Well, to spend would require passing the token (read: handing over the bill) to the new owner.
Key generation by private individuals could be prevented through custom exotic machine architecture without which the algorithms don't work--say, quantum-processed base-(largeprime) calculations. It wouldn't last forever, of course; doubtless, someone would be able to eventually crack the base-2305843009213693951 calculations that generate the keys, but by that time the new series of bills would be out;-p
Well, if you put the private key in the US mint and use it as an oracle, all you need to do is make a million copies of the obviously well known pub key off any random note.
If you put the private key in some kind of tamper proof smartcard oracle inside the note, all you need is a fake oracle that always says its public key is real.
You can't distribute the private key to every verification terminal in known space, someone will put it on wikileaks and then, trillion digit bases or not, it'll be all over tee shirts and stuff just like the DVD keys incident.
Decentralized anonymous authentication using two untrusted machines (the verifier and the banknote) is a harder problem than it first appears...
If I have an RFID reader, will I be able to tell how much cash the mark is holding?
There are explosive ramifications w/ regards to IED construction (awful pun, sorry), much like the probably proverbial "american passport RFID proximity detonator" for artillery shells.
Inks smear right off. The solution is to laminate, then it turns out they delaminate. The solution to that is to essentially plastic weld two thin layers together into one piece of clear plastic. Then they're thick enough to crack. They're not as indestructible as you claim. Sure, not as bad as a supermarket plastic bag, but...
The type of deterioration of plastic objects including banknotes experience does not quite fit in with the financial industries handling procedures for dealing with deteriorating paper money. Its not just a question of new squeegee rollers, its like whole new design concepts for storing, stacking and shipping bundles of "cash".
The capital costs of replacing all currency handling machinery in the country would be high, essentially a big ole wealth transfer to China whom would make it all...
Its all possible, and eventually it might make financial sense. It already has for several countries. However, we'll probably convert to poly right about the time we convert to metric.
You should check out Bitcoins. http://www.bitcoin.org/ The mathematics behind it are genius. I wander how long it will take before governments try to shut it down.
Its a frozen economy because no one can successfully compete with the cluster guys to make any spendable BC. Eventually everyone will abandon bitcoins because no one will have any but the handful of cluster ops whom will have generated and hoarded all of them, so they can be rich. I have no interest in making some cluster op rich, so I simply will not do so. I made about 200 BC back when the generation difficulty level was like two digits. Last time I checked it practically needed scientific notation to display the difficulty level. Oh, 14484.16236123, thats all.
BC is an excellent example of how "the cluster operators shall inherit the earth" is not going to work in the real world.
Its very much like trying to set up a beanie babies economy. Cornering the market and hoarding all the rhinoceros beanie babies in the entire world makes them quite useless as a currency, thus they become more or less worthless instead of uncountably valuable.
Much safer to use that type of hardware to upgrade the firmware on a $1 up to $20, then visit the automated checkout lanes.
Honestly, I sometimes wonder how automated checkout lanes stay in business. Often they dont. But you gotta wonder what kind of stuff appears in their bill receptors.
The only "Ultimate" deterrent would be to make it impossible to produce the currency for less than the value of the currency.
As long as the existence of the currency over the lifetime of the physical object generates more tax value by being used, than it cost to make, a govt will run a profit if they own the mint. If it costs $21 to make a $20, thats perfectly OK if the bill is so durable that each 5% sales tax and 30% income tax adds up to $22 of revenue from that physical artifact.
Also there is no deterrent from a wealthy enough foreign power minting bills just to mess with you. Kind of like you don't need to make a profit on a military battle rifle round for it to be convenient for a country to produce and use it.
The only ultimate deterrent remains something with a fission core, unfortunately.
Now here's an interesting thought--bear with me here--what if the serial number were generated as the public key to a private key hidden in the electronics in the note? That way, the authenticity could be verified easily, and, as a bonus, individual bills could be used as crypto keys.
You need something more complicated to prevent "double spending"/multiple copies being made, and simply creating your own pub/priv pairs.
How is this better than a web-based news source, even a paywalled one?
Its important to specify the difference between a push web app news source, which could do all kinds of cool filtering and instant access (not high latency of streaming) of attached videos, and this specific app which is probably (just guessing) designed to little more than collect more money.
A good news app would intelligently log how interested I am in a story, based on both how long I read and what rating I give it, and then in a Bayesian way filter my news for me. Also it would provide an intelligent mixture almost like a DJ for news.
