That value was proof in a low-information-velocity economy. Prior to the discovery of electromagnetism and its technology, there was no easy way to guarantee monetary payment over distances. I.e. payee didn't know for sure that payor was good for the money. In some limited areas where such thing could be checked and punishment made if found to be false (e.g. in a city or small political entity with reliable enforcement), you might be able to get away with more but in general, gold was the most effective and reliable transfer of that information.
That central advantage outweighed the other problems. And before the 19th century, economic growth rates were low all over the planet.
Today, electronic funds transfers can give notice of insufficient funds either immediately or with short notice, so the prime technological argument for gold is no longer applicable, and the monetary disadvantages are central.
The unsuitability of bitcoin as a currency for general economic use is the primary reason for its spontaneous popularity. Almost everybody who wants some is speculating on the possibility of instability in the 'shortage' direction. There is no bond market in bitcoin.
The other primary use case for bitcoin is of course enabling criminality---a means of clandestine monetary exchange outside the standard payment systems and their regulation.
Why is Russia willing to pick a fight with the US again, and keep building new nuclear weapons and threatining people with them?
The US is maintaining only a 1960's ICBM and a 1970's SLBM, but Russia keeps building and designing new ones. Why? Why do they get a free pass to act like they are lead by a KGB thug?
Actually most of the fallout comes from the fission products themselves. Modern nukes like a 300kT warhead from a MIRV are 2/3rds fission, mostly in the secondary. So the amount of radionuclides is almost proportional to yield and about the same between airburst and groundburst and it is a large.
It would be more widely dispersed in the air however, and perhaps that's the difference.
Because substantial amounts of tritium are essential for "boosted" fission nuclear weapons. Tritium (and deuterium, which is cheap and easy to procure) adds fusion to the core of a fission warhead. It's not significant in energy production directly (unlike a true H-bomb) but it substantially increases the efficiency and potency of the fission reaction by adding a boost of neutrons at the moment of maximum compression.
It is considered essential to producing warheads which are small enough for militarily capable missiles.
| A fundamental difference between regular business people, and computery people. They don't want to rework everything, and we'll rework everything because of because.
They don't want to rework everything (in the technology), because their career success depends on advancing the business. In the areas that they work on and are part of their career evaluation, there is plenty of churn in initiatives, reorganizations, and management styles and 'paradigms'.
The technologists have the same problem doing excessive reworking and rewriting their frameworks and 'paradigms' and deployment platforms etc for their own career desires, and have the same opinion of useless management fad changes as the business has with technology fad changes.
But strangers are murdered, without robbery, infrequently. Strangers, not in criminal street or drug gangs and not being arrested by police, are murdered much less frequently than that. No witnesses, no leads, no explanations? A pro?
It doesn't sound like a robbery. And it doesn't sound like something the Clintons would do.
It does sound like something Putin's men would do. Putin is clearly running the old KGB playbooks and interfering in US elections they way they used to interfere in Europe, but in the modern way.
Pressure Rich for dirt, and then ice him when he starts getting nervous and talks to FBI.
> Vector-based coordinate plotting would simplify the client, turning it into a dumb and simple coordinate plotter of basic vectors and GUI widgets that fill the exact containing rectangle that you ask of it.
Well, this time the State Department Inspector General, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation did the investigation, not Republicans, and they did find a few damn things.
| Higgs was ridiculed for good 50 years.This is no different.
It's completely different. The scalar "Higgs/6 other authors" field was never ridiculed.
Higgs field was an essential part of an extraordinarily empirically successful theory and was generally accepted as 'probably real' by the 1970's, but was difficult to find experimentally.
> And the mathematics behind these things is very primitive and simple, there is no elegance.
> But string theory is different. Although it has not been a success phenomenologically, it has led to many beautiful results in mathematics and field theory,
That is judging physics approaches by how fun are the mathematics they induce. Which is exactly the attitude which is being criticized.
As far as 'primitive and simple'----a primitive and simple phenomenological theory which gets the core behavior right and predicts O(0) and O(1) and maybe even O(2) effects is a fantastic and insightful triumph in most areas of physics!
If string theory is clever mathematics, let mathemeticians do it, and judge it their own way. In practice, as there is a roughly zero-sum competition for theoretical physics funding, I submit that string theory approaches have taken up far too much attention compared to so many other areas of potential study, most of which have not yet demonstrated themselves to be, over 40 years of intense study, fiercely repellent to experimental implication.
