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The Earth was known to be flat. Bloodlettings were known to be healthy...
CALL APOGEE, SAY AARDWOLF
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game.
I'm a puny punmaker.
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It isn't?  They aren't? 
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Me, all the time
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Johnny J. wrote: It isn't?
Only in Alabama.
Johnny J. wrote: They aren't?
See above.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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OriginalGriff wrote: Only in Alabama.
By my experience, the heads are totally flat in Alabama, not the Earth.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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Flatheads were mostly produced in Michigan by the auto makers and they were a popular design for their ease of maintenance.
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OriginalGriff wrote: Only in Alabama.
That genealogical tree don't have no branches! (yes I know, it's supposed to be doesn't have any branches)
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No. It was known that people used to think the Earth was flat. Indeed Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's circumference more than 2000 years ago. At least the Greeks had drawn their conclusions from ships apparently disappearing behind the horizon and trying to measure and calculate the circumference would have been kindof pointless if they still had thought the Earth to be flat.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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Euclid was the one ruining it. If he had, say, drowned when he was a kid, space would have had two large circular dimensions, and one short linear one.
And understanding string theory would have been much easier.
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It was one of the early forms of DoubleThink.
You had to believe and say that the Earth was flat as that was part of the one true infallible word of the State Religion.
But you would also know that it was incorrect.
See also 'The Emperors new clothes'.
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I think you are confusing that with the Sun going around the Earth. (That's what got Galileo in trouble).
But that was based on religious belief, not misapplied science.
Truth,
James
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den2k88 wrote: Bloodlettings were known to be healthy...
Yes, but that was before we found the limit of our universe. Nowadays you'd need to be very convincing and stuff.
It is also not limited to what we know, but what we can observe - has there ever been a particle observed that moved faster?
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Have we the technology to observe faster particles?
CALL APOGEE, SAY AARDWOLF
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game.
I'm a puny punmaker.
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For those that can collide with existing particles, yes. We'd have no way to determine their speed if they existed, but if they did and could collide with matter - then yes, one would notice an impact.
..what about all those planets that should have intelligent life? Any aliens passed by recently?
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Heh. I'll cheat here.
Some particles can travel faster than light, under centain conditions (see cherenkov radiation - Wikipedia[^]).
I believe the limit we are all talking about here, is the speed of light in vacuo. Supposedly, the speed of light in vacuo is the fastest speed any information can travel. However that too has been debunked under certain conditions (EPR paradox - Wikipedia[^]).
We've yet to observe any tachyons, that's true. But we'd yet to observe any gravitational waves up to last year as well (and we did). And the theory we have describing the world around us is just that: a theory. When it stops corresponding to reality, we don't (shouldn't, at least) try to change reality, we change (should, at least) the theory. The same way that the theory of relativity and it's imposed limit that no massive object can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuo, was a better approximation of Newtonian physics in the limit of very large speeds (i.e. it described phenomena that Newtonian physics couldn't), there may be some other theory that describes some exotic (yet unobserved) phenomena that occur in extremely large speeds, and where the limit of the speed of light is no longer applicable (though I can't think of any phenomenon that this has been observed so far) and that degenerates to relativistic theory for large speeds and to Newtonian theory for small speeds.
Physics was in a similar position at the turn of the 20th century - there were just a handful of phenomena that had yet to be interpreted adequately by classical physics - one of them was the photoelectric phenomenon, and another one was the linear emission spectrum of gases. Yet these two gave birth to quantum physics, and a whole lot of new areas of research for more than a century.
Relativity theory still has a few things not very well defined (naked singularities comes to mind). And the universe is a very big place, so we can't really say we have looked everywhere and there's nothing more to observe. I, for one, believe that we are still in for quite a few surprises in terms of exotic physical phenomena in the future.
Φευ! Εδόμεθα υπό ρηννοσχήμων λύκων!
(Alas! We're devoured by lamb-guised wolves!)
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yiangos wrote: Some particles can travel faster than light, under centain conditions
Nice cheating; we were assuming a near-vacuum like space, not the oceans.
yiangos wrote: We've yet to observe any tachyons, that's true
We're not limited to using light to observe stuff - if it is a particle then it surely has mass. Any particle (regardless of speed) would also interact on collision (with say, lots o' static, dense particles). And yes, I hope they exist, because that would mean that we could actually test what happens when the laws of causality are violated - might be a big bang for us 
yiangos wrote: But we'd yet to observe any gravitational waves up to last year as well (and we did).
Yes, but observing simply brings knowledge - it does not change the way things work. We may dream of teleporting a human (and a fly) from one pod to the other, but that doesn't mean it has to become reality.
yiangos wrote: I, for one, believe that we are still in for quite a few surprises in terms of exotic physical phenomena in the future.
Given the current state, yes, there would have to be. Were currently stuck with a set of theories that are a bit conflicting, and that are predicting some really weird things.
..and thanks for showing that the constant isn't 
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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But light does not travel at a constant speed, so the number assigned to it is all but arbitrary.
Who knows if it can go a lot faster, under the right conditions?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Well, it's defined according to the speed of light in a vacuum.
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What kind of vacuum? No real vacuum has been actually observed, only approximations of it.
CALL APOGEE, SAY AARDWOLF
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game.
I'm a puny punmaker.
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A perfect, theoretical one. As far as actually measuring it goes, the vacuums we can generate are probably good enough. After all, vacuum quality is just one source of uncertainty.
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Under what gravity?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Sounds like it's time for a "your momma" joke.
Jeremy Falcon
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Yo momma so fat that her gravity gradient is so steep that light can't escape her orbit, so she has effectively transformed into a black hole?
Did I get the parlance right?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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What is gravity? The whole thing about not traveling faster than the speed of light is special relativity which is consistent from cosmological scales down to the quantum. Gravity bending spacetime and thus light was general relativity and falls apart at quantum levels. It's one of the least understood things in physics.
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But that still doesn't completely rule out the Alcubierre drive[^]. We just need to find some exotic matter with a negative energy density.
If everyone here could have a look down the back of their sofas, I'm sure we'd be able to find some.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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