The existence of a creator could be proven with ease. Simply shout out 'Hey, God! Come down here for a moment, I've a few questions.' If God responds, that proves he exists. The problem is that a lack of response does not disprove his existence: it's quite possible God is simply ignoring you for reasons of his own. Theologians have done plenty of speculating on why that might be.
US politics is like professional wrestling. The characters are larger than life, everyone knows their role, and they put on a great show. We all know most of it is probably rigged behind the scenes, and most of what we see is just a big production for the public, but it doesn't matter - it's still entertaining.
Because there is great public support for teaching the bible in some states, it's easy for schools to violate the constitution and get away with it simply because no official dares to take action against them and face a career-killing backlash. In your case, the school probably just declared it a 'bible as literature' course and denied it was in any way religious. A paper-thin excuse, but with sufficient public support that is all it needs.
"Its also worth noting that unlike the US, religion isn't banned from schools"
The implications of that in the US vary between schools. While it's true that the school isn't permitted to officially endorse or promote any religion, there is often a great deal of popular pressure for them to do so which lets them do so in a more informal manner and sometimes just outright flout the law.
Note that most US schools start the day by encouraging students to pledge their allegiance to God and country. This is legal, because it isn't actually mandatory - but if you don't pledge, then the other students will declare you unpatriotic and stuff your head down the toilet in accordance with the great American tradition.
Clothing is an important social signal. It serves to indicate class and social groupings.
Even if everyone had a minaturised terahertz-wave scanner implanted in their eye, clothing would still be worn for that purpose. Besides, it provides protection from sun overexposure and low temperature. It's also very handy for obscuring the physical signs of sexual arousal, which would otherwise lead to some serious social awkwardness. Especially for teenage males, who tend to have it going up and down like a yo-yo while hormones run riot.
How about a big net? Couple of flagpoles, fine mesh between them. Drone cameras move fast - it'd be impossible to avoid if you don't know it's there, and very hard even if you do.
I think the big mistake Orwell made in writing 1984 was to neglect the private sector. He imagined the dangers of a government spying on citizens to exercise and protect their power, but had no idea of the lengths to which businesses would spy on people in order to secure wealth - as well as power.
Assange is wanted for questioning in regards to a sexual assault investigation that was previously closed, the decision having been reached by police that there was no grounds for prosecution. An investigation that was reopened in November 2010 - only days after Wikileaks put out the diplomatic cables, the motherlode of leaks.
The timing of that is rather suspicious. It's quite plausible that some political pressure was applied by the US which lead to a re-opening of a previously closed case. One thing all these leaks should teach us is that sometimes, there really is a shadowy party behind the scenes manipulating events. Not all conspiracy theories are wrong. Some of the schemes revealed would have done a Bond villain proud, and seemed like the ramblings of the paranoid before supporting documents were revealed - calling in a political favor to get the case reopened is quite a minor act in comparison.
Scientists like to be topical, and even when they aren't it's easy for their findings to be given a political spin or viewed through a political lens.
I don't know how respectable this research is, because I don't care enough to actually read it, and even if I did I am not remotely qualified to judge something in this field. I do know that even if the research is perfectly valid and the authors don't care about politics at all, it'll still aquire a political spin in the process of being turned into popular reporting. The left will go for the 'earth is delicate than we thought, so we must protect it' angle. The right will go for the 'Wiping out a species is really hard, and those pigeons were just a special case, so we can stop protecting the desert tortoise and give Bundy back his grazing land' angle.
The ASICs for scrypt are a recent introduction. The forums are full of people predicting that this will be the end of GPU mining litecoin now - the first generation may be slow, but the next is sure to leave GPUs in the dust as previously happened for bitcoin.
I'm not really a miner. I dabble, as a little hobby, but my rig consists of one low-end scrypt miner (The cheapest you can get) and two of the cheapest bitcoin ASICs you can get. I'm not expecting to many any profit on this, it's purely to play with the tech.
You can get ASICs for scrypt now. They don't perform very fast (My five-ASIC Gridseed miner is almost exactly as fast as my GPU), but they are very power-efficient.
