1. What is the "full faith and credit of the united states government worth"? Hint: ask an innocent Iraqi walking down the street in downtown Baghdad on March 19, 2003.
2. Legal tender does not have intrinsic value (and I don't think that wikipedia article is correct; I believe creditors can refuse legal tender and insist on other forms of payment; try paying your mortgage in pennies, for example).
3. Nobody has to accept cash, either.
4. Sounds a lot like U.S. currency in another country. In fact, all currencies are "private" and likely to be refused if you leave their locale of comfortable exchange. Or at the least you will be charged a hefty markup for using them.
Anything that you can trade with someone that they know they can trade with someone else can be considered to have the qualities of "money". This goes for dollar bills, gold bullion, wampum shells, electronic digits, IOUs, confederate scrip, or rubber ningis.
Money doesn't make the world go 'round. Greed or hunger, and a willingness to turn the crank for a paycheck, are what make the world go around.
that is because the people you expect to do anything are the ones that got elected so of course they won't do anything to themselves
however, this is a democracy and you have the right to free speech and you can make sure that your voice is heard by every politician and journalist and ear in earshot
and, in the end, if necessary, we can just start over from 1776
but that means that YOU have to do what YOU are supposed to do, instead of sitting on your fat ass eating cheetohs and whining about how unfair it is on slashdot
And don't count T. Boone Pickens as a philanthropist.
West Texas is blanketed by wind turbines now.
They're there to generate electricity to run the cricket pumps that have been there for several decades.
It takes electricity to bring oil to the surface.
And they haven't stopped drilling. At the current price of crude (4-5X what it was just 5 years ago) just about every drop in Texas is now profitable to extract. But it'll take a lot of electricity.
The moon has water. The water is bound up in the rocky material, the same way it was on Earth 4.5 billion years ago (when Earth was still pretty much molten).
Earth did not have pooling surface water until hundreds of millions of years later. The moon apparently cooled quickly enough that free water did not exude from the rocky material. Either that, or the moon is small enough that any exudate just floated off into space rather than forming an atmosphere (H20 is lighter than O2 or N2, so that is plausible, since there is no other gas in the lunar atmosphere, either).
Slashdot articles are vetted by someone before becoming main topics, right? No? Yes? Is one of the criteria now how much controversy the wrong information in the article will cause?
With all its resources and all its pretense to being anti-spam, has McAffee ever once tried to field a product or service that would trace spam back to its source and try to get it halted?
Of course not. They're in the business of hauling away the junk you receive. Stopping it from getting to you would lower their revenues.
They should have used a cylinder of diameter equal to its height.
They could then calibrate its height against its diameter. They can check its radius simply by placing it in a circular template and rotating it, as they move the template vertically, looking for the gaps.
Heck, they wouldn't even need to center it on the turntable. Just reflect a laser off the side, measure the deflection, and recalculate the surface from that. Take ten million data points in a few minutes.
With a sphere, you can't even support it without getting your support in the way of your measurement. And just about any support arrangement you can imagine can cause distortion of the overall shape.
Naff. These guys just wanted to say, "we made the most-perfect sphere" when talking about their imperfect spheroid nodules.
I wanted to see the list, so I clicked through the article link to a blog, which clicked through to a blog, and so on, and so on, until the last blog clicked through to here.
Quantum physics tells us that electrons prefer certain geometric arrangements about a nucleus.
Due to this, atoms prefer certain geometric arrangements that take advantage of this atomic-orbital energy function. If this allows for a repeating pattern, and the mechanical noise in the system is high enough to disrupt any non-optimal bonds, a repeating pattern will most likely form.
But if the gross arrangement of several atoms is stable to thermodynamic perturbation even though some bonds are non-optimally aligned, the whole structure will be maintained. Cooling a substance faster than it can rearrange itself into a lattice structure would be one way to leave it in this condition.
Meaning that amorphous glasses are simply substances that crystallize without forming a lattice geometry.
Tim Russert was not even-handed. He was a former White House staffer.
He typically softballed Republicans and turned his investigative skills loose only when interviewing Democrats. I know real even-handed journalists at (and above) Russert's level who have commented to me that they think he is a disgrace, even that there should be some prohibition on former political operatives taking jobs like moderator of Meet the Press, as it is clearly a conflict of interest for our Press to be in bed with our politicians.
