The human eye has a resolution of 1 arc-minute (1/60th of a degree), and so on a display that fills 90 degrees horizontally you can resolve 5400 pixels. The retina and brain do some fancy processing so that you can detect narrow linear features smaller than that. It's a kind of image sharpening, but it goes beyond the light sensing cells in the eye. For non-linear features like a checkerboard, 1 arc-minute is the limit.
So unless we are talking surround-screen, there isn't much reason to go past 4K, and no reason to go past 8K. In fact, you only see a small part of your field of view at full resolution. Stare at some icon or symbol on this page, and try to read anything else without moving your eyes. You can't. Your eyes have variable resolution away from the fovea, and make up for it by moving around.
The story is deeper than that. The Chinese liked to get paid in silver for their products (tea, porcelain, silk). Unfortunately silver is what the British money was made of (the pound sterling meant a pound of sterling silver = 92.5% pure). So it was creating a currency shortage. Britain thus wanted a product to balance trade and stop the silver outflow. Opium was that product.
The Chinese didn't want their people hooked on Opium, so they made it illegal. British trading companies that supplied the opium (it was grown in India at the time) formed a cartel to bring it in illegally, thus becoming the first drug cartel. When their people got arrested and goods seized, the British government forced China to submit in what is known as the Opium Wars. They acquired Hong Kong in the process. Later, the now legalized trading companies needed financing for the ships to deliver the expanded opium trade. So they founded the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Company. Now known as HSBC, one of the largest banks in the world, it is no stranger to laundering money for cartels, because it was*founded* by drug cartel members. To this day they print paper bank notes (currency) for Hong Kong. This makes money laundering really easy, because they can give you a suitcase of brand new money, with no traceable history.
> Modern heavy weaponry is not allowed to be owned and without it no citizenry could stand up against a government willing to use said heavy weaponry against their citizens.
This is a stupid argument. Anyone with an understanding of military doctrine knows you don't fight toe-to-toe with a well-armed force. You fight asymmetrically, and go for their weak spots. For example, infect some MRE's (field rations) with a deadly toxin, but don't announce which ones. They then waste a lot of time and energy figuring out how to feed the troops. You can similarly contaminate fuel supplies upstream of the supply depots. It's one thing to detect an IED in a dirt road, the metal parts stand out. It's quite another to detect one underneath a metal manhole cover. The list goes on.
They aren't, ever, for the same reason you have more than one kind of tool in a toolbox. 3D printers are very useful, but they can't wind electric motor coils or populate circuit boards with chips, both of which are needed in a decent machine. A collection of different machines, however, can collectively make the parts for each other, and they can all be controlled by shared software and parts files. Such a collection is called a "machine shop" or "factory", though, rather than a 3D printer.
> no way in hell I would have shelled out the $90 (+$10 for HD) they were charging for it.
I don't watch professional sports, but I do see my neighbor's house fill up with half a dozen cars at the appropriate times. I always assumed for PPV events, people would just pack in at whoever's house had the best TV and couches and split the cost. $16 a head is not too painful.
Just ask them how they feel about Elon Musk - his companies are manufacturing and installing solar panels, batteries, and electric cars, and he's worth billions personally.
> Why don't you show how the current climate changing has anything to do with mankind. The burden of proof of that is on you.
That the concentration of CO2 has risen by 40%, and that CO2 prevents heat from escaping the Earth, thus warming it, are facts that don't need proving. The issue is where is the CO2 coming from? Along with the total concentration going up, the ratio of Carbon-13 to Carbon-12 is changing. Plants slightly prefer the lighter isotope, because it diffuses and reacts faster. The only sources of enough plant-based carbon to account for the 120 ppm added added to the atmosphere are fossil fuels (which were plants once), and deforestation. Both of those are human caused changes. Inorganic sources of CO2, like volcanoes, don't care about isotopes. They don't cause a shift in the ratio, and thus are not the source.
Ice cores keep a record of volcanic eruptions (dust gets trapped), and CO2 levels (trapped bubbles), and the respective isotopes. The oxygen component also has isotopes, that let you measure temperature (water with Oxygen-16 evaporates faster than Oxygen-18). Trees record weather patterns in their growth rings, and solar activity in their Carbon-14 content. Combine all of these, and we have a good historical record going back about a million years and four ice ages. The current changes look nothing like the natual cycles in the past.
