For that matter, why is no one able to identify "Satoshi Nakamoto", the creator of bitcoin? Whoever that is holds about a million bitcoins, because they were mining back before anyone else was, and the difficulty of generating a block was trivial. The block chain shows those original coins have never been moved. So unless they tossed away the wallet file, their balance is worth nearly a billion dollars. Thus identifying Satoshi to beat the password out of him would be a financial gold mine, plus the new media would like to do stories.
Branson immediately converts the ticket sale to local currency (dollars or pounds, whichever they use). That way they can provide a refund if the buyer decides they don't really want to go into space. I don't know if Virgin Galactic is using a payment processor like BitPay or Coinbase, but those companies accept bitcoin on behalf of merchants, convert to local currency, and deposit that to your bank account daily. The exchange rate gets updated in real time, like you can see on this site:
The point of currency is to solve the "Coincidence of Wants" problem of barter. In pure barter, you have to find someone to trade with who both wants what you have to trade, and has what you want to get. Currency introduces a generally accepted intermediary. You trade away what you have, which for most people is their labor time, for currency. Then later you trade your currency for stuff you want. By separating the halves of a barter transaction, you make it easier for trades to happen, because you only have to satisfy one condition at a time.
Anything that people generally accept as an intermediary can function as a currency. Historically, that included cattle, precious metal, cowrie shells, and lots of other things. Address balances on the Block Chain (the public bitcoin transaction ledger) are just another intermediary. The various technical features are what make one intermediary preferred over another in a given situation.
Peak capacity is used throughout the electrical industry, from the generators to the nameplates of the devices in your house. The reason is the peak determines the size of the wires - in your walls or for transmission lines - to carry the load safely. For power sources, the other number you care about is "capacity factor", the percentage of peak capacity you can supply on average. It may be 90+% for nuclear (they still shut down for refueling, and sometimes for unplanned maintenance), and lower for other sources. Even hydroelectric has a limit if the water supply is less than peak turbine capacity. Photovoltaic can be as low as 15% in poor locations, while solar-thermal with storage can be much higher.
Less than 100% capacity factor is OK, because no power plant routinely operates at 100% capacity. For one thing, customer demand has daily and seasonal variations. For another, every plant stops for maintenance sometimes. Lastly, each power source has a different marginal operating cost. Hydroelectric, wind, and solar don't burn a fuel, so are relatively cheap per kWh when they run. Coal and natural gas consume fuel, thus have higher marginal cost when they run. A utility operator wants the cheapest mix to satisfy demand at any given time. Since natural gas prices can fluctuate dramatically over the life of a plant, one thing solar does is stabilize their costs. You know for sure that a solar plant will still not be burning fuel at the end of it's life. You have no idea what natural gas will cost in 40 years.
As far as photovoltaic peak production only being part of the day, that is well matched to the US southwest, where the peak air-conditioning demand happens exactly when solar has maximum power. Something like nuclear is better suited to baseload power, the part of demand that is always there. A nuclear reactor is a bitch to turn on and off, so they would rather keep it running all the time between refuelings.
If you are going to discuss power grids, you need to stop using just one performance parameter. That's not how real grids operate.
> what if government funds illicit operations by just changing a figure in a bank database to give itself more money to spend?
Why bother with that, when they literally own the printing presses for US currency? Just run the presses a little extra, and divert the cash to whatever illicit operation you want.
In practice, they don't even have to do that. Just have the CIA set up a "civilian contractor" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America_(airline) ) who overcharges for services as a way to launder the funds, and the leftovers after actual expenses goes to illicit operations. Secretly owning an airline also makes it easy to deliver agents wherever you want.
The bitcoins are still in the FBI seizure account. Not only that, entrepreneurs are sending small amounts to the account, with advertising attached, for online casinos, or cursing out the FBI. I find that amusing. If you scroll down past the tiny (0.0001 BTC) transactions, you will see the big transfers in for 324 BTC at a time. On a phone that spells out "FBI", so that is pretty clear who is doing the transfers.
Being unable to make a living at something is the free market's way of telling you to find something else to do. Horse dung sweepers used to be a necessary job in cities before automobiles, now not so much. They either became machine street sweeper operators, or found a new job. If the same happens to mediocre musicians, so be it. The very good ones will still find work.
I notice that new artists like Lady Gaga have adopted the popular "freemium" business model. She has given away literally billions of views of her music videos, and collects the ad revenue that YouTube pays, but it's free to the audience. Then she sells a limited commodity - seats at live shows - at a premium. I do that too, give away basic content, charge for premium service.
