It's not quite that simple. Fractional-reserve banking creates promises of money out of thin air. You can do fractional-reserve banking with gold coins, barrels of oil, strawberries, or any other commodity.
Even that's not quite fair to say, because every promise of money created is created at the same time as a right to future money, so the total net amount of money isn't changed.
Many people get f-r banking and fiat currency confused.
Over the course of the 20th century, something like twenty million Europeans were murdered, mostly by their own governments.
In that same time frame, something less than one million Americans were murdered, mostly by fellow citizens.
If American-style gun ownership had reduced state-sanctioned murder by just 10%, even at the cost of creating American-style private murder rates, Europe would have come out ahead on the deal.
I don't know how it works over there, but in the United States, this would result in rich people being unable to drive a car without half a dozen cops following them and watching their every move, while poor people driving at 90 through a school zone would be utterly ignored.
Also, if I were a sufficiently rich person, I could hire a poor person to drive me to work. I could cut my commute time in half!
...would you be willing to keep your old price, in return for only being able to stream stuff that was available for streaming on January 1, 2011?
They've been constantly adding new content (all of Star Trek!), and that ain't cheap. Netflix streaming has gone from being the last place to squeeze a few extra pennies out of old shows and movies to being the go-to place for anything but the latest entertainment.
Amen. I've long thought that probability should be a basic part of high school mathematics; it's far more relevant to the typical person's life than, say, trigonometry is.
The moon is lumpy and thus doesn't have a uniform gravity field. Objects in low orbits are slightly perturbed and don't take very long to hit the surface.
An object high enough to make the Mascons not matter is also high enough that Earth perturbs its orbit, and again, takes a short time (months, usually) to either get pulled completely out of orbit or hit the surface.
Proposed rule / law: Whenever a digital device is refusing to do something it technically could because of a DRM or other copy-protection concern, it must prominently make this clear to the user. Rather than "Incompatibility between display and device", the error message must be more along the lines of "This content will not be displayed because somebody figured out how to use your display chipset to rip Blu-Ray discs, so we're not showing new content on it."
An idea I read once that I liked is a loser-pays, but with the caveat that the loser's liability is limited to what (s)he spent on legal fees. So, if you sue Ford and lose, you'd at worst be out the cost of your own lawsuit. If Ford wants to win by throwing lawyers at the case, they can, just like today, but it'll be on their dime, not yours.
This would also give both sides an extra incentive to keep their legal fees down, always a good thing.
Once, driving late at night in rural Washington State, I realized that the moonlight was so bright that I *could* see just fine with it. I did a brief 5-10 second turn-off of my headlights, and I could actually see *better* than I could with my headlights on. Had I not been worried about other people not seeing me, deer in the road, and legal implications of driving without headlights, I might have been tempted to keep driving that way. It was amazing.
Yeah? Tell you what. Show me two LEDs, one of them constant-on and the other flashing for, say, one microsecond every 1.667 milliseconds (600Hz, which is ten times your claimed "refresh rate" for my eyes). I will *instantly* and *repeatably* tell you which is which.
Caveats: They should be reasonably bright, small, and the test would be easiest for me in a dark room.
I would wager any sum of money you care to name that I could tell them apart with less than five seconds of observation in greater than 95% of the trials.
Can but don't. I'm starting to see more and more cars on the road with LED taillights that are 'dimmed' by being 1% on, about 100 microseconds every 10 milliseconds. My eyes are *extremely* sensitive to flicker, and it drives me nuts.
Remember how these things work - they made a few observations, from which they made a cone through which they're 95% (or whatever) sure that the asteroid will pass. Mars filled up about 1.3% of that cone, and so they can say that there's a 1.3% chance that Mars will be hit by the asteroid.
A few days later, with better observations, the cone shrinks, and now Mars takes up 3.9% of the cone. As the cone shrinks, Mars will continue to consume a larger and larger portion of it, right up until the time (maybe) that the cone shrinks outside of Mars and they determine that there will be no impact.
So remember, this is not unusual, and *every* non-impact event follows this pattern: Scientists find potential impact. Impact probability increases. Impact probability increases. (maybe a few more repetitions, too) Suddenly, they decide that it's not going to hit, and impact probability goes to zero.
Can you jump ship at a moment's notice if you're living in company housing? If you quit, how long do you think it'd be before you'd have to move out, or start paying the (presumably) very high non-employee rent?
Would we have to have a COBRA for employee housing? Do you think Google wants to become a landlord?
On Friday, I got a stock spam, touting some unknown company, in my mail. Not my e-mail, but my PAPER mail. It looked like a much fancier version of a standard stock spam, with charts, graphs, and a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying that they were just promoters.
This isn't the first one of these I've gotten, either. I got a similar one a few months ago. I can't imagine that stock spam is worth mailing to people via USPS, but apparently somebody can.
