But the difference between gold and fiat currency is that no one can print gold, debasing the economy as they go on.
The amount of currency in circulation has nothing to do with debasing the economy or inflation. Most "money" is in checking and savings accounts. Actual cash is a fairly small percentage of the total amount of money. And it's not the Fed that creates money, it's the banks. Here's an old Straght Dope article about it.
But in theory, a gold standard assigns an intrinsic value to money.
This is the part where I get confused about why some people think the gold standard is so great. Gold has no intrinsic value. For that matter nothing has any intrinsic value. Everything is only worth what people think it's worth. Once you get past that, then you might as well eliminate the middle man and forget about the gold.
Maybe this is why I didn't like economics in college.:-b
However, why would the Constitution in Article 1, Section 10, prohibit the States from making anything but gold and silver legal tender, if Article I, Section 8 allows the Federal government to not only coin currency, but print currency?
Probably because they wanted to keep the States from being able to declare any old thing as currency. You don't want Virginia using tobacco leaves as money, or Florida to declare it will accept foreign banknotes, etc.
In the mid 90's it was apparent the wheels were coming off of FASA.
They shot themselves in the foot really. I watched it happening at GenCon. First there was Earthdawn. I can't speak for others, but I thought it was a pretty good game. The problem is that they never marketed it at all, and I thought they missed a big chance. It seemed like a lot of people were getting fed up with D&D at the time. The TSR castle was the biggest thing on the convention floor and it was nearly empty most of the time. If FASA had pushed Earthdawn, I think it could have been a big success. (Then again, I could be wrong.:))
Then came the whole card game thing. After Magic: The Gathering took off everyone and their brother decided they had to have a CCG to compete. After a while someone at FASA apparently noticed this too, so they dumped a lot of effort into the Shadowrun CCG. Only they were well behind the curve. The CCG market was flooded with crap and the fad was already slipping.
And THEN they decided to devote resources to Crimson Skies. I never played it, so I don't know if it was any good or not, but it seems to me that it was a bad time to be bringing out a whole new product while your cash cows are languishing.
So in the end I think they were brought down by bad decisions and bad management. Shame, really.
Why would one assume that sending radio signals between the stars makes any sense whatsoever for an advanced civilization
Well, the assumption is that they are trying to communicate with us. Any communication is likely to be the "smarts" (them) talking to the "stupids" (us). If you are an advanced civilization trying to communicate with some relatively primitive civilization you want a way to do it that's easy for the rubes to do and will go a long way. Radio waves are dead easy to make and have a very long range; the Arecibo telescope could detect a duplicate of itself broadcasting anywhere in the galaxy. So radio is actually a pretty good bet.
You might not like that kind of character but making such a huge change for, as far as I see it, no reason at all was a bad idea.
There was a very good reason for it. They had been spending hours beating it into the audience's heads that the Ring is the most evil thing ever created; it corrupts everyone it comes in contact with; and even the noblest and wisest are tempted by it. And then you have a character who says he wouldn't take it if he saw it lying by the side of the road? So much for the power of the Ring.
Gimli who is turned into little more than comic relief instead of a gruff dwarven warrior.
Fair enough, but I don't think it ruined the character.
Gandalf who is portrayed half the time as semi-senile with little clue what is going on (e.g. with Theoden he counsels against fighting Isengard contrary to Theoden's wishes etc.) whereas in the books he is the main mover of the effort against Sauron.
Um, what? In the movie he wants Theoden to take the fight to Saruman but Theoden decides to go to Helm's Deep instead.
Aragorn who seems to lose any sense of nobility and pines for Arwen. In the books he has a very humble but noble character who puts aside his love of Arwen to complete his task.
In the books the reason Aragorn completes his task is so Elrond will allow Arwen to marry him.
Plus the ones that never even make it in: Gildor, Farmer Maggot
Neither of whom really had anything to do with the main story and I didn't miss them. And thank God there was no Bombadil.
Jackson destroyed more than one character and severely warped others.