Gold has some intrinsic value: You can do useful things with it. It's very useful in electronics for a start - it doesn't have the best conductivity, but gold contacts never corrode. A very desireable property.
The intrinsic value is a lot less than the actual financial cost though, because it is desired primarily as a status symbol. People want it because it is rare and expensive, so it serves as a way to flaunt wealth.
There's a market system in play. The available fees are statistically divided among miners according to their processing power. If mining isnt economical, people stop doing it - which means the fees are divided among those left, making it more profitable. If more people start mining there is a smaller slice of the pie for each, and the reward for each falls. If all goes as planned, it'll settle into an equilibrium where the money to be made from transaction fees is just above the cost of powering and housing that hardware.
There is some concern that the equilibrium point may not have enough mining-power to maintain the network security, but that can be addressed by raising transaction fees. There's no actual organisation in charge of bitcoin that can make that decree, but there is the group maintaining the reference implimentation, bitcoind - the vast majority of bitcoin users use that, so they have de facto control - if they change the detault to pay more fees, most users will go along, except those who are very patient and penny-pinching.
Reminds me of the old Carrier Command game. Due to rushed development, the AI code was never fully finished - it was thick as two short planks. To compensate for these weaknesses, it was given certain advantages that made the game very unfair.
eg, the AI was never given pathfinding code - so it couldn't navigate around an island. The solution was to just let it drive over land too - thus allowing it to take a straight line between any two points. The manual lampshaded this by declaring it was a hover-carrier. Worse, you are dependant upon a network of resource production and fuel supply. The AI has one of these too, but if you act strategically to sever it from the network, nothing happens: It simply has infinite everything. The AI resource management network is nothing but a meaningless display.
If you desire an all-bitcoin environment, then this is a required precursor. If a business is accepting bitcoins, and they in turn do business with another that accepts bitcoins, then someone there will soon realise that skipping the dollar-conversion in the middle saves a lot of commission costs.
Bitcoin does have a few advantages aside from those sought by crypto-anarchist idealists. For one, it's conveniently international - even Paypal isn't active in all countries. It means you can offer a service globally without having to worry about handling a hundred different currencies and ten different payment services.
You can eliminate wastewater disposal with a bit of replumbing - if you need to, get a septic tank. But how can you stop it from raining?
Somewere I'm sure you can find a place where not only does the water company own the rain that falls on your property, but you've not choice but to pay them to take it away and pay them again to get it back.
I work with a school. I occasionally give students the address of my server, as I've a couple of utilities up there I made for use in IT classes (A public-domain* music collection, a utility to make rollover graphics). I can't risk students finding out my home address! I'd get a brick through my window for all the games sites I blocked.
In theory you have the option of just not using water. Collect rain or buy bottled - you might need to get a chemical toilet or dig a hole in the garden, but someone might go to such lengths in protest. I didn't even get that: The water company is also the drainage company, and charge for the service of removing the water that falls on any land you own. Unless you can somehow stop it from raining, you have to pay.
I think the tea party borrowed that ideal from Objectivism. The tendency to idealise the free market as the solution to all problems, while being blind to the flaws of a free market approach.
In the case of internet, there's more of an issue with first-to-enter-wins. Whoever cables up an area first must make a huge investment, but they also get 100% of the market - enough to recoup their investment and then make a tidy profit. Whoever follows has to spend just as much, but by that point all of their potential customers have already signed up with the first entry - and it's very difficult to convince people to switch provider, as it does bring a lot of hassle. That means that there is little hope of turning a profit by building a network in an area where another is already operating, and so many areas have only one broadband ISP available. It's essentially a natural monopoly.
There's some prospect of things like wimax fixing that by greatly lowering the cost of network consturction, but the technology is just at a fundamental disadvantage there. A wireless connection can never be as fast or as reliable as a wired one, and will always have to deal with contention. It's inherent in the technology.
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There are a few schools that do in the UK, but very few, and they all exist to serve specific religious communities.
The existence of a creator could be proven with ease. Simply shout out 'Hey, God! Come down here for a moment, I've a few questions.' If God responds, that proves he exists. The problem is that a lack of response does not disprove his existence: it's quite possible God is simply ignoring you for reasons of his own. Theologians have done plenty of speculating on why that might be.
