No, by his logic he said "wiping out large portions of the population" and "[p]ortions of the population would survive". It is logically consistent to simply and easily assume he figures on being one of the survivors... to be alive after such a culling.
So... you called it right the first time: Ra's Al Ghul. The "Demon" was always up to some genocidal scheme or another, in which he'd rule a vastly depopulated Earth.
Don't think there aren't many of us out here that feel the same way. There's only so much stooopid you can watch before you start thinking that perhaps Darwin was really onto something.
Nice propaganda. Now let me tell you the thing you either don't know, or omitted:
Some company/researcher uses his connections into the military-industrial complex to convince some SBIR flunky to put the ideas from the company/researcher into whatever RFP applies to them. The RFP is printed, the company/researcher "applies" to it, and whaddaya know... they "win" the contract.
After helping apply for 2 SBIRs in the materials field, I came to understand that too many SBIRs are like that. To put it simply: The game is rigged. The proposals tend to be written with some recipient in mind who has already been selected behind the scenes.
Hell, this happens all the time. I see a lot of job "interviews" that fall into that game. The interviews are conducted just to make it all look good for compliance with Federal labor law.
And for the record, we didn't "win" our SBIR until we naturally arranged to have a carefully worded RFP issued from our government contacts, which we "applied" for, and of course... we won it. Big shock, eh?
You'd get a lot more "bang for the buck" by simply using the sun. Insolation at Earth orbit is pretty high (1.3kW/m^2?), so construct a suitably large mirror for focusing sunlight. Park the mirror so that it illuminates the asteroid, and it will eventually become molten.
Then you might try zone refining by sweeping the beam of concentrated sunlight down the length of the molten or near-molten asteroid. This should allow the nickel and iron to at least separate.
There are a great many engineering details to work out -- like a backing mirror to provide insulation to the asteroid so it doesn't just cool uncontrollably on the backside -- but that's what you'd essentially do to obtain free fuel for your asteroid melter.
I strongly doubt the invention subculture will be destroyed. Instead, we will see the trend that has already gotten a good start: widespread lawlessness. And it's going to get a lot worse. The only defense the people have left against a bad legal system is to become common criminals. The invention subculture will simply become criminal... like the drug subculture. The subcultural incentive for these areas is too strong to destroy; certainly too strong for something as lame as the law. Laws have very little force. Economics is a much stronger force.
What would be the point in a company hiring researchers and developers if the employees themself held the patents?
Er... that crazy, nutty idea that you should pay for what the idea is worth.
The concept that a person owns an idea is as artificial as the concept that you own anything said person produces just because you pay him... so the moral concept devolves into "who really came up with the innovation?". The answer is "the researcher AND the company" who did the work... hence both should own the idea and profit thereby.
Any Republican will follow this argument... however, it does lead to that nasty, logical result of actually paying non-elite individuals on the level of what the elite get now (i.e. paying researchers some of the millions that a patent allegedly gathers from market action). And that's where you trip over yourself in your posting.
If people were paid even ONE PERCENT of the net profits from the use of their morally-patented work (i.e. the work they essentially innovated), then the system would be much more fair, and would undermine any argument that liberal-leaners like myself might make. But corporations don't even want to pay that 1%. They want it all. And even when getting it all, they connive to change the law to continue getting it all, even more than all. 100% wasn't good enough. They want 110%. And that's just immoral, antisocial greed, Sir. Very immoral indeed.
In true Western Civilization fashion, all we have to do is introduce the Human concept of "airborne hazard insurance" to the Martians, then we can pat outselves on our backs for being "good guys".
Now, if you only had said "I saw my assailant had brass knuckles" or "he threatened me with a knife in his hand", then the crime against you would have been classified as a felony (assault with a weapon), hence might have received more police attention. Not that the police are teaching you to lie in this fashion... naaah.
What review? The current system relies on big money chasing invalid patent claims in court. The banking industry can certainly do that... for a single patent that threatens them. As for patents that threaten the rest of us... well, we'd have to come up with a war chest for the court battle, right?
The 19th Century is returning to America, purchased by all the capital gains from the 20th. The "broken" patent system in America is just another manifestation of that. The rule of money and the rule of law are merging.
