First of all, many women do treat all men as (at least potential) rapists. As you note, it's not valid, and I'm certainly not trying to suggest that you have anything to do with it, but such as it is.
As unfortunate as it is that they asked you those questions, and that they felt like they should ask, I can see why they did. A well known bug-as-feature of the human brain is the extremely powerful and innate ability to categorize things. This is why we don't have to rediscover an apple every time we see one - but it also leads to stereotypes when this is applied to people. And it requires active work in everybody to realize this particular flaw of human thought and avoid or mitigate it, or avoid making these associations in the first place.
I am going somewhere with this. The thing is, almost all men in the workplace - and especially tech men - have or have heard a horror story about a man making a benign joke or a comment that a woman hears and takes offense to. Or a man who asks a woman out that he finds attractive and faces sexual harassment discipline, not because he was being harassing and asking multiple times, or creating a toxic workplace environment, but simply for asking (and men are expected to be the ones to ask).
Witness the recent Adria Richards case. She heard two guys talking to each other (not in reference to her) making a 12-year-old style "dongle" joke, proceeded to misinterpret something else they said as sexual when it wasn't, and decided that the best course of action was to publicly denounce them with a photograph on Twitter and write a blog post, instead of, you know, asking them to cut it out.
You're absolutely, unequivocally, 100% right that she does not say anything about all or most women, and you are obviously not "responsible" or "accountable" for what she and others like her have done. The problem is, virtually never has a man done these things - in fact if he does, he is laughed away before it gets anywhere (which is another problem). And most women won't either, but it's a risk that doesn't exist with men. So they're not holding you accountable for others' actions when they have a concern that doesn't exist with the men they hire.
It's not right, and I don't agree with it, but you can see where they're coming from. An apparently unique phenomenon with this (as opposed to other 'ism's) is a small minority of women considering anything sexual as therefore sexist against women (which I find a really creepy attitude). Guys tend to make sexual jokes to each other - it's probably not appropriate for work, but I have a hard time saying it is deserving of a career-damaging sexual harassment claim. And it's very rare for a man to complain about this to management, whereas it's statistically much much more likely (relative to men) for women to do so (even if most women wouldn't).
So what you saw was a bunch of men nervous about their careers. Maybe they shouldn't have been (both their fear and what caused it shouldn't be happening), but I have a hard time condemning them for it. Perfectly reasonable to not want to work in an environment where that was the prevailing fear, though...
Once you've ordered a meal, you are in debt for the value of the meal. The restaurant owner has to accept any and all legal tender, just as the GP said.
Basically, if you try to buy something in pennies as a "screw you" they can refuse to accept it - and everybody's still squared up. But if you owe somebody money they have to accept what you give them (I believe there are laws specifying the dollar value of various change that must be accepted for debts).
It's not some entity other than the one who's already directing you to the website. Presumably if it were easier to redirect at the DNS level as opposed to MITMing and getting a fake certificate, people would be doing that instead. It also makes any compromise much more visible and reduces the number of people you need to trust absolutely.
Why on earth do you think the US (or anyone else) would launch a preemptive strike? We have missile defense in the area. Japan's mobilized theirs, and have stated that they'll shoot it down if it comes anywhere near them. So this missile thing will either be "oh look, a shitty missile" or "oh look, we blew up your missile". Neither of which are inconsistent with the current policy of treating NK like a 3-year-old having a tantrum - don't respond to his outburst, but don't let him have the toy you told him he couldn't have until he behaved.
3: Inflation is a feature, not a bug. The work you did picking tomatoes last year is less valuable to the species than the work you did picking tomatoes today. The species would be better served if you used that same frugality to horde useful items instead of tokens, which is why the market rewards investment over savings.
Ten thousand times this.
Say everybody uses Bitcoin. I'm a farmer and I need a loan to buy some equipment - thankfully the company takes Bitcoin and there's a bank that's willing to lend Bitcoin. All set, right? The equipment will make me more money than I spend on the equipment plus the interest on the loan, so it makes sense to take out the money. This interest goes towards giving people a return on their investments, which encourages them to put their money in a bank. The bank matches up that money in savings with the money people need in loans, and everybody wins.
