50548695
submission
Nefarious Wheel writes:
China debuts an aerobatics team. The images this conjures up run the gamut of emotions: Do we have one in the West? Is this high comedy, or high technology? Can I laugh at this, or is the joke on us?
28185904
submission
Nefarious Wheel writes:
When Her Majesty, the Queen of England's finances were so rich they threatened to take too much money out of circulation, Parliament took over the management of her funds and put her on the "Queen's List". It's a drawing account, good for a yacht or two here and there and the extra silverware butler if you need one. She's still quite rich — most of London owed her rent, and she can throw the odd grand wedding if she wants...
What if we did that to the (say) top 100 billionaires — let the country take over the management of their money, let them buy whatever they want (with the exception of a few things like nuclear centrifuges, small armies, congressmen, corporations, judges, things like that). Let them buy whatever they want out of their fund otherwise, no real restrictions on amount beyond that. Put them on oh, call it "The Treasury List".
Would that fix the disparity between the 1% — 99% ?
541146
submission
Nefarious Wheel writes:
Strange ideas day. Was thinking of economical but extremely long-term storage, longer than you can depend on a magnetic domain to remain uncorrupted by stray fields. This line of thought resulted in this odd question:
Given the paper, machining and electronics technology available today, and ignoring magnetic and ink based solutions, how much data could you reliably store on a punched paper card? I'm sure the medium could hold more than the 80 to 96 bytes per unit of the past.
If you think about it, books from 800AD onward (such as the Book of Kells) are still with us, and hold considerable detail. It's unlikely we could expect that sort of data lifespan with today's media. But the sort of paper used for US Form 5081 could be with us for a very long time, given proper care and containment. So, how much data could you punch into a standard 80 column sized card before it became structurally unusable?
397087
submission
Nefarious Wheel writes:
Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs has admitted to losing the details of 25 million individuals, with 7.25 million U.K. families potentially affected. "This is the biggest privacy disaster by our government," said Jonathan Bamford, assistant information commissioner.
In a speech to Parliament on Tuesday, the chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, told of the loss of two discs containing the details of everybody in the U.K. who claims and receives child benefits.
Story at http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6219772.html?tag=nl.e550
181981
submission
Nefarious Wheel writes:
(From Physics News) Microfluidics is the science of carrying out fluid chemical processing on a chip whose channels are typically millimeters or microns across. In such a constricted space, viscosity becomes large, and the fluid flow can slow way down, thus limiting the kind of mixing or testing that can be done. Physicists at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, however, use tiny exploding bubbles to speed things up.See movie at http://stilton.tnw.utwente.nl/people/ohl/controlle d_cavitation.html/. the Twente scientists are the first to achieve flow visualization at rates of a million frames per second at a size scale of 100 microns.
