log☇︎
219000+ entries in 1.884s
asciilifeform: if i were to sell a few extra organs, i could run the 50k variant of the experiment. and i'd go to my grave knowing that equivalence principle can be violated. but that'd be all.
asciilifeform: including the set that want schwartz to die in a fire
decimation: But according to wikipedia, it appears that the Eötvös balance is some balls, a rod, some string, and some mirrors
asciilifeform: The20YearIRCloud: no need to be a con man in the usual sense to acquiesce to usg SOP.
assbot: Logged on 27-07-2014 19:05:02; asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: in 2010 i concocted a variant of the test that could be carried out for approx. 50k USD, from scratch. schwartz answered that, in his estimation, the test would work to spec, but results would not be accepted by the field unless carried out on one of the two existing eotvos balances. one - adelberger's, one - chicom. ☟︎
The20YearIRCloud: And harold white is a con too?
asciilifeform: decimation: we came up with a setup that didn't require eotvos balance
asciilifeform: but the folks involved with 'emdrive' have a rich history of fraud (usg and principals both)
asciilifeform: understand, we'd all love a working perpetuum mobile or reactionless thruster.
asciilifeform: nasa is happy to fund every perpetual-motion crank on the planet - but if you're an industrial organic chemist with a history of rocking the boat - forget it.
The20YearIRCloud: It's going to JPL for testing, which is a pretty darn good sign as to it working
asciilifeform: al schwarts published a possible recipe for room temperature supercon - afaik, it was ignored.
asciilifeform: don't shoot a man with lead and gunpowder, shoot him with pocket railgun on watch battery - classier.
asciilifeform: room temperature supercon is a box of surprises.
asciilifeform: khruschev turned this into a hanging offense. retroactively.
decimation: "Army officials say the canisters, if they exist, do not pose a threat to the affluent Spring Valley neighborhood as long as they remain undisturbed." << "it's okay for you"
The20YearIRCloud: If I find a box of AKs here in the US there's nothing to do but leap for joy
asciilifeform: or - to make life more interesting - let's say that you find a sealed crate of kalashes, in cosmoline, rather than coins.
asciilifeform: for instance, IANAL, but i can easily picture, e.g, a landlord, arguing 'mineral rights' on the coins.
decimation: one wonders about the potential 'laundry' being done off of such a rich stash
The20YearIRCloud: heck we had a local auctioneer do one guy's coin collection, the whole collection fit on a few small tables and sold for $350k
mircea_popescu: (in general your take is about the same as if publishing a book : about 5 to 10% after govt, agent, editor etc is done raping you)
The20YearIRCloud: $15k isn't much for a 'rare gold coin'
asciilifeform: when digging my garden (moved out of microscopic flat in late may, into a rented house) i found intact glass bottles, with caps on. appear to contain decades-old 'coca cola.'
mircea_popescu: The20YearIRCloud here's an exercise for you. today you find in a yard 1k coins of 10 grams each, minted 1750.
The20YearIRCloud: and the thing is, for the most part the world is a big big place and GPR is very limited in what it can do
asciilifeform: incidentally, if burial is recent, a searcher can use 'nazi method'
asciilifeform: decimation: the instrument in question is no military secret of any kind. contact a firm that lays pipes.
decimation: The20YearIRCloud: yeah that's probably not a bad idea, radar would also find unpleasant surprises that are buried
The20YearIRCloud: Once in a while I get the chance to buy a un-touched estate - Kids have no interest or are out of state, a trustee locks the property up and you bid on the real estate + all contents
The20YearIRCloud: Around here, most use coffee cans buried. Now you can go to a store and get a "underground safe"
mircea_popescu: everyone wants to be paid a rent for existing
asciilifeform: upon reading of that contract, i came to inescapable conclusion that the box thing is an active chump-magnet rather than simply a poor deal.
mircea_popescu: it seems to me it's time to go down on sam's club for acting like a bank w/o a license.