Except instead of the original script, have it go something like:
"Have you ever tapped someone's phone...without leaving your desk? Or downloaded their entire call history at the touch of a button?...You will - and the company that will bring it to you: AT&T."
This leads to a new avenue of attack on NSA snooping. Presumably some of the data being intercepted is copyrighted works belonging to big media. So all we have to do is convince the media companies that massive copyright infringement is happening, sit back, and enjoy the popcorn.
> "How, I wondered, is Musk going to solve the thermal expansion problem?
I used to walk under a solution every day going to work, where work was the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. They needed a way to test the optics of the Chandra X-Ray Telescope on the ground, so they built a 1000 foot (300 meter) vacuum pipe that connected an X-Ray source at one end to a vacuum chamber with the optics at the other. The reason for the long distance was to have the source at "infinity" optically, and it needed to be vacuum so air would not absorb or scatter the X-Rays.
This pipe ran outdoors, because it was longer than the building, and they wanted the X-Ray source away from other people working there. Naturally it had to deal with expansion due to heat and cold. It was handled with a metal bellows expansion joint (http://www.wahlcometroflex.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/metalrolledopt.jpg) between pipe sections, and the pipes themselves were on sliding support brackets on the concrete columns that held them up. So they can expand and contract as needed, and the bellows takes up the motion.
For the Hyperloop application, you would use finger expansion joints (http://www.ilwontec.com/eng/wp-content/uploads/contents/big_finger_expansion_joint.gif) inside the bellows. These are used on bridges for the same thermal expansion reason between the piers and suspended part of the roadway. Instead of being flat like in the picture, they would be circular, following the shape of the main pipe.
This is no longer a valid argument. The Silk Road online marketplace now represents less than 1% of all bitcoin transactions, and there are now over 7500 merchants using just one bitcoin processor (BitPay) to convert their sales to local currency.
The main reason for merchant adoption is they can save an average of 3% on bank card fraud and chargebacks + 2% on normal bank fees. 5% savings on sales is *huge*, it often is as much as their profit margin, so doubling your profit is a heck of an incentive.
They are intentionally selectively releasing the data in order to catch the government in more lies. First the government says "we don't monitor Americans". Then the media releases proof that they do. Then the government says "OK, we do monitor, but we have oversight". Then the media releases proof the oversight is non-existent. This is more powerful than indiscriminately releasing it all at once, because it shows how willing the government is to lie about what it does.
I expect the remainder of the files to be released once all the lies that can be proven false are done with.
They are both majority-owned (like most big corporations) by "mutual fund & institutional investors", which is another way of saying "Wall Street". Since many of the big Wall Street banks and brokerages are *also* owned by the same funds and institutions, effectively they form one entity with a single purpose: profit at any cost.
> Content creators don't like the idea, they'd like to earn a living
This is contradicted by the existence of open source software, Wikipedia, and the books that I write and give away. I am not the only one who does this, http://www.intechopen.com/ hosts many journals and books that are open. Lady Gaga has given away literally billions of plays of her music videos.
There are other ways to get value than by selling the content itself. In a world where anything digital can be copied at minimal cost, trying to make a living from restricting an item that isn't scarce is asking to fail.
And no new movies or songs are coming out that anyone wants?
Even if desirable new movies and songs come out, there was a backlog of such that existed before sufficient broadband to download them. So for a few years people were catching up with the backlog (including the time it took to develop suitable P2P software and get the original content into digital form if needed, then uploaded). According to the article, music piracy dropped by 80%, but did not stop entirely. That is consistent with the idea of catching up, then transitioning to only D/L new stuff.
> "Olav Torvund, former law professor at the University of Oslo, attributes this to good legal alternatives which are available today"
Or possibly the people who would pirate music already have most of what they want, and the remainder they can get from friends via a USB drive. Modern hard drives are absurdly large compared to music files. Once someone has downloaded what they want, why would they need to download again, unless they hear about a new group? If a friend has some new music, a 32 GB USB drive can carry around 10,000 songs, so it's trivial to hand copy. Thus I would *expect* piracy to drop off after a while, and what's left is just residual new music downloads.
Hyperloop ~ pneumatic tube but with magnetic propulsion (air pressure would keep "cars" from colliding instead of being used to pull the cars along)
Unfortunately 4000 kph and any sort of perceptible gas pressure leads to extreme drag and aero-heating. It *has* to operate in near-vacuum to reach those speeds. It doesn't matter if the gas is stationary or moving along with the passenger pods, it is going to be moving at high velocity relative to *something*, either the pods or the tube walls. Therefore you get drag and heating.
