Of course, the colluders have a bunch of big advantages. For starters, they see many more of the cards in play, and they don't go in waiting for a card that can't come up.
The reason you go all-in is to scare off draws. A big hand generally doesn't win against a lot of draws - only against a few. If the odds were still in favor of the pocket aces, all those poker books wouldn't tell you to play big hands differently from draws. Any poker book will tell you to never go all-in on a friendly game where everybody stays in and holds out to the showdown. You aren't scaring anybody out with your big bet. That is what you face with the colluders. Your best bet against a loose hand is to bet strictly on the basis of your pot-odds and take them to the cleaners, but in this case it isn't just a loose hand - those players are smart too.
In general if you play against colluders you're going to be taken to the cleaners - especially if they're using software to calculate odds/etc.
The interesting thing is that the guy's big mistake was to not pay attention to the signs that they were onto him. If he had just run out of NJ and not come back he'd probably have been fine. They had to catch him using counterfeit tokens within the state. This is because tokens are really just play-money and it isn't illegal to counterfeit them except in states that allow gambling...
It is only natural that increasing the number of governors increases the power of individual citizens.
When you have 1 senator for 10 million people, they are too busy to see anybody who doesn't have a suitcase full of cash for their next campaign ad. When you have 100 people running an entire country, business can afford to toss a few million at each of them. A $1 million contribution to somebody who represents New York is like spending only 10 cents per voter on an issue that might let your business overcharge each of them $10/yr.
On the other hand, when you have 400 people running NH, each person only represents 3000 people. You can actually get to know 3000 people - that is smaller than many colleges, and most people at least recognize most of their classmates at a college of that size even if they don't know all their names. A campaign contribution of $1 million is like spending $300 per voter - not many schemes are that profitable that it makes sense to subvert democracy to that degree.
The ultimate extreme is direct democracy, of course, where no individual gets the campaign contributions, but instead you advertise on the issues. Direct democracy has many problems - one of which being the apathy and mediocrity of the general population. However, increasing the size of Cognress would probably still be a step in the right direction - there is a balance of course.
Keep in mind that back in the 1800's, congress wasn't a whole lot smaller than it is today, but the population was WAY smaller. If Cognress grew proportionately it would probably look like the Republic in Star Wars. Even so, that probably isn't a bad thing...
Again, you insure the car, not the person. Your car's insurance goes up if there is a teenager in the house, and if there is a driver with tickets in the house.
Many insurance policies do offer coverage for rental cars, which of course is an exception to this principle. This is by no means automatic - if your policy doesn't explicitly cover rental cars, then you are NOT covered. Again, your car is insured, not you. Likewise, if you're driving a friend's car, most likely your insurance won't cover you.
Diesel has more energy per galon than gasoline, so it gets better milage.
I think it is actually just a result of the higher compression ratios. The actual energy content of diesel isn't all that different (in terms of kcal/gallon).
The question I have is why nobody has come up with a diesel hybrid. You have all these arguments that hybrids are no better than old-style diesels, which is true. The diesel engine is just a whole lot more efficient.
So, why not just make a diesel hybrid? Best of both worlds, and if you only need to tank up every 800 miles don't tell me you can't find find a gas station that sells it...
Except remove it from the public domain, I daresay?
Well, any derived work you make could be made fully proprietary. What you can't do is claim copyright over the original work, since that would be fraud (to claim copyright you must claim authorship or assignment, which would be a lie). You could put one comment in the source code and legitimately claim copyright, but the original source code without the comment would be public domain.
If someone says "it's public domain", my first question is "so, what does that mean?". A BSD license is a know quantity, IMHO.
Uh, the meaning of public domain was known AGES before BSD was ever invented.
It means that you relinquish copyright on the code. Anybody can do anything they want with it without fear. ANYTHING. That of course is the default with the 1st ammendment, but copyright is a limited restraint on freedom of expression. BSD is a far less limited restraint. Public domain is no restraint except that which is prohibited by other laws.