If I had to bet cash money on who would win, I'd pick the shelter inhabitants over the remaining population that "survived" the heat pulse. To take such a shelter, you'd have to prepare beforehand... but somehow, your preparation materials and people would have to survive in order to mount the "take the shelter" mission. And as far as I can see, that means having some sort of shelter of your own. So... why bother mounting the mission? Just stay in your own shelter.
This is a highly nonlinear event. There are a great many variables. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the idea of national shelters, therefore.
Look, I'm not trying to be a PITA here, but a tetrahedron isn't spherical either, but it makes a great balanced die, and you can form it by exteme removal of mass from a sphere. Granted, it's a regular polyhedron, like the cube and icosahedron. Removing mass from a sphere at balanced points doesn't strike me as a problem except in... er... assymetrical? cases like 2, 3 and what you imply is 5.
I aimed at "flat spots on a sphere" since (1) it rolls well, and (2) a 100-sided die already exists using that design. Things like 4-sided and 8-sided dice can be tranformed into "flat-spotted spheres" since I could easily visualize the balancing. But of course I was led into the direction of odd numbers of spots. So I still don't see the problem with putting, say, 17 spots upon a sphere and achieving a fair 17-sided die from it. I'm obviously assuming that 17 flat spots can be equidistantly distributed over the surface. I'm also assuming that "equidistantly distributed" will suffice for balance.
What's to read? Distributing mass (or the lack of it) on a spherical surface is the same as distributing anything else that seeks equidistance from each other... at 4 or more points. Hence, unlike your assertion, when I talk about point charges, I'm talking in almost exact metaphor.
Are you saying that 5 spots is a special case like 2 and 3? (I haven't visualized it yet myself.) Or that odd numbers of spots result in imbalance?
I already replied to the user "ionizer" about this. Grinding flat spots into a sphere doesn't mean that the resulting die will have only flat faces upon it. It will have flat AND round areas, with the idea that it will tend to come to rest on one of the flat areas. A 100-sided die already exists using this method (it's obviously cast plastic, not ground, but you get the idea). Flat spots + intervening round areas = total surface of die.
The 100-sided die unfortunately suffers from problems of long and indeterminate resolution. In other words, it tends to roll for a long distance before coming to rest, hence a long time. It is also a bit difficult to determine which number is exactly on top of the die when it does come to rest. Compared to just rolling 2 d10 dice as digits, it is a poor solution.
BTW, I saw a 7-sided die the other day that used 5 rectangular faces and 2 pentagonal faces. It was a clever thing, and I sincerely hope that the face areas were calculated to provide equal chances of resting points. Since the faces were of unequal shape, I couldn't be sure.
A functional 100-sided die is already marketed using this idea. It is essentially a plastic marble with 100 flat spots on it. Of course, between the flat spots we have the necessary and remaining round portions of the sphere. Round areas + flat areas = total sphere surface. Right?
I had thought that that was perfectly obvious. D&D players should be familiar with the 100-sided die I described above... it's for sale in most gaming shops.
A sphere itself is its own 1-sided die. It always produces 1 result.
To produce the 2-sided die, just grind 2 flat spots on your plastic sphere. Of course, they'll have to be positioned equidistant and equatorially, which will mean it will be almost impossible to actually roll it to produce results 1 or 2. But if you grind deep enough flat spots (logically, the extreme will simply be a coin) then it should work. Of course, you may as well just use a coin at that point.
The 3-sided die made from my method will suffer the same problems. You must grind the spots deep enough -- hence severly deforming the "sphere" -- to make it much more likely that a roll will result in a flat spot resting point rather than a round spot. In fact, I saw a 5-sided die just last week, whose shape kinda-sorta ended up as a ground-down sphere. (BTW, a 7-sided die I was shown was a real marvel of clever die construction. It was NOT based upon the sphere, but rather on a cylindrical pentagon (cross-section) which obviously rolls onto 1 of 7 faces (5 rectangular and 2 pentagonal).)
