Replace BTC with USD in your entire statement, and you'll have your answer as to why everyone (including governments) sees the USD as some sort of "magically universally accepted currency".
Totally. wrong. The magic words that exist on USD and don't exist on BTC are "legal tender". It means the bad boys with guns of the US government protect the purpose of your USD's on US soil, as a means of exchanging goods and services. In other words, currencies become accepted because regional powers are willing to kill, maim, and imprison if need be to make it so.
An additional point to this is: because the US Dollar is a currency agreed upon by the people of the US, through our government, as a medium of exchange for goods and services, it is in fact backed by the current and future productivity of the United States, which it turns out is still pretty damn valuable.
I think we should consider the possibility that this experiment was conducted with the muscular structure responsible for taste firmly lodged in a fleshy cavity on the side of the face.
Unfortunately for the theory of supersymmetry, this is yet another blow.
Ok, but why? Anyone care to explain this for me?
In simple terms (that I hope are accurate), supersymmetry is one of the predictions made by string theory (although the concept of supersymmetry pre-dates string theory). I believe there are other theories that incorporate supersymmetry as well. So, if the predictions made by supersymmetry don't hold up, any theory that is based on it will need to be revised or abandoned.
"Based on what you know about me so far, and the fact that I'm a decision-maker in your hiring process, how much of a raise do you think I deserve right now?"
What kind of bullshit logic is that? Something is broken, everyone hates it, so let's put all our efforts in making the alternatives better? How about contributing to PHP and fixing what you're bitching about instead of, well, bitching about it? You know, it's open-source and all.
Speaking of bullshit logic, why should I contribute to a language that I hate, instead of doing something useful in a language that I actually like?
NO ONE considered the time distortion of gravity? I mean, sure, it's the first time that the time distortion due to gravity has ever been significant in any practical application, but it's still a fundamen... wait, it's not the first time? You're saying that there's an 18-year-old system that relies on this principle to work properly? How many people use this obscure system? Every single person in the civilized world? You'd think that at least one of these researchers would have heard about it, then.
A fair point, which deserves an answer. The reason they're not thinking that is, probably, that there has as yet been no evidence that there were humans in mainland Greece anything like that early. The earliest known sign of human habitation in Europe is only ca. 40k years old.
Humans in Africa, however...
There is no evidence for Homo sapiens in Europe 130k years ago. However, according to the article, these tools are Acheulean technology, which was used by Homo erectus. These were not modern humans, and this technology was pretty widespread across Europe, as well as Africa and Asia.
"Verbification" is also a neologism, even though the activity that it describes has been occurring in the English language for several hundred years, so don't think you're going to stamp it out any time soon.
Also, "source" has always been a verb, and it's use as a noun is probably the result of nounification some 500-700 years ago.
It really isn't. The door of a Super Decathlon is nearly impossible to open in flight, and it would be even harder to fly the thing while wearing a parachute. Outside of sky diving, parachutes are almost unheard of in General Aviation.
In case anyone reads my post, I have a few corrections I want to make to myself:
The Super Decathlon's door can be removed in flight. I must have been thinking about a completely unrelated plane at the time.
Parachutes are also normally used in aerobatics. The Super Decathlon, being an aerobatic plane, certainly has accomodations for parachutes.
I'm not saying I think (or care) one way or another but it is conceivable he used a parachute...I mean...this is Steve Fossett after all.
It really isn't. The door of a Super Decathlon is nearly impossible to open in flight, and it would be even harder to fly the thing while wearing a parachute. Outside of sky diving, parachutes are almost unheard of in General Aviation.
This assumes that the cases taken were representative of all cases in the United States, and were randomly selected out of the pool of available cases. Considering that the Secret Service only gets involved in certain cases of identity theft, this is probably an incorrect assumption.
No, I'm not making really making that assumption. My only point is that a sample size of ~500 is valid for this kind of study, regardless of the population size. The validity of the sampling is another story completely. If you're taking a skewed sample, a sample size of 100,000 would be just as worthless as 10.
From the AP article: "The Federal Trade Commission has said about 3 million Americans have their identities stolen annually." And this study covers 517 cases over 7 years (2000-2006). I'm sorry, but I can't see a study of 517 cases during a period of approx. 21 million crimes providing really useful data.
