Umm, Aristotle was publishing proofs that the world was round back several hundred years BC, and they look like they might well have been known hundreds of years earlier. Proving that the Earth orbited the Sun required better optics than they had in the 16th Century, maybe -- Tycho Brache did pretty well with no lenses but his own eyes and an obsessive attention to accurate measurements over many years.
And finally, Special Relativity is less than 120 years old. Even the Michaelson-Morley experiments are much less than 200 years ago.
The RFC was written for and published on April Fool's Day. A number of semi-joking RFCs have been published on April 1st including the famous one for IP Transmission via Avian Carriers (i.e., carrier pigeons) and, several years later, a followup that reported the results from its actual implementation and testing (hint: NOT to be used for vi or emacs:-).
While the Avian Carriers RFC can be a model for lossy channels with long latency periods, I cannot guess what use super-luminal communications protocols will be.
"Only One Way" is false. Putting the phone in a Faraday cage also works. Actually, just use a steel lunchbox.
It might also work if you wrap the phone in a couple sheets of aluminum foil, but I haven't tried that to confirm it. Just make sure that any external antenna doesn't tear through.
I don't need to know who created the U.S. dollar in order to use it as a store of value or medium of trade for goods or services.
Everybody else does, though. Otherwise, Confederate bills would have value (interestingly, uncut bills DO, as a curiosity), and Zimbabwe would be the richest country in the world, followed by the Weimar Republic It is only the one-time probity of the US Government that made the US dollar better than other fiat currencies, and only since the term of Alexander Hamilton (ever hear the expression "not worth a Continental" describing the first attempt at a US dollar as a store of value?).
Scrooge McDuck being a cartoon character, I would no more expect real economic behavior of him than I would have expected it from the family that found A Diamond As Big As The Ritz (from the F.Scott Fitzgerald short story).
q. how many raspberry pi computers does it take to mine a bitcoin?
a. unknown. a beowulf cluster of them is still working on its first one.
You forgot that in Soviet Russia, the bitcoin miners would still be trying to purchase their first raspberry pi, and something about Natalie Portman covered in hot grits.
The government doesn't tax you on how much money you have
There are a few depositors in Cypriot banks that might disagree. Also, Pennsylvania attempted to institute a Personal Property Tax on its residents about a decade ago. In the PA case, it fell apart because no one wanted to report their personal property to the state, and the state had no way to track out-of-state accounts, whether bank accounts, mutual funds, or brokerage accounts, nor had they any way of tracking what in the Middle Ages were called Movables, like jewelry, coin collections, art, etc. That its first attempt was politically suicidal and impracticable does not mean that the Commonwealth did not have a legal right to this kind of tax, though.
OTOH, all real estate taxes are on the assessed value of your property; since real estate is harder to hide than Movables, it is possible to send people around every so often to track changes in property values, as well as tracking the current real estate market and generalizing across the neighborhood and across neighborhoods. Of course, whenever a total reassessment is done, at least half the people in the county complain that their assessment is nonsense (i.e., too high), and often can prove it, since no county will employ an assessment company that reports that the county value has declined and cannot be taxed as highly, even if it has.
Bitcoin is a bit easier to sneak across borders in large quantities and it (currently) opens up some options for shenanigans to the average man that are usually reserved for bankers, but it's not really that different from a regular currency.
Actually, bitcoins should be easier to move in large quantities, as currencies have limited top bills ($100 for the USA, frex) while the all-digital bitcoins can be treated like jewelry. Smuggling jewelry is and has always been fairly simple (hence the name, Jews having to keep their wealth mobile back in the days of pogroms and expulsions).
Info from a site named "We Love DC" about how DC is not so awful. Yeah, that is definitely an unbiased source. Definitely.
Seriously, all they do is redefine a coastal swamp as a "coastal tidal plane", which term might fit the Everglades as accurately. The DC "not-a-swamp, we-mean-it" areas sure looked like a salt-water swamp, the last time that I was there. Maybe a bit more algae in DC in April, and fewer mosquitoes than Florida in June.
Only if they can enter them into the blacklists:-)
Besides, most botnets don't have to infect these domains, as enough US PCs are infected (as are enough Western European, Japanese, Nigerian, etc.) to suffice.
Actually, I wonder if the botnets (as currently written) COULD infect these non-ASCII domain names? That might be an advantage to adding them.
You don't understand. Now the India-based companies will HAVE to buy the (.com in Hindi) domain names, or let them be bought by the people who would have bought a(n) (insert_India_company_here)_sucks.com domain and have their company names primarily linked with their hater sites. More money for VeriSign.
