One thing to keep in mind is that if you're going to read the Well World books, do not attempt to figure out the whole "780 hexes per hemisphere" thing.
It just flat-out doesn't work, and it's inconsistent with the given size of the world (and other properties mentioned, such as the number of Avenues) anyway.
See, that's the point of the table I was mentioning - to your ISP, who could do a quick sample of the data on your connection, what's going through isn't going to look like video/audio data (which tends to run over the full range for bytes), it's going to look like a bunch of web pages or chat. (Especially to your average person in monkey support - the kind of person who'd have to look at this - for whom HTML is some kind of dark and arcane language.)
Now I'm halfway interested in building a program to test this (and to see whether or not the resulting text file compresses down to a smaller file than the original file, which would be mildly amusing).
Possible to get around; the simplest setup I can think of involves a character-to-syllable substitution table. It's an extra step, and it obviously screws with your storage capacity (required space is going to be somewhere between 2 and 5 times as much, depending on your table), but it's basically foolproof as far as preventing analysis of the files. They look like extremely long text in (with a properly tuned table) a natural but unknown language.
...and carefully wording patent law to disallow... anything... that isn't an actual physical single-purpose machine.
In other words, if someone develops multiple new concepts all in a single machine - as a massively out-there example without the intent of conveying any sort of stereotype, a faster-than-light propulsion system that also provides radiation shielding - they shouldn't be able to patent it unless they can separate it into its individual components to operate on their own.
While I have no problem with the portion I skipped over in that first sentence (processes shouldn't be patentable, and I consider software patents to be a subcase of process patents), the idea that something with multiple uses shouldn't be patentable unless each of its individual uses can be made to stand on its own just rubs me the wrong way a bit.
I'd settle for reducing that last bit to "...that isn't an actual physical machine that has at least one unpatented purpose." And then improving the checks for prior art, because that's where the other weak point in the patent system is.
While I appreciate your attempts to gain converts to the Zero Population cause, it's not going to help either. The rich will just start declaring that childless people are henceforth the property of the state and forcibly impregnate them.
Think of this as a proof-of-concept work, which can rapidly (relative to the initial rate of progress from the 22k transistor range) be pushed to something closer to present-day processor strength. So figure sometime around 2020-2025 for them to have caught up to present-day transistor counts, with a system that'd have higher performance than anything we can get right now (without overclocking).
Granted, that 10-12 years figure is a gigantic ass pull on my part, but it shouldn't be too much slower than that. They'll catch up eventually, and to low-power chips faster than everything else.
Ease, yes. Efficiency, especially the amount of the wafer that's wasted due to it being circular initially, not so much.
A triangular layout probably would be ideal - you could (or at least, should be able to) adapt existing equipment (instead of two cuts at right angles, you make three cuts at 60-degree angles - hexagonal layouts would require either piecing together triangles produced this way, casting much smaller ingots such that it's one chip per wafer, or stamping out the hexagons), and you reduce waste somewhat (depending on the size of the chip and the size of the initial wafer).
However, the problem with triangular layouts (and hexagonal, for that matter) is that it involves cutting along planes the original ingot (which is a single huge silicon crystal) won't naturally fracture in.
So... unfortunately, we're stuck with square chips (if we start building up 3D chips, we'll have the option of cubes and octahedra) because of nature.
..."represent the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity..."
Right in what you quoted, so... yeah, it doesn't say what you're claiming it says, unfortunately. Try a different section. I believe 3(C) has what you're actually looking for, which is the "avoiding reporting requirements without necessarily involving unlawful activity" bit.
Hell no. They're hoping for it. At that point, they can declare martial law, and everything else goes down the tubes for the people who aren't involved in the revolution.
The only things they're worried about are (1) making sure they're still getting paid and (2) being out of town if the Revolution shows up and they have to nuke it.
200 petawatts is easy enough to produce - it's 200 joules over one femtosecond. (Chances are the pulse is somewhat longer than one femtosecond, but there are two ways to produce large power numbers - large amounts of energy, or very short timeframes.)
It is like choosing how to heat your home. You have Electricity, Natural Gas, Propane, Oil, Wood/Wood Pellets... Depending on your location you can choose an optimal solution.
For example, in Canada, the optimal solution is to set your house on fire, then use the insurance money to move somewhere warm.
Are neutrinos susceptible to the weak force? Would subtracting the effect of gravity onto photons account for the difference?
Yes to the first, probably not to the second.
