This looks to me like an actionable threat. Someday you're going to let something like this slip out of your mouth in public and someone is going to not just clean your clock, but take the fucker apart.
Amazing. I suppose it had to happen eventually, but I just had to mention that drinkypoo and I are actually agreeing on something. No point, just an observation.
The reality of this situation could very well be that people who learn how to relax, might do it by drinking. They're happier because they relax by this, or other means. The parent to drinky's post is a good example of someone who needs to relax a bit or he's gonna die young, either through doing somethign stupid, or just by eating himself up with stress.
Hmm let's see, it kills bacteria on contact, burns when put on your membranes or other unprotected tissue because it basically destroys organic material, and is flammable yet indigestible and a cup of it pure will kill you...yup sounds perfectly safe,
Can you provide cites to show anything to back this up? Specifically, that the "burning" sensation is it "destroy(ing) organic material", that it's indigestible, and that a cup of it will kill you?
Reason I ask, is that I looked up the LD50 for ethyl alcohol, can't find one for humans but I do find:
LD50/LC50:
CAS# 64-17-5:
Oral, mouse: LD50 = 3450 mg/kg;
Oral, rabbit: LD50 = 6300 mg/kg;
Oral, rat: LD50 = 7060 mg/kg;
So even if we're most like mice, let's say you weigh 100kg. So the LD50 for you (dose to cause lethality in 50% of the population, but of course you know that since you're throwing stats around, right?), let's see. 3450 mg/kg. times 100kg, is 345,000mg to have a 50% chance of killing you. 345 grams. This is 95% pure alcohol; industrial strength, most booze is right around 40%. But let's say you got "a cup" of pure alcohol. 1 cup is 236 milliliters. The specific gravity of ethanol is.789, so one cup of pure alcohol would be 186 grams of alcohol. 186 is significantly less than 345, in fact it's almost exactly half. So. If you drank a PINT of pure ethanol, it has a 50% chance of killing you. But remember, most booze is only 40%, so that's 2.5 pints you'd need, to have a 50% chance of killing you.
I can only conclude, then, that you pulled this, and probably the rest of your "facts", from somewhere dark and smelly in the immediate vicinity of your chair. Rounding errors and the question of the LD50 of ethanol in humans are the only wiggle room I'm seeing with my figures here, but we're at a heck of a lot more than "a cup of it will kill you".
How does a message saying, in effect, "I don't know if you're trying to be funny or if you're just completely unfamiliar with what you're talking about" equal touchy? Maybe I'm trying to understand a new, extremely subtle form of humor or something?
That's going to keep me laughing a long time. ESPECIALLY at the mac zealots out there (those who believe it was the perfectly secure OS,
to which I replied:
You know, it's funny. The ONLY people I ever see who say "perfectly secure" or "bulletproof", are people like you.
That's hardly me saying "Nobody ever claims that OS X is bulletproof and perfectly safe.". If you're unable to see the difference, well, maybe someone can explain it to you. My point was, and is, I've never met this mythical person who allegedly believes that.
But this is more than enouogh effort for an AC's troll post, don't you think?
Ignorance, or humor? It's so, so hard to tell. And besides, I could always boot the thing into Windows if I wanted. But by all means, don't let actual facts get in the way of your ignorance and/or joke./me waits for "one button mouse" comment/
That's going to keep me laughing a long time. ESPECIALLY at the mac zealots out there (those who believe it was the perfectly secure OS,
You know, it's funny. The ONLY people I ever see who say "perfectly secure" or "bulletproof", are people like you. Maybe you just don't read clearly and you think Mac folks actually are saying it, or maybe you're just an AC trying to stir up discussion. So are you ignorant, or are you lying?
Right, but now if you want to install a program or security update you have to power off, change jumper, power on, install, power off, reset jumper, power back on. This may or may not be worth it, particularily in the case of a security update.
Amazingly enough, I can draw on 25 year old experience on this one, sort of. Back in the early 1980s, I ran a BBS on a dialup TRS-80. The floppy drives, I put toggle switches on the front of so the read-only setting could be changed on the fly. So worst case, it'd be something you might be able to put an external switch for that jumper, outside the drive case. Maybe. Might blow up but at the time it worked great.
