PayPal business account set up in the name of a corporation. Later the corporation buys up all it's outstanding shares, becoming self-owned (or if that is not legal, a cycle of two corporations that own each other's stock). An autonomous agent actually operates the corporation, with no employees.
Well, not as large as the states that make up the former Yugoslavia, but the Bitcoin money supply ($295 million) is 1.8% of the Slovenia money supply ($16 billion), one of the states it broke up into. That's not bad considering Bitcoin's money supply was negligible two years ago.
* Bitcoin makes no promises, it is a transaction protocol, like FTP or HTTP. If someone is making promises, point them out.
* Bitcoin units in circulation are growing at about 12% a year, so it is not fixed volume. The final quantity of 21 quadrillion Satoshi should be sufficient for any conceivable financial purpose. 1 Bitcoin = 100,000,000 Satoshi, and transactions are recorded in the smaller unit. The larger bitcoin unit is for convenience when the price was low. milliBitcoin (mBTC) are becoming more common now that the value is higher, and people will transition to micro-coins and Satoshi when it makes sense. If you didn't know Bitcoin are divisible into smaller units, I guess you didn't know much about them.
* By your argument, the fixed volume of gold and land makes them scams too. New gold mining adds about 2%/year to the world supply, which about keeps even with population, and is slightly behind economic growth, so it is nearly fixed in the short term. They aren't making more land, of course, except in some cities where land values are very high. This is more than made up for by sea level rise which is decreasing the Earth dry land area.
From the summary: "So this is another step toward fully-useful home fabrication of... almost anything."
Well, a very small step. The Form 1 machine cannot make the polymer it consumes, or the metal enclosure for it's base. For those you need a flexible chemical plant to supply various polymers, and a hydraulic press to roll-form the sheet metal.
The Seed Factory Project ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Danielravennest/papers/Seed_Factory_Project ), which will be starting soon, is aimed at a more complete collection of machines that *can* fabricate "almost anything", including it's own parts. It will not be home-sized though. More community-sized, where you submit your "print job" and pick up the finished parts/items later. One feature of the seed concept is it does not have to do everything "out of the box". It can produce parts for additional types of machines to expand the range of things it can do. A design that includes a starter set + CAD files for additional machines saves money compared to including all the machines at the start.
Getting down to home-sized is not practical with current technology, nor it is efficient. How often do you need to print a new couch? It makes more sense to share the equipment over a larger group of people, so it is not sitting idle most of the time and reduces the cost.
Quite a lot, actually. It's part of the space systems engineering textbook I'm writing
What I do know is that 2015, two years from now, is a totally and completely unrealistic goal.
That is not an unrealistic goal to launch prospector spacecraft. Coondoggie's article summary mangles what they intend to do, and you misread it further. Their actual website lists three stages: Prospecting craft to find the asteroids, assay missions to bring back ~20 kg samples, and only then trying to actually mine. This is a sensible plan.
In the mean time, I hope to start building prototype "seed factory" hardware this year. A seed factory is the minimal starter set of machines to start building *other* machines, which in turn becomes your industrial base. Think of it like a bootstrap compiler for hardware. Feed it plans for other machines, it starts making parts. I'm aiming for making 85% of the 2nd generation machines, because 100% is too hard a goal. The other 15% you just buy.
Just tack on a PayPal "processing fee" for anyone that wants to use that method. This is an extra charge to cover the chance that PayPal will jerk you around. For example: Check, Visa, or Mastercard = $20 entry fee, Paypal = $20 + $5 Paypal processing fee = $25. This will make most people use another method, but still leave the option open for people who have no other way to pay. The extra fee covers your risk and hassle in using PayPal.
You can even adjust the processing fee in real time to keep your risk manageable: Assume you have reserves from last year's event equal to 20% of this year's expenses. Then adjust the fee so that no more than 20% of your registrations are through PayPal. In the worst case, you can still cover your bills, and argue unfreezing your account afterwards.
