See, that's the thing. Almost all 'hydrogen cars' require electricity to make the hydrogen.
And, you know, we have a pretty damn effective electricity transport system already in place.
So the claims basically come out to: We can convert electicity into hydrogen, either at a plant or at your house, (And transport it if you do it at a plant.), keep it in a portable format (Cooling isn't free.), and then convert it back to electricity with less loss than we could by using the electric grid and sticking it in a battery. I don't see any evidence of that at all.
(Yes, yes, this hydrogen car just directly burned hydrogen, instead of turning it back into electricity, but that's even more wasteful.)
It doesn't. It works in an electric car, or a hybrid.
Hydrogen cars are just toys. These specific hydrogen cars manage to combine the absurdity of the storage medium with the built-in waste of a combusion engine, and require you to own a pretty badass freezer, too.
Don't call me when car companies play with toys and claim it's the future. The near future is hybrids. The far future is either a purely electric car, or a methane or natural gas hybrid. Hydrogen cars are just silly.
Call me when hybrid cars drop in price more, or someone makes a jump in battery or electical transmission technology. Those advances are the important ones.
Well, they would, but you'd suck exactly the same amount out when burning the hydrogen.
However, you're being overgeneral. While pure water may convert perfectly to hydrogen, you've forgotten the fact that no one has perfectly pure water. If you're going to give it to them, you need to include the energy cost of purifying it. And the energy costs of producing said solar panels.
That's the thing about hydrogen cars. Everyone seems to fixate on the fact that hydrogen can burn cleanly. To which I say: Anyone can make a single component of a system which doesn't produce bad stuff. Show me a hypothetical system, from top to bottom. You can even include hypothetical advances.
Here's a question for you: How do you do regenerative braking in a hydrogen car?
That's the gag. You have a gas leak while your car's sitting in the garage, you might have a mess and possibly a flameout.
You have a hydrogen leak, and someone walks in and flips on the light switch...
I hope, if they're going to do this, they're at least going to have the sense to perfume the hydrogen, like they do natural gas, so we can go 'Oh, crap, hydrogen leak' and run like hell.
I don't really understand the logic of hydrogen cars. If we have hydrogen, we can effortlessly convert that to 100% clean electricity via burning. So why the hell don't we just do that at the power plant?
I mean, I'd understand if we had some magical source of hydrogen, and we didn't want to lose power though the overhead of power transfer and batteries...but we don't. We have absolutely no way of getting hydrogen, outside of fossil fuels, that doesn't use up more electricity than we put into it. I've never heard of any way even proposed to get said hydrogen.
The entire concept is completely illogical, it sounds like someone realized you can burn hydrogen and get water, slept through an enviromental film, and built a 'clean' car. Hey, I can build a car that takes a continual supply of D batteries, by that logic it's a clean car.
And I have to point out the same applies to anything, thanks to thermodynamics. Everything on earth either exists at the lowest energy state, or at least will stay there if we make energy from it. We can't go around breaking up H20 and burning the H to get power, and anyone who's ever had any physics will easily explain why.
The only exceptions are things that are ultimately powered by the ouside, such as solar, wind, water, and tidal power. (Although geothermal, while a closed cycle, is not incredibly likely to run down in any measurable time. And the same with fussion and fission.)
Ha, no, they recently got fermionic atoms to form a BEC.;)
I know, it's a trick. The fermionic atoms pair up. Weird trick, I don't really get it. (How are they overlapping enough do that in the first place? Damn quantum mechanics.)
So, more technically, it only occurs for entities which are bosonic.
But that way leads to madness and people walking though walls after removing a few atoms from their body and the wall.
Sorry, rereading I discovered I had a brainfart there. For 'inspections' in the first paragraph, read 'elections'. (Working on software involving 'inspectors' all day will do that to you.)
And to expand on that, for those who don't know: You can volunteer to be one of those people standing around. You don't get paid anything, there's absolutely no reward except knowing the people didn't rig the election. The Democrats and the Republicans have already appointed people pretty much everywhere, but you don't have to belong to a party or represent anyone at all.
You do have to register to vote, methinks, and I think you have to vote in another precinct, but it surely varies by state.
My state, Georgia, is using Diebold voting machines, and I'm going to try my best to be one of those observers, if I can get out of other obligations. There have been rather...interesting barriers placed on people observing some of Diebold's tricks...like standing you behind the tabulators, so you can't see either the screen or the flash cards people are putting into it.
Hopefully I can take a camera, if only to show how I was denied access. People in electronic voting states...get out there and observe, especially if you have technical knowhow. Watch the flash memory cards move around, demand they are logged as they are moved, watch to make sure everyone accessing the machine is authorized, make sure you know the version of software that's certified, and demand they check it after the election. None of this will work, but keep a record of it...this sort of shit is flat out illegal. Bring a tape recorder, bring a camera, bring a notebook. You asking for documentation that will not be provided will worry the election officals and the other obvservers, especially if you know what you're talking about.
