Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?
Funny, I got a pamphlet from Pueblo, Colorado entitled, "Do you know what the queers are doing to our soil?" They're planting elemental fluorine to defoliate landing strips for gay Martians! You know what, AC, I like you. You're not like the other people, here in this trailer park.
Actually, after a disaster of that magnitude I wouldn't expect cell service to work worth a damn either. Chances are, most of the organizing will be done by folks like me, with handheld 6m/2m/70cm band radios, and mobile (vehicle-mounted) stations for higher power and longer wavelengths. The handhelds and 2m/70 cm bands will get used for local organizing, 6m might link one town to the next, and 10m on down might be used to talk to relatively unaffected areas that can actually mobilize some resources.
The Conway, AR store had a pretty typical mix of white, black, Latino, and occasionally east Asian types. They all seemed roughly equal in terms of "ignorant" status, except for Asian as there was not an adequate sample to work with. Then again this isn't a ghetto, but a city of 50-60,000 people plus about as many who live outside town but closer to that store than one of the Little Rock stores.
It may or may not be significant that this store is in a dry county and therefore sells no alcohol outside of cooking wine.
It makes much more sense to plan for a lunar colony. It would require the same survival technology (except for the CO2), it's a lot closer making near-real-time communications possible, the communications equipment can be pointed the same way all the time (plus or minus 8 degrees), there is water ice at the poles of both, the lunar gravity well is much smaller as is the distance much less for returning mined materials (probably Helium-3), and if a polar crater location is chosen, solar power is available at all times outside of eclipses.
Once we have a functional lunar colony, the viability of a Martian colony will look a lot better.
Media partners telling you that the revenue model is viable is far from them telling you that they're going to hop on board and foot the bill. Particularly given the rather speculative nature of the venture -if the crew dies in landing, that's a lot of lost revenue for the studios (in spite of the short term ratings spike that it will undoubtedly garner).
Such risks are insurable, and there are specialist syndicates of Lloyd's of London who would pick it up. Any time the risk can be quantified with any degree of certainty, there will be someone willing to roll the dice -- as long as it comes with a "house advantage". The fact that each risk is a unique event does not matter if the gamblers can cover a sufficient number of them.
I went to the Wal-Mart in Conway, AR. It's not a "SuperCenter", but has a grocery department. To my amazement, they had EVERYTHING I was looking for when I wanted to make some traditional Central American dishes, including the Mexican dairy components (made in Southern California). I was pleasantly surprised, I thought I was going to have to go to a specialty store for them just like I did here in Southern California. (At least until I started buying them at L.A. area Wal-Marts.)
I wouldn't got to Wal-Mart for electronics unless I needed to replace a broken TV like RIGHT NOW, but the grocery section was solid enough. However, the 99 cent store is still the first place to hit. 5 pounds of potatoes for a buck? A dozen eggs for a buck? A loaf of bread (as fresh as anywhere else) for a buck? I have a hard time seeing Amazon or any other delivery service keeping up with prices like that.
Not only are there various laptops that will run OS X directly on the hardware, I've seen people run it in a VM under Windows. Granted it was just for shits and giggles and no serious work was done this way, but if there's a Mac app you just have to have, it might be an option instead of booting to OS X.
Ah, I see, so if someone threatens you with violence for what you believe in, you would stop believing in it?
What weak character such a person would posses...
No, I didn't say you or I would stop believing. I meant things like this example from Gustav Mahler:
During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler—who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism to secure the post—experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Semitic press.
He could convert (and did), but never stopped being considered a "dirty Jew" until he got to the United States where most people just didn't care.
Over a decade ago, I used to get my weed through a guy who wasn't yet 21. He was dealing to pay to go to college without having to hold down a job at the same time. Every time I'd go to pick up from him (and I found he did this to several other over-21 clients as well), he made us go to the liquor store and buy him beer as part of his payment. His mother knew he was dealing, and why so many people came around, but I think she had decided that was better than joining a gang or failing his classes because he was working all night flipping burgers. She also didn't seem to have a problem with him drinking, but she refused to buy alcohol for him. (She did, however, smoke his weed.)
There was another guy who I bought from, who liked to shoot the rats that ran across the cables outside his balcony. Since it was just a BB gun, all it ever did was knock the rats off the wire. It was only about a 10 foot drop, and they'd bounce off the ground and climb back up again. Then he'd shoot them again.