Also it would have all linked multimedia pre-downloaded via the push. No click and wait for video, ultra high res images instantly available.
Also it would have much better bookmarking than current websites.
I want it location aware. If I'm reading about yet another shooting 3 blocks away I want to see it on the google maps. Or a new restaurant opening up, I want turn by turn directions from my house.
Finally I'd want push downloaded instantly available background like relevant wikipedia articles, or if a lame journalist is misreporting on a scientific article, I want the original ARVIX paper please. Not just in the text, not a link to pop open Safari, but the actual paper right there. Not a text article paradigm, but a MIME like multimedia collection for each story.
What we're probably going to get is a reskinned safari or ibooks plus a big bill. But I/we can dream.
I never could understand how such people would work so hard at learning one thing -- basketball -- that they'd sweat, be out of breath, and have to take a shower afterwards, and then turn around and say that learning math was hard!
If you learn basketball you have a 0.001% chance of becoming a multimillionaire, or you'll be another poor modern peasant. But at least you have a chance.
If you learn math your career will either be asking if they want fries with that, or possibly a few short years before your job moves to the east and you'll be another poor modern peasant. No chance at all.
Thats what they mean by hard, its a hard lifestyle. In comparison, at least when you take a similar vow of poverty (and, lets face it, chastity) for religious reasons they claim you get future rewards.
Learning math is just as difficult as learning any other subject or content material. Deciphering poetry, learning programming, studying psychological theory, and learning calculus all involve concentration, study, and struggle from the learner.
You can end up in the human learning equivalent of dependency hell much easier in math than in any of your other examples, in fact I'd go so far as claiming its the worst possible tree of dependencies of any intellectual subject. With the possible exception of western philosophy, or at least thats a close second.
That would be a start. The X protocol is really chatty and there's lots of unneeded roundtrips. NX does filter away what isn't needed and compresses the rest into larger packets that then get sent all at once instead of small bits all the time. So, perhaps X.org should start doing the same.
For the past 17 years I've been hearing about this, but the problem is it becomes less useful every year. So back in the 14.4K era I heard with some effort I could compress my X data stream when I connect remotely, but frankly the compatibility and deployment hassles have not been worth it. Now 17 years later maybe they've got the perfect solution to run on my multi-megabit cablemodem. Excellent, thats just like someone finally perfecting their floppy disk automated cataloger/indexer (remember those?) in 2010. Or finally developing the idea gopher server in 2010. Thanks guys, but if I wanted to pay for something obsolete I'd get a classic car instead.
You do realise that technocracy is essentially government by those who believe themselves to be intellectually strong, yes? Epitomised by Wernher von Braun, it's really just an application of "might makes right".
The opponents of the technocracy gang are not the philosophers, but the theocracy gang. Epitomised by Palin. Frankly most people prefer the outcome of the technocracy gang rather than an irrational desire to return to the Christian middle ages / dark ages, complete with middle eastern crusades and the merger of state and religion.
It would be really nice if a "third party" of philosophers existed, but most of them spend most of their time smoking weed then debating "is-a" vs "has-a" instead of trying to rule or even discuss the philosophy of ruling.
Meanwhile we have turned the majority of Western humans from independent men into chair-warming consumers singing in lockstep for trinkets.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Re-read your Gibbon, assuming you're that well classically educated. One argument for the fall of the western half of the roman empire was Gibbon had evidence than less than a thousand people owned all the land of Europe, the remaining population were basically slaves of those thousand whom didn't really care about the genealogy of the bossman, thus they got tossed and the "barbarians" took over. We're trying to re-enact that wealth distribution here in the USA as quickly as we can, for what purpose I am unsure, as no one seemed to benefit last time around, other than the barbarians.
Anyway, we've gone from a thousand men with the theoretical possibility of being independent thinkers (even if most were not), to uncountable millions of men AND women with the theoretical possibility of being independent thinkers (again, even if most were not).
Part of the criticism is that if you assume the universe can be fully described with formal logic (logical atomism), then you are already subscribed to a certain type of metaphysics.
And that is exactly why they get made fun of, you can have long interesting discussions that require a shared, probably unspoken base of formal logical principles, but if you toss out those principles, you are left with an extremely shallow pool to draw from, little more than "I'm right because god told me so" or "might makes right" or "what if we're all brainz in tankz?".
There is plenty of historical evidence, across all cultures, that the other metaphysics pretty much suck, and at best have been completely ineffective, or at worst have been outright crippling to thought and human cultural development.
