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Rubik was a sculptor and architect, not a chemist or physicist. He invented an interesting puzzle. Its motion works identically to dynamics of "group functions", which some physicists realized works like a model of quark/antiquark combinations that compose several subatomic hadrons.

Answers

In a nutshell:
The $2 is rare, so many people save them. This increases the rarity. The initial reason they are rare appears to have to do with the bills being unpopular, although there is no known reason for why this is.

My guess is that it's an odd denomination. The $1 makes sense because it's atomic (at least, as far as dollars go--of course you can divide them into cents). $5 is good because it accounts for several $1 bills, in essense saving space in your wallet. The rest of the bills follow this pattern, each one saving more space when compared to ones (though obviously less space when compared to the next lowest denomination). But what does a $2 bill save you? It's half the space in your wallet, true, but it just doesn't compare to the $5, $10, $20.. jumping up in the denominations just seems to make more sense (though the $20->$50 jump is certainly strange).

Interestingly, for a long time, race tracks had minimum bets of $2. This made $2 bills popular in those areas because they made for easy bets. This might also account for the $1 bill's popularity in modern times, where, despite 10-10-220's assertions to the contrary, you can get something for "a buck". Many US fast food restaurants have "dollar" menus (although they tend to be more like $1.08 menus--and $1.08 would be awful for a bill denomination).

In reality, what does it matter? I like $2s because of their rarity and scarcity, and because I tend to get odd looks when I spend them. I've never been turned down, but I have seen people ask for confirmation by other employees/managers.

The United States Mint has a list of current legal tender. There may be some photos of them somewhere on the site, but I'll let someone else post the URL.

There is also another link with information on the two dollar bill.

From answers.com:

Legal tender in the United States

As laid down in the United States Coinage Act of 1965, all coins and currencies of the United States, regardless of when coined or issued, shall be legal-tender for all debts, public and private, public charges, taxes, duties and dues. This excuses the several States from the prohibition laid on them in the United States Constitution (Article I Section 10) against making anything other than gold or silver coin a legal tender.

However, US federal law does not restrict private businesses, persons or organisations in what methods of payment they choose to accept or refuse. Businesses are therefore free to insist on payment by credit card, for example, or to refuse larger denomination banknotes. Even further though, legal tender laws do not preclude businesses from choosing to reject U.S. dollars for payment altogether. In this regard legal tender laws do not pertain to voluntary transactions.The occasional practice of offering large quantities of small denomination coins to pay resented debts is restricted by regulations limiting the use of "subsidiary" and "minor" coins (those with denominations of less than one dollar) similar to the Canadian ones listed below.

Similar articles on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

I don't buy everything this guy says, in particular for payment-after-purchase transactions like restaurants and post-pay gas stations. My gut feeling is if you eat a dinner and offer to pay with legal tender, they have to accept it, despite any signs to the contrary. After all, maybe I'm illiterate. But then again IANAL.

A related article which includes the above is at LaborLawTalk, it says among other things that:
- "legal tender can be refused until a person is in debt" which is why pre-pay grocery stores can refuse $100 bills, but post-pay restaurants can't.

I've heard there are limits on what's legal tender with respect to minor coins, for example, if you owe someone $100, you can't pay it all in pennies, but I can't seem to find those limits online. If you can, please reply.

Yes we do.

Correction those 2003 series $2 bills were actually printed.

Yeah my bank still has these all in their fresh condition the last time I checked. 1996 and 1997 ones also exist.

"brief" life? WTF?

I think you mean "breathe"!

It's just a different way of grouping of decimal places. In India it's common to have them group two decimal places instead of three. Get a better description here: http://www.answers.com/topic/indian-numbering-syst em Globalisation is however making indians, albeit reluctantly, shift to the million/billion system, but it'll take time...

Look Tom Landauer's work at University of Colorado.

It makes more sense than you'd think: it turns out that knowledgable essays in a particular domain cluster statistically in useful ways. Yes, it does mean that something like Molly Bloom's Soliloquy wouldn't necessarily score very well, but then if you didn't know it wsa a Nobel Prize winning classic, would you think it was well written?