Hey probably meant (200 feet)^3, which would hold about two billion seven-cubic-inch cell phones. That's a small hill. You could probably find a vacant lot that could hold a pile that size in almost every city in the world.
You wouldn't be able to use it to prevent the next 9/11, but you could probably use a temporal communicator to prevent the next hurricane Katrina disaster. The hurricane or earthquake will still devastate the city, but that doesn't mean there has to be anyone in it at the time.
The people and government of New Orleans had several days' notice that a hurricane was coming. On the other hand, 30 minutes' notice would have been enough to scramble fighters and intercept the hijacked airplanes on 9/11; two hours would have been enough to arrest the hijackers before they ever got onto the planes.
It's enough to make one wonder: How feasible is a handheld laser weapon? (Say, a few watts?)
The main problem is that the amount of energy required to actually do *damage* with a laser is far greater than the amount of energy required to cause eye damage. If you fire your five-watt laser at an enemy, the reflection off of his reflective belt buckle, buttons on his jacket, or even just his glasses can be enough to damage your eyesight, at least temporarily. But even if that doesn't happen, you'll wind up doing far less damage than a typical handgun would.
That sort of thing would be labeled fascist in China, too, except that any person who did so would promptly find him / herself in a work camp if lucky, and six feet under if not.
As for enforcing it, you just need to hire a few thousand people to work at the Ministry of Information, reading blogs and checking the registration of the blog. Check the IP address that the person blogs from and make sure it matches up with the registrant. If not, trace the IP. Pretty simple stuff, really.
The United States of America is the only country in the world with the word 'America' in its official name, and therefore referring to it as 'America' and its inhabitants as 'Americans' is reasonable. Other constructs, such as 'United Statesian' run into the problem of name-collisions with countries like Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos.
No one gets mad when you refer to people from that big island in the South Pacific as 'Australians', despite the fact that people from New Guinea also live on the continent of Australia.
How much more awareness are you expecting?
on
Going Pink For October
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Is there any woman still out there not aware that sometimes her boobs can develop lumps that will kill her? If such an utterly clueless person exists, is turning websites pink really the best way to communicate with her?
After the election, look for a price spike, probably blamed on increased heating demand and Middle East instability.
So, you've dumped your life's savings into the commodities market, right?
If you genuinely believe that gasoline prices will soon go back up to where they were just a few months ago, you can make a *lot* of money if you're right...
Slashdot Mirror
It's not quite that simple. Fractional-reserve banking creates promises of money out of thin air. You can do fractional-reserve banking with gold coins, barrels of oil, strawberries, or any other commodity.
Even that's not quite fair to say, because every promise of money created is created at the same time as a right to future money, so the total net amount of money isn't changed.
Many people get f-r banking and fiat currency confused.
Over the course of the 20th century, something like twenty million Europeans were murdered, mostly by their own governments.
In that same time frame, something less than one million Americans were murdered, mostly by fellow citizens.
If American-style gun ownership had reduced state-sanctioned murder by just 10%, even at the cost of creating American-style private murder rates, Europe would have come out ahead on the deal.
Learn some science.
Neither volcanoes nor streetlights put out .01% as much light as the sun.
I don't know how it works over there, but in the United States, this would result in rich people being unable to drive a car without half a dozen cops following them and watching their every move, while poor people driving at 90 through a school zone would be utterly ignored.
Also, if I were a sufficiently rich person, I could hire a poor person to drive me to work. I could cut my commute time in half!
The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.
...would you be willing to keep your old price, in return for only being able to stream stuff that was available for streaming on January 1, 2011?
They've been constantly adding new content (all of Star Trek!), and that ain't cheap. Netflix streaming has gone from being the last place to squeeze a few extra pennies out of old shows and movies to being the go-to place for anything but the latest entertainment.
My employer - a large, well-known company - asked my group to start working 48-hour weeks back in October.
I gave my notice in November and now have a job that expects 40 hours per week.
Amen. I've long thought that probability should be a basic part of high school mathematics; it's far more relevant to the typical person's life than, say, trigonometry is.
Actually, no.
The moon is lumpy and thus doesn't have a uniform gravity field. Objects in low orbits are slightly perturbed and don't take very long to hit the surface.
An object high enough to make the Mascons not matter is also high enough that Earth perturbs its orbit, and again, takes a short time (months, usually) to either get pulled completely out of orbit or hit the surface.
There are no stable orbits around the moon.
Proposed rule / law: Whenever a digital device is refusing to do something it technically could because of a DRM or other copy-protection concern, it must prominently make this clear to the user. Rather than "Incompatibility between display and device", the error message must be more along the lines of "This content will not be displayed because somebody figured out how to use your display chipset to rip Blu-Ray discs, so we're not showing new content on it."