It does kind of bug me though, that a person who graduates with a degree in mathematics (which is a fairly difficult, hard-nosed subject) gets a wishy-washy BA degree, whereas a hippie with a degree in "environmental engineering" gets a BS, but ultimately I think there's a lot of problems with our current conception with categorizing things into "science" and "not-science".
That is a problem with your school. You can get a BA or a BS in computer science by selecting your school. I chose a BS school, didn't like the outdated curriculum, transferred to a BA school with a modern survey curriculum, loved it.
The BS school required a bit more analysis math. Only really useful if you get a job in numerical integration, or maybe graphics. The BA school required more discrete math which is useful, uh, pretty much every job other than N.I. and graphics.
The BS school simply required you fill your spare time with electives, if all your electives happen to be classes prefixed with a "CS", well thats OK as long as you eventually accumulate 128 credits. The BA school had a rather complicated and involved system of eight categories of knowledge and you needed a class in each, making you pretty well rounded. Weirdly enough, I was greatly surprised that I enjoyed art class, and not just for dating potential.
There were differences in foreign language requirements, something I no longer remember like the BS had to be a dead western european language like latin or greek or a modern strictly non-western language like Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, whereas the BA gave me credit for the Spanish I took in high school, and promptly forgot, but hey I got the transfer credit, so...
The differences are overshadowed by local administration. The BS school was in a very slow conversion from only offering the "cdrom multimedia developer" to the "web developer" specialization for the night school students, unfortunately this was in 2002 post.com crash, and I think cdrom multimedia developer crashed in the mid 90s. The BA school only offered a general survey kind of degree, so I got a semester of relational database theory (Codd normal forms! Yeah for ER diagrams!) and a semester of systems analysis, and a semester of procedural languages, and a semester or two of object oriented programming, and a semester of networking theory... it was much deeper, even though on paper a BA is supposed to be shallower than a BS.
Personally I'd recommend the BA in CS. If you can hack that, you should be a good enough self learner to handle any glossed over areas. You're going to be learning the rest of your life anyway so its not much of an issue.
A Ph.D. tells you nothing except that the holder did some original research at an early point in their career.
There is also little if any correlation in being able to research, and being able to teach. Culturally, "everyone knows" the purpose of a phd is to become a professor and teach university students while collecting a $100K+ salary. The upper 50% to 10% cream of the crop actually get hired to do that. So, pretty much by definition, as a general cross section of the population, they are in the bottom of the barrel of teaching ability. So I'd be expecting, unless they're education phds, they're almost by definition probably not going to be good teachers.
No need to wait, Linux ships with flashblock by default. Unblocking it, that might be a problem.
apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
To be honest, I've never really seen animated advertisements as "improving" my browsing experience so I usually don't bother, although I have it on a couple machines. Flash doesn't work so well on my ipad either. But if you have flash installed, you need flashblock in FF, or its just advertising hell.
If the spots where the paint was rubbed off were small enough that the contact resistance was 2 ohms, then they would be difficult to find with the probes. Metal at macroscopic sizes conducts quite well. A quick check with my handy Fluke 179 shows that a clip lead, roughly the same length as the distance between the two hooks in the Kindle cover, has a resistance that is below the threshold of measurability on the meter (0.1 Ohm).
Lets assume the metal wire in the kindle case is copper and a foot long (makes it simpler), you'd need a wire gauge quite a bit below 40 AWG to get 2 ohms in a foot. seeing as thats about as small as commercially available, yet is till way too big, and yet is only 3 thousandths of an inch across... doing some reasonable extrapolation thats a piece of copper about a thousandth of an inch in diameter. That will snap before it falls off the assembly line.
I suppose if the Chinese used nichrome or stainless steel its not so bad, but its still.. unrealistic.
Whomever designed the case should be fired with extreme prejudice. They're lucky they didn't fry a significant number of very expensive ebooks with something this stupid. If I were a victim of this I'd demand a replacement kindle while I was at it... no telling what long term affect this had on the device.
The article pic shows about 2 megs not 2 ohms of resistance. Thats not too unlikely for a persons dry skin. If you think about what leather is made out of, it makes sense that a human body and a leather case would have about the same resistance. I think it would be safe to assume the kindle engineers designed it to survive dry skin contact, so the case designers building their case out of dry animal skin is not exactly the dumbest intersection of the fashion designer and electronics world I have ever seen.
It looks like a flaw on the part of the cover maker. Amazon could put some amperage limiting circuitry, but I imagine it would raise the cost.