Which characters did he destroy? If you're talking about Faramir, then I hate to say it, but the Faramir in the movie is a better character than the one in the book.
One of the reasons why the Harry Potter films are so good
But they're not. They're OK. The LotR films are far and away better-made movies.
The only way you can really do this is crippling tax rates on the super rich, which only work for so long and has a side benefit of killing the industrial drive that creates them.
So, between 1940 and 1963 when the top marginal tax rate was over 80% there was no industrial drive?
To be fair, it's fair to be pissed off when your publisher releases your product before it is finished...
To be fair, it's fair that your publisher realizes after years of waiting that you're never really going to "finish" your game and decide to release it in whatever state it's in to at least recoup some money off it.
Although I don't even know if that would have saved ET. It was awful. Unplayable. Abyssmal. An insult to Atari owners. It's not a basically lovable or even playable game with some flaws that got a bad rap. It's a game that's almost completely impossible to play, and was flawed from conception.
I didn't think it was that bad. I played it for quite a while on the hardest difficulty. So there. >:(
- Why couldn't a creator have created photons between the furthest objects and us?
No reason, but that would imply the creator was trying to trick us into thinking the universe is older than it is. Why would he lie?
- How do you KNOW the objects are 13 billion light years away? Have you measured it with a tape measure? We use methods to measure objects that distant which can't possibly be proved with our current state of technology. They might be right, they may not. We ASSUME they're right, because there's no evidence that they're wrong, but we can't know for certain. Closer objects (100's of light years) we can measure using parallax, which is reasonably proven, but further objects use different methods which are more dubious.
This is ridiculous. We don't KNOW the objects are 13 billion light years away. We don't KNOW anything for sure in science. It certainly SEEMS like they're 13 billion light years away, given our understanding of cosmological redshift. How do you know that parallax works? How do you know that the earth isn't stationary and the creator is moving the rest of the universe around in little circles?
BTW - there IS evidence [ldolphin.org] that the speed of light has decreased over the last few hundred years.
The only tiny problem with this is that you can't just change the speed of light without changing a lot of other things in the process. It's not an independent variable. If you changed the speed of light as much as they want to, there wouldn't be any planets, stars, or probably atoms.
Incidentally, Barry Setterfield is a young-earth creationist, and his ideas have even been rejected by the Answers in Genesis people, so you know they must be crazy.
One of the testable results of his proof was that the Higgs bosun had to have a certain mass for the universe to collapse in the specific way needed to create the Omega Point.
For the laymen, a Higgs bosun is a very very massive particle the Standard Model predicts should add to the mass of ships. They have never been detected by current instruments, causing many scientists to doubt they exist. Proponents point out that possibly they haven't been detected because so far all the instruments have been land-based.
I can still see software companies trying to come up with ways to keep all 80 cores busy...
I wrote an application for my job (can't tell you, would have to kill you, etc.) that will gladly use as many processors as you can throw at it. So bring it on, Intel.:)
When creationists try to present creation theory in the classroom, alongside evolutionary viewpoints, they are viciously attacked.
That's because they don't have a scientific theory, and therefore shouldn't be presenting what they do have (which is an untestable hypothesis) in a science classroom.
"God did it" is not a theory.
why not let them stand side to side and see who wins? Let the almighty scientific method do it's work and bring forth the truth.
It did. The battle has already been fought over the last 100-150 years. Creationism lost. The debate is long over. It's only the creationists that haven't realized this yet.
Dropped a ball and your team lost the game? Now they are all mad at you? That should be good motivation to not drop the ball next time, and should provide extra incentive to practice more.
No, it's motivation to hate whatever game it was and want to never play it again ever.
And I'm still trying to figure out how Bill Clinton firing 93 US attorneys is justified while Gonzalez (allegedly at the direction of Bush) firing 8 is somehow a "scandal."
Because firing them all when you take office is standard practice. Firing some of them in the middle of your term for political reasons (eg, they are in the process of investigating certain Republicans), is NOT standard practice and actually falls under a little something called "obstruction of justice".