I have plenty of use for a service like this, for:
* Offsite backup of my content creation and personal files. I have a backup external drive at home, but it's nice to have another copy offsite. * Distributing technical data, which is all open-sourced. My home PC is bandwidth limited and not turned on all the time.
Note that with his distributed hosting, he can get along with a small number of users. It would just mean using fewer hosting providers to match the demand.
I'm still waiting for final resolution of fallout from the 2007 financial meltdown. A mutual fund I had shares in lied about the value of mortgage-backed securities they held. The legal process is slow, so you can expect it to take several years for the return of user data.
Nuclear rockets have a much higher specific impulse than chemical rockets.
Solar Thermal has the exact same higher specific impulse, because both heat up Hydrogen to produce thrust. The only difference is the heat source. Solar Thermal is lighter than Nuclear Thermal (reactors are heavy, and require shielding), and completely avoids all the issues with Nuclear (protests, accidents). The only place to consider Nuclear Thermal these days is if you are going to Jupiter or beyond. Jupiter has intense radiation belts, so extra shielding is a moot point, and beyond that distance sunlight gets pretty weak.
Bitcoin uses a global distributed transaction history and account book, known as the "block chain" (because it is a series of blocks of transactions). There are many copies of the transaction history - each user of the official client gets one. Therefore it is more secure against accidental loss or forgery than a typical bank database. Transactions have to be cryptographically signed by the account owner, or they get rejected. There also has to be enough balance in that account number, or they also get rejected. To say the Bitcoin network has no control whatsoever clearly shows you don't understand it. Distributed control is still control.
Most US dollars exist in electronic form in various accounts in the banking system. The majority of the backing of Federal Reserve Notes (the paper currency) is by Treasury debt which also only exists in electronic form (the Federal Reserve and the Treasury stopped using paper T-bonds decades ago). Therefore to attempt to say bitcoins are "virtual" being any different than the official US currency clearly shows you don't understand our monetary system either.
You claim Bitcoin is a scam. In that case, someone must be perpetrating a fraud. Who, exactly? The people verifying blocks of transactions (ie miners)? They are performing a useful service, one that every bank has to do. The exchanges that convert bitcoins for other currencies? How is that different than every stock exchange and bank foreign currency desk? For that matter, how is it different than any other commodity that is bought or sold? The network that makes it possible to send funds internationally with low fees? PayPal, Western Union, and bank wires have done that a long time. Bitcoin just does it cheaper.
What it seems like, to me, Chas, is you are projecting your failure to understand Bitcoin onto others. What gives it value is the ease of moving funds, and, for a business, the lower chance of getting ripped off by PayPal or chargebacks. Even if it is not perfect, if it is better than the alternatives, people will tend to use it.
For people not familiar with the building, it's 15 stories tall and fills the whole block, and has more total floor area than the Empire State Building. When the Port Authority outgrew this building, they built the World Trade Center to hold their offices.
If you fire up Google Earth for 111 8th Street, you will see that the service area for this wifi is all within 3 blocks of the building, and nearly all direct line of sight. An old cynic like me would say they did this so the Google staff could stay connected while going out to lunch or shop in the area. Google put in free wifi near their Mountain View headquarters too.
Proportional representation. Your candidate gets 40 percent of the vote? They get 40% of the voting power. They get 1% of the vote, they get 1% of the voting power. It's the 21st century, we can deal with fractional votes, or simply multiply congressional votes by 100 (43,500 votes in the House of Representatives instead of 435). Set a minimum of 1% to keep number of reps reasonable. The extra representatives can also spread out the work. It's obvious from the continual lateness of the budgets, and representatives who claim lack of time to read bills that there are not enough of them. We need more bodies to spread the workload.
