As someone who took "Physics for Engineers"...
on
The Three Hat Problem
·
· Score: 2
Assuming typical lakes, boats, and blocks, any difference in lake level caused by an action on the boat or block will be unmeasurably small, so we can assume it will remain effectively unchanged. --
This is how the concrete block in the boat was displacing water in proportion to its mass, obviously (which it equally obviously would no longer do once in the water). It was covered in the original post. --
Simultaneous or sequential doesn't change anything
on
The Three Hat Problem
·
· Score: 1
The probabilities are the same whether the coins are tossed sequentially or simultaneously. I don't know where you got the bizarre idea that they aren't. A basic concept of probability is that independent probabilistic events such as coin tosses are not affected by past results.
You can't change the probability of any individual guessing the correct hat, which is always 50%, but by choosing the proper condition of when to guess a certain answer you can concentrate the probability
In the winning method with 0.75 probability win, all players still guess wrong 50% of the time they guess, it's just that all wrong guesses are packed into one game where they don't do any extra harm, while the right guesses are spread out to a maximum one per game. --
Sail boats have the right of way over powered craft, even if the sail boat is smaller.
It's a matter of maneuverability. Sail boats are harder to steer than a motorboat, big cargo ships are harder to steer than small pleasure craft.
I don't think any really simple rule about size or propulsion applies 100% of the time; I doubt an oil supertanker gives way to a 4-man sailing boat. --
They want you to think that it's a responsible way to deal with a growing population of car-owners, but it's really a way of dealing with the growing population.
Back then, you could download the source off of a university server (IIRC, they had a JIT even back then). All the documentation was in Curl, and there were neat things like a falling blocks game.
I kept watching for something interesting to happen, but the page disappeared. A while later (still years ago), a "coming soon" commercial page popped up.
I mailed the guy who wrote it, and he made it pretty clear that it was going proprietary all the way.
A real shame. It was a great idea that got hung up for years while they decided to develop in private, hidden away from all the potential volunteer contributors, then killed by a decision to try to sell a programming/document language like a pile of cabbages. They don't seem to have realized that there have been better hypertext languages than HTML since before HTML was made, it's that HTML was an open standard supported by free software that made it so important. --
This is a bit like calling a cylindrical coil with its ends capped by disc conductors connecting to ends of the wire, "a cylindrical conductor which breaks the laws of electromagnetism by having too strong a magnetic field and one differently shaped and oriented".
This wasn't some freak effect in violation of current theory, but a device carefully designed according to current theory.
It's cooler than fresnel lenses (which could be considered to violate optics laws, if you ignore their small structure and treat them as flat plates), but not really more profound in its implications. --
The real problem is the damage we're going to cause with the slingshot effect. Sure, it sounds like a good idea, stealing momentum from a planet to send our satellites to others...
But every action has an equal and opposite reaction: we're sending planets hurtling back the way the satellites came! --
Gold has/never/ gone out of fashion. At no point in time has any society said "my, that gold is ugly stuff, let's get rid of it ASAP"; whenever it's been considered inappropriate for individual adornment, it's merely been appropriated to glorify state or religion. Even if all societies did stop valuing it for decoration, it has many valuable industrial uses. Its rock bottom price (barring, say, asteroid mining, which will finally destroy gold's worth as a portable store of value by making absurd supplies available) due to industrial value alone is not less than a quarter the current price (and I'm being conservative). Compare rhodium, palladium, etc. OTOH, there is no bottom limit on the value of paper money, it goes right down to nothing with depressing regularity.
It's true, gold will not be good for that much longer. Asteroid mining, or core tapping, has to come sooner or later, and then a day's skilled labor will buy a ton of gold or more. Personally, I think we're going to drop money in favor of automated commodity trading, since our computers can keep track of current trading value quite easily. For simplicity of human consideration, composite value indices will replace fiat money; you'll still think in dollars (now defined as complex calculations of a variety of indispensible products), but you'll transfer grams of gasoline, helium, type 137 wheat, antimatter, etc.
Stocks have exactly the same intrinsic value as scrap paper, as does paper money. That's what intrinsic value is: the use you (or others) could make of the thing you're holding, not what it entitles you to by law. Abstractions such as shares in a company do not have intrinsic value.
Another way of putting it is that intrinsic value is all the value they can't take away from you without taking away the actual object. I dunno about you, but I'd still want a few ounces of gold, even if I couldn't sell it or trade it. --
E-gold started out nice, but they rewrote their contract so you can't actually get your gold unless you're their gold-dealer.