BSD does in fact have a few restrictions - such as not being able to sue the author of the software for failure to perform against some set of requirements that the author obviously wasn't aware of. This is a big reason behind why it is used. However, I wouldn't say that public domain isn't a known quantity.
I'm not advocating public domain (actually, I'm far more a GPL fan), but it isn't like there is any big mystery behind what it is...
Obviously the comment is childish and should be restated.
However, I do want to point out that on some archs (such as amd64) reiserfs has only recently become stable, and reiser4 has a reputation for killing hard drives. Since the graphical installer project lags behind the rest of gentoo in general, it would only be natural that support for it on this platform would be even further behind. As seen from a few posts above, apparently the libs for reiser have a reputation for being buggy, and different distros take varying stances on the risk.
That said I've used reiserfs on x86 with no problems at all - it is considered fairly stable there, although as pointed out libparted still causes issues with it.
Perhaps the problem is the fact that the land is owned by the government.
If it were owned by a lumber company, they would make sure that any tree poachers are shot on sight, since they're stealling their raw materials. A lumber company would also manage the trees so that the land maintains its value (even if they intended to move on someday they would be able to sell the land for more money if it had trees on it 5-years away from cutting age than if it were a wasteland).
The problem is that the land that nobody owns, nobody cares for - except the government. And when the government owns 5 billion acres of forest and has 25 rangers to patrol it, you're not going to be enforcing any laws...
In theory they could just use software. There is no reason that a CD player can't speed-adjust just like an LP. And for what they pay for their LPs it could easily be done. Certainly with a little software it would be trivial (just have a library of songs, with the beats already marked in them).
In any case, this isn't a case of LPs being "better." Rather, this is a case of tradition. I'm sure there are already CD players on the market suitable for rappers. The only thing they'll miss is scratching, but I'm guessing that most DJs who use scratching probably have a separate sratch LP/record - I can't imagine they go replacing their needles and records every 25 songs...
I'm looking at various methods of backup redundancy but it will take conscious effort over many years, transfering and re-transfering these files to keep them intact.
Shouldn't be that bad. You probably have a half-dozen CDs/DVDs, and you simply need to recopy them every 5 years. By the time you come around to doing this twice, you'll be copying them onto whatever the latest high-tech media is that stores 1TB/disk, and you'll be feeling nostalgic about those days when you actually needed a shoebox full of DVDs to do a windows install...
LPs were "killed" by CDs, yet enthusiats and some DJs are still using them for various properties - including superior sound - that the CD don't hold.
Uh, the only people I know that use LPs are the same kinds of folks who buy $70 monster fiber optic cables and $1000 harmonically-aligned speaker stands. For some folks their wallets are just that much bigger than their sales-resistance. And, it always feels nice to be one of only 100 people in the country who knows that all the PhD engineers out there are wrong.
Film will just be the new LP for a while, and pretty soon the big market will be for $1000 archival-quality, radiation-proof, chromatically-aligned, and otherwise buzzward-compliant film-canisters to carry it around in.
Sure, film is cheaper to scale up (but how many people are shooting medium format outside of the professional photo community?). However, my understanding is that even medium-format is starting to get competition from ultra-high-res sensors that are themselves getting much larger.
It is just simple physics. If you capture more dpi in a CCD than you have grain-per-inch on film (or whatever the stat is called), then you can reproduce the image onto any media you want digitally, no matter what the guy wearing crystals and magnets says. In almost every area of science CCDs have replaced film for precisely this reason. It is just recent news that they've gotten cheap enough for consumers to afford. When was the last time somebody used film in a telescope, autoradiograph, or X-Ray crystallography experiment? (Granted, the latter two are tending to use image-plate technology which have many of the benefits of CCDs but are cheaper. They are still digitally scanned.)
Nothing wrong with film, and I'm sure it will always have some uses. However, except for a few niche areas most of those uses will be by the same sort who currently use LPs...
(In theory ontopic, with regard to the post I'm replying to - but clearly not in regard to the article itself.)