If you, as an observer, think any funny business happened, you then should inform whoever you were told to inform. (They will at first be very surprised, then very scared, and then, when they realized you're talking about obscure technical stuff like 'There was a flash card inserted into this machine at 4:12 that no one can document.', they will ignore you.) If nothing gets done, inform the press.
Contact your city/county government to volunteer, they'll point you in the right direction. Then google for your state code and read it. (My code confused the hell out of me because they kept refering to 'people who are registered to vote' as 'electors'. It makes sense once you think about it, an elector is 'a person who elects', but I've never heard electors used to mean the general voting population.)
There are people out there who think I'm being crazy...whatever. You'll see after the election. And, damn, this post got longer than it should have been.
Jesus Christ, people, did you actually read what I replied to?
We had sci-fi twits in here salivating over themselves because this newly discovered material could turn solid at higher temperatures, which was, astonishingly, the exact opposite of the fictional material Ice-9, which, amazingly, turned liquid at higher temperatures, which is possibly the stupidest observation to ever make, as that's what normally happens.
It's like someone invents a machine to body swap people, and everyone said...my god, that's the exact opposite of the book A Seperate Peace, which didn't have body swapping! Um, whatever. While it is technically correct that A Seperate Peace did not have body swapping machines, that is not a particularly unique trait of that book.
And, just in case you're not ashamed of yourself...I was right. Everything, including this material, turns liquid at higher temperatures. This stuff starts as a solid, and turns into a liquid, like everything else. This stuff just turns back into a solid when you go even higher, and I suspect it was you who did not read the article.
Yeah, BECs are another state of matter that isn't properly a gas or a solid or a liquid, but a single quantum entity.
But I thought it was simply a matter of temperature...it was just we don't have any way to get them down that low if they keep bouncing off each other.
I was just taking issue with calling Ice-9 the opposite of this, because Ice-9 turns into a liquid when it gets hotter. Everything we know of, with this singular exception, does that. (And, heck, even this does that...it just turns into a solid if you go even hotter.)
It's akin to calling anti-gravity 'the opposite of the planet Vulcan', because Vulcan has gravity. It's just crazy.
And it's not accurate to call it the opposite of anything in the first place. Almost all other normal matter, including Ice-9, starts as a solid, heats to a liquid, and then heats into a gas. This stuff starts as a solid, heats to a liquid, heats into a solid, and then...we don't know, but I suspect it heats back into a liquid and then into a gas.
Normal: solid - liquid - gas
This stuff: solid - liquid - solid -liquid -gas
Those aren't the opposite of each other. And mentioning Ice-9 as one of the 'normal' things is just dumb, as Ice-9 is doesn't exist and is impossible.
The Ice-9 reference was good for a laugh, even if not really relevant. But claiming this stuff is the opposite is just silly...Ice-9 followed exactly the normal patterns for phase transition, whereas this stuff manages to apparently go backwards a bit, because of weird energy issues with hydrogen bonds.
No one's thinking people always tell the truth. That's why inspections usually have four or five people just standing around to make sure there's no funny business going on, with completely different political agendas.
Aka, that 'redundancy' you were asking for earlier. It already exists, in human form. Computers could be adding to that redundancy, and generating results that are less subject to interpetation anyway.
Computers could generated a plainly printed ballot, with just the names of the selected candidates on it, that can be OCRed, instead of poorly filled in scantrons or confusing butterfly ballots or hanging chads or whatever.
And they could keep a record of the vote, linked to a number printed on the ballot. To vote tamper, you'd need to print off fake ballots, get them in the ballot box, and somehow edit the memory of a machine.
But, instead, the systems in place now are not only not adding that redundancy and security, they're taking away existing redundancy and security, for no obvious reason at all. They're making it so we have to trust a complete black box, instead of an open process that anyone was allowed to observe.
No one's claiming vote tampering hasn't happened in the past. But with new technology, we can remove all possibility of vote tampering, we can make voting incredibly easy, where no one can make a mistake, we can count results instantly but be assured of accuracy, and we can even allow blind people to vote by themselves for the first time ever. Instead, we're headed towards this hideous future where we push buttons and trust the people making the machine to tell us who won.
At 0 degrees Kelvin, it's not anything. It's just, in theory, a bunch of suspended frozen stuff that's exactly where it was before you hit 0. It has no chemical properties, because there is no way to do any sort of chemical interaction with it.
That's in theory, of couse, since you can't hit 0 degrees Kelvin.