US politics is like professional wrestling. The characters are larger than life, everyone knows their role, and they put on a great show. We all know most of it is probably rigged behind the scenes, and most of what we see is just a big production for the public, but it doesn't matter - it's still entertaining.
Because there is great public support for teaching the bible in some states, it's easy for schools to violate the constitution and get away with it simply because no official dares to take action against them and face a career-killing backlash. In your case, the school probably just declared it a 'bible as literature' course and denied it was in any way religious. A paper-thin excuse, but with sufficient public support that is all it needs.
"Its also worth noting that unlike the US, religion isn't banned from schools"
The implications of that in the US vary between schools. While it's true that the school isn't permitted to officially endorse or promote any religion, there is often a great deal of popular pressure for them to do so which lets them do so in a more informal manner and sometimes just outright flout the law.
Note that most US schools start the day by encouraging students to pledge their allegiance to God and country. This is legal, because it isn't actually mandatory - but if you don't pledge, then the other students will declare you unpatriotic and stuff your head down the toilet in accordance with the great American tradition.
Why would anyone want to waste processing power simulating the physical limitations of their eyes?
You may as well render lens flare.
Clothing is an important social signal. It serves to indicate class and social groupings.
Even if everyone had a minaturised terahertz-wave scanner implanted in their eye, clothing would still be worn for that purpose. Besides, it provides protection from sun overexposure and low temperature. It's also very handy for obscuring the physical signs of sexual arousal, which would otherwise lead to some serious social awkwardness. Especially for teenage males, who tend to have it going up and down like a yo-yo while hormones run riot.
It has them until a country with armed forces says otherwise.
How about a big net?
Couple of flagpoles, fine mesh between them. Drone cameras move fast - it'd be impossible to avoid if you don't know it's there, and very hard even if you do.
I think the big mistake Orwell made in writing 1984 was to neglect the private sector. He imagined the dangers of a government spying on citizens to exercise and protect their power, but had no idea of the lengths to which businesses would spy on people in order to secure wealth - as well as power.
Assange is wanted for questioning in regards to a sexual assault investigation that was previously closed, the decision having been reached by police that there was no grounds for prosecution. An investigation that was reopened in November 2010 - only days after Wikileaks put out the diplomatic cables, the motherlode of leaks.
The timing of that is rather suspicious. It's quite plausible that some political pressure was applied by the US which lead to a re-opening of a previously closed case. One thing all these leaks should teach us is that sometimes, there really is a shadowy party behind the scenes manipulating events. Not all conspiracy theories are wrong. Some of the schemes revealed would have done a Bond villain proud, and seemed like the ramblings of the paranoid before supporting documents were revealed - calling in a political favor to get the case reopened is quite a minor act in comparison.
Scientists like to be topical, and even when they aren't it's easy for their findings to be given a political spin or viewed through a political lens.
I don't know how respectable this research is, because I don't care enough to actually read it, and even if I did I am not remotely qualified to judge something in this field. I do know that even if the research is perfectly valid and the authors don't care about politics at all, it'll still aquire a political spin in the process of being turned into popular reporting. The left will go for the 'earth is delicate than we thought, so we must protect it' angle. The right will go for the 'Wiping out a species is really hard, and those pigeons were just a special case, so we can stop protecting the desert tortoise and give Bundy back his grazing land' angle.
No, it still concludes human were to blame. Just that it wasn't that impressive an achievement after all.
The ASICs for scrypt are a recent introduction. The forums are full of people predicting that this will be the end of GPU mining litecoin now - the first generation may be slow, but the next is sure to leave GPUs in the dust as previously happened for bitcoin.
I'm not really a miner. I dabble, as a little hobby, but my rig consists of one low-end scrypt miner (The cheapest you can get) and two of the cheapest bitcoin ASICs you can get. I'm not expecting to many any profit on this, it's purely to play with the tech.
You can get ASICs for scrypt now. They don't perform very fast (My five-ASIC Gridseed miner is almost exactly as fast as my GPU), but they are very power-efficient.