The non-ASCII IP names do not need IPv6, and they do not use either more or less IPv4 address space. Names are orthogonal to numbers.
OTOH, I rather doubt that there is any IPv4-only DNS/bind implementation that handles unicode names, nor do I expect a getipnodebyname() that handles them, unless it is IPv6-ready, as well.
Wrong. They went after Pinochet for his actions against Spaniards living in Chile, and Rumsfeld for his actions as US Sec.Def. Anyone affecting Spanish citizens anywhere in the world are liable for arrest and/or imprisonment if the Spanish can get them (which practically means if they enter Spanish territory).
Your Moroccan would indeed be liable to any Spanish court that felt the desire to try them, once the Moroccan entered Spanish-controlled territory so that Spanish law enforcement could arrest them, or any Spanish-located assets liable to freezing or seizure.
Otherwise it's not a fair world, just a dominium of the one country with the biggest guns. And if you're american and like that thought, learn some world history and consider the fact, that maybe not in 10 years, but in 50, 100, 200... it might not be the USA anymore. How would you like your grandchildren having to observe the laws of, say, China? Or the United States of Arabia, or whatever...
And IF the Chinese or the USArabia has the might in 50 or 100 years, do you think that they will care if the USA and American companies engaged in censorship to suit the French or not? Sorry, but the first sentence is the real state of affairs (OK, technically the country or countries with the biggest guns, or we'd all be saluting the swastika).
If there is a twitter.fr, I guess that it had better submit, but otherwise, just have all Twitter executives mark out France from their travel plans for a while.
A bit unfair. They did a proper job of defending Paris in WWI, and it only took 1/3 of the military aged men to do it.
Of course, after losing 1/3 of a generation, their response to any later suggestion to ensure that "They Shall Not Pass" is "Are you insane?!? I give up!" for at least the next century.
Right and wrong do not really exist on the sovereign state level. Did Britain and France have the "right" to dispose of Czechoslovakia in the Munich Accords? If not, to whom could the Czechs appeal, and would it have mattered? Did the USA and Britain have the "right" to consign Eastern Europe and part of Germany to Soviet control at Yalta? If they did not, to whom should the Poles or the people of the part of Italy that was given to Yugoslavia complain? Did Grand Fenwick have the "right" to declare war on the USA in the hopes of aid after they were defeated, or the "right" to blackmail the World after they captured a doomsday bomb that was just lying around during the evacuation exercise, and if not, to whom does the USA or USSR appeal that will be able to return the Bomb to its "proper" owners?
Sorry, but lacking the Organians, or at least the Vorlons, or a Security Council with the monopoly on nuclear weapons (as some in the US proposed in the halcyon days before the Soviets had their own Bomb), there is no appeal but the traditional Judge of Princes. Might may not make Right, but it *can* render the matter academic.
On the other hand, the British redcoats saw the American militias as terrorists,
Banastre Tarleton aside, the British DID see members of the American militia and the Continental Army as legitimate soldiers, because they took them as prisoners of war rather than just bayoneting them. Of course, they stored the PoWs on hulks in conditions that would make Abu Ghraib at its worst look like the Marriott, and a large portion of those prisoners died of various diseases (e.g., typhus) before they could be exchanged, but that is more the fault of the 18th century army and lack of sanitation in the pre-Pasteur, pre-Lister era.
Everybody is spying on everybody, so killing spies threatens international order.
Killing "spies" (which as a term of art means either A's military in B's country dressed as B civilians, or B civilians knowingly working for A) has always been on the table, just as has killing "enemy agents" (citizens of A working in B, with or without diplomatic cover, usually trying to develop and/or aid "spies") when they cannot be captured and interrogated, and maybe traded for "intelligence agents" (our guys who the other side would call "enemy agents" or "spies" if they used our terms) at a later date.
Al-Qaeda kills spies, not nations at peace.
So, Soviet Russia never killed any of its citizens who were spying for the West, or whom they thought might be (Subliminal Man says, "KAL 007 in the Reagan era), or just they never killed any British or American citizens during the Cold War, or before (Subliminal Man says, "Sidney Reilly")?
More on topic, the people that are threatened by the Tallinin Manual rule are not mere spies (i.e., seeking to learn secrets) but are more saboteurs (i.e., seeking to damage vital infrastructure, like dams or power stations [or gas centrifuges]).
Beer back then may have had a lower alcohol content then. The boiling of water is the first factor in killing harmful bacteria. Fruit was added after the mashing process (extracting of sugar from grain) to add the yeast needed for brewing.
