Traveling faster than light through basic acceleration is a mathematical impossibility. Traveling faster than light by not crossing the intervening distance is still a debated topic. Also, there no 'law of causality' that I recall studying in physics.
pistol ports in the doors would probably be an easy solution to this problem. Of course, a much simpler solution might be a trap door in front of the door...
Aye, Fuck the TSA. All you need is someone to make sure that passengers aren't getting on the planes with guns or highly flammable materials (gas, explosives, etc). A couple of bomb sniffing dogs should be able to take care of that.
There are finite number of BC, and the population is growing. If at any given time 1% of the people are interested in BC, is the demand going to grow or shrink? Demand goes up, supply is fixed, and the price will rise. Pretty trivial economic theory.
An interesting form of currency would be one where the money in circulation was pegged to the population, so that demand would be based strictly off the perceived value and not the rarity of the currency as a result of X people needing to use it to trade goods and services, where X is a growing number.
You could take a big hit doing this if they came out of the hearing and gave BC a stamp of approval. There is nothing about BC that is inherently designed to facilitate illegal activity, so the hearing could very well go either way.
So, because people live in a rural area, and some are old, it's ok to dump carbon into the atmosphere, and fuck up the planet for everyone?
I'm sorry, rural residents don't get a pass on doing the right thing because it's tradition to 'shit in the town well'.
Parent does have a point. I spent some time studying chess openings and competitive play, and it is kind of stale. There isn't a lot of variety in openings that won't get your ass kicked all over the board, and to be really competitive you have to spend a lot of time examining openings and positions that haven't changed much in several hundred years. I believe that a few chess masters have advocated changes to the game to mix it up a bit, and chance it from a game of who can memorize more openings and positions and into more of a dynamic strategy game.
If the speed of light is the absolute max speed in the universe, with no shortcuts in practice,
You know, I have always suspected that there will be ways for people with very advanced science to get around speed of light problem. Several hundred years ago, gravity was a similar looking, insurmountable barrier, and that has proven to be be trivial to 'get around' provided you are willing to make the proper engineering choices. Gravity and relativity are still things we don't have a lot of understanding of, and there is plenty to learn about how and why they work.
Snowden should be commended for standing up to a government who has been 'caught with it's hand in the cookie jar', engaging in illegal and immoral espionage of its own people. This behavior is far more damaging to the United State's values and long term interests than anything Snowden could ever do.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: Fuck you, NSA, you filthy traitors. The constitution isn't just rules for others to follow...
I don't think he can be arrested for this. He has plenty of evidence that he broke many laws, but if he was arrested, he could plead the 5th if the court asked him to turn over evidence incriminating himself. Additionally, he could call the veracity of the evidence into question, and plead the 5th again if the DA attempted to directly ask him if the data was fabricated.
Mind you, I think that he should probably be arrested and lose his license forever. This sort of stunt seems cool, but one screw up on his part around other people, and a family out on a Sunday drive is dead. This guy just effectively preformed 1st degree reckless endangerment for 30 hours. He knew what he was doing, and just didn't care. Fuck him.
A lot of the problems in our society would be corrected if people lived a great deal longer.
A lot of problem in society are corrected when people die. A friend of mine loves to repeat a saying he picked up somewhere: "If you could live to 1000, imagine all the weird kinds of racist you would be".
You really want assholes like Strom Thurmond living to the ripe old age of 1000?
I don't have a STEM degree, and I am a senior programmer. I dropped out of college entirely. I couldn't deal with the bureaucracy. You have to take this class, you can't take this class, bleah bleah bleah...
Of course, I have been programming since 1980 when as an 8 year old, I taught myself how to code. I also have self-educated myself in graduate level math, game theory, algorithms, statistics, relativistic physics, AI, and probably a half dozen other STEM type topics. I have worked in a half dozen languages, high level scripting to ASM and from the front to the back of the stack in contemporary Enterprise web app environments.
A degree is only worth as much as the person it is imprinted upon.
And why do bots exist? Because "grinding" is the only way to gain large amounts of currency in a short amount of time. Gold farmers do it for cash. Players do it to shortcut themselves to the top and to avoid grinding.
