As a regular user of that site, you are wrong about it taking 5 minutes to download. There are over a million documents there. Amusingly, the DOD equivalent report server, which has twice as many documents, is still online.
In the last decade computer modeling has confirmed that long period comets are Oort Cloud objects which have had their orbit modified by passing stars, molecular clouds, or galactic tides so that they come close to the Sun. We have also discovered three "Scattered Disk" objects in the last year whose orbits take them more than 2000 AU from the Sun, the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud. The Scattered Disk and Oort Cloud have the same origin - scattering from the Solar nebula by the larger planets. The only difference is how far they got scattered. There really isn't a physical distinction between them, the 2000 AU line is a convention adopted by astronomers.
> Carl Sagan wrote a lot about the Oort cloud. It would be nice if we could get first-hand evidence of it
We have two types of first hand evidence. The first are long period comets, which spend at least 90% of their life at Oort Cloud distances. They are Oort cloud objects that just happened to have their orbit perigee shifted by passing stars, molecular clouds, or galactic tides. They get close enough to the Sun to boil off their ice content, which makes them easy to find, but otherwise they are still members of the Oort cloud, because that is where they spend most of their time.
The other are "Scattered Disk Objects" ( http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/lists/t_centaurs.html ), which if you sort on "Q" (max distance from the Sun) you will see there are three that go beyond 2000 AU, the nominal inner edge of the Oort cloud. All were discovered in the past year or so, so they haven't made it to the textbooks yet.
There isn't an actual dividing line between the Scattered Disk and the Oort cloud, the nominal distance of 2000 AU is just a convention. How the Oort cloud objects got out there is by scattering of Solar nebula planetesimals by the larger planets. The Scattered disk is just objects that didn't get scattered quite as far.
> I just don't understand the current astronomical obsession with nearby stars/solar systems and exoplanets.
Maybe you should read up on what astronomers are actually working on this decade, instead of what you *think* they are working on. Exoplanets are a relatively small part of the astronomical enterprise. This report is a good starting point:
Yes we do. And how are "dollars", which mostly exist as database entries, backed by securities which *also* exist as database entries, any more "real"?
The bitcoin network consists of people willing to trade goods and services, and an account database that tracks balances. The database is designed to be very secure, so people are comfortable trading an item now for a balance, with the expectation they can later trade that balance for something else they want. The database itself isn't what gives the balances value, it's people's willingness to trade.
This is the same thing which gives precious metals most of their value - willingness to trade other things for them. If it were not for that, they would only have "use value" as industrial commodities. There is nothing wrong with precious metals, in fact bitcoin was designed to be similar. It was purposely made finite in quantity and hard to find, and the process of finding new coins is called "mining" by analogy to metals.
The individual accounts are numbered, in fact the number is the public part of a public-private key pair. An account has a balance which is the sum of all past incoming and outgoing transaction amounts. The amounts are in units called "bitcoins", which are recorded to 8 decimal places. Thus my account is currently 8.51336124 BTC. A transaction is a message signed with your private key (that's how you prove you have the right to make a transaction) giving the number of units to send, and the destination account number.
All past transactions are stored in a public ledger, called the block chain. So everyone can look at past transactions for a given account, and see if their current balance is sufficient for a new transaction. If not, the transaction is rejected, by everyone. This prevents "double spending", ie spending money you don't have.
What happened in this theft was VirWox, the exchange which was holding some coins for the victim, was convinced to send them to the thief's account. This is in fact traceable by VirWox and everyone else. You can then follow the money in later transactions wherever it goes. The tricky part is identifying the human that goes with an account number, since account numbers don't have personal information attached to them.
That's because you are not a merchant. Credit card fraud is 3% of all credit card transactions, and usually it is the merchant who loses. Credit card processing for legitimate transactions is another couple of percent in fees. A low fee solution with no possibility of charge backs is very attractive relative to this.
Assuming I wanted bitcoins enough to get paid in them, I would not have a problem having my wage rate set in dollars, then converted on payday to the bitcoin equivalent. It's not like having software look up the market rate and do a division problem is hard or anything.
And, no, I am not sick of him. I want to sell him a seed factory to put on Mars to produce necessities for colonists. Therefore I want his near-term projects to succeed:
I have not seen a Dragon capsule put into a thermal-vacuum chamber (if it has, let me know). Such a chamber lets you run the hardware through the whole range of environments and temperatures from launch to orbit. Presumably the liquid helium pressurant is very cold, and that can cause valve icing. When the compartment has air around it, that can supply heat to re-warm it, but a vacuum will not do that. So either you simulate the heck out of the thermal environment in a computer, or a test chamber, or find out the hard way what you forgot to consider. Valve heaters are a standard fix, but you do have to remember to include them in the design.