My understanding of auto insurance in most of the US is that you don't insure drivers at all. You insure cars. So, they weren't asking to cover the rest of your household (they were already covered if they drove a car, as would be a complete stranger if they had your permission to drive your car).
Rather, they were using the other members of your home to judge the risk of your car being involved in a loss. For example, if you happen to live with a car thief your car is at a higher risk of being in a crash whether you intend for him to drive your car or not. It is legal for insurance companies to profile in this manner.
If you have a house with 3 drivers and one car, the insurance company is going to assume that they will drive the car. On the other hand, if you live alone but you let your 10 neighbors borrow your car 10 times a day the insurance company won't figure it out. And it is perfectly legal.
Of course, Ohio may vary, but this is fairly standard from my understanding. In general you insure cars, not people.
Why don't you and a friend down the street set up a 2-wire phone system between your homes (easy enough to do). Then, try to obtain permission to string the wires over the public phone system across that nice tract of land that the township has allodial title for.
And that is for something that isn't threatening the business model of the local phone company. Next, try actually setting up a competitive phone system for your neighborhood. Even if you had a petition signed by every person within a mile of your house it would take a decade to make its way through court, and then you could start paying the local phone company to borrow the use of their poles.
Hey, don't get me wrong - I voted libertarian in the last election. And I'd be open to laws that made utilities competitive. However, the laws AREN'T written that way now, and trying to pretend that they are will just cause you to go bankrupt...
You know what, open up your own telephone company by laying your own cable down to compete, you have every right to do so.
Uh, a few problems with that.
1. If you tried it, you'd be tossed in jail, since in most communities the phone company is the only company allowed to go stringing wires all over the place. At the very least they have far less expensive access to do so. They also own the poles and can charge your company for their use at a rate they deem fair.
2. In most areas the existing infrastructure was paid for by the community - either directly through taxes, or through subsidies of some sort, or through emininent domain, or through granted-monopoly-status in which the company could recover their sunk costs. A new provider won't get any of these benefits, and cannot compete.
Now, if the government were to eminent-domain all the poles/wires, and then auction them back out to competitive phone companies, you might have a point. However, I doubt that is going to happen.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for the free market. However, the market in question is not free...
You seem knowledgable and forgive me if my questions seem amaturish, but I'm curious about:
1. Has your analysis taken into account the possibility that quasars could be directional emitters - that would imply that their energies are lower, and their numbers are greater, than if they were omnidirectional?
2. Would it matter if you assumed that the Mikly Way once was a quasar a long time ago, but that matter stopped falling in (perhaps the rest took up orbit around it)? Could it conceivably evaporate enough in that time (my understanding is that black holes evaporate very slowly at those sizes, and that this might be a trillions-of-years process and not billions, but I had to ask)? The presence of a galaxy alone doesn't always imply fuel for a black hole - after all, if everything is just in orbit around the galactic center, nothing will actually fall in despite being close.
I must admit I was a bit disappointed by this article. They were just talking about quasars obscured by dust. I was hoping for black holes floating in the middle of intergalactic space where nothing is there to consume. That could represent a form of dark matter.
I'd go one step further - math also fails to embrace the scientific method. It uses deductive and inductive reasoning to draw conclusions - not observation and experiment.
In fact, math would be much "further" if it were treated as a science. Fermat's last theorem would have been considered "proven" back in the 70s if it were treated as a science. They had more data supporting that theory back then than we have data today substantiating gravity. In physics we accept that a theory that is supported by repeatable experimentation is true (at least until we gather evidence to the contrary).
Of course, the other major difference is that if the axioms of a system of math are in fact true, then all the theorems of that system MUST also be true as well. That is NOT the case in any system of science. Even gravity can be falsified if somebody figures out that it doesn't quite work in the sense that we think it does.
Don't get me wrong - math is VERY important. It just isn't a science.
Uh, if you look at this site the worst the guy alleges is that somebody looked like they were planning on peeking at his planet with a telescope.
He published his code-name for the planet. Somebody did a search for that name and found some publicly-available telescope logs that had that name in it. (One might think that the reason those logs are publicly available is since the public pays for them at least in part.)