1) they only trade in big, hideously valuable bars, 2) they reserve the right to only deliver orders of a certain minimum number of bars (which they can change at their discretion)
The internal freedom of press is more important than the external one. Mockery of one's most important values is an assault and a form of mind control.
We must be free. Free from bad influences and wrong ideas. Free from the exhortations of rabble-rousers and apologists.
Most importantly, we must be free from the damage caused by those who don't share all products of their work, free of the possibility that source code will be withheld. Support Free Software. --
Compare: someone plays Pacman to an incredibly high score, and another person pays to take over the game, then brags about his great score.
Or (competitive version): a great athlete wins his way to the finals in Olympic Wrestling (an elimination tournament-type sport), you pay him $500000 and he lets you take his place. You are now guaranteed a silver medal.
Also (perhaps the most accurate): a great chess player wins his way to the finals of the world championship. One move away from winning, he sells his place in the game to the highest bidder.
E-Shells - trading in the only stuff guaranteed to have long term value: ammunition.
Everybody knows that this "civilization" thing isn't going to last forever, and when it breaks down, you're going to want a big pile of bullets. Not only are they useful, but they'll make great trade items, as they are highly portable and will surely become rare and valuable once the industrial machinery that produces them grinds to a halt.
We guarantee always to have in our ammunition dump a full stock of all , and we will transport them to you. We provide account in the four most popular civilian rounds: 12-guage shotgun shells, 30-06 centerfire rifle cartridges,.22 rimfire cartridges, and.45 handgun rounds. You can transfer whole shells or as little as 1/1000 of a shell from one account to another securely and instantly over the internet!
At least you can wipe your ass with paper money, but what can you do with gold? Does it keep you warm on a cold night, or shelter you from a snowstorm? Can you eat gold? Well, you could eat a bullet (surely less painful than bludgeoning yourself to death with a gold bar, or giving yourself enough papercuts with a dollar to be fatal), but we're thinking more along the lines of hunting and banditry.
E-Shells: the official e-commerce solution for the new dark ages.
Maybe it will take off when all the survivalist libertarians give up on E-Gold. --
The shiny rock doesn't represent something valuable, it is something valuable. Nobody decided by fiat that gold would be money, it's just everybody's favorite stuff. Many people spend a rather absurd portion of their wealth on gold ornaments.
Similarly, copper, silver, and other coin metals are also much in demand, and small enough to be worth carrying around in your pockets for trade.
There's nothing at all irrational about a market based on the trade value of shiny things. --
Every widely used language has a transliteration method to ASCII characters. They might be ugly, and they might be unpopular, but they work.
You may think the possibility of things like "surasshudotto/slashdot" are appalling, but this would mean replacing it with things like "U0fa2U235fUa79eU890dU100aU12baU67d2Uc390U1337".
I mean, you can't say it, you can't memorize it, and you're likely to screw it up even if you do write it down; it has to be passed around on computer, except for native language speakers with the proper software and training in that software. If the whole world has to standardize on something, it should be something short, sweet, and usable (if inconvenient) to all, like ASCII. Preferably the "standard keyboard" subset of ASCII; 3 rows of about ten keys, plus a thumb bar for the single most common key, and a border of peripherally useful keys, is just about ideal for human hands. Compare the proliferation of struggling methods of writing (non-romaji) in Japanese to the near-universal, simple and efficient typewriter method of English. Anyone can learn the alphabet in a few hours (practically everybody has already done so), and type at a computer instantly if they know the alphabet.
The highest points on the Sears tower, the tops of the decoratively-enhanced dual antennae, are higher than the purely decorative spires atop the Petronas towers. If they served no purpose whatsoever, the Sears tower would take the prize. If you look at scale pictures of them together, the Sears tower looks much taller; any layman would pick it as the taller building without hesitation.
Of course, the CN tower easily has them both beat, though it doesn't have usable floor-space for most of its height (so it's apparently not officially a "building"!). The KTHI-TV broadcasting tower in North Dakota is even taller, though I believe it is supported by guy-wires (which disqualifies it as a "free standing structure" -- the CN tower's claim to fame).
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming typical lakes, boats, and blocks, any difference in lake level caused by an action on the boat or block will be unmeasurably small, so we can assume it will remain effectively unchanged.
--
This is how the concrete block in the boat was displacing water in proportion to its mass, obviously (which it equally obviously would no longer do once in the water). It was covered in the original post.
--
The probabilities are the same whether the coins are tossed sequentially or simultaneously. I don't know where you got the bizarre idea that they aren't. A basic concept of probability is that independent probabilistic events such as coin tosses are not affected by past results.
