His control unit is sitting in the drivers side of a mid-60’s mustang, and looks like an old dynamite detonator.
Whoops. Corvette. Missed the sideways radio first time through. Arghle.
Damn thing still looks like something I’ve seen before, but for the life of me I don’t know what.
Dollars to donuts that that web page is maintained by the same guy who was making the posts. If there were even any posts in the first place.
As for his “predictions”, we have him knowing things like that Kerr and Tipler are big names in relativity research, that folks at CERN are doing physics, that people living in marshes build houses on stilts, and that society in the future will be based on people communicating with each other. If you saw any predictions more remarkable than those, let me know, because I missed them on my reading.
One more, and I’ll quit. If you do a yahoo search, there’s a load of people who’ve been interested in debunking this idiot. I’ve found one guy who asked a Seriously Educated Physics Professor.
http://www.anomalies.net/cgi-bin/bbs/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=9;t=000482
Should work, and boy is it fascinating. If he can build a little time machine like that, he should be able to come up with a simple script to get around his problems.
Why is a technical manual from 30 years in the future printed using a typewriter and a photocopier? Even the most basic engineering shops use computers.
ROTFLMAO!
Most old IBM mainframes do NOT run Unix. THe 5100 can translate IBM mainframe system machine code into APL? ::lol:: I would love to see that.
Besides, the Y2038 problem is hinged on people running 32-bit systems with a 32-bit time_t value. If people are still running 32-bit machines in 2038 I’d be very surprised. 64-bit machines, the new thing now which will surely be in widespread use by 2038, effectively nullify the whole issue by shoving it billions of years into the future.
Here’s the non-geek gloss: UNIX stores time values internally as a count of seconds since the epoch, or January 1, 1970 at 00:00:00 GMT. This value is stored in a data type that is called time_t in the widespread C programming language. Currently, on most machines, this value is 32 bits wide, which means it takes 32 binary digits to hold all of the values it can represent. It is also signed, which means it can represent a negative number. On most current machines, when a signed value gets too big, it `wraps-around’ so that the most positive value plus one becomes the most negative value. On 32-bit UNIX machines, this wrap-around will occur in the year 2038. After the wrap-around, 32-bit UNIX machines will think it’s sometime in the year 1901.
How do 64-bit systems fix this? By making the most positive value so truly huge that the sun will burn out before we count that high. Even if we begin to count milliseconds, we’ll still not hit a wrap-around condition for any semi-reasonable amount of time.
Chronos, although your moderating superpowers appear to be temporarily de-activated, you should know if it’s possible to track the IP addresses and rough physical location from which that guy’s message board posts originated.
Establishing the location from where the original posts at the time travel institute originated and comparing it to “THE HOST” of johntitor.com might prove your own bet.
Or put in a call to Moose and Squirrel for some upsidaisyum:
Um, Why would someone from the future spend so much time posting on message boards???
Just killing time I suppose.
It’s true to some extent. Obsolete hardware is definitely a problem in space projects. A few years ago I was involved in the operation of the Yohkoh satellite, which was launched in 1991. The communication system on the ground (used to send commands to the satellite and process telemetry data) was based on a Fujitsu S-3000 series computer, about twice the size of a refrigerator. This was state of the art when installed there in the early 1980s. It was still a reliable and supported system when the satellite was being developed during the late 1980s, so they wrote all the communication software for it. By the time the satellite died in 2001 it was seriously out of date; it broke down several times and it sometimes took weeks to find replacement parts. We did have backup systems, but those were spartan and difficult to use. Porting the system to a new computer would have been an enormous project; the software has to be 100% reliable because a wrong sequence of commands sent to the satellite can disable the satellite permanently. It would also have been expensive to keep a full set of replacement parts on hand. Imagine keeping enough spare parts to keep a car running for 20 years. You can keep an identical car as a parts car and you’d still be in trouble if the same component breaks twice.
Saint Zero: that’s the best debunking I’ve seen. One aspect that struck me as particularly daft was the laser light whose “beam is being bent by the gravitational field produced outside the vehicle by the distortion unit. The beam is visible through smoke that is coming from his cigar” (see here). Consider the gravitational field (and associated mass) necessary to do that, then ask why the smoke is able to float in the air - and indeed why the person holding the pointer and cigar isn’t falling into the singularity.
problem with time travel: i go back in time and i kill the person who invented time travel…
If time travel were a possibility there would be chaos as many different realities would spring up, and there would be too much confusion. And…If he is coming from 2036 then that means we are acknowledging that right now, the people in 2036 are living parallel to us, which means that everything is predetermined, and multiple realities are going on at the same time so…if time travel is possible in 2036 why wouldnt someone come back from 3026 or some other distant future
Complete and utter BS. The guy doesn’t mind sharing plans for a time machine, apparently * wants * to change the future, but doesn’t bother saying “Hey, maybe you guys should beef up airport security on Sept. 11?” Or even, “you know that butterfly ballot in Florida? Bad idea.”
But the IBM thing really puts the icing on the cake. Here’s the most salient feature of the IBM: “Although designed to be a small business computer, the high cost and lack of interfacing capability limited the acceptance of what could be called the 1st personal computer, the IBM 5100. " It had 64K of memory, and used either 8” 1.2 Meg floppy disks, or a cassette tape interface. No hard drive.
So – no serial output (certainly nothing that’s usable by even 1990’s standards) and no compatible media. Just how would you use this machine to do anything? You’d have to laboriously transcribe the results off the screen. It’s be easier to do any translation by hand. Unless all the computer programmers in the future have been wiped out by Terminators, it would be easier to program the appropriate algorithm. And if all the computer programmers had been wiped out, it would still be easier to come back in time with a description of the algorithm and a future iPod to bribe a programmer with to do the programming now. Program the algorithm on a Powerbook running OS-X or a Linux box and bring that back to the future.
My conclusion is that if this story is real, C. M. Kornbluth was right about the intelligence of future generations.
Finagle hit my immediate thought: Where’s his 9/11 prediction?
“He doesn’t want to interfere with events”, says a true believer. OK, fine. A vague “an unprecendented terrorist attack on US soil will occur within a few years” would suffice.
Almost forgot. In order to do that, he’d actually have to be from the future and not a delusional fraud.
This thing made milk squirt out of my nose.
BAD CheekyMonkey613! BAD MONKEY! BAD!
NO MAKE MILK SQUIRT OUT OF YOUR UNCLE BOSDA’S NOSE!
:smack: I’m sorry guys. I didn’t know this subject was discussed in earlier posts. As you can see, I’m a newbie to the board. It didn’t even cross my MIND to think that it’s “old news”.
All of you make valid points; most of which are WAY over my head (especially the physics and computer lingo). Give a poor interior decorator a break over here! 
I’ll be honest here … Thinking about this kept me up at night. I thought of the following things:
~ Why is it that when you “google” this guy, there are either messages from when it was happening, or VERY recent messages on boards about it (within the last week)?
~ Why is it with all the pictures he has, he doesn’t have a picture of himself?
~ Where were all you brainiacs when he was making all of these claims? LOL … Seems no one argued with him too much.
~ Part of what makes it believeable is that it’s SO unbelieveable, and so many people BELIEVED him…
Anyway, my head is still spinning, to tell you the truth. I’ll be honest, I’m still not convinced either way… 
The more I read, the less I know.
::o I’m sorry! No bananas for the Monkey!
Glad I’m amusing y’all while my brain goes into convulsions trying to wrap itself around the whole idea …
LOL … I’ll be good with my next subjects in GQ
Yup. I would have guessed this guy is living with his parents.