" We are betting off investing in creating more moral men and woman and a society that sustains them"
Been trying that for millenia. Success is limited.
Gold has some intrinsic value: You can do useful things with it. It's very useful in electronics for a start - it doesn't have the best conductivity, but gold contacts never corrode. A very desireable property.
The intrinsic value is a lot less than the actual financial cost though, because it is desired primarily as a status symbol. People want it because it is rare and expensive, so it serves as a way to flaunt wealth.
"am still looking for a good case where it accounts for a significant proportion of someone's business"
Silk Road? :>
There's a market system in play. The available fees are statistically divided among miners according to their processing power. If mining isnt economical, people stop doing it - which means the fees are divided among those left, making it more profitable. If more people start mining there is a smaller slice of the pie for each, and the reward for each falls. If all goes as planned, it'll settle into an equilibrium where the money to be made from transaction fees is just above the cost of powering and housing that hardware.
There is some concern that the equilibrium point may not have enough mining-power to maintain the network security, but that can be addressed by raising transaction fees. There's no actual organisation in charge of bitcoin that can make that decree, but there is the group maintaining the reference implimentation, bitcoind - the vast majority of bitcoin users use that, so they have de facto control - if they change the detault to pay more fees, most users will go along, except those who are very patient and penny-pinching.
Reminds me of the old Carrier Command game. Due to rushed development, the AI code was never fully finished - it was thick as two short planks. To compensate for these weaknesses, it was given certain advantages that made the game very unfair.
eg, the AI was never given pathfinding code - so it couldn't navigate around an island. The solution was to just let it drive over land too - thus allowing it to take a straight line between any two points. The manual lampshaded this by declaring it was a hover-carrier. Worse, you are dependant upon a network of resource production and fuel supply. The AI has one of these too, but if you act strategically to sever it from the network, nothing happens: It simply has infinite everything. The AI resource management network is nothing but a meaningless display.
If you desire an all-bitcoin environment, then this is a required precursor. If a business is accepting bitcoins, and they in turn do business with another that accepts bitcoins, then someone there will soon realise that skipping the dollar-conversion in the middle saves a lot of commission costs.
Bitcoin does have a few advantages aside from those sought by crypto-anarchist idealists. For one, it's conveniently international - even Paypal isn't active in all countries. It means you can offer a service globally without having to worry about handling a hundred different currencies and ten different payment services.
You can eliminate wastewater disposal with a bit of replumbing - if you need to, get a septic tank. But how can you stop it from raining?
Somewere I'm sure you can find a place where not only does the water company own the rain that falls on your property, but you've not choice but to pay them to take it away and pay them again to get it back.
I'm in the UK, and I use Domains by Proxy.
I work with a school. I occasionally give students the address of my server, as I've a couple of utilities up there I made for use in IT classes (A public-domain* music collection, a utility to make rollover graphics). I can't risk students finding out my home address! I'd get a brick through my window for all the games sites I blocked.
*Only in Europe. Sorry yanks.
In theory you have the option of just not using water. Collect rain or buy bottled - you might need to get a chemical toilet or dig a hole in the garden, but someone might go to such lengths in protest. I didn't even get that: The water company is also the drainage company, and charge for the service of removing the water that falls on any land you own. Unless you can somehow stop it from raining, you have to pay.
I think the tea party borrowed that ideal from Objectivism. The tendency to idealise the free market as the solution to all problems, while being blind to the flaws of a free market approach.
In the case of internet, there's more of an issue with first-to-enter-wins. Whoever cables up an area first must make a huge investment, but they also get 100% of the market - enough to recoup their investment and then make a tidy profit. Whoever follows has to spend just as much, but by that point all of their potential customers have already signed up with the first entry - and it's very difficult to convince people to switch provider, as it does bring a lot of hassle. That means that there is little hope of turning a profit by building a network in an area where another is already operating, and so many areas have only one broadband ISP available. It's essentially a natural monopoly.
There's some prospect of things like wimax fixing that by greatly lowering the cost of network consturction, but the technology is just at a fundamental disadvantage there. A wireless connection can never be as fast or as reliable as a wired one, and will always have to deal with contention. It's inherent in the technology.