The ones with the monopoly (or at least significant share of the oligopoly) on violence. It doesn't ultimately matter what you call yourself if others have the power to decide your fate based on THEIR beliefs.
It seems that some of the EPEAT requirements lead to bulkier designs and quite possibly extra parts needed to hold it all together. It seems inevitable that this would violate the design principles Apple has been using for the last decade-plus, at least with portable products. If there's a way to shave a millimeter or a gram here and there, Apple will find a way to do it. It's one way they achieve product differentiation from the competition. Unfortunately, doing so means gluing things together and wedging things up tight in ways that don't want to be disassembled.
I'm a bit surprised Apple isn't outright saying "EPEAT compliance means making our products ugly, and you don't want THAT, do you?"
And the entire electoral college is completely unnecessary given modern transportation systems, so we need to throw that out altogether.
I'd argue having all Congressmen in one city is unnecessary. Make them all telecommute, while LIVING in the district they supposedly represent. Then they might actually feel accountable to their electorate. Obviously Senators would only be compelled to live in a given state, since they don't have Senate districts.
Why is it necessary to have everyone in one room to take a vote? Why make it easy for lobbyists to bend the ears of hundreds of Representatives or dozens of Senators at once?
A neighbor bought a couple fireworks "cakes" that have their own internal timing (I'd imagine by fuse), much like this one shown on YouTube. They didn't shoot all that high (maybe 40-50 feet max), and they only had two of them (probably because they are expensive), but for everyone with a direct line of sight, they're just as flashy as the fancy professional shows. A group of people with synchronized watches could put on a show with these, though of course they wouldn't sync up with music particularly well. Most of them weren't stupidly loud either. There were a couple big booms, but they were visually unimpressive and may have been misfires. Almost all of the powder charge went into flash and propulsion, which is how it should be.
Get 20 people to chip in for some cakes, find a place where shooting them off is either legal or tolerated (the latter being the case here), and have your own awesome show!
It's just that a time beacon has terrestrial uses -- namely, it's an excellent way to test propagation in various radio bands in real time while also sending out some information of value. This means that any civilization that uses radio probably also uses something comparable to time beacons, where the content is not strictly repeating but is quite predictable nonetheless.
As I understand it one of the big markers that they look for is repetition, so ideally you want a signal of some kind that sends out the same stream of date repeatedly. I can't think of an earthly analogue right off the top of my head, perhaps like an alien commercial or something.
I've always wanted the tinted area at the top of the windshield replaced with a series of LCD panels -- not too many, nor too big, sorta square-ish (width similar to the height of the tinted area). Touch one and it goes dark to block the sun. Touch it again and it fades back to maximum transparency (which is still a couple stops of loss, but that's OK because this part of the window was ALWAYS tinted). You can run your finger across the whole thing to darken them all if driving in an area where doing it on-demand is just not practical, and there should be buttons on the dash to do the same (some of these panels will be out of reach of the driver). No computer is necessary, just a simple flip-flop on each one. When the car is turned off, they all go back to transparent.
It would be nice if the side windows had the same provision, since it is already possible to flip the sun visor to the side. It just doesn't reach far enough back, and light coming directly from the side can be distracting, not to mention baking the side of your head. The only addition here would be that when the window is rolled down, the panels would go transparent since they are no longer necessarily in the legally blockable area.
If there is more than one solution, then it is not a valid puzzle -- and several solving techniques are dependent on the axiom that there is exactly one correct answer. I know that I invoked such a technique at least once in coming up with this solution:
So, imagine 5 years from now, you are buying a new TV. you don;t care about internet connectivity, but the device comes with it embedded, and there are very few options in the TVs menus for configuring it. It uses powerline networking, so in order to just turn it on, you have already connected it to the Internet. At this point, you basically have to trust your TV manufacturer to not report to advertisers what you watch, including stuff like pr0n. with SMART devices you have to trust the manufacture implicitly..
This would be "firewalled" by a battery backup with its own inverter. It would probably be "firewalled" by a plain old power conditioner, one of which I happen to have on my TV already. It's there because this particular TV is quite prone to locking up due to power disturbances of any sort. It used to be that any use of the ATSC tuner, and sometimes the HDMI inputs, could suddenly glitch (the backlight would go partially out) or it could just lock up solid and have to be hard power cycled. This would happen anywhere from a couple times a week to a couple times an HOUR. Then I put a power conditioner on it, and it hasn't misbehaved since. Since this turned an annoyingly flaky device into one that was pretty much flawless, I decided to see if it would help on my desktop PC, which also exhibited what were apparently power-disturbance-induced errors and crashes. As a matter of fact, it did -- so I replaced the power supply with one I could trust, and put the power conditioner back on the TV.
