President: Luigi Vice-President: Gannondorf, Zelda Secretary of State: Samus, Metroid Secretary of Defense: Snake, Metal Gear Solid Secretary of the Interior: Spyro Secretary of the Treasury: Lara Croft, Tomb Raider Secretary of Commerce: Sly Cooper Secretary of Education: Pikachu, Pokemon Secretary of Energy: Sonic Attorney General: Tommy Vincenti, GTA Vice City Surgeon General: Dr. Mario
Well, it's not all bad: Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff: Master Chief, Halo
Yes. As far as I'm concerned, if you can't put yourself in orbit you can't really say you've gone to space. You just touched it.
Besides, being able to see the whole world in both night and day, big weather, a sunrise, a sunset, and so forth, would make this a much more interesting trip than just going up and coming down.
Anyway, I presume that would be the next space prize.
I guess it's kind of like scooping up liquid nitrogen in your hand. For a few brief moments it doesn't burn you, because it's too busy vaporizing from the heat of your skin and forming an insulating barrier of gas between the drop and your hand. Until your skin surface runs out of heat, of course.
It's a fun lab trick. Pour some in a cold bucket, then splash it on people. It goes poof when it hits their clothes or skin and either evaporates or bounces off onto the floor, where it sizzles and skids around for a while. Newbies always think they're going to freeze solid instantly though.
Also under the right conditions it'll chill them just enough to make girl's nipples go hard. Thin shirts and bras (or better yet, no bra) in summer works best for that.
So generating antimatter directly using current methods would be extremely expensive. More importantly, given how much energy it "contains" (via matter-antimatter annihilation), and assuming you need even MORE energy to generate it, the energy requirements would be prohibitive at best and simply unavailable at worst.
But what about harvesting antimatter? Isn't it present in cosmic rays and radiation? A large electromagnetic bubble could be used to filter out antiprotons and slow it down until it is united with positrons in a trap and stored. Since you're working in a hard vacuum, containment is less of an issue and your fields and machinery do not need to be sealed tight. It's just a variation of a bussard ramscoop. Of course it would have to be very large.
Generating antimatter requires massive amounts of energy. So why not go to the most naturally energetic object around - the Sun? Either make a factory designed to operate in close proximity to the sun and use the energy to make antimatter directly, or attempt to capture the naturally generated antimatter from the sun in some fashion. I am not an expert, but I presume at least some of the solar wind and certainly some of the solar atmosphere is composed of antimatter.
You'd think when the initial contact was made, the energy and heat from that reaction would blow or disintegrate the antimatter ball, imparting speed to the components which drives them out into the air and ground, thus continuing and accelerating the process.
Well, I'm sure there's some way around it, using a variety of tricks. Channel it with the dilithium crystals or something.
Punch cards have many other problems, are well documented, so probably we shouldn't be doing that. Scantron ballots are a little worrisome, but if you make people bubble in the "unapproved" too it fixes that nicely. Machines and touchscreens, it doesn't matter.
The topic raises a very good point. Depending on your voting hardware, there is no direct way for you or the voting council tell if the ballot has been modified after the fact if you were just specifying your approved candidates. Specifying unapproved candidates, or total candidates approved, helps a little, but complicates the procedure and is prone to error.
The question is how easy is it to enact WIDE-SCALE tampering - the only kind that matters. The key thing is that the best strategy in approval is to vote for your choice of the two front-runners, and any third party candidates. That means that in an election, the winner will likely be receiving more than 50% of the votes, because in a closely contested race everyone will want to specify their lesser of two evils, since they can also specify their true choice. Simply adding approvals for the loser on ballots would mean that BOTH were getting better than 50% - a highly suspicious situation where some voters voted for both. If NO votes were approved by more than 50% under approval (but were close), then tampering becomes attractive. But frankly in that range tampering is attractive under any system. Just ask Florida.
