1. Every drop of sea water contains 50 BILLION gold atoms. 2. ??? 3. PROFIT!!!
Seriously though, this has been known for some time. In "20,000 leagues under the sea" they were mining the ocean for gold, among other things. I imagine that in reality, the problem would be finding a cost effective method of extracting the gold.
Here's an example of how a similar situation might NOT work out:
Buy a house for $100,000 with 10% down (downpayment plus closing costs) at 5.75% , then experience a -8% deflation in housing prices for two years (rural area in down economy, buyer's market), then lose your job and have to sell your house fast (since you can't affort the house payment long without a job) so you lose another 10% or so, so you wind up, oh, owing more money then then your house sells for so you owe money at closing (money which you may not even have!), plus you are out of the 10 grand downpayment.
Now add in the possibility that you can't even deduct your mortgage interest because you don't have more deductions then your standard deduction...
And yes, there are some areas of the country where this is a realistic portrayal of the economic situation - parts of the Midwest and New England are a couple places I am aware of.
I got a Vanguard Aluminum briefcase at CompUSA for my Powerbook. They match very well due to the metallic looks of both and I don't have to worry about straps breaking, and the interior of the briefcase is padded as well. Then I got paranoid about people seeing me walk around town in an expensive silvery looking briefcase so now I put the briefcase into a fairly inexpensive backpack with sturdy straps and a snap-on top - no zipper to break at an inopportune time!
This is an excellent book. The author is to be commended for offering a free book such as this. Some parts of it were hard for me to read, basically because the site is (or was) open to editing, and therefore was a bit chaotic. But if you just stick to the main page and read through sequentially it goes pretty well. (Although for some reason the chapters for beginnings should be at the beginning, and they aren't.)
Overall, Good work! Where is the link to donate money to you via PayPal? (Just kidding, I hate paypal;) but you outta have some kind of donation link.
Most of the comments people are making seem to be of the opinions that these blacklists and blackholes are a good thing. So what I am about to say will probably not be very popular. In my experience, blacklists punish users more than spammers.
A while back I got a reply to my e-mail that had the word SPAM with a question mark inserted into the subject. After some correspondence I learned that my ISP had been "blacklisted" because they maintain open mail relays. I was snidely told I should complain to my ISP, as if I could somehow force them to fix the problem. Well I did send an e-mail telling them about the problem and asking what they could do. Their position on the subject was quite different. They felt that to close the mail relays would hurt their customers by preventing them from sending mail through the server even when they were not connected locally. Now before you point out that I could simply switch ISPs, keep in mind that I live in an area where there is not a big selection of ISPs. Anyway, their reply sounded like a lack of technical expertise to me, but apparently a few weeks later they changed their mind.
But now I had a new problem. I've got two internet connections, one which is a direct connection from my office, and the other which is a dialup connection from at home. Suddenly I found I was unable to send e-mail from my office account through my ISP account, nor could I send e-mail from my work account from at home, because both mail servers were rejecting mail not from or to their domain. This was an added pain because it meant that I had to keep changing the smtp server in my mail program everytime I switched locations.
I guess the point I am really trying to make is that various administrators will set things up the way they feel is best for the situation. However in this case closing open relaying prevented me from sending legitimate e-mails. I have a feeling that customers care less about preventing spam than they do about the system working for them. Yes, I hate spam too. On one of my accounts I've set up the system to reject e-mails from anyone not on my accept list. I still get the e-mail, only in a low priority directory that I occasionally check. The sender also gets a message telling them how they can bypass the filter. I can do this because I've got shell access on this account.
But it seems to me that blacklisting is wrong because first, it filters mail that could be from legitimate users, and second, it makes no attempt to inform the user that their e-mail was silently deleted. In my case I was lucky that my e-mail was simply flagged as possible spam, and not just deleted. Had I not found out from the recipient what was going on I might never have known.
This will also work for laptops. I recently purchased an external drive enclosure with a PCMCIA connector (also available in Firewire and USB), and a separate 3.5" hard drive. The cost of the two together was less than these external drives they advertise for backing up your notebook, plus I can reuse the drive enclosure for any 3.5" hard drive.