You can't change the probability of any individual guessing the correct hat, which is always 50%, but by choosing the proper condition of when to guess a certain answer you can concentrate the probability
In the winning method with 0.75 probability win, all players still guess wrong 50% of the time they guess, it's just that all wrong guesses are packed into one game where they don't do any extra harm, while the right guesses are spread out to a maximum one per game.
--
Very cool.
--
Sail boats have the right of way over powered craft, even if the sail boat is smaller.
It's a matter of maneuverability. Sail boats are harder to steer than a motorboat, big cargo ships are harder to steer than small pleasure craft.
I don't think any really simple rule about size or propulsion applies 100% of the time; I doubt an oil supertanker gives way to a 4-man sailing boat.
--
But the whole suits should be in a variety of fruity colors.
"I find your lack of faith... refreshing. Continue to Think Different, in accord with company policy."
--
They want you to think that it's a responsible way to deal with a growing population of car-owners, but it's really a way of dealing with the growing population.
Soyoil fuel is made of people!
--
...or -179 degrees Farenheit.
Not a problem.
--
#include ;
/*END_PROG*/ and no bugs!*/}
void main(){
char buffer[12]="Hello world!";
printf("%S",&buffer);
return 1;
/*Yay done
--
Back then, you could download the source off of a university server (IIRC, they had a JIT even back then). All the documentation was in Curl, and there were neat things like a falling blocks game.
I kept watching for something interesting to happen, but the page disappeared. A while later (still years ago), a "coming soon" commercial page popped up.
I mailed the guy who wrote it, and he made it pretty clear that it was going proprietary all the way.
A real shame. It was a great idea that got hung up for years while they decided to develop in private, hidden away from all the potential volunteer contributors, then killed by a decision to try to sell a programming/document language like a pile of cabbages. They don't seem to have realized that there have been better hypertext languages than HTML since before HTML was made, it's that HTML was an open standard supported by free software that made it so important.
--
This is a bit like calling a cylindrical coil with its ends capped by disc conductors connecting to ends of the wire, "a cylindrical conductor which breaks the laws of electromagnetism by having too strong a magnetic field and one differently shaped and oriented".
This wasn't some freak effect in violation of current theory, but a device carefully designed according to current theory.
It's cooler than fresnel lenses (which could be considered to violate optics laws, if you ignore their small structure and treat them as flat plates), but not really more profound in its implications.
--
Food remains a strong seller.
Residential electricity sales show no sign of declining in the e-slump.
People are still willing to pay to be entertained.
--
"See, these programmers are the most productive, their dials go to 11."
"That's odd, how productive are they?"
"Well, most programmers' dials only go to 10, so 11's like 1 higher."
(apologies to the Spinal Tap folks)
--
The real problem is the damage we're going to cause with the slingshot effect. Sure, it sounds like a good idea, stealing momentum from a planet to send our satellites to others...
But every action has an equal and opposite reaction: we're sending planets hurtling back the way the satellites came!
--
Gold has /never/ gone out of fashion. At no point in time has any society said "my, that gold is ugly stuff, let's get rid of it ASAP"; whenever it's been considered inappropriate for individual adornment, it's merely been appropriated to glorify state or religion. Even if all societies did stop valuing it for decoration, it has many valuable industrial uses. Its rock bottom price (barring, say, asteroid mining, which will finally destroy gold's worth as a portable store of value by making absurd supplies available) due to industrial value alone is not less than a quarter the current price (and I'm being conservative). Compare rhodium, palladium, etc. OTOH, there is no bottom limit on the value of paper money, it goes right down to nothing with depressing regularity.
It's true, gold will not be good for that much longer. Asteroid mining, or core tapping, has to come sooner or later, and then a day's skilled labor will buy a ton of gold or more. Personally, I think we're going to drop money in favor of automated commodity trading, since our computers can keep track of current trading value quite easily. For simplicity of human consideration, composite value indices will replace fiat money; you'll still think in dollars (now defined as complex calculations of a variety of indispensible products), but you'll transfer grams of gasoline, helium, type 137 wheat, antimatter, etc.
Stocks have exactly the same intrinsic value as scrap paper, as does paper money. That's what intrinsic value is: the use you (or others) could make of the thing you're holding, not what it entitles you to by law. Abstractions such as shares in a company do not have intrinsic value.
Another way of putting it is that intrinsic value is all the value they can't take away from you without taking away the actual object. I dunno about you, but I'd still want a few ounces of gold, even if I couldn't sell it or trade it.
--
only with magpies.
--
E-gold started out nice, but they rewrote their contract so you can't actually get your gold unless you're their gold-dealer.
