Hadn't encountered "Quantum Ghost Imaging" before. (If it provides a practical system for imaging a objects without exposing that an observer exists and/or without the observer having a clear line-of-sight for ordinary optics, the military applications would be obvious.)
But building replacement body parts and organs on nano-scaffolding is working fine in the laboratory. It's just a little engineering development and regulatory approval from deployment. The military knows how to fund and direct practical engineering development, can fast-track or sidestep regulatory approval, and has a continuing supply of people who need replacement body parts or substitutes to recover function. It makes perfect sense for the military to drive the final development and deployment of this technology, bringing their wounded back to full health rather than giving them a prosthetic and a pension.
The military is already flying and driving vehicles and aiming and firing weapons in difficult environments using "mechanical telepathy" - magnetic sensors in a helmet detecting the fields from the currents from the firing of nerves in - guess where - the speech center (among others). (While you're strapped into a fighter plane doing a 5-G maneuver or a helicopter shaking from flack: Look at a target and/or point a finger at it. When the targeting marker in the heads-up goggles is on it, think "BANG!". Just for one example.) Meanwhile the same technology is doing a very good job of speech recognition on subvocalization. So why not use it to drive a radio to "think-talk" to another guy in the unit?
Since at least the Vietnam era the US military has been a consumer and designer of role-playing game system products and video games, for good reason and with very good results. After noting that the soldiers who played the most on the video games in the PX were also some of the best shots, pilots, tank drivers and gunners, etc. they commissioned videogames with realistic weapon characteristics as training aids: Fun and effective, and a LOT cheaper than full-blown simulators. Role-playing game systems, meanwhile, greatly improved "war games" strategy practice and military planning, and they stay current with developments in the field (and are a major customer of some of the companies as well). Using a MMORG to do a Turing test, along with further development, on a computer-simulation of a soldier (in preparation for deploying AI weapon systems) fits right in and makes perfect sense to me.
So it looks to me like somebody is "pulling a Proxmire" - finding some government research that SOUNDS screwy and characterizing it to make it sound as ridiculous as possible in the public press.
You know the ghost that uses the white space to communicate on the tv and recorders? Won't they get pissed now that thier channels are getting clogged?
Sure.
Remember what they already did to that little kid in _Poltergeist_? We can expect a LOT more of that.
Did somebody just describe God's Own Crony Capitalists(tm) as loving competition?
Please don't confuse the Neocon faction currently in control of the Republican party electoral machinery (and most of the (R) seats in the congress) with conservatives. B-)
Republicans in appointed and bureaucratic positions are more likely to be from the other factions - some of which give more than lip service to economic freedom (which emphatically includes competition and excludes government action selectively helping favorites).
- States and localities are supposed to be prepared for and handle the first three days, while FEMA's charter (at the time) was to mobilize the big stuff (financial aid, rebuilding, food restocking, etc.) that comes in after that time.
- The fed was PROHIBITED (by The Posse Comitatus Act) from coming in without permission from the state's governor - which was withheld. So the fed mobilized as much as it could meanwhile, bringing some of it up to the state line and handing off some others to Non-Governmental Organizations (one of which was the Salvation Army) to bring in. (Then the NGOs were blocked from entering by the state and local authorities, too.)
(One tinfoil hat theory is that the NGOs were deliberately blocked in a political move to increase the suffering and thus the administration's embarrassment when it was blamed on them.)
At least I would have. But neither of my senators is up this time and my representative was one of the very few in my state who voted against both versions.
I hope others, who have the opportunity, make the point in the booth this time around.
Push for all candidates to sign a pledge that congressional committee appointments will be by random selection.
So you'd kick the congresscritters out of the committees that handle things they understand and put them on random committees? Seems to me that leaves them even more as puppets of their party's machine.
For instance: Ron Paul is essentially the only congresscritter with an understanding of economics. So bumping him from the House Banking committee would greatly reduce the effectiveness of the congress' oversight of the Fed and the banks.
One upside to a unilateral application of bandwidth billing by the ISPs: The implications for Botnets and other malware.
- It provides a financial incentive to users to get their machines cleaned out and keep them that way.