Then somebody did some calculations on a website to figure out where the planet was now, presumably to take a look at it.
At no point did anybody claim discovery of the planet, hold the investigator at ransom, threaten to release data, etc.
Essentially the astronomer in question is probably highly paranoid and considers it unethical for anybody else to peek at "his" planet.
Instead, you'd have to write it down, just as you'd essentially have to do with the operating hours of all businesses you deal with, local or remote. You'd be eliminating anything resembling a rule of thumb for business hours.
Uh, right now you look up what time zone another business is in and guess when they're open.
Under the proposed system, you look at how many hours away they are, and guess when they're open.
What's the difference?
It isn't like one business is going to open at 1842 and another at 1857. They'd both open at 1900 most likely, or 1800 perhaps. However, in your local neighborhood you could probably find examples of business that open at 7, 8, and 9 AM - so that is hardly anything revoluationary...
But what would you put into your crontab? You don't want to run your backup-which-slows- the-system-considerably to occur in the middle of the workday, so you would probably set it to some relative time, like "sunrise - 5 hours".
Uh, what do you put in your crontab now? 0300 most likely. A completely arbitrary time that happens to be in the middle of the night.
So pick some time that happens to be in the middle of your night and run your jobs then...
Note that in many enterprise-level servers they don't have the luxury of "night time" - when you run a global business the servers don't go to sleep at night...
For some reason the Navy has been able to use GMT at sea for ages. For some reason it doesn't matter that the sun is rising a 2200 hours...
Uh, why do we care exactly how many minutes the sun takes to travel this distance?
When I suggested sunrise to sunset I was simply referring to the tradition of working during daylight hours. Companies would pick an arbitrary starting time and stopping time for each branch, and they would probably tend to round it off. I doubt anybody would open at 0831.
It doesn't need to be nearly as complicated as you make it out to be, and computers have to deal with date changes in the middle of a day all the time. Do you think that Mastercard and Visa have separate databases for each region of Earth? Somehow they manage to mail out statements despite the fact that charges come in at 11:59PM and 12:01AM in a steady stream...
Well, sure, that may work (assuming they didn't put the TCPA into the CPU itself).
However, that only would retrieve the private key for that particular computer. So, that one PC would be able to rip protected content, and post it online. At least, until the key for that PC gets blacklisted, and then all new content will refuse to download to it.
This is the problem with the TCPA - it can in fact be done in a manner that keeps 99% of all computer users under wraps. Sure, it won't stop the hard-core counterfeiters, but there are so few of those that traditional law enforcement can keep up with them...
In China, there is only one timezone, but it works terribly since half the country wakes up in the dark and the other half wakes up in bright sunlight. They have adapted to this by "unofficially" setting work hours according to the longitudinal timezone rather than the government-mandated timezone.
My feeling is that they should simply have a chronometer which keeps ISO standard time. Go ahead and use an hours-minutes-seconds based system so that people get used to it. Forget leap-seconds - no need for that. Forget time zones - no need for that either. We'd probably go to 24-hour time and ditch am/pm since they'd have little meaning in most regions of the world.
An office would set their working hours as 1830-0230 and that would be it. No changing the time in the summer/winter/etc. They could change their hours in the summer/winter though.
An office on the other side of the country might start work at 1700 instead.
There would be no official countrywide designation of starting and stopping time, although most people would expect businesses to be generally open between sunrise and sunset. In 500 years nobody will care that the whole clock has drifted an hour, since the number on the clock doesn't mean anything in the first place. It is just a reference, and it would work fine for that purpose under such a system.
I can't really think of anybody who would be negatively impacted by such a system other than traditionalists. Astronomers would be fine - their star-tracking software probably calculates everything in some internal time format anyway, since the leap-year/leap-second/23h56m business already makes the current 24-hour clock useless for them. If anything, the software would be easier to design since the rules would be deterministic.
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Of course, the colluders have a bunch of big advantages. For starters, they see many more of the cards in play, and they don't go in waiting for a card that can't come up.