My loan is for 100BTC and I will need to give the bank 105BTC in 5 years. Oops. That 105BTC is virtually guaranteed to be worth more - and likely a lot more - in 5 years than it is now, because it's a deflationary currency by design (there is a hard maximum, and it's harder to find more the closer you get). It could very well be much more than all the money I got from using my fancy new machine, depending on how bad the deflation is. Would you take out a loan when there's a real possibility that the loan amount will be worth several times what you borrowed by the time the loan comes due? If that's not concrete enough, imagine borrowing $100 from your friend, then going back 30 years and having to pay back that same $100, worth about $350 today.
Note that this doesn't actually have to happen - it's about risk. And the risk is quite high that you'll end up owing a lot more value than you planned to. In this case, you'd be stupid to take out a loan. And if you had money, why put it in a bank when it'll gain value all on its own if you leave it under your digital mattress? So the first guy probably can't even get a loan in the first place, even if it made sense, which it doesn't.
Multiply all this by a few million. Small, steady inflation is good because it provides an incentive for people to put money in banks, and an assurance that you won't owe much more than you intend to on a loan. Despite all the hatred of banks around here, they are a vital thing in any macro economy because they provide for the ability to finance expensive things now that will make you more money later. This is how economies grow, and between this and the fact that there's an upper cap to begin with, the Bitcoin economy can't grow. Yes I know Bitcoins are divisible, but this is just more deflation since people with whole Bitcoins will suddenly have a lot more money if everybody decides to lower prices because supply has dried up. Or newcomers will be completely cut out of the market, which is already happening.
This is all basic basic introductory macroeconomics at any college in the world, and it blows my mind that so many Bitcoin advocates don't see this as a massive flaw. If you only use Bitcoin like a Paypal, the risk is lower and it makes more sense, but this doesn't make it a currency.
Amtrak owns 730 miles of track, including nearly all of their routes in the Northeast . But most of their routes outside that do run on freight rail tracks.
They invented the phonetic alphabet for a reason, and it's a good thing to know - there's a reason pilots and ham radio operators use it constantly. "Was that an N or an M?" "B or P?", and that's assuming the other person is already wondering if they misheard you. The NATO phonetic alphabet is designed for it to be virtually impossible to mistake one thing for another.
You're probably not really afraid of the metal tube, altitude, speed, or fuel. As you noted, those are "reasonable" (i.e., based on reasons) arguments - but as you also noted they're not really true so there's something more emotional going on. You're probably afraid of the loss of control coupled with the "mystery" behind it all - knowing how aerodynamics works at the abstract level is a poor answer to the feeling in your head that it just doesn't seem like it should work, or be safe.
I recommend going to your local general aviation airport and doing a "intro flight" in a small plane with an instructor. Most flight schools will let you fly a plane (of course with instruction from a pilot also at the controls!) for about half an hour for $70. Even if you have no interest in being a pilot, I can hardly think of a more exhilarating way to spend $70. And it takes a lot of the mystery out of it - flying makes more "sense" when you can feel the aerodynamic forces that respond to your movement of the yoke, just like the brake pedal or the wheel in a car letting you "feel" the car and the road. And since you're with an instructor who has a duplicate set of controls, they won't let you "mess it up" and you can do as much or as little as you (and they) are comfortable with.
I'd say bring a camera to catch some really incredible views, but I only got about 2 shots off in the 90 seconds free I had between performing the takeoff (yes, first time in a small plane, let alone at the controls, and I took it off the ground) and getting the controls back after the climb-out.
If that ATC radio recording is to be believed (and I have no reason not to), the co-pilot got hit in his eyes and asked for medical attention to meet him at the airport because he was suffering vision impairment. Doesn't sound like a "light scattered" thing to me, at least not in all cases.
There's a special kind of assholishness that comes from doing something very boring, except that they might cause a plane to crash and kill a bunch of people, or ruin a guy's career. Just because they thought it'd be "funny". I'd call this guy a psychopath with his disregard for people, except psychopaths usually have at least imagined "reasons" for treating people like toys.
It doesn't float away because it's filled with air. If it were filled with nothing (i.e., a vacuum) it should float away.
It's very reasonable to think about the overall density of something. Think about a boat - a boat floats because it is overall less dense than water it displaces.
