John Titor

I have to agree with you... although I am definately not up to judging the science of the thing, it smells like a movie promition to me! I'm guessing something Miramaxish and maybe even an Indie? The Blair Witch has indeed cursed as all!

B

Hi Jellin

"...No, I don't beleive it either, but my reasons are considered. I took the time to read it through and form an opinion. I'm sorry, but it bothers me that people sometimes ridicule and reject an idea when they very obviously haven't given it enough consideration to give it more than a cursory glance. Just enough information to construct a scathing and sarcastic rejection.

Sometimes I just have to speak out. You shouldn't simply reject an idea because you automatically don't like it. No, I certainly don't think we have to sit and consider the words of every screaming maniac out there (and this perhaps touches on some other recently hot threads) but if someone is going out of there way to present an idea in an open way with cival discussion, it's pretty poor form to dismiss it without even knowing what it is you;re dismissing...."

Sorry, I have to say that I DO like the idea.....I like it hugely. I hope to goodness that it DOES exist. I DID read, and have considered, and as I said, in MY opinion it's a well put together hoax. I hardly think that what I wrote could be considered as "scathing".... I'd have thought something along the lines of "anyone believeing this heap of **** must be out of their minds" etc, would be scathing. Sarcasm I'll take. As I said at the end.... MY opinion.
I've read a lot of time travel theory and really hope to find one day that it does exist, at which point should John Titor be proven to be true, then I'll gladly hold my hand up to it.
It's terrific fun...it's well written and has a definite "flow". But for me, I choose not to believe it. I wasn't saying that the military wouldnt allow him back...what i was saying was that if they KNEW he'd been posting on boards, then I doubt very MUCH they'd have allowed it.
Anyway.....let's agree to differ.......life's too short...
xx

I made a time machine once (key word here is once). I found the farther back you send it, the more energy builds up. My prototype went back about 14 billion years and exploded. WOW, was that ever a big bang!

p.s. 'The Butterfly Effect' is an excellent movie toillustrate the possible problems involved with time travel.

did you see the video? where is it?

You guys are missing one thing. There IS NO UNIX PROBLEM!
Most Unices, if not all, have moved over to 64-bit timers, AFAIK.
If you're running some ancient big iron right now and you cant upgrade it, it's probably going to be very dead, rusted and buried in 34 years

Ahem....

'Look I'm a SOLDIER I don't KNOW tech stuff!!!!!' - Kyle Reese

Juro,

Oz posted a link to it earlier, here it is.

http://www.anomalies.net/time_travel/steve.html

Kinda cheesy if ya ask me

And if Eggy's right, that's a huge "problem" with the story. The only way to get around that would be to say that he's a screw-up and HE thinks there's a Unix 'y2k' problem, but he's misinformed. But that's reeeeeaaaally pushing it.

Edit:
Actually, the government sent him back for the computer didn't it? Nevermind..

Ooooooh idea!

Time for some fun... if we can verify that "most" Unix machines have been updated as Eggy says, that would be a nice "fun fact" to post on the time travel message board at anomalies.net where they talk about John Titor....

Someone probly already has, I haven't gone through all those posts but its likely they already have.

Maybe they aren't very smart in the future? Or all their 64-bit unix code/machines went boom? Althought thats unlikely since the internet still apparently exists. My explination, if I was John and someone braught up that point would be, we just want the computer cuse its fun to play with old stuff.

One thing no one asked was if people use Windows, Mac, or Linux in the future. Most probly they still use all three, but since the population is smaller in USA then it would be interisting to see if more people use Mac or Linux then. It could be said "well since they're worried about the Unix problem or whatever..." but that could be for their servers, but why use Unix for servers anymore? Wouldn't you rather use Linux? Is there a Linux problem with clocks anyone know?

I guess they could be using Unix for different things than servers, I don't know what all Unix is used for nowdays... or in the future.

