On Mon, 6 Oct 2003, Bryan Murdock wrote:

> On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 14:44, Jacob Albretsen wrote:
> > Quoting Ross Werner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> >
> > > It just blows my mind that even at such "small" distances as the
> > > circumference of the earth, the "ping" times are at noticeable lengths
> > > even at the (probably unattainable) speed of light. What happens when we
> > > want to play Quake VII with someone on a moon colony? Is it simply
> > > theoretically impossible?
> >
> > Yep.  Except on Star Trek or Star Wars.
> >
> > You don't think they were moving the Mars Rover in real time do you?

Yeah, but I can wrap my brain around the idea that the distance between us
and Mars is big enough to create some huge lag. But to wrap my brain
around the fact that the distance between me and Australia _at the speed
of light_ is noticeable? Amazing.

It's interesting. Imagine /me/ teleporting instantly from here to
Australia--simply saying "less than a second!" seems amazingly fast. But
describing the round-trip for a packet of data at the same speed as "over
100ms" just feels /slow/.

> We just need to work on making the ansible from Ender's Game our
> physical layer.  How hard can that be?

Um, theoretically impossible?

Not that hard at all! ;-)

  ~ ross

-- 

This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter.



____________________
BYU Unix Users Group 
http://uug.byu.edu/ 
___________________________________________________________________
List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list

Reply via email to