But my point is that there isn't enough gold to cover our economy. Or do you want anything that uses gold to at least double in price because gold is now trading at $10000 per ounce?
As for the no longer redeemable for precious metals, they're redeemable for all sorts of goods. The american economy is the guarentee now. If the treasury dept actually went wild printing money, you'd get the rampant inflation seen in other countries with unstable governments. And you can't make them redeemable for other goods as well, because then you'd be artificially linking their prices.
While the backed by gold/silver is great for securing a unsecure currency, it won't work for the U.S. dollar for a very important reason. There isn't enough gold/silver for the U.S. government to back up the currency! The GDP of the U.S. is about 10 TRILLION dollars. Gold is trading at $268.30 per troy ounce according to cnn's business section. 37 Billion troy onces to cover 1 year's GDP. a troy ounce is 31.1 grams.
Any explanations on how we're going to store about 1 Billion kilograms of gold? Even if you figure that the amount of currency in circulation is much lower, you're still talking about the storage of millions of kilograms of precious metals. I found mention that there's 4 Billion in $1 bills alone.
and here's an interesting link:
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Politics/whynot th egoldstandard.html
(remove the space in notthe, I couldn't get rid of it)
or the counterpoint
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa016.html
Actually, I'd be for the viaducts even if the wildlife population isn't affected. I'd be worried about my car.
But I also agree about the hunting. Let's cull the herd before it's done through the medium of starvation. Don't forget that the end deaths will be 2-3 times what the hunting would be, because the deer that end up starving still eat before starving to death. It also results in damaged forest areas as the deer strip anything remotly edible.
Lets' see. According to
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/facts/HTML/FS- 00 3-HQ.html
Nasa's 2001 budget is 14 billion. A quick trip to the census says that there were about 275 million citizens in 2000. I figure that's close enough.
By golly, we can save $51 per person if we eliminate NASA. But guess what? No more weather satellites. Television, communication sats will also no longer be launched.
NASA has actually been the only government organization to provide a measurably positive effect on the economy. This might not be as true anymore, but the research done by NASA has had far-reaching effects.
It has to do with the alignment of the planets. We want to launch so we have the shortest intercept with mars. Mars and Earth have different orbital speeds, so they vary from 'right next to each other' to 'on opposite sides of the sun'. I've heard that probes could take from between 6-18 months to reach Mars, depending on the positions.
I'd think that we'd have a trip to Mars before a trip to jupitor anyways. The moons close. I've heard that a Mars mission would be 8 months at a minimum. Jupitor would take YEARS. We're going to want to do some serious stress testing first...
While the average american wouldn't recognize his own chief justice, I'd bet the presiding judge would. Just imagine looking at the prospective jurors...
There is a national list and blocking services for telemarketers.
But what the previous poster was trying to point out is that there is a relativly substantional cost to calling you.
This means that rather than needing than say, a.01% hit rate(percentage of people who earn the spammer money) to profit, you need a 4-5% hit rate to make your profit. This is a huge difference. It means that the telemarketer wants to get it's calling lists as specific as possible. They have to pay somebody to make those calls, the lines, and a building for them to operate from.
It limits them from just 'shotgunning' their ads out too indiscriminatly. They need a certain point before they break even with their advertising.
The junk-mail I got when I turned 18 must of cost the senders around 20-30 cents each. This naturally limits them. Want to mail 10,000 people? That'll be $2000 dollars. If the spammer already has a computer, the cost is maybe $20 (the cost of a ISP) for millions of emails.
Maybe he was complacent. After all, he said he was a frequent customer(not anymore!).
I'd assume he read the contract the first time, singed, then went on his merry way. Then he got the same paperwork the next time he came in, and so forth. Why bother reading it? It's the same agreement I signed last week.
I also can't imagine car rental contracts being any easier to read than microsoft EULA's. How many people would notice a subsection for the latest version of Works that says you have to pay, say, an additional $100 per re-install to insure that microshaft get's its money from pirates.
It is like the phone scams 'slamming'. Run a 'free' contest. Have in the fine print that by entering you agree to change your phone service.
I'd hardly call the average user running SETI stupid.
That said, I have to agree that if they want to run SETI, do it at home. My work says very explicitly: No unapproved software. Period. Even microsoft's been compromised at times. The more stuff you keep off your computer, the easier it is to keep it secure.
I also wouldn't call a web server hack unrelated. I just checked, and the executable appears to be on the web server. If I can compromise the web server, I could replace that executable with whatever I want. Like a backdoor program that reports who it's compromised to somewhere. Depending on how quiet I was about it, it could be days before somebody noticed.