* Reduces payload mass, because the Habitats themselves don't go anywhere. They stay in their transfer orbits permanently. Only a smaller crew capsule changes velocity at the ends of the trip. * Provides emergency fallback and rescue capability. For example, if your engine fails while attempting the Mars orbit insertion, you can either return to the transfer habitat, go forward to Phobos (whichever is closer) with backup system, or those bases can send a rescue vehicle. You are not alone out there, like with the canonical "hero mission to Mars to take photos, plant flag, leave footprints, and go home" * Make fuel at Mars too, so you have return capability, and stockpile fuel from Phobos in Low Mars Orbit for landing and return trips. Refueling in increments makes the fuel needed almost linear in velocity, rather than exponential if you bring it all from Earth. The Rocket Equation is telling you this is a good idea, you should listen.
There are nearly 10,000 known Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and another 10,000 Near Mars Objects (NMOs) are expected (2 of which are known to orbit Mars). We have not found as many NMOs yet because they are farther away, but there is every reason to expect them to exist, and likely even more since they are closer to the source in the Main Belt.
No matter what orbit you choose, there will be some of these objects in nearby orbits. So I propose setting up "Transfer Habitats" in convenient orbits to get to and from Mars. You would start with some pressurized modules brought from Earth, then bring in asteroid rocks from nearby. This has numerous advantages:
* Solves the radiation problem, if you wrap a layer of rock shielding around your modules. * Solves the boredom problem for the crew. They have more living space, and can spend their time growing food and extracting fuel from the rock. * Reduces mass from Earth, because of the previously mentioned food and fuel you make yourself * Eventually you can produce pure metals, glass, and other products to expand the habitat, and later ship to the next location (Phobos) where you repeat the process. Once the first of these shielded habitats is set up - in Earth orbit, the rest of them can come naturally over time. * Producing fuel in Earth Orbit and at Phobos makes it easier to land on the Moon and Mars. It totally changes the economics from "hauling lots of fuel with expensive rockets from Earth" to "making fuel and other supplies wherever I am".
All of this is laid out in more detail in the book I'm working on (Section 4.12 in particular):
There are three independent variables in designing a large space structure: orbit period, rotation period, and radius. The Tsiolkovsky 1895 design uses [24 hours, 24 hours, 35,000 km], but there is no requirement to use that particular design point, especially when other design points are much more feasible and efficient.
A split Skyhook system, with one in Low Orbit, and one in High Orbit, each with around 20-30 minute rotation period and 2-3 km/s tip velocity can be built with current carbon fiber strength and reasonable factors of safety and cable redundancy. It has the following additional advantages beside structural feasibility:
* Shorter by about a factor of 50 than 19th century space elevator design, thus much less exposed to meteor and debris damage * Cargo rides the Skyhook for half a rotation, then lets go to a different orbit. This completely eliminates the climbing system, and is much faster in any case. 19th century elevator concept completely ignores spending days in an elevator capsule passing through the radiation belts. * High orbit Skyhook is close enough to Earth escape to inject directly to Lunar gravity assist or planetary transfer orbit. * Habitat at tip of Skyhook is at a convenient gravity level (1.0 gees) * System can be built incrementally, is useful when partially built, and can literally bootstrap it's own construction. Payback times and economic flight rates are short for partially built versions.
> the narrow docking window of the high end of the much more feasible tumbling cable implementation would likely make it unfeasibly difficult
Meeting a moving target accelerating at 1 g at the tip of a Skyhook is exactly as hard as catching a baseball or landing on an aircraft carrier at 1 g. These are demonstrably solved problems, and with GPS plus active navigation aids at the landing pad, will be easy to automate. A landing platform or net can be as large as it needs to be to make sure you don't miss. Like airplanes, you don't line up your docking port/air stair until *after* you land and come to a stop.
From the point of view of gut bacteria, we are just hosts serving their purposes as transportation and food suppliers. If they can get more food by releasing the right kind of chemical signals into our system, they will. This is a real life example of the way the fictional Goa'uld parasites treated their human hosts. But bacteria are not aliens, they are actually derived from the same ancient ancestors as us.
There is a registry entry that calls up the Apps list of the start screen. You can create a shortcut that points to that registry entry, then change the icon on the shortcut to look like the start button (I used the Media Center icon). Pin it to the taskbar on the left, and there you are.