If Musk knows anything about the rockets he builds, he should know this. The front of a rocket sees "dynamic pressure", i.e. drag, caused by it's motion through the air. Sufficiently low orbits see drag that causes satellites to re-enter. Careful shaping of a vehicle can reduce drag, but not eliminate it. The only way to get rid of it is to remove the gas.
In fact, nobody transfers "bitcoins". Their only existence is as numbers in the "Block Chain" database. The Block Chain is a write-only database. In order to determine the current balance for an account number, you have to read all the transactions for that account and add them up. Therefore you cannot "move" or "transmit" anything. You can only write new transactions that are added to the existing data.
The database is also a shared distributed one. Everyone with a full client has a copy of the whole thing, but nobody's copy is "the original" or special in any way. Every copy is as valid as any other.
The only valid argument for a thing of value which can be transmitted would be a bitcoin wallet or the private keys they contain. Since they are just data files, they *can* be sent from person to person, and constitute value if any of the bitcoin account numbers they control have a balance. But almost nobody sends wallets, and certainly not via third party "wallet transmitters".
What hardly anyone understands is that space is full of abundant energy.
The world's fossil fuel (oil, coal, and natural gas) reserves are equal to 7 trillion barrels of oil, and one barrel contains 6 x 10^9 Joules. Thus we have 42 x 10^21 Joules of fossil fuel energy. The area within the Moon's orbit (384,000 km radius) has 38 x 10^21 Joules of sunlight passing through every minute, nearly as much....Every Minute!
Asteroids and the Moon are sources of raw materials, but the energy is what enables you to do something with it, and solar energy in space is easily extracted.
Slashdot Mirror
For that matter, why is no one able to identify "Satoshi Nakamoto", the creator of bitcoin? Whoever that is holds about a million bitcoins, because they were mining back before anyone else was, and the difficulty of generating a block was trivial. The block chain shows those original coins have never been moved. So unless they tossed away the wallet file, their balance is worth nearly a billion dollars. Thus identifying Satoshi to beat the password out of him would be a financial gold mine, plus the new media would like to do stories.
Branson immediately converts the ticket sale to local currency (dollars or pounds, whichever they use). That way they can provide a refund if the buyer decides they don't really want to go into space. I don't know if Virgin Galactic is using a payment processor like BitPay or Coinbase, but those companies accept bitcoin on behalf of merchants, convert to local currency, and deposit that to your bank account daily. The exchange rate gets updated in real time, like you can see on this site:
https://coinbase.com/merchants
The point of currency is to solve the "Coincidence of Wants" problem of barter. In pure barter, you have to find someone to trade with who both wants what you have to trade, and has what you want to get. Currency introduces a generally accepted intermediary. You trade away what you have, which for most people is their labor time, for currency. Then later you trade your currency for stuff you want. By separating the halves of a barter transaction, you make it easier for trades to happen, because you only have to satisfy one condition at a time.
Anything that people generally accept as an intermediary can function as a currency. Historically, that included cattle, precious metal, cowrie shells, and lots of other things. Address balances on the Block Chain (the public bitcoin transaction ledger) are just another intermediary. The various technical features are what make one intermediary preferred over another in a given situation.
Peak capacity is used throughout the electrical industry, from the generators to the nameplates of the devices in your house. The reason is the peak determines the size of the wires - in your walls or for transmission lines - to carry the load safely. For power sources, the other number you care about is "capacity factor", the percentage of peak capacity you can supply on average. It may be 90+% for nuclear (they still shut down for refueling, and sometimes for unplanned maintenance), and lower for other sources. Even hydroelectric has a limit if the water supply is less than peak turbine capacity. Photovoltaic can be as low as 15% in poor locations, while solar-thermal with storage can be much higher.
Less than 100% capacity factor is OK, because no power plant routinely operates at 100% capacity. For one thing, customer demand has daily and seasonal variations. For another, every plant stops for maintenance sometimes. Lastly, each power source has a different marginal operating cost. Hydroelectric, wind, and solar don't burn a fuel, so are relatively cheap per kWh when they run. Coal and natural gas consume fuel, thus have higher marginal cost when they run. A utility operator wants the cheapest mix to satisfy demand at any given time. Since natural gas prices can fluctuate dramatically over the life of a plant, one thing solar does is stabilize their costs. You know for sure that a solar plant will still not be burning fuel at the end of it's life. You have no idea what natural gas will cost in 40 years.