Still, the sphere idea is a bit geeky. It would quite a bit easier to make cylinders as the die base instead of spheres. All you'd have to do is grind down "n" equal faces on the cylinder to form a random number generator of "1 to n". The odds of the cylinder coming to rest on the endpoint are very unlikely. Some modern D&D die designs have just this feature, and so naturally use points on their ends to deter this.
But gamers don't want to roll cylinders. They want to roll DICE -- spherical in nature... or having the character of regular or semi-regular polygonal solids. Hence, my proposal.
P.S. A 3-sided die is nothing difficult. I came up with one in my teenage years when I started playing D&D. Think of a football. It is made from stitched-together "football" shapes (kind of a "rounded diamond" shape), usually in 4 sections. Just make a solid (suspiciously cylindrical-looking) with 3 of those shapes curving to meet each other, as if a football had been constructed with 1 panel missing. Just like the 4-sided "pyramid" die often used in gaming, the "football" d3 would fall upon a face while the opposing "mountain peak" shows the resulting number. The d3 would likely oscillate upon the curving bottom face a bit, but will unambiguously determine a result of 1, 2 or 3. Sure, the surfaces are curved, and the resulting die won't qualify as the polygonal solid we grew to love in geometry classes... but it is still a functional 3-sided die.
I'm a rugged individualist, but I'm at a loss of how to prepare for a heat pulse. The pulse will destroy all individual housing. Essentially every home will burn. Ghettoes and mansions will be cremated equally. I'm sure some of the innovative earth homes out in the Western US will survive, but that's also a bit hit-or-miss.
Hence, my implicit support of things like tunnels and mines for this kind of thing. We have plenty of abandoned mines we could put to this kind of use.
If we take a mathematical exercise of a sphere, and toss "x" point charges onto it, we should end up with an object that's balanced as the x charges distribute themselves "evenly".
The center of mass won't change when we do the same physically by representing these charges with uniform flat spots.
Now, a 2- or 3-sided die made by my suggested method won't be very useful, since 2- and 3-point distributions won't allow a flat spot commonly to fall under the die. (I just now realized I made an error in my use of a number marking... you'd have to mark the OPPOSITE side of the die with the number, not the flat spot. Jeez!) For 2- and 3-spots, they end up on an equatorial plane which will force the die to rest on either pole.
But starting at 4 points of sufficiently deep flat spots, you should end up with a functionally balanced die.
Despite the humorous tone (regardless, you were modded Humorous), this is a good idea at its core. Humanity has made NO preparations to survive a Chixculub-sized event. Picking out 1 million people from the world's 6100 million, and then making some preparations to move all those people quickly to secured sites, is a better move for preserving the Human race than just doing nothing. The sites could be put to dual-usage to not waste resources (since they could be otherwise sitting unused but maintained, for thousands of years), and as time passes "the million" will steadily die off and have inductions of new members.
Silly though that sounds, that does spark an idea on how to make custom dice. Take a uniform plastic marble, put it into a specific gripping device that is simply a 3-axis set of rollers, position it beneath a grinder that makes a specific flat spot, and then hook it all up to a computer. The computer calculates the size and positioning of "x" flat spots for an x-sided die, and then instructs the rollers to position the marble. Once the flat-spot position is attained, the rollers lock the marble into place and then the grinder makes the flat spot. Repeat for 1 to x count. Then release the rollers and the freshly made x-die falls out into a bin.
It would be a good idea to have the number of the flat spot painted on, too. It may make better sense to do a laser burn of the number onto the flat spot, since paint wears off.
Use of a laser may be expanded to even make the flat spots... hence eliminating the problems of grinder physical feedback on the rollers, melting the plastic, etc.
No, I'm not. I'm not a lawyer or an avid layperson.
You've chosen to be that way: uninformed and uninterested. By drawing from your own apathetic condition, you seem to dare to extrapolate to the general population... not just to judge, but aiming to enforce that view. Bravo. Who's doing that crack cocaine again?
Of course the general population is unqualified to make valid legal decisions, in pretty much exactly the same way they're not able to make informed decisions about the airfoil cross-section of the airplanes they fly in, or whether COX-2 inhibitors are an appropriate treatment for their aches and pains, or which deductions they can claim on their taxes.