- It provides an easily measurable cost of the traffic imposed by malware, which can then be used in prosecutions against those who deploy and use it.
Which brings up other issues:
- Will AT&T bill for incoming packets? Even those not solicited?
- If you're charged for all incoming packets how do you STOP somebody's botnet from sending you packets? DDoS attacks could become Distributed Denial of Funds...
- Will they charge for ICMP packets?
- How about the packets they use to communicate with and control their modem (which don't even get to the customer's interface)?
As for the phone situation, while caller is responsible has been enshrined into various agreements, it was always bogus there as well (again, both caller and recipient pay their respective providers).
"Initiator is responsible" makes SOME sense for connection-oriented communication. Especially on toll calling, where anybody can initiate but the receiver has essentially no idea who is calling until the connection is made. (That might be applicable to SOME internet traffic. For instance: You don't want to bill the victim for a DDoS attack. B-) )
But trying to extent that logic to the individual packets, regardless of protocol, just doesn't wash. Even in those network protocols where the concept of a connection exists and the initiator of a connection is the decision maker and primary beneficiary of the communication, that logic applies only to the connection itself.
It's not the upkeep of the peering link that's an issue. It's how much of the work of toting the packets is done by each network. If one has the long haul and the other doesn't the one without the long haul expense needs should be helping the one without (at least with credit for doing some long hauling for them.) And if there's three or more ISPs in the path the ones in the middle are toting packets for the customers on the ends and need some revenue for that from the guys with customers to bill.
But IMHO some of the ISPs are using a broken metric to see if they're coming out on the short end. If this is such a case, perhaps Sprint thinks Cogent is freeloading when in fact it's not.
As I posted last time this came up:
I'm not sure what metric Sprint uses to decide that Cogent is getting the better part of the deal. But one of the companies in a previous Cogent dispute was upset that far more packets crossing the peering points originated at Cogent than on their net.
IMHO that metric is nuts. For instance: When a user on network A connects to a stream server on network B, virtually all the packets "originate" on network B. Is this a "service" for the customer on network A or the server on network B? Why should network B be expected to pay network A for the bandwidth whose use is initiated by network A's customer?
My answer: The connection is a service to BOTH customers.
Now it may make sense for one network to bill another if most of the transport expense is borne by one of them. For instance: If network A is a long-distance backbone and network B is a municipal island. And it would certainly make sense for a network serving as a middle-man transport between the networks that have the customers to expect payment (or some other reciprocal service) from BOTH of the customers' network. But (unlike the initiation of a phone call) the "from" address of a packet does NOT inherently assign more "blame" for the transport than the "to" address. --
Using your newly defined metric, I get to start my own tiny network and peer with all of the tier 1 providers for free right?
If your tiny network buys a dark fiber loop coveing about half the continental US, lights it up, you rent rack space at co-location peering points with a Tier I in both Chicago and LA (and, as second-comer, maybe buy some line cards ports for their routers to hook up to you), set up routes to transport their customers' east-half-US traffic to your LA customers from Chicago and their customers' west-coast traffic to your Chicago customers from LA, then yes, you'd qualify. (They might owe you. Transport some of traffic between their LA and Chicago customers, or between LA and Chicago for connection between their customers and those of another Tier I peer and the WOULD owe you - at least credit toward your customers' traffic over their pipes to endpoints on THEIR peers or more than a half-continent away on their own nets.)
Peer with 'em to hook up the people in your neighborhood to the rest of the Internet and you owe them big-time. Granted you're providing local transport, termination, and customer service. But they and their other high-tier peers are providing essentialy all of the long-haul (of which half the bill should go to your customers) and you're getting all the customer revenue. So you need to fork out.
In the first case you might cut a deal with them to skip the accounting and billing overhead and just swap traffic. (Though you'd both keep measuring things, so if the deal turns out to be too one-sided you can renegotiate when it's up for renewal. Like Sprint and Cogent.)
My issue isn't with the billing arrangements. Just about what is a reasonable choice of metric.
After all, we don't want to double the bandwidth consumption by modifying the protocols so traffic consumers send an equivalent volume of garbage back toward servers, just to work around an ill-considered accounting metric that overbills the ISPs who feed the providers of services and underbills those who feed the consumers of them.