But assuming you mean 'near 0 Kelvin', like d00ket pointed out, things get really weird down there. Some substances don't appear to have freezing points, there is no state below 'liquid'...they just move slower and slower. And some freeze quite normally, then do another transition way down there where they move back to a liquid like substance.
The substance in the article is interesting, but not completely amazing. Various 'states of matter' are just rules of thumb.
Ice-9 would 'freeze' water at room temperature, and any water that water was in contact with. (Freeze in quotes because the water didn't get colder, it just solidified.)
I don't see how it's the opposite of this at all. Ice-9 just did the same thing that salt does...alter the freezing point of water, although in the opposite direction. Ice-9 was just weird in that the alteration wasn't due to any specific chemical additive, it was due to the molecular layout of Ice-9 itself, and thus it was 'contagious' to any water it touched. It would make that water Ice-9, and so one and so on.
BTW, Ice-9 seems to me a fairly obvious violation of thermodynamics, but I've never heard anyone point that out. Am I just crazy there?
Okay, here's the story, from a real computer programmer.
Computers can lie. They can lie The Big Lie. They can lie with a compete deadpan expression, claiming you did X instead of Y. If you ask them to present their documentation, they can lie about that. If you ask to see their code that produces the documentation, they can lie about that.(1) Unlike humans, they will produce perfectly consistent lies, and it's physically impossible to look inside a CPU and RAM chips while the computer is running. All you can do is, you guessed it, ask the computer what those contain, and it can blithly lie about that.
If you take the code to another computer, one that doesn't lie, and scan it, you will get the truth. Of course, at that point, the people making the lying computer will simple move the lies into the hardware, and you won't find anything wrong with the code anymore. You'll have nice clean code on the disk, and a secret chip on the motherboard that alters a known pointer to somewhere else in memory under certain circumstances. And, no, you can't run software to detect this, because...
Computers can even lie to themselves. This is why all DRM schemes keep getting broken, this is why all copy protection gets hacked, this is why I can watch DVDs on Linux and ignore the region code, this is how VMWare works. This is why Microsoft wants 'Trusted Computer' where, in theory, a CPU can be put in 'no lie' mode. But that doesn't exist yet, and it's doubtful it won't be hacked if it ever does.
And, with recent stunts by Diebold, where there have been delibrate backdoors installed, it's rather akin to a company trying to break it's own copy protection, one it designed to look pretty but be broke in a few seconds. The only thing that's saved us so far is that Diebold is completely incompetant.
Computers are perfect liars. Three computers could, in theory, fix that, if run by different companies and using different systems. (If you just have two, how do you resolve differences?) But no one seems to be doing that, and it would be rather expensive to stick three computer screens in each booth to show what each system thinks you voted for.
That said, we want redundency. Non-computer redundency. We want a printer, that prints ballots off, which are then counted, either alone or together with the computer count. That's all anyone wants.
You don't solve real world security issues by having multiple people check the same badge against the same database, and you don't solve voting security issues by simple recording a vote in three computers. You solve in by recording a vote outside a computer. If you're really clever, you make that vote human readable and machine readable via OCR.
1) Of course, Diebold machines run Windows, and if you think anyone can check that code you're dreaming anyway.
Congratulations, you've invented the exact same system that anyone with the slightest technical ability and the slightly concept of security has come up with.
I need to come up with a 'Independently invented the obvious idea that no one's using' award. I, myself, came up with that idea about a year ago. And I wasn't the first, and you won't be the last. So ask yourself a series of questions:
Is it obvious to any intelligent person that black box voting system can be tampered with, and, in fact, are being tampered(1) with?
Do we want systems that can, and have been, tampered with?
There are only two possible answers:
People making the decisions are not intelligent.
or
People making the decisions are want a voting system they can tamper with.
1) That is, tampered to the extent of not being certified and not being physically secured correctly. There's no evidence of vote tampering yet, but there's plenty of incidents of illegal alterations after certification that may or may not have included vote tampering.
In addition, there's plenty of records of precinct officals not knowing what version of software had been certified, there's been stolen machines that we have to assume have been stolen for the explicit purpose of reverse engineering, no one is keeping track of the flash memory cards, they're often just laying around, the entire situtation is a mess. The only reason we don't have evidence of vote tampering is there is no way to have evidence of vote tampering.
In fact, you want to know why Diebold resists printouts? There's every evidence that if they did them, their totals would be wrong. Not delibrately, not slanted one way or another, but just wrong everywhere, because the machines are not operated correctly.
And have you read the latest articles, why, look at that, on blackboxvoting, about how uncertified people were allowed access to a tabulator during an election? Which is a felony, but it's apparently okay because, hey, those computer guys don't need to be accountable to anyone.