Oh, the fossil fuel industry believes in science when it comes to geology and chemistry, that's where they make their money. I think deep in their hearts they believe in climate change too, but push the anti- view simply because it will give them a few more years to sell their product. The writing is already on the wall. India just raised their solar target to 8% of electric capacity in the next few years. China is installing 20 GW this year. Dubai for fuck's sake is installing massive amounts of solar panels, and they are a middle Eastern oil state. Courtesy of their sunny climate, the newest solar farms are coming in cheaper than fossil fuel. Renewable energy is being put in for the most unstoppable reason - it's becoming cheaper than the alternatives.
> Contrary to all the theories that – that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn't happened," said Cruz."
Being from a hot state, Cruz should know that a drink doesn't warm up while the ice is melting. Melting ice takes the equivalent of raising water temperature by 70C, that's why it is so effective in your cold drinks. Well, the world's ice is melting - the Arctic ocean, Greenland, northern permafrost, mountain glaciers, and in the last few years Antarctica. That's soaking up a lot of the heating. And what he's talking about is air temperature, while a 5000 times larger heat sink, the oceans, are being ignored. They are also warming, as evidenced by ocean temperature measurements, but also by global average sea level rise as the water warms and expands. Once the atmosphere warmed a few degrees, which it has, on balance heat is flowing from the air to the water and ice. But the atmosphere is the smallest heat sink. The heat is going elsewhere.
> I know, right? It wasn't aliens that built the pyramids, or anything supernatural. It's stupid to think that.
Exactly. A civil engineer wanted to figure out how the pyramids were built, so he went around asking the experts - Egyptian stonemasons (modern ones). The most plausible answer they came up with is the "shadouf" - the lever and water bag device for raising water from the Nile to irrigate fields. Pretty much everyone at the time would have been familiar with it. To raise stones for the pyramids, just build a bigger, sturdier version. A 5:1 leverage ratio makes a 2 ton block an 800 lb lift. A bunch of workers hanging their body weight on the lever end would raise the stone a foot or two. You prop the stone with some timbers, shorten the lifting rope, and repeat. When the stone gets to the next level of the pyramid, you rotate the lever arm horizontally and pivot the stone to the next step. A series of shadoufs like this could raise a stream of stones step by step up the pyramid.
In comparison to dragging the stones up a giant dirt ramp (which there is no evidence for), levering the stones up is immensely easier. You merely climb up one step, put your foot in a rope loop, and let gravity do the rest.
Worldwide, installations are expected to increase from 44.2 GW last year to 57 GW this year ( http://www.pv-tech.org/news/gl... ). I think we have reached en masse.
> An alternate, plausible chain of events is that NASA originally, disagreed with ESAB and felt the floor fix was unnecessary in the first place
That's not plausible if you understand where the Michoud Assembly Facility is. It's next to New Orleans, and all of the ground around there is soft and swampy. If you are building anything heavy or that needs to be rigid, it needs heavy foundation reinforcement (thick slab, pilings, etc.).
Solar thermal with hot-rock storage can be nearly around the clock, and modern vacuum-powder insulation can keep the rocks warm a long time.
Also, everyone seems to forget that big hydroelectric dams are massive structures. They aren't going anywhere for centuries. Replacing the generators and water turbines is a small job compared to pouring a million cubic yards of concrete. So even if you lost the tech level to run the dams, you could regain it relatively easily, and have lots of power to work with.
> the forward looking saudis will do what they have to do to be able to compete in the world
The Middle East and Africa are rapidly deploying solar panels ( http://www.solarbuzz.com/sites... ) They have an excellent climate for it, and they know the oil won't last forever. The Sun will.
Solar cement kilns have been demonstrated. The limestone and shale that are calcined to make Portland Cement don't care how they are heated, They just need to reach a high enough temperature for a while. We mostly use fossil fuels today for the process, but concentrated sunlight works fine.
A combination of solar furnaces (mirrors and a steering mechanism to track the Sun), and thermal depolymerization ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) can break down most anything organic into crude oil type feedstocks. That includes items like paper and animal byproducts. There is lots and lots of feedstock buried in landfills. So to reboot that part of civilization, you can use those ingredients.