Occam's razor doesn't say "the simplest answer is best", although it's often phrased that way. What it says is "do not multiply entities unnecessarily", or, "the explanation with the fewest assumptions is usually best". Thus, explanations that require assuming the existence of an undetectable supernatural entity are probably not very good.:)
Funnily enough I flew back from London to DC today on a British Air 747. I tried to access the games and just got a screen saying, "Sorry, games are unavailable". I blame Slashdot. >:(
It's bullshit. That type of sentence is a DEAD GIVEAWAY that this guy is a paid shill for Microsoft. Period.
Yeah, because everyone who doesn't love absolutely everything about Linux is automatically a Microsoft shill.
If you want to integrate with Microsoft Exchange, you're an idiot in the first place.
Haha, he's an idiot for trying to integrate with a piece of software that a large portion of people in business use! What a fool!
There is nothing from Exchange either that most companies need or can't be found in other mail/groupware clients.
That may be true, but in the Real World you have to work with what's available. Try convincing the Powers That Be in a corporation that they need to scrap and replace Exchange with something else because you can't get Linux to work with it. See how many sentences you get in before they either start laughing or ask you to leave. Like it or not, Exchange is what people use. If Linux can't talk to it, well, that's a problem.
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But the difference between gold and fiat currency is that no one can print gold, debasing the economy as they go on.
The amount of currency in circulation has nothing to do with debasing the economy or inflation. Most "money" is in checking and savings accounts. Actual cash is a fairly small percentage of the total amount of money. And it's not the Fed that creates money, it's the banks. Here's an old Straght Dope article about it.
But in theory, a gold standard assigns an intrinsic value to money.
:-b
This is the part where I get confused about why some people think the gold standard is so great. Gold has no intrinsic value. For that matter nothing has any intrinsic value. Everything is only worth what people think it's worth. Once you get past that, then you might as well eliminate the middle man and forget about the gold.
Maybe this is why I didn't like economics in college.
However, why would the Constitution in Article 1, Section 10, prohibit the States from making anything but gold and silver legal tender, if Article I, Section 8 allows the Federal government to not only coin currency, but print currency?
Probably because they wanted to keep the States from being able to declare any old thing as currency. You don't want Virginia using tobacco leaves as money, or Florida to declare it will accept foreign banknotes, etc.
Averagado's number = 6.023 * 10 ^ 23 (exact).
Mass of one mole of carbon atoms (naturally occurring isotopic mix) = 16 grams (exact).
Yeah, but it's a pain in the ass to count them all. Especially when you get lost somewhere around 5.1789 X 10^21 and have to start all over again. >:(
In the mid 90's it was apparent the wheels were coming off of FASA.
:))
They shot themselves in the foot really. I watched it happening at GenCon. First there was Earthdawn. I can't speak for others, but I thought it was a pretty good game. The problem is that they never marketed it at all, and I thought they missed a big chance. It seemed like a lot of people were getting fed up with D&D at the time. The TSR castle was the biggest thing on the convention floor and it was nearly empty most of the time. If FASA had pushed Earthdawn, I think it could have been a big success. (Then again, I could be wrong.
Then came the whole card game thing. After Magic: The Gathering took off everyone and their brother decided they had to have a CCG to compete. After a while someone at FASA apparently noticed this too, so they dumped a lot of effort into the Shadowrun CCG. Only they were well behind the curve. The CCG market was flooded with crap and the fad was already slipping.
And THEN they decided to devote resources to Crimson Skies. I never played it, so I don't know if it was any good or not, but it seems to me that it was a bad time to be bringing out a whole new product while your cash cows are languishing.
So in the end I think they were brought down by bad decisions and bad management. Shame, really.