Wikipedia is available over HTTP in a much more up-to-date, interactive and dynamic format than DVDs.

Well, yes, if you want to read it you're probably not going to download the entire bloody encyclopedia to your local machine via bittorrent.

But some people would have valid reasons for wanting this. A lot of places resyndicate Wikipedia content, e.g. www.thefreedictionary.com. or answers.com; I'm exactly sure why these sites do it, but I can think or many valid reasons.

Maybe data miners or researchers want to run scripts on Wikipedia and make all kinds of conclusions (such things are entirely legal and above board, since the content is free).

The whole purpose of the DVD sets is... I don't know. I really don't.

Well, not all of us are connected to the Internet 24/7. Some of us have laptops without wireless Internet, and even computers without network cards at all.

Lastly, there are many places in the world where you can't get a reliable net connection at all (e.g. various places in Africa, Asia).

Or....maybe because the actual word is googol. Got this interesting little fact from their corporate information page . Of course, since I did get both of these links from Google, they're probably wrong.

load some implementation of conway's game of life and make it an infinite inhabitable surface and set a million or so live squares in a random pattern at ~30% density.

that should keep the cpu running quite hot

Atari did this. They, along with other companies, caused the great video game crash of 1983. However, we might see a different outcome this time since Open Source Software has a very different effect on markets than closed source.

Tasp

Let's suppose the UK were host to an organisation called "Inaid" that was funding a terrorist group called the "INA" which was blowing up soldiers and civilians in the US. Let us also suppose "Inaid" had substantial popular support in the UK and our Government did nothing to close it down or even to discourage it. How long do you think it would be before the UK was put on Dubya Bush's list of "nations that continue to harbor or support terrorism"?

ever hear of one of these?

seriously, what's wrong with you? anyone could figure out from the post that it was funny. shades of James H. Vipond (anyone else remember that guy?)

Hose it down with waste oil (because water would evaporate) just like Times Beach, Missouri.

If the number started at 60 40 years means ~27 doubling of 60 so today's processores should have 8 billion tansistors 200 doublings of 8 billion is about 1.32*10^74 According to answers.com earth is composed of roughly 10^50 atoms and the Observable universe is estimated at 10^80 to 10^85 which is 335-356 years from now, not 300-400 Also, composing a transistor out of a single atom it pretty tough. plus you have to have gates etc. And if the whole observable universe is the processor, where is the rest of the system? ;) obviously you could make a system on a chip, but even then valuable atoms are being used and taking away from moore's law. plus the atoms of the device used to fabricate the observable universe into a giant processor... on the plus side, with that many transistors, you can probabbly encode the entire history of the universe into a mathmatically lossless codec that can achieve fit the entire sum of knowledge into a single byte of data. Some people believe this already happened, and the resulting processing caused the universe to collapse into a singularity and expolode into a new universe.

So long as the site at bosleymedical.com doesn't pretend they ARE Bosley Medical, where's the confusion? You get to the site and see it's a complaint site, and the confusion is over.

With *sucks or *reallysucks domains the confusion argument is rendered mute by the bulk of US court decisions.

Forcing all protest into something like a "(whatever)sucks.com" is like saying picketers can only march along a 40' section of sidewalk around the corner, next to the building loading zone.

Also, the word you're looking for is "moot", not "mute". Arguments are rendered moot.

The legal drinking age in Quebec and Alberta is 18, I'm sure someone in Vermont (or Montana) could verify this too ;-)

WTF are you talking about, and why are you wasting my time? Do I have to start reading at +3 to avoid all the idiots with karma?

http://www.answers.com/joke&r=67

http://www.answers.com/topic/planck-units

Your h is planck's constant. Planck units represent serveral different units.

If the information on this page is incorrect, please point to another one. I do appreciate being shown when I am wrong. However "I am a physicist" doesn't mean anything. You can claim to be whoever you want on the Internet.

It doesn't. Here is a more accurate description of how the technology works. The marketing droids turned "perpendicular" into "3D" to increase the hype level. This advance will probably only give an incremental improvement in density. Sigh.