What defines solid? There's lots of things that are "solid" but filled with holes; think pumice or a brick. Molecules are mostly empty space, as are atoms themselves. It's not necessarily any sillier to think of aerogel as being solid than it is to think of pumice being solid. If you want to draw the line, it's always going to be arbitrary
If you could explain why it's survived and grown as it did so far, and then further explained why it would fail from there, IMO your arguments would hold a lot more weight. Otherwise, it just sounds like you are trying to say bitcoin's behavior (past and present) is impossible and therefore it should fail any second now, without explaining the incongruity of that statement.
I believe I did - it's novel, and since people are playing around buying things with Bitcoin, it has enough value to be a decent decentralized way to send money electronically. But nobody takes a salary in Bitcoin, you can't pay your taxes in it, you'd be stupid to take out a loan in it (even if you could), and its deflationary nature makes it so prone to crashes (as demonstrated over and over!) that it'd be a terrible idea to store any real value. Thus it's essentially useless unless you're a miner (and very rapidly even for them) or a person using it "transitionally" by putting $50 in to buy some e-trinket or some webhosting or something because it's a cool new thing. When the second group runs out, there won't be enough value to be able to reliably transfer "real" money electronically from one point to another, and the whole thing will come crashing down.
Would you take your salary or wage in Bitcoin? Keep in mind that you have to be able to pay your rent, taxes, utilities, gas, car maintenance, health care, and credit card bills with it. You could transfer it straight to your national currency, but then what's the point? It's just a really volatile way to get a paycheck. And if you therefore can't afford to live off Bitcoin, then what's the point of a currency?
Fair enough, but frankly immediate usage is essentially irrelevant for a currency. It's only useful for more than toys or novelty if it has long term prospects, because most of what actually having an economy is about is whether you have savings (bank deposits, etc) that match investment (loans, etc), and in Bitcoin you have neither. So I guess they're equal, but zero (or at least "trivial fraction of total economy") is not a healthy level for either.
By the way, what's the GDP of the "Bitcoin economy"? At best it must be a small fraction of the total circulation. This is fine for a "currency" that's merely used for transferring "real" money around, but not good for something that people hope will have its own marketplace and people earning bitcoins by working and spending them on things.
Bitcoins are losing ground because they crash in value every few months and the software has at least one (and certainly more) bugs that - rather than cause a program crash - *break* the currency. Read about the "block chain" bug from a few weeks ago - that's not an acceptable thing for a currency to have. And a good currency shouldn't change in real value particularly quickly, since people, employers, businesses selling products all need time to adjust to fluctuations. From 2011 to 2012, inflation seems to have been about 2%, which is pretty slow. Bitcoin has much larger market-wide fluctuations on the order of *weeks*, not years. How would you feel if you were being paid in Bitcoin and one week, you suddenly made half as much, and the gas station didn't change their price quickly enough and you still *had* to buy gas to get to work?
Let alone the structural problems of having a fixed amount of money - Ill get to those later. Since the "early adopters" were able to get a lot of Bitcoins very easily, all it takes is one person deciding to dump their Bitcoins for a significant fraction of the total value of the market to be traded at once. That's not a good thing, and as we have seen (several times already!) the market crashes.
But let me elaborate on the inflation thing. This is literally something that you learn in any school's "Introduction to Macroeconomics" class - it's the most basic of economic theory above "um well there's supply and demand and they balance out". Inflation is what allows the total value of the market to grow. And real markets need to be able to increase in value as the market grows, otherwise the value of the currency deflates - which is great if you already had money, but disastrous if you don't. Furthermore, the loans thing is really important. Again, basic basic macroeconomic theory says that if you want to build a new factory for Y and it will make you 2Y in profit, you should take out a loan to build it. But you'd be stupid to do that in Bitcoins because the currency could very likely deflate severely before the loan is due - and now your Y is worth a whole hell of a lot more than it was originally, maybe even more than the 2Y you planned to make. So nobody invests, ever - though even if they did it would just deflate the market further! You'd be a fool to store your money in a bank if it gains in value sitting under your digital mattress, so taking out a loan isn't even feasible anyway since there's no banks with money to loan.
It just boggles my mind that people think Bitcoin will work. I wasn't a particularly good economics student and this is obvious even to me. The only conclusion I can draw is that the entire "Bitcoin fandom" has no grasp of basic, solid macroeconomic theory.
