And I understand the usability and draw of scope enclosing lambdas, but before we had that it was no big matter to use a simple function pointer with a data structure or define an interface and implement a class that would contain the enclosed data variables then use an instance of that class for the function. To me the lambda capability was never missed. I 'm happy to use it but I find the syntax a bit awkward.
I know it seems picky and silly to disagree with what's obviously a personal preference, but surely the new lambda syntax is less awkward that the alternatives you were forced in the past to use? You had to create (named) classes and interfaces for specific cases, or you had to derive (named) classes from existing interfaces, or you had to create a (again, named) class with a specifically named function in it.
And now, we have a language for which the code
[](){}();
Cleanly compiles, and helpfully does nothing at all. What's not to like?
We have spare CPU cycles today, we don't need to code for the bare metal to get the performance we need.
Great points, but I must take issue with this. We don't have spare CPU cycles, because this is exactly equivalent to saying we have electricity to spare, which we most certainly don't, especially on mobile.
Language safey features do not necessarily need to come at a run-time cost in any case, since well-written C++ is about as safe and fast as it gets. Unless you count the hours it ends up taking to compile...
You're both right. A battery is (more or less) a perfect voltage source, in series with a resistor. From that perspective, the current you see, and the voltage you see, are just different ways of looking at the same thing.
You can't 'ramp up the current draw' at a given voltage, because the voltage across the battery will change precisely in sync with the current, according to ohms law and the nominal battery voltage. Inside an iPhone, of course, there is complex power management circuitry that will attempt to provide a fixed voltage, at whatever current is required, using a DC to DC converter of some clever type. When the power - the current multiplied by the voltage - available from the battery drops below a certain level, then this converter will no longer be able to provide the voltage required by the phone's electronics. When this happens - and it might be quite unpredictable if the battery is old - that voltage output by the DC converter will drop. This will kill the processor, and it will trigger a brown-out reset of some kind. And that will sure look like a crash, and that's what people will call it.
For international inter-currency transactions this is true. For transactions within currencies, I can do that to your bank account using my phone, zero fees, and it happens straight away. I think in the US the banks appear to have everyone over a barrel, which may well explain the interest in bitcoin (maybe).
You installed an OS upgrade, because you wanted the phone to do more than it did when you bought it. Revert back to the older iOS version, and it'll perform just like it did when it was new. The older iOS version IPSW files are easy to download, and installing them is just a matter of holding down option (or shift on a PC) when you click "update" in itunes.
replaceable batteries and expandable storage are on the required list for my next phone!
You'll be pretty lucky to find one - especially one that actually integrates the expandable storage with the phone's storage, so that you just magically have more space for everything. I'm not sure these even exist.
If you wanted to make a law around device performance, which I think might be a fairly sensible idea, then it should be that OS upgrades do not degrade performance of your device, and the OS upgrades must be available for some period of time after purchase (say, I don't know, five years - looking at you, Android). This is the trouble with the argument - that OS upgrades invariably bring new features to your device, but often at the expense of performance, people expect their device to keep getting more and more features the longer they own it. It's my view that the camera app, for instance, has no business whatever getting slower and slower to launch on each iOS update - and that is the kind of thing that could potentially be covered by consumer protection laws.
I don't see what it all has to do with "right to repair" though. The right to repair is long, long gone, it pretty much went away once we got microscopic surface mount components, and parts that you simply can't get your hands on.
If everything goes even slightly tits-up technologically speaking, then all of your examples will retain their value, due to their being useful - except no-one will care about moon rocks very much, due to their lack of utility.
I do understand what you're saying, but my point is that bitcoin is just too complicated, and far too reliant on an incredibly intricate and expensive worldwide network of machines, using huge amounts of electricity, and is fundamentally and completely without a use of any sort whatsoever, so that its current value cannot possibly be sustained.
Even moon rocks and dinosaur skulls are somewhat useful, insofar that one might study them and learn something new about the world, or the moon, or dinosaurs. Or even to just put them on a shelf and admire them. If the computers go away, just what are you going to do with your bitcoin?
Tobacco has value. A little ironically, its value is to provide a short-term pleasurable experience, before slowly killing you, but human beings being what they are - bacchanalian at heart - that's enough value for us.
Bitcoin has negative value. The electricity costs of running the network subtract from its net zero value. Some-one's paying for the electricity somewhere, and doing nothing whatever useful with it to boot, and this alone is enough to bring the thing crashing down.
The value of a US Dollar isn't due to the "strength" of the government backing it..........They're hard enough to counterfeit
These two statements are contradictory. The physical manifestation of the currency is hard to counterfeit precisely due to the strength of the government backing it. Counterfeiting the currency is illegal, and it's the government's strength that enforces this. The first statement is therefore false.
Manipulating markets isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Manipulating markets is precisely the thing that makes all modern economies actually function. Without it, as we see very often in unregulated markets, catastrophic cycles of boom and bust are the norm. With too little, those cycles still dominate.
They don't have a value because they are not useful. If a country's peoples decided, through their governments, to make bitcoin the official currency of their realm, and managed to solve all of its scaling problems (probably by centralising the entire infrastructure), then it still wouldn't have value (like regular money doesn't, as such), but it would become a terms in which we talk about value. It would also become the de-facto way in which value is transferred in that country, such as the value of your time spent in labour being transferred to another, who in turn increases your share of the world's resources.
However, this isn't likely to happen - if it does, then we'll just be talking about a new currency (like the Euro, for example), and we would no longer be talking about a useless chain of highly computationally expensive hashes, which is what bitcoin is really. That country would also suffer all the problems that going back to a gold standard has, and would be forced to abandon their currency, in favour of one that they can control.
Your comments about gold not being especially attractive are a little undermined by how much of it people buy for that purpose alone, and that's not the point anyway. Gold is only one of a whole world's worth of assets, it's just the one that's uppermost in people's minds when they think about value. People that store their wealth in assets don't just buy gold alone, they would diversify, and presumably trade on the way the relative value of those assets fluctuates, in order to (unfairly, many would argue) increase that wealth.
Rarity is neither a sufficient, nor a necessary condition for value. If something is so common that everyone has limitless access to it, then sure, its going to be hard to put a value on it. And rare things are often traded, but they fall in and out of favour quite easily and quickly, as people's personal tastes change. Whatever your tastes, the value of real assets doesn't change on that basis alone.
Gold does, because it's very useful, and it looks really nice, and it's quite hard to damage or destroy. Lots of other things have value too, often more value, such as a country's population, physical space on the ground, all the other elements, water, food, plastic, oil. etc etc. All these things have value.
In order to represent the value that these things possess, we attempt to measure their value in terms of each other. In order to have a functioning economy, we also invent an abstract measure of value - which we call money - and state the "true" value of a physical asset in terms of it. The supply of money is modified by a controlling government agency to attempt to manage the increase, decrease and movement of real assets in the world. Other economic systems, such as centrally planned communist ones, have tried to do the same thing without money, but it tends not to work very well. Perhaps it could, but people tend not to do what they're told, and money is a great and very convincing illusion.
So. Since bitcoin is nothing more or less than a particular arrangements of bits in a computer, and serves no other purpose, it cannot have value. Our abstract money systems don't have value either, but they do perform vital economic functions, and so we tolerate them, and very often conflate "money" and "value" in our minds, since it's difficult to have a conversation about value without having it in terms of money. This leads to silly arguments like "going to space is a waste of money, we should spend that money of feeding the hungry instead", as though one can eat rockets.
a formal in the mathematical sense, rather than the social sense, way for money to work.
No, we absolutely do not need this, since the whole entire function of money in the modern world is a social one. The reason the money supply is fiddled with by central government agencies is to try to manage an economy of supply and demand. Money is not a concrete object - trying to make modern money into a concrete thing will fail, because it cannot provide the vital governmental functions that real fiat currencies do.
I think most of the bitcoin trading activities is due to trading bots, and the whole thing is one giant and peculiar illusion of value created by computer programs exchanging data with each other.
But whatever it is, there can be no such thing as investment in bitcoin, because doing so is precisely the opposite of useful work. If everyone invested all their money in bitcoin, we would all starve, because there would be no effort left over for growing food. The whole entire enterprise is a monumentally stupid idea.
