iwr

The maximum signal speed loss due to inclination would be sqrt(1+(1/refraction_index^2))-1, or around 20% for fiber described above. Although, in practice, the fiber would not be even close to its maximum angle.

But potentially, a lower refraction index fiber with a reflective coating would allow signals to travel faster.

This is interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-crystal_fiber

"All subjects, except sex, are dull until somebody makes them interesting."

Certainly, sex can be dull. Unfortunately, going into the specific anecdotes concerning the topic would make HN less work-safe and also damage the modesty thereof.

Not an evil thing in itself. Putting all that content in one location has some value.

I was just wondering if hair thin, hollow, reflective tubes could be made cheap enough for oceanic data cables. It would obviously be more expensive than regular fiber.

The speed of light in optic fiber is about 66% of c. Is it feasible to just build a hollow reflective tube/waveguide?

A small adage: the poor of yesterday are not necessarily the poor of today. Immigrants arriving in the US are usually at the bottom of the ladder. As long as the US receives immigrants, it will have a somewhat bottom-heavy income distribution (more than otherwise).

Also note that while it may be tempting to "soak the rich", they are the most mobile segment of society. Arguably too, they are the most productive private users of capital. (I'd make a distinction here between real private capitalists and bankers/financialists etc)

Finally, technology allows individuals today to be vastly more productive than their potential peers. The differences are much more stark in a high division of labor society. Whereas, if you are a great hunter your productivity could be maybe 2-3 times better than average, a guru programmer can be a few orders of magnitude above the otherwise average skilled professional.

One mitigating measure would be to use secure VPN. Traffic from the VPN to the destination would still be unencrypted, but would eliminate drive-by hackers.

Could be a brown-dwarf-sized companion to our star, a possible answer for the relative scarcity of objects beyond 50 or so au.

Do you have a real-life use scenario for this DB-FS paradigm?

A natural monopoly doesn't need legal protections, it will continue to exist regardless. The very reason competition was banned was because it was possible.

It became illegal because competitor operators were a threat to AT&T. The government made a deal with them by giving them legal protection, getting some political control in return. Even after the divestiture, the Baby Bells had preferential treatment and received automatic mobile licenses when the technology appeared.

Secondly, it's kind of silly to think about web monopolies when users can freely change operators. Google, Facebook etc have to work hard to maintain their users.

It would be interesting to use IAX2 instead of SIP. Unlike SIP, IAX(2) is transparent to NAT.

NAT was one of the problems that Skype had to face, resorting to using routable clients to funnel traffic to clients behind NAT. Yes, IPv6 is right around the corner, but VoIP should not have to wait for its implementation.

When you want to have a mass product, you need to work with the reality that many possible clients will not have a directly routable IP.

How do you reconcile that with the fact that it was illegal to compete with AT&T?

Once upon a time, Altavista was The Search and MySpace was The Social Network.

Apparently, there is no XSLT version. Well, here is one: The XML file: <?xml version="1.0"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="99bottles.xsl"?> <beer>99</beer>

The XSLT: <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform>; <xsl:output method="html" indent="yes"/>

    <xsl:template match="/">
        <html>
            <head>
                <title>Beer!</title>
            </head>
            <body>
                <xsl:call-template name="beer">
                    <xsl:with-param name="bottles" select="/beer"/>
                </xsl:call-template>
            </body>
        </html>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template name="beer">
        <xsl:param name="bottles" />