Small beer, the daily brew, had about 2% alcohol -- enough to allow storage after brewing killed the germs in the original water and on the ingredients. Full strength beers, ales, and mead had about the same alcohol content that you can find today (except where limited by law). Fruit doesn't necessarily add yeast nor is it necessary to get yeast; often it comes from the environment just like bread molds do.
From what I understand, beer was the reason that ancient civilizations started to farm so they could harvest grain.
No. Grain, whether for beer or bread or both, led nomadic tribes to settle down to farm, then to make defensible towns to keep the surplus from nomads, which eventually led to civilizations to keep the largest towns safe from smaller towns or nomadic hordes wanting to steal all the surplus wealth and grain. There were no ancient civilizations before farming, Conan The Barbarian and Kull The Conqueror notwithstanding (although there were fish farms in Japan before grain farms).
Contrary to what you think, duels and gunfights were far less common than you think.
And slapping a man a far worse insult than you think (unless the slapper was female, of course -- in that case, it would just be embarrassing or foreplay). Also, most duels ended with both men exchanging fruitless shots, then deciding that honor was satisfied. Slapping another man, however, was far more serious than A making ambiguous comments about another man (B) (probably that he was entirely too close to his daughter) then refusing to publicly apologize for the third hand comments that got back to B unless B stated what those comments were (ie, the Hamilton-Burr cause of action).
The main reason that the West was so safe was that everyone went armed, and as Robert E. Heinlein pointed out, a well-armed populace is a polite populace. Punching a man would be less of an insult than slapping him.
Wrong. Slap a man's face, and his seconds would contact yours and arrange pistols for two and coffee for one; in the Old West, he would just draw on you, or, if Wyatt Earp, pull your revolver from your holster and pistol-whip you into unconsciousness. As for cowards and back room deals, how did the Templars lose everything, or what happened when Thomas Cromwell broke up the monasteries for King Henry VIII?
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, Aristotle was publishing proofs that the world was round back several hundred years BC, and they look like they might well have been known hundreds of years earlier. Proving that the Earth orbited the Sun required better optics than they had in the 16th Century, maybe -- Tycho Brache did pretty well with no lenses but his own eyes and an obsessive attention to accurate measurements over many years.
And finally, Special Relativity is less than 120 years old. Even the Michaelson-Morley experiments are much less than 200 years ago.
why doesn't the future simply publish the RFC?!
You are assuming that they didn't.
The RFC was written for and published on April Fool's Day. A number of semi-joking RFCs have been published on April 1st including the famous one for IP Transmission via Avian Carriers (i.e., carrier pigeons) and, several years later, a followup that reported the results from its actual implementation and testing (hint: NOT to be used for vi or emacs :-).
While the Avian Carriers RFC can be a model for lossy channels with long latency periods, I cannot guess what use super-luminal communications protocols will be.
YET !
"Only One Way" is false. Putting the phone in a Faraday cage also works. Actually, just use a steel lunchbox.
It might also work if you wrap the phone in a couple sheets of aluminum foil, but I haven't tried that to confirm it. Just make sure that any external antenna doesn't tear through.
I don't need to know who created the U.S. dollar in order to use it as a store of value or medium of trade for goods or services.
Everybody else does, though. Otherwise, Confederate bills would have value (interestingly, uncut bills DO, as a curiosity), and Zimbabwe would be the richest country in the world, followed by the Weimar Republic It is only the one-time probity of the US Government that made the US dollar better than other fiat currencies, and only since the term of Alexander Hamilton (ever hear the expression "not worth a Continental" describing the first attempt at a US dollar as a store of value?).
Scrooge McDuck being a cartoon character, I would no more expect real economic behavior of him than I would have expected it from the family that found A Diamond As Big As The Ritz (from the F.Scott Fitzgerald short story).
q. how many raspberry pi computers does it take to mine a bitcoin?
a. unknown. a beowulf cluster of them is still working on its first one.
You forgot that in Soviet Russia, the bitcoin miners would still be trying to purchase their first raspberry pi, and something about Natalie Portman covered in hot grits.
The government doesn't tax you on how much money you have
There are a few depositors in Cypriot banks that might disagree. Also, Pennsylvania attempted to institute a Personal Property Tax on its residents about a decade ago. In the PA case, it fell apart because no one wanted to report their personal property to the state, and the state had no way to track out-of-state accounts, whether bank accounts, mutual funds, or brokerage accounts, nor had they any way of tracking what in the Middle Ages were called Movables, like jewelry, coin collections, art, etc. That its first attempt was politically suicidal and impracticable does not mean that the Commonwealth did not have a legal right to this kind of tax, though.