1) they only trade in big, hideously valuable bars, 2) they reserve the right to only deliver orders of a certain minimum number of bars (which they can change at their discretion)
It's fiat money, folks.
E-gold does not guarantee to ever give you what's yours.
--
The internal freedom of press is more important than the external one. Mockery of one's most important values is an assault and a form of mind control.
We must be free. Free from bad influences and wrong ideas. Free from the exhortations of rabble-rousers and apologists.
Most importantly, we must be free from the damage caused by those who don't share all products of their work, free of the possibility that source code will be withheld. Support Free Software.
--
Compare: someone plays Pacman to an incredibly high score, and another person pays to take over the game, then brags about his great score.
Or (competitive version): a great athlete wins his way to the finals in Olympic Wrestling (an elimination tournament-type sport), you pay him $500000 and he lets you take his place. You are now guaranteed a silver medal.
Also (perhaps the most accurate): a great chess player wins his way to the finals of the world championship. One move away from winning, he sells his place in the game to the highest bidder.
How could this not be cheating?
--
E-Shells - trading in the only stuff guaranteed to have long term value: ammunition.
.22 rimfire cartridges, and .45 handgun rounds. You can transfer whole shells or as little as 1/1000 of a shell from one account to another securely and instantly over the internet!
Everybody knows that this "civilization" thing isn't going to last forever, and when it breaks down, you're going to want a big pile of bullets. Not only are they useful, but they'll make great trade items, as they are highly portable and will surely become rare and valuable once the industrial machinery that produces them grinds to a halt.
We guarantee always to have in our ammunition dump a full stock of all , and we will transport them to you. We provide account in the four most popular civilian rounds: 12-guage shotgun shells, 30-06 centerfire rifle cartridges,
At least you can wipe your ass with paper money, but what can you do with gold? Does it keep you warm on a cold night, or shelter you from a snowstorm? Can you eat gold? Well, you could eat a bullet (surely less painful than bludgeoning yourself to death with a gold bar, or giving yourself enough papercuts with a dollar to be fatal), but we're thinking more along the lines of hunting and banditry.
E-Shells: the official e-commerce solution for the new dark ages.
Maybe it will take off when all the survivalist libertarians give up on E-Gold.
--
The shiny rock doesn't represent something valuable, it is something valuable. Nobody decided by fiat that gold would be money, it's just everybody's favorite stuff. Many people spend a rather absurd portion of their wealth on gold ornaments.
Similarly, copper, silver, and other coin metals are also much in demand, and small enough to be worth carrying around in your pockets for trade.
There's nothing at all irrational about a market based on the trade value of shiny things.
--
no text
--
Every widely used language has a transliteration method to ASCII characters. They might be ugly, and they might be unpopular, but they work.
You may think the possibility of things like "surasshudotto/slashdot" are appalling, but this would mean replacing it with things like "U0fa2U235fUa79eU890dU100aU12baU67d2Uc390U1337".
I mean, you can't say it, you can't memorize it, and you're likely to screw it up even if you do write it down; it has to be passed around on computer, except for native language speakers with the proper software and training in that software. If the whole world has to standardize on something, it should be something short, sweet, and usable (if inconvenient) to all, like ASCII. Preferably the "standard keyboard" subset of ASCII; 3 rows of about ten keys, plus a thumb bar for the single most common key, and a border of peripherally useful keys, is just about ideal for human hands. Compare the proliferation of struggling methods of writing (non-romaji) in Japanese to the near-universal, simple and efficient typewriter method of English. Anyone can learn the alphabet in a few hours (practically everybody has already done so), and type at a computer instantly if they know the alphabet.
ASCII is just easier.
--
The highest points on the Sears tower, the tops of the decoratively-enhanced dual antennae, are higher than the purely decorative spires atop the Petronas towers. If they served no purpose whatsoever, the Sears tower would take the prize. If you look at scale pictures of them together, the Sears tower looks much taller; any layman would pick it as the taller building without hesitation.
Of course, the CN tower easily has them both beat, though it doesn't have usable floor-space for most of its height (so it's apparently not officially a "building"!). The KTHI-TV broadcasting tower in North Dakota is even taller, though I believe it is supported by guy-wires (which disqualifies it as a "free standing structure" -- the CN tower's claim to fame).
More info here.
--
the building designed by the chief architect with the largest penis.
This accolade goes to a strip mall in Minneapolis, by towering acting architect Benjamin Johnson, locally known as "The Big Johnson Building".
There's another category for "highest architect", but the winning building fell down less than 2 weeks after official completion.
--