I'm wondering what's going to happen when the US and the rest of the world loses collective interest in the middle east?
Not gonna happen. Less than half of the oil the US imports is used as fuel in the first place. Even without being used as fuel, petroleum is still in massive demand as a chemical feedstock.
Not to mention something under a third of the US's oil imports come from the Middle East in the first place - the bulk comes from Canada, Central, and South America.
Far more interesting to me than the inevitable collapse of the Middle East is the inevitable collapse of the oil fueled Scandinavian social democracies
> I don't think you grasp why so much weight is in the casing... which is to produce shrapnel.
First, what in the world would make you think I don't know why I build my casings the way I do?
I don't give a rats ass about why you build your casings the way do you. Your casings aren't the topic of discussion here. Military weapons are the topic of discussion.
With a low explosive such as black powder, flash, etc casing thickness is all about the pressure developed.
Nobody with an IQ over the freezing point of water is talking about low explosives, because the odds that someone is using such explosives are roughly nil.
A casing that's TOO strong will waste weight, peel open instead of fracturing, and some point not rupture at all.
Again, nobody with an IQ above the freezing point of water (a group which excludes you) is discussing a casing that's "too strong".
Next time you think about correcting you might first ask yourself "do I have a clue what I'm talking about?"
I did, and the answer is, I do.
When you're considering educating someone about what they do
You have provided absolutely zero evidence that you've done such things. You've provided abundant evidence you have zero clue - and even more evidence that you're an ignorant shithead trying to impress someone who does know. You've failed.
I'd say that a 6kg weapon using a simple explosive like black powder would be a dangerous item to have laying around the house, but not particularly effective as a military weapon. (Remember most of the weight is the casing, it would be less than a kg of explosive composition.).
I don't think you grasp why so much weight is in the casing... which is to produce shrapnel. The low percentage of explosive filler isn't a bug, it's a feature - because a higher percentage of explosive means a lower weight of fragments. Its quite effective as an anti-personnel weapon. It also works very well at making them keep their head down, stay under cover, never gather in large groups, etc... etc... (AKA terror and increasing friction.)
Modern military explosives are significantly more powerful, and much harder to make, if the people launching these have access to a good supply of military explosives.
An irrelevant non-sequitur. You don't need modern explosive to cause significant casualties and damage.
It's a pointless distinction... Because everyone but Bitcoin zealots know that Bitcoin isn't actually money. There's no inherent store of value, such as being backed by gold, nor is it backed by the economy of a nation. It's sole value lies in the Faith of the Believers - other than that, it's not conceptually really any different from an arcade or casino token.
The submitter uses that term for one reason only; to inflate Bitcoin into something it's patently not. It's an appeal to emotion, not academic or economic usage.
In the US, real money is defined as gold or silver, as is similar in the Constitutions of several states and the Bretton Woods Agreement.
[[Citation Needed]] - and no weasel words or using gold bugs, bitcoin zealots, or other nut jobs as references either.
Historians, economists, and traders use the term 'fiat' all the time, but this may be the first time any of them were accused of being 'leet' rather than 'nerds'.
That's because you're confusing academic and professional usage (the 'nerds') with colloquial usage specifically intended as denigration.
Why do you have a burr up your ass about a particular economic term?
Because it's being misused to imply that Bitcoin is something it isn't.
Good grief, why is that even a hard question? The answer is because it's not well explored, we as a civilization have always explored, and in the end have always ended up benefitting by doing so.
We as a civilization have only explored when there was economic (material), political, or military advantages to be had. Period. Continuing to go to the Moon provided none of these things. Neither does going to Mars.
The FCC in 2015 said broadband providers are common carriers under Title 2. This made 400 pages of onerous regulations applicable to all broadband providers, some of the regulations are ridiculous and very subjective. See this link: https://www.redstate.com/diary...
Yep, as expected of Slashdot of late - the ill educated right wing moron crowd weighs in with "pity the poor corporations and all those pesky regulations".
But picking half a dozen titles stretched over 2 decades or more that have power lines in them and saying it's an "obsession" has to be a joke right? Do people even realize hundreds of titles are released every year?
It's much more than half a dozen titles... More like a hundred or so, and the work is still in progress.
Abstract trading; not actual gold exchanges done on top of the real thing. Also, money was created ON TOP of gold and that is where all the action happened.
When you see other kinds of money float on top of bitcoin then you will see it scale. I see no reason why it can not become a kind of digital gold as long as the encryption holds up.