That's actually not true either. Al Gore didn't invent the idea of internetworking, or any of the protocols, but he was in fact instrumental in making it the "Internet" (big I) that businesses and individuals could connect to and actually use. In more technical terms, his bill (the "Gore bill") worked to transition the NSFNet away from a research system and towards, well, the Internet we have today. If that weren't enough, the bill also sent the funding to NSCA, which they used to create Mosaic.
Among the many technological achievements that resulted from the funding of the Gore Bill, was the development of Mosaic in 1993... Gore's legislation also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers, including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, created the Mosaic Web browser, the commercial Internet's technological springboard. 'If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened,' Andreessen says of Gore's bill, 'at least, not until years later.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn (recipients of this award):
Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President"
the genomics would support a much higher selection for digesting of it –as they do with milk –if a small area invented brewing and this was the core civilizing agent.
Uh, as I understand it, northern Europeans in fact do have a much higher alcohol tolerance than people of Asian and Native American descent. The metabolism of alcohol is highly variable with ethnicity.
To be honest I don't recall ever having a dropped landline call since 9/11 (northeast NJ so it's understandable that the network was properly overloaded)
Say what you want about the Bell monopoly (and its Baby Bells) - they sure knew how to engineer a damn solid network.
Arguably a United States spaceship is within the territorial limits of the United States. This is why the FCC licenses aeronautical and nautical stations regardless of where they are. It's also why US embassies use radio frequencies for their communications that are allocated by the US, not the host country.
Surely they will continue to use good engineering practice in picking frequencies that are either designated for a similar-enough purpose, or can be made available for this use. We managed to talk to the astronauts in the Apollo program after all.
AM doesn't suffer from the capture effect. The "range" of a low-power "highway advisory" type station is limited because in order to clearly hear the low-power station, you need a strong enough signal that the main user of that frequency is completely overpowered. This limits the range, and "transition" is linear (the further you get, the more you hear the main user). By comparison, if one FM signal is stronger than another by even a bit, that's *all* you hear. Furthermore if there are periodic changes in which signal is the strongest in a fringe area, it's extremely disruptive because there's an abrupt transition back and forth - not a gentle fading. So the fact that the AM band is full of crap that doesn't seem to affect things doesn't prove very much.
Yeah, but this is for the FCC, not the FAA, so the specific means of propulsion isn't obviously relevant. The "experimental aircraft license" note nor the commercial/noncommercial distinction certainly isn't relevant, and I can't find any explicit language one way or another that says whether a space flight could or couldn't use air-band frequencies legally. There may in fact be some, but it doesn't seem like that's what you were talking about.
Rather than guesstimating a timeframe for when these "suborbital launch providers" might in theory potentially begin "fly[ing] several times per day", they're allowing for current needs without over-provisioning or over-promising. They're already being forward looking with these rules, so presumably when needs change, or are about to change, they'll adjust them to meet the upcoming requirements.
Whatever the intent of the founders was, the Supreme Court has been granting itself unenumerated powers since 1803 with as much authority as the States themselves had in declaring independence from Britain, or in creating a new government in the first place. It's intellectually dishonest (or at least very shortsighted) to talk about the rights of a group to unilaterally decide things and convince people to go along with it, and disallow another from doing it. By a similar argument to yours, states should have decided at that point to dissolve the union - anything else counts as acquiescence. But nobody objected, and so the Court gained a new power.
Similarly, when a bunch of states said "well, we'll secede" and they were stopped from doing so, they lost the right to secede by being unable to actually do so. Whatever you think about the particular result, it's impossible to argue that a state can secede from the union. At some point, you exceed the boundaries of what words on paper can address. What allows anybody to annex territory, or invade and conquer? The only thing that's stopped countries from doing that recently is the threat of external retaliation; prior to that, countries have been conquering each other since they were tribes.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, many women do treat all men as (at least potential) rapists. As you note, it's not valid, and I'm certainly not trying to suggest that you have anything to do with it, but such as it is.
As unfortunate as it is that they asked you those questions, and that they felt like they should ask, I can see why they did. A well known bug-as-feature of the human brain is the extremely powerful and innate ability to categorize things. This is why we don't have to rediscover an apple every time we see one - but it also leads to stereotypes when this is applied to people. And it requires active work in everybody to realize this particular flaw of human thought and avoid or mitigate it, or avoid making these associations in the first place.
I am going somewhere with this. The thing is, almost all men in the workplace - and especially tech men - have or have heard a horror story about a man making a benign joke or a comment that a woman hears and takes offense to. Or a man who asks a woman out that he finds attractive and faces sexual harassment discipline, not because he was being harassing and asking multiple times, or creating a toxic workplace environment, but simply for asking (and men are expected to be the ones to ask).
Witness the recent Adria Richards case. She heard two guys talking to each other (not in reference to her) making a 12-year-old style "dongle" joke, proceeded to misinterpret something else they said as sexual when it wasn't, and decided that the best course of action was to publicly denounce them with a photograph on Twitter and write a blog post, instead of, you know, asking them to cut it out.
You're absolutely, unequivocally, 100% right that she does not say anything about all or most women, and you are obviously not "responsible" or "accountable" for what she and others like her have done. The problem is, virtually never has a man done these things - in fact if he does, he is laughed away before it gets anywhere (which is another problem). And most women won't either, but it's a risk that doesn't exist with men. So they're not holding you accountable for others' actions when they have a concern that doesn't exist with the men they hire.
It's not right, and I don't agree with it, but you can see where they're coming from. An apparently unique phenomenon with this (as opposed to other 'ism's) is a small minority of women considering anything sexual as therefore sexist against women (which I find a really creepy attitude). Guys tend to make sexual jokes to each other - it's probably not appropriate for work, but I have a hard time saying it is deserving of a career-damaging sexual harassment claim. And it's very rare for a man to complain about this to management, whereas it's statistically much much more likely (relative to men) for women to do so (even if most women wouldn't).
So what you saw was a bunch of men nervous about their careers. Maybe they shouldn't have been (both their fear and what caused it shouldn't be happening), but I have a hard time condemning them for it. Perfectly reasonable to not want to work in an environment where that was the prevailing fear, though...
Once you've ordered a meal, you are in debt for the value of the meal. The restaurant owner has to accept any and all legal tender, just as the GP said.
Basically, if you try to buy something in pennies as a "screw you" they can refuse to accept it - and everybody's still squared up. But if you owe somebody money they have to accept what you give them (I believe there are laws specifying the dollar value of various change that must be accepted for debts).
For anyone unaware, they were quite aware of the Ghostbusters reference. The XML namespace is:
http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul
which of course links to:
There is no data.
There is only XUL!
It's not some entity other than the one who's already directing you to the website. Presumably if it were easier to redirect at the DNS level as opposed to MITMing and getting a fake certificate, people would be doing that instead. It also makes any compromise much more visible and reduces the number of people you need to trust absolutely.
Why on earth do you think the US (or anyone else) would launch a preemptive strike? We have missile defense in the area. Japan's mobilized theirs, and have stated that they'll shoot it down if it comes anywhere near them. So this missile thing will either be "oh look, a shitty missile" or "oh look, we blew up your missile". Neither of which are inconsistent with the current policy of treating NK like a 3-year-old having a tantrum - don't respond to his outburst, but don't let him have the toy you told him he couldn't have until he behaved.
3: Inflation is a feature, not a bug. The work you did picking tomatoes last year is less valuable to the species than the work you did picking tomatoes today. The species would be better served if you used that same frugality to horde useful items instead of tokens, which is why the market rewards investment over savings.
Ten thousand times this.
Say everybody uses Bitcoin. I'm a farmer and I need a loan to buy some equipment - thankfully the company takes Bitcoin and there's a bank that's willing to lend Bitcoin. All set, right? The equipment will make me more money than I spend on the equipment plus the interest on the loan, so it makes sense to take out the money. This interest goes towards giving people a return on their investments, which encourages them to put their money in a bank. The bank matches up that money in savings with the money people need in loans, and everybody wins.
My loan is for 100BTC and I will need to give the bank 105BTC in 5 years. Oops. That 105BTC is virtually guaranteed to be worth more - and likely a lot more - in 5 years than it is now, because it's a deflationary currency by design (there is a hard maximum, and it's harder to find more the closer you get). It could very well be much more than all the money I got from using my fancy new machine, depending on how bad the deflation is. Would you take out a loan when there's a real possibility that the loan amount will be worth several times what you borrowed by the time the loan comes due? If that's not concrete enough, imagine borrowing $100 from your friend, then going back 30 years and having to pay back that same $100, worth about $350 today.
Note that this doesn't actually have to happen - it's about risk. And the risk is quite high that you'll end up owing a lot more value than you planned to. In this case, you'd be stupid to take out a loan. And if you had money, why put it in a bank when it'll gain value all on its own if you leave it under your digital mattress? So the first guy probably can't even get a loan in the first place, even if it made sense, which it doesn't.
Multiply all this by a few million. Small, steady inflation is good because it provides an incentive for people to put money in banks, and an assurance that you won't owe much more than you intend to on a loan. Despite all the hatred of banks around here, they are a vital thing in any macro economy because they provide for the ability to finance expensive things now that will make you more money later. This is how economies grow, and between this and the fact that there's an upper cap to begin with, the Bitcoin economy can't grow. Yes I know Bitcoins are divisible, but this is just more deflation since people with whole Bitcoins will suddenly have a lot more money if everybody decides to lower prices because supply has dried up. Or newcomers will be completely cut out of the market, which is already happening.
This is all basic basic introductory macroeconomics at any college in the world, and it blows my mind that so many Bitcoin advocates don't see this as a massive flaw. If you only use Bitcoin like a Paypal, the risk is lower and it makes more sense, but this doesn't make it a currency.
Amtrak owns 730 miles of track, including nearly all of their routes in the Northeast . But most of their routes outside that do run on freight rail tracks.
They invented the phonetic alphabet for a reason, and it's a good thing to know - there's a reason pilots and ham radio operators use it constantly. "Was that an N or an M?" "B or P?", and that's assuming the other person is already wondering if they misheard you. The NATO phonetic alphabet is designed for it to be virtually impossible to mistake one thing for another.
You're probably not really afraid of the metal tube, altitude, speed, or fuel. As you noted, those are "reasonable" (i.e., based on reasons) arguments - but as you also noted they're not really true so there's something more emotional going on. You're probably afraid of the loss of control coupled with the "mystery" behind it all - knowing how aerodynamics works at the abstract level is a poor answer to the feeling in your head that it just doesn't seem like it should work, or be safe.
I recommend going to your local general aviation airport and doing a "intro flight" in a small plane with an instructor. Most flight schools will let you fly a plane (of course with instruction from a pilot also at the controls!) for about half an hour for $70. Even if you have no interest in being a pilot, I can hardly think of a more exhilarating way to spend $70. And it takes a lot of the mystery out of it - flying makes more "sense" when you can feel the aerodynamic forces that respond to your movement of the yoke, just like the brake pedal or the wheel in a car letting you "feel" the car and the road. And since you're with an instructor who has a duplicate set of controls, they won't let you "mess it up" and you can do as much or as little as you (and they) are comfortable with.
I'd say bring a camera to catch some really incredible views, but I only got about 2 shots off in the 90 seconds free I had between performing the takeoff (yes, first time in a small plane, let alone at the controls, and I took it off the ground) and getting the controls back after the climb-out.
A little late for anybody other than you to see this reply, but check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFC0n-_y0zU
If that ATC radio recording is to be believed (and I have no reason not to), the co-pilot got hit in his eyes and asked for medical attention to meet him at the airport because he was suffering vision impairment. Doesn't sound like a "light scattered" thing to me, at least not in all cases.
There's a special kind of assholishness that comes from doing something very boring, except that they might cause a plane to crash and kill a bunch of people, or ruin a guy's career. Just because they thought it'd be "funny". I'd call this guy a psychopath with his disregard for people, except psychopaths usually have at least imagined "reasons" for treating people like toys.
Americans should be outraged by a lot of things. And everybody thinks it's a different list of things.
It doesn't float away because it's filled with air. If it were filled with nothing (i.e., a vacuum) it should float away.
It's very reasonable to think about the overall density of something. Think about a boat - a boat floats because it is overall less dense than water it displaces.