Translation of 'Some kind of risk': There could be a problem with it, but we don't want to spend the resources to precisely determine what the actual risk factor is. If we do it for the SETI client, we'll have to do it for all the little programs people download and mail to each other.
The original Southparks were done using paper cutouts. Then the creators got a SG machine when it became popular. Of course, somebody might have gone back and re-done them.
Firethorn
Re:Curiosity killed the cat
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 1
As well as the ultimate hazardous waste disposal unit. Because whatever goes into it doesn't come out. At least as anything close to what it went in as. Radioactive, chemical, it wouldn't matter.
Then again, you'd have to worry about how large the event horizon was. How fast could you feed stuff through the equivalent, of say, half a pinhead?
That simply means that they aren't releasing the soot into the atmosphere anymore. Mercury and such is still produced. When you figure out the relative 'deadlieness' vs. sheer amount, the coal plant will loose every time.
Sure, Nuclear is 'Very Deadly'
But only at 2-3 drums a year...
VS.
Coal's 'Nasty Stuff' at thousands/millions of tons per year.
Or you can get the Proxomitron and have it filter out the pop-ups, banner ads, geocities 'branding', and all that other annoying stuff. That's the true negative of 'shock the monkey' ads. If it's annoying enough, I add a filter for it, and don't see it again. I'm much less likely to go through this work for a text add that isn't annoying the heck out of me.
Two totally different things. Divx is a recording format, Napster is a distribution system. Divx is to VHS as Napster is to catalog sales. VHS already won it's day in court (the movie/tv companies tried to shut it down when it first appeared).
Yes, this is an amazing coincidence. I remember this movie too, and snitching was part of his basic plan. The movie was called 'The Wave'. The movie was based on the actual experiment. The teacher ended up calling it off early because it was so successful that it was scaring him. He started it because of a comment 'it can't happen here in the U.S.' It really disturbed me, because of the sheer ease of doing it.
I've worked for a mail 'preperation' company (NOT JUNK MAIL) that prepared things like church mailings, oil filter catalogs for farm equipment (established customers), and other things. For so called 'prepaid' return envelopes, it's actually costs by number returned. It goes to a special P.O. Box where everything sent there is charged to the mailbox owner. Overweight, non-standard dimension, all costs more and IS charged. It came up when people were returning address correction/subscription forms and not folding them like they said to.
Actually, they've caught quite a few via chat-rooms that progress to e-mail. I'm in the USAF, and it was a big story when OSI picked him up in a sting. The base is in Colorado, and this guy set up a meeting in Missouri, flew down there, where they picked him up. Of course, he used a work computer for alot of this, where you consent to monitoring every time you use the computer.
Yes, but if I run across the border and buy the drugs at 1/4 the price, I can bring them back and still take them! Or better yet, buy them from a mail order place in Mexico, and get them cheap. Of course, the standards are looser in Mexico, so I might not be getting the same thing/quality, but oh well.
The problem with region coding is that people in europe could buy online, and have shipped overseas, movies released here in the US both cheaper and sooner (I understand they get the movies around a year later than the US release). This wasn't a problem for the movie industry with tape because of the differences in PAL/NTSC. But a DVD will play anywhere (without region encoding). This would mean an end to their ability to charge$10-20(equiv.) more per movie.
On a article lower down, somebody said it's all the FDA's fault. While the FDA has it's problems, do we really want to let the drug companies have free reign with their new 'wonder drug'? The suggested solution was to weaken the FDA and let the media do the control. But the media is an unscientific process. They jump on spectacular stuff, that will get them ratings. They don't worry about finding out before the release of the drug if it'll cause kidney failure (example) 20 years down the road.
They're idiots to put the IRS on the return box. The IRS is big enough that if the upper-ups get wind of it, they'd come down HARD. First people they'd call...
The local post office inspector general and their legal department. They have enough problems with their popularity.
Have you heard of Pan and Scan? This is where the movie has imbedded commands to cut the picture down to TV scale, losing the left and right borders, but with the commands, it will favor whatever side the 'action' is on. This way, I can get my letterboxed movie (I can't afford a widescreen) while you can enjoy that you're filling your TV, giving you a larger picture, just not as much of the picture as the director intended.
I've seen movies both ways, and I find that I prefer to see all the action, sometimes you miss something important because it's on the edge of the screen. Of course, this depends on the movie, some use the width of the movie ratio more than others.
Slashdot Mirror
But my point is that there isn't enough gold to cover our economy. Or do you want anything that uses gold to at least double in price because gold is now trading at $10000 per ounce?
As for the no longer redeemable for precious metals, they're redeemable for all sorts of goods. The american economy is the guarentee now. If the treasury dept actually went wild printing money, you'd get the rampant inflation seen in other countries with unstable governments. And you can't make them redeemable for other goods as well, because then you'd be artificially linking their prices.