---
What I suspect probably happened is that, for neutrinos, the more curved space is, the more likely tunneling effects will be seen. In other words, assuming there's a fourth spatial dimension for space to curve "through" (you know, like how technically the surface of a sphere is 2-dimensional, but there is very much a third dimension at work there), the probability of a neutrino exhibiting quantum tunneling at any given point is roughly equal to the hyperbolic tangent of the curvature K of space at that point. (I'm using the hyperbolic tangent as an example here, because it exhibits nice behavior over the positive real numbers as a probability. Large values of K are equivalent to extremely curved space; the limiting case of flat space is K=0. You know, just like the definition of curvature in calculus.:-D)
Then again, I'm just another armchair physicist, so this could be entirely wrong, but it seems like it'd be a starting point worth looking at if things are being measured correctly.
Base-12 divisions of a day are also nice - a four-digit time display is somewhat better than twice as accurate as a four-digit decimal time display would be. (And the first three divisions work out to nice round quantities anyway - two hours, ten minutes, and fifty seconds respectively.)
Re:Sugar is not only toxic but it's addictive.
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And according to the Timecube guy, there are four days in every day.
I see no reason why we should promote lunacy, especially dietary lunacy.
My doctorb has proof that I have a previously unknown mitochondrial disorder that does not cause, but results in, a deep-seated need to receive large quantities of money.
$2.2 billion dollars would be appreciated as compensation.
Actually, if you look on the site (under FAQs) it tells you that unless you're running it through Tor, it's going to hit up an IRC network for the current node list. (Running it through Tor, it uses a hard-coded node list to get the initial nodes, then queries those nodes for further nodes.)
Slashdot Mirror
One thing to keep in mind is that if you're going to read the Well World books, do not attempt to figure out the whole "780 hexes per hemisphere" thing.
It just flat-out doesn't work, and it's inconsistent with the given size of the world (and other properties mentioned, such as the number of Avenues) anyway.
See, that's the point of the table I was mentioning - to your ISP, who could do a quick sample of the data on your connection, what's going through isn't going to look like video/audio data (which tends to run over the full range for bytes), it's going to look like a bunch of web pages or chat. (Especially to your average person in monkey support - the kind of person who'd have to look at this - for whom HTML is some kind of dark and arcane language.)
Now I'm halfway interested in building a program to test this (and to see whether or not the resulting text file compresses down to a smaller file than the original file, which would be mildly amusing).
Possible to get around; the simplest setup I can think of involves a character-to-syllable substitution table. It's an extra step, and it obviously screws with your storage capacity (required space is going to be somewhere between 2 and 5 times as much, depending on your table), but it's basically foolproof as far as preventing analysis of the files. They look like extremely long text in (with a properly tuned table) a natural but unknown language.
...and carefully wording patent law to disallow ... anything ... that isn't an actual physical single-purpose machine.
In other words, if someone develops multiple new concepts all in a single machine - as a massively out-there example without the intent of conveying any sort of stereotype, a faster-than-light propulsion system that also provides radiation shielding - they shouldn't be able to patent it unless they can separate it into its individual components to operate on their own.
While I have no problem with the portion I skipped over in that first sentence (processes shouldn't be patentable, and I consider software patents to be a subcase of process patents), the idea that something with multiple uses shouldn't be patentable unless each of its individual uses can be made to stand on its own just rubs me the wrong way a bit.
I'd settle for reducing that last bit to "...that isn't an actual physical machine that has at least one unpatented purpose." And then improving the checks for prior art, because that's where the other weak point in the patent system is.
You try loading it into your media player of choice and see what it sounds like.
If it sounds like static, it's random bits. If it sounds like music, it's an MP3.
If it sounds like godawful screeching noises, it's also an MP3 (of popular music).
While I appreciate your attempts to gain converts to the Zero Population cause, it's not going to help either. The rich will just start declaring that childless people are henceforth the property of the state and forcibly impregnate them.
Even the men.
Think of this as a proof-of-concept work, which can rapidly (relative to the initial rate of progress from the 22k transistor range) be pushed to something closer to present-day processor strength. So figure sometime around 2020-2025 for them to have caught up to present-day transistor counts, with a system that'd have higher performance than anything we can get right now (without overclocking).
Granted, that 10-12 years figure is a gigantic ass pull on my part, but it shouldn't be too much slower than that. They'll catch up eventually, and to low-power chips faster than everything else.
Ease, yes. Efficiency, especially the amount of the wafer that's wasted due to it being circular initially, not so much.