Look closely at the dudes meter, its 2 megohms not 2 ohms. Lets guess its a single cell li-poly at 3.7 volts. Thats a smokin' current of 74 microamps. What, a quarter of a milliwatt, something like that?
Good luck building a 74 microamp fuse. I once built a microwave preamp in the 80s and static fried the active device, that probably was a 74 microamp fuse, in a weird sort of way.... Active current limiting at that level is kind of a mystery to me... I suppose you'd need a mosfet off resistance in the hundreds of megohms since the load impedance is in the single megohm range, but PC board leakage currents are going to be a problem at that level. Leakage currents thru the plastic kindle case would probably be in the microamp range?
First, his meter's reading 2 Megaohms, not 2 Ohms. I guess he's not much of an "Electronics Person".
Second, it would appear that he's measuring conductivity though his body to achieve that number. Both of his fingers are touching the probe tips.
He would get about the same resistance if he skipped the whole leather cover thing and just held the meter probes. You'd think they'd notice something like that.
And Connectify earns their spot on "57 Lamest Tech Moments of 2010"
seriously though pretty much any tightly fitting leather case will probably put the device under some continuous strain, probably leading to something internal flexing, then a reboot. With those nice strong metal clamps gripping the case tightly, I could imagine it.
Re:The only question I have is
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Firefox 4 Beta 8 Up
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· Score: 1, Interesting
There is a reason people have been calling FF bloated lately. This is without any addons, plugins (besides maybe Java), or themes or any crap built into FF.
34.7 megs? I can only run 120 FF processes on my main desktop then. Bummer. Hmm, that would be 12 across and 10 down.
Only things that matters to me are:
Adblock plus Firefox sync firebug flashblock ghostery remove-it-permanently Noscript
once I can get all that cross platform, I'm ready to switch. I'll put up with anything else, as long as those addons work.
He/She knows that there is information that he/she doesn't have about the company's finances and general operation that management DOES have.
typo, you mean MIGHT have, which might even be correct information, and might even be considered when making decisions, sometimes.
Also don't forget priorities, not just raw knowledge. Triggering your golden parachute might be a perfectly great idea for an exec, but not for anyone or anything else involved.
No I didn't fall for the advertising. The hazards that are present during operations do not completely go away when operations stop. I assume that the chemicals are being stored somewhere on premise. Who's monitoring it?
In theory they could have just locked the door behind themselves and ran for it, although that seems unlikely.
Alternatively, in theory, the HF is a liquid acid you simply store it in teflon lined carboys / barrels on a shelf. Not challenging, done all the time. Stack the barrels over a bed of decon material, which is probably how they're usually stored, in case they leak. The hexaflouride can be reduced to U metal using sodium, resulting in a pile of sodium fluoride (as in your toothpaste) and U metal. There are other methods to store hex mostly involving big steel tanks widely spaced etc Throw the leftover spare Na into a swimming pool and sell the movie to mythbusters, thats right up their alley. Raw U oxide is pretty stable. Its actually kinda challenging to get to react. Oxides are usually pretty boring, U oxides no exception. Think of Fe or Al oxides, pretty boring stuff. Metallic U is relatively boring, put it in a plastic dessicant bag in a safe. Don't make big piles of enriched U. Other than that, now we're getting down to the toxicity of the lunchroom refrigerator after a couple months, stale chips in the vending machines, that weird taste diet sodas get after a couple months, etc.
I don't know enough about the plant to know if its a "just in time" facility. Some of the stuff they use is not exactly a commodity so they probably have great experience with medium term storage. A facility that buys a tanker car (or a unit train of tanker cars?) of HF once per year is probably not logistically or safety challenged by storing it in the stockroom for a couple extra months.
I suppose you could empty the warehouse and ship the barrels back to where ever they came from, worst case scenario. A refinery near a flourite mine or whatever and a refinery near a U mine, I guess.
As for whos monitoring, probably the usual EPA air sniffer, some outsourced security guards, the usual. Its not the first industrial plant in history that has ever shut down...
and an attitude that they know more or better than the owners of the company
Any competent worker has this attitude.
By definition, the industry worker has at least some industry experience, and the owners, mostly by being stockholders, probably in a mutual fund and don't even know they own that stock, statistically would have very little to zero experience in that industry.
I own approximately one ten-millionth of the local electric power company (which is quite a stack of money), yet have never worked in the electricity generation industry (although friends of mine have worked there and I find that industry to be interesting)
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Well, to spend would require passing the token (read: handing over the bill) to the new owner.