An idea I read once that I liked is a loser-pays, but with the caveat that the loser's liability is limited to what (s)he spent on legal fees. So, if you sue Ford and lose, you'd at worst be out the cost of your own lawsuit. If Ford wants to win by throwing lawyers at the case, they can, just like today, but it'll be on their dime, not yours.
This would also give both sides an extra incentive to keep their legal fees down, always a good thing.
Once, driving late at night in rural Washington State, I realized that the moonlight was so bright that I *could* see just fine with it. I did a brief 5-10 second turn-off of my headlights, and I could actually see *better* than I could with my headlights on. Had I not been worried about other people not seeing me, deer in the road, and legal implications of driving without headlights, I might have been tempted to keep driving that way. It was amazing.
Yeah? Tell you what. Show me two LEDs, one of them constant-on and the other flashing for, say, one microsecond every 1.667 milliseconds (600Hz, which is ten times your claimed "refresh rate" for my eyes). I will *instantly* and *repeatably* tell you which is which.
Caveats: They should be reasonably bright, small, and the test would be easiest for me in a dark room.
I would wager any sum of money you care to name that I could tell them apart with less than five seconds of observation in greater than 95% of the trials.
Can but don't. I'm starting to see more and more cars on the road with LED taillights that are 'dimmed' by being 1% on, about 100 microseconds every 10 milliseconds. My eyes are *extremely* sensitive to flicker, and it drives me nuts.
Remember how these things work - they made a few observations, from which they made a cone through which they're 95% (or whatever) sure that the asteroid will pass. Mars filled up about 1.3% of that cone, and so they can say that there's a 1.3% chance that Mars will be hit by the asteroid.
A few days later, with better observations, the cone shrinks, and now Mars takes up 3.9% of the cone. As the cone shrinks, Mars will continue to consume a larger and larger portion of it, right up until the time (maybe) that the cone shrinks outside of Mars and they determine that there will be no impact.
So remember, this is not unusual, and *every* non-impact event follows this pattern: Scientists find potential impact. Impact probability increases. Impact probability increases. (maybe a few more repetitions, too) Suddenly, they decide that it's not going to hit, and impact probability goes to zero.
Can you jump ship at a moment's notice if you're living in company housing? If you quit, how long do you think it'd be before you'd have to move out, or start paying the (presumably) very high non-employee rent?
Would we have to have a COBRA for employee housing? Do you think Google wants to become a landlord?
On Friday, I got a stock spam, touting some unknown company, in my mail. Not my e-mail, but my PAPER mail. It looked like a much fancier version of a standard stock spam, with charts, graphs, and a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying that they were just promoters.
This isn't the first one of these I've gotten, either. I got a similar one a few months ago. I can't imagine that stock spam is worth mailing to people via USPS, but apparently somebody can.
Hey probably meant (200 feet)^3, which would hold about two billion seven-cubic-inch cell phones. That's a small hill. You could probably find a vacant lot that could hold a pile that size in almost every city in the world.
Hold a small object and toss it back and forth from one hand to the other. Trivial, right?
Now try it with one eye closed.
The people and government of New Orleans had several days' notice that a hurricane was coming. On the other hand, 30 minutes' notice would have been enough to scramble fighters and intercept the hijacked airplanes on 9/11; two hours would have been enough to arrest the hijackers before they ever got onto the planes.
The main problem is that the amount of energy required to actually do *damage* with a laser is far greater than the amount of energy required to cause eye damage. If you fire your five-watt laser at an enemy, the reflection off of his reflective belt buckle, buttons on his jacket, or even just his glasses can be enough to damage your eyesight, at least temporarily. But even if that doesn't happen, you'll wind up doing far less damage than a typical handgun would.
That sort of thing would be labeled fascist in China, too, except that any person who did so would promptly find him / herself in a work camp if lucky, and six feet under if not.
As for enforcing it, you just need to hire a few thousand people to work at the Ministry of Information, reading blogs and checking the registration of the blog. Check the IP address that the person blogs from and make sure it matches up with the registrant. If not, trace the IP. Pretty simple stuff, really.
The United States of America is the only country in the world with the word 'America' in its official name, and therefore referring to it as 'America' and its inhabitants as 'Americans' is reasonable. Other constructs, such as 'United Statesian' run into the problem of name-collisions with countries like Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos.
No one gets mad when you refer to people from that big island in the South Pacific as 'Australians', despite the fact that people from New Guinea also live on the continent of Australia.
Is there any woman still out there not aware that sometimes her boobs can develop lumps that will kill her? If such an utterly clueless person exists, is turning websites pink really the best way to communicate with her?
So, you've dumped your life's savings into the commodities market, right?
If you genuinely believe that gasoline prices will soon go back up to where they were just a few months ago, you can make a *lot* of money if you're right...