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Nuclear weapons are just invasion insurance policy. Also, useful bargaining chips in exchange for foreign aid.

The solution would be just to halt all foreign aid and sign a peace treaty, or remove all options, including the nuclear one, from the table. This would give the NK leaders no foreign enemies, perhaps leaving lower ranked party members seeking to overthrow them.

Watching that made me think the first Von Neumann Universal Constructor would be built by a carpenter.

If you opt out of the nude.js, the pat-down bot gets to fondle your dangling pointers.

Reading is 2-3 times faster than listening.

The cheaters(?) would be visible if they do significantly worse in the second test, compared to the first.

Our ability to measure cosmological distances (past 100M ly) is very limited. Past 1bn ly we are basically talking about the Hubble law, which has to be infered from other distance measurements. The Hubble law means very little as a distance estimate to individual galaxies, but can work to get an average for a good number of distant objects (within an order-of-magnitude accuracy).

More on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder

So for now, our foundations of Cosmology are still too shaky to strap a "what came before" theory on top of it.

One day, aliens will use our oceans as heat sinks for their great galactic computer. And even then, ZFS will serve them well.

There is actually no other word in literary language that conveys the full meanings of lol. It is here to stay!

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Lights by their design will stop traffic and reduce road capacity (they are ostensibly for safety rather than road use).

The point about a roundabout was to keep traffic moving, not stop it. If there are lights, there is no difference between a roundabout and a circular intersection.

Don't underestimate the idiocy of traffic planners. In my town we have roundabouts and stoplights on the roads leading in.

By the time the debt collectors are called in (3 or more months overdue), the chances are already more that the money would never be paid.

These people have a bad reputation, but debtors too are reneging on a contract. It's terrible to be a business owner (not just credit-related) and to have one of your customers stiff you on a bill.

Would this system block websites at the IP level or at the DNS level?

Doing it at the DNS level would mean you could roll your own DNS or use a non-US DNS provider.

Doing it at the IP level would mean banned IPs and reverse-lookups of IPs back into domain names, checking against a list of banned domains. This one could only be bypassed through proxies.

And at the end of it all, a student will come out of a business school sporting a shiny degree, but not much else. If he didn't cheat on his tests, he would be surely cheated out of an education.

This professor places more emphasis on a test with recycled questions than practical work.

Compare that to the rapid developments of post-war Germany, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, then post-1990: Poland, Hungary, The Czech Republic etc. We have to look at opportunity costs, not just raw improvements.

The difference is that companies are voluntary associations of individuals. A government is a monopoly of force and justice; it can exert its authority even on those that have not explicitly (via a free contract) agreed to it.

That may be the reason that large organizations are difficult to maintain. How many of the Fortune 500 companies today were still there 4 years ago?

As an organization grows, it requires people in support structures that are less linked to the ultimate bottom line. Ludwig von Mises proposed the idea that an organization requires a level of bureaucracy, in the absence of market signals. So to the extent that an employee is removed from from the direct market operations of the company, a bureaucracy is required.

Now, the reason companies don't outsource all their work to bidding contractors is that there is some value in holding resources in reserve. A bid-contractor is only as good as the next assignment, he may leave for another company when you need him the most. The solution is to have a contract where the particular individual will reserve his time and energy to one company (a.k.a. an employee). The employee will be effectively "slacking off", but will be on call for when his resources are needed.

What's an inerter?

The inevitable failure happened not because of particular details that the central planners disregarded, but because there WERE planners in the first place. The market has a network-optimality aspect to it that a monolithic institution cannot replicate.

Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

Would this system block websites at the IP level or at the DNS level?

Doing it at the DNS level would mean you could roll your own DNS or use a non-US DNS provider.

Doing it at the IP level would mean the ISP reverse-lookups IP addresses back into domain names and checking against a list of banned addresses. This one could only be bypassed through proxies.

What exactly is a test bank?

My money would be on the professor bluffing.

Edit: OK, it could be possible to correlate results from the first test with the second one.

Pretty much all arab-looking people will get special attention going through US Customs. I have a friend whose name is the same to someone on the no-fly list and he can't enter the US without serious hassle.

It's no comfort that you can be detained indefinitely, without appeal, or recognition of existance. Granted, the risk is not that big for Western-looking people (who haven't travelled to the Arab world), but it's inexcusable for a country that considers itself the leader of the "Free World".

This reminds me of an old episode of South Park.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/155014/learning-the-tr...

"Feeling warm is a sign of the last stages of hypothermia"

Maths is a self-consistent and closed system. From that point of view, the nature of axioms is irrelevant. You can have an unlimited kinds of axiomatic systems, each consistent and each explanatory in its own way. What is a theorem in one system can be treated as an axiom in the next as long as the system itself leads to no contradictions.

Given that human knowledge encompasses more than one axiomatic system, it would be foolish to endow a system designed to replicate human knowledge with an immutable set of axioms.

Please watch this presentation of Richard Feynman on the nature of maths and physics: http://www.feynmanphysicslectures.com/relation-of-mathematic...

You could sort of get a keyboard with an included USB hub and connect a mouse to it. Or better, get a monitor with a USB hub and just connect your peripherals to the monitor. If you want to go overboard, you can even get speakers and a network card that connect through USB.

But sadly, with Intel torpedoing USB3, our dream of a one-cable computer is still far.

Humans can live off the land just about anywhere on Earth, but with a Mars mission now, they would be wholly dependent for decades at the very least. For colonization to work, it must be self-sufficient nearly from day one. Otherwise, it would be just a few footprints, 50 years too early and countless billions over budget.

Would it be possible to crank up the radiation (intensity or hardness) to peer deeper into the body?

Certification will lead to the recognition of your product as an enterprise-ready technology, allowing interoperability and intercompatibilitization with all Oracle Java products and libraries. In today's complex and increasingly specialized economy, a promise of compatibility is not sufficient. The Oracle Java Compatibility Process™ provide you with the credentials you need to succeed in acquiring market share.

"For now, I'm not going to support this in the parser as it appears to be a fairly dusty corner of the language. Maybe at some later date."

And that is why this particular parser won't pass the Java TCKs.

So what did NASA announce after all?

Edit: Apparently, this: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_10-299_CHANDRA.h...

"Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence of the youngest black hole known to exist in our cosmic neighborhood"

"The 30-year-old object is a remnant of SN 1979C, a supernova in the galaxy M100 approximately 50 million light years from Earth."

Well, pretty underwhelming.