The drive enclosure was a bit more expensive than the rack mentioned above (under $100 with shipping) however it did come with a two sets of enclosures - one for the drive itself to use externally, and another to put in a PC cabinet if you want to hot swap the drive with it instead of using the card slot.
For example, if in August (or before) someone had said to the general public something like, "You can probably hijack an airplane with legal objects and then destroy a building with it", the passengers wouldn't have let the hijacking get anywhere, and the hijackers probably wouldn't have tried.
Good luck getting the desired results. Even after the fact people are still complaining about how the increase in airport security is mostly cosmetic. Not to mention the fact that if you are overheard even mentioning the word "bomb" in an airport, you are likely to be detained for a while. (This was true even before recent events...)
The point is, people are always coming up with ideas, but the policy makers, and the people in charge simply don't have the desire, resources, or whatever to act on very many of them. How does suggesting a possible vulnerability in airport security motivate the responsible person or persons to actually implement a change?
Ok, I understand the part about using a relational database instead of mapping a string hierarchy to identifiers. I agree with that part.
But could you explain what you mean when you say objects in a filesystem are forced to be serialized? And what orthogonal persistency is. It sure sounds good, but I would really like to know what it means.
He refused to say how he determined which sites were in violation, citing "proprietary" methods.
Well its obvious from the number of web sites that his "proprietary" method is visiting Google. Scarier still is that I recognized that number so quickly...:-)
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!)
(emphasis mine)
But then our friend goes on to claim:
There is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950.
Nice try, but you just referenced Joshua 10:12 in the Old Testament (written WAY before 1950, something that EVERYONE will agree on...):
12 Then Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, "O sun, stand still at Gibeon, And O moon in the valley of Aijalon."
Survey: Does anybody ever read stories that are two days old? Does anybody ever post to stories that are that old? Do moderators ever moderate stories that old?
If you're reading this thread and are a moderator, please moderate me DOWN, just so I know. I've even used a +1 bonus to make it easier to find. However, if you've come to this message some other way than by reading this thread (such as from my user page), or if you aren't moderating, instead you can reply to this message.
Thanks!
Marvin
So that's what Bush's revived star wars...
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 2
is REALLY for... blasting pirate satellites out of orbit;-)
I was on a long trip across the country and I kept noticing that it was taking me longer to get there than I had calculated. Turns out my odometer was 2% fast, meaning that it was reading 2% farther than I actually went.
When I talked to the dealer about it, I was informed that Honda actually designs their speedometers to read 10% faster than your actual speed! Sure enough when I measured it, the odometer was 2% fast but the odometer consistently 10% fast!
My problem with this is that I tend to drive right at the speed limit, mostly out of habit, and come to find out I'm actually driving 10% UNDER the speed limit. So around here where interstate speed limits are 70, I actually have to drive 77 just to be at the speed limit!
When we moved, the area we moved to did not have MLS. So, it was impossible to find anything online in the area. However, most of the stuff for sale was listed by all the realty agents in town.
On another topic, why is it that online displays of houses often are missing pictures? The same could be said of anything sold online, but for something as important as a house I have to wonder. Compared to the commission a realtor will get, would it really cost that much to get a digital camera with decent resolution and shoot some good pictures, inside and out?
California in general has higher prices than most of the nation on everything from real estate to gasoline. I used to think this was strange until I realized that it has always been that way.
Back in the mid 19th century gold rush to California, some people were able to make quite a bit of money taking extra durable items with them to sell when they reached their destination. This was true to some degree of other locations too; if you've ever played a frontier game such as Oregon Trail you find that each more distant output charges more for basic supplies, sometimes 400-500% more.
In a sense, I guess California has always been seen as the land of opportunity (and good weather). This natural attraction, as well as its relative distance from sources of basic supplies has contributed to above average prices. For the present generation the attraction has the added edge of technology, the perceived panacea for all our troubles.