I found out how to do this by googling Windows 8 setup tips, but don't remember where I saw it.
Also, if you put your desktop tile of the default start screen on the top left, hitting enter will take you to the desktop. Since the windows key takes you to tile view, it's pretty easy to toggle back and forth. The way I look at it, the tile view and full apps list are the same as previous Windows pinned to start button and "All Apps", just blown up to full screen size for touch devices.
Note that these cards are slightly different than consumer graphics cards. They have more double-precision pipelines because scientific computing cares more about that kind of math. They are also much more expensive than consumer cards. The underlying chip design is similar to the 600-series graphics cards. You can think of it as a modified version optimized for math, since the 600 series came out first, and is being produced in higher volume.
It was a fictional concept thought up by Vernor Vinge in the early 1990's, to satisfy the needs of some novels he wrote, then further developed as a serious idea:
(It helps that Vinge is a professor of mathematics, as well as an SF author).
If increasing computing power is subject to diminishing returns, explain your own existence running on a 100 Hz, 25W meatware processor, and the exponential growth of supercomputer power.
The trend has already started to "Phablets", phones with a screen large enough to be a tablet. The rationale is to only have to carry around one device when you are moving around. So you may as well pack in all the features you can.
You can stay right in the US. Just move to an area with a low population density, small government, and lots of hunters and farmers. Cost of living is usually low, and people tend to leave you alone, because they don't know if you might be the one with plenty of rifle experience. When I lived in an area like that, I knew the power company guy and the road maintenance guy by name, because they would stop and chat.
Slashdot Mirror
PayPal business account set up in the name of a corporation. Later the corporation buys up all it's outstanding shares, becoming self-owned (or if that is not legal, a cycle of two corporations that own each other's stock). An autonomous agent actually operates the corporation, with no employees.
Well, not as large as the states that make up the former Yugoslavia, but the Bitcoin money supply ($295 million) is 1.8% of the Slovenia money supply ($16 billion), one of the states it broke up into. That's not bad considering Bitcoin's money supply was negligible two years ago.
* Bitcoin makes no promises, it is a transaction protocol, like FTP or HTTP. If someone is making promises, point them out.
* Bitcoin units in circulation are growing at about 12% a year, so it is not fixed volume. The final quantity of 21 quadrillion Satoshi should be sufficient for any conceivable financial purpose. 1 Bitcoin = 100,000,000 Satoshi, and transactions are recorded in the smaller unit. The larger bitcoin unit is for convenience when the price was low. milliBitcoin (mBTC) are becoming more common now that the value is higher, and people will transition to micro-coins and Satoshi when it makes sense. If you didn't know Bitcoin are divisible into smaller units, I guess you didn't know much about them.
* By your argument, the fixed volume of gold and land makes them scams too. New gold mining adds about 2%/year to the world supply, which about keeps even with population, and is slightly behind economic growth, so it is nearly fixed in the short term. They aren't making more land, of course, except in some cities where land values are very high. This is more than made up for by sea level rise which is decreasing the Earth dry land area.
From the summary: "So this is another step toward fully-useful home fabrication of... almost anything."
Well, a very small step. The Form 1 machine cannot make the polymer it consumes, or the metal enclosure for it's base. For those you need a flexible chemical plant to supply various polymers, and a hydraulic press to roll-form the sheet metal.
The Seed Factory Project ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Danielravennest/papers/Seed_Factory_Project ), which will be starting soon, is aimed at a more complete collection of machines that *can* fabricate "almost anything", including it's own parts. It will not be home-sized though. More community-sized, where you submit your "print job" and pick up the finished parts/items later. One feature of the seed concept is it does not have to do everything "out of the box". It can produce parts for additional types of machines to expand the range of things it can do. A design that includes a starter set + CAD files for additional machines saves money compared to including all the machines at the start.
Getting down to home-sized is not practical with current technology, nor it is efficient. How often do you need to print a new couch? It makes more sense to share the equipment over a larger group of people, so it is not sitting idle most of the time and reduces the cost.
How much do you know about Asteroid Mining?