I'm not sure what metric Sprint uses to decide that Cogent is getting the better part of the deal. But one of the companies in a previous Cogent dispute was upset that far more packets crossing the peering points originated at Cogent than on their net.
IMHO that metric is nuts. For instance: When a user on network A connects to a stream server on network B, virtually all the packets "originate" on network B. Is this a "service" for the customer on network A or the server on network B? Why should network B be expected to pay network A for the bandwidth whose use is initiated by network A's customer?
My answer: The connection is a service to BOTH customers.
Now it may make sense for one network to bill another if most of the transport expense is borne by one of them. For instance: If network A is a long-distance backbone and network A is a municipal island. And it would certainly make sense for a network serving as a middle-man transport between the networks that have the customers to expect payment (or some other reciprocal service) from BOTH of the customers' network. But (unlike the initiation of a phone call) the "from" address of a packet does NOT inherently assign more "blame" for the transport than the "to" address.
The C-SPAN site uses a flakey AJAX framework to try to sniff your stream reader. Unfortunately it's broken for some browsers. That seems to include firefox - including the version on my Ubuntu Feisty install which I keep up-to-the-minute with the upgrade tool.
So I've reverse-engineered it enough to find URLs for the underlying streams.
Here are direct links to the realplayer streams for C-SPAN, C-SPAN2, and C-SPAN3.
= = =
PS: I haven't been able to figure out how to construct similar links for archived shows. If anybody else can mange that, please follow up with it. Thanks.
I'm reminded of this story from a few years ago, where a 500 year old Leonardo drawing inspired improvements in mitral valve heart surgery.
And the story is marvelously content-free about what the insight and new repair technique actually WERE. (As usual for modern, dumbed-down news media. But I suppose it's better than their previous approach, where they attempted to report it but always got it wrong...)
So that story is additional evidence for the need to archive the important stuff, since the mass-distributed versions are useless. B-) (Or is it B-( ?)
As I see it, this plasma rocket is not really useful without a nuclear power source of some kind.
There's a fine, time-proven, continuous fusion reactor about 93 megamiles away from Earth, complete with a power beam system sending plenty of power out this way. They call it "the sun".
At this distance it provides over a kilowatt per square yard of receiver surface area. In orbit (or at feather-light acceleration) the collection structures can be very low mass. So even something with pretty low efficiency and derated by being at a mars or jupiter orbital distance will be more than adequate to keep the craft powered. Using such "beamed power" also means you don't have to carry fuel at all - just the reaction mass.
The question will be whether it's a better tradeoff to carry a nuclear reactor, a solar collection system, or a lightsail. (The ion engine gives you more controllability than a lightsail so solutions involving it might be better even if more massive and/or less powerful.)
I for one am in favor of a tricky ballot system, something that requires a bit of thought. After all, what benefit does anybody anyplace get from running our society based on the opinions of people who are too dumb-stupid to solve even a simple concrete problem like "where shall I place an X if I want to vote for candidate Y?"
That depends: Are they willing and able to take up arms and fight for their beliefs, either on their own or if a charismatic leader eggs them on? If so, I WANT the election system to measure their opinion.
Elections aren't about "making smart decisions". They're about figuring out how the war would come out and convincing the losers that they'd lose the war, too. Then the losers aren't tempted to hold a war to reverse the decision.
And that's why the issues with the electronic election systems are so dangerous: They weaken the belief of the losers that they've really lost.
(The easiest way to produce that belief is for the process to both BE honest and to be VERIFIABLY honest. The electronic election systems fail on (at least) the second part.)
McCain,... has to have his wife sit and read email to him?
Being president isn't about working hands-on. Being president is about picking and motivating other people to do the actual work (or to pick subordinates to do it or pick further subordinatesx, ad fractalam).
Much like military officers standing with their hands behind them and ordering others to get things done.
If he can get his wife to handle his email and read it to him, rather than having to fight with the interface himself, that shows he's exceptionally proficient at such skills. B-)
You can say that new money gets its value by diluting the rest of the money. But the reason it is necessary to expand the money supply in the first place is because the underlying value represented by the money (the GDP) is growing.
a) The value the money represents is not the GDP. The value of the money, like any other commodity, is what people are willing to trade for it.
