Hyperinflation has a specific definition (50% or higher monthly inflation, so ~12,900% annual inflation).

No, we are not seeing hyperinflation. We aren't even seeing inflation anywhere close to what has historically been "high" in the US, except in the healthcare field! Hell, up until this weekend, gas prices were dropping.

The Tea Party is trying to undo everything that made the country great back in the 50s and early 60s. What do you call someone trying to undermine the country?

And by 2018 North America should be the proud home of at least a dozen new countries, because the Tea stands for treason.

How are you keeping it lit, and where did you find rolling papers that size?

A jump from 900kbps ("around 1Mbps") to 7200kbps ("around 7Mbps") is very much a 700% increase.

The problem is a lack of significant figures here, which means that the "around 1Mbps to around 7Mbps" increase could be anywhere from as low as ~333% (1.5Mbps to 6.5Mbps) to as high as 1400% (0.5Mbps to 7.5Mbps).

This response has been brought to you by the -pedantic switch. Have a nice day!

Think of it this way (warning: sort of a car analogy):

You know those ads where they're like "We've got cars starting at $300, THIS WEEKEND ONLY!", and they'll mention some kind of halfway decent car at a ridiculously low price? That's entirely to get suckers to come in, and when they find out that the really good deal they were hoping for isn't there, well, there's the salesman, trying to talk up a new Honda Accord or such instead.

Hawaii serves the same purpose. It's to draw bidders in. We run it early, sell it to Canada while nobody's really paying attention, and everyone else can stick around for the crap states because people don't like to feel like they missed out on the only worthwhile thing.

(Alternatively, Hawaii was included just as an example so that I didn't get several metric tons of Southern butthurt for only including their states.)

Hence my petition. Get rid of (some of) the net receivers, gain some much-needed capital to help pay down the national debt in exchange, and as a side effect we have a smaller government to boot.

(For what it's worth, I don't expect to get more than a couple hundred signatures, tops.)

I don't see what's so great about thi--ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!

Thank you for illustrating my point of "incoherent arguments for the opponents", since nowhere in the GP did I say that the Republicans were the only ones using emotional arguments, or anything similar to that.

Considering that Republicans use emotional arguments for their supporters, moral ones for the undecided, and incoherent ones for their opponents... well, that looks like they're trying to keep their supporters convinced and are trying to bludgeon the undecided, and that they therefore don't actually believe anyone is their ally.

In other words, they're acting exactly like sociopaths would - they're convinced that given half a chance, their "supporters" will screw them over in a heartbeat, just because they'd do the same thing.

Mackenzie Calhoun. (Novels only, unfortunately.)

That would be "Luminous", by... hey, Greg Egan again. Good story, if kind of short.

If you want to stick in that general direction of things, BTW, the short story collection Dark Integers and Other Stories has that plus four other more or less loosely-related (I believe only one actually qualifies as a sequel to Luminous) stories. Probably your best bet for sticking to math-related fiction.

But it's clearly fat electrons stuck in the wiring.

I think I like that last option the best at this point. Sometimes the only way to get meaningful progress is to start over from the beginning.

Thermodynamic argument against Nothing (and, for that matter, the production of Something from Nothing): the entropy state for Nothing is infinite. (Specifically, negative infinity. It's based on the logarithm - in this situation, it doesn't matter what base you use, though 2 is traditional - of the number of possible states that are identical to the current state based on macroscopic properties, or of the number of bits of information needed to describe the system.)

Clearly, an infinity is a more complicated state than any other number, because you can produce any real number out of it without changing it. (That is, the solutions of "-infinity + x = -infinity" are... well, all real values of x.) Since x in the parenthetically-noted equation corresponds to the entropy of any given subset of existence, it therefore becomes possible to produce Something (an object with 2^x states) from Nothing (an object with 0 states).

The next step is determining what the simplest state is, and proving it, which will be left as an exercise for the reader. (I suspect that the simplest state is "an infinite number of objects at maximum entropy, such that the distribution of object sizes is itself at a state of maximum entropy" - but proving that is liable to be an absolute mess at best. The net result is an infinite multiverse where the component universes are of varying properties, including at least one flat universe with an infinite number of dimensions.)