What defines solid? There's lots of things that are "solid" but filled with holes; think pumice or a brick. Molecules are mostly empty space, as are atoms themselves. It's not necessarily any sillier to think of aerogel as being solid than it is to think of pumice being solid. If you want to draw the line, it's always going to be arbitrary
If you could explain why it's survived and grown as it did so far, and then further explained why it would fail from there, IMO your arguments would hold a lot more weight. Otherwise, it just sounds like you are trying to say bitcoin's behavior (past and present) is impossible and therefore it should fail any second now, without explaining the incongruity of that statement.
I believe I did - it's novel, and since people are playing around buying things with Bitcoin, it has enough value to be a decent decentralized way to send money electronically. But nobody takes a salary in Bitcoin, you can't pay your taxes in it, you'd be stupid to take out a loan in it (even if you could), and its deflationary nature makes it so prone to crashes (as demonstrated over and over!) that it'd be a terrible idea to store any real value. Thus it's essentially useless unless you're a miner (and very rapidly even for them) or a person using it "transitionally" by putting $50 in to buy some e-trinket or some webhosting or something because it's a cool new thing. When the second group runs out, there won't be enough value to be able to reliably transfer "real" money electronically from one point to another, and the whole thing will come crashing down.
Would you take your salary or wage in Bitcoin? Keep in mind that you have to be able to pay your rent, taxes, utilities, gas, car maintenance, health care, and credit card bills with it. You could transfer it straight to your national currency, but then what's the point? It's just a really volatile way to get a paycheck. And if you therefore can't afford to live off Bitcoin, then what's the point of a currency?
Fair enough, but frankly immediate usage is essentially irrelevant for a currency. It's only useful for more than toys or novelty if it has long term prospects, because most of what actually having an economy is about is whether you have savings (bank deposits, etc) that match investment (loans, etc), and in Bitcoin you have neither. So I guess they're equal, but zero (or at least "trivial fraction of total economy") is not a healthy level for either.
By the way, what's the GDP of the "Bitcoin economy"? At best it must be a small fraction of the total circulation. This is fine for a "currency" that's merely used for transferring "real" money around, but not good for something that people hope will have its own marketplace and people earning bitcoins by working and spending them on things.
Bitcoins are losing ground because they crash in value every few months and the software has at least one (and certainly more) bugs that - rather than cause a program crash - *break* the currency. Read about the "block chain" bug from a few weeks ago - that's not an acceptable thing for a currency to have. And a good currency shouldn't change in real value particularly quickly, since people, employers, businesses selling products all need time to adjust to fluctuations. From 2011 to 2012, inflation seems to have been about 2%, which is pretty slow. Bitcoin has much larger market-wide fluctuations on the order of *weeks*, not years. How would you feel if you were being paid in Bitcoin and one week, you suddenly made half as much, and the gas station didn't change their price quickly enough and you still *had* to buy gas to get to work?
Let alone the structural problems of having a fixed amount of money - Ill get to those later. Since the "early adopters" were able to get a lot of Bitcoins very easily, all it takes is one person deciding to dump their Bitcoins for a significant fraction of the total value of the market to be traded at once. That's not a good thing, and as we have seen (several times already!) the market crashes.
But let me elaborate on the inflation thing. This is literally something that you learn in any school's "Introduction to Macroeconomics" class - it's the most basic of economic theory above "um well there's supply and demand and they balance out". Inflation is what allows the total value of the market to grow. And real markets need to be able to increase in value as the market grows, otherwise the value of the currency deflates - which is great if you already had money, but disastrous if you don't. Furthermore, the loans thing is really important. Again, basic basic macroeconomic theory says that if you want to build a new factory for Y and it will make you 2Y in profit, you should take out a loan to build it. But you'd be stupid to do that in Bitcoins because the currency could very likely deflate severely before the loan is due - and now your Y is worth a whole hell of a lot more than it was originally, maybe even more than the 2Y you planned to make. So nobody invests, ever - though even if they did it would just deflate the market further! You'd be a fool to store your money in a bank if it gains in value sitting under your digital mattress, so taking out a loan isn't even feasible anyway since there's no banks with money to loan.
It just boggles my mind that people think Bitcoin will work. I wasn't a particularly good economics student and this is obvious even to me. The only conclusion I can draw is that the entire "Bitcoin fandom" has no grasp of basic, solid macroeconomic theory.
That's actually not true either. Al Gore didn't invent the idea of internetworking, or any of the protocols, but he was in fact instrumental in making it the "Internet" (big I) that businesses and individuals could connect to and actually use. In more technical terms, his bill (the "Gore bill") worked to transition the NSFNet away from a research system and towards, well, the Internet we have today. If that weren't enough, the bill also sent the funding to NSCA, which they used to create Mosaic.
Among the many technological achievements that resulted from the funding of the Gore Bill, was the development of Mosaic in 1993... Gore's legislation also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers, including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, created the Mosaic Web browser, the commercial Internet's technological springboard. 'If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened,' Andreessen says of Gore's bill, 'at least, not until years later.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn (recipients of this award):
Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President"
Assuming you're a 501(c)(3) (and if not, why not?) you can use Google Apps for Nonprofits for free.
the genomics would support a much higher selection for digesting of it –as they do with milk –if a small area invented brewing and this was the core civilizing agent.
Uh, as I understand it, northern Europeans in fact do have a much higher alcohol tolerance than people of Asian and Native American descent. The metabolism of alcohol is highly variable with ethnicity.
To be honest I don't recall ever having a dropped landline call since 9/11 (northeast NJ so it's understandable that the network was properly overloaded)
Say what you want about the Bell monopoly (and its Baby Bells) - they sure knew how to engineer a damn solid network.
Arguably a United States spaceship is within the territorial limits of the United States. This is why the FCC licenses aeronautical and nautical stations regardless of where they are. It's also why US embassies use radio frequencies for their communications that are allocated by the US, not the host country.
Surely they will continue to use good engineering practice in picking frequencies that are either designated for a similar-enough purpose, or can be made available for this use. We managed to talk to the astronauts in the Apollo program after all.
AM doesn't suffer from the capture effect. The "range" of a low-power "highway advisory" type station is limited because in order to clearly hear the low-power station, you need a strong enough signal that the main user of that frequency is completely overpowered. This limits the range, and "transition" is linear (the further you get, the more you hear the main user). By comparison, if one FM signal is stronger than another by even a bit, that's *all* you hear. Furthermore if there are periodic changes in which signal is the strongest in a fringe area, it's extremely disruptive because there's an abrupt transition back and forth - not a gentle fading. So the fact that the AM band is full of crap that doesn't seem to affect things doesn't prove very much.
Furthermore, it appears that the FCC has always supported LPFM just as GP claims. The Congress made it more difficult for stations to be licensed in 2000 (of that legislation: "Basically, this act shifts policy making from the FCC to Congress, which was considered an insult against the FCC."), but since then there's been a shift back to making it easier. You should update your arguments. Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski said, "Low power FM stations are small, but they make a giant contribution to local community programming. This important law eliminates the unnecessary restrictions that kept these local stations off the air in cities and towns across the country."
Yeah, but this is for the FCC, not the FAA, so the specific means of propulsion isn't obviously relevant. The "experimental aircraft license" note nor the commercial/noncommercial distinction certainly isn't relevant, and I can't find any explicit language one way or another that says whether a space flight could or couldn't use air-band frequencies legally. There may in fact be some, but it doesn't seem like that's what you were talking about.
Rather than guesstimating a timeframe for when these "suborbital launch providers" might in theory potentially begin "fly[ing] several times per day", they're allowing for current needs without over-provisioning or over-promising. They're already being forward looking with these rules, so presumably when needs change, or are about to change, they'll adjust them to meet the upcoming requirements.
Troll article is troll
Whatever the intent of the founders was, the Supreme Court has been granting itself unenumerated powers since 1803 with as much authority as the States themselves had in declaring independence from Britain, or in creating a new government in the first place. It's intellectually dishonest (or at least very shortsighted) to talk about the rights of a group to unilaterally decide things and convince people to go along with it, and disallow another from doing it. By a similar argument to yours, states should have decided at that point to dissolve the union - anything else counts as acquiescence. But nobody objected, and so the Court gained a new power.
Similarly, when a bunch of states said "well, we'll secede" and they were stopped from doing so, they lost the right to secede by being unable to actually do so. Whatever you think about the particular result, it's impossible to argue that a state can secede from the union. At some point, you exceed the boundaries of what words on paper can address. What allows anybody to annex territory, or invade and conquer? The only thing that's stopped countries from doing that recently is the threat of external retaliation; prior to that, countries have been conquering each other since they were tribes.