As far as photovoltaic peak production only being part of the day, that is well matched to the US southwest, where the peak air-conditioning demand happens exactly when solar has maximum power. Something like nuclear is better suited to baseload power, the part of demand that is always there. A nuclear reactor is a bitch to turn on and off, so they would rather keep it running all the time between refuelings.
If you are going to discuss power grids, you need to stop using just one performance parameter. That's not how real grids operate.
Barnum was conservative. Given world birth rates, there are ~250 suckers born every minute, plus ~4.5 thieves who will take their money.
Escorts are starting to take bitcoin too:
http://www.zdnet.com/the-worlds-first-bitcoin-escort-agency-7000021209/
> what if government funds illicit operations by just changing a figure in a bank database to give itself more money to spend?
Why bother with that, when they literally own the printing presses for US currency? Just run the presses a little extra, and divert the cash to whatever illicit operation you want.
In practice, they don't even have to do that. Just have the CIA set up a "civilian contractor" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America_(airline) ) who overcharges for services as a way to launder the funds, and the leftovers after actual expenses goes to illicit operations. Secretly owning an airline also makes it easy to deliver agents wherever you want.
As the link in the summary shows: https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH
The bitcoins are still in the FBI seizure account. Not only that, entrepreneurs are sending small amounts to the account, with advertising attached, for online casinos, or cursing out the FBI. I find that amusing. If you scroll down past the tiny (0.0001 BTC) transactions, you will see the big transfers in for 324 BTC at a time. On a phone that spells out "FBI", so that is pretty clear who is doing the transfers.
Being unable to make a living at something is the free market's way of telling you to find something else to do. Horse dung sweepers used to be a necessary job in cities before automobiles, now not so much. They either became machine street sweeper operators, or found a new job. If the same happens to mediocre musicians, so be it. The very good ones will still find work.
I notice that new artists like Lady Gaga have adopted the popular "freemium" business model. She has given away literally billions of views of her music videos, and collects the ad revenue that YouTube pays, but it's free to the audience. Then she sells a limited commodity - seats at live shows - at a premium. I do that too, give away basic content, charge for premium service.
Someone needs to do a parody of the AT&T "You will" commercials: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MnQ8EkwXJ0
Except instead of the original script, have it go something like:
"Have you ever tapped someone's phone...without leaving your desk? Or downloaded their entire call history at the touch of a button?...You will - and the company that will bring it to you: AT&T."
This leads to a new avenue of attack on NSA snooping. Presumably some of the data being intercepted is copyrighted works belonging to big media. So all we have to do is convince the media companies that massive copyright infringement is happening, sit back, and enjoy the popcorn.
> "How, I wondered, is Musk going to solve the thermal expansion problem?
I used to walk under a solution every day going to work, where work was the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. They needed a way to test the optics of the Chandra X-Ray Telescope on the ground, so they built a 1000 foot (300 meter) vacuum pipe that connected an X-Ray source at one end to a vacuum chamber with the optics at the other. The reason for the long distance was to have the source at "infinity" optically, and it needed to be vacuum so air would not absorb or scatter the X-Rays.
This pipe ran outdoors, because it was longer than the building, and they wanted the X-Ray source away from other people working there. Naturally it had to deal with expansion due to heat and cold. It was handled with a metal bellows expansion joint (http://www.wahlcometroflex.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/metalrolledopt.jpg) between pipe sections, and the pipes themselves were on sliding support brackets on the concrete columns that held them up. So they can expand and contract as needed, and the bellows takes up the motion.
For the Hyperloop application, you would use finger expansion joints (http://www.ilwontec.com/eng/wp-content/uploads/contents/big_finger_expansion_joint.gif) inside the bellows. These are used on bridges for the same thermal expansion reason between the piers and suspended part of the roadway. Instead of being flat like in the picture, they would be circular, following the shape of the main pipe.
It ain't rocket surgery.
But this is: http://www.prosalesconnection.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/RocketSurgery2.jpg
This is no longer a valid argument. The Silk Road online marketplace now represents less than 1% of all bitcoin transactions, and there are now over 7500 merchants using just one bitcoin processor (BitPay) to convert their sales to local currency.
The main reason for merchant adoption is they can save an average of 3% on bank card fraud and chargebacks + 2% on normal bank fees. 5% savings on sales is *huge*, it often is as much as their profit margin, so doubling your profit is a heck of an incentive.