I read it on slashdot, so take it with a grain of salt. There's nothing horribly difficult about changing the time_t type however, and the worst that could happen would that some poorly programmed code would be broken, but also easily fixable.
The code that defines the type of number used to store time is probably "typedef time_t int" which makes it a default 32-bit integer that can count up to 2 gigs - 2147483647. Changing it to "typedef time_t unsigned int" would allow it to reach 4 gigs - 4294967295 - easily. I dont know if the time libs use any negative time_t values for errors or something but they could prolly just use the errno variable for that. It's been a year since I coded in C.
Using "float" as the type could let them go up to 10^38 - thats a one and 38 zeros:

100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Using a "double" could let them have about 10 times as much as that - 10^308 -
100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Anyway I wouldnt worry about any silly unix bug if I were you. Hardware itself is rapidly moving towards the 64-bit age, where the default integer type will be 64 bits in size.

Why do you all assume it's THAT problem? As far as I saw, he only said "There is a problem with UNIX in the future.". Nothing about that specific problem.

For all we know, there's an unknown problem in 64-bit unix that suddenly comes up in 2038 or whatever.

He said what the problem was somewhere I think... said it had to do with the time. But we could be reading it wrong or he's wrong, maybe the time is fine but theres something else.

Maybe he had another mission though that he didn't mention and the Unix part was a lesser important mission that he felt free to tell us. Maybe he actualy went back to cause a war, or stop it, or kill someone. Never know, he IS supposedly government.

Oz, Linux is Unix for all intents and purposes. Or rather, Unix and Linux are POSIX-compliant, POSIX being a standard that defines its behaviour. C is also an ANSI standard, but both of these standards dont define the actual space allocated to storing time quantities, so any code that relies on time_t being of specific size is incorrect.
In college I was always taught to NEVER rely on the size of ANY type. We use the sizeof() function liberally and instinctively in all code relying on sizes of data types.
There was talk in the Linux kernel mailing list about the time bug, back in 2000. It was mentioned that some 64 bit hardware architectures were ALREADY using 64-bit time values since as far back as 1995. It is certainly possible to use 64-bit time values in 32-bit platforms such as the PC.
Changing time_t to an unsigned integer would not alter its size though, and would extend the current systems' lives by another 70 years.
I wouldnt worry about it if I were you

James:

I find it hard to believe it would be anything else than the UNIX clock stopping
Also, I think anyone who believes this guy should be publically flogged to death
It's like those people who wonder why we look for water on other planets when aliens "could be anything else". There should be a penalty for people who talk about that which they dont know jack about. Say, a public flogging!
It's basic chemistry. There are over 100 elements in the periodic table, and two fields: Organic chemistry (the chemistry of carbon and water, essentially) and Inorganic chemistry (everything else).
There is absolutely no substance capable of forming molecules as complex, stable and versatile as carbon, and water is a pretty special substance too. I wont bore you with the details, but there's little reason to believe that complex lifeforms could be based on something other than water and carbon.
There's also very good reasons why we are shaped the way we are, and I would expect a lot of alien races to resemble us in some easily recognizable ways.

They could be made up of an undiscovered element only found on another planet.

But yeah, it's very hard to imagine that he implied something other than the UNIX time bug.

That seems to seal the coffin on JT, I guess. But if we start having WACO incidents every month during the next year or two... I'd definitely reconsider my position here.

Garoad, due to the very definition and nature of atomic elements, it is unlikely that there are any useful, undiscovered ones. Allow me to explain.
An element is defined by its atomic number, which is the number of protons in its atomic nucleus. It's fairly obvious that there cant be any atoms with an atomic number smaller than 1
It is also fairly obvious that there arent any fractional atomic numbers. Either you have a whole proton or you dont.
It is believed that atoms of Hydrogen(#1) and some Helium(#2) were created during/shortly after the Big Bang. It is not impossible, but unlikely, that heavier elements were formed back then, and it is generally accepted that everything with a higher number of protons was formed in the cores of stars, which are nothing but huge spinning balls of hot, concentrated hydrogen and helium, undergoing nuclear fusion. It takes an incredible amount of energy to accelerate atoms so that they will collide and fuse. To give you an idea, a normal star will usually only produce elements up to Iron (#2, and anything heavier than that requires the massive explosions we know as supernovas. The heaviest of elements were formed in such violent explosions that for a brief moment, the energy output from them outshines the entire universe put together!
We have long had the ability to synthesize new elements. However, none of them are stable and so they break apart in fractions of a second. Due to the nature of the forces that bind atomic nuclei together, the larger they become, the less likely they are to stay together.
Also, think of it this way. The universe has had 15 billion years to experiment with creating new forms of matter. If there were any other stable, useful elements out there, IMHO we would have found them already.
I have no doubt that larger atoms than those we know have been created throughout the life of the universe. But since they are inherently unstable, they have all disassembled into smaller, stabler elements. Darwinist thinking always works great, even at these subatomic levels

