Even then, this has no practical consequence whatsoever. If you want to compute the circumference of the galaxy, to accuracy such that your answer is off by less than a nanometer, you still need only ~100 digits of pi.
So yes, in principle you could need more than 10 digits, allthough in practice it's pretty unlikely (it wouldn't matter unless you knew the -radius- with that high precision).
But raising the bar from 5 trillion digits, to 10 trillion ?
Irrelevant in the real world. (possibly there's math-applications, I suppose)
Indeed. The tigther the "official" rules for behaviour, the more hypocrisy.
Catholic priests aren't actually all celibate. Muslims don't all avoid alcohol. Jews don't all avoid pizza. Mormons don't all stick to ths missionary position, and wait until marriage with sex.
They just lie about it. Because the official rules don't allow them to openly admit to being human, like the rest of us.
To add insult to injury, they then go on to claim they're morally superior. Yet it's pretty hard to see how lying makes you superior to being truthful.
There is, infact, a simple, straightforward way of getting all the advantages of electronic voting, while preserving the advantages of paper-voting.
Have the voting-machine print your vote as the last step, then deposit this printed vote in a ballot-box the old-fashioned way.
To verify the vote, simply count the paper-ballots the old-fashioned way, and compare the result with the results from the electronic voting.
It isn't really needed to count all the votes: picking a small fraction of voting-places randomly and checking those, has a high probability of detecting systematic attempts at cheating nationwide.
The GPS may reduce (not prevent, they're not infallible) something which is *already* low enough risk to be essentially a non-issue.
It's not cost-effective. There's on the order of half a million kids in kindergarten in Sweden, Buying a tracker-thingy may only cost $100, but that still adds up to $50 million (plus whatever the data-plan for these cost, they must have some kind of connectivity for transmitting the position)
$50 million to save on the order of 0.2 kids a year, is $250 million pro saved life.
Even if you restrict yourself to inside-sweden, there's a lot of things you can do that has a lot larger benefit, for the same cost.
Working (as in safe, efficient, reliable and cost-effective) beaming-technology is one piece of that puzzle, but not the most difficult one to overcome.
solar in space can collect 2-3 times the energy for the same size and quality cells. (no clouds, 24 hour illumination, no atmosphere) minus the unavoidable transmission-losses, you may still come out ahead of earth-based solar.
However, being twice as efficient helps not at all, when you are also a thousand times as expensive. Launch-cost, assembly-cost and maintenance cost, is the killer. We'd need a space-elevator or in-space-manufacturing to significantly change this.
Yeah, and there's absolutely no reason a "card-reader which harvests the data" should be possible to construct - and indeed with a well-engineered chip-card, it isn't.
A magnetic stripe can obviously be read and duplicated. But a chip-card can use challenge-response. That is, to verify the card the protocol between ATM and card runs something like this:
ATM: What's your public key ? Card: dead0011beef ATM: Prove it ? Card: Here's Trents signature that attest it. ATM: "Please sign 17ae4082b1f" Card: return sign(my_private_key 17ae4082b1f) ATM: verify(card_public_key, signature received in last step)
The thing is, there doesn't need to be any easy way of reading out the private key of the card. What's needed is to use one of the many protocols that lets the card prove that it *knows* the private_key, without actually revealing that key.
And this ain't science fiction - it's the way ATMs and retail-terminals *alreay* operates where I live. (though they're generally still *also* able to read magnetic stripes, for backwards compatibility, but they refuse to do so if your card is a chip-card. (the cards also tends to have chip -and- magnetic - the latter is only for use abroad on terminals unequipped for chips - and yes, that adds to risk!)
You contradict yourself: "They hold no value, yet they hold value IF".
You're confused. Like *all* value, the value is the product of probability and payout. A lottery-ticket that has 1% chance of paying $100 has a fair value of $1.