I'm not sure how approval would be affected if there is no clear front-runner, or if somehow both front-runners really ARE approved of by majorities of the people. Frankly, the divisive tendency of plurality has warped our approach to candidates so much it's hard to say how people might vote if they were free of the two-party control over the whole system.
If the ballots deviate too much from the polls and from the general populous's will, people will notice and cry foul. Only closely contested or poll-free elections can get away with it. And to get away with it when you're only able to tamper with existing ballots, you need to be able to delete votes rather than just add in any system.
In the end, ballot integrity for ANY system depends primarily on a corruption-free voting administration. Checking an extra box on a ballot is possibly the easiest way to corrupt a vote, but like all tampering it requires allowing people or hardware to access and tamper with the votes, either before (software) during (electronic and lever) or after (paper of any kind; counting machines) voting. And pure mechanical or electronic systems can tamper however they want - so long as the end result looks plausible and doesn't contradict the paper trail if there is one.
So on that basis, I think that Approval voting is no worse off than any other voting system in terms of corruptibility.
On a similar note, I was thinking about the nature of paper money vs. coins, considering whether it's easier to carry around dollar coins vs. dollar bills, and had to ask myself - if one or the other is generally more convenient, then why are we using both?
coins - compact, very durable. Harder to fake in some ways, easier in others (slugs in vending machines). A quarter weighs 5.7 grams, a dime 2.3 grams (everything below that is pretty much useless these days, and really we should be using 20 and 50 cent pieces for various reasons)
bills - lighter weight, more sophisticated anti-counterfeit measures, but the features hardest to fake are the ones generally ignored. Large flat size means they need to be protected by something, and folded to fit into pocket. Uses a relatively durable paper, and plastic notes are available that are even more durable, but not nearly as durable as coins. Why aren't they using bar codes for serial numbers? Can be rolled into a very compact tube. Weighs 1.0 gram.
but what about... cards - sophisticated anti-counterfeit (including electronic, physical, and visual) options available. Lightweight but durable and compact. Plastic credit card weighs 4.7 grams. Paper business card weighs 1.0 grams.
If we used cards instead of bills, our money would be easier to carry around, quite durable, and could incorporate sophisticated electronic anti-counterfeit schemes like RSA authentication, embedded RFID, and so forth. Vending machines wouldn't eat or reject your money just because it's old. It could be the same weight. It allows the same hardware to read or use both "bills", credit cards, debit cards, and even cash cards - and if you used cards instead of coins, you wouldn't need anything else. This could allow people to never having to use cash at all, because there cards work everywhere. About the only downside is you wouldn't have the same thick stack of bills to shuffle through.
For the record, I'm socially liberal, economically agnostic, am strongly against pre-emptive warfare and wars without congressional approval including the current one, and dislike George Bush intensely.
Fahrenheit 9/11 was the first Moore movie I have seen. It was good in the sense that it was asking all the questions that should have been asked and pointing out all the inconsistencies of the Bush administration and the synchophants that support it. In other words, everything the media should have been doing instead of repeating talking points straight from the Drudge Report and indulging in shallow displays of patriotism.
However, I wasn't impressed with Moore's style or technique in F911. It just wasn't very good. The pacing was bad, the first half of the movie dragged, the music was waaay off, etc. His stunts and little editing quirks seemed juvenile. I had already seen "Supersize Me" earlier this year, and I couldn't help but think how much better MADE that movie was than F911. Anyway, I have no reason to think Moore's other films are any different. They probably follow the same pattern - excellent subject matter, deep research, and a mediocre-to-poor execution.
But then again, the famed 7-minute pause was *after* the 2nd jet crashed into the WTC. So even had he calmly stood up, excused himself, and taken/delegated control, it was too late.
Except maybe for the one that hit the Pentagon and the one that went down in Pennsylvania.
There were four planes that were hijacked and went down, remember? And we weren't sure if there were more on the way.
I recall reading a another article about mems-based micropower supplies. But in that case, they were designed to turn stray vibrations from the environment into power. The mems-based nuclear battery designs sound awfully similar. I suspect that it would be possible to make a mems device capable of absorbing power from both vibration and particle emission, thereby increasing output and useful lifetime.