Amen brother! But more specifically:
Bots exist because blizzard has created a market by writing software that wastes people's time. If they really wanted to put an end to botting, they would fix their crappy game so people don't have to engage in repetitive pointless tasks to max reputations and get cash. If the pointless grinds are removed, then there is less economic incentive to have to bot. If gold is easy to acquire, there isn't any value in buying it from a gold farmer.
They can go lawyer all over anyone who writes this software, but it costs a lot less to write a bot (in terms of time and resources) than it takes to sue someone out of existence. If the authors properly incorporated, then they can file for a new LLC for about $100, and be back in business by Friday. So, Blizzard == a pack of drooling idiots.
As a software engineer who has worked on some larger projects, I can tell you that you are in fantasy land if you think that every line of code can be vetted without spending a small fortune on code review. Those costs might be justifiable for a project like a space shuttle guidance system, where the cost of failure is billions of dollars and multiple lives, but nobody is going to shell out that kind of budget for a sub $100 consumer router.
The word incompetence doesn't begin to describe the situation.
Is it incompetence, or a system which is measured as successful by how many patents it processes and accepts?
I don't get the impression the USPTO has any incentive to do their job thoroughly and competently -- but that this is what they've been told to do by the government.
Just keep cranking out patents and let the courts decide seems to be how they operate.
I agree with you that it would seem to be a logical step for the USPO to take, but it begs the (rhetorical) question : Is the USPO in charge of getting patents filed (basically filling out the forms and stuffing it in a filling cabinet for someone else to seriously evaluate), or are they in charge of vetting patents and acting as authority about what is or isn't actually legally a viable patent?
Clearly, the geek and nerd community feels it is the latter role that they should be full filling, as evinced by the volume of criticism you see on sites like/. If consider the role that they have to fill, I suspect that the USPO would tell you their job is more of the former, since they don't have the time, money or lawyers to do much more than rubber stamp things. Consider that you can file a patent for just about ANYTHING and for only a couple thousand bucks in filling fees, the USPO has to vet it and get it processed in a relatively short period of time. That's a lot of knowledge and expertise working on a very modest budget.
I think that the USPO does very well with the funds that they are allocated and under the directive that they have been given. Unless you are some sort of stellar organization genius that can step up and work miracles, you shouldn't be calling them incompetent, but rather calling their mission directives into question. Do you really think that the guy in the USPO who gave a green light to stuff like 'one click checkout', couldn't see the obvious idiocy to the patent? He/she looks at patents every day, all day. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that they can probably spot a dumb patent a mile away, but their organizational directives don't allow them veto power over a patent application, 'because its dumb.', as that would create all sorts of legal issues.
It is easy to stand back an slag a process based on its failures, but its much harder to get in there and actually fix things. If you have better ideas, call your government and tell them.
Actually, this form of robot is probably a good thing to build, as it would be employed by a military in the same way that land mines were traditionally used. With the added benefit that it would cover a much larger area, and me easier to decommission or move when the fighting is over so you don't have children blowing their hands off twenty years later.
The god that people follow is they god that they aspire to. Those people who are marching around with 'God hates fags' signs are people who want god to hate homosexuals because they hate homosexuals, and they want validation from a superior position that their fear is correct. People who preach about angry violent gods want there to be angry violent gods because they want to be angry and violent. Listen to the lies about religion that people tell you. There is no god, but you can understand a religious person's agenda by looking at the god they are preaching about.
Except that, because of the NSA's clusterfuck idiocy, now we have each country building it's own internet, which may or may not actually be part of a larger global network. Expect more of this in the future. It is the state's version of a 'walled garden' platform.
The number of violent criminals with guns is vastly dwarfed by the number of really stupid, careless, and honest people with guns. Therefore, I am scared of the latter, and not the former and advocate gun bans. Guns don't kill people, careless idiots kill people.
We should start teaching at least the basic fundamentals of algebra by first or second grade. Those of us who grew up learning programming at a young age know that this is doable.