Of course it is moving fast, but a velocity fast enough to escape the solar system poses even more problems with exposure and light frequency shift.

1. Read my other posts - moving it to somewhere else in the solar system outside the immediate area of the earth-moon orbit is not the same as moving it outside the solar system ...
2. Escape velocity from the solar system is only 41 km/sec, less than 4x the earth's escape velocity.http://www.answers.com/topic/escape-veloc ity

Simply because solar sails are purely science fiction right now.

Besides if they did actually build one it wouldn't work in low earth orbit where Hubble is because the Earth's magnetosphere deflects the solar particles away from Earth. You have to get pretty far out to get away from this effect.

You're wrong. Even in a low earth orbit, light pressure can affect a solar sail. The original Echo comms satellites http://www.answers.com/topic/echo-satellite were nothing more than aluminiumised mylar balloons.

Their orbits were affected by light pressure from the sun http://www.decodesystems.com/btl-orbit.html

Another force that makes the satellite's orbit shift slightly is the faint pressure caused by the light from the sun. Although this pressure is much too small for us to perceive without the help of very delicate instruments, it is enough to affect a satellite, which has nothing to support it in space and is exposed to solar pressure for a very long time. Since the Echo balloon is a plastic sphere, 100 feet in diameter, that weighs only a little more than 100 pounds, the light rays striking its surface are enough to cause a second "wobble" effect. This wobble centers about the line from the earth to the sun. Light pressure also forces the orbit to go slightly out of round from a perfect circle, and other gradual effects on the satellite's orbit are caused by the gravitational attraction of the moon and the sun.

After an exhaustive, 3-year study, a 16-member panel said there is 'no conclusive and consistent evidence' that ordinary exposure to EMF's causes cancer, neurobehavioral problems, or reproductive and developmental disorders."

And many sites allege a justified concern:

Some believe the electro-magnetic fields emitted by CRT monitors constitute a health danger to the functioning of living cells. Exposure to these fields is far lower at distances of 85cm or farther.

If there are many peer-reviewed studies of the health dangers of CRT usage, they are not easy to find.

KHAAAAAAARTMAN!

I am sure I have seen something similar, and it had a much better title than Opera Soundwave.. It was the Global Open Source Shared Independent Platform Evocation and Responder

First check the definition of vaccine. Then you will see that vaccine is not the word you are looking for.

Less pedantically however, the answer is no. Right now, no amount of funding could produce such a thing. I cite no sources. It is immediately and intuitively obvious.

Glad I could clear that up.

Seriously... I'm 6'5", which means that I'm taller than a good 95% of the people that I meet.

Being 5'6" myself, and ectomorphic in physique as well, I know all to well what you're talking about. I'm invisible. In any group setting, the "Alpha Male" is never me by default. If I am required to take a leadership role, I have to earn it, every time - it's never given to me. Having been small my entire life, I've observed the phenomena you're talking about keenly - from the other side. Fortunately, being an introverted geek I prefer invisibility anyway. I'd like to think I'm well-adjusted, however I've known other Lilliputian fellows with severe Napoleon complexes; you know the type, small and diminuative they demand attention and are generally the worst pricks you'll ever meet.

I always thought it was amusing that Apple names their OS releases after fast, nimble predators. While MS names theirs after the prey.

So what does that mean?

It means you don't know what you're talking about. The only Microsoft code name that could be a big cat prey was Impala (NT 4 embedded). You may say so's Longhorn, but the origin of the code name is in reality the name of a saloon positioned between the Whistler and Blackcomb mountains, in Whistler BC. Look here for a more complete list of internal code names.

Actually that information is from Wikipedia. While Wikipedia is a "Free Document", it's still polite to give a correct attribution.

Anyway, thanks for pointing this out. Anyone with a Li-Ion battery should read the Wikipedia article. I'm glad I didn't buy a spare laptop battery.

Are you sure that it's that we conservatives don't know what socialism is, or that self-professed socialists don't know what communism is?

Where did communism enter into it?