Likewise, the diode-type nuclear battery could double as a photovoltaic cell if it was made in the right type. Consider planting a radioisotope seed in the center of the photovoltaic beads that spheral solar's panels use. All particles would be absorbed by the silicon and there would be no need for additional sheilding. Manufacture would be easier than with a conventional flat cell.
In both cases, the devices would derive a good portion of their power from non-nuclear sources, nuclear power alone would provide a constant if reduced stream of power, and as the isotopes wear out the devices continue to function when source power is available. It may have its uses.
If you've ever wondered why anyone would bother to use complex and accurate physics in a side scroller, Gish is the answer. You can only do five things - move, jump, get sticky, get slippery, and get dense - but it's how well you can control all that and what you do with it that makes it interesting. Momentum is everything.
Some of those levels are really hard though, until you teach yourself some new tricks. Like how to maximize your ability to bounce and jump. Jump in the air, go heavy to drop faster, go sticky when you hit the ground to spread yourself out more, then go normal and jump again, and repeat. You can go real high real fast with that one.
Flat rate services generally have problems with their models. They never seem to suspect that once unlimited anything is available to their clients, they often start pushing those unlimits.
Netflix in particular quietly stiffs their customers who try to take full advantage of their supposedly unlimited rentals. Sure, when you start out you're getting two sets of movies a week. But then gradually they start getting "sent" and "recieved" slower and slower, until you're getting only one or less. Mind you, this usually happens after you get a series of emails asking how many days it took to recieve your movies. If you ask about it, NF just blames the post office, although they have no explanation as to how the postal service could suddenly become slower for just your mail to and from Netflix, regardless of whether it was sent from your home, post office box, or post office itself. It couldn't be their fault - that would be false advertising.
The only problem with renting, is the sort of business maneuvering where the big companies crowd out the little ones by buying up all the spectrum.
The way I figure, if the FCC/stations would just drop the false pretense that airwave broadcasters are serving the public good by carrying "news", this wouldn't be an issue. Hell, at this point I would say to ditch licensing of VHF/UHF spectrum for TV ENTIRELY. It can be put to better use. Cable and Satellite have far better selections, and radio is far more widespread. If they must, they can set aside a narrow band of spectrum for public access and local content.
0.99 is way too much for me, IMHO, as I like to listen to a lot of songs relatively few times per. 0.25 is more like it. 0.10 is probably closer to the true value of your average song.
For the record, if TV were pay-per-view, I wouldn't spend more than $0.25 per commercial-free half-hour one-time-view. It doesn't sound like much, but any more than that and the prices take it above cable and rental. Again, 0.10 or less is closer to the value of your average TV half-hour show.
Well, it doesn't matter. The RIAA and MPAA have made a career of charging exorbitant prices for what is mostly crap-not-worth-the-time-it-takes-to-watch/listen, whilst royally screwing the artists, good or bad. As the IP laws strengthen this will only worse, and will probably only give them more ways to screw people (such as purchasers of blank media). Your tax dollars at work.
Most folks aren't bothered by piracy of this sort, because most people correctly consider recorded entertainment to have little or no intrinsic worth - the sort of thing that once upon a time you could buy for a song. If they really do like it, they pay.
I wouldn't worry about it too much - the app hasn't been updated in two years (still beta), and never fails to crash when trying to do slideshow on mine since I upgraded to Panther.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet the cruise control has a hidden program to accelerate constantly when Sammy Hagar's "I Can't Drive 55" comes on over the speakers.
President: Luigi
Vice-President: Gannondorf, Zelda
Secretary of State: Samus, Metroid
Secretary of Defense: Snake, Metal Gear Solid
Secretary of the Interior: Spyro
Secretary of the Treasury: Lara Croft, Tomb Raider
Secretary of Commerce: Sly Cooper
Secretary of Education: Pikachu, Pokemon
Secretary of Energy: Sonic
Attorney General: Tommy Vincenti, GTA Vice City
Surgeon General: Dr. Mario
Well, it's not all bad:
Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff: Master Chief, Halo
Yes. As far as I'm concerned, if you can't put yourself in orbit you can't really say you've gone to space. You just touched it.