        <xsl:if test="$bottles &gt; 0">
            <p>
                <xsl:value-of select="$bottles"/>
                <xsl:choose>
                    <xsl:when test="$bottles = 1" >
                        <xsl:text> bottle of beer on the wall</xsl:text>
                    </xsl:when>
                    <xsl:otherwise>
                        <xsl:text> bottles of beer on the wall</xsl:text>
                    </xsl:otherwise>
                </xsl:choose>
                <br/>
                <xsl:value-of select="$bottles"/>
                <xsl:choose>
                    <xsl:when test="$bottles = 1" >
                        <xsl:text> bottle of beer!</xsl:text>
                    </xsl:when>
                    <xsl:otherwise>
                        <xsl:text> bottles of beer!</xsl:text>
                    </xsl:otherwise>
                </xsl:choose>
                <br/>
                <xsl:text>You take one down, and pass it around</xsl:text>
                <br/>
                <xsl:choose>
                    <xsl:when test="($bottles - 1) = 0" >
                        <xsl:text>No bottles of beer on the wall!</xsl:text>
                    </xsl:when>
                    <xsl:otherwise>
                        <xsl:value-of select="$bottles - 1"/>
                        <xsl:text> bottles of beer on the wall!</xsl:text>                        
                    </xsl:otherwise>
                </xsl:choose>
            </p>
            <xsl:call-template name="beer">
                <xsl:with-param name="bottles" select="$bottles - 1"/>
            </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:if>

    </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Remember that the great monopoly to be broken up by anti-trust law was in fact a government-mandated one: AT&T. Without the government banning competition, AT&T would have been very much different in 1974 (the time of the divestiture).

Ender was deliberately put in a position where he was forced to fight back or get killed. His "handlers" wanted a dehumanized person capable of everything, including genocide.

"The task of the training battalions is to crush and completely destroy the individual, however strong a character he may have possessed, and to fashion out of that person a type to fit the standards of spetsnaz, a type who will be filled with an explosive charge of hatred and spite and a craving for revenge." Source: http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov6/index.html

It's a book by Viktor Suvorov "Spetsnaz. The Story Behind the Soviet SAS". A quick and interesting read.

Violence and degradation is a common method of training soldiers. Some (not me) would say the school system is deliberately set in this fashion.

This is great stuff!

This looks interesting, I'll check it out!

The cheapest small-traffic solution I've found is to hook one or more phones to a PC and communicate with them via Hayes AT commands. Can look a little hacky, but once you have the box set up, you don't have to worry anymore. Switching "gateways" is the same as switching sim cards.

Next step: build a Von Neumann Universal Constructor!

It's strange how a society supposedly obsessed with safety nonetheless thinks normal to place a child in such an environment, then do everything to prevent them from defending themselves. It's a prison environment, only the inmates did nothing to deserve being there.

The problem could be that kids don't interact much with people outside their age group. They have no reference point of how adults behave. It becomes a sort of Lord of the Flies world.

In that sense, Intel is just making CPUs on top of x86 bytecode that runs natively. I wonder if a little extra firmware can eliminate the need for an OS altogether.

Low blue sensitivity may be due to the eye's lens being opaque to UV (very bright blue). This is for good reasons because then daylight illumination would be painful and cause retinal damage over time.

The blue color receptor can actually capture a wider range blues and low UV shades. People who had cataract surgery (which replaces the defective lens with an artificial one) may see into these deeper shades of blue if they received an older style of implant.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2002/may/30/medicalscience...

Translation and interpreting is an AI-hard problem.

For a foundation thinking ultra longterm, they have a flaky server.

"Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later. Apache/2.2.11 (Ubuntu) Server at www.longbets.org Port 80"

For comparison purposes: using a Core 2 Duo @ 2.6GHz and the official bitcoin binary, it would take around 45 days before there's a 90% chance to get a block (50 coins).

Even if an attacker can muster the computing power to overwhelm the current bitcoin network, these efforts would be very visible and traceable to a few sources. You could thus tell people are giving out fake coins.

However, given the lack of inherent value (or backing) in a coin hash, bitcoins can't be used as money, only as money-substitutes (IOUs with an indeterminate recepient). The Dollar itself is "backed" by the US government requiring taxes be paid in it.

The big boys' RepRap!

But from the looks of it, the 3d printing process is for mold making rather than the finished product itself.

Not to confuse OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), used to aggregate RSS files with OBML (Opera Binary Markup Language).

I was confused why or how OPML would serve Opera's purposes in this instance.