Wow. Can you even hear what you said here? The citizen is the basis of the law. You've just delivered a rationale (a false one, BTW) for dequalifying citizen authority entirely. After all, you somehow "need" to be some certified legal expert to even hold an opinion and act upon it therefore, right?
By your reasoning, it is illegal to represent yourself in court. Since it isn't, your argument has a hole in it you could pass a modest gas giant planet through.
Here's some advice, Chump: stop worshipping the professional classes before they get around to "deauthorizing" something that you do now that is entirely in your self-interest and right to do.
I mean... wow. You're so inculcated with the slavery mindset that it doesn't even occur to you to question it.
"[N]ot necessarily qualified"? To critique the very thing that makes his labors worthwhile to others? Get off your high horse. Are YOU necessarily qualified to judge legal things which affect YOU? The implied answer is YES... else, you're just a slave -- not even a citizen, fer crissakes!
Idol worship? Strange, I thought his words alone were cogent and worthy of further consideration. In addition, he's a fellow whose very work is heavily dependent upon the legal environment he talked about. That sounds like a man to listen to, doesn't it? After all, we listen to Microsoft's declarations too, since they hold a monopolistic position which affects the legal environment the rest of us exist in.
It is fairly amusing to see Darl spouting crapola over a venue like some "earnings teleconference". I could do the same if I could somehow convince a corporation to pay the bills for such an event. I could then demonstrate some of my armpit-fart noises which has made me so popular at parties.
"Wealthy Wacko Holds Conference: Declares Black is White"... that is essentially what happened here.
Such as soaking the taxpayers for even more "public projects" and assorted corporate welfare for their buddies. If we keep this up, Humanity will deserve its extinction.
Yeah, pretty amazing, eh? These things can go off in the megaton range, but if they are high enough up (50km+), you won't hear anything (at least, over the normal background noise on the ground). That thin air really helps not carry the pressure wave, which we can detect as sound.
Slashdot Mirror
No, by his logic he said "wiping out large portions of the population" and "[p]ortions of the population would survive". It is logically consistent to simply and easily assume he figures on being one of the survivors ... to be alive after such a culling.
... you called it right the first time: Ra's Al Ghul. The "Demon" was always up to some genocidal scheme or another, in which he'd rule a vastly depopulated Earth.
So
Don't think there aren't many of us out here that feel the same way. There's only so much stooopid you can watch before you start thinking that perhaps Darwin was really onto something.
Nice propaganda. Now let me tell you the thing you either don't know, or omitted:
... they "win" the contract.
... we won it. Big shock, eh?
Some company/researcher uses his connections into the military-industrial complex to convince some SBIR flunky to put the ideas from the company/researcher into whatever RFP applies to them. The RFP is printed, the company/researcher "applies" to it, and whaddaya know
After helping apply for 2 SBIRs in the materials field, I came to understand that too many SBIRs are like that. To put it simply: The game is rigged. The proposals tend to be written with some recipient in mind who has already been selected behind the scenes.
Hell, this happens all the time. I see a lot of job "interviews" that fall into that game. The interviews are conducted just to make it all look good for compliance with Federal labor law.
And for the record, we didn't "win" our SBIR until we naturally arranged to have a carefully worded RFP issued from our government contacts, which we "applied" for, and of course
You'd get a lot more "bang for the buck" by simply using the sun. Insolation at Earth orbit is pretty high (1.3kW/m^2?), so construct a suitably large mirror for focusing sunlight. Park the mirror so that it illuminates the asteroid, and it will eventually become molten.
Then you might try zone refining by sweeping the beam of concentrated sunlight down the length of the molten or near-molten asteroid. This should allow the nickel and iron to at least separate.
There are a great many engineering details to work out -- like a backing mirror to provide insulation to the asteroid so it doesn't just cool uncontrollably on the backside -- but that's what you'd essentially do to obtain free fuel for your asteroid melter.
I strongly doubt the invention subculture will be destroyed. Instead, we will see the trend that has already gotten a good start: widespread lawlessness. And it's going to get a lot worse. The only defense the people have left against a bad legal system is to become common criminals. The invention subculture will simply become criminal ... like the drug subculture. The subcultural incentive for these areas is too strong to destroy; certainly too strong for something as lame as the law. Laws have very little force. Economics is a much stronger force.