The reason you go all-in is to scare off draws. A big hand generally doesn't win against a lot of draws - only against a few. If the odds were still in favor of the pocket aces, all those poker books wouldn't tell you to play big hands differently from draws. Any poker book will tell you to never go all-in on a friendly game where everybody stays in and holds out to the showdown. You aren't scaring anybody out with your big bet. That is what you face with the colluders. Your best bet against a loose hand is to bet strictly on the basis of your pot-odds and take them to the cleaners, but in this case it isn't just a loose hand - those players are smart too.
In general if you play against colluders you're going to be taken to the cleaners - especially if they're using software to calculate odds/etc.
The interesting thing is that the guy's big mistake was to not pay attention to the signs that they were onto him. If he had just run out of NJ and not come back he'd probably have been fine. They had to catch him using counterfeit tokens within the state. This is because tokens are really just play-money and it isn't illegal to counterfeit them except in states that allow gambling...
It is only natural that increasing the number of governors increases the power of individual citizens.
When you have 1 senator for 10 million people, they are too busy to see anybody who doesn't have a suitcase full of cash for their next campaign ad. When you have 100 people running an entire country, business can afford to toss a few million at each of them. A $1 million contribution to somebody who represents New York is like spending only 10 cents per voter on an issue that might let your business overcharge each of them $10/yr.
On the other hand, when you have 400 people running NH, each person only represents 3000 people. You can actually get to know 3000 people - that is smaller than many colleges, and most people at least recognize most of their classmates at a college of that size even if they don't know all their names. A campaign contribution of $1 million is like spending $300 per voter - not many schemes are that profitable that it makes sense to subvert democracy to that degree.
The ultimate extreme is direct democracy, of course, where no individual gets the campaign contributions, but instead you advertise on the issues. Direct democracy has many problems - one of which being the apathy and mediocrity of the general population. However, increasing the size of Cognress would probably still be a step in the right direction - there is a balance of course.
Keep in mind that back in the 1800's, congress wasn't a whole lot smaller than it is today, but the population was WAY smaller. If Cognress grew proportionately it would probably look like the Republic in Star Wars. Even so, that probably isn't a bad thing...
Again, you insure the car, not the person. Your car's insurance goes up if there is a teenager in the house, and if there is a driver with tickets in the house.
Many insurance policies do offer coverage for rental cars, which of course is an exception to this principle. This is by no means automatic - if your policy doesn't explicitly cover rental cars, then you are NOT covered. Again, your car is insured, not you. Likewise, if you're driving a friend's car, most likely your insurance won't cover you.
Diesel has more energy per galon than gasoline, so it gets better milage.
I think it is actually just a result of the higher compression ratios. The actual energy content of diesel isn't all that different (in terms of kcal/gallon).
The question I have is why nobody has come up with a diesel hybrid. You have all these arguments that hybrids are no better than old-style diesels, which is true. The diesel engine is just a whole lot more efficient.
So, why not just make a diesel hybrid? Best of both worlds, and if you only need to tank up every 800 miles don't tell me you can't find find a gas station that sells it...
Except remove it from the public domain, I daresay?
Well, any derived work you make could be made fully proprietary. What you can't do is claim copyright over the original work, since that would be fraud (to claim copyright you must claim authorship or assignment, which would be a lie). You could put one comment in the source code and legitimately claim copyright, but the original source code without the comment would be public domain.
If someone says "it's public domain", my first question is "so, what does that mean?". A BSD license is a know quantity, IMHO.
Uh, the meaning of public domain was known AGES before BSD was ever invented.
It means that you relinquish copyright on the code. Anybody can do anything they want with it without fear. ANYTHING. That of course is the default with the 1st ammendment, but copyright is a limited restraint on freedom of expression. BSD is a far less limited restraint. Public domain is no restraint except that which is prohibited by other laws.
BSD does in fact have a few restrictions - such as not being able to sue the author of the software for failure to perform against some set of requirements that the author obviously wasn't aware of. This is a big reason behind why it is used. However, I wouldn't say that public domain isn't a known quantity.