In any case, this power conditioner lies between the meter and the device, so it's on "my" side of the meter. As such, it's not tampering with "their" network in any way. It's only filtering out "noise" generated by the switching of other equipment, which in my case seemed to be primarily the compressor on the refrigerator at startup.
Except... cell phones are using digital encoding nowadays, not analog. Then, the digital signals are not sent as straight 1/0 pulses, they're combined into blocks of multiple bits and sent AS ANALOG WAVES by changing frequency and phase shift. Whether the source signals were analog in nature or whether they were digital data is completely irrelevant -- the type of waveform sent out by the transmitter is exactly the same as it is sending digital data in an analog format in either case.
I had a daisy wheel printer through high school and college because I couldn't afford a laser printer, and dot matrix print was not accepted. In some cases, the use of a computer was "not allowed", but how can you tell the difference between what is typed and what comes off a daisy wheel unless variable spacing is used?
I even wrote software that would use the period and micro-spacing to generate headline fonts and line graphics. It was slow and hard on ribbons, but it worked.
Another interesting view of what kind of life might dwell in a gas giant is found in The Algebraist. Though there are some significant issues with the story (namely that the supposed plot line ends up being almost totally irrelevant by the end, and several other sub-plots fizzle into nothing without so much as a lampshade), the depiction of life within a gas giant is one of the more compelling elements.
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Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?
Funny, I got a pamphlet from Pueblo, Colorado entitled, "Do you know what the queers are doing to our soil?" They're planting elemental fluorine to defoliate landing strips for gay Martians! You know what, AC, I like you. You're not like the other people, here in this trailer park.
Actually, after a disaster of that magnitude I wouldn't expect cell service to work worth a damn either. Chances are, most of the organizing will be done by folks like me, with handheld 6m/2m/70cm band radios, and mobile (vehicle-mounted) stations for higher power and longer wavelengths. The handhelds and 2m/70 cm bands will get used for local organizing, 6m might link one town to the next, and 10m on down might be used to talk to relatively unaffected areas that can actually mobilize some resources.
The Conway, AR store had a pretty typical mix of white, black, Latino, and occasionally east Asian types. They all seemed roughly equal in terms of "ignorant" status, except for Asian as there was not an adequate sample to work with. Then again this isn't a ghetto, but a city of 50-60,000 people plus about as many who live outside town but closer to that store than one of the Little Rock stores.
It may or may not be significant that this store is in a dry county and therefore sells no alcohol outside of cooking wine.
It makes much more sense to plan for a lunar colony. It would require the same survival technology (except for the CO2), it's a lot closer making near-real-time communications possible, the communications equipment can be pointed the same way all the time (plus or minus 8 degrees), there is water ice at the poles of both, the lunar gravity well is much smaller as is the distance much less for returning mined materials (probably Helium-3), and if a polar crater location is chosen, solar power is available at all times outside of eclipses.
Once we have a functional lunar colony, the viability of a Martian colony will look a lot better.
Media partners telling you that the revenue model is viable is far from them telling you that they're going to hop on board and foot the bill. Particularly given the rather speculative nature of the venture -if the crew dies in landing, that's a lot of lost revenue for the studios (in spite of the short term ratings spike that it will undoubtedly garner).
Such risks are insurable, and there are specialist syndicates of Lloyd's of London who would pick it up. Any time the risk can be quantified with any degree of certainty, there will be someone willing to roll the dice -- as long as it comes with a "house advantage". The fact that each risk is a unique event does not matter if the gamblers can cover a sufficient number of them.
I went to the Wal-Mart in Conway, AR. It's not a "SuperCenter", but has a grocery department. To my amazement, they had EVERYTHING I was looking for when I wanted to make some traditional Central American dishes, including the Mexican dairy components (made in Southern California). I was pleasantly surprised, I thought I was going to have to go to a specialty store for them just like I did here in Southern California. (At least until I started buying them at L.A. area Wal-Marts.)