> These other "quantum gravity" approaches that Smolin champions are completely disconnected from any kind of real physics
> Because I'd use that massive wealth to provide people with bread and circuses and invest the rest to developing promising new technologies,
And you'd be outcompeted & defeated by the other trillionaires from SPECTRE who don't bother wasting their resources at disposal on that sort of wussy stuff but on dominating people like you.
| Someone left a bug in the contract, and because this is a programmed contract, not a written one, no one could enforce the "spirit" of the contract over the exact (erroneous) content of the contract.
A perfect instantiation of a naive (is there any other kind?) libertarian's dream and everybody else's nightmare.
| The "Federal" Reserve is a *private* bank whose purpose is entirely self-serving.
It's not a private bank. Its creation and operations are detailed in U.S. Federal Code, its top management is chosen and confirmed by elected government officials, it regulates private banks with force of law, and its profits are turned over to the U.S. Treasury. It does not have the same motives and behavior as a private bank. Intentionally, the Fed is not a direct part of the political cabinet departments and is more of an independent agency, similar to NASA, CIA and EPA, and not similar to Treasury, whose chief serves at the discretion of the President and is a member of the cabinet.
The Fed does, as part of its very nature, interact heavily with private banks.
The US or Fed do not pay interest on Federal Reserve notes. The U.S. does pay interest on Treasury bills, notes and bonds.
The FDIC is an agency which is created by Congress, the same way as the Federal Reserve. The FDIC's protection of depositors is guaranteed by law, but the Federal Reserve's bailout of institutions is discretionary.
It's literally part of the old KGB playbook. Because POTUS Trump would cause friction between US and European NATO allies. Hurting US/Europe alliances is considered a benefit to Russia.
| The President has a lot more resources to pay off a blackmail than a former SoS.
Actually, not true in this case.
The President has influence and authority, but authority which is mediated through legal processes, paper trail, and agencies with their own independent power. Maybe Obama could convince somehow the CIA to pay off some blackmail from their stash of unmarked bills used to pay overseas informants, but then, CIA would have tremendous blackmail potential over Obama.
The Clintons have hundreds of millions of dollars as their personal, owned, wealth. Call up a banker somewhere, and it's done.
Well, there are liquid hydrocarbon fueled racing cars which are far less than 90% efficient which have significantly more than 2,000 HP. They dissipate energy into hot exhaust and a radiator.
The truck proposed by the company has a radiator and liquid coolant, and the power is being outputted over 6 wheels, so between 3 to 6 electric motors.
Given that conventional over the road diesel trucks have about 500 HP, it seems quite unlikely that 2,000 HP would be used for any more than a small fraction of the time. And surely the competent engine management control would detect overheating in motors/coolant/battery pack/electronics and limit output if necessary.
Plants grow and remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but then they die, and when they decay the CO2 goes back in.
Back in geological time when the coal was being made from plants, bacteria and fungi had not yet evolved the ability to break down certain tough parts of the plants, and therefore dead plants built up and up and up and over geological time were compressed and ended up underground. Today, these are known as coal mines.
Since then, these microbes do have the ability to break down and decay the dead plants fully, the CO2 will never ever leave the atmosphere in the long run.
To reduce CO2 climatically, it has to go somewhere which is entirely out of the biosphere and stay there. For instance, coal is excellent carbon sequestration.
In 100 years, the uncontrolled mining and burning of coal will be regarded like civilization today sees slavery: a revoltingly immoral abomination, and yet once was legal, accepted and a major commercial activity. Except that the ill consequences of past evil people would continue to hurt them indefinitely.
It looks like nonsense because it treats photons as if they were Newtonian particles and with ignorance of Maxwell's equations and relativity.
Start with section 2. It treats photons as particles with some momentum m*v. I mean, what? That's just wrong. Photons are relativistic p = E/c and quantum mechanical, E = 2\pi hbar f.
I mean take a look at this:
"Normally, of course, photons are not supposed to have inertial mass in this way, but here this is assumed. It is not clear what the size of this mass is, but it is clear for example that light inside a mirrored box produces a kind of inertial mass for the box. "
So in orthodox physics, photons are not supposed to have inertial mass, but also in orthodox physics light makes inertial mass and it's clear that it's so.