Key generation by private individuals could be prevented through custom exotic machine architecture without which the algorithms don't work--say, quantum-processed base-(largeprime) calculations. It wouldn't last forever, of course; doubtless, someone would be able to eventually crack the base-2305843009213693951 calculations that generate the keys, but by that time the new series of bills would be out ;-p
Well, if you put the private key in the US mint and use it as an oracle, all you need to do is make a million copies of the obviously well known pub key off any random note.
If you put the private key in some kind of tamper proof smartcard oracle inside the note, all you need is a fake oracle that always says its public key is real.
You can't distribute the private key to every verification terminal in known space, someone will put it on wikileaks and then, trillion digit bases or not, it'll be all over tee shirts and stuff just like the DVD keys incident.
Decentralized anonymous authentication using two untrusted machines (the verifier and the banknote) is a harder problem than it first appears...
If I have an RFID reader, will I be able to tell how much cash the mark is holding?
There are explosive ramifications w/ regards to IED construction (awful pun, sorry), much like the probably proverbial "american passport RFID proximity detonator" for artillery shells.
Inks smear right off. The solution is to laminate, then it turns out they delaminate. The solution to that is to essentially plastic weld two thin layers together into one piece of clear plastic. Then they're thick enough to crack. They're not as indestructible as you claim. Sure, not as bad as a supermarket plastic bag, but...
The type of deterioration of plastic objects including banknotes experience does not quite fit in with the financial industries handling procedures for dealing with deteriorating paper money. Its not just a question of new squeegee rollers, its like whole new design concepts for storing, stacking and shipping bundles of "cash".
The capital costs of replacing all currency handling machinery in the country would be high, essentially a big ole wealth transfer to China whom would make it all...
Its all possible, and eventually it might make financial sense. It already has for several countries. However, we'll probably convert to poly right about the time we convert to metric.
You should check out Bitcoins. http://www.bitcoin.org/ The mathematics behind it are genius. I wander how long it will take before governments try to shut it down.
Its a frozen economy because no one can successfully compete with the cluster guys to make any spendable BC. Eventually everyone will abandon bitcoins because no one will have any but the handful of cluster ops whom will have generated and hoarded all of them, so they can be rich. I have no interest in making some cluster op rich, so I simply will not do so. I made about 200 BC back when the generation difficulty level was like two digits. Last time I checked it practically needed scientific notation to display the difficulty level. Oh, 14484.16236123, thats all.
BC is an excellent example of how "the cluster operators shall inherit the earth" is not going to work in the real world.
Its very much like trying to set up a beanie babies economy. Cornering the market and hoarding all the rhinoceros beanie babies in the entire world makes them quite useless as a currency, thus they become more or less worthless instead of uncountably valuable.
Much safer to use that type of hardware to upgrade the firmware on a $1 up to $20, then visit the automated checkout lanes.
Honestly, I sometimes wonder how automated checkout lanes stay in business. Often they dont. But you gotta wonder what kind of stuff appears in their bill receptors.
The only "Ultimate" deterrent would be to make it impossible to produce the currency for less than the value of the currency.
As long as the existence of the currency over the lifetime of the physical object generates more tax value by being used, than it cost to make, a govt will run a profit if they own the mint. If it costs $21 to make a $20, thats perfectly OK if the bill is so durable that each 5% sales tax and 30% income tax adds up to $22 of revenue from that physical artifact.
Also there is no deterrent from a wealthy enough foreign power minting bills just to mess with you. Kind of like you don't need to make a profit on a military battle rifle round for it to be convenient for a country to produce and use it.
The only ultimate deterrent remains something with a fission core, unfortunately.
Now here's an interesting thought--bear with me here--what if the serial number were generated as the public key to a private key hidden in the electronics in the note? That way, the authenticity could be verified easily, and, as a bonus, individual bills could be used as crypto keys.
You need something more complicated to prevent "double spending"/multiple copies being made, and simply creating your own pub/priv pairs.
How is this better than a web-based news source, even a paywalled one?
Its important to specify the difference between a push web app news source, which could do all kinds of cool filtering and instant access (not high latency of streaming) of attached videos, and this specific app which is probably (just guessing) designed to little more than collect more money.
A good news app would intelligently log how interested I am in a story, based on both how long I read and what rating I give it, and then in a Bayesian way filter my news for me. Also it would provide an intelligent mixture almost like a DJ for news.