I wish Media Matters went back farther than two years. It would be interesting to compare Scott McLellan's admissions of the lack of due diligence by the White House Press Corps with a log of Russert's failings in the days leading up to the war.
If the ISP isn't virus-scanning uploads, the ISP is inviting attacks.
If SSP is as transparent as SSL (and how could it not be, since it's only 4 letters away in the alphabet!) then it will work. If it takes user intervention, it will probably fail.
There's no reason to believe Opera or IE would not adopt it, if it works.
It only works because the victim complies without involving the authorities. In that case, the extortionist could collect the money while having coffee with the victim in the lobby of the White House and not be caught.
But if the victim knows enough to involve the authorities, all of those means can be traced.
The point is, virus writers up to now have been random vandals using an ultimately untraceable medium (the Internet) to make hit-and-run attacks. Since they now WANT your money to FIND THEM, you can now FIND THEM by following your money, by enlisting the help of the people who are empowered to do the following, apprehending, convicting, and PUNISHING.
The Rubik's cube has a finite number of configurations reachable from the solved configuration using the rules of transformation. Therefore, it is possible by elaborating all of the sequences of transformations until loops are found to create a set of transformation sequences that reaches all possible configurations. The question is, have you found the optimal sequence in every case. The answer is yes if you have enumerated every sequence of shorter length.
So, in order to prove that 23 is the longest distance from a solved state, you have to compute the result of all possible 22-move sequences without reaching the 23-move state.
At any position, you can make one of 9 moves (rotate by 90 degrees any of the three planes in any of the 3 dimensions). So there are 9^22 possible sequences to enumerate.
9^22 is 984,770,902,183,611,232,881.
Hmmmm...tricky...
Of course, you can probably eliminate sequences that loop in fewer than 22 moves by working up from 1, meaning you don't need to revisit with those starting sequences as you go longer. There is where things get elegant.
Anyone have the phone number for Magrathea? I'll be over here doing some designing...
The value of this system is that there is no ambiguity in the marking.
Hanging chads, stray pencil marks, incompletely filled bubbles, are all unnecessary sources of error -- and, as we saw in 2000, enough ambiguity to turn the election on its head*.
The electronic recording also makes the initial tally all but instantaneous. Elections can be certified within minutes of the closing of the polls. Challenges to the result can be recounted much more quickly as well, with no haggling over what a ballot says, so long as the paper copies of the ballots are protected from damage.
* - Various studies conducted after the election showed varying results, but the one study that used the standards in place at the time of the election showed Gore got more valid votes. The Republicans' (possibly illegal) delaying tactics (those people storming the counting room were all GOP staffers, not the general public of Florida - you can see John Bolton clearly in one picture) and their majority on the Supreme Court did indeed induce a result counter to the wishes of the voters.
Seriously. In order for extortion to work, money has to change hands. Money can be traced, easily (don't believe what they say about Western Union). This is a great way to track down and capture the people who are spreading the virus. And the people whose files are encrypted could as easily have seen those files deleted, or worse. So it's no difference to them, except that they now have a hand in putting a crook behind bars.
The virus tossers are actually making their situation worse by turning to extortion. But they weren't all that bright to start with.
On the other hand, Sprint has always had the worst coverage anywhere I've used it.
Last time I tried it, I had it for about 2 weeks. 75% of my calls were dropped, and 100% of calls when I was driving. And there were constant dropouts in the conversations.
I got T-mobile and was happy with it. A year later, I sold my Sprint phone to a friend and he signed up with Sprint. He was okay with the service, but when I called him I recognized the dropouts and dropped calls. I warned him before, and I kept pointing it out, but he said he didn't have a problem with it.
I've switched from T-Mobile to Verizon (T-Mobile reduced its handset offerings). And they're about the same. Almost no calls get dropped with either one. And Verizon's data transfer rate is literall 10X as fast as what I had with T-Mobile.
If you have a problem with the conglomeration, complain to your legislators. Slashdot doesn't have a vote.
"Anti-matter" is not the opposite of matter. It is matter with opposite charge or other opposite properties. Mass has no opposite. It is there, or it isn't. (Or it is and then it isn't and then it is and then it isn't, on the level of quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field.)