OTOH, all real estate taxes are on the assessed value of your property; since real estate is harder to hide than Movables, it is possible to send people around every so often to track changes in property values, as well as tracking the current real estate market and generalizing across the neighborhood and across neighborhoods. Of course, whenever a total reassessment is done, at least half the people in the county complain that their assessment is nonsense (i.e., too high), and often can prove it, since no county will employ an assessment company that reports that the county value has declined and cannot be taxed as highly, even if it has.
Bitcoin is a bit easier to sneak across borders in large quantities and it (currently) opens up some options for shenanigans to the average man that are usually reserved for bankers, but it's not really that different from a regular currency.
Actually, bitcoins should be easier to move in large quantities, as currencies have limited top bills ($100 for the USA, frex) while the all-digital bitcoins can be treated like jewelry. Smuggling jewelry is and has always been fairly simple (hence the name, Jews having to keep their wealth mobile back in the days of pogroms and expulsions).
It's not, actually.
Info from a site named "We Love DC" about how DC is not so awful. Yeah, that is definitely an unbiased source. Definitely.
Seriously, all they do is redefine a coastal swamp as a "coastal tidal plane", which term might fit the Everglades as accurately. The DC "not-a-swamp, we-mean-it" areas sure looked like a salt-water swamp, the last time that I was there. Maybe a bit more algae in DC in April, and fewer mosquitoes than Florida in June.
Only if they can enter them into the blacklists :-)
Besides, most botnets don't have to infect these domains, as enough US PCs are infected (as are enough Western European, Japanese, Nigerian, etc.) to suffice.
Actually, I wonder if the botnets (as currently written) COULD infect these non-ASCII domain names? That might be an advantage to adding them.
You don't understand. Now the India-based companies will HAVE to buy the (.com in Hindi) domain names, or let them be bought by the people who would have bought a(n) (insert_India_company_here)_sucks.com domain and have their company names primarily linked with their hater sites. More money for VeriSign.
Not everyone can get on with Latin characters.
But they can with Indo-arabic numerals?
The non-ASCII IP names do not need IPv6, and they do not use either more or less IPv4 address space. Names are orthogonal to numbers.
OTOH, I rather doubt that there is any IPv4-only DNS/bind implementation that handles unicode names, nor do I expect a getipnodebyname() that handles them, unless it is IPv6-ready, as well.
Wrong. They went after Pinochet for his actions against Spaniards living in Chile, and Rumsfeld for his actions as US Sec.Def. Anyone affecting Spanish citizens anywhere in the world are liable for arrest and/or imprisonment if the Spanish can get them (which practically means if they enter Spanish territory).
Your Moroccan would indeed be liable to any Spanish court that felt the desire to try them, once the Moroccan entered Spanish-controlled territory so that Spanish law enforcement could arrest them, or any Spanish-located assets liable to freezing or seizure.
Otherwise it's not a fair world, just a dominium of the one country with the biggest guns. And if you're american and like that thought, learn some world history and consider the fact, that maybe not in 10 years, but in 50, 100, 200... it might not be the USA anymore. How would you like your grandchildren having to observe the laws of, say, China? Or the United States of Arabia, or whatever...
And IF the Chinese or the USArabia has the might in 50 or 100 years, do you think that they will care if the USA and American companies engaged in censorship to suit the French or not? Sorry, but the first sentence is the real state of affairs (OK, technically the country or countries with the biggest guns, or we'd all be saluting the swastika).
If there is a twitter.fr, I guess that it had better submit, but otherwise, just have all Twitter executives mark out France from their travel plans for a while.
A bit unfair. They did a proper job of defending Paris in WWI, and it only took 1/3 of the military aged men to do it.
Of course, after losing 1/3 of a generation, their response to any later suggestion to ensure that "They Shall Not Pass" is "Are you insane?!? I give up!" for at least the next century.
Somehow I do not think that the Twiiter execs are much like the shoe company executive in Kurosawa's High And Low. Very little leverage expected.
Right and wrong do not really exist on the sovereign state level. Did Britain and France have the "right" to dispose of Czechoslovakia in the Munich Accords? If not, to whom could the Czechs appeal, and would it have mattered? Did the USA and Britain have the "right" to consign Eastern Europe and part of Germany to Soviet control at Yalta? If they did not, to whom should the Poles or the people of the part of Italy that was given to Yugoslavia complain? Did Grand Fenwick have the "right" to declare war on the USA in the hopes of aid after they were defeated, or the "right" to blackmail the World after they captured a doomsday bomb that was just lying around during the evacuation exercise, and if not, to whom does the USA or USSR appeal that will be able to return the Bomb to its "proper" owners?