You're the one who needs to start using your brain.
And especially if their chatroom won't let them talk to that cool new 'girl' from New York that their friends are talking to. They'll just find another damn chatroom, or IM program. Or just 'IM' via email, it really is fast enougyh.
This is possibly the most obvious example of a technological solution to a social problem ever. It's completely absurd.
The only way this works is if you restrict all access to everywhere on the internet except this one chatroom. And at that point, they don't really have an 'internet' connection anymore, do they? If you're going to do that, why not just turn the internet off and make them use the telephone to call their friends.
Oh, wait, that still doesn't work, because it assumes that no one with a legit ID isn't going to loan it out or have it stolen, ever.
Where the heck is 'around here'? When I was replacing the tub in a bathroom about three years ago, I actually looked for something that could do that, and didn't find anything that was advertised as such, and I don't have enough hydrolic knowledge to figure out what the correct names of those things might be. You're saying it's in the tap?
As for what you're talking about, that's why things need overrides.;)
I guess I have a different defination of 'a game' than others. Single zero blackjack is a completely different game from double zero. It requires a different board and a different wheel. Do casinos regularly replace one for another? (Well, that's a silly question with roulette. How many casinos in the US even have single zero roulette? Two?)
But, yes, they can adjust certain variations of the rules, and they can introduce games that are similiar to standard ones but aren't them, like crappy-ass blackjack.
I was really just taking issue with the concept of them 'tuning' the payoffs so they're sure to win. They don't go 'Oh, we didn't make as much money last week, we better change the payoffs on blackjack.'. That's just absurd.
And it doesn't make any sense, anyway. They win, period, and the amount they win is directly proportional to the amount bet on each game. By iron laws of propibility, if they have a machine with a house advantage of 5%, they will make 5% of all bets off that machine every month. The only way that can fail to happen is if someone breaks the bank.
What casinos adjust is the number and type of each game. Just like, really, any business. They don't adjust the payoffs anymore than Walmart adjusts the quality of their products when they're losing money. They certainly can introduce games with worse payoffs, like Walmart can go out and buy shittier products.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Baccarat, much like craps, allows you to bet for or against the single person playing currently. Baccarat has something like a 1% house odds if you bet against that person, and 1.25% if you bet on them, depending on the number of decks. The only sucker bet is on a tie.
This is as better odds than a perfect blackjack game without card counting, better odds than roulette, even single zero roulette, better odds than everything except certain casinos with side bets on craps, where you can make wagers with 0% house advangate after you've already wagered.
And I've never heard of or seen two identical video poker machines with different payoffs in the same casino, or even set different ways at different times, but it's certainly possible, as some of the machines can be set different ways, so I won't argue. I was under the impression that wasn't allowed in most places, though.
You have absolutely no idea of what a contest is. A contest is a meaningless test of skill. There is no value to winning besides winning, and maybe a pointless trophy.
That's not to say gambling makes it not a contest. The contest can, in fact, be 'who's the best gambler?'. Hence penny-ante games.
Now, there's another test of skill. Where ther outcome is not meaningless. It's an actual logical result of the test. For example, the stock market. If you play the stock market, and 'win', you have made money as a logical result. If you can haul heavy logs for hours a day, when most people can't, you (hopefully) can get a job to pay you to do that. I will call these 'jobs'.
Now, of course, the boundary is very questionable sometimes, but there's an easy way to decide it: In a contest, the amount of effort you are putting into it is not worth the reward. For example, in a random basketball game, you spend a lot of time and energy to get...the abilty to say you won. Woo, that was really worth it.
Gambling is funny because it took a contest, and added to make it a job. But it's not just a straight 'Be a good poker player, and you win'. It actually added a layer of complexity, and I don't see anything wrong with recognizing gambling as a contest...unless the reason for gambling is to make money.
Now, you can argue how you pay at online casinos, but no one needs to be paying ten dollar antes to see who's the best gambler. The entire inticement for casinos is to make money, it's not to see who has the most skill.
As for Everquest being a business...I didn't say it wasn't. And I didn't say online casinos were, either, although they are. I said online gambling is a business. When you go and try to make money online, you have exited 'contest-land' and are now entering 'business-world'. There is no such thing as 'cheating' in business-world...when you're trying to take money from other people, any legal means are kosher.
(And, yes, I'm aware people can play Everquest in order to level up and sell stuff online...but Everquest certainly isn't encouraging that. Whereas that's the point of online casinos. They actually run ads about how you can win big!)
BTW, people reading this might conclude that I don't approve of gambling. I have no problem with gambling. But you don't have to be 'fair' to people in casinos. Whereas, if you're playing a game of hoops with someone, and they lose a contact, you stop the game and help, because it's just a contest.