Your sentiment is in the right place, but your suggestion is really bad. There is a lot of evidence suggestion that math isn't really great for younger kids. The ability of a first grader to work with abstract concepts limits their capacity to really comprehend what is going on. I have read articles by educators that suggest that math be pushed back several years until about 3rd grade. If you hit a young kid with a lot of boring abstract problems they will become bored and frustrated very quickly, and young kids don't have a long attention span.
Ultimately, the best systems would be one where kids proceed at their own pace.
That depends on what you are teaching. College has changed from 'The halls of higher learning' to the thing that every American HS school does because that is what you do to get ahead in life. For the majority of college students (who are kinda just idiots, and don't really need 4 years of college), the GP post is really the number that matters.
I also want to be able to drag a slider on the console that lets me optimize between trip duration and fuel efficiency. You could enable drivers very easily to radically cut their fuel consumption.
The more mass you convert to energy, the bigger the explosion. The unconsumed fuel is the radioactive waste that is spread about, so if you are producing waste, you aren't creating the theoretically most efficient detonation. Since the goal with most nuclear devices is to create a big explosion, most military weapons are going to be designed the be as efficient as possible. (Especially because of the c^2 portion of the equation, which says that even a little mass will release a lot of energy. Even being a little more efficient with your fuel will yield a lot more energy.)
Now you could build bombs that poison the detonation zone, but that makes them substantially less useful. For example, you can't really use them against an invader or against a enemy in close proximity. You can't use them when invading, because you are poisoning the land you are trying to take and hold.You are also getting a smaller bang for your buck, where your opponent might be employing higher yield clean bombs. (Or worse, twice as many bombs of the same yield.)
You say that Apple has 80 billion in the bank and, in the case of Apple, is partially true (you don't think they really have 80 billion, instant liquidity, in the bank, do you?)
Actually, a year or two ago, they did have that much in liquid assets. There was even talk about a stock buy back. I would hope they have done something to capitalize on it since then, but its tricky to spend that much money in an intelligent fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
Traveling faster than light through basic acceleration is a mathematical impossibility. Traveling faster than light by not crossing the intervening distance is still a debated topic. Also, there no 'law of causality' that I recall studying in physics.
pistol ports in the doors would probably be an easy solution to this problem. Of course, a much simpler solution might be a trap door in front of the door...
Aye, Fuck the TSA. All you need is someone to make sure that passengers aren't getting on the planes with guns or highly flammable materials (gas, explosives, etc). A couple of bomb sniffing dogs should be able to take care of that.
There are finite number of BC, and the population is growing. If at any given time 1% of the people are interested in BC, is the demand going to grow or shrink? Demand goes up, supply is fixed, and the price will rise. Pretty trivial economic theory.
An interesting form of currency would be one where the money in circulation was pegged to the population, so that demand would be based strictly off the perceived value and not the rarity of the currency as a result of X people needing to use it to trade goods and services, where X is a growing number.
You could take a big hit doing this if they came out of the hearing and gave BC a stamp of approval. There is nothing about BC that is inherently designed to facilitate illegal activity, so the hearing could very well go either way.
So, because people live in a rural area, and some are old, it's ok to dump carbon into the atmosphere, and fuck up the planet for everyone? I'm sorry, rural residents don't get a pass on doing the right thing because it's tradition to 'shit in the town well'.
Parent does have a point. I spent some time studying chess openings and competitive play, and it is kind of stale. There isn't a lot of variety in openings that won't get your ass kicked all over the board, and to be really competitive you have to spend a lot of time examining openings and positions that haven't changed much in several hundred years. I believe that a few chess masters have advocated changes to the game to mix it up a bit, and chance it from a game of who can memorize more openings and positions and into more of a dynamic strategy game.
If the speed of light is the absolute max speed in the universe, with no shortcuts in practice,
You know, I have always suspected that there will be ways for people with very advanced science to get around speed of light problem. Several hundred years ago, gravity was a similar looking, insurmountable barrier, and that has proven to be be trivial to 'get around' provided you are willing to make the proper engineering choices. Gravity and relativity are still things we don't have a lot of understanding of, and there is plenty to learn about how and why they work.