I wouldn't got to Wal-Mart for electronics unless I needed to replace a broken TV like RIGHT NOW, but the grocery section was solid enough. However, the 99 cent store is still the first place to hit. 5 pounds of potatoes for a buck? A dozen eggs for a buck? A loaf of bread (as fresh as anywhere else) for a buck? I have a hard time seeing Amazon or any other delivery service keeping up with prices like that.
Not only are there various laptops that will run OS X directly on the hardware, I've seen people run it in a VM under Windows. Granted it was just for shits and giggles and no serious work was done this way, but if there's a Mac app you just have to have, it might be an option instead of booting to OS X.
Ah, I see, so if someone threatens you with violence for what you believe in, you would stop believing in it?
What weak character such a person would posses...
No, I didn't say you or I would stop believing. I meant things like this example from Gustav Mahler:
During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler—who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism to secure the post—experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Semitic press.
He could convert (and did), but never stopped being considered a "dirty Jew" until he got to the United States where most people just didn't care.
Over a decade ago, I used to get my weed through a guy who wasn't yet 21. He was dealing to pay to go to college without having to hold down a job at the same time. Every time I'd go to pick up from him (and I found he did this to several other over-21 clients as well), he made us go to the liquor store and buy him beer as part of his payment. His mother knew he was dealing, and why so many people came around, but I think she had decided that was better than joining a gang or failing his classes because he was working all night flipping burgers. She also didn't seem to have a problem with him drinking, but she refused to buy alcohol for him. (She did, however, smoke his weed.)
There was another guy who I bought from, who liked to shoot the rats that ran across the cables outside his balcony. Since it was just a BB gun, all it ever did was knock the rats off the wire. It was only about a 10 foot drop, and they'd bounce off the ground and climb back up again. Then he'd shoot them again.
Who determines your faith - you, or other people?
The ones with the monopoly (or at least significant share of the oligopoly) on violence. It doesn't ultimately matter what you call yourself if others have the power to decide your fate based on THEIR beliefs.
It seems that some of the EPEAT requirements lead to bulkier designs and quite possibly extra parts needed to hold it all together. It seems inevitable that this would violate the design principles Apple has been using for the last decade-plus, at least with portable products. If there's a way to shave a millimeter or a gram here and there, Apple will find a way to do it. It's one way they achieve product differentiation from the competition. Unfortunately, doing so means gluing things together and wedging things up tight in ways that don't want to be disassembled.
I'm a bit surprised Apple isn't outright saying "EPEAT compliance means making our products ugly, and you don't want THAT, do you?"
While they may harass and sue you, they don't often go with the "Kill the Infidels" if you say something nasty about their Ronnie or Tommy.
I suppose you've never heard of Auditing Process R2-45.
And the entire electoral college is completely unnecessary given modern transportation systems, so we need to throw that out altogether.
I'd argue having all Congressmen in one city is unnecessary. Make them all telecommute, while LIVING in the district they supposedly represent. Then they might actually feel accountable to their electorate. Obviously Senators would only be compelled to live in a given state, since they don't have Senate districts.
Why is it necessary to have everyone in one room to take a vote? Why make it easy for lobbyists to bend the ears of hundreds of Representatives or dozens of Senators at once?
A neighbor bought a couple fireworks "cakes" that have their own internal timing (I'd imagine by fuse), much like this one shown on YouTube. They didn't shoot all that high (maybe 40-50 feet max), and they only had two of them (probably because they are expensive), but for everyone with a direct line of sight, they're just as flashy as the fancy professional shows. A group of people with synchronized watches could put on a show with these, though of course they wouldn't sync up with music particularly well. Most of them weren't stupidly loud either. There were a couple big booms, but they were visually unimpressive and may have been misfires. Almost all of the powder charge went into flash and propulsion, which is how it should be.
Get 20 people to chip in for some cakes, find a place where shooting them off is either legal or tolerated (the latter being the case here), and have your own awesome show!
It's just that a time beacon has terrestrial uses -- namely, it's an excellent way to test propagation in various radio bands in real time while also sending out some information of value. This means that any civilization that uses radio probably also uses something comparable to time beacons, where the content is not strictly repeating but is quite predictable nonetheless.
As I understand it one of the big markers that they look for is repetition, so ideally you want a signal of some kind that sends out the same stream of date repeatedly. I can't think of an earthly analogue right off the top of my head, perhaps like an alien commercial or something.
Like a time beacon?