Besides, being able to see the whole world in both night and day, big weather, a sunrise, a sunset, and so forth, would make this a much more interesting trip than just going up and coming down.
Anyway, I presume that would be the next space prize.
High initial expenditure, but potentially large returns. Assuming it can be done. Which I don't know.
I guess it's kind of like scooping up liquid nitrogen in your hand. For a few brief moments it doesn't burn you, because it's too busy vaporizing from the heat of your skin and forming an insulating barrier of gas between the drop and your hand. Until your skin surface runs out of heat, of course.
It's a fun lab trick. Pour some in a cold bucket, then splash it on people. It goes poof when it hits their clothes or skin and either evaporates or bounces off onto the floor, where it sizzles and skids around for a while. Newbies always think they're going to freeze solid instantly though.
Also under the right conditions it'll chill them just enough to make girl's nipples go hard. Thin shirts and bras (or better yet, no bra) in summer works best for that.
So generating antimatter directly using current methods would be extremely expensive. More importantly, given how much energy it "contains" (via matter-antimatter annihilation), and assuming you need even MORE energy to generate it, the energy requirements would be prohibitive at best and simply unavailable at worst.
But what about harvesting antimatter? Isn't it present in cosmic rays and radiation? A large electromagnetic bubble could be used to filter out antiprotons and slow it down until it is united with positrons in a trap and stored. Since you're working in a hard vacuum, containment is less of an issue and your fields and machinery do not need to be sealed tight. It's just a variation of a bussard ramscoop. Of course it would have to be very large.
Generating antimatter requires massive amounts of energy. So why not go to the most naturally energetic object around - the Sun? Either make a factory designed to operate in close proximity to the sun and use the energy to make antimatter directly, or attempt to capture the naturally generated antimatter from the sun in some fashion. I am not an expert, but I presume at least some of the solar wind and certainly some of the solar atmosphere is composed of antimatter.
You'd think when the initial contact was made, the energy and heat from that reaction would blow or disintegrate the antimatter ball, imparting speed to the components which drives them out into the air and ground, thus continuing and accelerating the process.
Well, I'm sure there's some way around it, using a variety of tricks. Channel it with the dilithium crystals or something.
Punch cards have many other problems, are well documented, so probably we shouldn't be doing that. Scantron ballots are a little worrisome, but if you make people bubble in the "unapproved" too it fixes that nicely. Machines and touchscreens, it doesn't matter.
The topic raises a very good point. Depending on your voting hardware, there is no direct way for you or the voting council tell if the ballot has been modified after the fact if you were just specifying your approved candidates. Specifying unapproved candidates, or total candidates approved, helps a little, but complicates the procedure and is prone to error.
The question is how easy is it to enact WIDE-SCALE tampering - the only kind that matters. The key thing is that the best strategy in approval is to vote for your choice of the two front-runners, and any third party candidates. That means that in an election, the winner will likely be receiving more than 50% of the votes, because in a closely contested race everyone will want to specify their lesser of two evils, since they can also specify their true choice. Simply adding approvals for the loser on ballots would mean that BOTH were getting better than 50% - a highly suspicious situation where some voters voted for both. If NO votes were approved by more than 50% under approval (but were close), then tampering becomes attractive. But frankly in that range tampering is attractive under any system. Just ask Florida.
I'm not sure how approval would be affected if there is no clear front-runner, or if somehow both front-runners really ARE approved of by majorities of the people. Frankly, the divisive tendency of plurality has warped our approach to candidates so much it's hard to say how people might vote if they were free of the two-party control over the whole system.
If the ballots deviate too much from the polls and from the general populous's will, people will notice and cry foul. Only closely contested or poll-free elections can get away with it. And to get away with it when you're only able to tamper with existing ballots, you need to be able to delete votes rather than just add in any system.