And which communism do you mean? The state communism theorized by Marx? The total authoritarianism perpitrated by Lenin and Stalin? Libertarian communism as proposed by writers like Puente and Fontenis? Council communism? Anarcho-Communism?

It's very convenient for apologists for capitalism to claim that all socialism is commmunism, all communism is Soviet-style Marxism/Leninism, the Soviet Union failed, therefore there is no alternative to capitalism, Q.E.D. But there are problems with every step of that chain of logic.

Are you sure that it's that we conservatives don't know what socialism is, or that self-professed socialists don't know what communism is?

Where did communism enter into it?

And which communism do you mean? The state communism theorized by Marx? The total authoritarianism perpitrated by Lenin and Stalin? Libertarian communism as proposed by writers like Puente and Fontenis? Council communism? Anarcho-Communism?

It's very convenient for apologists for capitalism to claim that all socialism is commmunism, all communism is Soviet-style Marxism/Leninism, the Soviet Union failed, therefore there is no alternative to capitalism, Q.E.D. But there are problems with every step of that chain of logic.

Not likely.

The Southern Pacific doesn't exist anymore, because it was absorbed into the Union Pacific in 1996....

I have found that answers.com is a quite good alternative to Google at times when I *know* what I'm looking for. It may be I want a definition of a word, want to know when a certain historic event happened, want a translation or similar.

It also has quick links to Google, Google images, Google news, Technorati if I want to find a blog and Amazon if I want to find a product. All in all a very nice alternative, and I have quite grown to liking it a lot (and hence using it a lot too. :)

// "Hello World" by Stephen McGreal.
// Note that the views expressed in this source code do not necessarily coincide with those of the author :o)

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5uxX0r5!!!L0L0L0L0L!!!!!!!

- The L33t programming language

If you are too lazy to google for information and such.

Yes, actually. This isn't just some sand scooped off a beach. Solar panel grade silicon comes from the leftovers after semiconductor grade silicon users have picked through their crystal wafers, which is why there is a shortage in the first place, since there is a narrow range of quality ("almost" good enough for semiconductors). As for titanium, my 30 year old encyclopeda says its one of the 10 most common metals on the planet. Titanium Oxide is cheaply produced and used liberally in paint.

Titanium is malleable when hot (meaning you can flatten it into foil). So producing titanium foil is probably not a difficult task, depending on how hot "hot" is. (Though the article mentions that the titanium foil used is thinner than household aluminum foil. The process looks like it would be easy anyway, but time consuming.)

As for your post on waste products, the most common smelting procedure in use works without catalyst or flux to produce pig-iron and Titanium Oxide, though this process is common because of its use in paint. This process was recently developed for producing metallic titanium, its outputs are salt (NaCl), titanium, and whatever impurities get washed into the liquid sodium stream and removed later.

Here is Shatner's monologue from the Just for Laughs festival in 2000. It is a parody of a famous Canadian beer commercial.

I can understand requiring backdoors to VoIP telephones, but to the internet and instant messaging clients too?

Pretty soon good old fasioned postal service will be the only way to truly privately communicate. They can't open personal letters, can they?

militia (m-lsh') pronunciation
n.

1. An army composed of ordinary citizens rather than professional soldiers.
2. A military force that is not part of a regular army and is subject to call for service in an emergency.
3. The whole body of physically fit civilians eligible by law for military service.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Okay, I see this all the time. The word is "analog", not "analogue". "Analogue" is something that is analagous to something else. "Analog" is the opposite of "digital".

Okay, I see this all the time. The word is "analog", not "analogue". "Analogue" is something that is analagous to something else. "Analog" is the opposite of "digital".

That would be a ken-by-ten .

I thought that the plural was octopi

But if I was to go digging through my ex's trash and find out that she hasn't paid her credit card bills in 3 months and publish that information, that is libel.

I've never seen the term "libel" used officially to refer to privacy violations, just as I've never seen the term "theft" used officially to refer to federal copyright violations. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law seems to have only the defamation definition.

Fixed link.

Stupid slashcode.

Answers.com has, not surprisingly, an answer.

Answers.com has, not surprisingly, an answer.