, and there is much to be said for the lessons of reciprocity and as about civilized society like as for Moses and Confucius.

The usual most obvious sort of exposition of "the fundamental question of metaphysics" as "why is there something rather than nothing" is that that's how the "beginnings" at least two of them, in the Old and New Testament, the old "most printed book in the world", have.

Here the "Freedom of Religion" is guaranteed in the law of the land.

"There is no 'but', only 'yet'", is a quotation of a statement about definitions in words (as "a quotation of ...", ad infinitum, with regards to the infinitive "to quote") of a defense of a belief that quasi-modal logic is un-sound.

And it's not hygienic, ....

So you admit to being insufficiently precise in your original formulation, which is to say wrong.

We were talking about programming the human brain, which hasn't got a lot in common with the sorts of computers you claim to be programming, which made it an even sillier claim.

I'm sure that you like to think that, but it doesn't make it true.

Granting that you clearly don't have any idea what your question might mean, you've just trash-canned yourself.

The Encyclopedia was a French project and it was at the core of the radical enlightenment. Spinoza - who turns out to have been key figure in it if you believe Jonathon Israel, was of Portugese descent, living in the Netherland and publishing in Latin , which got polished by his friends on the way to getting published.

Sure. My time in the Netherlands rubbed my nose in that - I was never encouraged to write Dutch, and was exploited - mostly via my Dutch hockey team - to polish up Dutch English before it got published.

The largest chunk was a Dutch Ph.D. thesis on palliative care, which didn't need much cleaning up. I'd done more work for the guys supervisor who needed the help more.

It certainly is science fiction, which doesn't stop people having half-baked ideas about using it in real life.

A quantum state doesn't have any mass.

Since Scotty was always pixels on a screen, \it an illusion.

Via my wife I hung out with quite a few dialect experts. My accent is educated Australian, slightly soften by 22 years living in England. One work colleague - with whom I'm still in contact - is Scottish, but I don't seem to have picked up his accent.

My surname is a west country surname - there are more pages of Slomans in the Taunton telephone directory than in the London telephone directory - and it is a contraction of Sloughman, who was some who farmed bottom land close to a river.

I'm not slow - both my parents had university degrees and I got a Ph.D. All my nieces and nephews have been to university and graduated - one now works for Google. My father's sister married a very clever vet, who ended up with a D.Sc, and both their kids were professors at Adelaide University for a bit. It isn't a high prestige school and both moved on to better jobs. That is the clever branch of the family. My father's 25 patents - I've only got three - instills a certain measure of humility.

I respond to more posts than I should. I really should find a better way of filling in my day. Some of my responses have been interesting, but it doesn't happen often

Really? Do tell us what that might have been.

The good stuff can be pretty good, but religion gone bad can be very nasty indeed

It's an expository trick rather than anything informative.

Up to a point. Human sacrifice is always frowned on, and people who let their kids die when medical treatment might have saved them do go to jail.

The point about moving clocks is made in section 4 "Physical Meaning of the Equations Obtained in Respect to Moving Rigid Bodies and Moving Clocks" and the equation is at at the bottom of page 10.

It looks pretty explicit to me, but I got the same story out of George Gamow's "Mr Tompkins in Wonderland" when I was kid.

For the general relativity case you'd have to look at the 1915 paper.

The trash here is you. You know perfectly well that special relativity and general relativity predict different time dialations, because only general relativity includes corrections for gravitational time dilation, but you post only the special relativity paper and ask me to point out the section of time dilation, which I do, while mentioning that this is only half the story.

Now you want to make a fuss of the fact that the special realtivity paper is only half the story - a fact which I have mentioned repeatedly.

I don't know what kind of rhetorical game you think you are playing, but it has to be a singularly stupid one.

I do.

Much more than an ignorant, arrogant idiot could imagine, sorry, trash.

I'm sure that you don't like to think that, but it doesn't make it false.

Come on, trash, your spitting and slandering can't stand against my logic. Have some dignity and face it.

, you've just trash-canned yourself.

Sorry, trash, definitely no predictions of clock corrections there. You're deluding, as usual.

No, the trash here is you. You know perfectly well that both of your s**ts predict no clock errors to correct.

because only

No it doesn't.

A lie, of course. I was not asking you to point where your divine idiot mumbled about his dilation delusion, I asked you where he predicted any clock corrections.

Now I understand why teachers blow up in rocketships...the engineers don't understand physics.