Every civilized country has ended up abandoning gold because gold does not scale. The amount of gold in a vault used to support a given currency serves as a hard limit on the size of the economy that currency can support. Even with Bitcoin's divisibility, there's still a hard limit.
Nor were the currencies built on gold in vaults truly abstract - ultimately they were trusted because the issuing authorities were trusted. (Those pesky governments that Bitcoin zealots hope to deprecate.) There's no such trusted authority for Bitcoin.
In a situation where North Korea is brandishing a nuclear tipped ICBM and threatening to launch it at the US a bit like a crazy person with a gun doing a suicide by cop, all of those start to seem like they'd be very nice to have.
Since we're not in such a situation... (Hint: The person making threats and increasing the chance of war lives in Mar-a-Lago, not Pyongyang. If he'd shut the fuck up and stop acting like a schoolyard bully, we wouldn't be in this situation.)
So the many cartoons, comics, works of fiction, etc were all released generally to entertain a very few?
Doesn't matter whether they were or weren't, we're discussing interest in space not interest in "cartoons, comics, works of fiction, etc".
Robert Goddard did his work well before the russians were the bad guys (he didn't even live to see that come about).
Yet another irrelevancy.
It is true that interest swelled immensely once Sputnik was launched, mostly because that proved that the daydreams could actually be realized.
Mostly because of propaganda and marketing. And even that couldn't sustain interest once the stunt was over and men on the moon became yesterday's news.
I can't say with certainty that loss of the stars has resulted in loss of interest in space, but it would certainly be interesting to see a study correlating interest in space w/ visibility of the stars.
And we're right back where we started - the part where you don't grasp there never any significant or widespread interest to start with.
Having come full circle, it's abundantly clear you have no idea what you're talking about and no interest in correcting that lack. I'm done here.
Certainly. But it ignores two realities... First, that period predates the actual doing anything in space. Second, it never was a very widespread interest. The only time in which interest in space was anything resembling widespread was during the Space Race.
None of this correlates to any degree with the spread of night lighting.
And what of the societal effects? Could our reduced interests in space be at least partly due to generations of children growing up who have never truly seen the stars in the way earlier ones did?
What little public interest there was in space was a result of "beeaaat the rooskies!" propaganda and paranoia. Once the "Reds" were beaten, interest waned. The visibility of the sky or the lack thereof had nothing to do with it.
The last time I truly saw the Milky Way in all of its glory was during a camping trip in the Badlands. I highly recommend it.
Though it's on the outer fringes, much of the Badlands are still within light polluted area. You've never truly seen the sky until you've seen it from well out in the ocean, hundreds of miles from land.
I'd like to see the MAFIAA try to get their cronies to raid a satellite.
Since the satellite is the legal responsibility of the nation of the owners-or-record, they'll have very little problem. And the ground stations, control system, and other infrastructure are here on the ground... Again, no problem.
The problem with powered armor isn't the suit design - it's the power supply, which requires carefully refined unobtanium moderated with pixie dust in sealed unicorn horn capsules.
Being deflationary limits the maximum size of the economy that can be built on it.
True, but that's not a problem, because we're not going to build an economy on top of it
o.0 Um, circulating it as spendable currency is building an economy on top of it. Hell, hoarding it as store of wealth is building an economy on top it.
Like so many other bitcoin shills you have no idea what you're talking about - you just spew out words you have no idea of the meaning of.
nobody but an investor has any motive for holding BTC any longer than absolutely necessary.
I use it as a store of wealth. I also keep some gold for the same purpose.
Sears kicked ass for years because they owned their own real estate and they were able to offer competitive prices.
Sears kicked also ass for years because at a national level, they were the One Big Chain that you could find everywhere. And if you couldn't find 'em locally, they had the best mail order and delivery service in the country.
But all that changed in the 50's and 60's... They began divesting themselves of real estate and moving out of downtown shopping areas and out into malls and suburbia. A long series of dubious 'expansions' into other ventures sapped them of capital and left them short when the crises of the mid-late 70's hit. Their own retail arm cannibalized their mail-order arm (which they kept pouring money into long after is was sensible).
They were already failing before they started selling real estate, though, which they started doing specifically because they couldn't cover their operating expenses otherwise. And they were failing not because they couldn't compete with the internets, but because they didn't try. They compromised customer service, which was what got people through the door. They also compromised quality, for instance Craftsman tools have been going downhill for years. So why would you bother to go in there?