SpaceX staff are rediscovering why we use clean rooms, thermal vacuum chambers, and a full understanding of the launch and space environment. Launch to orbit is unforgiving, and you need to make sure things are right before you try, or you get a higher failure rate.
Stability is easily achieved by software that adjusts price in BTC to the current exchange rate, which already is done by many online stores taking BTC for payment. The coin value then only needs to be stable for the time the transaction takes to complete (minutes for the buyer, a day for the merchant to sweep their funds back to local currency)
As more people use it, the fluctuations are decreasing over time. It's not yet as stable as other assets, but give it time, it's still new.
I see it as an inherently transnational currency, where other currencies are locally issued and controlled, although they may be traded and used outside their native region. Removing national borders as toll booths and inspection stations is a plus for trade, just like removing river and bridge tolls was in early European trade.
This is a poor analysis. I mine bitcoin partly to heat my computer room in the winter. It displaces electricity that otherwise would go into a portable heater. Therefore it doesn't cost me anything to mine right now (aside from wear and tear on my graphics card). Even ignoring that, if I paid full electric cost, the coins I accumulated through mining are worth more than twice the electricity used. I just had to be patient for the price to rise.
Comparing Bitcoin to a small nation is actually a valid one. $33/coin at the moment x 10.84 million coins in circulation = $358 million in circulation. That puts it between Swaziland and Burundi, two small African nations. It just happens that the "Bitcoinians" are a distributed online nation, instead of tied to geography. That there are 23 smaller national money supplies, and 167 larger ones does not invalidate Bitcoin, in fact it shows it has already reached the scale for a national currency, if not the world's largest. Given the value was trivial as little as 2 years ago, that is quite an achievement. It show how fast adoption can be for an internet-based tool.
This is an old and tired argument. There is no central issuer of bitcoins promising high gains to new investors and paying off old investors with the proceeds. New bitcoins are issued in a decentralized fashion for verifying the transaction history. Therefore it does not meet the definition of a pyramid scheme.
What it is closer to is a collaboratively built database which tracks account balances. What value is put on those balances in terms of other goods (including local currencies) is purely a supply and demand situation, there never was a promise of any future value made. What value people find in it is the features the software and database provides - privacy, fast transfers around the world, low fees, predictable growth rate, etc.
Now with it going higher, it would mean having to let customers overpay, or give them stuff they don't want (e.g., 25 tracks, or 2 albums + 5 tracks), which if you only want ONE song, is kind of annoying.
Software to the rescue: Stores which take bitcoin automatically adjust the price to the market, in real time. I'm surprised a Slashdot reader didn't get that immediately.
Get used to disappointment. It's a nerd currency, and is only getting more popular. We are far from running out of nerds to use it, much less average folks.
The Bitcoin network merely maintains a distributed account book and transaction history in arbitrary units. The cryptographic security and other features have induced people to trade account balances for other goods and services, but trade in and of itself is legal. If you think bitcoins can be declared illegal, you would have to tell us what feature(s) it has that a business account book that tracks work in arbitrary units does not.
Rather than place hills and grass individually, it uses fractal formulas to create the shapes and textures. The formulas and textures are height and slope aware, and it uses atmospheric haze to give a distance effect. The software is E-on Vue, which is used in professional movie making, but I just diddled around with it for fun.
What some people here on Slashdot are missing is that bitcoin is not just a virtual currency, it's a transaction protocol, with new features being developed and applications being written. It should be thought of in the same category as FTP and HTTP, as a means of securely transferring balances, rather than bits.
The protocol can be used for other purposes than a currency. You can use it anywhere you need to securely transfer a quantity, value, amount, or balance from one place to another online. Think for a bit what you can do with that, it goes far beyond just currencies. The distribution of initial amounts can use other algorithms than the one in the Bitcoin system, they just chose one that appears to work well for a currency.
Slashdot Mirror
As a regular user of that site, you are wrong about it taking 5 minutes to download. There are over a million documents there. Amusingly, the DOD equivalent report server, which has twice as many documents, is still online.
Yes, now that we have ion thrusters, we can go much faster.
Not any more.
In the last decade computer modeling has confirmed that long period comets are Oort Cloud objects which have had their orbit modified by passing stars, molecular clouds, or galactic tides so that they come close to the Sun. We have also discovered three "Scattered Disk" objects in the last year whose orbits take them more than 2000 AU from the Sun, the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud. The Scattered Disk and Oort Cloud have the same origin - scattering from the Solar nebula by the larger planets. The only difference is how far they got scattered. There really isn't a physical distinction between them, the 2000 AU line is a convention adopted by astronomers.