What would be the point in a company hiring researchers and developers if the employees themself held the patents?
... that crazy, nutty idea that you should pay for what the idea is worth.
... so the moral concept devolves into "who really came up with the innovation?". The answer is "the researcher AND the company" who did the work ... hence both should own the idea and profit thereby.
... however, it does lead to that nasty, logical result of actually paying non-elite individuals on the level of what the elite get now (i.e. paying researchers some of the millions that a patent allegedly gathers from market action). And that's where you trip over yourself in your posting.
Er
The concept that a person owns an idea is as artificial as the concept that you own anything said person produces just because you pay him
Any Republican will follow this argument
If people were paid even ONE PERCENT of the net profits from the use of their morally-patented work (i.e. the work they essentially innovated), then the system would be much more fair, and would undermine any argument that liberal-leaners like myself might make. But corporations don't even want to pay that 1%. They want it all. And even when getting it all, they connive to change the law to continue getting it all, even more than all. 100% wasn't good enough. They want 110%. And that's just immoral, antisocial greed, Sir. Very immoral indeed.
S'funny, I was immediately reminded instead of John Kerry's campaign.
In true Western Civilization fashion, all we have to do is introduce the Human concept of "airborne hazard insurance" to the Martians, then we can pat outselves on our backs for being "good guys".
Now, if you only had said "I saw my assailant had brass knuckles" or "he threatened me with a knife in his hand", then the crime against you would have been classified as a felony (assault with a weapon), hence might have received more police attention. Not that the police are teaching you to lie in this fashion ... naaah.
What review? The current system relies on big money chasing invalid patent claims in court. The banking industry can certainly do that ... for a single patent that threatens them. As for patents that threaten the rest of us ... well, we'd have to come up with a war chest for the court battle, right?
The 19th Century is returning to America, purchased by all the capital gains from the 20th. The "broken" patent system in America is just another manifestation of that. The rule of money and the rule of law are merging.
If I had to bet cash money on who would win, I'd pick the shelter inhabitants over the remaining population that "survived" the heat pulse. To take such a shelter, you'd have to prepare beforehand ... but somehow, your preparation materials and people would have to survive in order to mount the "take the shelter" mission. And as far as I can see, that means having some sort of shelter of your own. So ... why bother mounting the mission? Just stay in your own shelter.
This is a highly nonlinear event. There are a great many variables. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the idea of national shelters, therefore.
Look, I'm not trying to be a PITA here, but a tetrahedron isn't spherical either, but it makes a great balanced die, and you can form it by exteme removal of mass from a sphere. Granted, it's a regular polyhedron, like the cube and icosahedron. Removing mass from a sphere at balanced points doesn't strike me as a problem except in ... er ... assymetrical? cases like 2, 3 and what you imply is 5.
I aimed at "flat spots on a sphere" since (1) it rolls well, and (2) a 100-sided die already exists using that design. Things like 4-sided and 8-sided dice can be tranformed into "flat-spotted spheres" since I could easily visualize the balancing. But of course I was led into the direction of odd numbers of spots. So I still don't see the problem with putting, say, 17 spots upon a sphere and achieving a fair 17-sided die from it. I'm obviously assuming that 17 flat spots can be equidistantly distributed over the surface. I'm also assuming that "equidistantly distributed" will suffice for balance.
What's to read? Distributing mass (or the lack of it) on a spherical surface is the same as distributing anything else that seeks equidistance from each other ... at 4 or more points. Hence, unlike your assertion, when I talk about point charges, I'm talking in almost exact metaphor.
Are you saying that 5 spots is a special case like 2 and 3? (I haven't visualized it yet myself.) Or that odd numbers of spots result in imbalance?
I already replied to the user "ionizer" about this. Grinding flat spots into a sphere doesn't mean that the resulting die will have only flat faces upon it. It will have flat AND round areas, with the idea that it will tend to come to rest on one of the flat areas. A 100-sided die already exists using this method (it's obviously cast plastic, not ground, but you get the idea). Flat spots + intervening round areas = total surface of die.