Just publish the dam stuff and be done with it.
They are intentionally selectively releasing the data in order to catch the government in more lies. First the government says "we don't monitor Americans". Then the media releases proof that they do. Then the government says "OK, we do monitor, but we have oversight". Then the media releases proof the oversight is non-existent. This is more powerful than indiscriminately releasing it all at once, because it shows how willing the government is to lie about what it does.
I expect the remainder of the files to be released once all the lies that can be proven false are done with.
They are both majority-owned (like most big corporations) by "mutual fund & institutional investors", which is another way of saying "Wall Street". Since many of the big Wall Street banks and brokerages are *also* owned by the same funds and institutions, effectively they form one entity with a single purpose: profit at any cost.
> Content creators don't like the idea, they'd like to earn a living
This is contradicted by the existence of open source software, Wikipedia, and the books that I write and give away. I am not the only one who does this, http://www.intechopen.com/ hosts many journals and books that are open. Lady Gaga has given away literally billions of plays of her music videos.
There are other ways to get value than by selling the content itself. In a world where anything digital can be copied at minimal cost, trying to make a living from restricting an item that isn't scarce is asking to fail.
And no new movies or songs are coming out that anyone wants?
Even if desirable new movies and songs come out, there was a backlog of such that existed before sufficient broadband to download them. So for a few years people were catching up with the backlog (including the time it took to develop suitable P2P software and get the original content into digital form if needed, then uploaded). According to the article, music piracy dropped by 80%, but did not stop entirely. That is consistent with the idea of catching up, then transitioning to only D/L new stuff.
> "Olav Torvund, former law professor at the University of Oslo, attributes this to good legal alternatives which are available today"
Or possibly the people who would pirate music already have most of what they want, and the remainder they can get from friends via a USB drive. Modern hard drives are absurdly large compared to music files. Once someone has downloaded what they want, why would they need to download again, unless they hear about a new group? If a friend has some new music, a 32 GB USB drive can carry around 10,000 songs, so it's trivial to hand copy. Thus I would *expect* piracy to drop off after a while, and what's left is just residual new music downloads.
Hyperloop ~ pneumatic tube but with magnetic propulsion (air pressure would keep "cars" from colliding instead of being used to pull the cars along)
Unfortunately 4000 kph and any sort of perceptible gas pressure leads to extreme drag and aero-heating. It *has* to operate in near-vacuum to reach those speeds. It doesn't matter if the gas is stationary or moving along with the passenger pods, it is going to be moving at high velocity relative to *something*, either the pods or the tube walls. Therefore you get drag and heating.
If Musk knows anything about the rockets he builds, he should know this. The front of a rocket sees "dynamic pressure", i.e. drag, caused by it's motion through the air. Sufficiently low orbits see drag that causes satellites to re-enter. Careful shaping of a vehicle can reduce drag, but not eliminate it. The only way to get rid of it is to remove the gas.
"It's a poor workman who blames his tool."
Very applicable, and yes, pun intended.
In fact, nobody transfers "bitcoins". Their only existence is as numbers in the "Block Chain" database. The Block Chain is a write-only database. In order to determine the current balance for an account number, you have to read all the transactions for that account and add them up. Therefore you cannot "move" or "transmit" anything. You can only write new transactions that are added to the existing data.
The database is also a shared distributed one. Everyone with a full client has a copy of the whole thing, but nobody's copy is "the original" or special in any way. Every copy is as valid as any other.
The only valid argument for a thing of value which can be transmitted would be a bitcoin wallet or the private keys they contain. Since they are just data files, they *can* be sent from person to person, and constitute value if any of the bitcoin account numbers they control have a balance. But almost nobody sends wallets, and certainly not via third party "wallet transmitters".
What hardly anyone understands is that space is full of abundant energy.
The world's fossil fuel (oil, coal, and natural gas) reserves are equal to 7 trillion barrels of oil, and one barrel contains 6 x 10^9 Joules. Thus we have 42 x 10^21 Joules of fossil fuel energy. The area within the Moon's orbit (384,000 km radius) has 38 x 10^21 Joules of sunlight passing through every minute, nearly as much....Every Minute!
Asteroids and the Moon are sources of raw materials, but the energy is what enables you to do something with it, and solar energy in space is easily extracted.
The only way to end without losing everything to hyperinflation and confiscation by the police state is to vote third party
18th century solutions (voting and political parties) are not going to help. Making government irrelevant will.
Visions of places like the Culture are part of what inspires me to work on post-scarcity machines:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories