Like the speculation that somewhere within Visa's accounting system, they store currency transactions as 8 byte integers, completely disregarding any fractional money.
Mining companies produce gold, and industrial users consume gold, for their own purposes, with no regard for the effect of the gold supply on the economy.
Mining _cartels_. And you can bet that once you put the power to fiddle with the money supply into their hands, they _will_ use that power for their benefit.
now compare that limitation with mars, with the very low atmospheric pressure, the much lower gravity, and the bitter cold.
Heating something is much easier than cooling it, in most cases. Heck, as soon as you start generating serious power, you'll have plenty of waste heat.
you would need a moonsuit to go outside on mars, even a terraformed one, unless you figured out some magical way to bulk up the atmosphere.
Magically bulking up Mars' atmosphere is probably much, much easier than magically bulking down Venus' atmosphere. And once a comfortable atmospheric pressure exists on Mars, it'd take on the order of a million years until it's blown off into space again.
desert dwellers on earth are familiar with the very hot days and very cold nights.
They'd freeze to death if a desert night on Earth was, say, three times as long as it is now. A night on Venus is over a hundred times as long as as a night on Earth. Same goes for the day.
It also has gravity closer to ours than the moon or Mars.
Gravity is a nice thing, but since you eventually want to launch more stuff into space, Mars-like gravity is better than something close to 1g. It allows all the niceties (indoor plumbing, showers, toilets, kitchens, cups of coffee, etc) while still making it much easier to launch something.
If we could turn the CO2 into O2 and usable carbon (like for soil), we could eventually live on it.
Unfortunately, you'll need hydrogen, too, and most of Venus' hydrogen has already escaped into space. Large amounts of nitrogen would be nice, too, which Venus seems to be lacking, too.
Wouldn't be easy, but probably more feasible than terra-forming Mars.
Mars is probably closer to being terraformed now than Venus will be for thousands of years (even if we start working on it now). You could take a walk on Mars in a spacesuit right now, on Venus, you'd be well-done within seconds. A Martian day is about 25 hours, compare that to a few weeks on Venus, with all the associated problems (even if we get rid of the atmosphere, someone on the planet will be in direct sunlight for weeks, and without sunlight for weeks).
The approach for terraforming Venus that sounds most promising to me was to build a giant sunshade, wait until the atmosphere solidifies, and then ship it offworld or shoot it into space. Then crash some comets rich in hydrogen and nitrogen on the planet.
A lot of energy doesn't help one bit if you can't turn it into a useful form.
In fact, many of our present ways of generating energy would work much better in really cold places due to a higher temperature difference to work with.
and you're closer to the sun... which is actually good: something to work with.
I hope you're bringing sunscreen with SPF measured in powers of ten.
Nothing about a soul would instantly provide some hole in thermodynamics,
I believe the concept of a soul is implied in the second law of thermodynamics. It's the sum of effects of your existence, which is irreversible and _unique_. Of course, it'll also become lost in the threshold of detectability, but that's mostly a flaw of technology, which shouldn't be a concern to any entity that claims omnipotence.
They had access to meat, and fish, and some fruit and veg.
And access meant several hours of walking each day for them, with success not being guaranteed.
Want to emulate a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Throw out your fridge. Don't buy any food with preservatives in it (not because they may be bad for you, but because our ancestors didn't have them, maybe with the exception of salt). When buying food, use a non-motorized mode of transport (walk for the real experience, but biking counts, too). See how quickly you'll be fit and lean like caveman.
The restricted carbohydrate hypothesis is basically that before the invention of agriculture just 10,000 years ago, our bodies were not subjected to huge quantities of carbs like bread, pasta, cereals, rice, and so on.
You mean the time when getting food either meant spending a long time each day walking and gathering it, or tracking it, chasing it down, killing it and carrying back to the camp? And that success in actually getting any food wasn't guaranteed each day?
Yes, certainly exercise and reduced availability of food didn't have anything to do with people being leaner back then.
If you want to eat like a caveman, try throwing out your fridge. Better yet, don't store any food at home (that'll reduce the temptation too). And use a non-motorized means of transport to fetch food. Yes, even if you live ten miles from the nearest supermarket. You'll be lean and fit like a caveman in less than a year.
Many artificial sweeteners are actually pretty much the same thing, as they're broken down into glucose inside the body - same as sugar.
Which ones would that be? Sucralose is not metabolized, aspartame is broken down into amino acids instead of sugars, aspartame has almost no food energy.
Also, most artificial sweeteners are sweeter than sugar, so less of them is needed to achieve the same sweetness in the food. Usually, in order to simplify preparation, manufacturers add a tasteless carbohydrate (usually maltodextrin)... hence many "sugar-free" products have almost exactly the same amount of calories as their sugared counterparts.
The difference here is that with voluntary service and relatively easy transitions to and from military life, many of us either are or were the military.
I don't know what point you're trying to make. In fact, you're contradicting yourself - with voluntary service, you'll only have people in the military who want to be there. With compulsory service, pretty much all of the population above a certain age are or have been the military. It's one of the reasons why the country I live in (technically) has compulsory military service - to avoid the formation of a parallel military society.
I would have disobeyed an unlawful order to fire on civilians... He would have disobeyed the order...
Possibly. But if just one guy obeyed it, got scared, or had an itchy trigger finger, you'd have ended up in a self-defense situation pretty quickly. What are you going to do if an angry mob wants to bash your head in because someone who was wearing the same uniform as you shot a few people?
Oh, and in most cases, there is of course no order to fire on civilians, but terrorists, criminal elements, foreign-sponsored agitators, and whatnot.
What if the flying-camera-drone catches some police abuse on civilians, or some other egregious violation of human or civil rights? Do we, as civilians, have the right to request the footage of that incident at that time?
Oh, you certainly have all the right in the world to request the footage of the incident, which will do you a whole lot of good if the tape has been "misplaced" or just doesn't exist because the camera had a "glitch" just when it happened. *winkwink*
I know there are plenty of examples throughout history where the military has quelled it's own populace, but I would like to think that US troops would hopefully be above that.
In most of these examples, the populace probably also thought that their troops were above that, or they wouldn't have done things that required them to be quelled.
Slashdot Mirror
Fixed point arithmetics. Ever heard of it?
So if a paper currency can collapse, it's entirely possible for gold as a currency to collapse as well.
Anyone who played Civ4 should know at least one example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa
And this wasn't even about people being desperate, it happened because the local market was flooded with so much gold that hyperinflation set in.
Mining _cartels_. And you can bet that once you put the power to fiddle with the money supply into their hands, they _will_ use that power for their benefit.
Yikes.
IQ tests are a pretty poor example as no study has found any relation between academic success and IQ.
So you claim that you'll find just as many academically successful people with an IQ of less than 70 as you'll find with an IQ of more than 130?
WTF are you smoking and where can I get some?
When used as a chisel, or when used as a hammer?
Here were my answers: butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly.
Here's a hint: One of them is _not_ a butterfly.
Heating something is much easier than cooling it, in most cases. Heck, as soon as you start generating serious power, you'll have plenty of waste heat.
you would need a moonsuit to go outside on mars, even a terraformed one, unless you figured out some magical way to bulk up the atmosphere.
Magically bulking up Mars' atmosphere is probably much, much easier than magically bulking down Venus' atmosphere. And once a comfortable atmospheric pressure exists on Mars, it'd take on the order of a million years until it's blown off into space again.
desert dwellers on earth are familiar with the very hot days and very cold nights.
They'd freeze to death if a desert night on Earth was, say, three times as long as it is now. A night on Venus is over a hundred times as long as as a night on Earth. Same goes for the day.
Gravity is a nice thing, but since you eventually want to launch more stuff into space, Mars-like gravity is better than something close to 1g. It allows all the niceties (indoor plumbing, showers, toilets, kitchens, cups of coffee, etc) while still making it much easier to launch something.
If we could turn the CO2 into O2 and usable carbon (like for soil), we could eventually live on it.
Unfortunately, you'll need hydrogen, too, and most of Venus' hydrogen has already escaped into space. Large amounts of nitrogen would be nice, too, which Venus seems to be lacking, too.
Wouldn't be easy, but probably more feasible than terra-forming Mars.