asciilifeform: i can hardly picture a dumber hiding place then a container in a public place with your name on it.
asciilifeform: divorce << probably the worst possible use of a bank box in usa. other tidbit in the contract was that the bank will immediately impound any box against whose owner there are civil proceedings
decimation: re: gult's gulch << I find it amusing that folks who supposedly value 'self-reliance' and 'liberty' are unable to actually fly to chile and buy some land for themselves, it can't be that hard for a person with means & brains
decimation: well I think those terms are 'aspirational' - it goes to the arbitration conversation from a few weeks ago. everyone wants a click-wrap eula that holds them immune from any liability
asciilifeform: decimation: the point of the bank box story is that it was entirely unclear to me wtf is the very point of such a thing, given the caveats
mircea_popescu: (look at what happened when people thought the church is a people, started donating a little to it and inadvertently created the largest landholder because unlike them, thge church didn;t die regularly)
asciilifeform: drowning a box of strange in the atlantic is a considerably quieter operation than launching a rocket, however. so perhaps it wins.
asciilifeform: sea capsule is just a gedankenexperiment (though, i'm told, u.s. navy has insisted on actually trying.) i'm not altogether convinced that, properly carried out, it is cheaper than 'graveyard orbit'
asciilifeform: but notice that active players in a war rarely occupy themselves with hiding valuables
mircea_popescu: if you like living, pay is not really a relevant consideration.
mircea_popescu: in it. This can’t be delegated, it’s a personal thing. Like citizenship. Like nationality. The only nation immune to the fate of Rhodesia is a nation of that kind of people, living in that kind of world.
mircea_popescu: There isn’t, nor is there going to be a way, manner, instrument or device through which to protect the passive from the active. If you’re not prepared and absolutely willing to spend any amount of time up to the entire rest of your life seeking out and butchering leeches with only the satifaction of well applied, excruciating cruelty as your reward, you’re not made for this world and you won’t long have a place
assbot: A very unfair perspective. pe Trilema - Un blog de Mircea Popescu.
mircea_popescu: the relevant quote is in http://trilema.com/2013/a-very-unfair-perspective/ :
mircea_popescu: (you wouldn't be able to arrest anyone, but you would be able to void any application for a warrant)
mircea_popescu: decimation: The20YearIRCloud: When I say "allodial title" I mean something like having the right to arrest anyone - including government employees - on your property << that';s maybe going a little far. but the right to quash any action of anyone involving that land is germane.
mircea_popescu: xmj experienced live a tiny case study of this general principle, originally.
mircea_popescu: here's a thought : everything that has historical precendent now didn't originally.
asciilifeform: if this happens - it'll be a historic first, afaik.
mircea_popescu: which is the point of a "justice system" in the first place.
mircea_popescu: take any stirkingly beautiful woman walking into a bar. is she more likely or less likely to be hit on ?
asciilifeform: and if it becomes generally known that, e.g., a Castle Moldenstein, contains a bunker full of goodies - there is the incentive for all-comers to soften the target.
mircea_popescu: for everyone. this is not a valid objection any more than saying "for as long as gravity is still in force"
mircea_popescu: meanwhile back at reality ranch, obtaining superior fire power in a limited geographical area is a trivial task.
mircea_popescu: as a gif. enough nightmare fuel there for a week
asciilifeform: it is said to contain a great many.
mircea_popescu: The20YearIRCloud: There's a town close to me that once every year auctions off 250-350 safe deposit box contents, you bid per box and don't know what is in them. All are seized from people who either didn't pay up or forgot about em << isn't there a reality show predicated on this process ?
blast: but the island of woman is real, except its a mountain, in brazil ;D
mircea_popescu: seems of the ilk of "island of women" and "tower of song", ie, cheap notional filler for "virtual spaces" a la video games
thestringpuller: i am about to go into a panel on bitcoin lol
cazalla: would it be a safe bet the reason newegg and other sites offer a discount when using bitcoin is that it's easy means of coin for usg? they can print as much $ to give discounts and the coin flows from customers -> newegg -> bitpay -> usg?