When the money could be redemed for gold or silver the value of the money was essentially the same as the value of the gold or silver. (Having it in paper form gave it a slight added value due to convenience.)
These days the only underlying value to the money is the goverment's promise to use the courts and police to force creditors to accept it as payment.
b) There is no need to expand the currency to deal with an expanded GDP. You can just let the existing money supply deflate instead, lowering prices.
There's no need to keep prices stable. A loaf of bread once cost a dime. Why shouldn't it cost a dime again?
Printing more money doesn't reward those who create value. It rewards those who get hold of the new money first - mianly banks and the government's cronies and employees - and penalizes those who have paychecks, savings, and contracts denominated in dollars - who are usually the creators of new value.
Information? What information? There is no fucking information. It's both 1 and 0 from beginning to end, for crying out loud.
The information is not stored as the state of the particle but as the entanglement of the states of the set of particles. The state of a set of N entangled qbits encodes 2^N separate possible sets of states and thus 2^N bits of information, while one operation on the set can perform 2^N operations in parallel, one on each of the possible combinations of states.
Now there are a limited number of things you can do. And to get to a usable output you have to perform computations that reduce the allowed states to the set that contains the answers you want, of which you only get to observe one when you finally collapse the wave functions. But that's enough to do some very useful computations.
Like perhaps using a chip containing N entangled qbits and suitable supporting structures to find a factor of a positive composite number M = ((2^N)-1) in O(N) time. Goodbye RSA encryption, hello Big Brother.
Somehow you store a qbit which is both 0 and 1. Then you try to retrieve it. Problem is, as soon as you do so, it collapses to either 0 or 1. So how do you know that what you stored is what you got back?
You don't retrieve it in a way that causes the entanglement to collapse. You instead transfer the enganglement to another particle which then participates in the next step of the computation (or perform that computational step on the nucleus that has been acting as a storage medium).
The first one corresponds to a memory (with a destructive read - because you can't COPY entanglement, so the qbit itself DOES collapse when the information is transferred out).
The second one corresponds to a bit in a datapath register where the computation takes place in the register logic rather than in a nearby hunk of logic. (I.e. the old "accumulator" style of processor typical through the 1960s.)
Last time I looked chips WERE "painstakingly ..."
on
Storing Qubits In Nuclei
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The claim that this technique is promising because it "uses silicon technology" seems a bit of a stretch -- the silicon the researchers employed was a painstakingly grown crystal of extremely high purity.
So?... Even a single quantum computer would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars to intelligence agencies around the world. The price of materials really isn't an issue.
Last time I looked, single-crystal silicon technology (what's used in chips except for things like amorphous-silicon memory) consists EXPLICITLY of "painstakingly grown crystal of extremely high purity".
- A defect in the crystal structure results in the failure of every component that the defect is present in.
- Carefully-controlled Minuscule fractions of impurity atoms selectively substituted for silicon atoms define the active regions. Unplanned impurities change the characteristics, resulting in components that don't behave according to design.
So existing silicon technology is exactly what is required. Bednarz's concerns are off the mark. The purity and crystalline nature of the component won't impose any extra costs, because it's what is already done.
Some OTHER requirement MIGHT make it costly. But that's a separate issue.)
Greenspan did exactly what all the [...] Libertarians wanted... lowered the interest rate the Fed charged for money
I call bullshit.
When the Federal Reserve prints (or equivalent) and loans out ANY money, the new money gets its value by diluting the value of ALL the money, thus stealing value from the money already out there.
Libertarians explicitly REJECT this sort of theft.
They believe that ALL money should consist of, or be 100% backed by, a valuable commodity. The value of the money would fluctuate ONLY according to the value of the commodity (and, in the case of "backed" tokens, by the perception of the reliability of the commodity warehousing operation). Thus it would be impossible for the government or its proxies to steal the value out of money already out there to give to its cronies.
So, no, libertarians did NOT want the Fed to lower interest rates.
Slashdot Mirror
Hadn't encountered "Quantum Ghost Imaging" before. (If it provides a practical system for imaging a objects without exposing that an observer exists and/or without the observer having a clear line-of-sight for ordinary optics, the military applications would be obvious.)