In the aerospace industry, we had metadata around the actual design documents, and a process for incorporating changes. Some examples are:
* A drawing tree. A complete airplane or other complicated product had a top level drawing, that called out major assemblies (wings, landing gear, engine installation, etc). The major assembly drawings then called out sub-assemblies, in a tree structure, until you get to the parts level. Documents tied to a particular drawing (like engine installation procedure) got the same number as the drawing with a -002, -003, etc added, so you could track what they go with.
* Interface drawings and documents. Between assemblies you defined the interfaces between them - mechanical, dimensional, electrical, etc. You can't change your side of the interface before first consulting the people on the other side, and updating the interface data. That's how you ensure the pieces go together later.
* Requirements tracking. For example, the 747 landing gear has to support a takeoff weight of 880,000 pounds. Therefore there has to be a weights tracking process that assigns weight budgets to the various parts, and reports status back up the tree. Otherwise you can end up with a plane that's too heavy for the landing gear. Anywhere else there is a critical design value with contributions from various parts, you use this method.
All this metadata has to be passed around along with the actual parts drawings and software code. If you don't, then anything too complicated for one person to design is likely to need rework when the pieces of the design are merged.
Most makerspaces are hobbyist-level workshops. They don't usually have industrial grade software or fabrication machines available, because those are expensive. I'm working on the idea of a "MakerNet", where instead of a converted warehouse space with hobbyist tools and home-made workbenches, you have more commercial-grade machines spread around, either run as small businesses, or owned by groups of more serious hobbyists. For example, a $6,000 lathe might be split among half a dozen people. When you have a more serious project to do, you send the files for the various pieces to the respective machines that can make them. You also send payment, or deduct from a network account, to pay for the raw materials and other items you use up.
So higher quality machines, and people who regularly use them, therefore better output. But networked and distributed cost, so it is affordable on a hobbyist budget, and you have access to machines you can't afford on your own. Makerspaces can certainly be part of such a network. They would just need to have some machines and people that are able to do the better quality work.
That's what bank safety deposit boxes are for. Offsite, hard to break into, more or less fireproof through sheer mass, even if the building around it burns. Ask the bank about how thick the walls are, though. Class 3 is recommended (12 inches thick concrete), with additional outside fireproofing.
> Tape isn't dead, but it's not worth it for small quantities
The cheapest LTO-6 drive on NewEgg is $1500, and Sony has the tapes for $18/TB. External hard drives are running about $35/TB. So you need ~90 TB for cost crossover on sheer data volume, not considering usability and reliability. So I would agree, with those kind of prices, you might want to *start* thinking about tape when you get to 100 TB, because 1 drive isn't very reliable. It might work for backup storage, since you can get by with a broken tape drive for however long your backup cycle is.
Nope. A "bitcoin" unit is just an entry of 1.0000 in the transaction ledger known as the "block chain". The block chain is just a bunch of files listing every bitcoin transaction ever. My copy is 36 GB at the moment.
The Bitcoin Network is what makes it possible to write new transactions into the ledger in a secure way. Secure means nobody can rewrite old entries in the ledger, and everybody can verify the contents are correct. Only the person with the private cryptographic key to an address can send the balance in that address to someone else. Without the network, the ledger could not be updated, making the balances recorded there useless.
> First, a Bitcoin in of itself has no real-world value.
Neither does a UPS shipping label. It's the network of trucks and distribution centers that give the shipping token (the label) value. They are what enable moving a package from one place to another. That's a useful service, and hence people are willing to pay for the label.
Similarly, a bitcoin is merely an entry of 1.0000 units in a big distributed ledger (the block chain). It's the network of relay nodes and miners that give the bitcoin token value. They are what enable moving monetary value from one place to another. That's a useful service, and hence people are willing to pay for the tokens. Other parts of the ecosystem add more usefulness, and thus more value. Websites, wallet software, custom hardware, smartphone apps, exchanges, merchants who accept bitcoin, etc.
The transaction protocol also includes a scripting language, so you can make your money programmable. How useful is that? People have only touched the surface of what you can do with that capability.
Slashdot Mirror
The human eye has a resolution of 1 arc-minute (1/60th of a degree), and so on a display that fills 90 degrees horizontally you can resolve 5400 pixels. The retina and brain do some fancy processing so that you can detect narrow linear features smaller than that. It's a kind of image sharpening, but it goes beyond the light sensing cells in the eye. For non-linear features like a checkerboard, 1 arc-minute is the limit.