If we still use money in the way that it's used today in a thousand year's time, I'll be totally astonished. I mean, I'll have been dead for a millennia, but I'll be one very astonished dead person.
As human beings we don't understand the function of money very well, and we keep inventing more and complex ways to move it around, and its derivatives. If we ever realise that money is a signal, not an object - that its fluctuations are not indicative of wealth in any meaningful sense - we might have a chance of hitting that next millennia.
This is true. The difference is that even after the US dollar crashes, it's still not worth nothing. The US still exists. When bitcoin goes pop, it will be worth nothing, because it cannot be exchanged at all without an immensely expensive and complex worldwide network of computers.
But this will only work if the price continues to rise. Once all the coins are found, who's going to bother continuing to run their mining rigs? The only answers that I've found are that running the blockchain will become so cheap that everyone's smartphones are doing it all the time (which will fairly obviously never happen, it's not like you're going to get any better algorithms for hashing - it's brute force, and if it ever becomes cheaper than brute force, then the entire thing will collapse anyway, because mining being hard is the entire basis of the enterprise), and that transaction fees will cover maintaining the blockchain.
If the system becomes centralised, then you'll basically have this form of currently, with a completely limited supply, and no backing of any sort whatever. Not assets, not a government, nothing. I find this hard to imagine.
which is the gold standard (ha!) if you will of cryptocurrencies.
Why's that? Is it because you say so, or because bitcoin was there first, or for some other reason? Is there anything that prevents another taking its place?
Also, I'm not too bad at distinguishing gold-colored plastic, from actual gold. And given some weighing scales, I suspect I'd also be able to determine any gold-colored objects from actual gold too.
Slashdot Mirror
And I understand the usability and draw of scope enclosing lambdas, but before we had that it was no big matter to use a simple function pointer with a data structure or define an interface and implement a class that would contain the enclosed data variables then use an instance of that class for the function. To me the lambda capability was never missed. I 'm happy to use it but I find the syntax a bit awkward.
I know it seems picky and silly to disagree with what's obviously a personal preference, but surely the new lambda syntax is less awkward that the alternatives you were forced in the past to use? You had to create (named) classes and interfaces for specific cases, or you had to derive (named) classes from existing interfaces, or you had to create a (again, named) class with a specifically named function in it.
And now, we have a language for which the code
[](){}();
Cleanly compiles, and helpfully does nothing at all. What's not to like?
We have spare CPU cycles today, we don't need to code for the bare metal to get the performance we need.
Great points, but I must take issue with this. We don't have spare CPU cycles, because this is exactly equivalent to saying we have electricity to spare, which we most certainly don't, especially on mobile.
Language safey features do not necessarily need to come at a run-time cost in any case, since well-written C++ is about as safe and fast as it gets. Unless you count the hours it ends up taking to compile...
You're both right. A battery is (more or less) a perfect voltage source, in series with a resistor. From that perspective, the current you see, and the voltage you see, are just different ways of looking at the same thing.
You can't 'ramp up the current draw' at a given voltage, because the voltage across the battery will change precisely in sync with the current, according to ohms law and the nominal battery voltage. Inside an iPhone, of course, there is complex power management circuitry that will attempt to provide a fixed voltage, at whatever current is required, using a DC to DC converter of some clever type. When the power - the current multiplied by the voltage - available from the battery drops below a certain level, then this converter will no longer be able to provide the voltage required by the phone's electronics. When this happens - and it might be quite unpredictable if the battery is old - that voltage output by the DC converter will drop. This will kill the processor, and it will trigger a brown-out reset of some kind. And that will sure look like a crash, and that's what people will call it.
For international inter-currency transactions this is true. For transactions within currencies, I can do that to your bank account using my phone, zero fees, and it happens straight away. I think in the US the banks appear to have everyone over a barrel, which may well explain the interest in bitcoin (maybe).
You installed an OS upgrade, because you wanted the phone to do more than it did when you bought it. Revert back to the older iOS version, and it'll perform just like it did when it was new. The older iOS version IPSW files are easy to download, and installing them is just a matter of holding down option (or shift on a PC) when you click "update" in itunes.
replaceable batteries and expandable storage are on the required list for my next phone!