The 99% margin of error on this study is about 5.5% (e.g. there is a 99% chance that the real percentages are within 5.5 points of the reported percentages). If the sample size were 1000, we would see a margin of error of 4%, and a we'd need a sample size of 10,000 to give us a 1.2% margin of error. One of the things that you learn if you ever take a statistics course is that, regardless of your actual population, you just don't get much better results when your sample size increases beyond a few hundred.
Are there really any memory problems that cannot be cured by strict adherance to the rule of "allocate memory at the beginging of a routine, deallocate same amount at the end"?
If only one thread is running on your computer, then no. As soon as you start dealing with multiple threads, you cannot strictly adhere to that.
Of course, there's also the issue that certain non-memory problems cannot be solved if you are strictly adhering to that rule. Without going into too much detail, maintaining state, almost by definition, requires allocating memory that does not get deallocated for the lifetime of the application. And I've never seen a non-trivial application that did not require maintaining state.
Linux users have another option not mentioned that isn't available to Windows or Mac-OS users... they can quietly/publicly vent, and then write a patch to fix the problem.
Generally speaking, no they can't. OS development is a skill that the vast majority of people do not, and never will, have. The best you can say is that a small fraction of Linux users can attempt to write a patch to fix the problem, and a fraction of those can do it successfully.
You might as well say that Windows users can decompile the kernel or APIs, and then write a patch to fix the problem. For most people, both tasks are equally accomplishable.
That will supply the voter with a third party verifiable proof of who they voted for. This is a bad thing.
Someone always brings this up, and I just don't buy it. For one thing, the ticket doesn't need to be stamped with any clear-text identifying information, so you can know that I possess a ticket that proves that someone voted a certain way, but you don't know how I got that ticket. Secondly, if I wanted verifiable proof, I can think of plenty of ways of doing that more reliably. For example, a cell phone camera will have good enough resolution, and everybody has one.
I mean, it was observed that the distance between us (earth) and the stars increases. BUT this does not mean, that SPACE itself inflates: If space itself would inflate or deflate - and probably it does so - nobody would be able to tell because if space in general increases everywhere at the same rate, the ruler that you are using in order to measure length would also inflate with the same rate as space expands. So therefore your ruler would grow at the same rate as the universe does so there can be no method in order to detect the growth of space in itself at all. Furthermore, in order to be able to tell that it is getting bigger, you have to relate it to something outside of itself compared to which it gets bigger...
So, with "expanding universe" only one thing can be meant: that simply the known matter is travelling away from us.
Actually, the evidence available suggests very strongly that space itself is inflating. Every distant object in the observable universe is moving away from our solar system at more or less the same rate. So, either space itself is inflating, or our solar system is the center of the "explosion". There are two reasons why we can detect this, and our "ruler" does not expand as well. First of all, the forces that hold our body, and our solar system together are much stronger than this expansion over the relevent distances (i.e. the atoms that make up your body are constantly being pushed away from each other by the expansion, but this is very weak compared to the elecromagnetic force that hold you together). Secondly, the speed of light does not change, which makes it a very useful ruler in measuring exactly how fast everything is moving apart.
In fact, the generally accepted theory among cosmologists is that known matter is not actually moving apart at all, there's just more space between it now than there used to be.
It was very easy for us to "prove" a wide range of conflicting hypotheses by tweaking the rules until we got the results we wanted. Without knowing the assumptions behind the simulation, it's really impossible to judge the accuracy of the simulations.
I do not believe any system that lets someone track a single vote will stand up against the provisions in the constitution which protect anonymous voting.
I'm pretty sure that there are no provisions in the US Constitution that say anything at all about anonymous voting.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can pull this off, I'd guess it would be worth a lot more than $1M.
Totally. wrong. The magic words that exist on USD and don't exist on BTC are "legal tender". It means the bad boys with guns of the US government protect the purpose of your USD's on US soil, as a means of exchanging goods and services. In other words, currencies become accepted because regional powers are willing to kill, maim, and imprison if need be to make it so.
An additional point to this is: because the US Dollar is a currency agreed upon by the people of the US, through our government, as a medium of exchange for goods and services, it is in fact backed by the current and future productivity of the United States, which it turns out is still pretty damn valuable.
First define a known force. Right now the unit of force is defined in terms of a kilogram.
That's easy! Gravity, of course!