Tell me something, Mr. Gambling-Is-A-Contest. Let's say there was a time limit on someone's hand, and they lost their connnection. (Yes, I'm sure there are rules about this, but let's pretend.) Would you let them have more time? Or would you take their money?
No they aren't, at least not in the US. If you win over a certain amount total, you're supposed to pay taxes on it. If you win over a certain amount at once, the casino are required to 'help' you pay taxes, just like businesses 'help' you pay taxes on your other income.
Although I'm fairly certain it's wins minus losses. If you get make three 1,000 dollars bets at 5:1 odds, and one wins, giving you 5,000, you only have to pay taxes on the 2,000 you actually came out ahead, IIRC. (And, no, if you don't win, you don't get to deduct losses as business expenses or anything else.) As almost no one comes out of gambling with more money they came into it, said taxes are not incredibly important. (And those who do come out of it with more usually won big instantly and quit, and thus the IRS will learn about it automatically.)
However, you're quite right in that you don't 'have' to pay taxes on gambling, just like you don't 'have' to pay sales taxes on out of state orders, and you don't 'have' to pay taxes if you're a hooker. You do, actually, have to pay taxes on those things, but it's basically an honor system, as the government can't keep track of it.
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And, you know, we have a pretty damn effective electricity transport system already in place.
So the claims basically come out to: We can convert electicity into hydrogen, either at a plant or at your house, (And transport it if you do it at a plant.), keep it in a portable format (Cooling isn't free.), and then convert it back to electricity with less loss than we could by using the electric grid and sticking it in a battery. I don't see any evidence of that at all.
(Yes, yes, this hydrogen car just directly burned hydrogen, instead of turning it back into electricity, but that's even more wasteful.)
Hydrogen cars are just toys. These specific hydrogen cars manage to combine the absurdity of the storage medium with the built-in waste of a combusion engine, and require you to own a pretty badass freezer, too.
Don't call me when car companies play with toys and claim it's the future. The near future is hybrids. The far future is either a purely electric car, or a methane or natural gas hybrid. Hydrogen cars are just silly.
Call me when hybrid cars drop in price more, or someone makes a jump in battery or electical transmission technology. Those advances are the important ones.
As for converting a car to partially power it via hydrogen...why not just run it off pure vodka?
I'll tell you why not...they both cost more than gas!
Good grief, is everyone trying to build hydrogen cars completely mad? Do they know how much energy it costs to cool something that low?
What, he swore off plastic? And what's he going to drive the car on?
Well, they would, but you'd suck exactly the same amount out when burning the hydrogen.
However, you're being overgeneral. While pure water may convert perfectly to hydrogen, you've forgotten the fact that no one has perfectly pure water. If you're going to give it to them, you need to include the energy cost of purifying it. And the energy costs of producing said solar panels.
That's the thing about hydrogen cars. Everyone seems to fixate on the fact that hydrogen can burn cleanly. To which I say: Anyone can make a single component of a system which doesn't produce bad stuff. Show me a hypothetical system, from top to bottom. You can even include hypothetical advances.
Here's a question for you: How do you do regenerative braking in a hydrogen car?
You have a hydrogen leak, and someone walks in and flips on the light switch...
I hope, if they're going to do this, they're at least going to have the sense to perfume the hydrogen, like they do natural gas, so we can go 'Oh, crap, hydrogen leak' and run like hell.
I don't really understand the logic of hydrogen cars. If we have hydrogen, we can effortlessly convert that to 100% clean electricity via burning. So why the hell don't we just do that at the power plant?
I mean, I'd understand if we had some magical source of hydrogen, and we didn't want to lose power though the overhead of power transfer and batteries...but we don't. We have absolutely no way of getting hydrogen, outside of fossil fuels, that doesn't use up more electricity than we put into it. I've never heard of any way even proposed to get said hydrogen.
The entire concept is completely illogical, it sounds like someone realized you can burn hydrogen and get water, slept through an enviromental film, and built a 'clean' car. Hey, I can build a car that takes a continual supply of D batteries, by that logic it's a clean car.
And I have to point out the same applies to anything, thanks to thermodynamics. Everything on earth either exists at the lowest energy state, or at least will stay there if we make energy from it. We can't go around breaking up H20 and burning the H to get power, and anyone who's ever had any physics will easily explain why.
The only exceptions are things that are ultimately powered by the ouside, such as solar, wind, water, and tidal power. (Although geothermal, while a closed cycle, is not incredibly likely to run down in any measurable time. And the same with fussion and fission.)
I know, it's a trick. The fermionic atoms pair up. Weird trick, I don't really get it. (How are they overlapping enough do that in the first place? Damn quantum mechanics.)
So, more technically, it only occurs for entities which are bosonic.