Firethorn
While the backed by gold/silver is great for securing a unsecure currency, it won't work for the U.S. dollar for a very important reason. There isn't enough gold/silver for the U.S. government to back up the currency! The GDP of the U.S. is about 10 TRILLION dollars. Gold is trading at $268.30 per troy ounce according to cnn's business section. 37 Billion troy onces to cover 1 year's GDP. a troy ounce is 31.1 grams.
t th egoldstandard.html
Any explanations on how we're going to store about 1 Billion kilograms of gold? Even if you figure that the amount of currency in circulation is much lower, you're still talking about the storage of millions of kilograms of precious metals. I found mention that there's 4 Billion in $1 bills alone.
and here's an interesting link:
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Politics/whyno
(remove the space in notthe, I couldn't get rid of it)
or the counterpoint
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa016.html
Firethorn
Actually, I'd be for the viaducts even if the wildlife population isn't affected. I'd be worried about my car.
But I also agree about the hunting. Let's cull the herd before it's done through the medium of starvation. Don't forget that the end deaths will be 2-3 times what the hunting would be, because the deer that end up starving still eat before starving to death. It also results in damaged forest areas as the deer strip anything remotly edible.
Firethorn
Sorry, Yeesh. So I misspelled Jupiter. I've been up WAY too long. At least I only have an hour left.
Firethorn
$200-300 sounds fishy to me
- 00 3-HQ.html
Lets' see. According to
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/facts/HTML/FS
Nasa's 2001 budget is 14 billion. A quick trip to the census says that there were about 275 million citizens in 2000. I figure that's close enough.
By golly, we can save $51 per person if we eliminate NASA. But guess what? No more weather satellites. Television, communication sats will also no longer be launched.
NASA has actually been the only government organization to provide a measurably positive effect on the economy. This might not be as true anymore, but the research done by NASA has had far-reaching effects.
Firethorn
It has to do with the alignment of the planets. We want to launch so we have the shortest intercept with mars. Mars and Earth have different orbital speeds, so they vary from 'right next to each other' to 'on opposite sides of the sun'. I've heard that probes could take from between 6-18 months to reach Mars, depending on the positions.
Firethorn
I'd think that we'd have a trip to Mars before a trip to jupitor anyways. The moons close. I've heard that a Mars mission would be 8 months at a minimum. Jupitor would take YEARS. We're going to want to do some serious stress testing first...
Firethorn
Or was it before he became Chief Justice?
While the average american wouldn't recognize his own chief justice, I'd bet the presiding judge would. Just imagine looking at the prospective jurors...
Firethorn
Try taking one of those snail letters to the local postmaster. The post office will gladly nail the perpetrators of the fraud to the wall.
Firethorn
There is a national list and blocking services for telemarketers.
.01% hit rate(percentage of people who earn the spammer money) to profit, you need a 4-5% hit rate to make your profit. This is a huge difference. It means that the telemarketer wants to get it's calling lists as specific as possible. They have to pay somebody to make those calls, the lines, and a building for them to operate from.
But what the previous poster was trying to point out is that there is a relativly substantional cost to calling you.
This means that rather than needing than say, a
It limits them from just 'shotgunning' their ads out too indiscriminatly. They need a certain point before they break even with their advertising.
The junk-mail I got when I turned 18 must of cost the senders around 20-30 cents each. This naturally limits them. Want to mail 10,000 people? That'll be $2000 dollars. If the spammer already has a computer, the cost is maybe $20 (the cost of a ISP) for millions of emails.
Firethorn
But Axe 1.0 can crack it in under 6 seconds!
Firethorn
Better yet, AOL Germany. I might actually end up going with them since T-Online (the phone company's ISP) stopped offering flat rate.
Firethorn
Maybe he was complacent. After all, he said he was a frequent customer(not anymore!).
I'd assume he read the contract the first time, singed, then went on his merry way. Then he got the same paperwork the next time he came in, and so forth. Why bother reading it? It's the same agreement I signed last week.
I also can't imagine car rental contracts being any easier to read than microsoft EULA's. How many people would notice a subsection for the latest version of Works that says you have to pay, say, an additional $100 per re-install to insure that microshaft get's its money from pirates.
It is like the phone scams 'slamming'. Run a 'free' contest. Have in the fine print that by entering you agree to change your phone service.
Firethorn
I'd hardly call the average user running SETI stupid.
That said, I have to agree that if they want to run SETI, do it at home. My work says very explicitly: No unapproved software. Period. Even microsoft's been compromised at times. The more stuff you keep off your computer, the easier it is to keep it secure.