You'll be pretty lucky to find one - especially one that actually integrates the expandable storage with the phone's storage, so that you just magically have more space for everything. I'm not sure these even exist.
If you wanted to make a law around device performance, which I think might be a fairly sensible idea, then it should be that OS upgrades do not degrade performance of your device, and the OS upgrades must be available for some period of time after purchase (say, I don't know, five years - looking at you, Android). This is the trouble with the argument - that OS upgrades invariably bring new features to your device, but often at the expense of performance, people expect their device to keep getting more and more features the longer they own it. It's my view that the camera app, for instance, has no business whatever getting slower and slower to launch on each iOS update - and that is the kind of thing that could potentially be covered by consumer protection laws.
I don't see what it all has to do with "right to repair" though. The right to repair is long, long gone, it pretty much went away once we got microscopic surface mount components, and parts that you simply can't get your hands on.
If everything goes even slightly tits-up technologically speaking, then all of your examples will retain their value, due to their being useful - except no-one will care about moon rocks very much, due to their lack of utility.
I do understand what you're saying, but my point is that bitcoin is just too complicated, and far too reliant on an incredibly intricate and expensive worldwide network of machines, using huge amounts of electricity, and is fundamentally and completely without a use of any sort whatsoever, so that its current value cannot possibly be sustained.
Even moon rocks and dinosaur skulls are somewhat useful, insofar that one might study them and learn something new about the world, or the moon, or dinosaurs. Or even to just put them on a shelf and admire them. If the computers go away, just what are you going to do with your bitcoin?
Tobacco has value. A little ironically, its value is to provide a short-term pleasurable experience, before slowly killing you, but human beings being what they are - bacchanalian at heart - that's enough value for us.
Bitcoin has negative value. The electricity costs of running the network subtract from its net zero value. Some-one's paying for the electricity somewhere, and doing nothing whatever useful with it to boot, and this alone is enough to bring the thing crashing down.
The value of a US Dollar isn't due to the "strength" of the government backing it... .... ...They're hard enough to counterfeit
These two statements are contradictory. The physical manifestation of the currency is hard to counterfeit precisely due to the strength of the government backing it. Counterfeiting the currency is illegal, and it's the government's strength that enforces this. The first statement is therefore false.
Manipulating markets isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Manipulating markets is precisely the thing that makes all modern economies actually function. Without it, as we see very often in unregulated markets, catastrophic cycles of boom and bust are the norm. With too little, those cycles still dominate.
You're probably a couple of orders of magnitude too high in that estimate, if not more.
and a rise in currencies that aren't dependent upon miners and have low/no transaction fees.
You mean like all the current, existing currencies?
They don't have a value because they are not useful. If a country's peoples decided, through their governments, to make bitcoin the official currency of their realm, and managed to solve all of its scaling problems (probably by centralising the entire infrastructure), then it still wouldn't have value (like regular money doesn't, as such), but it would become a terms in which we talk about value. It would also become the de-facto way in which value is transferred in that country, such as the value of your time spent in labour being transferred to another, who in turn increases your share of the world's resources.
However, this isn't likely to happen - if it does, then we'll just be talking about a new currency (like the Euro, for example), and we would no longer be talking about a useless chain of highly computationally expensive hashes, which is what bitcoin is really. That country would also suffer all the problems that going back to a gold standard has, and would be forced to abandon their currency, in favour of one that they can control.
Your comments about gold not being especially attractive are a little undermined by how much of it people buy for that purpose alone, and that's not the point anyway. Gold is only one of a whole world's worth of assets, it's just the one that's uppermost in people's minds when they think about value. People that store their wealth in assets don't just buy gold alone, they would diversify, and presumably trade on the way the relative value of those assets fluctuates, in order to (unfairly, many would argue) increase that wealth.
Rarity is neither a sufficient, nor a necessary condition for value. If something is so common that everyone has limitless access to it, then sure, its going to be hard to put a value on it. And rare things are often traded, but they fall in and out of favour quite easily and quickly, as people's personal tastes change. Whatever your tastes, the value of real assets doesn't change on that basis alone.