God, I wish the environmentalist would take the same position with regards to nuclear power!
/me raises hand
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person considers himself an "environmentalist" who is strongly pro-nuke-power. It makes the most sense after all, solves most of the problems in exchange for other manageable problems. Problem is, emotionalism gets in the way of science (no, really?) like on so many other topics.
Now if I can just convince the last supervisor that Media Wiki is better than MS Word with Track Changes turned on (shudder!).
There's a word macro out there called word2wiki, by some German guy I think. Works great, and helped me overcome that last bit of social inertia here. You can write it in word, no problem, run it through the macro, and paste the result into your wiki, it's all wikified, no (gasp!) having to learn any new tags.
I ahad someone do this to me once, I took a look at it and knew immediatly what it did so I told them straight off.
They were unhappy that I didn't 'Walk the process'.
Well, seems to me, that didn't backfire at all. You learned something about the people interviewing you. Remember, an interview is just as much "Do I want to work here", as "Do I want to hire you". The interviewer gets to set the agenda, but if you don't go into it with a "are they good enough to employ me" point of view, you're doing it wrong. It's one thing if you're broke, unemployed, and hungry of course, but even still, the interview process is your chance as a professional, to decide who you want to work for.
Very interesting -- where does one find "junk silver" coins?
You can go in to your local coin dealer and pay about a 10% premium for them, or you can order from someone like apmex.com in the "wholesale lots" screen to get it a bit closer to spot price. In the case of the 1921-D half I found, it was on a week when silver was peaking (back in May), and the coin dealer was a freaking zoo - busy, buying a lot, no time to check through the incoming stuff for key dates. So I took a bit of a hit on the per-ounce cost but got much better coins than most weeks. I don't know if apmex goes through for dates, I'm guessing they do. It's very random.
A normal mech will have additional sections to test the coin - the track itself has a maximum size, coins too large will not fit, coins too thin fall through, some are filtered by magnetic elements as you suggest, others by electronically listening to the sound a coin makes after hitting a piezo element at the end of the run.
Interesting. I get bags of pennies from the local bank - they're glad to be rid of them, as they have to pay to have them taken away otherwise. So I know they're all pennies before I get them. But, I use an older coin counter as a hopper/dispensing system anyway, so they're checked again for mechanical size that way. Sometimes a dime shows up in the penny bags, it comes out into a different hopper of course. One other mechanism I've looked at, bought, and not used yet, is a "coin comparator", as used in slot machines to detect bogus coins or tokens. You put a known "good" sample coin under the sample coin, and then the coin being tested passes through a slot. The coin generates a signal in the sense coil which they compare to the sample coin with some wonderfully elegant circuitry, and if it matches, it drops through. If it doesn't match by a certain amount, a little solenoid kicks it to the other slot (return hopper). If the magnet & track thing didn't work this well, I'd probably fire up that sucker.
Of course, now that it's illegal to melt the copper ones, the value of this exercise is in the joy of solving an interesting problem, and in pre-sorting out all the zinc so I can go through just copper pennies, which is where all the wheat cents and interesting dates/errors are anyway. Right now, it's just gallons of pennies for "someday if ever". If copper goes to 10x where it is, the decision to sort or sell gets really easy. And keep in mind - even if it's illegal to melt them, the coins have a melt value, and it's not illegal to _trade_ at that value, just to destroy them.
Your information is totally wrong, and of course you were modded up for it. Penny content changed to steel and maganese in 1942, bronze in 1943, and in 1982 to copper-plated zinc. That's it.
Good lord. Yet another person imperiously posting completely incorrect information when the real info is so, so easy to find. Makes me question the credibility of those posters when I'm reading what they pull out of the sky on topics I'm not as familiar with.
Oh, and to the guy who keeps modding me "troll" for posting corrections? Why don't you grow some cahones and tell me why you think I'm wrong. Facts are a wonderful thing, try some with me. Let's talk.
How about by weight? A copper penny is 3 oz., while a zinc penny is 2.5. Seems ideal for a coin-sorter type device.
Grams, not ounces, of course. Problem with weight, is a balance is going to be SLOW. Unless I had come up with a strain gage and some sort of solenoid to kick the coin one way or the other. Turns out they behave extremely different in a high magnetic field. So I have a contraption with a pair of old hard drive magnets across some hotwheels track, and a couple ramps. Coin down ramp, through magnet. Copper ones slow down MUCH more through the magnets due to the induced eddy currents. They fall on the first ramp; the zinc ones don't lose as much of the horizontal vector, so the fly out to the second ramp. Processing time is as fast as the coin counter can space them on the track. Zinc ones go byebye, copper ones go into a bucket. All the interesting ones from a collecting standpoint are pre-1983 anyway. Then if someone wants to go through for dates or varieties or for melting, the bucket on the left is full of copper cents, you don't have to waste time digging through zinc ones to find the good ones.
Another sorting mechanism which seems like it would work, but didn't for me, would be to differentiate by density. Copper is slightly more dense than iron, zinc is somewhat less. It would seem to work that a handfulls of pennies into a vibrating container filled with iron pellets (OK, BB's), would let the copper pennies sink, the zinc pennies float. Doesn't work, I don't know why. But the magnets and hotwheel track works great, and has the benefits of being elegantly simple, and somewhat rube-goldberg'ish at the same time.
How about by weight? A copper penny is 3 oz., while a zinc penny is 2.5. Seems ideal for a coin-sorter type device.
Grams, not ounces, of course. Problem with weight, is a balance is going to be SLOW. Unless I had come up with a strain gage and some sort of solenoid to kick the coin one way or the other. Turns out they behave extremely different in a high magnetic field. So I have a contraption with a pair of old hard drive magnets across some hotwheels track, and a couple ramps. Coin down ramp, then horizontal and through magnets. Copper ones slow down MUCH more through the magnets due to the induced eddy currents. They fall on the first ramp; the zinc ones don't lose as much of the horizontal vector, so the fly out to the second ramp. Processing time is as fast as the coin counter can space them on the track. Zinc ones go byebye back to a different bank than I get bags of pennies from, copper ones go into a bucket. All the interesting ones from a collecting standpoint are pre-1983 anyway. Then if someone wants to go through for dates or varieties or for melting, the bucket on the left is full of copper cents, you don't have to waste time digging through zinc ones to find the good ones.
Another sorting mechanism which seems like it would work, but didn't for me, would be to differentiate by density. Copper is slightly more dense than iron, zinc is somewhat less. It would seem to work that a handfulls of pennies into a vibrating container filled with iron pellets (OK, BB's), would let the copper pennies sink, the zinc pennies float. Doesn't work, I don't know why. But the magnets and hotwheel track works great.
Refining the actual metals (precious or not) aside, I was already under the impressions that destruction or US currency (which melting and refining would be classified under) is already illegal. So what is new here
Destruction of "minor coinage" hasn't been illegal until now.
Half-dollars continued to use a lesser amount of silver through 1970 (and 1976 bicentennial), after which they transitioned to the same makeup as the quarter. Some of the earlier Eisenhower dollers also contained a silver mixture.
You can actually still get current production US silver coins. The "silver proof sets" are available, cost more than the standard proof sets, and may or may not be more collectable a few decades out. Here's a link. I've found a few of these very new proofs (half dollars) in circulation. Some meth-head or kid is cracking out the coin sets, I suppose.
I've been a good sport to this point.. but you are now the 4th person to correct me on this without bothering to read the others..
Actually, I thought I added value to the thread by pointing out that your conclusions were therefore wrong. Not just correcting your facts, but taking it further to point out the perhaps obvious. I just don't get why people would bother to post at all, on a topic they have slight knowledge of at best, especially when getting the real dates and metals would have taken a dozen seconds at wikipedia.
My second question is how much would it cost to refine these metals to make them worth the most? Copper prices are sky high right now but a lump of melted pennies probably wouldn't be able to be sold as a "copper" since there are a number of other metals involved. Is this something that can really be profitable?
That's a really great question. The deal is, at least for silver and gold coins - they are kept in their coin form but traded at or near melt value. There are several reasons for this. First, a US coin (silver dime/quarter/half/dollar), or penny or nickel, will have a known alloy. You _know_ that this object is, say, 90% silver, or 90% gold, or 95% copper. You don't have to have it assayed for purity to find out what it's got; the mint took care of that when it was made.
Another reason to leave them in coin form, is that people _do_ collect the coins at a premium to the melt value. I've been buying "junk silver" coins for years, going through them, picking out the good ones, and selling 'em on eBay. Once found a silver half in a junk silver buy, that I sold for $230 or so over there. If ya melt them into ingots, they're just not as interesting. Coins are also easier to count, store, handle, and so on. Bulk metals investing, sure, go buy that 100 ounce silver bar, but it's a BIG chunk of money to swing at one time in either direction - can't just sell a roll of silver quarters and get 100 bucks, or whatever. Coins are a convenient form factor to have them in, so melting costs don't enter into it - because they're rarely melted.
Now for copper, which is a base metal and used widely in industry, melting would probably happen more often. The spot market would then reflect this, and when copper gets to the point where it's worth melting, this regulation may be gone and a spot market will develop with prices to reflect processing costs. It all evens out in the end. In the meantime, 20% or so of the circulating pennies in this part of the country are the 95% copper type. If only there were some way to distinguish them automatically using an electromagnetic signature or something (ahem), one could sort them at a rate of 5 coins per second, store the copper, turn in the zinc ones, and play the numbers. The ban on melting screws that up a bit...
An interesting idea, but topics 1 thru 3 require complicity in grand theft. Topic number 4 is intrigging; Why not have the interviewer present code, and have the candidate describe it?
That's the approach I take. "Here, what does this script do? Go into as much detail as you'd like." It's not so much what they say, but how they approach the problem that I'm interested in.
Peter Boyle's death is appropriate news for an entertainment/celebrity news site. This is a technology site and it's not appropriate here as he has no connection to technology or technology-related issues.
Who said anything about Peter Boyle? This is about some blogger attempting shennanigans pretending he's being threatened with a lawsuit over google rankings, in an effort to boost traffic to his site.
That said, nobody has done the Frankenstein monster better than Boyle.
You must have broken your glasses with that knee-jerk reaction. After you find your other pair, try reading it again.
No, you and the (other?) AC just don't get the fact that, 150 years later, it doesn't matter what the definition of the word is. What matters is how it was defined as it was used at the time. That's the central point. Don't bother expecting another response if you reply to this as AC, by the way.
I still believe the general idea of the post I made, the nature of the arms the "right to keep and bear arms" is talking about is the tools of home defense and implements of a standard infantryman of the day.
The wording is "keep and bear arms", not "keep and bear arms as long as there are no new technological developments". And the Federalist Papers make it pretty clear that the point of doing that is to prevent the government from getting too much power over the people. This document, don't forget, is about the rights of the people.
So when cities or high crime areas try and regulate the possession and carrying of concealable weapons I don't think it follows that they are automatically infringing upon the right to bear arms. I think my right to a gun in my house, to protect my property, short or long is very different than my right to have it tucked in my coat when I'm at the supermarket, isn't it?
Is it? The problem isn't with the gun being concealable - a good person with a gun, is only a threat to a bad person who tries to do something bad. If you're a good person, your gun makes me safer; if you're a bad person, your gun makes me less safe. The problem with legislation, is that by definition, the bad guys don't follow the laws (that's because they're bad guys). So a disparity is created where the criminal is armed, and _knows_ that his potential victim is safe to attack.
In every state that has passed concealed carry laws, the violent person-on-person crime rate has gone down. Without exception. Criminals aren't stupid, they know what is and isn't safe. This improvement couldn't happen without concealable guns; the "maybe he is, maybe he isn't" factor is strong in deterrence. So really, the 2nd is about defense against the government, and CCW is about defense against individual criminals. The same dynamics are involved though - if (bad thing) thinks they can get away with it, they will try.
Slashdot Mirror
This looks to me like an actionable threat. Someday you're going to let something like this slip out of your mouth in public and someone is going to not just clean your clock, but take the fucker apart.
Amazing. I suppose it had to happen eventually, but I just had to mention that drinkypoo and I are actually agreeing on something. No point, just an observation.
The reality of this situation could very well be that people who learn how to relax, might do it by drinking. They're happier because they relax by this, or other means. The parent to drinky's post is a good example of someone who needs to relax a bit or he's gonna die young, either through doing somethign stupid, or just by eating himself up with stress.
Hmm let's see, it kills bacteria on contact, burns when put on your membranes or other unprotected tissue because it basically destroys organic material, and is flammable yet indigestible and a cup of it pure will kill you...yup sounds perfectly safe,
.789, so one cup of pure alcohol would be 186 grams of alcohol. 186 is significantly less than 345, in fact it's almost exactly half. So. If you drank a PINT of pure ethanol, it has a 50% chance of killing you. But remember, most booze is only 40%, so that's 2.5 pints you'd need, to have a 50% chance of killing you.
Can you provide cites to show anything to back this up? Specifically, that the "burning" sensation is it "destroy(ing) organic material", that it's indigestible, and that a cup of it will kill you?
Reason I ask, is that I looked up the LD50 for ethyl alcohol, can't find one for humans but I do find: LD50/LC50: CAS# 64-17-5: Oral, mouse: LD50 = 3450 mg/kg; Oral, rabbit: LD50 = 6300 mg/kg; Oral, rat: LD50 = 7060 mg/kg; So even if we're most like mice, let's say you weigh 100kg. So the LD50 for you (dose to cause lethality in 50% of the population, but of course you know that since you're throwing stats around, right?), let's see. 3450 mg/kg. times 100kg, is 345,000mg to have a 50% chance of killing you. 345 grams. This is 95% pure alcohol; industrial strength, most booze is right around 40%. But let's say you got "a cup" of pure alcohol. 1 cup is 236 milliliters. The specific gravity of ethanol is
I can only conclude, then, that you pulled this, and probably the rest of your "facts", from somewhere dark and smelly in the immediate vicinity of your chair. Rounding errors and the question of the LD50 of ethanol in humans are the only wiggle room I'm seeing with my figures here, but we're at a heck of a lot more than "a cup of it will kill you".
How does a message saying, in effect, "I don't know if you're trying to be funny or if you're just completely unfamiliar with what you're talking about" equal touchy? Maybe I'm trying to understand a new, extremely subtle form of humor or something?
Your interpretation is flawed. He wrote:
That's going to keep me laughing a long time. ESPECIALLY at the mac zealots out there (those who believe it was the perfectly secure OS,
to which I replied: You know, it's funny. The ONLY people I ever see who say "perfectly secure" or "bulletproof", are people like you.
That's hardly me saying "Nobody ever claims that OS X is bulletproof and perfectly safe.". If you're unable to see the difference, well, maybe someone can explain it to you. My point was, and is, I've never met this mythical person who allegedly believes that. But this is more than enouogh effort for an AC's troll post, don't you think?
Dude, this was on a Mac... no games. duh
/me waits for "one button mouse" comment/
Ignorance, or humor? It's so, so hard to tell. And besides, I could always boot the thing into Windows if I wanted. But by all means, don't let actual facts get in the way of your ignorance and/or joke.
That's going to keep me laughing a long time. ESPECIALLY at the mac zealots out there (those who believe it was the perfectly secure OS,
You know, it's funny. The ONLY people I ever see who say "perfectly secure" or "bulletproof", are people like you. Maybe you just don't read clearly and you think Mac folks actually are saying it, or maybe you're just an AC trying to stir up discussion. So are you ignorant, or are you lying?
Right, but now if you want to install a program or security update you have to power off, change jumper, power on, install, power off, reset jumper, power back on. This may or may not be worth it, particularily in the case of a security update.
Amazingly enough, I can draw on 25 year old experience on this one, sort of. Back in the early 1980s, I ran a BBS on a dialup TRS-80. The floppy drives, I put toggle switches on the front of so the read-only setting could be changed on the fly. So worst case, it'd be something you might be able to put an external switch for that jumper, outside the drive case. Maybe. Might blow up but at the time it worked great.
God, I wish the environmentalist would take the same position with regards to nuclear power!
/me raises hand
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person considers himself an "environmentalist" who is strongly pro-nuke-power. It makes the most sense after all, solves most of the problems in exchange for other manageable problems. Problem is, emotionalism gets in the way of science (no, really?) like on so many other topics.
Now if I can just convince the last supervisor that Media Wiki is better than MS Word with Track Changes turned on (shudder!).
There's a word macro out there called word2wiki, by some German guy I think. Works great, and helped me overcome that last bit of social inertia here. You can write it in word, no problem, run it through the macro, and paste the result into your wiki, it's all wikified, no (gasp!) having to learn any new tags.
I ahad someone do this to me once, I took a look at it and knew immediatly what it did so I told them straight off. They were unhappy that I didn't 'Walk the process'.
Well, seems to me, that didn't backfire at all. You learned something about the people interviewing you. Remember, an interview is just as much "Do I want to work here", as "Do I want to hire you". The interviewer gets to set the agenda, but if you don't go into it with a "are they good enough to employ me" point of view, you're doing it wrong. It's one thing if you're broke, unemployed, and hungry of course, but even still, the interview process is your chance as a professional, to decide who you want to work for.
Very interesting -- where does one find "junk silver" coins?
You can go in to your local coin dealer and pay about a 10% premium for them, or you can order from someone like apmex.com in the "wholesale lots" screen to get it a bit closer to spot price. In the case of the 1921-D half I found, it was on a week when silver was peaking (back in May), and the coin dealer was a freaking zoo - busy, buying a lot, no time to check through the incoming stuff for key dates. So I took a bit of a hit on the per-ounce cost but got much better coins than most weeks. I don't know if apmex goes through for dates, I'm guessing they do. It's very random.
A normal mech will have additional sections to test the coin - the track itself has a maximum size, coins too large will not fit, coins too thin fall through, some are filtered by magnetic elements as you suggest, others by electronically listening to the sound a coin makes after hitting a piezo element at the end of the run.
Interesting. I get bags of pennies from the local bank - they're glad to be rid of them, as they have to pay to have them taken away otherwise. So I know they're all pennies before I get them. But, I use an older coin counter as a hopper/dispensing system anyway, so they're checked again for mechanical size that way. Sometimes a dime shows up in the penny bags, it comes out into a different hopper of course. One other mechanism I've looked at, bought, and not used yet, is a "coin comparator", as used in slot machines to detect bogus coins or tokens. You put a known "good" sample coin under the sample coin, and then the coin being tested passes through a slot. The coin generates a signal in the sense coil which they compare to the sample coin with some wonderfully elegant circuitry, and if it matches, it drops through. If it doesn't match by a certain amount, a little solenoid kicks it to the other slot (return hopper). If the magnet & track thing didn't work this well, I'd probably fire up that sucker.
Of course, now that it's illegal to melt the copper ones, the value of this exercise is in the joy of solving an interesting problem, and in pre-sorting out all the zinc so I can go through just copper pennies, which is where all the wheat cents and interesting dates/errors are anyway. Right now, it's just gallons of pennies for "someday if ever". If copper goes to 10x where it is, the decision to sort or sell gets really easy. And keep in mind - even if it's illegal to melt them, the coins have a melt value, and it's not illegal to _trade_ at that value, just to destroy them.
I work for the U.S. Mint. So I am really getting a kick out of most of these replies.
Fark.com called - they say they're sorry and they'll take you back.
Your information is totally wrong, and of course you were modded up for it. Penny content changed to steel and maganese in 1942, bronze in 1943, and in 1982 to copper-plated zinc. That's it.
Good lord. Yet another person imperiously posting completely incorrect information when the real info is so, so easy to find. Makes me question the credibility of those posters when I'm reading what they pull out of the sky on topics I'm not as familiar with.
Oh, and to the guy who keeps modding me "troll" for posting corrections? Why don't you grow some cahones and tell me why you think I'm wrong. Facts are a wonderful thing, try some with me. Let's talk.
How about by weight? A copper penny is 3 oz., while a zinc penny is 2.5. Seems ideal for a coin-sorter type device.
Grams, not ounces, of course. Problem with weight, is a balance is going to be SLOW. Unless I had come up with a strain gage and some sort of solenoid to kick the coin one way or the other. Turns out they behave extremely different in a high magnetic field. So I have a contraption with a pair of old hard drive magnets across some hotwheels track, and a couple ramps. Coin down ramp, through magnet. Copper ones slow down MUCH more through the magnets due to the induced eddy currents. They fall on the first ramp; the zinc ones don't lose as much of the horizontal vector, so the fly out to the second ramp. Processing time is as fast as the coin counter can space them on the track. Zinc ones go byebye, copper ones go into a bucket. All the interesting ones from a collecting standpoint are pre-1983 anyway. Then if someone wants to go through for dates or varieties or for melting, the bucket on the left is full of copper cents, you don't have to waste time digging through zinc ones to find the good ones.
Another sorting mechanism which seems like it would work, but didn't for me, would be to differentiate by density. Copper is slightly more dense than iron, zinc is somewhat less. It would seem to work that a handfulls of pennies into a vibrating container filled with iron pellets (OK, BB's), would let the copper pennies sink, the zinc pennies float. Doesn't work, I don't know why. But the magnets and hotwheel track works great, and has the benefits of being elegantly simple, and somewhat rube-goldberg'ish at the same time.
How about by weight? A copper penny is 3 oz., while a zinc penny is 2.5. Seems ideal for a coin-sorter type device.
Grams, not ounces, of course. Problem with weight, is a balance is going to be SLOW. Unless I had come up with a strain gage and some sort of solenoid to kick the coin one way or the other. Turns out they behave extremely different in a high magnetic field. So I have a contraption with a pair of old hard drive magnets across some hotwheels track, and a couple ramps. Coin down ramp, then horizontal and through magnets. Copper ones slow down MUCH more through the magnets due to the induced eddy currents. They fall on the first ramp; the zinc ones don't lose as much of the horizontal vector, so the fly out to the second ramp. Processing time is as fast as the coin counter can space them on the track. Zinc ones go byebye back to a different bank than I get bags of pennies from, copper ones go into a bucket. All the interesting ones from a collecting standpoint are pre-1983 anyway. Then if someone wants to go through for dates or varieties or for melting, the bucket on the left is full of copper cents, you don't have to waste time digging through zinc ones to find the good ones.
Another sorting mechanism which seems like it would work, but didn't for me, would be to differentiate by density. Copper is slightly more dense than iron, zinc is somewhat less. It would seem to work that a handfulls of pennies into a vibrating container filled with iron pellets (OK, BB's), would let the copper pennies sink, the zinc pennies float. Doesn't work, I don't know why. But the magnets and hotwheel track works great.
Refining the actual metals (precious or not) aside, I was already under the impressions that destruction or US currency (which melting and refining would be classified under) is already illegal. So what is new here
Destruction of "minor coinage" hasn't been illegal until now.
Half-dollars continued to use a lesser amount of silver through 1970 (and 1976 bicentennial), after which they transitioned to the same makeup as the quarter. Some of the earlier Eisenhower dollers also contained a silver mixture.
You can actually still get current production US silver coins. The "silver proof sets" are available, cost more than the standard proof sets, and may or may not be more collectable a few decades out. Here's a link. I've found a few of these very new proofs (half dollars) in circulation. Some meth-head or kid is cracking out the coin sets, I suppose.
I've been a good sport to this point.. but you are now the 4th person to correct me on this without bothering to read the others..
Actually, I thought I added value to the thread by pointing out that your conclusions were therefore wrong. Not just correcting your facts, but taking it further to point out the perhaps obvious. I just don't get why people would bother to post at all, on a topic they have slight knowledge of at best, especially when getting the real dates and metals would have taken a dozen seconds at wikipedia.
My second question is how much would it cost to refine these metals to make them worth the most? Copper prices are sky high right now but a lump of melted pennies probably wouldn't be able to be sold as a "copper" since there are a number of other metals involved. Is this something that can really be profitable?
That's a really great question. The deal is, at least for silver and gold coins - they are kept in their coin form but traded at or near melt value. There are several reasons for this. First, a US coin (silver dime/quarter/half/dollar), or penny or nickel, will have a known alloy. You _know_ that this object is, say, 90% silver, or 90% gold, or 95% copper. You don't have to have it assayed for purity to find out what it's got; the mint took care of that when it was made.
