Yes, I assume you've read about the recent creation of NaCl3, NaCl7, Na3Cl2, Na2Cl, and Na3Cl at high pressures, compounds not possible in standard chemistry.
According to this document linked to from your page world production of gold has increased by a factor of almost 7 over the last century, which is a significant increase, especially since as you say, price has not changed really at all (ignoring the large increase in the last five years, the price/ton in 1900 was the same as in 2005). This seems to indicate price is set by the demand side; also it seems to show consumption has increased by a similar factor, so more gold mined means more gold used.
The last few years however show a huge increase in price without any increase in production or usage, which does indicate to me that speculation was driving the price - the recent crash supports this.
It surprised me to be honest - here is the page I saw, and it's 1967, not 1969.This article backs up the data and discusses the gold supply in general - it does seem as though most people assume that gold mining is much less prevalent than it actually is.
Half of all of the gold in the world was mined after 1969. I wouldn't be surprised if it was similar for silver. And while that obviously hasn't affected the price massively, the supply of gold is increasing rapidly - which I would say indicates the price has nothing to do with supply or utility.
Actually according to Wikipedia the average purity of crystal is 62%, so it would be a bit short of the world's population. It would cover the adult population though:)
Yes, it's true both by absolute value and percentage, there's any number of sources available but this BBC article has a good summary of various figures.
Chart one on the police report you linked to shows there were fewer crimes where firearms were used in 2011 than in 1997, the year the handgun ban went into effect. That's despite the fact that
The method used for counting the number of firearms offences in England and Wales was changed on 1 April 1998 and, as a result, the reported number of offences has been seen to increase across some categories of offence.
If you look at the second chart then you can even see that the "big increase" of firearm use in 2003 was nothing to do with handguns anyway, it was mostly from air guns.
We're not, we're British Citizens as of 1983, and were formally Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies since 1948. The term British Subject applies to a very small minority of people who weren't from places that were members of the Commonwealth before 1948. See this article.
Hardware acceleration of audio is pointless today given how little system resources it takes to mix multi-channel audio in realtime... but apart from that, both WDDM and UAA introduced in Vista moved large parts of the graphics and sound drivers out of the kernel, which is a huge stability gain.
Gah, Larry Wall and his "natural language" crap, he's a terrible language designer and an even worse linguist. And I'm sure you've seen the Perl 6 periodic table of operators, which I'm fairly sure the Perl core think is a good thing, not an utterly obvious example of why Perl 6 is still not near release.
Powershell 3 seems to have a bunch of syntax improvements that make it better though, had a look earlier, you can now write "(dir).fileName" rather than "dir | % { $_.fileName }" and everything works the same now with both a single output or a list of outputs, along with a bunch of other stuff that should make it less of a symbol-fest. However, in the mean time I've finally remembered the syntax for FOR in cmd.exe, and have written most of what I need as a file-processing library in Python. I'm not a Windows admin, that'll do for me.
PS. lol, just remember that one of the new syntax features is that instead of writing $_ you can now use $PSItem - apparently lots of people had complained about strange, meaningless symbols being confusing. Fancy that!
I like everything about Powershell except the syntax... which was inspired by Perl according to one of the designers. When I read this it explained a lot, because I hate Perl's syntax as well.
Glad you found the info, I meant to reply sooner but got distracted by shiny things.
There's been a huge flux in all areas of web development the last few years, who knows what will come up in the new few. At the moment a good portion of the problems I have is there's too much code out there for everything, all in different states of development and with slightly different features and methodology - it's not always easy to find the right tools. Still, I'm sure something like the Apache Commons, Spring, etc. will eventually arise as a de-facto standard.
No, because JS scripts get cached locally and loaded from there if already present - many, many sites use Google's JS library CDN as the source for libraries, as then the user's browser only ever downloads each file once, and then every site that also links to the same library loads it from the local cache.
Plus there's things like local storage now, which means web sites can store data and assets locally (up to a limit), and use that as a cache. Writing a remote version check and update handler is pretty trivial for an application.
The first two are about 1% of the internet, and how do screen-readers distinguish between DOM elements in the original HTML and DOM elements created by Javascript?
Why would the government know better than a particular person what is in that particular person's best interest for them to do?
Because they have more information about the global picture, a longer-term view, lack that person's bias and can consult expert opinion. How many of these are actually followed would be the difference between good and bad government IMO. And if you've read about behavioural economics, then you know that people don't act in their own self-interest a lot of the time due to how our brains work and evaluate things like sunk costs, risk vs. reward or relative value.
Also, asking about a particular person's best-interest is a straw man, government is about society as a whole, and because society is made of up of lots of people with all kinds of complex interconnections, often what is best for one particular person isn't what's best for everyone as a whole. Being a criminal might be best for one person, but negative for lots of other people - and you can't just have criminals, or they have nothing to steal.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but that unofficial page really does have almost everything on it :)
Yes, I assume you've read about the recent creation of NaCl3, NaCl7, Na3Cl2, Na2Cl, and Na3Cl at high pressures, compounds not possible in standard chemistry.