Sorry, but lacking the Organians, or at least the Vorlons, or a Security Council with the monopoly on nuclear weapons (as some in the US proposed in the halcyon days before the Soviets had their own Bomb), there is no appeal but the traditional Judge of Princes. Might may not make Right, but it *can* render the matter academic.
On the other hand, the British redcoats saw the American militias as terrorists,
Banastre Tarleton aside, the British DID see members of the American militia and the Continental Army as legitimate soldiers, because they took them as prisoners of war rather than just bayoneting them. Of course, they stored the PoWs on hulks in conditions that would make Abu Ghraib at its worst look like the Marriott, and a large portion of those prisoners died of various diseases (e.g., typhus) before they could be exchanged, but that is more the fault of the 18th century army and lack of sanitation in the pre-Pasteur, pre-Lister era.
Everybody is spying on everybody, so killing spies threatens international order.
Killing "spies" (which as a term of art means either A's military in B's country dressed as B civilians, or B civilians knowingly working for A) has always been on the table, just as has killing "enemy agents" (citizens of A working in B, with or without diplomatic cover, usually trying to develop and/or aid "spies") when they cannot be captured and interrogated, and maybe traded for "intelligence agents" (our guys who the other side would call "enemy agents" or "spies" if they used our terms) at a later date.
Al-Qaeda kills spies, not nations at peace.
So, Soviet Russia never killed any of its citizens who were spying for the West, or whom they thought might be (Subliminal Man says, "KAL 007 in the Reagan era), or just they never killed any British or American citizens during the Cold War, or before (Subliminal Man says, "Sidney Reilly")?
More on topic, the people that are threatened by the Tallinin Manual rule are not mere spies (i.e., seeking to learn secrets) but are more saboteurs (i.e., seeking to damage vital infrastructure, like dams or power stations [or gas centrifuges]).
Mormons love humans, whereas AC thinks that they are wretched things no better than monkeys. AC is just a killjoy.
I consider any form of intoxication to be depraved
Seriously a killjoy. Probably against sex because it can lead to more humans even with the best birth control, as well.
Beer back then may have had a lower alcohol content then. The boiling of water is the first factor in killing harmful bacteria. Fruit was added after the mashing process (extracting of sugar from grain) to add the yeast needed for brewing.
Small beer, the daily brew, had about 2% alcohol -- enough to allow storage after brewing killed the germs in the original water and on the ingredients. Full strength beers, ales, and mead had about the same alcohol content that you can find today (except where limited by law). Fruit doesn't necessarily add yeast nor is it necessary to get yeast; often it comes from the environment just like bread molds do.
From what I understand, beer was the reason that ancient civilizations started to farm so they could harvest grain.
No. Grain, whether for beer or bread or both, led nomadic tribes to settle down to farm, then to make defensible towns to keep the surplus from nomads, which eventually led to civilizations to keep the largest towns safe from smaller towns or nomadic hordes wanting to steal all the surplus wealth and grain. There were no ancient civilizations before farming, Conan The Barbarian and Kull The Conqueror notwithstanding (although there were fish farms in Japan before grain farms).
Contrary to what you think, duels and gunfights were far less common than you think.
And slapping a man a far worse insult than you think (unless the slapper was female, of course -- in that case, it would just be embarrassing or foreplay). Also, most duels ended with both men exchanging fruitless shots, then deciding that honor was satisfied. Slapping another man, however, was far more serious than A making ambiguous comments about another man (B) (probably that he was entirely too close to his daughter) then refusing to publicly apologize for the third hand comments that got back to B unless B stated what those comments were (ie, the Hamilton-Burr cause of action).
The main reason that the West was so safe was that everyone went armed, and as Robert E. Heinlein pointed out, a well-armed populace is a polite populace. Punching a man would be less of an insult than slapping him.
Where do you come from, 1960s or 70s France, or Eastern Europe?
Wrong. Slap a man's face, and his seconds would contact yours and arrange pistols for two and coffee for one; in the Old West, he would just draw on you, or, if Wyatt Earp, pull your revolver from your holster and pistol-whip you into unconsciousness. As for cowards and back room deals, how did the Templars lose everything, or what happened when Thomas Cromwell broke up the monasteries for King Henry VIII?