Why would one assume that sending radio signals between the stars makes any sense whatsoever for an advanced civilization
:)
Well, the assumption is that they are trying to communicate with us. Any communication is likely to be the "smarts" (them) talking to the "stupids" (us). If you are an advanced civilization trying to communicate with some relatively primitive civilization you want a way to do it that's easy for the rubes to do and will go a long way. Radio waves are dead easy to make and have a very long range; the Arecibo telescope could detect a duplicate of itself broadcasting anywhere in the galaxy. So radio is actually a pretty good bet.
Then you just have to pick the right frequency.
You might not like that kind of character but making such a huge change for, as far as I see it, no reason at all was a bad idea.
There was a very good reason for it. They had been spending hours beating it into the audience's heads that the Ring is the most evil thing ever created; it corrupts everyone it comes in contact with; and even the noblest and wisest are tempted by it. And then you have a character who says he wouldn't take it if he saw it lying by the side of the road? So much for the power of the Ring.
Gimli who is turned into little more than comic relief instead of a gruff dwarven warrior.
Fair enough, but I don't think it ruined the character.
Gandalf who is portrayed half the time as semi-senile with little clue what is going on (e.g. with Theoden he counsels against fighting Isengard contrary to Theoden's wishes etc.) whereas in the books he is the main mover of the effort against Sauron.
Um, what? In the movie he wants Theoden to take the fight to Saruman but Theoden decides to go to Helm's Deep instead.
Aragorn who seems to lose any sense of nobility and pines for Arwen. In the books he has a very humble but noble character who puts aside his love of Arwen to complete his task.
In the books the reason Aragorn completes his task is so Elrond will allow Arwen to marry him.
Plus the ones that never even make it in: Gildor, Farmer Maggot
Neither of whom really had anything to do with the main story and I didn't miss them. And thank God there was no Bombadil.
Jackson destroyed more than one character and severely warped others.
Which characters did he destroy? If you're talking about Faramir, then I hate to say it, but the Faramir in the movie is a better character than the one in the book.
One of the reasons why the Harry Potter films are so good
But they're not. They're OK. The LotR films are far and away better-made movies.
If you can't afford healthcare then you don't deserve it.
Yeah, maybe those poor people should die and decrease the surplus population!
The only way you can really do this is crippling tax rates on the super rich, which only work for so long and has a side benefit of killing the industrial drive that creates them.
So, between 1940 and 1963 when the top marginal tax rate was over 80% there was no industrial drive?
To be fair, it's fair to be pissed off when your publisher releases your product before it is finished...
To be fair, it's fair that your publisher realizes after years of waiting that you're never really going to "finish" your game and decide to release it in whatever state it's in to at least recoup some money off it.
Although I don't even know if that would have saved ET. It was awful. Unplayable. Abyssmal. An insult to Atari owners. It's not a basically lovable or even playable game with some flaws that got a bad rap. It's a game that's almost completely impossible to play, and was flawed from conception.
I didn't think it was that bad. I played it for quite a while on the hardest difficulty. So there. >:(
- Why couldn't a creator have created photons between the furthest objects and us?
No reason, but that would imply the creator was trying to trick us into thinking the universe is older than it is. Why would he lie?
- How do you KNOW the objects are 13 billion light years away? Have you measured it with a tape measure? We use methods to measure objects that distant which can't possibly be proved with our current state of technology. They might be right, they may not. We ASSUME they're right, because there's no evidence that they're wrong, but we can't know for certain. Closer objects (100's of light years) we can measure using parallax, which is reasonably proven, but further objects use different methods which are more dubious.
This is ridiculous. We don't KNOW the objects are 13 billion light years away. We don't KNOW anything for sure in science. It certainly SEEMS like they're 13 billion light years away, given our understanding of cosmological redshift. How do you know that parallax works? How do you know that the earth isn't stationary and the creator is moving the rest of the universe around in little circles?
BTW - there IS evidence [ldolphin.org] that the speed of light has decreased over the last few hundred years.
The only tiny problem with this is that you can't just change the speed of light without changing a lot of other things in the process. It's not an independent variable. If you changed the speed of light as much as they want to, there wouldn't be any planets, stars, or probably atoms.