Also it would have all linked multimedia pre-downloaded via the push. No click and wait for video, ultra high res images instantly available.
Also it would have much better bookmarking than current websites.
I want it location aware. If I'm reading about yet another shooting 3 blocks away I want to see it on the google maps. Or a new restaurant opening up, I want turn by turn directions from my house.
Finally I'd want push downloaded instantly available background like relevant wikipedia articles, or if a lame journalist is misreporting on a scientific article, I want the original ARVIX paper please. Not just in the text, not a link to pop open Safari, but the actual paper right there. Not a text article paradigm, but a MIME like multimedia collection for each story.
What we're probably going to get is a reskinned safari or ibooks plus a big bill. But I/we can dream.
I never could understand how such people would work so hard at learning one thing -- basketball -- that they'd sweat, be out of breath, and have to take a shower afterwards, and then turn around and say that learning math was hard!
If you learn basketball you have a 0.001% chance of becoming a multimillionaire, or you'll be another poor modern peasant. But at least you have a chance.
If you learn math your career will either be asking if they want fries with that, or possibly a few short years before your job moves to the east and you'll be another poor modern peasant. No chance at all.
Thats what they mean by hard, its a hard lifestyle. In comparison, at least when you take a similar vow of poverty (and, lets face it, chastity) for religious reasons they claim you get future rewards.
Learning math is just as difficult as learning any other subject or content material. Deciphering poetry, learning programming, studying psychological theory, and learning calculus all involve concentration, study, and struggle from the learner.
You can end up in the human learning equivalent of dependency hell much easier in math than in any of your other examples, in fact I'd go so far as claiming its the worst possible tree of dependencies of any intellectual subject. With the possible exception of western philosophy, or at least thats a close second.
That would be a start. The X protocol is really chatty and there's lots of unneeded roundtrips. NX does filter away what isn't needed and compresses the rest into larger packets that then get sent all at once instead of small bits all the time. So, perhaps X.org should start doing the same.
For the past 17 years I've been hearing about this, but the problem is it becomes less useful every year. So back in the 14.4K era I heard with some effort I could compress my X data stream when I connect remotely, but frankly the compatibility and deployment hassles have not been worth it. Now 17 years later maybe they've got the perfect solution to run on my multi-megabit cablemodem. Excellent, thats just like someone finally perfecting their floppy disk automated cataloger/indexer (remember those?) in 2010. Or finally developing the idea gopher server in 2010. Thanks guys, but if I wanted to pay for something obsolete I'd get a classic car instead.
You do realise that technocracy is essentially government by those who believe themselves to be intellectually strong, yes? Epitomised by Wernher von Braun, it's really just an application of "might makes right".
The opponents of the technocracy gang are not the philosophers, but the theocracy gang. Epitomised by Palin. Frankly most people prefer the outcome of the technocracy gang rather than an irrational desire to return to the Christian middle ages / dark ages, complete with middle eastern crusades and the merger of state and religion.
It would be really nice if a "third party" of philosophers existed, but most of them spend most of their time smoking weed then debating "is-a" vs "has-a" instead of trying to rule or even discuss the philosophy of ruling.
Meanwhile we have turned the majority of Western humans from independent men into chair-warming consumers singing in lockstep for trinkets.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Re-read your Gibbon, assuming you're that well classically educated. One argument for the fall of the western half of the roman empire was Gibbon had evidence than less than a thousand people owned all the land of Europe, the remaining population were basically slaves of those thousand whom didn't really care about the genealogy of the bossman, thus they got tossed and the "barbarians" took over. We're trying to re-enact that wealth distribution here in the USA as quickly as we can, for what purpose I am unsure, as no one seemed to benefit last time around, other than the barbarians.
Anyway, we've gone from a thousand men with the theoretical possibility of being independent thinkers (even if most were not), to uncountable millions of men AND women with the theoretical possibility of being independent thinkers (again, even if most were not).
So your point is...?
Part of the criticism is that if you assume the universe can be fully described with formal logic (logical atomism), then you are already subscribed to a certain type of metaphysics.
And that is exactly why they get made fun of, you can have long interesting discussions that require a shared, probably unspoken base of formal logical principles, but if you toss out those principles, you are left with an extremely shallow pool to draw from, little more than "I'm right because god told me so" or "might makes right" or "what if we're all brainz in tankz?".
There is plenty of historical evidence, across all cultures, that the other metaphysics pretty much suck, and at best have been completely ineffective, or at worst have been outright crippling to thought and human cultural development.
