I don't see how those 'less able to pay end up paying more', since playing a lottery is itself entirely voluntary. If someone who can't afford it is blowing cash on lottery tickets, in my opinion it's that person's gambling problem, not the state's regressive tax.
Unfortunately, chronological age is but a poor approximation of competence. People develop their faculties at very diverse rates. I (and probably a lot of other Slashdot readers) have the classic 'nerd' problem: ahead of the curve abstract thinking skill development, behind the curve in social skills; I have met people with the reverse as well, highly developed social skills with underdeveloped abstract thinking skills. This inconsistent development rate makes it hard to keep things consistent even within the scope of a single person's development. The result is simply to handwave away the problem of personal development by setting some chronological age by which it is assumed most people will reach competence.
<pedantic>That's actually magenta, the nearest primary (in RGB-space) to fuchsia.</pedantic> IIRC fuchsia has less blue in it, whereas puce has less red in it.
The one thing that really gripes me about inheritance taxes, though, is that in order for them to hold water, they necessitate a gift tax. It's there to close a loophole, to prevent Rich Dad from slipping a few million untaxed currency units to the kids sometime before he joins the choir invisible. IIRC the gift tax imposes inheritance-equivalent taxes on any transfer of assets exceeding $10,000 in the US.
I just about fell out of my chair laughing. Too bad I don't have mod points.:-)
There are a couple distinctions between this case and the famous one of old, though... the charge of worshipping false gods wouldn't fly in the US (despite continuing religious intolerance issues), and IIRC Socrates was trying to make Athens a better place at the expense of entrenched interests instead of defending them.
If I recall correctly, a battery actually behaves as a voltage source in series with a resistor; the higher the battery capacity, the smaller the internal resistance, and as a battery depletes, the internal resistance increases while the voltage remains constant. However, under a constant load resistance, this means that the voltage across the load will decrease since the internal resistance will take up more of the voltage drop.
Taking your motor example (and ignoring capacitance and inductance for simplicity), the circuit consists of the battery's voltage source, the battery's internal resistance, and the motor's resistance. The current flow is then I=V[battery]/(R[battery]+R[load]). If the battery resistance is a significant fraction of the load resistance, it both decreases the current through the system and decreases the voltage across the load.
On another note, this explains why paralleled batteries yield higher capacity: 1/R[combined] = sum[i](1/R[i]). For the typical case where all cells are equivalent, this means that R[combined]=R[cell]/numCells.
Kinda like "bzzzzzzt", I think. Then again, isn't that how any level charged bolt sounds?:-)
While we're on the subject of Blizz bugs, you know that lightning mastery boosts the damage of bone spells? My L80 sorc has a Slvl 5 wand of Bone Spear for dealing with those pesky immunes.:-)
Blizzard produces some damn good games, and they are willing to slip a release indefinitely to make the game playable out of the box, which is more than I can say for a lot of game companies. I bought licenses for D1, SC, BW, D2 and D2X, but almost never play on battle.net due to the combination of b.net lamers and local firewall problems. I just find it aggravating that they are so protective of their code; I wrote an aiscript.bin disassembler in perl a while back, but I never saw anything come of the AI script hacking projects. Amusingly, the Insane AI's fork off a thread that executes a "give myself 2000 free ore and gas" instruction at startup and every couple minutes thereafter.
Congratulations, you've reinvented the video projector! Please proceed to the USPTO to claim your prize.
A scanning projector with a reasonably powered laser sounds like it might be just the ticket for brighter displays. One of the major headaches with current projection video systems is that projected CRTs need to be driven so hard that they burn in very rapidly. The big difficulty may be moving the horizontal scan mirror quickly and accurately enough -- for 640x480 at 85Hz refresh, you're looking at 43 KHz horizontal sync!
MCGA was an odd one: 320x200 256 color (fitting nicely into 64000 bytes of video memory). The VGA is capable of emulating this mode, but can only use 64k of its 256k video memory for it; to use the full 256k, planar interleaving (aka Mode X) is required.
Yes and no. It's certainly theft of chattel, and therefore actionable as a civil matter.
IANAL, but IIRC it's actually trespass to chattel, not theft of; they're making inappropriate use of your resources rather than heisting them outright.
The reason that Amercians with genetically-based diseases survive is due to human ingenuity and compassion, not evolution.
As has been brought up elsewhere in this thread, Homo sapiens out-competed all other hominids on the playing field, and I suspect this is due in no small part to our ingenuity and compassion. However, when we Americans finally do die, 75% of the time it's either caused or largely promoted by a genetic problem. Much like the cave fish with vestigial eyes, though, if perfectly-functioning islets of Langerhans don't figure that prominently in one's relative reproductive success, glitches that prevent them from working properly will be propagated.
Here's a simple solution for the contentious $$ aspect -- require that royalties assessed under a RAND license must be expressed as a percentage of the sale price of the item using the licensed tech.
This reminds me of another software difficulty: software which is available for free (and often available in source form), with license terms that forbid distribution for fee or other consideration. After all, does "sale price" include the media price? Shipping and handling fees? What about aggregate media? That opens another can of worms.
A better solution would be that the patents would be licensed Royalty-Free for implementations covered by a license meeting the Open Source Definition requirements. This would allow flexibility for open-source implementors while preserving the proprietary products value chain. The only major complaint from patent holders I can think of with this approach is that open source may outcompete proprietary products, drying up the royalty stream.
MAC addresses don't stay the same across IP routing. When a gateway forwards a packet, the source MAC address is the address of the gateway's interface, and the destination address, if the destination host is not directly on that network, is the next gateway's MAC address.
War is the health of the state!
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 1
I find the concept of a multifront over-when-we-say-so-but-could-take-years-so-just-k eep-supporting-us war to be quite horrifying, myself. We should have limited, clearly defined objectives against limited, clearly defined enemies. "All terrorists and their friends" is not a clearly defined enemy, particularly in light of the ludicrous recent attempts to define terrorism.
War on terrorism, war on drugs, war on this year's insolent country on the other side of the world-- it keeps Joe Sixpack cheering for Uncle Sam, as Randolph Bourne explains in his 1918 essay, "War is the Health of the State". War whips the people into a patriotic frenzy, and encourages the mentality that those who do not unconditionally support the State must therefore be its enemies. In America, this effect, in combination with our existing conformist and anti-intellectual attitudes, means that anyone who wants to ask questions before we start shooting will likely be labeled un-American, if not traitorous.
I remember a little beastie like that. I think it was called Adidas. It was both a.com-file bacterium and a boot sector infector, and if memory serves, polymorphic to boot. Occasionally caused the computer to refuse to boot. A friend of mine was being driven bananas by the little beggar; I wrote a perl script to detect and remove the.com files as part of the cleanup process.
Unless a machine is can only be used for lethal or illegal purposes, for example a jet fighter or lockpicks...
Even jet fighters and lockpicks have non-harmful, non-lawbreaking uses. A jet fighter is a fast, maneuverable airplane-- it can be used for recon or fast (if ridiculously expensive) transportation. Lockpicks? Well, how many times have you lost a key, locked your keys in your car or home, etc.? A friend of a friend of mine has picked the lock to his own place more than once due to forgetting or misplacing the key (occasionally scaring the daylights out of his roommate in the process).
... no dice. The OS performs a challenge-response handshake with (what it expects to be) a trusted processor; unless the VM system has a trusted-host certificate and its corresponding private key, it can't pose as a trusted host.
If we limited our previous technology to only that which poses no threat of harm, we would still be sitting in cottages weaving clothes by hand.
This was precisely what Asimov illustrated in the difference between the Spacer and Settler cultures. The Spacers' entire lives were perfused with Three-Law robots, making them an excessively conservative, even stagnant, culture; the Settlers used no artificial sentience (but did use lesser AI technologies like fuzzy logic and expert systems), and outgrew and out-teched the Spacers by leaps and bounds because of their willingness and ability to take risks.
You think any of those guys want the feds investigating their privacy????