I'm not advocating public domain (actually, I'm far more a GPL fan), but it isn't like there is any big mystery behind what it is...
Obviously the comment is childish and should be restated.
However, I do want to point out that on some archs (such as amd64) reiserfs has only recently become stable, and reiser4 has a reputation for killing hard drives. Since the graphical installer project lags behind the rest of gentoo in general, it would only be natural that support for it on this platform would be even further behind. As seen from a few posts above, apparently the libs for reiser have a reputation for being buggy, and different distros take varying stances on the risk.
That said I've used reiserfs on x86 with no problems at all - it is considered fairly stable there, although as pointed out libparted still causes issues with it.
Perhaps the problem is the fact that the land is owned by the government.
If it were owned by a lumber company, they would make sure that any tree poachers are shot on sight, since they're stealling their raw materials. A lumber company would also manage the trees so that the land maintains its value (even if they intended to move on someday they would be able to sell the land for more money if it had trees on it 5-years away from cutting age than if it were a wasteland).
The problem is that the land that nobody owns, nobody cares for - except the government. And when the government owns 5 billion acres of forest and has 25 rangers to patrol it, you're not going to be enforcing any laws...
In theory they could just use software. There is no reason that a CD player can't speed-adjust just like an LP. And for what they pay for their LPs it could easily be done. Certainly with a little software it would be trivial (just have a library of songs, with the beats already marked in them).
In any case, this isn't a case of LPs being "better." Rather, this is a case of tradition. I'm sure there are already CD players on the market suitable for rappers. The only thing they'll miss is scratching, but I'm guessing that most DJs who use scratching probably have a separate sratch LP/record - I can't imagine they go replacing their needles and records every 25 songs...
I'm looking at various methods of backup redundancy but it will take conscious effort over many years, transfering and re-transfering these files to keep them intact.
Shouldn't be that bad. You probably have a half-dozen CDs/DVDs, and you simply need to recopy them every 5 years. By the time you come around to doing this twice, you'll be copying them onto whatever the latest high-tech media is that stores 1TB/disk, and you'll be feeling nostalgic about those days when you actually needed a shoebox full of DVDs to do a windows install...
LPs were "killed" by CDs, yet enthusiats and some DJs are still using them for various properties - including superior sound - that the CD don't hold.
Uh, the only people I know that use LPs are the same kinds of folks who buy $70 monster fiber optic cables and $1000 harmonically-aligned speaker stands. For some folks their wallets are just that much bigger than their sales-resistance. And, it always feels nice to be one of only 100 people in the country who knows that all the PhD engineers out there are wrong.
Film will just be the new LP for a while, and pretty soon the big market will be for $1000 archival-quality, radiation-proof, chromatically-aligned, and otherwise buzzward-compliant film-canisters to carry it around in.
Sure, film is cheaper to scale up (but how many people are shooting medium format outside of the professional photo community?). However, my understanding is that even medium-format is starting to get competition from ultra-high-res sensors that are themselves getting much larger.
It is just simple physics. If you capture more dpi in a CCD than you have grain-per-inch on film (or whatever the stat is called), then you can reproduce the image onto any media you want digitally, no matter what the guy wearing crystals and magnets says. In almost every area of science CCDs have replaced film for precisely this reason. It is just recent news that they've gotten cheap enough for consumers to afford. When was the last time somebody used film in a telescope, autoradiograph, or X-Ray crystallography experiment? (Granted, the latter two are tending to use image-plate technology which have many of the benefits of CCDs but are cheaper. They are still digitally scanned.)
Nothing wrong with film, and I'm sure it will always have some uses. However, except for a few niche areas most of those uses will be by the same sort who currently use LPs...
(In theory ontopic, with regard to the post I'm replying to - but clearly not in regard to the article itself.)
My understanding of auto insurance in most of the US is that you don't insure drivers at all. You insure cars. So, they weren't asking to cover the rest of your household (they were already covered if they drove a car, as would be a complete stranger if they had your permission to drive your car).