Quite a lot, actually. It's part of the space systems engineering textbook I'm writing
What I do know is that 2015, two years from now, is a totally and completely unrealistic goal.
That is not an unrealistic goal to launch prospector spacecraft. Coondoggie's article summary mangles what they intend to do, and you misread it further. Their actual website lists three stages: Prospecting craft to find the asteroids, assay missions to bring back ~20 kg samples, and only then trying to actually mine. This is a sensible plan.
In the mean time, I hope to start building prototype "seed factory" hardware this year. A seed factory is the minimal starter set of machines to start building *other* machines, which in turn becomes your industrial base. Think of it like a bootstrap compiler for hardware. Feed it plans for other machines, it starts making parts. I'm aiming for making 85% of the 2nd generation machines, because 100% is too hard a goal. The other 15% you just buy.
Just tack on a PayPal "processing fee" for anyone that wants to use that method. This is an extra charge to cover the chance that PayPal will jerk you around. For example: Check, Visa, or Mastercard = $20 entry fee, Paypal = $20 + $5 Paypal processing fee = $25. This will make most people use another method, but still leave the option open for people who have no other way to pay. The extra fee covers your risk and hassle in using PayPal.
You can even adjust the processing fee in real time to keep your risk manageable: Assume you have reserves from last year's event equal to 20% of this year's expenses. Then adjust the fee so that no more than 20% of your registrations are through PayPal. In the worst case, you can still cover your bills, and argue unfreezing your account afterwards.
I have plenty of use for a service like this, for:
* Offsite backup of my content creation and personal files. I have a backup external drive at home, but it's nice to have another copy offsite.
* Distributing technical data, which is all open-sourced. My home PC is bandwidth limited and not turned on all the time.
Note that with his distributed hosting, he can get along with a small number of users. It would just mean using fewer hosting providers to match the demand.
I'm still waiting for final resolution of fallout from the 2007 financial meltdown. A mutual fund I had shares in lied about the value of mortgage-backed securities they held. The legal process is slow, so you can expect it to take several years for the return of user data.
Nuclear rockets have a much higher specific impulse than chemical rockets.
Solar Thermal has the exact same higher specific impulse, because both heat up Hydrogen to produce thrust. The only difference is the heat source. Solar Thermal is lighter than Nuclear Thermal (reactors are heavy, and require shielding), and completely avoids all the issues with Nuclear (protests, accidents). The only place to consider Nuclear Thermal these days is if you are going to Jupiter or beyond. Jupiter has intense radiation belts, so extra shielding is a moot point, and beyond that distance sunlight gets pretty weak.
Source: Me. I'm a rocket scientist, and writing a space systems engineering book: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods
Bitcoin uses a global distributed transaction history and account book, known as the "block chain" (because it is a series of blocks of transactions). There are many copies of the transaction history - each user of the official client gets one. Therefore it is more secure against accidental loss or forgery than a typical bank database. Transactions have to be cryptographically signed by the account owner, or they get rejected. There also has to be enough balance in that account number, or they also get rejected. To say the Bitcoin network has no control whatsoever clearly shows you don't understand it. Distributed control is still control.
Most US dollars exist in electronic form in various accounts in the banking system. The majority of the backing of Federal Reserve Notes (the paper currency) is by Treasury debt which also only exists in electronic form (the Federal Reserve and the Treasury stopped using paper T-bonds decades ago). Therefore to attempt to say bitcoins are "virtual" being any different than the official US currency clearly shows you don't understand our monetary system either.
You claim Bitcoin is a scam. In that case, someone must be perpetrating a fraud. Who, exactly? The people verifying blocks of transactions (ie miners)? They are performing a useful service, one that every bank has to do. The exchanges that convert bitcoins for other currencies? How is that different than every stock exchange and bank foreign currency desk? For that matter, how is it different than any other commodity that is bought or sold? The network that makes it possible to send funds internationally with low fees? PayPal, Western Union, and bank wires have done that a long time. Bitcoin just does it cheaper.