So unless we are talking surround-screen, there isn't much reason to go past 4K, and no reason to go past 8K. In fact, you only see a small part of your field of view at full resolution. Stare at some icon or symbol on this page, and try to read anything else without moving your eyes. You can't. Your eyes have variable resolution away from the fovea, and make up for it by moving around.
The story is deeper than that. The Chinese liked to get paid in silver for their products (tea, porcelain, silk). Unfortunately silver is what the British money was made of (the pound sterling meant a pound of sterling silver = 92.5% pure). So it was creating a currency shortage. Britain thus wanted a product to balance trade and stop the silver outflow. Opium was that product.
The Chinese didn't want their people hooked on Opium, so they made it illegal. British trading companies that supplied the opium (it was grown in India at the time) formed a cartel to bring it in illegally, thus becoming the first drug cartel. When their people got arrested and goods seized, the British government forced China to submit in what is known as the Opium Wars. They acquired Hong Kong in the process. Later, the now legalized trading companies needed financing for the ships to deliver the expanded opium trade. So they founded the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Company. Now known as HSBC, one of the largest banks in the world, it is no stranger to laundering money for cartels, because it was*founded* by drug cartel members. To this day they print paper bank notes (currency) for Hong Kong. This makes money laundering really easy, because they can give you a suitcase of brand new money, with no traceable history.
> Modern heavy weaponry is not allowed to be owned and without it no citizenry could stand up against a government willing to use said heavy weaponry against their citizens.
This is a stupid argument. Anyone with an understanding of military doctrine knows you don't fight toe-to-toe with a well-armed force. You fight asymmetrically, and go for their weak spots. For example, infect some MRE's (field rations) with a deadly toxin, but don't announce which ones. They then waste a lot of time and energy figuring out how to feed the troops. You can similarly contaminate fuel supplies upstream of the supply depots. It's one thing to detect an IED in a dirt road, the metal parts stand out. It's quite another to detect one underneath a metal manhole cover. The list goes on.
They aren't, ever, for the same reason you have more than one kind of tool in a toolbox. 3D printers are very useful, but they can't wind electric motor coils or populate circuit boards with chips, both of which are needed in a decent machine. A collection of different machines, however, can collectively make the parts for each other, and they can all be controlled by shared software and parts files. Such a collection is called a "machine shop" or "factory", though, rather than a 3D printer.
> no way in hell I would have shelled out the $90 (+$10 for HD) they were charging for it.
I don't watch professional sports, but I do see my neighbor's house fill up with half a dozen cars at the appropriate times. I always assumed for PPV events, people would just pack in at whoever's house had the best TV and couches and split the cost. $16 a head is not too painful.
Just ask them how they feel about Elon Musk - his companies are manufacturing and installing solar panels, batteries, and electric cars, and he's worth billions personally.
> Why don't you show how the current climate changing has anything to do with mankind. The burden of proof of that is on you.
That the concentration of CO2 has risen by 40%, and that CO2 prevents heat from escaping the Earth, thus warming it, are facts that don't need proving. The issue is where is the CO2 coming from? Along with the total concentration going up, the ratio of Carbon-13 to Carbon-12 is changing. Plants slightly prefer the lighter isotope, because it diffuses and reacts faster. The only sources of enough plant-based carbon to account for the 120 ppm added added to the atmosphere are fossil fuels (which were plants once), and deforestation. Both of those are human caused changes. Inorganic sources of CO2, like volcanoes, don't care about isotopes. They don't cause a shift in the ratio, and thus are not the source.
Ice cores keep a record of volcanic eruptions (dust gets trapped), and CO2 levels (trapped bubbles), and the respective isotopes. The oxygen component also has isotopes, that let you measure temperature (water with Oxygen-16 evaporates faster than Oxygen-18). Trees record weather patterns in their growth rings, and solar activity in their Carbon-14 content. Combine all of these, and we have a good historical record going back about a million years and four ice ages. The current changes look nothing like the natual cycles in the past.
> These guys deny science because of greed.