I've always wanted the tinted area at the top of the windshield replaced with a series of LCD panels -- not too many, nor too big, sorta square-ish (width similar to the height of the tinted area). Touch one and it goes dark to block the sun. Touch it again and it fades back to maximum transparency (which is still a couple stops of loss, but that's OK because this part of the window was ALWAYS tinted). You can run your finger across the whole thing to darken them all if driving in an area where doing it on-demand is just not practical, and there should be buttons on the dash to do the same (some of these panels will be out of reach of the driver). No computer is necessary, just a simple flip-flop on each one. When the car is turned off, they all go back to transparent.
It would be nice if the side windows had the same provision, since it is already possible to flip the sun visor to the side. It just doesn't reach far enough back, and light coming directly from the side can be distracting, not to mention baking the side of your head. The only addition here would be that when the window is rolled down, the panels would go transparent since they are no longer necessarily in the legally blockable area.
If there is more than one solution, then it is not a valid puzzle -- and several solving techniques are dependent on the axiom that there is exactly one correct answer. I know that I invoked such a technique at least once in coming up with this solution:
8 1 2 7 5 3 6 4 9
9 4 3 6 8 2 1 7 5
6 7 5 4 9 1 8 2 3
1 5 4 8 3 7 2 9 6
3 6 9 2 4 5 7 8 1
2 8 7 1 6 9 5 3 4
5 2 1 9 7 4 3 6 8
4 3 8 5 2 6 9 1 7
7 9 6 3 1 8 4 5 2
Perhaps there is an error in the original article's depiction of the puzzle?
This just a few minutes old...
Live coverage of the announcement, courtesy of The Telegraph.
Glad to see we may not be a Type 13 planet after all...
So, imagine 5 years from now, you are buying a new TV. you don;t care about internet connectivity, but the device comes with it embedded, and there are very few options in the TVs menus for configuring it. It uses powerline networking, so in order to just turn it on, you have already connected it to the Internet. At this point, you basically have to trust your TV manufacturer to not report to advertisers what you watch, including stuff like pr0n. with SMART devices you have to trust the manufacture implicitly..
This would be "firewalled" by a battery backup with its own inverter. It would probably be "firewalled" by a plain old power conditioner, one of which I happen to have on my TV already. It's there because this particular TV is quite prone to locking up due to power disturbances of any sort. It used to be that any use of the ATSC tuner, and sometimes the HDMI inputs, could suddenly glitch (the backlight would go partially out) or it could just lock up solid and have to be hard power cycled. This would happen anywhere from a couple times a week to a couple times an HOUR. Then I put a power conditioner on it, and it hasn't misbehaved since. Since this turned an annoyingly flaky device into one that was pretty much flawless, I decided to see if it would help on my desktop PC, which also exhibited what were apparently power-disturbance-induced errors and crashes. As a matter of fact, it did -- so I replaced the power supply with one I could trust, and put the power conditioner back on the TV.
In any case, this power conditioner lies between the meter and the device, so it's on "my" side of the meter. As such, it's not tampering with "their" network in any way. It's only filtering out "noise" generated by the switching of other equipment, which in my case seemed to be primarily the compressor on the refrigerator at startup.
Except... cell phones are using digital encoding nowadays, not analog. Then, the digital signals are not sent as straight 1/0 pulses, they're combined into blocks of multiple bits and sent AS ANALOG WAVES by changing frequency and phase shift. Whether the source signals were analog in nature or whether they were digital data is completely irrelevant -- the type of waveform sent out by the transmitter is exactly the same as it is sending digital data in an analog format in either case.
Rolling blackouts occurred much more often when Enron was fucking with the market. Smart meters are irrelevant to the discussion.
I had a daisy wheel printer through high school and college because I couldn't afford a laser printer, and dot matrix print was not accepted. In some cases, the use of a computer was "not allowed", but how can you tell the difference between what is typed and what comes off a daisy wheel unless variable spacing is used?
I even wrote software that would use the period and micro-spacing to generate headline fonts and line graphics. It was slow and hard on ribbons, but it worked.
Another interesting view of what kind of life might dwell in a gas giant is found in The Algebraist. Though there are some significant issues with the story (namely that the supposed plot line ends up being almost totally irrelevant by the end, and several other sub-plots fizzle into nothing without so much as a lampshade), the depiction of life within a gas giant is one of the more compelling elements.