mircea_popescu: i have a glass table and an optic mouse. ☟︎
mircea_popescu: cazalla quite. costs like a bitcoin to do, too.
mircea_popescu: so mebbe there's some meat to the assertion, vi inhabits a middle that doesnt really exist
mircea_popescu: but actually... i find myself using nano a lot moar these days
mircea_popescu: this old world sort of nonsense can not endure my friends! i am making a company that will revolutionize drawing!
mircea_popescu: and for that matter, pencils are horribly unintuitive interfaces. think of all the great drawing in the world, and the poor user buying a pencil in the shop will draw what ? a cat ?
asciilifeform: i.e., instrument with user interface of a pencil, but somehow not the functionality of pencil.
asciilifeform: 'usability' << is not necessarily a nonsense word. consider the difference between the linux and bsd userland utils
mircea_popescu: not a bad idea jurov
asciilifeform: 'error - not a typewriter' << actual
Apocalyptic: "Random data is generated by encrypting /dev/zero" // a curious way to generate random data
mircea_popescu: "Create a random file of a certain, and display progress along the way."
mircea_popescu: but a good gui is a provab le impossibility. "make me a very hot woman that still wants to be my girlfriend instead of say that guy's"
decimation: true. making a good gui is difficult and thankless work
mircea_popescu: decimation i think the only reason it isn't a solved problem is this sort of argument : http://contravex.com/2014/08/26/infosec-education-because-stephane-bortzmeyer-is-lazy-and-im-not/ ie "usability". once you add that fuzzy requirement smart people get bored and leave,
decimation: this is true, seems like it should be a 'solved problem'. I think some implementations of 'hadoop' do exactly this
decimation: asciilifeform: do you know of a reasonable gui tool to search and index djvu's with text?
asciilifeform: 'i even made a pony-monkey hybrid to please you! what's with all the screaming. you like monkeys, you like ponys. maybe i used too many monkeys... isn't it enough that i ruined a pony making a gift for you!'
mircea_popescu: i'd like a fluffy one! :D
asciilifeform: yes, we'd all like 'a pony.'
decimation: asciilifeform: yeah I agree, 'djvu' with a text-track would be a pretty good format
mircea_popescu: this would have been a perfect application for ai
decimation: to be fair I think there are methods of using good compression with pdf too. My main point yesterday was about searching the text, for which pdfs are not necessary. after all, if you ocr it, then it ought to exist as a .txt file
asciilifeform: a fat book takes <5 MB typically.
asciilifeform: 'djvu', even on an aged box, scrolls so quickly one almost can believe he has a microfilm viewer.
decimation: djvu is a pretty amazing 'paper' compression tool. proprietary "paperport" works very well too
asciilifeform: russians, accustomed to carrying around terabytes of scanned w4r3z for a generation, prefer 'djvu' - for which there is really no substitute.
mircea_popescu: rather than reading the same "us girl next door in a sheet = roman matron" story re-written over and over 500 times.
mircea_popescu: anyway, one is well advised to evaluate his level of interest on such topics. if it's a passing casual worth 5k words then skimming one of these pulpy offerings is maybe fine. if serious enough to remember names, then probably skimming the original papers is a better bet
asciilifeform: muppet, who was given the job of cranking out a tabloid-grade book supposedly based on the 100kg or so of stolen paper.
mircea_popescu: finally a high level defector is taken into a manager's meeting, fed somon fume and asked politely
mircea_popescu: by the 5th or so replacement there's a distinct impression with upper cia management that the soviets are like... sending complicated insider jokes over the mole wire.
Apocalyptic: mircea, I'm asking whether it's worth a read, I don't have nor know it
asciilifeform: Apocalyptic: he printed a large number of variations on 'sword & shield', most repeat themselves in a genuinely dreary way
Apocalyptic: asciilifeform, on a related note what's your opinion about 'KGB: the Inside Story' by Christopher Andrew ?