Sears was dying long before the 'net came along. On top of the problems outlined above, there was a lot more going on: The slide of the middle class (their bread and butter) starting back in the 80's... The perception that they were store that "your parents went to"... Their ungainly internal infrastructure (and extensive fiefdoms*, often at war with each other).... Competition from Target and other, more nimble and image conscious, chains... Etc. Etc.. Etc...
* The internal fiefdoms really hurt them... There were both regional fiefdoms, and product line fiefdoms. This made it very difficult to rationalize and control the company as a whole because powerful middle management could and did sabotage those efforts to their own ends.
False. Bitcoin circulates, it has underlying value, and it is deflationary
Um, no. While Bitcoin does circulate - it's has precisely no underlying value. It's completely hypothetical.
And what Bitcoin shills fail to grasp is that deflationary is a bug, not a feature. Being deflationary limits the maximum size of the economy that can be built on it. Being deflationary encourages people to buy in and hold with the intent of recouping that investment at a higher price. (This removes currency from circulation and further limits the size of the circulating economy.)
Myself, I suspect most bitcoin circulation is illusory... It's bought with a real currency, and promptly spent. The recipient then promptly redeems the BTC for real currency. Given the daily fluctuations, nobody but an investor has any motive for holding BTC any longer than absolutely necessary.
Lavarand is the subject of this patent and I wonder if CloudFlare has a license?
The filing date of the patent (the date it's effective from) is Jan 29, 1996. US patents are good for twenty years. As I write this, it's Nov 8th 2017.
Slashdot Mirror
Not gonna happen. Less than half of the oil the US imports is used as fuel in the first place. Even without being used as fuel, petroleum is still in massive demand as a chemical feedstock.
Not to mention something under a third of the US's oil imports come from the Middle East in the first place - the bulk comes from Canada, Central, and South America.
Far more interesting to me than the inevitable collapse of the Middle East is the inevitable collapse of the oil fueled Scandinavian social democracies
I don't give a rats ass about why you build your casings the way do you. Your casings aren't the topic of discussion here. Military weapons are the topic of discussion.
Nobody with an IQ over the freezing point of water is talking about low explosives, because the odds that someone is using such explosives are roughly nil.
Again, nobody with an IQ above the freezing point of water (a group which excludes you) is discussing a casing that's "too strong".
I did, and the answer is, I do.
You have provided absolutely zero evidence that you've done such things. You've provided abundant evidence you have zero clue - and even more evidence that you're an ignorant shithead trying to impress someone who does know. You've failed.
I don't think you grasp why so much weight is in the casing... which is to produce shrapnel. The low percentage of explosive filler isn't a bug, it's a feature - because a higher percentage of explosive means a lower weight of fragments. Its quite effective as an anti-personnel weapon. It also works very well at making them keep their head down, stay under cover, never gather in large groups, etc... etc... (AKA terror and increasing friction.)
An irrelevant non-sequitur. You don't need modern explosive to cause significant casualties and damage.
It's a pointless distinction... Because everyone but Bitcoin zealots know that Bitcoin isn't actually money. There's no inherent store of value, such as being backed by gold, nor is it backed by the economy of a nation. It's sole value lies in the Faith of the Believers - other than that, it's not conceptually really any different from an arcade or casino token.
The submitter uses that term for one reason only; to inflate Bitcoin into something it's patently not. It's an appeal to emotion, not academic or economic usage.
[[Citation Needed]] - and no weasel words or using gold bugs, bitcoin zealots, or other nut jobs as references either.
That's because you're confusing academic and professional usage (the 'nerds') with colloquial usage specifically intended as denigration.
Because it's being misused to imply that Bitcoin is something it isn't.
[[Citation needed]]
We as a civilization have only explored when there was economic (material), political, or military advantages to be had. Period. Continuing to go to the Moon provided none of these things. Neither does going to Mars.
Yep, as expected of Slashdot of late - the ill educated right wing moron crowd weighs in with "pity the poor corporations and all those pesky regulations".
It's much more than half a dozen titles... More like a hundred or so, and the work is still in progress.
Every civilized country has ended up abandoning gold because gold does not scale. The amount of gold in a vault used to support a given currency serves as a hard limit on the size of the economy that currency can support. Even with Bitcoin's divisibility, there's still a hard limit.
