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The configuration would be saved in Flash memory and loaded at boot time. Also, you'd need to reboot the FPGA each time a new configuration would be written in.

I am not yet aware of FPGA-like chip architecture that can be reconfigured dynamically.

Leprosy is slightly contagious, but significant over very long exposures.

While the notion is simple, the math is not.

The idea that medieval people believed in a flat Earth is not true. The shape and approximate size of the Earth was knowm since ancient times (3rd century BC).

Columbus was not turned down at first because people believed he'd fall off the edge of the Earth; they knew he could not have possibly reached Asia, the distance was too great. It was only pure luck (finding America) that saved him. A venture capitalist in those times would have been rational not to buy into the expedition.

As for geocentrism, that has some merits. But note that Ptolemy and his followers were really hindered by a lack of good astronomical data. Using methods of those times, an epicyclical model of the planets was pretty accurate and could have been refined further. The model of Copernicus was deemed superior because it needed fewer epicycles to make the math right. The breakthrough came only after Kepler got the very accurate Huygens observations (taken over 20 years); after he had enough datapoints, he could come up with his famous laws.

And so, let's not blame the Ancients right away. They were not as ignorant as we may believe.

I wonder why package monitors are not a standard equipment. The monitor would comminucate wirelessly through encrypted channels. Once at the delivery location, the customer may inspect the package logs and he could refuse delivery, or demand compensation.

An accelerometer, a gyroscope, a small battery and microcontroller with bluetooth connectivity. Should be possible to build a contraption for around $100.

All so stuff like this: http://www.gadling.com/2010/02/23/videos-bad-baggage-handler... dosn't happen more often.

If the citizens can't be mustered to pay taxes, then that too is a condemnation of the state. Note that countries with high levels of corruption also tend to have high tax evasion among the tax base.

The greater idea would be that free people should not be forced to go and wage aggressive war. If a political entity decides in favor of war and there is conscription, individuals can't legally refuse if they disagree. Sure, aggressive wars can be waged with professional armies, but then at least there is the possibility of opting out.

In the case of defensive war, there are two options: take refuge or take up arms. Sometimes, the refugee option is better. If you're a married man, your first responsibility should be toward the safety of your family. If that means running away, that is indeed the better option.

Learning to defend oneself and one's family should be a primary responsibility. But I'm not sure the army is the only means to achieve that.

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As an aside, in a country with conscription there would be no civilians. If all able-bodied men/women are expected to serve in the military, they are fair game according to the rules of war. Conscription is one of the things that makes total war possible. Without conscripts, the war machine will eventually run out of money. With conscripts, the state can wage war up to the point of self-destruction.

What did you use for server-side JS? It's not a common option for app development.

While flying twice as high as passanger aircraft, the sonic boom would still be a problem with the Concorde. The restriction would be greatly reduced with a suborbital plane, which cruises outside the atmosphere.

This may sound harsh, but an army of slaves (i.e. conscripts) is incompatible with a free country. If the citizens can't be mustered to volunteer in its defense, the current state as a social organization becomes obsolete.

Granted, there are many Israelis who would indeed volunteer and militarily, they are not in danger.

Is it really that big of a secret when some party is "fucking a country really bad"? The fact that a politician was heard saying it should not have changed things. The level of debt, regulations and taxation is pretty much public knowledge. And so, if a subsequent party gains power and does nothing about those issues, there should be equal outrage.

Would this also mean new C programming libraries for the FPGA?

Couldn't scientific journals, or journal databases like Springer Link make the data behind papers available?

You could write a wrapper that outputs SAX events to predetermined files or named pipes, say, selectable as command line arguments; for instance, the startElement event could be outputted to startElement.txt. Then your script can monitor these files and do the processing from there.

I'm sure there are better ways to do it, though.

You don't need to build the entire document tree in memory. You just have to use a sequential parser like SAX or StAX.

What is a scenario where business would be disrupted in this manner? After all, even with the bailouts, credit is as hard to obtain.

I have in fact sent both e-mail, fax and snail-mail (with delivery confirmation) to a number of customers.

Even though it's possible and legal to sign a contract by completely electronic means, snail-mailing a hardcopy is still the norm.

There could be a cat/mouse game going on between law enforcement and criminals running UAVs (eg. to run drugs). Miniature dogfights?

Not everyone needs public-facing IP addresses. It's also possible to write network/web applications that work through NAT, or that don't need routable clients.

Considering the transition to IPv6 will take at least a decade, do your apps need clients with public routable IPs?

It would have been far cheaper just to rescue the FDIC and preserve the money held in savings/checking accounts.

Wall Street organizations, in their present form, are functionally bankrupt. Having been bailed out, the clearing of bad debt never happened. This effectively trapped a large amount of capital in their vaults. In addition, the government is doing everything possible to funnel more productive resources into these black holes.

The real systemic risk was in throwing good resources after the bad. The "contagion" was other governments being spurred to do the same.

"In the year 2010, a large payload was launched into LEO, ostensibly as a classified spy satellite. No one would have believed that behind this event lay not a human, but an innocuous computer intelligence secretly living in one of the NSA's computing clusters. Not long after, the details of a mysterious infrastructure project on the Moon was revealed: a Von Neumann factory. Growing at an exponential rate, this new organism was by then unstoppable..."

You can use Google Calendar's SMS notification. In Europe it's free to receive messages and calls, so it costs nothing.

Still, it's unfriendly to newbies. You need to learn console commands. Also, the registration process does not allow webmail addresses. On places like chess.com or chesscube, you can pretty much start right away.

That said, I still prefer FICS for the greater flexibility in timings and the ability to review all past games.

I improved my English spelling and punctuation by doing CastingWords transcripts a few years ago. Perhaps the main motivation for some people is the actual money.

Though I'm curious how they got people from India onto the site. After all, you could only use a US credit card or Amazon credit to get paid.

Did someone document their progress, or overview the development of a medium-sized app (~10K LoC) on GAE?

I fail to understand why pdf is not a purely representational document format (i.e. without scripting and executable content).

Copying is not theft because there are no such things as property rights in the value of things. Value is the valuation of others, it exists in the minds of other people. You do not have a property right to the value of your house, for instance, in the sense that you can't have a right to how other people think (or how other people evaluate).

Creating copyable things does take work and it is the right of a creator to be able to sell it. It would also be his right to sign a contract with his customer not to copy the work. DRM, watermarks, SaaS are all good tools to reduce unauthorized copying.

With that said, even if you disagree about copyrights, can we not call it a property right?

We can assume literacy on these boards :)