And no, a hole isn't "anti-matter". It's merely a void in the surrounding matter. It rises because of a principle known as "buoyancy" which is really the gross action of the matter surrounding it causing pressure differentials as a function of distance from the CM. As long as the surrounding matter can flow, it can fill any displacement of the void, and the mass will tend to move down rather than up, and the void will therefore appear to tend to move up rather than down.
And no, hot-air balloons don't rise because of the heat, they rise because they make the air in the balloon less dense than the air outside the balloon. How they do it is not relevant. A rigid balloon and a vacuum pump would work, too.
The tungsten filament is constantly being turned into gas by the heat, and the gas is constantly recrystallizing onto the filament (by a process I forget the precise details of though I seem to recall it varies with the fourth power of temperature).
This happens at different rates depending on the curvature of the surface. It is slower in the flatter regions and faster near sharp corners. The effect is such that a nick in the filament, rather than becoming a choke-point for current and thus a place for catastrophic melting to occur, is filled in by the recrystallization. A bump spreads, becoming a smooth hill, which then slowly evaporates. The wire is self-maintaining while hot.
This is, in fact, the magic that caused the Tungsten filament to be the one that worked as an incandescent light, while all of the other materials failed catastrophically at the temperatures required to produce significant blackbody radiation to be useful lights.
By "solid state" they clearly mean a unit that does not require a gaseous environment (in this case tungsten gas in an otherwise evacuated space); they have mechanical robustness to think of as well.
They'd probably have to disqualify you if you came up with an incandescent filament material that put out 1100 lumens at 5 Watts, but that would be worth a whole lot more than $20 million, so you shouldn't be too upset about it.
Slashdot Mirror
1. What is the "full faith and credit of the united states government worth"? Hint: ask an innocent Iraqi walking down the street in downtown Baghdad on March 19, 2003.
2. Legal tender does not have intrinsic value (and I don't think that wikipedia article is correct; I believe creditors can refuse legal tender and insist on other forms of payment; try paying your mortgage in pennies, for example).
3. Nobody has to accept cash, either.
4. Sounds a lot like U.S. currency in another country. In fact, all currencies are "private" and likely to be refused if you leave their locale of comfortable exchange. Or at the least you will be charged a hefty markup for using them.
Anything that you can trade with someone that they know they can trade with someone else can be considered to have the qualities of "money". This goes for dollar bills, gold bullion, wampum shells, electronic digits, IOUs, confederate scrip, or rubber ningis.
Money doesn't make the world go 'round. Greed or hunger, and a willingness to turn the crank for a paycheck, are what make the world go around.
that is because the people you expect to do anything are the ones that got elected so of course they won't do anything to themselves
however, this is a democracy and you have the right to free speech and you can make sure that your voice is heard by every politician and journalist and ear in earshot
and, in the end, if necessary, we can just start over from 1776
but that means that YOU have to do what YOU are supposed to do, instead of sitting on your fat ass eating cheetohs and whining about how unfair it is on slashdot
larger textures, more textures, more vertices, more shapes
in other words, instead of the creepy, highly replicated graphics of today, you will be able to have more realistic, highly entropic graphics tomorrow
at least, for the short time before it all changes again and the world starts raytracing depth-shaded ellipsoids in realtime
And don't count T. Boone Pickens as a philanthropist.
West Texas is blanketed by wind turbines now.
They're there to generate electricity to run the cricket pumps that have been there for several decades.
It takes electricity to bring oil to the surface.
And they haven't stopped drilling. At the current price of crude (4-5X what it was just 5 years ago) just about every drop in Texas is now profitable to extract. But it'll take a lot of electricity.
The moon has water.
The water is bound up in the rocky material, the same way it was on Earth 4.5 billion years ago (when Earth was still pretty much molten).
Earth did not have pooling surface water until hundreds of millions of years later. The moon apparently cooled quickly enough that free water did not exude from the rocky material. Either that, or the moon is small enough that any exudate just floated off into space rather than forming an atmosphere (H20 is lighter than O2 or N2, so that is plausible, since there is no other gas in the lunar atmosphere, either).
Slashdot articles are vetted by someone before becoming main topics, right? No? Yes? Is one of the criteria now how much controversy the wrong information in the article will cause?
With all its resources and all its pretense to being anti-spam, has McAffee ever once tried to field a product or service that would trace spam back to its source and try to get it halted?
Of course not. They're in the business of hauling away the junk you receive. Stopping it from getting to you would lower their revenues.