I also wouldn't call a web server hack unrelated. I just checked, and the executable appears to be on the web server. If I can compromise the web server, I could replace that executable with whatever I want. Like a backdoor program that reports who it's compromised to somewhere. Depending on how quiet I was about it, it could be days before somebody noticed.
Translation of 'Some kind of risk': There could be a problem with it, but we don't want to spend the resources to precisely determine what the actual risk factor is. If we do it for the SETI client, we'll have to do it for all the little programs people download and mail to each other.
Firethorn
The original Southparks were done using paper cutouts. Then the creators got a SG machine when it became popular. Of course, somebody might have gone back and re-done them.
Firethorn
As well as the ultimate hazardous waste disposal unit. Because whatever goes into it doesn't come out. At least as anything close to what it went in as. Radioactive, chemical, it wouldn't matter.
Then again, you'd have to worry about how large the event horizon was. How fast could you feed stuff through the equivalent, of say, half a pinhead?
Firethorn
That simply means that they aren't releasing the soot into the atmosphere anymore. Mercury and such is still produced. When you figure out the relative 'deadlieness' vs. sheer amount, the coal plant will loose every time.
Sure, Nuclear is 'Very Deadly'
But only at 2-3 drums a year...
VS.
Coal's 'Nasty Stuff' at thousands/millions of tons per year.
Coal loses...
Firethorn
Or you can get the Proxomitron and have it filter out the pop-ups, banner ads, geocities 'branding', and all that other annoying stuff. That's the true negative of 'shock the monkey' ads. If it's annoying enough, I add a filter for it, and don't see it again. I'm much less likely to go through this work for a text add that isn't annoying the heck out of me.
Firethorn
Firethorn
Two totally different things. Divx is a recording format, Napster is a distribution system. Divx is to VHS as Napster is to catalog sales. VHS already won it's day in court (the movie/tv companies tried to shut it down when it first appeared).
Firethorn
Yes, this is an amazing coincidence. I remember this movie too, and snitching was part of his basic plan. The movie was called 'The Wave'. The movie was based on the actual experiment. The teacher ended up calling it off early because it was so successful that it was scaring him. He started it because of a comment 'it can't happen here in the U.S.' It really disturbed me, because of the sheer ease of doing it.
Firethorn
I've worked for a mail 'preperation' company (NOT JUNK MAIL) that prepared things like church mailings, oil filter catalogs for farm equipment (established customers), and other things. For so called 'prepaid' return envelopes, it's actually costs by number returned. It goes to a special P.O. Box where everything sent there is charged to the mailbox owner. Overweight, non-standard dimension, all costs more and IS charged. It came up when people were returning address correction/subscription forms and not folding them like they said to.
Firethorn
Actually, they've caught quite a few via chat-rooms that progress to e-mail. I'm in the USAF, and it was a big story when OSI picked him up in a sting. The base is in Colorado, and this guy set up a meeting in Missouri, flew down there, where they picked him up. Of course, he used a work computer for alot of this, where you consent to monitoring every time you use the computer.
Yes, but if I run across the border and buy the drugs at 1/4 the price, I can bring them back and still take them! Or better yet, buy them from a mail order place in Mexico, and get them cheap. Of course, the standards are looser in Mexico, so I might not be getting the same thing/quality, but oh well.
The problem with region coding is that people in europe could buy online, and have shipped overseas, movies released here in the US both cheaper and sooner (I understand they get the movies around a year later than the US release). This wasn't a problem for the movie industry with tape because of the differences in PAL/NTSC. But a DVD will play anywhere (without region encoding). This would mean an end to their ability to charge$10-20(equiv.) more per movie.
On a article lower down, somebody said it's all the FDA's fault. While the FDA has it's problems, do we really want to let the drug companies have free reign with their new 'wonder drug'?
The suggested solution was to weaken the FDA and let the media do the control. But the media is an unscientific process. They jump on spectacular stuff, that will get them ratings. They don't worry about finding out before the release of the drug if it'll cause kidney failure (example) 20 years down the road.
It's mail fraud.
They're idiots to put the IRS on the return box. The IRS is big enough that if the upper-ups get wind of it, they'd come down HARD. First people they'd call...
The local post office inspector general and their legal department. They have enough problems with their popularity.
Firethorn
Have you heard of Pan and Scan?
This is where the movie has imbedded commands to cut the picture down to TV scale, losing the left and right borders, but with the commands, it will favor whatever side the 'action' is on.
This way, I can get my letterboxed movie (I can't afford a widescreen) while you can enjoy that you're filling your TV, giving you a larger picture, just not as much of the picture as the director intended.
I've seen movies both ways, and I find that I prefer to see all the action, sometimes you miss something important because it's on the edge of the screen. Of course, this depends on the movie, some use the width of the movie ratio more than others.
Firethorn