What it seems like, to me, Chas, is you are projecting your failure to understand Bitcoin onto others. What gives it value is the ease of moving funds, and, for a business, the lower chance of getting ripped off by PayPal or chargebacks. Even if it is not perfect, if it is better than the alternatives, people will tend to use it.
For people not familiar with the building, it's 15 stories tall and fills the whole block, and has more total floor area than the Empire State Building. When the Port Authority outgrew this building, they built the World Trade Center to hold their offices.
If you fire up Google Earth for 111 8th Street, you will see that the service area for this wifi is all within 3 blocks of the building, and nearly all direct line of sight. An old cynic like me would say they did this so the Google staff could stay connected while going out to lunch or shop in the area. Google put in free wifi near their Mountain View headquarters too.
Proportional representation. Your candidate gets 40 percent of the vote? They get 40% of the voting power. They get 1% of the vote, they get 1% of the voting power. It's the 21st century, we can deal with fractional votes, or simply multiply congressional votes by 100 (43,500 votes in the House of Representatives instead of 435). Set a minimum of 1% to keep number of reps reasonable. The extra representatives can also spread out the work. It's obvious from the continual lateness of the budgets, and representatives who claim lack of time to read bills that there are not enough of them. We need more bodies to spread the workload.
The Abrams can't go far without fuel. The fuel trucks are the vulnerable point in the system. Logistics wins wars, not bullets by themselves.
Oh, and improvised paint bombs. Once all the windows and optical sensors a covered in paint, the tank is not as useful.
Forgot to mention:
* Reduces payload mass, because the Habitats themselves don't go anywhere. They stay in their transfer orbits permanently. Only a smaller crew capsule changes velocity at the ends of the trip.
* Provides emergency fallback and rescue capability. For example, if your engine fails while attempting the Mars orbit insertion, you can either return to the transfer habitat, go forward to Phobos (whichever is closer) with backup system, or those bases can send a rescue vehicle. You are not alone out there, like with the canonical "hero mission to Mars to take photos, plant flag, leave footprints, and go home"
* Make fuel at Mars too, so you have return capability, and stockpile fuel from Phobos in Low Mars Orbit for landing and return trips. Refueling in increments makes the fuel needed almost linear in velocity, rather than exponential if you bring it all from Earth. The Rocket Equation is telling you this is a good idea, you should listen.
There are nearly 10,000 known Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and another 10,000 Near Mars Objects (NMOs) are expected (2 of which are known to orbit Mars). We have not found as many NMOs yet because they are farther away, but there is every reason to expect them to exist, and likely even more since they are closer to the source in the Main Belt.
No matter what orbit you choose, there will be some of these objects in nearby orbits. So I propose setting up "Transfer Habitats" in convenient orbits to get to and from Mars. You would start with some pressurized modules brought from Earth, then bring in asteroid rocks from nearby. This has numerous advantages:
* Solves the radiation problem, if you wrap a layer of rock shielding around your modules.
* Solves the boredom problem for the crew. They have more living space, and can spend their time growing food and extracting fuel from the rock.
* Reduces mass from Earth, because of the previously mentioned food and fuel you make yourself
* Eventually you can produce pure metals, glass, and other products to expand the habitat, and later ship to the next location (Phobos) where you repeat the process. Once the first of these shielded habitats is set up - in Earth orbit, the rest of them can come naturally over time.
* Producing fuel in Earth Orbit and at Phobos makes it easier to land on the Moon and Mars. It totally changes the economics from "hauling lots of fuel with expensive rockets from Earth" to "making fuel and other supplies wherever I am".
All of this is laid out in more detail in the book I'm working on (Section 4.12 in particular):
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods
Dani Eder
(ex Boeing, now independent designer of self-supporting communities)
There are three independent variables in designing a large space structure: orbit period, rotation period, and radius. The Tsiolkovsky 1895 design uses [24 hours, 24 hours, 35,000 km], but there is no requirement to use that particular design point, especially when other design points are much more feasible and efficient.
