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Comment Re:And this is what will finish them off. (Score 2, Insightful) 425

by teknognome (#26960829) Attached to: AP Considers Making Content Require Payment

(perhaps even creating their own)

They already did create their own news syndication operation. It's the AP. "The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staffers." from Wikipedia

Comment Re:Needs a "sarcasm" tag? (Score 1) 874

by teknognome (#26907267) Attached to: Don't Like EULAs? Get Your Cat To Agree To Them

P.S. Her funniest essay is "I Like Babies". It's not what you expect... or, if it is, you are very strange.

Apparently I'm very strange, as I (correctly) expected it to be about eating babies after reading your intro to it. It's sort of the obvious 'unexpected' thing to like about babies. Now if it were about how she liked to use babies for painting, that'd be less expected...

Comment Re:No matter how deluded, the poster has a point (Score 1) 540

by teknognome (#25959605) Attached to: US Has Been In Recession Since December 2007

Our entire economy, since we've moved from the gold standard in the 70's to a pure fiat based monetary system is still entirely, 100% based on faith. Your money has no value other than what other people think it's worth.

And guess what, gold had value because of what people thought it was worth. Not because it's intrinsically useful (like, say, chickens) but because it's shiny and durable.
The Military

40 Years Ago, the US Lost a Nuclear Bomb 470

Posted by kdawson from the chrome-dome-down dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "A BBC investigation has found that in 1968 the US abandoned a nuclear weapon beneath the ice in northern Greenland after a nuclear-armed B52 crashed on the ice a few miles from Thule Air Base. The Stratofortress disintegrated on impact with the sea ice and parts of it began to melt through to the fjord below. The high explosives surrounding the four nuclear weapons on board detonated without setting off the nuclear devices, which had not been armed by the crew. The Pentagon maintained that all four weapons had been 'destroyed' and while technically true, investigators piecing together fragments from the crash could only account for three of the weapons. Investigators found that 'something melted through ice such as burning primary or secondary.' A subsequent search by a US submarine was beset by technical problems and, as winter encroached and the ice began to freeze over, the search was abandoned. 'There was disappointment in what you might call a failure to return all of the components,' said a former nuclear weapons designer at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory. 'It would be very difficult for anyone else to recover classified pieces if we couldn't find them.'"
Math

Amazonian Tribe Has No Word To Express Numbers 482

Posted by kdawson from the how-many-fingers dept.
In 2004 we discussed the Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon, when a study appeared characterizing their language as a "one, two, many" language. Now reader mu22le informs us of a new study of the Piraha pointing to the possibility that they use no number words at all. Instead they seem to use the word formerly thought to mean "two" to represent a quantity of 5 or 6, and the "one" word for anything from 1 to 4. The language has about 300 native speakers. "The study... offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, Gibson said."

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If Machiavelli were a programmer, he'd have worked for AT&T.

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