The second statement, about light inside a mirrored box, is so because of relativity and the assertion of the equivalence principle. Electromagnetic fields are part of the stress energy tensor (following Maxwell) which feeds into the source term of general relativity. So yes, there is some sort of inertial contribution, but in fact it can be computed pretty exactly, and it's extraordinarily tiny, and really mostly related to the energy density of the EM field.
So relativity sometimes, but not other times? WTF?
And if the non-standard theory that inertia comes from matter interacting with Unruh radiation, how exactly does that work with photons? Photons don't interact with photons. Zero cross section until the point that they are so energetic they can pop out electron/positron pairs from the vacuum, which is so far not an experimentally accessible regime.
Presumably the idea is that the Unruh radiation inside the cavity is quantized in a particular way different from free space, but wouldn't that mean that inertia of (presumably charged) particles inside that cavity would be altered? But he was talking about the non-sensical 'inertial mass' of the photons themselves. WTF?
I don't mind non-standard theories and their exploration at all, but it's necessary to be clear which standard axioms are being rejected and which others are preserved, and follow that consistently. I just saw very unclear physics.
There are some traditions. Certain instruments of government are considered more independent of the Presidential administration than others, and thus the terms of their directors are intentionally not supposed to coincide with the Presidential terms.
I think that CIA, NASA, Federal Reserve, and FBI are in that category. Cabinet secretaries are, naturally, appointed by the President directly.
With respect to the current issue: CIA will not torture. But a contractor, or an agency of another government, will.
Slashdot Mirror
That value was proof in a low-information-velocity economy. Prior to the discovery of electromagnetism and its technology, there was no easy way to guarantee monetary payment over distances. I.e. payee didn't know for sure that payor was good for the money. In some limited areas where such thing could be checked and punishment made if found to be false (e.g. in a city or small political entity with reliable enforcement), you might be able to get away with more but in general, gold was the most effective and reliable transfer of that information.
That central advantage outweighed the other problems. And before the 19th century, economic growth rates were low all over the planet.
Today, electronic funds transfers can give notice of insufficient funds either immediately or with short notice, so the prime technological argument for gold is no longer applicable, and the monetary disadvantages are central.
The unsuitability of bitcoin as a currency for general economic use is the primary reason for its spontaneous popularity. Almost everybody who wants some is speculating on the possibility of instability in the 'shortage' direction. There is no bond market in bitcoin.
The other primary use case for bitcoin is of course enabling criminality---a means of clandestine monetary exchange outside the standard payment systems and their regulation.
Why is Russia willing to pick a fight with the US again, and keep building new nuclear weapons and threatining people with them?
The US is maintaining only a 1960's ICBM and a 1970's SLBM, but Russia keeps building and designing new ones. Why? Why do they get a free pass to act like they are lead by a KGB thug?
Actually most of the fallout comes from the fission products themselves. Modern nukes like a 300kT warhead from a MIRV are 2/3rds fission, mostly in the secondary. So the amount of radionuclides is almost proportional to yield and about the same between airburst and groundburst and it is a large.
It would be more widely dispersed in the air however, and perhaps that's the difference.
Because substantial amounts of tritium are essential for "boosted" fission nuclear weapons. Tritium (and deuterium, which is cheap and easy to procure) adds fusion to the core of a fission warhead. It's not significant in energy production directly (unlike a true H-bomb) but it substantially increases the efficiency and potency of the fission reaction by adding a boost of neutrons at the moment of maximum compression.
It is considered essential to producing warheads which are small enough for militarily capable missiles.
Hackers were hence probably DPRK.
| A fundamental difference between regular business people, and computery people. They don't want to rework everything, and we'll rework everything because of because.
They don't want to rework everything (in the technology), because their career success depends on advancing the business. In the areas that they work on and are part of their career evaluation, there is plenty of churn in initiatives, reorganizations, and management styles and 'paradigms'.
The technologists have the same problem doing excessive reworking and rewriting their frameworks and 'paradigms' and deployment platforms etc for their own career desires, and have the same opinion of useless management fad changes as the business has with technology fad changes.
Yes, people are murdered all the time.
But strangers are murdered, without robbery, infrequently. Strangers, not in criminal street or drug gangs and not being arrested by police, are murdered much less
frequently than that. No witnesses, no leads, no explanations? A pro?
It doesn't sound like a robbery. And it doesn't sound like something the Clintons would do.