The 100-sided die unfortunately suffers from problems of long and indeterminate resolution. In other words, it tends to roll for a long distance before coming to rest, hence a long time. It is also a bit difficult to determine which number is exactly on top of the die when it does come to rest. Compared to just rolling 2 d10 dice as digits, it is a poor solution.
BTW, I saw a 7-sided die the other day that used 5 rectangular faces and 2 pentagonal faces. It was a clever thing, and I sincerely hope that the face areas were calculated to provide equal chances of resting points. Since the faces were of unequal shape, I couldn't be sure.
Why is my idea so hard to understand?
... it's for sale in most gaming shops.
... or having the character of regular or semi-regular polygonal solids. Hence, my proposal.
... but it is still a functional 3-sided die.
A functional 100-sided die is already marketed using this idea. It is essentially a plastic marble with 100 flat spots on it. Of course, between the flat spots we have the necessary and remaining round portions of the sphere. Round areas + flat areas = total sphere surface. Right?
I had thought that that was perfectly obvious. D&D players should be familiar with the 100-sided die I described above
A sphere itself is its own 1-sided die. It always produces 1 result.
To produce the 2-sided die, just grind 2 flat spots on your plastic sphere. Of course, they'll have to be positioned equidistant and equatorially, which will mean it will be almost impossible to actually roll it to produce results 1 or 2. But if you grind deep enough flat spots (logically, the extreme will simply be a coin) then it should work. Of course, you may as well just use a coin at that point.
The 3-sided die made from my method will suffer the same problems. You must grind the spots deep enough -- hence severly deforming the "sphere" -- to make it much more likely that a roll will result in a flat spot resting point rather than a round spot. In fact, I saw a 5-sided die just last week, whose shape kinda-sorta ended up as a ground-down sphere. (BTW, a 7-sided die I was shown was a real marvel of clever die construction. It was NOT based upon the sphere, but rather on a cylindrical pentagon (cross-section) which obviously rolls onto 1 of 7 faces (5 rectangular and 2 pentagonal).)
Still, the sphere idea is a bit geeky. It would quite a bit easier to make cylinders as the die base instead of spheres. All you'd have to do is grind down "n" equal faces on the cylinder to form a random number generator of "1 to n". The odds of the cylinder coming to rest on the endpoint are very unlikely. Some modern D&D die designs have just this feature, and so naturally use points on their ends to deter this.
But gamers don't want to roll cylinders. They want to roll DICE -- spherical in nature
P.S. A 3-sided die is nothing difficult. I came up with one in my teenage years when I started playing D&D. Think of a football. It is made from stitched-together "football" shapes (kind of a "rounded diamond" shape), usually in 4 sections. Just make a solid (suspiciously cylindrical-looking) with 3 of those shapes curving to meet each other, as if a football had been constructed with 1 panel missing. Just like the 4-sided "pyramid" die often used in gaming, the "football" d3 would fall upon a face while the opposing "mountain peak" shows the resulting number. The d3 would likely oscillate upon the curving bottom face a bit, but will unambiguously determine a result of 1, 2 or 3. Sure, the surfaces are curved, and the resulting die won't qualify as the polygonal solid we grew to love in geometry classes
I'm a rugged individualist, but I'm at a loss of how to prepare for a heat pulse. The pulse will destroy all individual housing. Essentially every home will burn. Ghettoes and mansions will be cremated equally. I'm sure some of the innovative earth homes out in the Western US will survive, but that's also a bit hit-or-miss.
Hence, my implicit support of things like tunnels and mines for this kind of thing. We have plenty of abandoned mines we could put to this kind of use.
I'm sorry, I'm just not following your argument.
... you'd have to mark the OPPOSITE side of the die with the number, not the flat spot. Jeez!) For 2- and 3-spots, they end up on an equatorial plane which will force the die to rest on either pole.
If we take a mathematical exercise of a sphere, and toss "x" point charges onto it, we should end up with an object that's balanced as the x charges distribute themselves "evenly".
The center of mass won't change when we do the same physically by representing these charges with uniform flat spots.