‘Impossible’ Sodium Chlorides Challenge Foundation of Chemistry
According to this document linked to from your page world production of gold has increased by a factor of almost 7 over the last century, which is a significant increase, especially since as you say, price has not changed really at all (ignoring the large increase in the last five years, the price/ton in 1900 was the same as in 2005). This seems to indicate price is set by the demand side; also it seems to show consumption has increased by a similar factor, so more gold mined means more gold used.
The last few years however show a huge increase in price without any increase in production or usage, which does indicate to me that speculation was driving the price - the recent crash supports this.
It surprised me to be honest - here is the page I saw, and it's 1967, not 1969.This article backs up the data and discusses the gold supply in general - it does seem as though most people assume that gold mining is much less prevalent than it actually is.
Half of all of the gold in the world was mined after 1969. I wouldn't be surprised if it was similar for silver. And while that obviously hasn't affected the price massively, the supply of gold is increasing rapidly - which I would say indicates the price has nothing to do with supply or utility.
Actually according to Wikipedia the average purity of crystal is 62%, so it would be a bit short of the world's population. It would cover the adult population though :)
Not far off! According to this page the density is 1.2 g/cm3. So 200 gallons is approximately 1000kg, which is about 10 billion 100ug doses.
Yes, it's true both by absolute value and percentage, there's any number of sources available but this BBC article has a good summary of various figures.
Chart one on the police report you linked to shows there were fewer crimes where firearms were used in 2011 than in 1997, the year the handgun ban went into effect. That's despite the fact that
If you look at the second chart then you can even see that the "big increase" of firearm use in 2003 was nothing to do with handguns anyway, it was mostly from air guns.
With the other half being "the government has been corrupted by companies: we need more companies!"
We're not, we're British Citizens as of 1983, and were formally Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies since 1948. The term British Subject applies to a very small minority of people who weren't from places that were members of the Commonwealth before 1948. See this article.
You can pay cash and cheques in via ATMs in every bank branch I've been to in the UK since as far back as I can remember, no need for counter service.
Hardware acceleration of audio is pointless today given how little system resources it takes to mix multi-channel audio in realtime... but apart from that, both WDDM and UAA introduced in Vista moved large parts of the graphics and sound drivers out of the kernel, which is a huge stability gain.
Not if you're an adult with ADHD.
I hear the song "Hot Shot City" is particularly good.
Which is absolutely horrible for any album with tracks by multiple artists.
Your understanding of human nature is at least fifty years behind current research, but does serve to justify your beliefs.
Gah, Larry Wall and his "natural language" crap, he's a terrible language designer and an even worse linguist. And I'm sure you've seen the Perl 6 periodic table of operators, which I'm fairly sure the Perl core think is a good thing, not an utterly obvious example of why Perl 6 is still not near release.
Powershell 3 seems to have a bunch of syntax improvements that make it better though, had a look earlier, you can now write "(dir).fileName" rather than "dir | % { $_.fileName }" and everything works the same now with both a single output or a list of outputs, along with a bunch of other stuff that should make it less of a symbol-fest. However, in the mean time I've finally remembered the syntax for FOR in cmd.exe, and have written most of what I need as a file-processing library in Python. I'm not a Windows admin, that'll do for me.
PS. lol, just remember that one of the new syntax features is that instead of writing $_ you can now use $PSItem - apparently lots of people had complained about strange, meaningless symbols being confusing. Fancy that!
I like everything about Powershell except the syntax... which was inspired by Perl according to one of the designers. When I read this it explained a lot, because I hate Perl's syntax as well.
Glad you found the info, I meant to reply sooner but got distracted by shiny things.
There's been a huge flux in all areas of web development the last few years, who knows what will come up in the new few. At the moment a good portion of the problems I have is there's too much code out there for everything, all in different states of development and with slightly different features and methodology - it's not always easy to find the right tools. Still, I'm sure something like the Apache Commons, Spring, etc. will eventually arise as a de-facto standard.
No, because JS scripts get cached locally and loaded from there if already present - many, many sites use Google's JS library CDN as the source for libraries, as then the user's browser only ever downloads each file once, and then every site that also links to the same library loads it from the local cache.
Plus there's things like local storage now, which means web sites can store data and assets locally (up to a limit), and use that as a cache. Writing a remote version check and update handler is pretty trivial for an application.
The first two are about 1% of the internet, and how do screen-readers distinguish between DOM elements in the original HTML and DOM elements created by Javascript?
Wow, that guy is a huge dick.
Why would the government know better than a particular person what is in that particular person's best interest for them to do?
Because they have more information about the global picture, a longer-term view, lack that person's bias and can consult expert opinion. How many of these are actually followed would be the difference between good and bad government IMO. And if you've read about behavioural economics, then you know that people don't act in their own self-interest a lot of the time due to how our brains work and evaluate things like sunk costs, risk vs. reward or relative value.
Also, asking about a particular person's best-interest is a straw man, government is about society as a whole, and because society is made of up of lots of people with all kinds of complex interconnections, often what is best for one particular person isn't what's best for everyone as a whole. Being a criminal might be best for one person, but negative for lots of other people - and you can't just have criminals, or they have nothing to steal.
The Daily Mail website has a different editorial staff and content entirely from the paper.