It does sound like something Putin's men would do. Putin is clearly running the old KGB playbooks and interfering in US elections they way they used to interfere in Europe, but in the modern way.
Pressure Rich for dirt, and then ice him when he starts getting nervous and talks to FBI.
> Vector-based coordinate plotting would simplify the client, turning it into a dumb and simple coordinate plotter of basic vectors and GUI widgets that fill the exact containing rectangle that you ask of it.
I welcome you to the X window system.
Well, this time the State Department Inspector General, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation did the investigation, not Republicans, and they did find a few damn things.
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/05/ig-report-on-clintons-emails/
| Higgs was ridiculed for good 50 years.This is no different.
It's completely different. The scalar "Higgs/6 other authors" field was never ridiculed.
Higgs field was an essential part of an extraordinarily empirically successful theory and was generally accepted as 'probably real' by the 1970's, but was difficult to find experimentally.
> And the mathematics behind these things is very primitive and simple, there is no elegance.
> But string theory is different. Although it has not been a success phenomenologically, it has led to many beautiful results in mathematics and field theory,
That is judging physics approaches by how fun are the mathematics they induce. Which is exactly the attitude which is being criticized.
As far as 'primitive and simple'----a primitive and simple phenomenological theory which gets the core behavior right and predicts O(0) and O(1) and maybe even O(2) effects is a fantastic and insightful triumph in most areas of physics!
If string theory is clever mathematics, let mathemeticians do it, and judge it their own way. In practice, as there is a roughly zero-sum competition for theoretical physics funding, I submit that string theory approaches have taken up far too much attention compared to so many other areas of potential study, most of which have not yet demonstrated themselves to be, over 40 years of intense study, fiercely repellent to experimental implication.
> These other "quantum gravity" approaches that Smolin champions are completely disconnected from any kind of real physics
Other than quantum mechanics and gravitation?
> Because I'd use that massive wealth to provide people with bread and circuses and invest the rest to developing promising new technologies,
And you'd be outcompeted & defeated by the other trillionaires from SPECTRE who don't bother wasting their resources at disposal on that sort of wussy stuff but on dominating people like you.
So, as an insider of Tesla he can't easily sell lots of Tesla stock.
But as an insider of Solar City, he can sell without consequences the newly-acquired Tesla stock as soon as his Solar City shares are converted?
He needs money for a divorce too. That was a bad investment.
| Someone left a bug in the contract, and because this is a programmed contract, not a written one, no one could enforce the "spirit" of the contract over the exact (erroneous) content of the contract.
A perfect instantiation of a naive (is there any other kind?) libertarian's dream and everybody else's nightmare.
http://www.startrek.com/database_article/landru
| The "Federal" Reserve is a *private* bank whose purpose is entirely self-serving.
It's not a private bank. Its creation and operations are detailed in U.S. Federal Code, its top management is chosen and confirmed by elected government officials, it regulates private banks with force of law, and its profits are turned over to the U.S. Treasury. It does not have the same motives and behavior as a private bank. Intentionally, the Fed is not a direct part of the political cabinet departments and is more of an independent agency, similar to NASA, CIA and EPA, and not similar to Treasury, whose chief serves at the discretion of the President and is a member of the cabinet.
The Fed does, as part of its very nature, interact heavily with private banks.
The US or Fed do not pay interest on Federal Reserve notes. The U.S. does pay interest on Treasury bills, notes and bonds.
The FDIC is an agency which is created by Congress, the same way as the Federal Reserve. The FDIC's protection of depositors is guaranteed by law, but the Federal Reserve's bailout of institutions is discretionary.
| Why they would support Trump I don't know,
It's literally part of the old KGB playbook. Because POTUS Trump would cause friction between US and European NATO allies. Hurting US/Europe alliances is considered a benefit to Russia.
| The President has a lot more resources to pay off a blackmail than a former SoS.
Actually, not true in this case.
The President has influence and authority, but authority which is mediated through legal processes, paper trail, and agencies with their own independent power. Maybe Obama could convince somehow the CIA to pay off some blackmail from their stash of unmarked bills used to pay overseas informants, but then, CIA would have tremendous blackmail potential over Obama.
The Clintons have hundreds of millions of dollars as their personal, owned, wealth. Call up a banker somewhere, and it's done.