Suppose you have a light which state is determined by a switch that takes zero time to turn on or off, timed in a halving geometric progression. Thus, the lamp turns on for one second, then off for the next 1/2 second, then on for the next 1/4 second, then off for the next 1/8th and so on. At the end of two seconds, is the lamp on or off?
Even if you have an instantaneous switch, that is, a switch that turns on or off instantly once you get the photon (or whatever triggers the cahnge) to the switch, you will probably reach a saturation point at which the switch is actually faster than whatever you are switching with.
An easy way to imagine this is to rephrase the question as: "What if we make the switch toggle as fast as it can?" Somewhere there is going to be a limiting factor and the switch is going to oscillate at some frequency. Then you'll probably have some kind of light (or EMF) source.
However, another interesting take off from the idea of an instantaneous switch is the concept I like to think of as "instant eternity". What if, instead of a switch which toggles at increases rates, you have some space-time phenomena (a black hole maybe) which causes the observer to experience time twice at an exponential rate? This is somewhat the opposite of time dialation where time slows. So the first second I experience is 1/2 second to you, the next second I experience is 1/4 second to you, and so on. I would in effect experience an eternity or an infinite time passage while you would only experience a finite time passage.
The interesting thing about this is that it could happen. All that has to happen is that the entire universe has to accelerate away from me as I remain at rest such. That's pretty improbable, but maybe there is some shortcut to this. The point is, there is a physically possible way to do this, only we need a technology to make it practical. Suppose there is such a way. Now what if different people used this technology, but each one used it at a different time. Would they all wind up in the same place?
Slashdot Mirror
How exactly would $4/gallon be fair to anybody but B.P. stockholders?
How would your driving habits change in the long term if gasoline prices tripled or quadrupled and your fuel budget did not?
1. Every drop of sea water contains 50 BILLION gold atoms.
2. ???
3. PROFIT!!!
Seriously though, this has been known for some time. In "20,000 leagues under the sea" they were mining the ocean for gold, among other things. I imagine that in reality, the problem would be finding a cost effective method of extracting the gold.
Here's an example of how a similar situation might NOT work out:
Buy a house for $100,000 with 10% down (downpayment plus closing costs) at 5.75% , then experience a -8% deflation in housing prices for two years (rural area in down economy, buyer's market), then lose your job and have to sell your house fast (since you can't affort the house payment long without a job) so you lose another 10% or so, so you wind up, oh, owing more money then then your house sells for so you owe money at closing (money which you may not even have!), plus you are out of the 10 grand downpayment.
Now add in the possibility that you can't even deduct your mortgage interest because you don't have more deductions then your standard deduction...
And yes, there are some areas of the country where this is a realistic portrayal of the economic situation - parts of the Midwest and New England are a couple places I am aware of.
I got a Vanguard Aluminum briefcase at CompUSA for my Powerbook. They match very well due to the metallic looks of both and I don't have to worry about straps breaking, and the interior of the briefcase is padded as well. Then I got paranoid about people seeing me walk around town in an expensive silvery looking briefcase so now I put the briefcase into a fairly inexpensive backpack with sturdy straps and a snap-on top - no zipper to break at an inopportune time!
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought "Surf"!
This is an excellent book. The author is to be commended for offering a free book such as this. Some parts of it were hard for me to read, basically because the site is (or was) open to editing, and therefore was a bit chaotic. But if you just stick to the main page and read through sequentially it goes pretty well. (Although for some reason the chapters for beginnings should be at the beginning, and they aren't.)
;) but you outta have some kind of donation link.
Overall, Good work! Where is the link to donate money to you via PayPal? (Just kidding, I hate paypal
Most of the comments people are making seem to be of the opinions that these blacklists and blackholes are a good thing. So what I am about to say will probably not be very popular. In my experience, blacklists punish users more than spammers.