In the end, ballot integrity for ANY system depends primarily on a corruption-free voting administration. Checking an extra box on a ballot is possibly the easiest way to corrupt a vote, but like all tampering it requires allowing people or hardware to access and tamper with the votes, either before (software) during (electronic and lever) or after (paper of any kind; counting machines) voting. And pure mechanical or electronic systems can tamper however they want - so long as the end result looks plausible and doesn't contradict the paper trail if there is one.
So on that basis, I think that Approval voting is no worse off than any other voting system in terms of corruptibility.
I don't know about where you are, but in NYC (which is close to me) they use thin cards. Metrocards they call them. No tokens anymore.
On a similar note, I was thinking about the nature of paper money vs. coins, considering whether it's easier to carry around dollar coins vs. dollar bills, and had to ask myself - if one or the other is generally more convenient, then why are we using both?
coins - compact, very durable. Harder to fake in some ways, easier in others (slugs in vending machines). A quarter weighs 5.7 grams, a dime 2.3 grams (everything below that is pretty much useless these days, and really we should be using 20 and 50 cent pieces for various reasons)
bills - lighter weight, more sophisticated anti-counterfeit measures, but the features hardest to fake are the ones generally ignored. Large flat size means they need to be protected by something, and folded to fit into pocket. Uses a relatively durable paper, and plastic notes are available that are even more durable, but not nearly as durable as coins. Why aren't they using bar codes for serial numbers? Can be rolled into a very compact tube. Weighs 1.0 gram.
but what about...
cards - sophisticated anti-counterfeit (including electronic, physical, and visual) options available. Lightweight but durable and compact. Plastic credit card weighs 4.7 grams. Paper business card weighs 1.0 grams.
If we used cards instead of bills, our money would be easier to carry around, quite durable, and could incorporate sophisticated electronic anti-counterfeit schemes like RSA authentication, embedded RFID, and so forth. Vending machines wouldn't eat or reject your money just because it's old. It could be the same weight. It allows the same hardware to read or use both "bills", credit cards, debit cards, and even cash cards - and if you used cards instead of coins, you wouldn't need anything else. This could allow people to never having to use cash at all, because there cards work everywhere. About the only downside is you wouldn't have the same thick stack of bills to shuffle through.
For the record, I'm socially liberal, economically agnostic, am strongly against pre-emptive warfare and wars without congressional approval including the current one, and dislike George Bush intensely.
Fahrenheit 9/11 was the first Moore movie I have seen. It was good in the sense that it was asking all the questions that should have been asked and pointing out all the inconsistencies of the Bush administration and the synchophants that support it. In other words, everything the media should have been doing instead of repeating talking points straight from the Drudge Report and indulging in shallow displays of patriotism.
However, I wasn't impressed with Moore's style or technique in F911. It just wasn't very good. The pacing was bad, the first half of the movie dragged, the music was waaay off, etc. His stunts and little editing quirks seemed juvenile. I had already seen "Supersize Me" earlier this year, and I couldn't help but think how much better MADE that movie was than F911. Anyway, I have no reason to think Moore's other films are any different. They probably follow the same pattern - excellent subject matter, deep research, and a mediocre-to-poor execution.
But then again, the famed 7-minute pause was *after* the 2nd jet crashed into the WTC. So even had he calmly stood up, excused himself, and taken/delegated control, it was too late.
Except maybe for the one that hit the Pentagon and the one that went down in Pennsylvania.
There were four planes that were hijacked and went down, remember? And we weren't sure if there were more on the way.
Contrary to your sig, Bush never claimed Saddam was linked to 9/11.
He and his administration just insinuated it at every possible opportunity.
Also a fat actor, and one with some serious acting credentials.
...like a debate at the Holiday Inn Ballroom. Which is where this debate is being held. I suspect Nader didn't want to debase himself.