> Carl Sagan wrote a lot about the Oort cloud. It would be nice if we could get first-hand evidence of it
We have two types of first hand evidence. The first are long period comets, which spend at least 90% of their life at Oort Cloud distances. They are Oort cloud objects that just happened to have their orbit perigee shifted by passing stars, molecular clouds, or galactic tides. They get close enough to the Sun to boil off their ice content, which makes them easy to find, but otherwise they are still members of the Oort cloud, because that is where they spend most of their time.
The other are "Scattered Disk Objects" ( http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/lists/t_centaurs.html ), which if you sort on "Q" (max distance from the Sun) you will see there are three that go beyond 2000 AU, the nominal inner edge of the Oort cloud. All were discovered in the past year or so, so they haven't made it to the textbooks yet.
There isn't an actual dividing line between the Scattered Disk and the Oort cloud, the nominal distance of 2000 AU is just a convention. How the Oort cloud objects got out there is by scattering of Solar nebula planetesimals by the larger planets. The Scattered disk is just objects that didn't get scattered quite as far.
> I just don't understand the current astronomical obsession with nearby stars/solar systems and exoplanets.
Maybe you should read up on what astronomers are actually working on this decade, instead of what you *think* they are working on. Exoplanets are a relatively small part of the astronomical enterprise. This report is a good starting point:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12951 (there is a free pdf download option if you register).
Yes we do. And how are "dollars", which mostly exist as database entries, backed by securities which *also* exist as database entries, any more "real"?
The bitcoin network consists of people willing to trade goods and services, and an account database that tracks balances. The database is designed to be very secure, so people are comfortable trading an item now for a balance, with the expectation they can later trade that balance for something else they want. The database itself isn't what gives the balances value, it's people's willingness to trade.
This is the same thing which gives precious metals most of their value - willingness to trade other things for them. If it were not for that, they would only have "use value" as industrial commodities. There is nothing wrong with precious metals, in fact bitcoin was designed to be similar. It was purposely made finite in quantity and hard to find, and the process of finding new coins is called "mining" by analogy to metals.
You can shop for anything online using http://bitspend.net/
Amazon, newegg, ebay, department stores, etc.
You can get a US Dollar-denominated Mastercard debit card from http://www.okpay.com/en/services/accept-payments/index.html
and fund it with bitcoins.
The individual accounts are numbered, in fact the number is the public part of a public-private key pair. An account has a balance which is the sum of all past incoming and outgoing transaction amounts. The amounts are in units called "bitcoins", which are recorded to 8 decimal places. Thus my account is currently 8.51336124 BTC. A transaction is a message signed with your private key (that's how you prove you have the right to make a transaction) giving the number of units to send, and the destination account number.
All past transactions are stored in a public ledger, called the block chain. So everyone can look at past transactions for a given account, and see if their current balance is sufficient for a new transaction. If not, the transaction is rejected, by everyone. This prevents "double spending", ie spending money you don't have.
What happened in this theft was VirWox, the exchange which was holding some coins for the victim, was convinced to send them to the thief's account. This is in fact traceable by VirWox and everyone else. You can then follow the money in later transactions wherever it goes. The tricky part is identifying the human that goes with an account number, since account numbers don't have personal information attached to them.
> Personally I don't see the point of bitcoins.
That's because you are not a merchant. Credit card fraud is 3% of all credit card transactions, and usually it is the merchant who loses. Credit card processing for legitimate transactions is another couple of percent in fees. A low fee solution with no possibility of charge backs is very attractive relative to this.
> because prices and wages are sticky.
Correction, were sticky. With this marvelous invention called "software", you can list prices in two currencies, and have one float against the other:
http://bitcoinstore.com/consumer-electronics/cameras-optics.html?cat=5526
Assuming I wanted bitcoins enough to get paid in them, I would not have a problem having my wage rate set in dollars, then converted on payday to the bitcoin equivalent. It's not like having software look up the market rate and do a division problem is hard or anything.
That would be 2014 according to their launch manifest:
http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php
And, no, I am not sick of him. I want to sell him a seed factory to put on Mars to produce necessities for colonists. Therefore I want his near-term projects to succeed:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Danielravennest/SFP/Report
I have not seen a Dragon capsule put into a thermal-vacuum chamber (if it has, let me know). Such a chamber lets you run the hardware through the whole range of environments and temperatures from launch to orbit. Presumably the liquid helium pressurant is very cold, and that can cause valve icing. When the compartment has air around it, that can supply heat to re-warm it, but a vacuum will not do that. So either you simulate the heck out of the thermal environment in a computer, or a test chamber, or find out the hard way what you forgot to consider. Valve heaters are a standard fix, but you do have to remember to include them in the design.