A while back I got a reply to my e-mail that had the word SPAM with a question mark inserted into the subject. After some correspondence I learned that my ISP had been "blacklisted" because they maintain open mail relays. I was snidely told I should complain to my ISP, as if I could somehow force them to fix the problem. Well I did send an e-mail telling them about the problem and asking what they could do. Their position on the subject was quite different. They felt that to close the mail relays would hurt their customers by preventing them from sending mail through the server even when they were not connected locally. Now before you point out that I could simply switch ISPs, keep in mind that I live in an area where there is not a big selection of ISPs. Anyway, their reply sounded like a lack of technical expertise to me, but apparently a few weeks later they changed their mind.
But now I had a new problem. I've got two internet connections, one which is a direct connection from my office, and the other which is a dialup connection from at home. Suddenly I found I was unable to send e-mail from my office account through my ISP account, nor could I send e-mail from my work account from at home, because both mail servers were rejecting mail not from or to their domain. This was an added pain because it meant that I had to keep changing the smtp server in my mail program everytime I switched locations.
I guess the point I am really trying to make is that various administrators will set things up the way they feel is best for the situation. However in this case closing open relaying prevented me from sending legitimate e-mails. I have a feeling that customers care less about preventing spam than they do about the system working for them. Yes, I hate spam too. On one of my accounts I've set up the system to reject e-mails from anyone not on my accept list. I still get the e-mail, only in a low priority directory that I occasionally check. The sender also gets a message telling them how they can bypass the filter. I can do this because I've got shell access on this account.
But it seems to me that blacklisting is wrong because first, it filters mail that could be from legitimate users, and second, it makes no attempt to inform the user that their e-mail was silently deleted. In my case I was lucky that my e-mail was simply flagged as possible spam, and not just deleted. Had I not found out from the recipient what was going on I might never have known.
The new question to ponder will be...
How many Beowulf clusters can dance on the head of a pin?
46309 to 469313 would be a lot of comments.
Try 469309 to 469313.
This will also work for laptops. I recently purchased an external drive enclosure with a PCMCIA connector (also available in Firewire and USB), and a separate 3.5" hard drive. The cost of the two together was less than these external drives they advertise for backing up your notebook, plus I can reuse the drive enclosure for any 3.5" hard drive.
The drive enclosure was a bit more expensive than the rack mentioned above (under $100 with shipping) however it did come with a two sets of enclosures - one for the drive itself to use externally, and another to put in a PC cabinet if you want to hot swap the drive with it instead of using the card slot.
Bill Gates' reaction to the settlement
Notice the poor innocent youth to his right...
For example, if in August (or before) someone had said to the general public something like, "You can probably hijack an airplane with legal objects and then destroy a building with it", the passengers wouldn't have let the hijacking get anywhere, and the hijackers probably wouldn't have tried.
Good luck getting the desired results. Even after the fact people are still complaining about how the increase in airport security is mostly cosmetic. Not to mention the fact that if you are overheard even mentioning the word "bomb" in an airport, you are likely to be detained for a while. (This was true even before recent events...)
The point is, people are always coming up with ideas, but the policy makers, and the people in charge simply don't have the desire, resources, or whatever to act on very many of them. How does suggesting a possible vulnerability in airport security motivate the responsible person or persons to actually implement a change?
Ok, I understand the part about using a relational database instead of mapping a string hierarchy to identifiers. I agree with that part.
But could you explain what you mean when you say objects in a filesystem are forced to be serialized? And what orthogonal persistency is. It sure sounds good, but I would really like to know what it means.
pieces of Gecko have been spotted in a beta version of the next CompuServe client
Actually they've spotted pieces of Geico, which can save CompuServe customers 15% or more on car insurance.
Just today Google updated their counter to the above number. I wonder why it's always an even multiple of 1000...
... ordered 1,387,529,000 web sites shut down...
:-)
He refused to say how he determined which sites were in violation, citing "proprietary" methods.
Well its obvious from the number of web sites that his "proprietary" method is visiting Google. Scarier still is that I recognized that number so quickly...
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!)
(emphasis mine)
But then our friend goes on to claim:
There is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950.
Nice try, but you just referenced Joshua 10:12 in the Old Testament (written WAY before 1950, something that EVERYONE will agree on...):
12 Then Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, "O sun, stand still at Gibeon, And O moon in the valley of Aijalon."