I'm skeptical. There is no mystery, only technobabble.

He doesn't provide anything curiously insightful in any of his comments. He presents nothing along the lines of new terminology, mysterious acronyms or idioms, or even any indication of any tidbits of knowledge that makes me ask "whoa, what did he mean by that?".

It's all technobabble and random (and relatively uncreative) predictions that any reasonably intelligent person could pull together into a potential future.

If I had read through his writings and seen at least a few mysterious nouns or verbs used in passing which went unexplained, then I'd give him at least a baseline of credibility. I just can't see the English language not incorporating new idioms or terminology over the span of 24 years that would be apparent in his writing.

It was an entertaining read, but fiction can often be =)

I'll be sure to consider that Mr. Titor was probably a genuine time traveler while I'm being consumed along with everyone in the US.

What direction do the prevailing winds blow in Portugal, Eggy?

Freaking a, I should have gone into Chemistry afterall (or stayed in that major anyway). By now I'd have an interesting job instead of a crappy job hunt. Damnit!

Well it depends. In the winter we get cold winds from the north, in the summer we get warm winds from the south, and theres moist wind coming in from the atlantic pretty much all the time
You dont want to move to portugal though. This place sucks
We're decades behind everyone else. Taxes go up, salaries go down, its virtually impossible to get anything through our overly bureaucratic justice system, which is slow as molasses, so we have a general feeling of impunity, leading to high levels of corruption, tax evasion etc.
We're pretty much the least productive nation in Europe. The government recently stated that it has 200,000 surplus employees, and if the numbers arent high enough by themselves, bear in mind that we only have 10 million ppl in total. Some people actually complain they havent been given anything to do in 6 years
I've had a couple of swedish friends for years, and they're coming to visit me next summer. One of them lives in what he describes as a "ghetto", in the middle of all the turkish immigrants and stuff. His job consists of driving subway trains, and that alone nets him twice as much money as mom makes, at the pinnacle of her career. The other one has so much MORE money than him, that I'm probably getting a free trip to Paris at their expense! LOL!
Portugal is a good place to go and retire. If you have amassed what in your country might be considered a modest amount of wealth, you can come here and be filthy rich instead. Then again, you would be an order of magnitude richer in eastern europe or any third world country
I'm baffled as to why people waste what seems to me as unbelievable amounts of money to buy their own sim, when my whole tuition is around half of that.

Less productive than Italy?

Don't worry we'll be happy to share our nuclear fallout across the Atlantic when we get it. It might not be "fresh" but just take a few good deep breaths!

Garoad,

Thanks for posting the link to the video. After watching it a couple of times I started to think... (always dangerous):

Wouldn't the the temporal shift/time gate thingy move along with the machine that is making/controlling it? If so, when he walks in it would move.... and he'd never really be able to walk into the gate.

I could be completely off on that.. but I was just wondering..

Not a bad question, actually. No idea...

The way I thought it worked is that the traveller was stationary (I think he even said the traveller is stationary...?)

KINDA cheesy? It's a fake background notice how his ltitle pen laser thing doesn't reflect off of the fireplace as he waves it around. In fact, it just disappears.

He used some effects with adobe premiere, and called it "weird". What a maroon.

LF

You know what...that video isn't very convincing.

But I think there's another MAJOR inconsistency here. On johntitor.com there's pictures of the actual machine, right? Well those pictures don't seem to resemble anything in the video.....?

LF: maybe the fact that the laser went off like that was the point. It seemed like he was using it to "detect" where to walk, and when the laser stopped firing, that shows you the right direction.

Silly huh?