But that way leads to madness and people walking though walls after removing a few atoms from their body and the wall.
And to expand on that, for those who don't know: You can volunteer to be one of those people standing around. You don't get paid anything, there's absolutely no reward except knowing the people didn't rig the election. The Democrats and the Republicans have already appointed people pretty much everywhere, but you don't have to belong to a party or represent anyone at all.
You do have to register to vote, methinks, and I think you have to vote in another precinct, but it surely varies by state.
My state, Georgia, is using Diebold voting machines, and I'm going to try my best to be one of those observers, if I can get out of other obligations. There have been rather...interesting barriers placed on people observing some of Diebold's tricks...like standing you behind the tabulators, so you can't see either the screen or the flash cards people are putting into it.
Hopefully I can take a camera, if only to show how I was denied access. People in electronic voting states...get out there and observe, especially if you have technical knowhow. Watch the flash memory cards move around, demand they are logged as they are moved, watch to make sure everyone accessing the machine is authorized, make sure you know the version of software that's certified, and demand they check it after the election. None of this will work, but keep a record of it...this sort of shit is flat out illegal. Bring a tape recorder, bring a camera, bring a notebook. You asking for documentation that will not be provided will worry the election officals and the other obvservers, especially if you know what you're talking about.
If you, as an observer, think any funny business happened, you then should inform whoever you were told to inform. (They will at first be very surprised, then very scared, and then, when they realized you're talking about obscure technical stuff like 'There was a flash card inserted into this machine at 4:12 that no one can document.', they will ignore you.) If nothing gets done, inform the press.
Contact your city/county government to volunteer, they'll point you in the right direction. Then google for your state code and read it. (My code confused the hell out of me because they kept refering to 'people who are registered to vote' as 'electors'. It makes sense once you think about it, an elector is 'a person who elects', but I've never heard electors used to mean the general voting population.)
There are people out there who think I'm being crazy...whatever. You'll see after the election. And, damn, this post got longer than it should have been.
We had sci-fi twits in here salivating over themselves because this newly discovered material could turn solid at higher temperatures, which was, astonishingly, the exact opposite of the fictional material Ice-9, which, amazingly, turned liquid at higher temperatures, which is possibly the stupidest observation to ever make, as that's what normally happens.
It's like someone invents a machine to body swap people, and everyone said...my god, that's the exact opposite of the book A Seperate Peace, which didn't have body swapping! Um, whatever. While it is technically correct that A Seperate Peace did not have body swapping machines, that is not a particularly unique trait of that book.
And, just in case you're not ashamed of yourself...I was right. Everything, including this material, turns liquid at higher temperatures. This stuff starts as a solid, and turns into a liquid, like everything else. This stuff just turns back into a solid when you go even higher, and I suspect it was you who did not read the article.
But I thought it was simply a matter of temperature...it was just we don't have any way to get them down that low if they keep bouncing off each other.
I was just taking issue with calling Ice-9 the opposite of this, because Ice-9 turns into a liquid when it gets hotter. Everything we know of, with this singular exception, does that. (And, heck, even this does that...it just turns into a solid if you go even hotter.)
It's akin to calling anti-gravity 'the opposite of the planet Vulcan', because Vulcan has gravity. It's just crazy.
And it's not accurate to call it the opposite of anything in the first place. Almost all other normal matter, including Ice-9, starts as a solid, heats to a liquid, and then heats into a gas. This stuff starts as a solid, heats to a liquid, heats into a solid, and then...we don't know, but I suspect it heats back into a liquid and then into a gas.
Normal: solid - liquid - gas
This stuff: solid - liquid - solid -liquid -gas
Those aren't the opposite of each other. And mentioning Ice-9 as one of the 'normal' things is just dumb, as Ice-9 is doesn't exist and is impossible.
The Ice-9 reference was good for a laugh, even if not really relevant. But claiming this stuff is the opposite is just silly...Ice-9 followed exactly the normal patterns for phase transition, whereas this stuff manages to apparently go backwards a bit, because of weird energy issues with hydrogen bonds.
Aka, that 'redundancy' you were asking for earlier. It already exists, in human form. Computers could be adding to that redundancy, and generating results that are less subject to interpetation anyway.
Computers could generated a plainly printed ballot, with just the names of the selected candidates on it, that can be OCRed, instead of poorly filled in scantrons or confusing butterfly ballots or hanging chads or whatever.
And they could keep a record of the vote, linked to a number printed on the ballot. To vote tamper, you'd need to print off fake ballots, get them in the ballot box, and somehow edit the memory of a machine.
But, instead, the systems in place now are not only not adding that redundancy and security, they're taking away existing redundancy and security, for no obvious reason at all. They're making it so we have to trust a complete black box, instead of an open process that anyone was allowed to observe.