I recall reading a another article about mems-based micropower supplies. But in that case, they were designed to turn stray vibrations from the environment into power. The mems-based nuclear battery designs sound awfully similar. I suspect that it would be possible to make a mems device capable of absorbing power from both vibration and particle emission, thereby increasing output and useful lifetime.
Likewise, the diode-type nuclear battery could double as a photovoltaic cell if it was made in the right type. Consider planting a radioisotope seed in the center of the photovoltaic beads that spheral solar's panels use. All particles would be absorbed by the silicon and there would be no need for additional sheilding. Manufacture would be easier than with a conventional flat cell.
In both cases, the devices would derive a good portion of their power from non-nuclear sources, nuclear power alone would provide a constant if reduced stream of power, and as the isotopes wear out the devices continue to function when source power is available. It may have its uses.
Ahem. That was why I specifically said "get dense" instead of the equivalent (I think preferred also) "get hard".
A game where you are moving and jumping deep inside a cave while getting hard, slippery, and sticky just wouldn't be appropriate for all ages.
Not that I wouldn't download such a game in a heartbeat.
If you've ever wondered why anyone would bother to use complex and accurate physics in a side scroller, Gish is the answer. You can only do five things - move, jump, get sticky, get slippery, and get dense - but it's how well you can control all that and what you do with it that makes it interesting. Momentum is everything.
Some of those levels are really hard though, until you teach yourself some new tricks. Like how to maximize your ability to bounce and jump. Jump in the air, go heavy to drop faster, go sticky when you hit the ground to spread yourself out more, then go normal and jump again, and repeat. You can go real high real fast with that one.
Flat rate services generally have problems with their models. They never seem to suspect that once unlimited anything is available to their clients, they often start pushing those unlimits.
Netflix in particular quietly stiffs their customers who try to take full advantage of their supposedly unlimited rentals. Sure, when you start out you're getting two sets of movies a week. But then gradually they start getting "sent" and "recieved" slower and slower, until you're getting only one or less. Mind you, this usually happens after you get a series of emails asking how many days it took to recieve your movies. If you ask about it, NF just blames the post office, although they have no explanation as to how the postal service could suddenly become slower for just your mail to and from Netflix, regardless of whether it was sent from your home, post office box, or post office itself. It couldn't be their fault - that would be false advertising.
The only problem with renting, is the sort of business maneuvering where the big companies crowd out the little ones by buying up all the spectrum.
The way I figure, if the FCC/stations would just drop the false pretense that airwave broadcasters are serving the public good by carrying "news", this wouldn't be an issue. Hell, at this point I would say to ditch licensing of VHF/UHF spectrum for TV ENTIRELY. It can be put to better use. Cable and Satellite have far better selections, and radio is far more widespread. If they must, they can set aside a narrow band of spectrum for public access and local content.
0.99 is way too much for me, IMHO, as I like to listen to a lot of songs relatively few times per. 0.25 is more like it. 0.10 is probably closer to the true value of your average song.
For the record, if TV were pay-per-view, I wouldn't spend more than $0.25 per commercial-free half-hour one-time-view. It doesn't sound like much, but any more than that and the prices take it above cable and rental. Again, 0.10 or less is closer to the value of your average TV half-hour show.
Well, it doesn't matter. The RIAA and MPAA have made a career of charging exorbitant prices for what is mostly crap-not-worth-the-time-it-takes-to-watch/listen, whilst royally screwing the artists, good or bad. As the IP laws strengthen this will only worse, and will probably only give them more ways to screw people (such as purchasers of blank media). Your tax dollars at work.
Most folks aren't bothered by piracy of this sort, because most people correctly consider recorded entertainment to have little or no intrinsic worth - the sort of thing that once upon a time you could buy for a song. If they really do like it, they pay.
Flash Lynch Mobs.
Raggedy man.
Those guys blow. At least Stephenson has written some good stuff.
I wouldn't worry about it too much - the app hasn't been updated in two years (still beta), and never fails to crash when trying to do slideshow on mine since I upgraded to Panther.
It's too bad, I liked the interface on it.