No, bitcoin does not have value.
Gold does, because it's very useful, and it looks really nice, and it's quite hard to damage or destroy. Lots of other things have value too, often more value, such as a country's population, physical space on the ground, all the other elements, water, food, plastic, oil. etc etc. All these things have value.
In order to represent the value that these things possess, we attempt to measure their value in terms of each other. In order to have a functioning economy, we also invent an abstract measure of value - which we call money - and state the "true" value of a physical asset in terms of it. The supply of money is modified by a controlling government agency to attempt to manage the increase, decrease and movement of real assets in the world. Other economic systems, such as centrally planned communist ones, have tried to do the same thing without money, but it tends not to work very well. Perhaps it could, but people tend not to do what they're told, and money is a great and very convincing illusion.
So. Since bitcoin is nothing more or less than a particular arrangements of bits in a computer, and serves no other purpose, it cannot have value. Our abstract money systems don't have value either, but they do perform vital economic functions, and so we tolerate them, and very often conflate "money" and "value" in our minds, since it's difficult to have a conversation about value without having it in terms of money. This leads to silly arguments like "going to space is a waste of money, we should spend that money of feeding the hungry instead", as though one can eat rockets.
a formal in the mathematical sense, rather than the social sense, way for money to work.
No, we absolutely do not need this, since the whole entire function of money in the modern world is a social one. The reason the money supply is fiddled with by central government agencies is to try to manage an economy of supply and demand. Money is not a concrete object - trying to make modern money into a concrete thing will fail, because it cannot provide the vital governmental functions that real fiat currencies do.
Probably. Neither of them have the least thing to do with the global money supply though.
You could tattoo the seed to get your wallet on your foot and never lose access to it.
Sometimes, your foot comes off.
I think most of the bitcoin trading activities is due to trading bots, and the whole thing is one giant and peculiar illusion of value created by computer programs exchanging data with each other.
But whatever it is, there can be no such thing as investment in bitcoin, because doing so is precisely the opposite of useful work. If everyone invested all their money in bitcoin, we would all starve, because there would be no effort left over for growing food. The whole entire enterprise is a monumentally stupid idea.
GUI frameworks are an old, well-studied area of programming
At yet, mostly, they still are all awful.
It's exactly how I feel about twitter:
Tweet storm
I'm pretty sure that in a thousand years
If we still use money in the way that it's used today in a thousand year's time, I'll be totally astonished. I mean, I'll have been dead for a millennia, but I'll be one very astonished dead person.
As human beings we don't understand the function of money very well, and we keep inventing more and complex ways to move it around, and its derivatives. If we ever realise that money is a signal, not an object - that its fluctuations are not indicative of wealth in any meaningful sense - we might have a chance of hitting that next millennia.
This is true. The difference is that even after the US dollar crashes, it's still not worth nothing. The US still exists. When bitcoin goes pop, it will be worth nothing, because it cannot be exchanged at all without an immensely expensive and complex worldwide network of computers.
But this will only work if the price continues to rise. Once all the coins are found, who's going to bother continuing to run their mining rigs? The only answers that I've found are that running the blockchain will become so cheap that everyone's smartphones are doing it all the time (which will fairly obviously never happen, it's not like you're going to get any better algorithms for hashing - it's brute force, and if it ever becomes cheaper than brute force, then the entire thing will collapse anyway, because mining being hard is the entire basis of the enterprise), and that transaction fees will cover maintaining the blockchain.
If the system becomes centralised, then you'll basically have this form of currently, with a completely limited supply, and no backing of any sort whatever. Not assets, not a government, nothing. I find this hard to imagine.
which is the gold standard (ha!) if you will of cryptocurrencies.
Why's that? Is it because you say so, or because bitcoin was there first, or for some other reason? Is there anything that prevents another taking its place?
Also, I'm not too bad at distinguishing gold-colored plastic, from actual gold. And given some weighing scales, I suspect I'd also be able to determine any gold-colored objects from actual gold too.
How will it be possible then, given the list of crytocurrencies available, for any one of them to become accepted everywhere?