You think they care? They already have enough reporters digging around in their lives, and probably a "balance of unrevealed dirt" thing going with their fellow pols-- the 'Potomac two-step', as the President calls it in Clancy's Clear and Present Danger. They might have a problem with FISA's authority to issue warrants for covert fishing expeditions, or wayward cops' tendencies to plant evidence once they decide who they think is guilty, but... nah.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how those 'less able to pay end up paying more', since playing a lottery is itself entirely voluntary. If someone who can't afford it is blowing cash on lottery tickets, in my opinion it's that person's gambling problem, not the state's regressive tax.
Unfortunately I tend to go through a Terry Pratchett novel far too quickly for it to last through an entire vacation. :-)
This sort of thing already happened to Ultima Online... looks like the whole enchilada got cloned, client and server.
Unfortunately, chronological age is but a poor approximation of competence. People develop their faculties at very diverse rates. I (and probably a lot of other Slashdot readers) have the classic 'nerd' problem: ahead of the curve abstract thinking skill development, behind the curve in social skills; I have met people with the reverse as well, highly developed social skills with underdeveloped abstract thinking skills. This inconsistent development rate makes it hard to keep things consistent even within the scope of a single person's development. The result is simply to handwave away the problem of personal development by setting some chronological age by which it is assumed most people will reach competence.
<pedantic>That's actually magenta, the nearest primary (in RGB-space) to fuchsia.</pedantic> IIRC fuchsia has less blue in it, whereas puce has less red in it.
The one thing that really gripes me about inheritance taxes, though, is that in order for them to hold water, they necessitate a gift tax. It's there to close a loophole, to prevent Rich Dad from slipping a few million untaxed currency units to the kids sometime before he joins the choir invisible. IIRC the gift tax imposes inheritance-equivalent taxes on any transfer of assets exceeding $10,000 in the US.
I just about fell out of my chair laughing. Too bad I don't have mod points. :-)
There are a couple distinctions between this case and the famous one of old, though... the charge of worshipping false gods wouldn't fly in the US (despite continuing religious intolerance issues), and IIRC Socrates was trying to make Athens a better place at the expense of entrenched interests instead of defending them.
Ironic that you should say that, AC. I suggest you log in before you post next time.
If I recall correctly, a battery actually behaves as a voltage source in series with a resistor; the higher the battery capacity, the smaller the internal resistance, and as a battery depletes, the internal resistance increases while the voltage remains constant. However, under a constant load resistance, this means that the voltage across the load will decrease since the internal resistance will take up more of the voltage drop.
Taking your motor example (and ignoring capacitance and inductance for simplicity), the circuit consists of the battery's voltage source, the battery's internal resistance, and the motor's resistance. The current flow is then I=V[battery]/(R[battery]+R[load]). If the battery resistance is a significant fraction of the load resistance, it both decreases the current through the system and decreases the voltage across the load.
On another note, this explains why paralleled batteries yield higher capacity: 1/R[combined] = sum[i](1/R[i]). For the typical case where all cells are equivalent, this means that R[combined]=R[cell]/numCells.
Kinda like "bzzzzzzt", I think. Then again, isn't that how any level charged bolt sounds? :-)
While we're on the subject of Blizz bugs, you know that lightning mastery boosts the damage of bone spells? My L80 sorc has a Slvl 5 wand of Bone Spear for dealing with those pesky immunes. :-)
Blizzard produces some damn good games, and they are willing to slip a release indefinitely to make the game playable out of the box, which is more than I can say for a lot of game companies. I bought licenses for D1, SC, BW, D2 and D2X, but almost never play on battle.net due to the combination of b.net lamers and local firewall problems. I just find it aggravating that they are so protective of their code; I wrote an aiscript.bin disassembler in perl a while back, but I never saw anything come of the AI script hacking projects. Amusingly, the Insane AI's fork off a thread that executes a "give myself 2000 free ore and gas" instruction at startup and every couple minutes thereafter.
A scanning projector with a reasonably powered laser sounds like it might be just the ticket for brighter displays. One of the major headaches with current projection video systems is that projected CRTs need to be driven so hard that they burn in very rapidly. The big difficulty may be moving the horizontal scan mirror quickly and accurately enough -- for 640x480 at 85Hz refresh, you're looking at 43 KHz horizontal sync!