And a IOU from someone that is 90% likely to actually pay you $100 has a fair value of $90. (offcourse it's tricky to fairly estimate the chance of fulfillment, but that's no excuse for setting the probability to zero)
Indeed. With a large parliament and proportional representation, *very* small parties get represented. For example, the German "Bundestag" has 621 members, which means with purely proportional representation you would get your first member with around 0.16% of the votes.
In practice you'd be -over- represented at that, because the voice of a single person, will be more often and more clearly heard than the voice of a single member of a 100-person strong political group. In essence, you're able to make a lot of noise - entirely unproportional to the actual influence you hold in votes and representatives.
There's a 4% cut-off in norway for proportional representation too. You can get represented being smaller, by winning a seat directly (in practice by having being strong in some geographic region), but there's also compensating seats handed out to ensure near-proportional representation. However these have a cut-off point of 4%, parties smaller than that doesn't get them, even if they're under-represented.
Yeah. But it's slightly different. Because they've heard it before, the claims that it's safe, and then they've lived with a decade of restrictions on picking berries or eating certain meat. And that's people 2000km away from the accident.
Yes, this time it's different. I actually *do* believe that current nuclear is safe enough to be recommendable. But I can understand those who're not feeling calm about it. (I live in Norway, it's a *long* way from Chernobyl, nevertheless the consequences here where noticeable for a decade)
Not all renewables suck.
We get around 85% of our electricity from hydroelectric dams with large magazines in the high mountains.
Throttlable from full production to 20% production in a few minutes, and with storage-capacity measured in *months*.
Sometimes the sum is larger than the parts: Use variable sources, such as sun and wind for what they can provide, fill in the voids with those sources that are on-demand. Yeah, this means 1Mwh of when-you-want-it hydroelectric power is worth more than 1Mwh of when-the-sun-shines solar power.
Slashdot Mirror
Even then, this has no practical consequence whatsoever. If you want to compute the circumference of the galaxy, to accuracy such that your answer is off by less than a nanometer, you still need only ~100 digits of pi.
So yes, in principle you could need more than 10 digits, allthough in practice it's pretty unlikely (it wouldn't matter unless you knew the -radius- with that high precision).
But raising the bar from 5 trillion digits, to 10 trillion ?
Irrelevant in the real world. (possibly there's math-applications, I suppose)
Indeed. The tigther the "official" rules for behaviour, the more hypocrisy.
Catholic priests aren't actually all celibate. Muslims don't all avoid alcohol. Jews don't all avoid pizza. Mormons don't all stick to ths missionary position, and wait until marriage with sex.
They just lie about it. Because the official rules don't allow them to openly admit to being human, like the rest of us.
To add insult to injury, they then go on to claim they're morally superior. Yet it's pretty hard to see how lying makes you superior to being truthful.
Most people would be *extatic* to learn that walking around somewhere now burns more calories than it used to.
Weight-loss is a billion-dollar-industry, people pay trough the nose for the priviledge of having calories burnt.
There is, infact, a simple, straightforward way of getting all the advantages of electronic voting, while preserving the advantages of paper-voting.
Have the voting-machine print your vote as the last step, then deposit this printed vote in a ballot-box the old-fashioned way.
To verify the vote, simply count the paper-ballots the old-fashioned way, and compare the result with the results from the electronic voting.
It isn't really needed to count all the votes: picking a small fraction of voting-places randomly and checking those, has a high probability of detecting systematic attempts at cheating nationwide.
The GPS may reduce (not prevent, they're not infallible) something which is *already* low enough risk to be essentially a non-issue.
It's not cost-effective. There's on the order of half a million kids in kindergarten in Sweden, Buying a tracker-thingy may only cost $100, but that still adds up to $50 million (plus whatever the data-plan for these cost, they must have some kind of connectivity for transmitting the position)
$50 million to save on the order of 0.2 kids a year, is $250 million pro saved life.
Even if you restrict yourself to inside-sweden, there's a lot of things you can do that has a lot larger benefit, for the same cost.
Journalists don't know statistics, news at 11.