Mars is probably closer to being terraformed now than Venus will be for thousands of years (even if we start working on it now). You could take a walk on Mars in a spacesuit right now, on Venus, you'd be well-done within seconds. A Martian day is about 25 hours, compare that to a few weeks on Venus, with all the associated problems (even if we get rid of the atmosphere, someone on the planet will be in direct sunlight for weeks, and without sunlight for weeks).
The approach for terraforming Venus that sounds most promising to me was to build a giant sunshade, wait until the atmosphere solidifies, and then ship it offworld or shoot it into space. Then crash some comets rich in hydrogen and nitrogen on the planet.
there's a lot of energy in that atmosphere,
A lot of energy doesn't help one bit if you can't turn it into a useful form.
In fact, many of our present ways of generating energy would work much better in really cold places due to a higher temperature difference to work with.
and you're closer to the sun... which is actually good: something to work with.
I hope you're bringing sunscreen with SPF measured in powers of ten.
The representatives of several tabloids would like to have a word with you.
Nothing about a soul would instantly provide some hole in thermodynamics,
I believe the concept of a soul is implied in the second law of thermodynamics. It's the sum of effects of your existence, which is irreversible and _unique_. Of course, it'll also become lost in the threshold of detectability, but that's mostly a flaw of technology, which shouldn't be a concern to any entity that claims omnipotence.
And access meant several hours of walking each day for them, with success not being guaranteed.
Want to emulate a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Throw out your fridge. Don't buy any food with preservatives in it (not because they may be bad for you, but because our ancestors didn't have them, maybe with the exception of salt). When buying food, use a non-motorized mode of transport (walk for the real experience, but biking counts, too). See how quickly you'll be fit and lean like caveman.
Paraphrasing Razor from Jagged Alliance 2, when an enemy gets his head blown off: "That's one way to lose a few pounds."
You mean the time when getting food either meant spending a long time each day walking and gathering it, or tracking it, chasing it down, killing it and carrying back to the camp? And that success in actually getting any food wasn't guaranteed each day?
Yes, certainly exercise and reduced availability of food didn't have anything to do with people being leaner back then.
If you want to eat like a caveman, try throwing out your fridge. Better yet, don't store any food at home (that'll reduce the temptation too). And use a non-motorized means of transport to fetch food. Yes, even if you live ten miles from the nearest supermarket. You'll be lean and fit like a caveman in less than a year.
Even better: Just think of baby carrots and apples, and don't eat anything as snacks.
Ever get yourself checked for adult ADHD?
Many artificial sweeteners are actually pretty much the same thing, as they're broken down into glucose inside the body - same as sugar.
Which ones would that be? Sucralose is not metabolized, aspartame is broken down into amino acids instead of sugars, aspartame has almost no food energy.
Also, most artificial sweeteners are sweeter than sugar, so less of them is needed to achieve the same sweetness in the food. Usually, in order to simplify preparation, manufacturers add a tasteless carbohydrate (usually maltodextrin) ... hence many "sugar-free" products have almost exactly the same amount of calories as their sugared counterparts.
They don't need to know who you are, just that you're up to no good.
It never rains in southern California.
What, you didn't know that?
I don't know what point you're trying to make. In fact, you're contradicting yourself - with voluntary service, you'll only have people in the military who want to be there. With compulsory service, pretty much all of the population above a certain age are or have been the military. It's one of the reasons why the country I live in (technically) has compulsory military service - to avoid the formation of a parallel military society.
I would have disobeyed an unlawful order to fire on civilians... He would have disobeyed the order...
Possibly. But if just one guy obeyed it, got scared, or had an itchy trigger finger, you'd have ended up in a self-defense situation pretty quickly. What are you going to do if an angry mob wants to bash your head in because someone who was wearing the same uniform as you shot a few people?
Oh, and in most cases, there is of course no order to fire on civilians, but terrorists, criminal elements, foreign-sponsored agitators, and whatnot.
Or maybe he just didn't anticipate IR cameras.
Oh, you certainly have all the right in the world to request the footage of the incident, which will do you a whole lot of good if the tape has been "misplaced" or just doesn't exist because the camera had a "glitch" just when it happened. *winkwink*
In most of these examples, the populace probably also thought that their troops were above that, or they wouldn't have done things that required them to be quelled.
Yes. Let's put a paratrooper SWAT team on those planes, for all the crimes than the onboard armament can't handle.