I think we should consider the possibility that this experiment was conducted with the muscular structure responsible for taste firmly lodged in a fleshy cavity on the side of the face.
Unfortunately for the theory of supersymmetry, this is yet another blow.
Ok, but why? Anyone care to explain this for me?
In simple terms (that I hope are accurate), supersymmetry is one of the predictions made by string theory (although the concept of supersymmetry pre-dates string theory). I believe there are other theories that incorporate supersymmetry as well. So, if the predictions made by supersymmetry don't hold up, any theory that is based on it will need to be revised or abandoned.
"Based on what you know about me so far, and the fact that I'm a decision-maker in your hiring process, how much of a raise do you think I deserve right now?"
What kind of bullshit logic is that? Something is broken, everyone hates it, so let's put all our efforts in making the alternatives better? How about contributing to PHP and fixing what you're bitching about instead of, well, bitching about it? You know, it's open-source and all.
Speaking of bullshit logic, why should I contribute to a language that I hate, instead of doing something useful in a language that I actually like?
NO ONE considered the time distortion of gravity? I mean, sure, it's the first time that the time distortion due to gravity has ever been significant in any practical application, but it's still a fundamen... wait, it's not the first time? You're saying that there's an 18-year-old system that relies on this principle to work properly? How many people use this obscure system? Every single person in the civilized world? You'd think that at least one of these researchers would have heard about it, then.
A fair point, which deserves an answer. The reason they're not thinking that is, probably, that there has as yet been no evidence that there were humans in mainland Greece anything like that early. The earliest known sign of human habitation in Europe is only ca. 40k years old.
Humans in Africa, however ...
There is no evidence for Homo sapiens in Europe 130k years ago. However, according to the article, these tools are Acheulean technology, which was used by Homo erectus. These were not modern humans, and this technology was pretty widespread across Europe, as well as Africa and Asia.
"Verbification" is also a neologism, even though the activity that it describes has been occurring in the English language for several hundred years, so don't think you're going to stamp it out any time soon. Also, "source" has always been a verb, and it's use as a noun is probably the result of nounification some 500-700 years ago.
It really isn't. The door of a Super Decathlon is nearly impossible to open in flight, and it would be even harder to fly the thing while wearing a parachute. Outside of sky diving, parachutes are almost unheard of in General Aviation.
In case anyone reads my post, I have a few corrections I want to make to myself:
I'm not saying I think (or care) one way or another but it is conceivable he used a parachute...I mean...this is Steve Fossett after all.
It really isn't. The door of a Super Decathlon is nearly impossible to open in flight, and it would be even harder to fly the thing while wearing a parachute. Outside of sky diving, parachutes are almost unheard of in General Aviation.
How are you today. What would you like to discuss? Tell me more. I'm not sure I understand you fully. I sometimes also want to kill your coworkers.
No, it's a press release.
Generally speaking, no they can't. OS development is a skill that the vast majority of people do not, and never will, have. The best you can say is that a small fraction of Linux users can attempt to write a patch to fix the problem, and a fraction of those can do it successfully.
You might as well say that Windows users can decompile the kernel or APIs, and then write a patch to fix the problem. For most people, both tasks are equally accomplishable.
I think the term you are looking for is gross incompetence.
Maybe they're trying to convince people that even if they wanted to rig the election, they're too stupid to do it properly?
Actually, there's already a word for this: firmware
Actually, the evidence available suggests very strongly that space itself is inflating. Every distant object in the observable universe is moving away from our solar system at more or less the same rate. So, either space itself is inflating, or our solar system is the center of the "explosion". There are two reasons why we can detect this, and our "ruler" does not expand as well. First of all, the forces that hold our body, and our solar system together are much stronger than this expansion over the relevent distances (i.e. the atoms that make up your body are constantly being pushed away from each other by the expansion, but this is very weak compared to the elecromagnetic force that hold you together). Secondly, the speed of light does not change, which makes it a very useful ruler in measuring exactly how fast everything is moving apart.
In fact, the generally accepted theory among cosmologists is that known matter is not actually moving apart at all, there's just more space between it now than there used to be.
It was very easy for us to "prove" a wide range of conflicting hypotheses by tweaking the rules until we got the results we wanted. Without knowing the assumptions behind the simulation, it's really impossible to judge the accuracy of the simulations.