Oh, the fossil fuel industry believes in science when it comes to geology and chemistry, that's where they make their money. I think deep in their hearts they believe in climate change too, but push the anti- view simply because it will give them a few more years to sell their product. The writing is already on the wall. India just raised their solar target to 8% of electric capacity in the next few years. China is installing 20 GW this year. Dubai for fuck's sake is installing massive amounts of solar panels, and they are a middle Eastern oil state. Courtesy of their sunny climate, the newest solar farms are coming in cheaper than fossil fuel. Renewable energy is being put in for the most unstoppable reason - it's becoming cheaper than the alternatives.
> Contrary to all the theories that – that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn't happened," said Cruz."
Being from a hot state, Cruz should know that a drink doesn't warm up while the ice is melting. Melting ice takes the equivalent of raising water temperature by 70C, that's why it is so effective in your cold drinks. Well, the world's ice is melting - the Arctic ocean, Greenland, northern permafrost, mountain glaciers, and in the last few years Antarctica. That's soaking up a lot of the heating. And what he's talking about is air temperature, while a 5000 times larger heat sink, the oceans, are being ignored. They are also warming, as evidenced by ocean temperature measurements, but also by global average sea level rise as the water warms and expands. Once the atmosphere warmed a few degrees, which it has, on balance heat is flowing from the air to the water and ice. But the atmosphere is the smallest heat sink. The heat is going elsewhere.
> I know, right? It wasn't aliens that built the pyramids, or anything supernatural. It's stupid to think that.
Exactly. A civil engineer wanted to figure out how the pyramids were built, so he went around asking the experts - Egyptian stonemasons (modern ones). The most plausible answer they came up with is the "shadouf" - the lever and water bag device for raising water from the Nile to irrigate fields. Pretty much everyone at the time would have been familiar with it. To raise stones for the pyramids, just build a bigger, sturdier version. A 5:1 leverage ratio makes a 2 ton block an 800 lb lift. A bunch of workers hanging their body weight on the lever end would raise the stone a foot or two. You prop the stone with some timbers, shorten the lifting rope, and repeat. When the stone gets to the next level of the pyramid, you rotate the lever arm horizontally and pivot the stone to the next step. A series of shadoufs like this could raise a stream of stones step by step up the pyramid.
In comparison to dragging the stones up a giant dirt ramp (which there is no evidence for), levering the stones up is immensely easier. You merely climb up one step, put your foot in a rope loop, and let gravity do the rest.
We are an oligarchy of the rich and powerful. Corporations and government are tools to maintain the oligarchy.
(An oligarchy is rule by a small group of people)
> Now they're just waiting for the products to arrive en masse.
For the Phillippines, that was 2014. They went from 3 MW installed in 2013 to 117 MW in 2014 ( http://www.pv-tech.org/news/ih... ).
Worldwide, installations are expected to increase from 44.2 GW last year to 57 GW this year ( http://www.pv-tech.org/news/gl... ). I think we have reached en masse.
> An alternate, plausible chain of events is that NASA originally, disagreed with ESAB and felt the floor fix was unnecessary in the first place
That's not plausible if you understand where the Michoud Assembly Facility is. It's next to New Orleans, and all of the ground around there is soft and swampy. If you are building anything heavy or that needs to be rigid, it needs heavy foundation reinforcement (thick slab, pilings, etc.).
> While they'd be intermittent
Solar thermal with hot-rock storage can be nearly around the clock, and modern vacuum-powder insulation can keep the rocks warm a long time.
Also, everyone seems to forget that big hydroelectric dams are massive structures. They aren't going anywhere for centuries. Replacing the generators and water turbines is a small job compared to pouring a million cubic yards of concrete. So even if you lost the tech level to run the dams, you could regain it relatively easily, and have lots of power to work with.
> the forward looking saudis will do what they have to do to be able to compete in the world
The Middle East and Africa are rapidly deploying solar panels ( http://www.solarbuzz.com/sites... ) They have an excellent climate for it, and they know the oil won't last forever. The Sun will.
Solar cement kilns have been demonstrated. The limestone and shale that are calcined to make Portland Cement don't care how they are heated, They just need to reach a high enough temperature for a while. We mostly use fossil fuels today for the process, but concentrated sunlight works fine.
A combination of solar furnaces (mirrors and a steering mechanism to track the Sun), and thermal depolymerization ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) can break down most anything organic into crude oil type feedstocks. That includes items like paper and animal byproducts. There is lots and lots of feedstock buried in landfills. So to reboot that part of civilization, you can use those ingredients.