It does kind of bug me though, that a person who graduates with a degree in mathematics (which is a fairly difficult, hard-nosed subject) gets a wishy-washy BA degree, whereas a hippie with a degree in "environmental engineering" gets a BS, but ultimately I think there's a lot of problems with our current conception with categorizing things into "science" and "not-science".
That is a problem with your school. You can get a BA or a BS in computer science by selecting your school. I chose a BS school, didn't like the outdated curriculum, transferred to a BA school with a modern survey curriculum, loved it.
The BS school required a bit more analysis math. Only really useful if you get a job in numerical integration, or maybe graphics. The BA school required more discrete math which is useful, uh, pretty much every job other than N.I. and graphics.
The BS school simply required you fill your spare time with electives, if all your electives happen to be classes prefixed with a "CS", well thats OK as long as you eventually accumulate 128 credits. The BA school had a rather complicated and involved system of eight categories of knowledge and you needed a class in each, making you pretty well rounded. Weirdly enough, I was greatly surprised that I enjoyed art class, and not just for dating potential.
There were differences in foreign language requirements, something I no longer remember like the BS had to be a dead western european language like latin or greek or a modern strictly non-western language like Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, whereas the BA gave me credit for the Spanish I took in high school, and promptly forgot, but hey I got the transfer credit, so...
The differences are overshadowed by local administration. The BS school was in a very slow conversion from only offering the "cdrom multimedia developer" to the "web developer" specialization for the night school students, unfortunately this was in 2002 post .com crash, and I think cdrom multimedia developer crashed in the mid 90s. The BA school only offered a general survey kind of degree, so I got a semester of relational database theory (Codd normal forms! Yeah for ER diagrams!) and a semester of systems analysis, and a semester of procedural languages, and a semester or two of object oriented programming, and a semester of networking theory... it was much deeper, even though on paper a BA is supposed to be shallower than a BS.
Personally I'd recommend the BA in CS. If you can hack that, you should be a good enough self learner to handle any glossed over areas. You're going to be learning the rest of your life anyway so its not much of an issue.
A Ph.D. tells you nothing except that the holder did some original research at an early point in their career.
There is also little if any correlation in being able to research, and being able to teach. Culturally, "everyone knows" the purpose of a phd is to become a professor and teach university students while collecting a $100K+ salary. The upper 50% to 10% cream of the crop actually get hired to do that. So, pretty much by definition, as a general cross section of the population, they are in the bottom of the barrel of teaching ability. So I'd be expecting, unless they're education phds, they're almost by definition probably not going to be good teachers.
No need to wait, Linux ships with flashblock by default. Unblocking it, that might be a problem.
apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
To be honest, I've never really seen animated advertisements as "improving" my browsing experience so I usually don't bother, although I have it on a couple machines. Flash doesn't work so well on my ipad either. But if you have flash installed, you need flashblock in FF, or its just advertising hell.
If the spots where the paint was rubbed off were small enough that the contact resistance was 2 ohms, then they would be difficult to find with the probes. Metal at macroscopic sizes conducts quite well. A quick check with my handy Fluke 179 shows that a clip lead, roughly the same length as the distance between the two hooks in the Kindle cover, has a resistance that is below the threshold of measurability on the meter (0.1 Ohm).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wire_gauge
Lets assume the metal wire in the kindle case is copper and a foot long (makes it simpler), you'd need a wire gauge quite a bit below 40 AWG to get 2 ohms in a foot. seeing as thats about as small as commercially available, yet is till way too big, and yet is only 3 thousandths of an inch across... doing some reasonable extrapolation thats a piece of copper about a thousandth of an inch in diameter. That will snap before it falls off the assembly line.
I suppose if the Chinese used nichrome or stainless steel its not so bad, but its still .. unrealistic.
Whomever designed the case should be fired with extreme prejudice. They're lucky they didn't fry a significant number of very expensive ebooks with something this stupid. If I were a victim of this I'd demand a replacement kindle while I was at it... no telling what long term affect this had on the device.
The article pic shows about 2 megs not 2 ohms of resistance. Thats not too unlikely for a persons dry skin. If you think about what leather is made out of, it makes sense that a human body and a leather case would have about the same resistance. I think it would be safe to assume the kindle engineers designed it to survive dry skin contact, so the case designers building their case out of dry animal skin is not exactly the dumbest intersection of the fashion designer and electronics world I have ever seen.