But building replacement body parts and organs on nano-scaffolding is working fine in the laboratory. It's just a little engineering development and regulatory approval from deployment. The military knows how to fund and direct practical engineering development, can fast-track or sidestep regulatory approval, and has a continuing supply of people who need replacement body parts or substitutes to recover function. It makes perfect sense for the military to drive the final development and deployment of this technology, bringing their wounded back to full health rather than giving them a prosthetic and a pension.
The military is already flying and driving vehicles and aiming and firing weapons in difficult environments using "mechanical telepathy" - magnetic sensors in a helmet detecting the fields from the currents from the firing of nerves in - guess where - the speech center (among others). (While you're strapped into a fighter plane doing a 5-G maneuver or a helicopter shaking from flack: Look at a target and/or point a finger at it. When the targeting marker in the heads-up goggles is on it, think "BANG!". Just for one example.) Meanwhile the same technology is doing a very good job of speech recognition on subvocalization. So why not use it to drive a radio to "think-talk" to another guy in the unit?
Since at least the Vietnam era the US military has been a consumer and designer of role-playing game system products and video games, for good reason and with very good results. After noting that the soldiers who played the most on the video games in the PX were also some of the best shots, pilots, tank drivers and gunners, etc. they commissioned videogames with realistic weapon characteristics as training aids: Fun and effective, and a LOT cheaper than full-blown simulators. Role-playing game systems, meanwhile, greatly improved "war games" strategy practice and military planning, and they stay current with developments in the field (and are a major customer of some of the companies as well). Using a MMORG to do a Turing test, along with further development, on a computer-simulation of a soldier (in preparation for deploying AI weapon systems) fits right in and makes perfect sense to me.
So it looks to me like somebody is "pulling a Proxmire" - finding some government research that SOUNDS screwy and characterizing it to make it sound as ridiculous as possible in the public press.
You know the ghost that uses the white space to communicate on the tv and recorders? Won't they get pissed now that thier channels are getting clogged?
Sure.
Remember what they already did to that little kid in _Poltergeist_? We can expect a LOT more of that.
Did somebody just describe God's Own Crony Capitalists(tm) as loving competition?
Please don't confuse the Neocon faction currently in control of the Republican party electoral machinery (and most of the (R) seats in the congress) with conservatives. B-)
Republicans in appointed and bureaucratic positions are more likely to be from the other factions - some of which give more than lip service to economic freedom (which emphatically includes competition and excludes government action selectively helping favorites).
Also:
- States and localities are supposed to be prepared for and handle the first three days, while FEMA's charter (at the time) was to mobilize the big stuff (financial aid, rebuilding, food restocking, etc.) that comes in after that time.
- The fed was PROHIBITED (by The Posse Comitatus Act) from coming in without permission from the state's governor - which was withheld. So the fed mobilized as much as it could meanwhile, bringing some of it up to the state line and handing off some others to Non-Governmental Organizations (one of which was the Salvation Army) to bring in. (Then the NGOs were blocked from entering by the state and local authorities, too.)
(One tinfoil hat theory is that the NGOs were deliberately blocked in a political move to increase the suffering and thus the administration's embarrassment when it was blamed on them.)
At least I would have. But neither of my senators is up this time and my representative was one of the very few in my state who voted against both versions.
I hope others, who have the opportunity, make the point in the booth this time around.
Push for all candidates to sign a pledge that congressional committee appointments will be by random selection.
So you'd kick the congresscritters out of the committees that handle things they understand and put them on random committees? Seems to me that leaves them even more as puppets of their party's machine.
For instance: Ron Paul is essentially the only congresscritter with an understanding of economics. So bumping him from the House Banking committee would greatly reduce the effectiveness of the congress' oversight of the Fed and the banks.
One upside to a unilateral application of bandwidth billing by the ISPs: The implications for Botnets and other malware.
- It provides a financial incentive to users to get their machines cleaned out and keep them that way.
- It provides an easily measurable cost of the traffic imposed by malware, which can then be used in prosecutions against those who deploy and use it.