In the aerospace industry, we had metadata around the actual design documents, and a process for incorporating changes. Some examples are:
* A drawing tree. A complete airplane or other complicated product had a top level drawing, that called out major assemblies (wings, landing gear, engine installation, etc). The major assembly drawings then called out sub-assemblies, in a tree structure, until you get to the parts level. Documents tied to a particular drawing (like engine installation procedure) got the same number as the drawing with a -002, -003, etc added, so you could track what they go with.
* Interface drawings and documents. Between assemblies you defined the interfaces between them - mechanical, dimensional, electrical, etc. You can't change your side of the interface before first consulting the people on the other side, and updating the interface data. That's how you ensure the pieces go together later.
* Requirements tracking. For example, the 747 landing gear has to support a takeoff weight of 880,000 pounds. Therefore there has to be a weights tracking process that assigns weight budgets to the various parts, and reports status back up the tree. Otherwise you can end up with a plane that's too heavy for the landing gear. Anywhere else there is a critical design value with contributions from various parts, you use this method.
All this metadata has to be passed around along with the actual parts drawings and software code. If you don't, then anything too complicated for one person to design is likely to need rework when the pieces of the design are merged.
Most makerspaces are hobbyist-level workshops. They don't usually have industrial grade software or fabrication machines available, because those are expensive. I'm working on the idea of a "MakerNet", where instead of a converted warehouse space with hobbyist tools and home-made workbenches, you have more commercial-grade machines spread around, either run as small businesses, or owned by groups of more serious hobbyists. For example, a $6,000 lathe might be split among half a dozen people. When you have a more serious project to do, you send the files for the various pieces to the respective machines that can make them. You also send payment, or deduct from a network account, to pay for the raw materials and other items you use up.
So higher quality machines, and people who regularly use them, therefore better output. But networked and distributed cost, so it is affordable on a hobbyist budget, and you have access to machines you can't afford on your own. Makerspaces can certainly be part of such a network. They would just need to have some machines and people that are able to do the better quality work.
Apparently moisture farmers and 'vaporators can be a real thing on Mars.
Perhaps the water is being insulated by the eddy of plastic trash in the central Pacific?
That's what bank safety deposit boxes are for. Offsite, hard to break into, more or less fireproof through sheer mass, even if the building around it burns. Ask the bank about how thick the walls are, though. Class 3 is recommended (12 inches thick concrete), with additional outside fireproofing.
> Tape isn't dead, but it's not worth it for small quantities
The cheapest LTO-6 drive on NewEgg is $1500, and Sony has the tapes for $18/TB. External hard drives are running about $35/TB. So you need ~90 TB for cost crossover on sheer data volume, not considering usability and reliability. So I would agree, with those kind of prices, you might want to *start* thinking about tape when you get to 100 TB, because 1 drive isn't very reliable. It might work for backup storage, since you can get by with a broken tape drive for however long your backup cycle is.
> That is completely self-referential.
Nope. A "bitcoin" unit is just an entry of 1.0000 in the transaction ledger known as the "block chain". The block chain is just a bunch of files listing every bitcoin transaction ever. My copy is 36 GB at the moment.
The Bitcoin Network is what makes it possible to write new transactions into the ledger in a secure way. Secure means nobody can rewrite old entries in the ledger, and everybody can verify the contents are correct. Only the person with the private cryptographic key to an address can send the balance in that address to someone else. Without the network, the ledger could not be updated, making the balances recorded there useless.
> First, a Bitcoin in of itself has no real-world value.
Neither does a UPS shipping label. It's the network of trucks and distribution centers that give the shipping token (the label) value. They are what enable moving a package from one place to another. That's a useful service, and hence people are willing to pay for the label.
Similarly, a bitcoin is merely an entry of 1.0000 units in a big distributed ledger (the block chain). It's the network of relay nodes and miners that give the bitcoin token value. They are what enable moving monetary value from one place to another. That's a useful service, and hence people are willing to pay for the tokens. Other parts of the ecosystem add more usefulness, and thus more value. Websites, wallet software, custom hardware, smartphone apps, exchanges, merchants who accept bitcoin, etc.
The transaction protocol also includes a scripting language, so you can make your money programmable. How useful is that? People have only touched the surface of what you can do with that capability.