I strongly suspect that the *actual* result was that 33% of all kids gets their first mobile phone before they turn 10.
Which isn't the same thing as saying that 33% of all kids under 10 have a phone.
But that's journalism to you.
Working (as in safe, efficient, reliable and cost-effective) beaming-technology is one piece of that puzzle, but not the most difficult one to overcome.
solar in space can collect 2-3 times the energy for the same size and quality cells. (no clouds, 24 hour illumination, no atmosphere) minus the unavoidable transmission-losses, you may still come out ahead of earth-based solar.
However, being twice as efficient helps not at all, when you are also a thousand times as expensive. Launch-cost, assembly-cost and maintenance cost, is the killer. We'd need a space-elevator or in-space-manufacturing to significantly change this.
Yeah, and there's absolutely no reason a "card-reader which harvests the data" should be possible to construct - and indeed with a well-engineered chip-card, it isn't.
A magnetic stripe can obviously be read and duplicated. But a chip-card can use challenge-response. That is, to verify the card the protocol between ATM and card runs something like this:
ATM: What's your public key ?
Card: dead0011beef
ATM: Prove it ?
Card: Here's Trents signature that attest it.
ATM: "Please sign 17ae4082b1f"
Card: return sign(my_private_key 17ae4082b1f)
ATM: verify(card_public_key, signature received in last step)
The thing is, there doesn't need to be any easy way of reading out the private key of the card. What's needed is to use one of the many protocols that lets the card prove that it *knows* the private_key, without actually revealing that key.
And this ain't science fiction - it's the way ATMs and retail-terminals *alreay* operates where I live. (though they're generally still *also* able to read magnetic stripes, for backwards compatibility, but they refuse to do so if your card is a chip-card. (the cards also tends to have chip -and- magnetic - the latter is only for use abroad on terminals unequipped for chips - and yes, that adds to risk!)
You contradict yourself: "They hold no value, yet they hold value IF".
You're confused. Like *all* value, the value is the product of probability and payout. A lottery-ticket that has 1% chance of paying $100 has a fair value of $1.
And a IOU from someone that is 90% likely to actually pay you $100 has a fair value of $90. (offcourse it's tricky to fairly estimate the chance of fulfillment, but that's no excuse for setting the probability to zero)
Indeed. With a large parliament and proportional representation, *very* small parties get represented. For example, the German "Bundestag" has 621 members, which means with purely proportional representation you would get your first member with around 0.16% of the votes.
In practice you'd be -over- represented at that, because the voice of a single person, will be more often and more clearly heard than the voice of a single member of a 100-person strong political group. In essence, you're able to make a lot of noise - entirely unproportional to the actual influence you hold in votes and representatives.
There's a 4% cut-off in norway for proportional representation too. You can get represented being smaller, by winning a seat directly (in practice by having being strong in some geographic region), but there's also compensating seats handed out to ensure near-proportional representation. However these have a cut-off point of 4%, parties smaller than that doesn't get them, even if they're under-represented.
Yeah. But it's slightly different. Because they've heard it before, the claims that it's safe, and then they've lived with a decade of restrictions on picking berries or eating certain meat. And that's people 2000km away from the accident.
Yes, this time it's different. I actually *do* believe that current nuclear is safe enough to be recommendable. But I can understand those who're not feeling calm about it. (I live in Norway, it's a *long* way from Chernobyl, nevertheless the consequences here where noticeable for a decade)
Indeed.
Who would -not- gamble if winning meant netting $10 million whereas "losing" meant coming out with zero ?
Not all renewables suck. We get around 85% of our electricity from hydroelectric dams with large magazines in the high mountains. Throttlable from full production to 20% production in a few minutes, and with storage-capacity measured in *months*. Sometimes the sum is larger than the parts: Use variable sources, such as sun and wind for what they can provide, fill in the voids with those sources that are on-demand. Yeah, this means 1Mwh of when-you-want-it hydroelectric power is worth more than 1Mwh of when-the-sun-shines solar power.