Survey: Does anybody ever read stories that are two days old? Does anybody ever post to stories that are that old? Do moderators ever moderate stories that old?
If you're reading this thread and are a moderator, please moderate me DOWN, just so I know. I've even used a +1 bonus to make it easier to find. However, if you've come to this message some other way than by reading this thread (such as from my user page), or if you aren't moderating, instead you can reply to this message.
Thanks!
Marvin
is REALLY for... blasting pirate satellites out of orbit ;-)
I was on a long trip across the country and I kept noticing that it was taking me longer to get there than I had calculated. Turns out my odometer was 2% fast, meaning that it was reading 2% farther than I actually went.
When I talked to the dealer about it, I was informed that Honda actually designs their speedometers to read 10% faster than your actual speed! Sure enough when I measured it, the odometer was 2% fast but the odometer consistently 10% fast!
My problem with this is that I tend to drive right at the speed limit, mostly out of habit, and come to find out I'm actually driving 10% UNDER the speed limit. So around here where interstate speed limits are 70, I actually have to drive 77 just to be at the speed limit!
When we moved, the area we moved to did not have MLS. So, it was impossible to find anything online in the area. However, most of the stuff for sale was listed by all the realty agents in town.
On another topic, why is it that online displays of houses often are missing pictures? The same could be said of anything sold online, but for something as important as a house I have to wonder. Compared to the commission a realtor will get, would it really cost that much to get a digital camera with decent resolution and shoot some good pictures, inside and out?
Well I don't know about all solar panels, but the booklet that came with mine said the panels are more efficient in hotter temperatures.
From tests I have done I have personally seen maximum output power decrease over 20% between 30 degree (F) and 90 degrees.
Marv
California in general has higher prices than most of the nation on everything from real estate to gasoline. I used to think this was strange until I realized that it has always been that way.
Back in the mid 19th century gold rush to California, some people were able to make quite a bit of money taking extra durable items with them to sell when they reached their destination. This was true to some degree of other locations too; if you've ever played a frontier game such as Oregon Trail you find that each more distant output charges more for basic supplies, sometimes 400-500% more.
In a sense, I guess California has always been seen as the land of opportunity (and good weather). This natural attraction, as well as its relative distance from sources of basic supplies has contributed to above average prices. For the present generation the attraction has the added edge of technology, the perceived panacea for all our troubles.
try www.kernel.org!
Suppose you have a light which state is determined by a switch that takes zero time to turn on or off, timed in a halving geometric progression. Thus, the lamp turns on for one second, then off for the next 1/2 second, then on for the next 1/4 second, then off for the next 1/8th and so on. At the end of two seconds, is the lamp on or off?
Even if you have an instantaneous switch, that is, a switch that turns on or off instantly once you get the photon (or whatever triggers the cahnge) to the switch, you will probably reach a saturation point at which the switch is actually faster than whatever you are switching with.
An easy way to imagine this is to rephrase the question as: "What if we make the switch toggle as fast as it can?" Somewhere there is going to be a limiting factor and the switch is going to oscillate at some frequency. Then you'll probably have some kind of light (or EMF) source.
However, another interesting take off from the idea of an instantaneous switch is the concept I like to think of as "instant eternity". What if, instead of a switch which toggles at increases rates, you have some space-time phenomena (a black hole maybe) which causes the observer to experience time twice at an exponential rate? This is somewhat the opposite of time dialation where time slows. So the first second I experience is 1/2 second to you, the next second I experience is 1/4 second to you, and so on. I would in effect experience an eternity or an infinite time passage while you would only experience a finite time passage.
The interesting thing about this is that it could happen. All that has to happen is that the entire universe has to accelerate away from me as I remain at rest such. That's pretty improbable, but maybe there is some shortcut to this. The point is, there is a physically possible way to do this, only we need a technology to make it practical. Suppose there is such a way. Now what if different people used this technology, but each one used it at a different time. Would they all wind up in the same place?