Rather, they were using the other members of your home to judge the risk of your car being involved in a loss. For example, if you happen to live with a car thief your car is at a higher risk of being in a crash whether you intend for him to drive your car or not. It is legal for insurance companies to profile in this manner.
If you have a house with 3 drivers and one car, the insurance company is going to assume that they will drive the car. On the other hand, if you live alone but you let your 10 neighbors borrow your car 10 times a day the insurance company won't figure it out. And it is perfectly legal.
Of course, Ohio may vary, but this is fairly standard from my understanding. In general you insure cars, not people.
Uh, you go ahead and try that...
Why don't you and a friend down the street set up a 2-wire phone system between your homes (easy enough to do). Then, try to obtain permission to string the wires over the public phone system across that nice tract of land that the township has allodial title for.
And that is for something that isn't threatening the business model of the local phone company. Next, try actually setting up a competitive phone system for your neighborhood. Even if you had a petition signed by every person within a mile of your house it would take a decade to make its way through court, and then you could start paying the local phone company to borrow the use of their poles.
Hey, don't get me wrong - I voted libertarian in the last election. And I'd be open to laws that made utilities competitive. However, the laws AREN'T written that way now, and trying to pretend that they are will just cause you to go bankrupt...
You know what, open up your own telephone company by laying your own cable down to compete, you have every right to do so.
Uh, a few problems with that.
1. If you tried it, you'd be tossed in jail, since in most communities the phone company is the only company allowed to go stringing wires all over the place. At the very least they have far less expensive access to do so. They also own the poles and can charge your company for their use at a rate they deem fair.
2. In most areas the existing infrastructure was paid for by the community - either directly through taxes, or through subsidies of some sort, or through emininent domain, or through granted-monopoly-status in which the company could recover their sunk costs. A new provider won't get any of these benefits, and cannot compete.
Now, if the government were to eminent-domain all the poles/wires, and then auction them back out to competitive phone companies, you might have a point. However, I doubt that is going to happen.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for the free market. However, the market in question is not free...
You seem knowledgable and forgive me if my questions seem amaturish, but I'm curious about:
1. Has your analysis taken into account the possibility that quasars could be directional emitters - that would imply that their energies are lower, and their numbers are greater, than if they were omnidirectional?
2. Would it matter if you assumed that the Mikly Way once was a quasar a long time ago, but that matter stopped falling in (perhaps the rest took up orbit around it)? Could it conceivably evaporate enough in that time (my understanding is that black holes evaporate very slowly at those sizes, and that this might be a trillions-of-years process and not billions, but I had to ask)? The presence of a galaxy alone doesn't always imply fuel for a black hole - after all, if everything is just in orbit around the galactic center, nothing will actually fall in despite being close.
I must admit I was a bit disappointed by this article. They were just talking about quasars obscured by dust. I was hoping for black holes floating in the middle of intergalactic space where nothing is there to consume. That could represent a form of dark matter.
I'd go one step further - math also fails to embrace the scientific method. It uses deductive and inductive reasoning to draw conclusions - not observation and experiment.
In fact, math would be much "further" if it were treated as a science. Fermat's last theorem would have been considered "proven" back in the 70s if it were treated as a science. They had more data supporting that theory back then than we have data today substantiating gravity. In physics we accept that a theory that is supported by repeatable experimentation is true (at least until we gather evidence to the contrary).
Of course, the other major difference is that if the axioms of a system of math are in fact true, then all the theorems of that system MUST also be true as well. That is NOT the case in any system of science. Even gravity can be falsified if somebody figures out that it doesn't quite work in the sense that we think it does.
Don't get me wrong - math is VERY important. It just isn't a science.
Uh, if you look at this site the worst the guy alleges is that somebody looked like they were planning on peeking at his planet with a telescope.
He published his code-name for the planet. Somebody did a search for that name and found some publicly-available telescope logs that had that name in it. (One might think that the reason those logs are publicly available is since the public pays for them at least in part.)