It looks like a flaw on the part of the cover maker. Amazon could put some amperage limiting circuitry, but I imagine it would raise the cost.
Look closely at the dudes meter, its 2 megohms not 2 ohms. Lets guess its a single cell li-poly at 3.7 volts. Thats a smokin' current of 74 microamps. What, a quarter of a milliwatt, something like that?
Good luck building a 74 microamp fuse. I once built a microwave preamp in the 80s and static fried the active device, that probably was a 74 microamp fuse, in a weird sort of way.... Active current limiting at that level is kind of a mystery to me... I suppose you'd need a mosfet off resistance in the hundreds of megohms since the load impedance is in the single megohm range, but PC board leakage currents are going to be a problem at that level. Leakage currents thru the plastic kindle case would probably be in the microamp range?
First, his meter's reading 2 Megaohms, not 2 Ohms. I guess he's not much of an "Electronics Person".
Second, it would appear that he's measuring conductivity though his body to achieve that number. Both of his fingers are touching the probe tips.
He would get about the same resistance if he skipped the whole leather cover thing and just held the meter probes. You'd think they'd notice something like that.
And Connectify earns their spot on "57 Lamest Tech Moments of 2010"
seriously though pretty much any tightly fitting leather case will probably put the device under some continuous strain, probably leading to something internal flexing, then a reboot. With those nice strong metal clamps gripping the case tightly, I could imagine it.
There is a reason people have been calling FF bloated lately. This is without any addons, plugins (besides maybe Java), or themes or any crap built into FF.
34.7 megs? I can only run 120 FF processes on my main desktop then. Bummer. Hmm, that would be 12 across and 10 down.
Only things that matters to me are:
Adblock plus
Firefox sync
firebug
flashblock
ghostery
remove-it-permanently
Noscript
once I can get all that cross platform, I'm ready to switch. I'll put up with anything else, as long as those addons work.
He/She knows that there is information that he/she doesn't have about the company's finances and general operation that management DOES have.
typo, you mean MIGHT have, which might even be correct information, and might even be considered when making decisions, sometimes.
Also don't forget priorities, not just raw knowledge. Triggering your golden parachute might be a perfectly great idea for an exec, but not for anyone or anything else involved.
No I didn't fall for the advertising. The hazards that are present during operations do not completely go away when operations stop. I assume that the chemicals are being stored somewhere on premise. Who's monitoring it?
In theory they could have just locked the door behind themselves and ran for it, although that seems unlikely.
Alternatively, in theory, the HF is a liquid acid you simply store it in teflon lined carboys / barrels on a shelf. Not challenging, done all the time. Stack the barrels over a bed of decon material, which is probably how they're usually stored, in case they leak. The hexaflouride can be reduced to U metal using sodium, resulting in a pile of sodium fluoride (as in your toothpaste) and U metal. There are other methods to store hex mostly involving big steel tanks widely spaced etc Throw the leftover spare Na into a swimming pool and sell the movie to mythbusters, thats right up their alley. Raw U oxide is pretty stable. Its actually kinda challenging to get to react. Oxides are usually pretty boring, U oxides no exception. Think of Fe or Al oxides, pretty boring stuff. Metallic U is relatively boring, put it in a plastic dessicant bag in a safe. Don't make big piles of enriched U. Other than that, now we're getting down to the toxicity of the lunchroom refrigerator after a couple months, stale chips in the vending machines, that weird taste diet sodas get after a couple months, etc.
I don't know enough about the plant to know if its a "just in time" facility. Some of the stuff they use is not exactly a commodity so they probably have great experience with medium term storage. A facility that buys a tanker car (or a unit train of tanker cars?) of HF once per year is probably not logistically or safety challenged by storing it in the stockroom for a couple extra months.
I suppose you could empty the warehouse and ship the barrels back to where ever they came from, worst case scenario. A refinery near a flourite mine or whatever and a refinery near a U mine, I guess.
As for whos monitoring, probably the usual EPA air sniffer, some outsourced security guards, the usual. Its not the first industrial plant in history that has ever shut down...
and an attitude that they know more or better than the owners of the company
Any competent worker has this attitude.
By definition, the industry worker has at least some industry experience, and the owners, mostly by being stockholders, probably in a mutual fund and don't even know they own that stock, statistically would have very little to zero experience in that industry.
I own approximately one ten-millionth of the local electric power company (which is quite a stack of money), yet have never worked in the electricity generation industry (although friends of mine have worked there and I find that industry to be interesting)