Snowden should be commended for standing up to a government who has been 'caught with it's hand in the cookie jar', engaging in illegal and immoral espionage of its own people. This behavior is far more damaging to the United State's values and long term interests than anything Snowden could ever do.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: Fuck you, NSA, you filthy traitors. The constitution isn't just rules for others to follow...
I don't think he can be arrested for this. He has plenty of evidence that he broke many laws, but if he was arrested, he could plead the 5th if the court asked him to turn over evidence incriminating himself. Additionally, he could call the veracity of the evidence into question, and plead the 5th again if the DA attempted to directly ask him if the data was fabricated.
Mind you, I think that he should probably be arrested and lose his license forever. This sort of stunt seems cool, but one screw up on his part around other people, and a family out on a Sunday drive is dead. This guy just effectively preformed 1st degree reckless endangerment for 30 hours. He knew what he was doing, and just didn't care. Fuck him.
A lot of the problems in our society would be corrected if people lived a great deal longer.
A lot of problem in society are corrected when people die. A friend of mine loves to repeat a saying he picked up somewhere: "If you could live to 1000, imagine all the weird kinds of racist you would be".
You really want assholes like Strom Thurmond living to the ripe old age of 1000?
I don't have a STEM degree, and I am a senior programmer. I dropped out of college entirely. I couldn't deal with the bureaucracy. You have to take this class, you can't take this class, bleah bleah bleah...
Of course, I have been programming since 1980 when as an 8 year old, I taught myself how to code. I also have self-educated myself in graduate level math, game theory, algorithms, statistics, relativistic physics, AI, and probably a half dozen other STEM type topics. I have worked in a half dozen languages, high level scripting to ASM and from the front to the back of the stack in contemporary Enterprise web app environments.
A degree is only worth as much as the person it is imprinted upon.
Hanging's too good for him. Burning's too good for him! He should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive!
And why do bots exist? Because "grinding" is the only way to gain large amounts of currency in a short amount of time. Gold farmers do it for cash. Players do it to shortcut themselves to the top and to avoid grinding.
Amen brother! But more specifically:
Bots exist because blizzard has created a market by writing software that wastes people's time. If they really wanted to put an end to botting, they would fix their crappy game so people don't have to engage in repetitive pointless tasks to max reputations and get cash. If the pointless grinds are removed, then there is less economic incentive to have to bot. If gold is easy to acquire, there isn't any value in buying it from a gold farmer.
They can go lawyer all over anyone who writes this software, but it costs a lot less to write a bot (in terms of time and resources) than it takes to sue someone out of existence. If the authors properly incorporated, then they can file for a new LLC for about $100, and be back in business by Friday. So, Blizzard == a pack of drooling idiots.
As a software engineer who has worked on some larger projects, I can tell you that you are in fantasy land if you think that every line of code can be vetted without spending a small fortune on code review. Those costs might be justifiable for a project like a space shuttle guidance system, where the cost of failure is billions of dollars and multiple lives, but nobody is going to shell out that kind of budget for a sub $100 consumer router.
The word incompetence doesn't begin to describe the situation.
/. If consider the role that they have to fill, I suspect that the USPO would tell you their job is more of the former, since they don't have the time, money or lawyers to do much more than rubber stamp things. Consider that you can file a patent for just about ANYTHING and for only a couple thousand bucks in filling fees, the USPO has to vet it and get it processed in a relatively short period of time. That's a lot of knowledge and expertise working on a very modest budget.
Is it incompetence, or a system which is measured as successful by how many patents it processes and accepts?
I don't get the impression the USPTO has any incentive to do their job thoroughly and competently -- but that this is what they've been told to do by the government.
Just keep cranking out patents and let the courts decide seems to be how they operate.
I agree with you that it would seem to be a logical step for the USPO to take, but it begs the (rhetorical) question : Is the USPO in charge of getting patents filed (basically filling out the forms and stuffing it in a filling cabinet for someone else to seriously evaluate), or are they in charge of vetting patents and acting as authority about what is or isn't actually legally a viable patent?