SpaceX staff are rediscovering why we use clean rooms, thermal vacuum chambers, and a full understanding of the launch and space environment. Launch to orbit is unforgiving, and you need to make sure things are right before you try, or you get a higher failure rate.
Stability is easily achieved by software that adjusts price in BTC to the current exchange rate, which already is done by many online stores taking BTC for payment. The coin value then only needs to be stable for the time the transaction takes to complete (minutes for the buyer, a day for the merchant to sweep their funds back to local currency)
As more people use it, the fluctuations are decreasing over time. It's not yet as stable as other assets, but give it time, it's still new.
I see it as an inherently transnational currency, where other currencies are locally issued and controlled, although they may be traded and used outside their native region. Removing national borders as toll booths and inspection stations is a plus for trade, just like removing river and bridge tolls was in early European trade.
This is a poor analysis. I mine bitcoin partly to heat my computer room in the winter. It displaces electricity that otherwise would go into a portable heater. Therefore it doesn't cost me anything to mine right now (aside from wear and tear on my graphics card). Even ignoring that, if I paid full electric cost, the coins I accumulated through mining are worth more than twice the electricity used. I just had to be patient for the price to rise.
Comparing Bitcoin to a small nation is actually a valid one. $33/coin at the moment x 10.84 million coins in circulation = $358 million in circulation. That puts it between Swaziland and Burundi, two small African nations. It just happens that the "Bitcoinians" are a distributed online nation, instead of tied to geography. That there are 23 smaller national money supplies, and 167 larger ones does not invalidate Bitcoin, in fact it shows it has already reached the scale for a national currency, if not the world's largest. Given the value was trivial as little as 2 years ago, that is quite an achievement. It show how fast adoption can be for an internet-based tool.
This is an old and tired argument. There is no central issuer of bitcoins promising high gains to new investors and paying off old investors with the proceeds. New bitcoins are issued in a decentralized fashion for verifying the transaction history. Therefore it does not meet the definition of a pyramid scheme.
What it is closer to is a collaboratively built database which tracks account balances. What value is put on those balances in terms of other goods (including local currencies) is purely a supply and demand situation, there never was a promise of any future value made. What value people find in it is the features the software and database provides - privacy, fast transfers around the world, low fees, predictable growth rate, etc.
Now with it going higher, it would mean having to let customers overpay, or give them stuff they don't want (e.g., 25 tracks, or 2 albums + 5 tracks), which if you only want ONE song, is kind of annoying.
Software to the rescue: Stores which take bitcoin automatically adjust the price to the market, in real time. I'm surprised a Slashdot reader didn't get that immediately.
http://bitcoinstore.com/
Get used to disappointment. It's a nerd currency, and is only getting more popular. We are far from running out of nerds to use it, much less average folks.
7,635
The Bitcoin network merely maintains a distributed account book and transaction history in arbitrary units. The cryptographic security and other features have induced people to trade account balances for other goods and services, but trade in and of itself is legal. If you think bitcoins can be declared illegal, you would have to tell us what feature(s) it has that a business account book that tracks work in arbitrary units does not.
Bitcoin is nothing more than a distributed account book/transaction history. Since when is that illegal?
"I make policy."
You may make policy for Anonymous Cowards, but you will have to do more than that to convince us you are anything but a weenie whackadoodle.
I did this landscape by a process called "procedural generation":
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-lPWscdDzXM8/TjtfFx12uRI/AAAAAAAACqc/gIukXZ8t0Sc/s1600/TerrainFracta+2l.jpg
Rather than place hills and grass individually, it uses fractal formulas to create the shapes and textures. The formulas and textures are height and slope aware, and it uses atmospheric haze to give a distance effect. The software is E-on Vue, which is used in professional movie making, but I just diddled around with it for fun.
What some people here on Slashdot are missing is that bitcoin is not just a virtual currency, it's a transaction protocol, with new features being developed and applications being written. It should be thought of in the same category as FTP and HTTP, as a means of securely transferring balances, rather than bits.
The protocol can be used for other purposes than a currency. You can use it anywhere you need to securely transfer a quantity, value, amount, or balance from one place to another online. Think for a bit what you can do with that, it goes far beyond just currencies. The distribution of initial amounts can use other algorithms than the one in the Bitcoin system, they just chose one that appears to work well for a currency.