A triangular layout probably would be ideal - you could (or at least, should be able to) adapt existing equipment (instead of two cuts at right angles, you make three cuts at 60-degree angles - hexagonal layouts would require either piecing together triangles produced this way, casting much smaller ingots such that it's one chip per wafer, or stamping out the hexagons), and you reduce waste somewhat (depending on the size of the chip and the size of the initial wafer).
However, the problem with triangular layouts (and hexagonal, for that matter) is that it involves cutting along planes the original ingot (which is a single huge silicon crystal) won't naturally fracture in.
So... unfortunately, we're stuck with square chips (if we start building up 3D chips, we'll have the option of cubes and octahedra) because of nature.
..."represent the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity..."
Right in what you quoted, so... yeah, it doesn't say what you're claiming it says, unfortunately. Try a different section. I believe 3(C) has what you're actually looking for, which is the "avoiding reporting requirements without necessarily involving unlawful activity" bit.
Hell no. They're hoping for it. At that point, they can declare martial law, and everything else goes down the tubes for the people who aren't involved in the revolution.
The only things they're worried about are (1) making sure they're still getting paid and (2) being out of town if the Revolution shows up and they have to nuke it.
I would advocate for Forth
Cue the Reverse Polack jokes.
Granted, that's the worst part of learning Forth (or an HP calculator).
200 petawatts is easy enough to produce - it's 200 joules over one femtosecond. (Chances are the pulse is somewhat longer than one femtosecond, but there are two ways to produce large power numbers - large amounts of energy, or very short timeframes.)
Pokey the Penguin, is that you?
It is like choosing how to heat your home. You have Electricity, Natural Gas, Propane, Oil, Wood/Wood Pellets... Depending on your location you can choose an optimal solution.
For example, in Canada, the optimal solution is to set your house on fire, then use the insurance money to move somewhere warm.
Are neutrinos susceptible to the weak force?
Would subtracting the effect of gravity onto photons account for the difference?
Yes to the first, probably not to the second.
---
What I suspect probably happened is that, for neutrinos, the more curved space is, the more likely tunneling effects will be seen. In other words, assuming there's a fourth spatial dimension for space to curve "through" (you know, like how technically the surface of a sphere is 2-dimensional, but there is very much a third dimension at work there), the probability of a neutrino exhibiting quantum tunneling at any given point is roughly equal to the hyperbolic tangent of the curvature K of space at that point. (I'm using the hyperbolic tangent as an example here, because it exhibits nice behavior over the positive real numbers as a probability. Large values of K are equivalent to extremely curved space; the limiting case of flat space is K=0. You know, just like the definition of curvature in calculus. :-D)
Then again, I'm just another armchair physicist, so this could be entirely wrong, but it seems like it'd be a starting point worth looking at if things are being measured correctly.
If memory serves, it wasn't intended as a bioweapon so much as a "hey, with this we can turn them into customers" device.
Which I suppose proves that the Pierson's Puppeteers and AT&T have a lot in common.
Please make sure that these are vulnerable to projectile weaponry. The last time we had to deal with life forms of this sort, it was a real pain.
Signed,
Col. Jack O'Neill
A paralegal willingly giving up their job for the benefit of faceless consumers? ... in this economy?
They're probably a T-Mobile customer and already had a job in a different field lined up.
Base-12 divisions of a day are also nice - a four-digit time display is somewhat better than twice as accurate as a four-digit decimal time display would be. (And the first three divisions work out to nice round quantities anyway - two hours, ten minutes, and fifty seconds respectively.)
And according to the Timecube guy, there are four days in every day.
I see no reason why we should promote lunacy, especially dietary lunacy.
The short answer is: Because communism has already been tried and it doesn't work.
In communism's defense, the last implementation had some kind of weird bug relating to a lack of religion.
My doctorb has proof that I have a previously unknown mitochondrial disorder that does not cause, but results in, a deep-seated need to receive large quantities of money.
$2.2 billion dollars would be appreciated as compensation.
Why are you asking people who don't exist?
So, I will give you US$1.00 for all 21 million bitcoins.
And then you're going to resell them for a profit, or sit on them so that you can claim "HA! I told you it would fail!"
In the former case, well, you've just managed to prove that it is in fact a functioning currency with a value higher than $0.0476/million.
In the latter case, you're an asshole and I recommend that people not sell any bitcoins to you.
Actually, if you look on the site (under FAQs) it tells you that unless you're running it through Tor, it's going to hit up an IRC network for the current node list. (Running it through Tor, it uses a hard-coded node list to get the initial nodes, then queries those nodes for further nodes.)