A split Skyhook system, with one in Low Orbit, and one in High Orbit, each with around 20-30 minute rotation period and 2-3 km/s tip velocity can be built with current carbon fiber strength and reasonable factors of safety and cable redundancy. It has the following additional advantages beside structural feasibility:
* Shorter by about a factor of 50 than 19th century space elevator design, thus much less exposed to meteor and debris damage
* Cargo rides the Skyhook for half a rotation, then lets go to a different orbit. This completely eliminates the climbing system, and is much faster in any case. 19th century elevator concept completely ignores spending days in an elevator capsule passing through the radiation belts.
* High orbit Skyhook is close enough to Earth escape to inject directly to Lunar gravity assist or planetary transfer orbit.
* Habitat at tip of Skyhook is at a convenient gravity level (1.0 gees)
* System can be built incrementally, is useful when partially built, and can literally bootstrap it's own construction. Payback times and economic flight rates are short for partially built versions.
> the narrow docking window of the high end of the much more feasible tumbling cable implementation would likely make it unfeasibly difficult
Meeting a moving target accelerating at 1 g at the tip of a Skyhook is exactly as hard as catching a baseball or landing on an aircraft carrier at 1 g. These are demonstrably solved problems, and with GPS plus active navigation aids at the landing pad, will be easy to automate. A landing platform or net can be as large as it needs to be to make sure you don't miss. Like airplanes, you don't line up your docking port/air stair until *after* you land and come to a stop.
...for an evil genius to set up his lair. Who would ever suspect an empty building at the busiest intersection in the world?
"Genius has it's limits. Stupidity knows no bounds." - Anon.
Exactly where are the Pirate Bay servers? You can't confiscate them if you can't find them.
From the point of view of gut bacteria, we are just hosts serving their purposes as transportation and food suppliers. If they can get more food by releasing the right kind of chemical signals into our system, they will. This is a real life example of the way the fictional Goa'uld parasites treated their human hosts. But bacteria are not aliens, they are actually derived from the same ancient ancestors as us.
There is a registry entry that calls up the Apps list of the start screen. You can create a shortcut that points to that registry entry, then change the icon on the shortcut to look like the start button (I used the Media Center icon). Pin it to the taskbar on the left, and there you are.
I found out how to do this by googling Windows 8 setup tips, but don't remember where I saw it.
Also, if you put your desktop tile of the default start screen on the top left, hitting enter will take you to the desktop. Since the windows key takes you to tile view, it's pretty easy to toggle back and forth. The way I look at it, the tile view and full apps list are the same as previous Windows pinned to start button and "All Apps", just blown up to full screen size for touch devices.
Time to open the Office of Defense Intelligence Security Investigation
Current NVIDIA K20X compute card produces 5.575 Gflops double precision/Watt:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6446/nvidia-launches-tesla-k20-k20x-gk110-arrives-at-last
Note that these cards are slightly different than consumer graphics cards. They have more double-precision pipelines because scientific computing cares more about that kind of math. They are also much more expensive than consumer cards. The underlying chip design is similar to the 600-series graphics cards. You can think of it as a modified version optimized for math, since the 600 series came out first, and is being produced in higher volume.
It was a fictional concept thought up by Vernor Vinge in the early 1990's, to satisfy the needs of some novels he wrote, then further developed as a serious idea:
http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html
(It helps that Vinge is a professor of mathematics, as well as an SF author).
If increasing computing power is subject to diminishing returns, explain your own existence running on a 100 Hz, 25W meatware processor, and the exponential growth of supercomputer power.
The trend has already started to "Phablets", phones with a screen large enough to be a tablet. The rationale is to only have to carry around one device when you are moving around. So you may as well pack in all the features you can.
You can stay right in the US. Just move to an area with a low population density, small government, and lots of hunters and farmers. Cost of living is usually low, and people tend to leave you alone, because they don't know if you might be the one with plenty of rifle experience. When I lived in an area like that, I knew the power company guy and the road maintenance guy by name, because they would stop and chat.