That's utterly naff.
They should have used a cylinder of diameter equal to its height.
They could then calibrate its height against its diameter. They can check its radius simply by placing it in a circular template and rotating it, as they move the template vertically, looking for the gaps.
Heck, they wouldn't even need to center it on the turntable. Just reflect a laser off the side, measure the deflection, and recalculate the surface from that. Take ten million data points in a few minutes.
With a sphere, you can't even support it without getting your support in the way of your measurement. And just about any support arrangement you can imagine can cause distortion of the overall shape.
Naff. These guys just wanted to say, "we made the most-perfect sphere" when talking about their imperfect spheroid nodules.
You don't have to use diamond. You can use graphite.
But carbon is somewhat loaded with isotopes, some of which decay and change mass over time.
Better to grow your regular crystal from something more pure and stable.
I wanted to see the list, so I clicked through the article link to a blog, which clicked through to a blog, and so on, and so on, until the last blog clicked through to here.
And this reply was already posted.
(logs off)
Then what part of speech is "Terrist"?
What's so hard to understand?
Quantum physics tells us that electrons prefer certain geometric arrangements about a nucleus.
Due to this, atoms prefer certain geometric arrangements that take advantage of this atomic-orbital energy function. If this allows for a repeating pattern, and the mechanical noise in the system is high enough to disrupt any non-optimal bonds, a repeating pattern will most likely form.
But if the gross arrangement of several atoms is stable to thermodynamic perturbation even though some bonds are non-optimally aligned, the whole structure will be maintained. Cooling a substance faster than it can rearrange itself into a lattice structure would be one way to leave it in this condition.
Meaning that amorphous glasses are simply substances that crystallize without forming a lattice geometry.
" I am a Libertarian and I hate the two main political parties."
Libertarians are just Republicans who refuse the Religious Right's political support.
I'm sorry. Severe brain-fart there. I have confused Russert with someone else.
"Never mind."
-Emily Litella
Tim Russert was not even-handed. He was a former White House staffer.
He typically softballed Republicans and turned his investigative skills loose only when interviewing Democrats. I know real even-handed journalists at (and above) Russert's level who have commented to me that they think he is a disgrace, even that there should be some prohibition on former political operatives taking jobs like moderator of Meet the Press, as it is clearly a conflict of interest for our Press to be in bed with our politicians.
I wish Media Matters went back farther than two years. It would be interesting to compare Scott McLellan's admissions of the lack of due diligence by the White House Press Corps with a log of Russert's failings in the days leading up to the war.
http://mediamatters.org/issues_topics/tags/tim_russert
>Exactly, nobody should ever be made to pay for such defective software like that from Microsoft.
Exactly. That's why Linux is free...
They're also very tasty.
Can't help you on the question of their visual ability. Though I'm pretty sure they didn't see the net until it was too late.
I guess I get to really well-stocked sushi bars more often than really well-stocked aquariums.
No, they realized Chuck isn't the author.
If the ISP isn't virus-scanning uploads, the ISP is inviting attacks.
If SSP is as transparent as SSL (and how could it not be, since it's only 4 letters away in the alphabet!) then it will work. If it takes user intervention, it will probably fail.
There's no reason to believe Opera or IE would not adopt it, if it works.
It only works because the victim complies without involving the authorities. In that case, the extortionist could collect the money while having coffee with the victim in the lobby of the White House and not be caught.
But if the victim knows enough to involve the authorities, all of those means can be traced.
The point is, virus writers up to now have been random vandals using an ultimately untraceable medium (the Internet) to make hit-and-run attacks. Since they now WANT your money to FIND THEM, you can now FIND THEM by following your money, by enlisting the help of the people who are empowered to do the following, apprehending, convicting, and PUNISHING.
The Rubik's cube has a finite number of configurations reachable from the solved configuration using the rules of transformation. Therefore, it is possible by elaborating all of the sequences of transformations until loops are found to create a set of transformation sequences that reaches all possible configurations. The question is, have you found the optimal sequence in every case. The answer is yes if you have enumerated every sequence of shorter length.
So, in order to prove that 23 is the longest distance from a solved state, you have to compute the result of all possible 22-move sequences without reaching the 23-move state.
At any position, you can make one of 9 moves (rotate by 90 degrees any of the three planes in any of the 3 dimensions). So there are 9^22 possible sequences to enumerate.