No one's claiming vote tampering hasn't happened in the past. But with new technology, we can remove all possibility of vote tampering, we can make voting incredibly easy, where no one can make a mistake, we can count results instantly but be assured of accuracy, and we can even allow blind people to vote by themselves for the first time ever. Instead, we're headed towards this hideous future where we push buttons and trust the people making the machine to tell us who won.
Everything starts as a liquid at higher temps and gets solid at lower ones.
That's in theory, of couse, since you can't hit 0 degrees Kelvin.
But assuming you mean 'near 0 Kelvin', like d00ket pointed out, things get really weird down there. Some substances don't appear to have freezing points, there is no state below 'liquid'...they just move slower and slower. And some freeze quite normally, then do another transition way down there where they move back to a liquid like substance.
The substance in the article is interesting, but not completely amazing. Various 'states of matter' are just rules of thumb.
I don't see how it's the opposite of this at all. Ice-9 just did the same thing that salt does...alter the freezing point of water, although in the opposite direction. Ice-9 was just weird in that the alteration wasn't due to any specific chemical additive, it was due to the molecular layout of Ice-9 itself, and thus it was 'contagious' to any water it touched. It would make that water Ice-9, and so one and so on.
BTW, Ice-9 seems to me a fairly obvious violation of thermodynamics, but I've never heard anyone point that out. Am I just crazy there?
Computers can lie. They can lie The Big Lie. They can lie with a compete deadpan expression, claiming you did X instead of Y. If you ask them to present their documentation, they can lie about that. If you ask to see their code that produces the documentation, they can lie about that.(1) Unlike humans, they will produce perfectly consistent lies, and it's physically impossible to look inside a CPU and RAM chips while the computer is running. All you can do is, you guessed it, ask the computer what those contain, and it can blithly lie about that.
If you take the code to another computer, one that doesn't lie, and scan it, you will get the truth. Of course, at that point, the people making the lying computer will simple move the lies into the hardware, and you won't find anything wrong with the code anymore. You'll have nice clean code on the disk, and a secret chip on the motherboard that alters a known pointer to somewhere else in memory under certain circumstances. And, no, you can't run software to detect this, because...
Computers can even lie to themselves. This is why all DRM schemes keep getting broken, this is why all copy protection gets hacked, this is why I can watch DVDs on Linux and ignore the region code, this is how VMWare works. This is why Microsoft wants 'Trusted Computer' where, in theory, a CPU can be put in 'no lie' mode. But that doesn't exist yet, and it's doubtful it won't be hacked if it ever does.
And, with recent stunts by Diebold, where there have been delibrate backdoors installed, it's rather akin to a company trying to break it's own copy protection, one it designed to look pretty but be broke in a few seconds. The only thing that's saved us so far is that Diebold is completely incompetant.
Computers are perfect liars. Three computers could, in theory, fix that, if run by different companies and using different systems. (If you just have two, how do you resolve differences?) But no one seems to be doing that, and it would be rather expensive to stick three computer screens in each booth to show what each system thinks you voted for.
That said, we want redundency. Non-computer redundency. We want a printer, that prints ballots off, which are then counted, either alone or together with the computer count. That's all anyone wants.
You don't solve real world security issues by having multiple people check the same badge against the same database, and you don't solve voting security issues by simple recording a vote in three computers. You solve in by recording a vote outside a computer. If you're really clever, you make that vote human readable and machine readable via OCR.
1) Of course, Diebold machines run Windows, and if you think anyone can check that code you're dreaming anyway.
I need to come up with a 'Independently invented the obvious idea that no one's using' award. I, myself, came up with that idea about a year ago. And I wasn't the first, and you won't be the last. So ask yourself a series of questions:
Is it obvious to any intelligent person that black box voting system can be tampered with, and, in fact, are being tampered(1) with?
Do we want systems that can, and have been, tampered with?
There are only two possible answers:
People making the decisions are not intelligent.
or
People making the decisions are want a voting system they can tamper with.
1) That is, tampered to the extent of not being certified and not being physically secured correctly. There's no evidence of vote tampering yet, but there's plenty of incidents of illegal alterations after certification that may or may not have included vote tampering.
In addition, there's plenty of records of precinct officals not knowing what version of software had been certified, there's been stolen machines that we have to assume have been stolen for the explicit purpose of reverse engineering, no one is keeping track of the flash memory cards, they're often just laying around, the entire situtation is a mess. The only reason we don't have evidence of vote tampering is there is no way to have evidence of vote tampering.
In fact, you want to know why Diebold resists printouts? There's every evidence that if they did them, their totals would be wrong. Not delibrately, not slanted one way or another, but just wrong everywhere, because the machines are not operated correctly.