Incidentally, Barry Setterfield is a young-earth creationist, and his ideas have even been rejected by the Answers in Genesis people, so you know they must be crazy.
One of the testable results of his proof was that the Higgs bosun had to have a certain mass for the universe to collapse in the specific way needed to create the Omega Point.
For the laymen, a Higgs bosun is a very very massive particle the Standard Model predicts should add to the mass of ships. They have never been detected by current instruments, causing many scientists to doubt they exist. Proponents point out that possibly they haven't been detected because so far all the instruments have been land-based.
Clearly more research is needed.
I can still see software companies trying to come up with ways to keep all 80 cores busy...
:)
I wrote an application for my job (can't tell you, would have to kill you, etc.) that will gladly use as many processors as you can throw at it. So bring it on, Intel.
I also hurt people who use 'i' for loops. Is it a 1 or i or l? My eyes are not that good anymore :(
I was with you up to this.
When creationists try to present creation theory in the classroom, alongside evolutionary viewpoints, they are viciously attacked.
That's because they don't have a scientific theory, and therefore shouldn't be presenting what they do have (which is an untestable hypothesis) in a science classroom.
"God did it" is not a theory.
why not let them stand side to side and see who wins? Let the almighty scientific method do it's work and bring forth the truth.
It did. The battle has already been fought over the last 100-150 years. Creationism lost. The debate is long over. It's only the creationists that haven't realized this yet.
You bastardized a classic SciFi/Western-in-space TV show,
I think what you meant was, "You took a shitty, campy 70s show and made it worth watching."
I might well have watched more than once
So you watched it once and yet you still feel well-informed enough to bitch about how much it sucks?
that spelled your eventual undoing.
The irony is that the new series has lasted longer than the original.
Whatever.
Indeed.
Dropped a ball and your team lost the game? Now they are all mad at you? That should be good motivation to not drop the ball next time, and should provide extra incentive to practice more.
No, it's motivation to hate whatever game it was and want to never play it again ever.
Get a goddamned grip. The US has more guns -- and more gun deaths -- than any other developed nation.
Correlation does not necessarily imply causation.
And I'm still trying to figure out how Bill Clinton firing 93 US attorneys is justified while Gonzalez (allegedly at the direction of Bush) firing 8 is somehow a "scandal."
Because firing them all when you take office is standard practice. Firing some of them in the middle of your term for political reasons (eg, they are in the process of investigating certain Republicans), is NOT standard practice and actually falls under a little something called "obstruction of justice".
Pardon me, but your hypocrisy is showing.
Your ignorance is.
I would like to add, instead of getting 100MPG, the same effect can be achieved if people would just live closer to work.
You're assuming that it's easy to do that. It's not. I work near a very affluent area and the cost of housing is prohibitive for me to live there.
Occam's razor doesn't say "the simplest answer is best", although it's often phrased that way. What it says is "do not multiply entities unnecessarily", or, "the explanation with the fewest assumptions is usually best". Thus, explanations that require assuming the existence of an undetectable supernatural entity are probably not very good. :)
Funnily enough I flew back from London to DC today on a British Air 747. I tried to access the games and just got a screen saying, "Sorry, games are unavailable". I blame Slashdot. >:(
It's bullshit. That type of sentence is a DEAD GIVEAWAY that this guy is a paid shill for Microsoft. Period.
Yeah, because everyone who doesn't love absolutely everything about Linux is automatically a Microsoft shill.
If you want to integrate with Microsoft Exchange, you're an idiot in the first place.
Haha, he's an idiot for trying to integrate with a piece of software that a large portion of people in business use! What a fool!
There is nothing from Exchange either that most companies need or can't be found in other mail/groupware clients.
That may be true, but in the Real World you have to work with what's available. Try convincing the Powers That Be in a corporation that they need to scrap and replace Exchange with something else because you can't get Linux to work with it. See how many sentences you get in before they either start laughing or ask you to leave. Like it or not, Exchange is what people use. If Linux can't talk to it, well, that's a problem.