Another reason to leave them in coin form, is that people _do_ collect the coins at a premium to the melt value. I've been buying "junk silver" coins for years, going through them, picking out the good ones, and selling 'em on eBay. Once found a silver half in a junk silver buy, that I sold for $230 or so over there. If ya melt them into ingots, they're just not as interesting. Coins are also easier to count, store, handle, and so on. Bulk metals investing, sure, go buy that 100 ounce silver bar, but it's a BIG chunk of money to swing at one time in either direction - can't just sell a roll of silver quarters and get 100 bucks, or whatever. Coins are a convenient form factor to have them in, so melting costs don't enter into it - because they're rarely melted.
Now for copper, which is a base metal and used widely in industry, melting would probably happen more often. The spot market would then reflect this, and when copper gets to the point where it's worth melting, this regulation may be gone and a spot market will develop with prices to reflect processing costs. It all evens out in the end. In the meantime, 20% or so of the circulating pennies in this part of the country are the 95% copper type. If only there were some way to distinguish them automatically using an electromagnetic signature or something (ahem), one could sort them at a rate of 5 coins per second, store the copper, turn in the zinc ones, and play the numbers. The ban on melting screws that up a bit...
They stopped making em out of copper before the 50's (I forget exactly when its finals week XD)
For values of "the 50's" which equal 1982.
they make them out of an electroplated nickel alloy now..
Only if your "nickel alloy" is "pure zinc".
Dare i say it shouldn't just be oil we should be concerned about running out?
Well I can't help but think we're in no danger of people pulling guesses out of their ass, pretending they have answers, and then:
JUNK METAL coins are now worth more than their face value... I think this is a sign that asteroid mining could be feasible
...coming to an unsupportable position based on incomplete understanding of the situation.
An interesting idea, but topics 1 thru 3 require complicity in grand theft. Topic number 4 is intrigging; Why not have the interviewer present code, and have the candidate describe it?
That's the approach I take. "Here, what does this script do? Go into as much detail as you'd like." It's not so much what they say, but how they approach the problem that I'm interested in.
Peter Boyle's death is appropriate news for an entertainment/celebrity news site. This is a technology site and it's not appropriate here as he has no connection to technology or technology-related issues.
Who said anything about Peter Boyle? This is about some blogger attempting shennanigans pretending he's being threatened with a lawsuit over google rankings, in an effort to boost traffic to his site.
That said, nobody has done the Frankenstein monster better than Boyle.
You must have broken your glasses with that knee-jerk reaction. After you find your other pair, try reading it again.
No, you and the (other?) AC just don't get the fact that, 150 years later, it doesn't matter what the definition of the word is. What matters is how it was defined as it was used at the time. That's the central point. Don't bother expecting another response if you reply to this as AC, by the way.
I still believe the general idea of the post I made, the nature of the arms the "right to keep and bear arms" is talking about is the tools of home defense and implements of a standard infantryman of the day.
The wording is "keep and bear arms", not "keep and bear arms as long as there are no new technological developments". And the Federalist Papers make it pretty clear that the point of doing that is to prevent the government from getting too much power over the people. This document, don't forget, is about the rights of the people.
So when cities or high crime areas try and regulate the possession and carrying of concealable weapons I don't think it follows that they are automatically infringing upon the right to bear arms. I think my right to a gun in my house, to protect my property, short or long is very different than my right to have it tucked in my coat when I'm at the supermarket, isn't it?
Is it? The problem isn't with the gun being concealable - a good person with a gun, is only a threat to a bad person who tries to do something bad. If you're a good person, your gun makes me safer; if you're a bad person, your gun makes me less safe. The problem with legislation, is that by definition, the bad guys don't follow the laws (that's because they're bad guys). So a disparity is created where the criminal is armed, and _knows_ that his potential victim is safe to attack.
In every state that has passed concealed carry laws, the violent person-on-person crime rate has gone down. Without exception. Criminals aren't stupid, they know what is and isn't safe. This improvement couldn't happen without concealable guns; the "maybe he is, maybe he isn't" factor is strong in deterrence. So really, the 2nd is about defense against the government, and CCW is about defense against individual criminals. The same dynamics are involved though - if (bad thing) thinks they can get away with it, they will try.