Which brings up other issues:
- Will AT&T bill for incoming packets? Even those not solicited?
- If you're charged for all incoming packets how do you STOP somebody's botnet from sending you packets? DDoS attacks could become Distributed Denial of Funds...
- Will they charge for ICMP packets?
- How about the packets they use to communicate with and control their modem (which don't even get to the customer's interface)?
... that ruin the clear plastic cover over the artwork when you try to remove them.
As for the phone situation, while caller is responsible has been enshrined into various agreements, it was always bogus there as well (again, both caller and recipient pay their respective providers).
"Initiator is responsible" makes SOME sense for connection-oriented communication. Especially on toll calling, where anybody can initiate but the receiver has essentially no idea who is calling until the connection is made. (That might be applicable to SOME internet traffic. For instance: You don't want to bill the victim for a DDoS attack. B-) )
But trying to extent that logic to the individual packets, regardless of protocol, just doesn't wash. Even in those network protocols where the concept of a connection exists and the initiator of a connection is the decision maker and primary beneficiary of the communication, that logic applies only to the connection itself.
It's not the upkeep of the peering link that's an issue. It's how much of the work of toting the packets is done by each network. If one has the long haul and the other doesn't the one without the long haul expense needs should be helping the one without (at least with credit for doing some long hauling for them.) And if there's three or more ISPs in the path the ones in the middle are toting packets for the customers on the ends and need some revenue for that from the guys with customers to bill.
But IMHO some of the ISPs are using a broken metric to see if they're coming out on the short end. If this is such a case, perhaps Sprint thinks Cogent is freeloading when in fact it's not.
As I posted last time this came up:
I'm not sure what metric Sprint uses to decide that Cogent is getting the better part of the deal. But one of the companies in a previous Cogent dispute was upset that far more packets crossing the peering points originated at Cogent than on their net.
IMHO that metric is nuts. For instance: When a user on network A connects to a stream server on network B, virtually all the packets "originate" on network B. Is this a "service" for the customer on network A or the server on network B? Why should network B be expected to pay network A for the bandwidth whose use is initiated by network A's customer?
My answer: The connection is a service to BOTH customers.
Now it may make sense for one network to bill another if most of the transport expense is borne by one of them. For instance: If network A is a long-distance backbone and network B is a municipal island. And it would certainly make sense for a network serving as a middle-man transport between the networks that have the customers to expect payment (or some other reciprocal service) from BOTH of the customers' network. But (unlike the initiation of a phone call) the "from" address of a packet does NOT inherently assign more "blame" for the transport than the "to" address.
--
Using your newly defined metric, I get to start my own tiny network and peer with all of the tier 1 providers for free right?
If your tiny network buys a dark fiber loop coveing about half the continental US, lights it up, you rent rack space at co-location peering points with a Tier I in both Chicago and LA (and, as second-comer, maybe buy some line cards ports for their routers to hook up to you), set up routes to transport their customers' east-half-US traffic to your LA customers from Chicago and their customers' west-coast traffic to your Chicago customers from LA, then yes, you'd qualify. (They might owe you. Transport some of traffic between their LA and Chicago customers, or between LA and Chicago for connection between their customers and those of another Tier I peer and the WOULD owe you - at least credit toward your customers' traffic over their pipes to endpoints on THEIR peers or more than a half-continent away on their own nets.)
Peer with 'em to hook up the people in your neighborhood to the rest of the Internet and you owe them big-time. Granted you're providing local transport, termination, and customer service. But they and their other high-tier peers are providing essentialy all of the long-haul (of which half the bill should go to your customers) and you're getting all the customer revenue. So you need to fork out.
In the first case you might cut a deal with them to skip the accounting and billing overhead and just swap traffic. (Though you'd both keep measuring things, so if the deal turns out to be too one-sided you can renegotiate when it's up for renewal. Like Sprint and Cogent.)
My issue isn't with the billing arrangements. Just about what is a reasonable choice of metric.
After all, we don't want to double the bandwidth consumption by modifying the protocols so traffic consumers send an equivalent volume of garbage back toward servers, just to work around an ill-considered accounting metric that overbills the ISPs who feed the providers of services and underbills those who feed the consumers of them.