MCGA was an odd one: 320x200 256 color (fitting nicely into 64000 bytes of video memory). The VGA is capable of emulating this mode, but can only use 64k of its 256k video memory for it; to use the full 256k, planar interleaving (aka Mode X) is required.
IANAL, but IIRC it's actually trespass to chattel, not theft of; they're making inappropriate use of your resources rather than heisting them outright.
As has been brought up elsewhere in this thread, Homo sapiens out-competed all other hominids on the playing field, and I suspect this is due in no small part to our ingenuity and compassion. However, when we Americans finally do die, 75% of the time it's either caused or largely promoted by a genetic problem. Much like the cave fish with vestigial eyes, though, if perfectly-functioning islets of Langerhans don't figure that prominently in one's relative reproductive success, glitches that prevent them from working properly will be propagated.
This reminds me of another software difficulty: software which is available for free (and often available in source form), with license terms that forbid distribution for fee or other consideration. After all, does "sale price" include the media price? Shipping and handling fees? What about aggregate media? That opens another can of worms.
A better solution would be that the patents would be licensed Royalty-Free for implementations covered by a license meeting the Open Source Definition requirements. This would allow flexibility for open-source implementors while preserving the proprietary products value chain. The only major complaint from patent holders I can think of with this approach is that open source may outcompete proprietary products, drying up the royalty stream.
Or, as the California and Colorado state laws require, the Subject header begins with "ADV:", although this is incompatible with some other spam laws.
I still think per-address-pair hash cash is a better solution; see the LAPO hash-cash demo applet for a simple hash cash generator implementation.
MAC addresses don't stay the same across IP routing. When a gateway forwards a packet, the source MAC address is the address of the gateway's interface, and the destination address, if the destination host is not directly on that network, is the next gateway's MAC address.
War on terrorism, war on drugs, war on this year's insolent country on the other side of the world-- it keeps Joe Sixpack cheering for Uncle Sam, as Randolph Bourne explains in his 1918 essay, "War is the Health of the State". War whips the people into a patriotic frenzy, and encourages the mentality that those who do not unconditionally support the State must therefore be its enemies. In America, this effect, in combination with our existing conformist and anti-intellectual attitudes, means that anyone who wants to ask questions before we start shooting will likely be labeled un-American, if not traitorous.
Then again, apparently there's a company out there that basically claims to have broken Shannon's limit. Sounds about as likely as over-unity efficiency to me, but if they really pulled it off, they'll shake things up. Here's the Slashdot meta-story.
I remember a little beastie like that. I think it was called Adidas. It was both a .com-file bacterium and a boot sector infector, and if memory serves, polymorphic to boot. Occasionally caused the computer to refuse to boot. A friend of mine was being driven bananas by the little beggar; I wrote a perl script to detect and remove the .com files as part of the cleanup process.
Even jet fighters and lockpicks have non-harmful, non-lawbreaking uses. A jet fighter is a fast, maneuverable airplane-- it can be used for recon or fast (if ridiculously expensive) transportation. Lockpicks? Well, how many times have you lost a key, locked your keys in your car or home, etc.? A friend of a friend of mine has picked the lock to his own place more than once due to forgetting or misplacing the key (occasionally scaring the daylights out of his roommate in the process).
... no dice. The OS performs a challenge-response handshake with (what it expects to be) a trusted processor; unless the VM system has a trusted-host certificate and its corresponding private key, it can't pose as a trusted host.
This was precisely what Asimov illustrated in the difference between the Spacer and Settler cultures. The Spacers' entire lives were perfused with Three-Law robots, making them an excessively conservative, even stagnant, culture; the Settlers used no artificial sentience (but did use lesser AI technologies like fuzzy logic and expert systems), and outgrew and out-teched the Spacers by leaps and bounds because of their willingness and ability to take risks.
You think they care? They already have enough reporters digging around in their lives, and probably a "balance of unrevealed dirt" thing going with their fellow pols-- the 'Potomac two-step', as the President calls it in Clancy's Clear and Present Danger. They might have a problem with FISA's authority to issue warrants for covert fishing expeditions, or wayward cops' tendencies to plant evidence once they decide who they think is guilty, but ... nah.