You're the one who needs to start using your brain.
This is possibly the most obvious example of a technological solution to a social problem ever. It's completely absurd.
The only way this works is if you restrict all access to everywhere on the internet except this one chatroom. And at that point, they don't really have an 'internet' connection anymore, do they? If you're going to do that, why not just turn the internet off and make them use the telephone to call their friends.
Oh, wait, that still doesn't work, because it assumes that no one with a legit ID isn't going to loan it out or have it stolen, ever.
As for what you're talking about, that's why things need overrides. ;)
But, yes, they can adjust certain variations of the rules, and they can introduce games that are similiar to standard ones but aren't them, like crappy-ass blackjack.
I was really just taking issue with the concept of them 'tuning' the payoffs so they're sure to win. They don't go 'Oh, we didn't make as much money last week, we better change the payoffs on blackjack.'. That's just absurd.
And it doesn't make any sense, anyway. They win, period, and the amount they win is directly proportional to the amount bet on each game. By iron laws of propibility, if they have a machine with a house advantage of 5%, they will make 5% of all bets off that machine every month. The only way that can fail to happen is if someone breaks the bank.
What casinos adjust is the number and type of each game. Just like, really, any business. They don't adjust the payoffs anymore than Walmart adjusts the quality of their products when they're losing money. They certainly can introduce games with worse payoffs, like Walmart can go out and buy shittier products.
This is as better odds than a perfect blackjack game without card counting, better odds than roulette, even single zero roulette, better odds than everything except certain casinos with side bets on craps, where you can make wagers with 0% house advangate after you've already wagered.
And I've never heard of or seen two identical video poker machines with different payoffs in the same casino, or even set different ways at different times, but it's certainly possible, as some of the machines can be set different ways, so I won't argue. I was under the impression that wasn't allowed in most places, though.
That's not to say gambling makes it not a contest. The contest can, in fact, be 'who's the best gambler?'. Hence penny-ante games.
Now, there's another test of skill. Where ther outcome is not meaningless. It's an actual logical result of the test. For example, the stock market. If you play the stock market, and 'win', you have made money as a logical result. If you can haul heavy logs for hours a day, when most people can't, you (hopefully) can get a job to pay you to do that. I will call these 'jobs'.
Now, of course, the boundary is very questionable sometimes, but there's an easy way to decide it: In a contest, the amount of effort you are putting into it is not worth the reward. For example, in a random basketball game, you spend a lot of time and energy to get...the abilty to say you won. Woo, that was really worth it.
Gambling is funny because it took a contest, and added to make it a job. But it's not just a straight 'Be a good poker player, and you win'. It actually added a layer of complexity, and I don't see anything wrong with recognizing gambling as a contest...unless the reason for gambling is to make money.
Now, you can argue how you pay at online casinos, but no one needs to be paying ten dollar antes to see who's the best gambler. The entire inticement for casinos is to make money, it's not to see who has the most skill.
As for Everquest being a business...I didn't say it wasn't. And I didn't say online casinos were, either, although they are. I said online gambling is a business. When you go and try to make money online, you have exited 'contest-land' and are now entering 'business-world'. There is no such thing as 'cheating' in business-world...when you're trying to take money from other people, any legal means are kosher.
(And, yes, I'm aware people can play Everquest in order to level up and sell stuff online...but Everquest certainly isn't encouraging that. Whereas that's the point of online casinos. They actually run ads about how you can win big!)
BTW, people reading this might conclude that I don't approve of gambling. I have no problem with gambling. But you don't have to be 'fair' to people in casinos. Whereas, if you're playing a game of hoops with someone, and they lose a contact, you stop the game and help, because it's just a contest.
Tell me something, Mr. Gambling-Is-A-Contest. Let's say there was a time limit on someone's hand, and they lost their connnection. (Yes, I'm sure there are rules about this, but let's pretend.) Would you let them have more time? Or would you take their money?
Although I'm fairly certain it's wins minus losses. If you get make three 1,000 dollars bets at 5:1 odds, and one wins, giving you 5,000, you only have to pay taxes on the 2,000 you actually came out ahead, IIRC. (And, no, if you don't win, you don't get to deduct losses as business expenses or anything else.) As almost no one comes out of gambling with more money they came into it, said taxes are not incredibly important. (And those who do come out of it with more usually won big instantly and quit, and thus the IRS will learn about it automatically.)
However, you're quite right in that you don't 'have' to pay taxes on gambling, just like you don't 'have' to pay sales taxes on out of state orders, and you don't 'have' to pay taxes if you're a hooker. You do, actually, have to pay taxes on those things, but it's basically an honor system, as the government can't keep track of it.