Now, a 2- or 3-sided die made by my suggested method won't be very useful, since 2- and 3-point distributions won't allow a flat spot commonly to fall under the die. (I just now realized I made an error in my use of a number marking
But starting at 4 points of sufficiently deep flat spots, you should end up with a functionally balanced die.
How close would you want to be? Closer than the usual proximity to a Disater Area rock concert? If so, you'll be toast.
Despite the humorous tone (regardless, you were modded Humorous), this is a good idea at its core. Humanity has made NO preparations to survive a Chixculub-sized event. Picking out 1 million people from the world's 6100 million, and then making some preparations to move all those people quickly to secured sites, is a better move for preserving the Human race than just doing nothing. The sites could be put to dual-usage to not waste resources (since they could be otherwise sitting unused but maintained, for thousands of years), and as time passes "the million" will steadily die off and have inductions of new members.
Silly though that sounds, that does spark an idea on how to make custom dice. Take a uniform plastic marble, put it into a specific gripping device that is simply a 3-axis set of rollers, position it beneath a grinder that makes a specific flat spot, and then hook it all up to a computer. The computer calculates the size and positioning of "x" flat spots for an x-sided die, and then instructs the rollers to position the marble. Once the flat-spot position is attained, the rollers lock the marble into place and then the grinder makes the flat spot. Repeat for 1 to x count. Then release the rollers and the freshly made x-die falls out into a bin.
... hence eliminating the problems of grinder physical feedback on the rollers, melting the plastic, etc.
It would be a good idea to have the number of the flat spot painted on, too. It may make better sense to do a laser burn of the number onto the flat spot, since paint wears off.
Use of a laser may be expanded to even make the flat spots
No, I'm not. I'm not a lawyer or an avid layperson.
... not just to judge, but aiming to enforce that view. Bravo. Who's doing that crack cocaine again?
... wow. You're so inculcated with the slavery mindset that it doesn't even occur to you to question it.
You've chosen to be that way: uninformed and uninterested. By drawing from your own apathetic condition, you seem to dare to extrapolate to the general population
Of course the general population is unqualified to make valid legal decisions, in pretty much exactly the same way they're not able to make informed decisions about the airfoil cross-section of the airplanes they fly in, or whether COX-2 inhibitors are an appropriate treatment for their aches and pains, or which deductions they can claim on their taxes.
Wow. Can you even hear what you said here? The citizen is the basis of the law. You've just delivered a rationale (a false one, BTW) for dequalifying citizen authority entirely. After all, you somehow "need" to be some certified legal expert to even hold an opinion and act upon it therefore, right?
By your reasoning, it is illegal to represent yourself in court. Since it isn't, your argument has a hole in it you could pass a modest gas giant planet through.
Here's some advice, Chump: stop worshipping the professional classes before they get around to "deauthorizing" something that you do now that is entirely in your self-interest and right to do.
I mean
Wow!
"[N]ot necessarily qualified"? To critique the very thing that makes his labors worthwhile to others? Get off your high horse. Are YOU necessarily qualified to judge legal things which affect YOU? The implied answer is YES ... else, you're just a slave -- not even a citizen, fer crissakes!
Idol worship? Strange, I thought his words alone were cogent and worthy of further consideration. In addition, he's a fellow whose very work is heavily dependent upon the legal environment he talked about. That sounds like a man to listen to, doesn't it? After all, we listen to Microsoft's declarations too, since they hold a monopolistic position which affects the legal environment the rest of us exist in.
It is fairly amusing to see Darl spouting crapola over a venue like some "earnings teleconference". I could do the same if I could somehow convince a corporation to pay the bills for such an event. I could then demonstrate some of my armpit-fart noises which has made me so popular at parties.
... that is essentially what happened here.
"Wealthy Wacko Holds Conference: Declares Black is White"
Such as soaking the taxpayers for even more "public projects" and assorted corporate welfare for their buddies. If we keep this up, Humanity will deserve its extinction.
Yeah, pretty amazing, eh? These things can go off in the megaton range, but if they are high enough up (50km+), you won't hear anything (at least, over the normal background noise on the ground). That thin air really helps not carry the pressure wave, which we can detect as sound.