Well, there are liquid hydrocarbon fueled racing cars which are far less than 90% efficient which have significantly more than 2,000 HP. They dissipate energy into hot exhaust and a radiator.
The truck proposed by the company has a radiator and liquid coolant, and the power is being outputted over 6 wheels, so between 3 to 6 electric motors.
Given that conventional over the road diesel trucks have about 500 HP, it seems quite unlikely that 2,000 HP would be used for any more than a small fraction of the time. And surely the competent engine management control would detect overheating in motors/coolant/battery pack/electronics and limit output if necessary.
His company's cars work as advertised, and aren't secretly powered by a coal turbine.
Sure, here is the "duck test": Bitcoin is not 'generally accepted' or generally seen as a 'store of value' outside of niche communities.
More generally, a mature currency has a debt market around it. And there are debt markets around mature currencies.
| So then how is a bitcoin different from a euro in this regard?
In practice, because there is no substantive bond or debt market in bitcoin.
Units of exchange are a 'level 1' currency, in place for thousands of years, but modern money is 'level 2'.
Plants grow and remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but then they die, and when they decay the CO2 goes back in.
Back in geological time when the coal was being made from plants, bacteria and fungi had not yet evolved the ability to break down certain tough parts of the plants, and therefore dead plants built up and up and up and over geological time were compressed and ended up underground. Today, these are known as coal mines.
Since then, these microbes do have the ability to break down and decay the dead plants fully, the CO2 will never ever leave the atmosphere in the long run.
To reduce CO2 climatically, it has to go somewhere which is entirely out of the biosphere and stay there. For instance, coal is excellent carbon sequestration.
In 100 years, the uncontrolled mining and burning of coal will be regarded like civilization today sees slavery: a revoltingly immoral abomination, and yet once was legal, accepted and a major commercial activity. Except that the ill consequences of past evil people would continue to hurt them indefinitely.
It looks like nonsense because it treats photons as if they were Newtonian particles and with ignorance of Maxwell's equations and relativity.
Start with section 2. It treats photons as particles with some momentum m*v. I mean, what? That's just wrong. Photons are relativistic p = E/c and quantum mechanical, E = 2\pi hbar f.
I mean take a look at this:
"Normally, of course, photons are not supposed to have inertial mass in this way,
but here this is assumed. It is not clear what the size of this mass is, but it is
clear for example that light inside a mirrored box produces a kind of inertial mass
for the box. "
So in orthodox physics, photons are not supposed to have inertial mass, but also in orthodox physics light makes inertial mass and it's clear that it's so.
The second statement, about light inside a mirrored box, is so because of relativity and the assertion of the equivalence principle. Electromagnetic fields are part of the stress energy tensor (following Maxwell) which feeds into the source term of general relativity. So yes, there is some sort of inertial contribution, but in fact it can be computed pretty exactly, and it's extraordinarily tiny, and really mostly related to the energy density of the EM field.
So relativity sometimes, but not other times? WTF?
And if the non-standard theory that inertia comes from matter interacting with Unruh radiation, how exactly does that work with photons? Photons don't interact with photons. Zero cross section until the point that they are so energetic they can pop out electron/positron pairs from the vacuum, which is so far not an experimentally accessible regime.
Presumably the idea is that the Unruh radiation inside the cavity is quantized in a particular way different from free space, but wouldn't that mean that inertia of (presumably charged) particles inside that cavity would be altered? But he was talking about the non-sensical 'inertial mass' of the photons themselves. WTF?
I don't mind non-standard theories and their exploration at all, but it's necessary to be clear which standard axioms are being rejected and which others are preserved, and follow that consistently. I just saw very unclear physics.
The courts have ruled that an API is copyrightable.
Now, the question is whether Google's use of the API violates the GPL contract or not?
"The freely available GPL version only applies to full implementations"
Does it? Does GPL prohibit somebody from taking part of a piece of software, and then using it in a GPL-compliant manner?
Next, did Google use the API's (let's say to be concrete the interface definitions), in a GPL-compliant manner?
There are some traditions. Certain instruments of government are considered more independent of the Presidential administration than others, and thus the terms of their directors are intentionally not supposed to coincide with the Presidential terms.
I think that CIA, NASA, Federal Reserve, and FBI are in that category. Cabinet secretaries are, naturally, appointed by the President directly.
With respect to the current issue: CIA will not torture. But a contractor, or an agency of another government, will.