Nor were the currencies built on gold in vaults truly abstract - ultimately they were trusted because the issuing authorities were trusted. (Those pesky governments that Bitcoin zealots hope to deprecate.) There's no such trusted authority for Bitcoin.
Since we're not in such a situation... (Hint: The person making threats and increasing the chance of war lives in Mar-a-Lago, not Pyongyang. If he'd shut the fuck up and stop acting like a schoolyard bully, we wouldn't be in this situation.)
If it effects everyone, then it's by default an anti-nazi, err..., conservative conspiracy.
There's been a lot of very promising hydrogen related technologies coming to fruition over the next ten years for almost thirty years.
Doesn't matter whether they were or weren't, we're discussing interest in space not interest in "cartoons, comics, works of fiction, etc".
Yet another irrelevancy.
Mostly because of propaganda and marketing. And even that couldn't sustain interest once the stunt was over and men on the moon became yesterday's news.
And we're right back where we started - the part where you don't grasp there never any significant or widespread interest to start with.
Having come full circle, it's abundantly clear you have no idea what you're talking about and no interest in correcting that lack. I'm done here.
Certainly. But it ignores two realities... First, that period predates the actual doing anything in space. Second, it never was a very widespread interest. The only time in which interest in space was anything resembling widespread was during the Space Race.
None of this correlates to any degree with the spread of night lighting.
True, but completely fucking irrelevant.
Easy enough to avoid - plumped birds are so marked on the label, don't buy them.
*All* turkeys will lose weight during cooking, plumped or not.
What little public interest there was in space was a result of "beeaaat the rooskies!" propaganda and paranoia. Once the "Reds" were beaten, interest waned. The visibility of the sky or the lack thereof had nothing to do with it.
Though it's on the outer fringes, much of the Badlands are still within light polluted area. You've never truly seen the sky until you've seen it from well out in the ocean, hundreds of miles from land.
At ISS altitude, the "nation" will only last a couple of years before atmospheric drag brings it down.
Since the satellite is the legal responsibility of the nation of the owners-or-record, they'll have very little problem. And the ground stations, control system, and other infrastructure are here on the ground... Again, no problem.
The problem with powered armor isn't the suit design - it's the power supply, which requires carefully refined unobtanium moderated with pixie dust in sealed unicorn horn capsules.
o.0 Um, circulating it as spendable currency is building an economy on top of it. Hell, hoarding it as store of wealth is building an economy on top it.
Like so many other bitcoin shills you have no idea what you're talking about - you just spew out words you have no idea of the meaning of.
Translation: "I use BTC as an investment".
Sears kicked also ass for years because at a national level, they were the One Big Chain that you could find everywhere. And if you couldn't find 'em locally, they had the best mail order and delivery service in the country.
But all that changed in the 50's and 60's... They began divesting themselves of real estate and moving out of downtown shopping areas and out into malls and suburbia. A long series of dubious 'expansions' into other ventures sapped them of capital and left them short when the crises of the mid-late 70's hit. Their own retail arm cannibalized their mail-order arm (which they kept pouring money into long after is was sensible).
Sears was dying long before the 'net came along. On top of the problems outlined above, there was a lot more going on: The slide of the middle class (their bread and butter) starting back in the 80's... The perception that they were store that "your parents went to"... Their ungainly internal infrastructure (and extensive fiefdoms*, often at war with each other).... Competition from Target and other, more nimble and image conscious, chains... Etc. Etc.. Etc...
* The internal fiefdoms really hurt them... There were both regional fiefdoms, and product line fiefdoms. This made it very difficult to rationalize and control the company as a whole because powerful middle management could and did sabotage those efforts to their own ends.
Um, no. While Bitcoin does circulate - it's has precisely no underlying value. It's completely hypothetical.
And what Bitcoin shills fail to grasp is that deflationary is a bug, not a feature. Being deflationary limits the maximum size of the economy that can be built on it. Being deflationary encourages people to buy in and hold with the intent of recouping that investment at a higher price. (This removes currency from circulation and further limits the size of the circulating economy.)
Myself, I suspect most bitcoin circulation is illusory... It's bought with a real currency, and promptly spent. The recipient then promptly redeems the BTC for real currency. Given the daily fluctuations, nobody but an investor has any motive for holding BTC any longer than absolutely necessary.
The filing date of the patent (the date it's effective from) is Jan 29, 1996. US patents are good for twenty years. As I write this, it's Nov 8th 2017.
I'll let you do the math.