I'm not sure what metric Sprint uses to decide that Cogent is getting the better part of the deal. But one of the companies in a previous Cogent dispute was upset that far more packets crossing the peering points originated at Cogent than on their net.
IMHO that metric is nuts. For instance: When a user on network A connects to a stream server on network B, virtually all the packets "originate" on network B. Is this a "service" for the customer on network A or the server on network B? Why should network B be expected to pay network A for the bandwidth whose use is initiated by network A's customer?
My answer: The connection is a service to BOTH customers.
Now it may make sense for one network to bill another if most of the transport expense is borne by one of them. For instance: If network A is a long-distance backbone and network A is a municipal island. And it would certainly make sense for a network serving as a middle-man transport between the networks that have the customers to expect payment (or some other reciprocal service) from BOTH of the customers' network. But (unlike the initiation of a phone call) the "from" address of a packet does NOT inherently assign more "blame" for the transport than the "to" address.
I'd be interested in what they'd say about slashdot use at work and whether they'd rate it as a net gain or loss for the company.
Though I suppose it would depend on how the user used it...
That seems to include firefox - including the version on my Ubuntu Feisty install which I keep up-to-the-minute with the upgrade tool.
Correction: Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
The C-SPAN site uses a flakey AJAX framework to try to sniff your stream reader. Unfortunately it's broken for some browsers. That seems to include firefox - including the version on my Ubuntu Feisty install which I keep up-to-the-minute with the upgrade tool.
So I've reverse-engineered it enough to find URLs for the underlying streams.
Here are direct links to the realplayer streams for C-SPAN, C-SPAN2, and C-SPAN3.
= = =
PS: I haven't been able to figure out how to construct similar links for archived shows. If anybody else can mange that, please follow up with it. Thanks.
I'm reminded of this story from a few years ago, where a 500 year old Leonardo drawing inspired improvements in mitral valve heart surgery.
And the story is marvelously content-free about what the insight and new repair technique actually WERE. (As usual for modern, dumbed-down news media. But I suppose it's better than their previous approach, where they attempted to report it but always got it wrong...)
So that story is additional evidence for the need to archive the important stuff, since the mass-distributed versions are useless. B-) (Or is it B-( ?)
As I see it, this plasma rocket is not really useful without a nuclear power source of some kind.
There's a fine, time-proven, continuous fusion reactor about 93 megamiles away from Earth, complete with a power beam system sending plenty of power out this way. They call it "the sun".
At this distance it provides over a kilowatt per square yard of receiver surface area. In orbit (or at feather-light acceleration) the collection structures can be very low mass. So even something with pretty low efficiency and derated by being at a mars or jupiter orbital distance will be more than adequate to keep the craft powered. Using such "beamed power" also means you don't have to carry fuel at all - just the reaction mass.
The question will be whether it's a better tradeoff to carry a nuclear reactor, a solar collection system, or a lightsail. (The ion engine gives you more controllability than a lightsail so solutions involving it might be better even if more massive and/or less powerful.)
I for one am in favor of a tricky ballot system, something that requires a bit of thought. After all, what benefit does anybody anyplace get from running our society based on the opinions of people who are too dumb-stupid to solve even a simple concrete problem like "where shall I place an X if I want to vote for candidate Y?"
That depends: Are they willing and able to take up arms and fight for their beliefs, either on their own or if a charismatic leader eggs them on? If so, I WANT the election system to measure their opinion.
Elections aren't about "making smart decisions". They're about figuring out how the war would come out and convincing the losers that they'd lose the war, too. Then the losers aren't tempted to hold a war to reverse the decision.
And that's why the issues with the electronic election systems are so dangerous: They weaken the belief of the losers that they've really lost.
(The easiest way to produce that belief is for the process to both BE honest and to be VERIFIABLY honest. The electronic election systems fail on (at least) the second part.)
McCain, ... has to have his wife sit and read email to him?
Being president isn't about working hands-on. Being president is about picking and motivating other people to do the actual work (or to pick subordinates to do it or pick further subordinatesx, ad fractalam).
Much like military officers standing with their hands behind them and ordering others to get things done.