Clearly, the geek and nerd community feels it is the latter role that they should be full filling, as evinced by the volume of criticism you see on sites like
I think that the USPO does very well with the funds that they are allocated and under the directive that they have been given. Unless you are some sort of stellar organization genius that can step up and work miracles, you shouldn't be calling them incompetent, but rather calling their mission directives into question. Do you really think that the guy in the USPO who gave a green light to stuff like 'one click checkout', couldn't see the obvious idiocy to the patent? He/she looks at patents every day, all day. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that they can probably spot a dumb patent a mile away, but their organizational directives don't allow them veto power over a patent application, 'because its dumb.', as that would create all sorts of legal issues.
It is easy to stand back an slag a process based on its failures, but its much harder to get in there and actually fix things. If you have better ideas, call your government and tell them.
Actually, this form of robot is probably a good thing to build, as it would be employed by a military in the same way that land mines were traditionally used. With the added benefit that it would cover a much larger area, and me easier to decommission or move when the fighting is over so you don't have children blowing their hands off twenty years later.
The god that people follow is they god that they aspire to. Those people who are marching around with 'God hates fags' signs are people who want god to hate homosexuals because they hate homosexuals, and they want validation from a superior position that their fear is correct. People who preach about angry violent gods want there to be angry violent gods because they want to be angry and violent. Listen to the lies about religion that people tell you. There is no god, but you can understand a religious person's agenda by looking at the god they are preaching about.
Except that, because of the NSA's clusterfuck idiocy, now we have each country building it's own internet, which may or may not actually be part of a larger global network. Expect more of this in the future. It is the state's version of a 'walled garden' platform.
Thanks for shitting in the pool, NSA.
The number of violent criminals with guns is vastly dwarfed by the number of really stupid, careless, and honest people with guns. Therefore, I am scared of the latter, and not the former and advocate gun bans. Guns don't kill people, careless idiots kill people.
We should start teaching at least the basic fundamentals of algebra by first or second grade. Those of us who grew up learning programming at a young age know that this is doable.
Your sentiment is in the right place, but your suggestion is really bad. There is a lot of evidence suggestion that math isn't really great for younger kids. The ability of a first grader to work with abstract concepts limits their capacity to really comprehend what is going on. I have read articles by educators that suggest that math be pushed back several years until about 3rd grade. If you hit a young kid with a lot of boring abstract problems they will become bored and frustrated very quickly, and young kids don't have a long attention span.
Ultimately, the best systems would be one where kids proceed at their own pace.
That depends on what you are teaching. College has changed from 'The halls of higher learning' to the thing that every American HS school does because that is what you do to get ahead in life. For the majority of college students (who are kinda just idiots, and don't really need 4 years of college), the GP post is really the number that matters.
I also want to be able to drag a slider on the console that lets me optimize between trip duration and fuel efficiency. You could enable drivers very easily to radically cut their fuel consumption.
E=Mc^2 gives you the answer.
The more mass you convert to energy, the bigger the explosion. The unconsumed fuel is the radioactive waste that is spread about, so if you are producing waste, you aren't creating the theoretically most efficient detonation. Since the goal with most nuclear devices is to create a big explosion, most military weapons are going to be designed the be as efficient as possible. (Especially because of the c^2 portion of the equation, which says that even a little mass will release a lot of energy. Even being a little more efficient with your fuel will yield a lot more energy.)
Now you could build bombs that poison the detonation zone, but that makes them substantially less useful. For example, you can't really use them against an invader or against a enemy in close proximity. You can't use them when invading, because you are poisoning the land you are trying to take and hold.You are also getting a smaller bang for your buck, where your opponent might be employing higher yield clean bombs. (Or worse, twice as many bombs of the same yield.)
You say that Apple has 80 billion in the bank and, in the case of Apple, is partially true (you don't think they really have 80 billion, instant liquidity, in the bank, do you?)
Actually, a year or two ago, they did have that much in liquid assets. There was even talk about a stock buy back. I would hope they have done something to capitalize on it since then, but its tricky to spend that much money in an intelligent fashion.