9^22 is 984,770,902,183,611,232,881.
Hmmmm...tricky...
Of course, you can probably eliminate sequences that loop in fewer than 22 moves by working up from 1, meaning you don't need to revisit with those starting sequences as you go longer. There is where things get elegant.
Anyone have the phone number for Magrathea? I'll be over here doing some designing...
The value of this system is that there is no ambiguity in the marking.
Hanging chads, stray pencil marks, incompletely filled bubbles, are all unnecessary sources of error -- and, as we saw in 2000, enough ambiguity to turn the election on its head*.
The electronic recording also makes the initial tally all but instantaneous. Elections can be certified within minutes of the closing of the polls. Challenges to the result can be recounted much more quickly as well, with no haggling over what a ballot says, so long as the paper copies of the ballots are protected from damage.
* - Various studies conducted after the election showed varying results, but the one study that used the standards in place at the time of the election showed Gore got more valid votes. The Republicans' (possibly illegal) delaying tactics (those people storming the counting room were all GOP staffers, not the general public of Florida - you can see John Bolton clearly in one picture) and their majority on the Supreme Court did indeed induce a result counter to the wishes of the voters.
Seriously. In order for extortion to work, money has to change hands. Money can be traced, easily (don't believe what they say about Western Union). This is a great way to track down and capture the people who are spreading the virus. And the people whose files are encrypted could as easily have seen those files deleted, or worse. So it's no difference to them, except that they now have a hand in putting a crook behind bars.
The virus tossers are actually making their situation worse by turning to extortion. But they weren't all that bright to start with.
On the other hand, Sprint has always had the worst coverage anywhere I've used it.
Last time I tried it, I had it for about 2 weeks. 75% of my calls were dropped, and 100% of calls when I was driving. And there were constant dropouts in the conversations.
I got T-mobile and was happy with it. A year later, I sold my Sprint phone to a friend and he signed up with Sprint. He was okay with the service, but when I called him I recognized the dropouts and dropped calls. I warned him before, and I kept pointing it out, but he said he didn't have a problem with it.
I've switched from T-Mobile to Verizon (T-Mobile reduced its handset offerings). And they're about the same. Almost no calls get dropped with either one. And Verizon's data transfer rate is literall 10X as fast as what I had with T-Mobile.
If you have a problem with the conglomeration, complain to your legislators. Slashdot doesn't have a vote.
Sorry, this is all silly.
"Anti-matter" is not the opposite of matter. It is matter with opposite charge or other opposite properties. Mass has no opposite. It is there, or it isn't. (Or it is and then it isn't and then it is and then it isn't, on the level of quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field.)
And no, a hole isn't "anti-matter". It's merely a void in the surrounding matter. It rises because of a principle known as "buoyancy" which is really the gross action of the matter surrounding it causing pressure differentials as a function of distance from the CM. As long as the surrounding matter can flow, it can fill any displacement of the void, and the mass will tend to move down rather than up, and the void will therefore appear to tend to move up rather than down.
And no, hot-air balloons don't rise because of the heat, they rise because they make the air in the balloon less dense than the air outside the balloon. How they do it is not relevant. A rigid balloon and a vacuum pump would work, too.
Incandescents are not solid state.
The tungsten filament is constantly being turned into gas by the heat, and the gas is constantly recrystallizing onto the filament (by a process I forget the precise details of though I seem to recall it varies with the fourth power of temperature).
This happens at different rates depending on the curvature of the surface. It is slower in the flatter regions and faster near sharp corners. The effect is such that a nick in the filament, rather than becoming a choke-point for current and thus a place for catastrophic melting to occur, is filled in by the recrystallization. A bump spreads, becoming a smooth hill, which then slowly evaporates. The wire is self-maintaining while hot.
This is, in fact, the magic that caused the Tungsten filament to be the one that worked as an incandescent light, while all of the other materials failed catastrophically at the temperatures required to produce significant blackbody radiation to be useful lights.
By "solid state" they clearly mean a unit that does not require a gaseous environment (in this case tungsten gas in an otherwise evacuated space); they have mechanical robustness to think of as well.
They'd probably have to disqualify you if you came up with an incandescent filament material that put out 1100 lumens at 5 Watts, but that would be worth a whole lot more than $20 million, so you shouldn't be too upset about it.