If he can get his wife to handle his email and read it to him, rather than having to fight with the interface himself, that shows he's exceptionally proficient at such skills. B-)
You can say that new money gets its value by diluting the rest of the money. But the reason it is necessary to expand the money supply in the first place is because the underlying value represented by the money (the GDP) is growing.
a) The value the money represents is not the GDP. The value of the money, like any other commodity, is what people are willing to trade for it.
When the money could be redemed for gold or silver the value of the money was essentially the same as the value of the gold or silver. (Having it in paper form gave it a slight added value due to convenience.)
These days the only underlying value to the money is the goverment's promise to use the courts and police to force creditors to accept it as payment.
b) There is no need to expand the currency to deal with an expanded GDP. You can just let the existing money supply deflate instead, lowering prices.
There's no need to keep prices stable. A loaf of bread once cost a dime. Why shouldn't it cost a dime again?
Printing more money doesn't reward those who create value. It rewards those who get hold of the new money first - mianly banks and the government's cronies and employees - and penalizes those who have paychecks, savings, and contracts denominated in dollars - who are usually the creators of new value.
Information? What information? There is no fucking information. It's both 1 and 0 from beginning to end, for crying out loud.
The information is not stored as the state of the particle but as the entanglement of the states of the set of particles. The state of a set of N entangled qbits encodes 2^N separate possible sets of states and thus 2^N bits of information, while one operation on the set can perform 2^N operations in parallel, one on each of the possible combinations of states.
Now there are a limited number of things you can do. And to get to a usable output you have to perform computations that reduce the allowed states to the set that contains the answers you want, of which you only get to observe one when you finally collapse the wave functions. But that's enough to do some very useful computations.
Like perhaps using a chip containing N entangled qbits and suitable supporting structures to find a factor of a positive composite number M = ((2^N)-1) in O(N) time. Goodbye RSA encryption, hello Big Brother.
Every component, or one out of one.
In this context a component is a circuit element on the chip (i.e. a transistor or the like) while the chip is an "assembly", not a "component".
Of course most chips don't have redundancy and fail if any of the (millions of) components on them are defective.
Somehow you store a qbit which is both 0 and 1. Then you try to retrieve it. Problem is, as soon as you do so, it collapses to either 0 or 1. So how do you know that what you stored is what you got back?
You don't retrieve it in a way that causes the entanglement to collapse. You instead transfer the enganglement to another particle which then participates in the next step of the computation (or perform that computational step on the nucleus that has been acting as a storage medium).
The first one corresponds to a memory (with a destructive read - because you can't COPY entanglement, so the qbit itself DOES collapse when the information is transferred out).
The second one corresponds to a bit in a datapath register where the computation takes place in the register logic rather than in a nearby hunk of logic. (I.e. the old "accumulator" style of processor typical through the 1960s.)
Last time I looked, single-crystal silicon technology (what's used in chips except for things like amorphous-silicon memory) consists EXPLICITLY of "painstakingly grown crystal of extremely high purity".
- A defect in the crystal structure results in the failure of every component that the defect is present in.
- Carefully-controlled Minuscule fractions of impurity atoms selectively substituted for silicon atoms define the active regions. Unplanned impurities change the characteristics, resulting in components that don't behave according to design.
So existing silicon technology is exactly what is required. Bednarz's concerns are off the mark. The purity and crystalline nature of the component won't impose any extra costs, because it's what is already done.
Some OTHER requirement MIGHT make it costly. But that's a separate issue.)
Greenspan did exactly what all the [...] Libertarians wanted... lowered the interest rate the Fed charged for money
I call bullshit.
When the Federal Reserve prints (or equivalent) and loans out ANY money, the new money gets its value by diluting the value of ALL the money, thus stealing value from the money already out there.
Libertarians explicitly REJECT this sort of theft.
They believe that ALL money should consist of, or be 100% backed by, a valuable commodity. The value of the money would fluctuate ONLY according to the value of the commodity (and, in the case of "backed" tokens, by the perception of the reliability of the commodity warehousing operation). Thus it would be impossible for the government or its proxies to steal the value out of money already out there to give to its cronies.
So, no, libertarians did NOT want the Fed to lower interest rates.
Learn before you talk.