Then somebody did some calculations on a website to figure out where the planet was now, presumably to take a look at it.
At no point did anybody claim discovery of the planet, hold the investigator at ransom, threaten to release data, etc.
Essentially the astronomer in question is probably highly paranoid and considers it unethical for anybody else to peek at "his" planet.
I would think that it would be no different than finding a book in a government box. You would be free to use the book, but not copy it.
Depending on who you talk to, you don't need a license to use software - just to distribute it...
Instead, you'd have to write it down, just as you'd essentially have to do with the operating hours of all businesses you deal with, local or remote. You'd be eliminating anything resembling a rule of thumb for business hours.
Uh, right now you look up what time zone another business is in and guess when they're open.
Under the proposed system, you look at how many hours away they are, and guess when they're open.
What's the difference?
It isn't like one business is going to open at 1842 and another at 1857. They'd both open at 1900 most likely, or 1800 perhaps. However, in your local neighborhood you could probably find examples of business that open at 7, 8, and 9 AM - so that is hardly anything revoluationary...
But what would you put into your crontab? You don't want to run your backup-which-slows- the-system-considerably to occur in the middle of the workday, so you would probably set it to some relative time, like "sunrise - 5 hours".
Uh, what do you put in your crontab now? 0300 most likely. A completely arbitrary time that happens to be in the middle of the night.
So pick some time that happens to be in the middle of your night and run your jobs then...
Note that in many enterprise-level servers they don't have the luxury of "night time" - when you run a global business the servers don't go to sleep at night...
For some reason the Navy has been able to use GMT at sea for ages. For some reason it doesn't matter that the sun is rising a 2200 hours...
Uh, why do we care exactly how many minutes the sun takes to travel this distance?
When I suggested sunrise to sunset I was simply referring to the tradition of working during daylight hours. Companies would pick an arbitrary starting time and stopping time for each branch, and they would probably tend to round it off. I doubt anybody would open at 0831.
It doesn't need to be nearly as complicated as you make it out to be, and computers have to deal with date changes in the middle of a day all the time. Do you think that Mastercard and Visa have separate databases for each region of Earth? Somehow they manage to mail out statements despite the fact that charges come in at 11:59PM and 12:01AM in a steady stream...
Well, sure, that may work (assuming they didn't put the TCPA into the CPU itself).
However, that only would retrieve the private key for that particular computer. So, that one PC would be able to rip protected content, and post it online. At least, until the key for that PC gets blacklisted, and then all new content will refuse to download to it.
This is the problem with the TCPA - it can in fact be done in a manner that keeps 99% of all computer users under wraps. Sure, it won't stop the hard-core counterfeiters, but there are so few of those that traditional law enforcement can keep up with them...
In China, there is only one timezone, but it works terribly since half the country wakes up in the dark and the other half wakes up in bright sunlight. They have adapted to this by "unofficially" setting work hours according to the longitudinal timezone rather than the government-mandated timezone.
My feeling is that they should simply have a chronometer which keeps ISO standard time. Go ahead and use an hours-minutes-seconds based system so that people get used to it. Forget leap-seconds - no need for that. Forget time zones - no need for that either. We'd probably go to 24-hour time and ditch am/pm since they'd have little meaning in most regions of the world.
An office would set their working hours as 1830-0230 and that would be it. No changing the time in the summer/winter/etc. They could change their hours in the summer/winter though.
An office on the other side of the country might start work at 1700 instead.
There would be no official countrywide designation of starting and stopping time, although most people would expect businesses to be generally open between sunrise and sunset. In 500 years nobody will care that the whole clock has drifted an hour, since the number on the clock doesn't mean anything in the first place. It is just a reference, and it would work fine for that purpose under such a system.
I can't really think of anybody who would be negatively impacted by such a system other than traditionalists. Astronomers would be fine - their star-tracking software probably calculates everything in some internal time format anyway, since the leap-year/leap-second/23h56m business already makes the current 24-hour clock useless for them. If anything, the software would be easier to design since the rules would be deterministic.