A method of doing this effectively is discussed here, where the success of the system is not dependent on a particular value for bitcoins, but only that they have some value at all.
While completely un-user-friendly at present (just take a look at Bitcoin.org whenever it comes back up), BitCoin is a phenomenon of significant scale:
Value of BitCoins in current circulation: > 5 million USD Quantities traded daily on exchanges: in the 10's of thousands of dollars' worth daily Bitcoin transactions on the network itself: around 10,000 BTC per hour Computational power of the BitCoin network: 186 Ghash/sec (about 42,000 quad core CPU's, or around 2 petaFLOPS) Active nodes right now on the p2p network: >2,600
Security: vetted by leading cryptographers as many orders of magnitude better than online banking. Cheating on a single transaction with BitCoins you already own requires you to outpace those 2 petaFLOPS above. Usurping the entire network requires you to beat the *cumulative* cycles of the network over it's whole existence. "Stealing" someone else's coins without direct access to their keys: laughable to even try and compute.
Mining/where BitCoins come from: don't be confused by this, it is as irrelevant to using them as the paper money engraving and printing process is to using cash. Many people seem to get hung up on it as the primary source of getting bitcoins, which it isn't by a long shot.. TL;DR: an open, competitive process is used to "create" the coins, with increased competition resulting in increased security so that the more valuable bitcoins become the more secure they will get. In practice this means that the cost of creating coins stays reasonably close to the market value of them. In paper money this would be like if 5$ worth of security features actually went into each individual $5 bill as opposed to the few cents that goes into the most secure paper currency, and then $100 worth of security into each individual $100 bill. Now you begin to understand why BitCoin is so much more secure than traditional banking.
Privacy: individual transactions are public, but can be split over an arbitrary # of addresses, and nobody knows who owns any addresses so in practice all transactions are completely anonymous with regards to the receiver, and you would have to be watching all connections to a given node to catch a spend, identical to traffic analysis plus discovery powers on a traditional bank. Unlike a traditional bank, BitCoin happily works over Tor and other anonymisation protocols.
And finally, the eternal question of whether BitCoin is going to seriously succeed or end up on the fringe: This is silly to pontificate on. BitCoin, like anything else on the internet, will succeed if we cause it to succeed, and fail if we ignore it. It takes a lot of hard work to establish a digital currency, and whether people put that in or not all across the web will determine what happens to BitCoin. The underlying math is provably secure; thanks to the copyfight we know that the p2p network can't be taken down by authorities. Now we just have to see if an open transaction standard that allows anyone to participate can, like the web before it, gain enough traction to matter.
"Anything and everything fuels conflict in Africa. At most, this is throwing a match into a raging fire."
But what can we, as a world community, do about it? We can't just barge in a la Iraq and impose our own order. This is something the African people have to do for themselves.
There are real and practical ways for "we as a world community" (=powerful first worlders) to make a difference, but we may not like the answers: they invariably involve giving up our artifical hegemony in world trade to actually allow economic participation by third world countries as true peers.
Sit down some time with an expert 3rd world economist(yes, there are lots of them). He or she will tell you plainly that the problem is not ignorance as to what to do. It is powers that be having the will to implement what needs to happen. And until we make that requirement for change an ultimatum to our leaders, any other actions will be impotent and ineffectual.
Hell, if it wasn't somethign else they would just kill each other for the hell of it
are the entire problem, and voice the very perspective that could successfully keep Africa in its current state for the next 200 years. Have we really not yet learned?
It's not the consumers of the world's fault that the Africans have absolutely no respect for the concept of rule of law or privet property, and are driven by greed to covet whatever they can sell.
The correct saying should be "anytime a material of value is found in Africa, the locals will murder each other to steal it and sell it." this is true of minerals on the international market, as well as their neighbors corn on the domestic market. People in other nations shouldn't feel bad for profiting from bad government on the part of Africans.
I strongly suggest that you reexamine your statement with an eye to detect lurking ethnocentrism. Here's a tip: begin by presuming "the Africans" to be exactly the same as you or I, and ask what underlying complexities may be in play that you are missing.
So is the problem our farm subsidies, or the failure of the third world to enact their own tariffs and subsidies to protect their own agricultural base? With the current price of transport, countries which have maintained local production, rather than increased dependency on foreign trade for foodstuffs, are far better positioned.
"their own tariffs and subsidies" are explicitly prevented by every agreement our first world countries have ever signed with them, backed up by all the might of our powerful governments(military and economic), all in the name of "free trade" measured by a standard we ourselves fail against. Anyone who really believes that the worsening situation of third world economies is somehow due to them being stupid needs to pull their head out of their ethnocentric ass.
Intellectual 'Property' is a crude attempt to provide a mechanism to support the development and implementation of ideas. The solution to Intellectual 'property' is not to fix it, but to obsolete it--create more effective ways that do not rely on this broken, expensive, backwards system. Once those ways prove superior, no one will complain when the deprecated code is removed from the lawbooks.
In short--let IP-based methodologies shoot themselves in the foot. None of them can compete with an effective model based on actually providing widespread availability on purpose. If any large software corporation, for example, started publishing a set sales cap after which their software becomes free(as in speech), or implemented some other realistic association between the cost of production and the cost to consumers, the marketing value of a company actually doing something for the general public would be unmatchable. Never underestimate the power of "Don't be evil". Marketing an image is far easier and cheaper when that image doesn't have to be faked.
An effective way to do this with Compiz (available only for linux, sorry windows nerds) is to leave the whole system on default, garish whites and blacks, then use either built-in inversion or a custom palette to tuen it to your choosing. This is particularly effective for those obnoxious websites that refuse to accept your custom stylesheet.
Rather than being moved by wind in the absence of standing water or by ice in its presence, why couldn't the rocks have been moved by standing water in the absence of ice, the water itself being driven by wind? The presence of the water would reduce the friction through buoyancy and also provide more pushing force via wind-initiated currents. Such currents would tend to prevail in similar directions within localities but differ between them, would allow situations where small rocks but not large ones move, and would tend to leave the stakes unaffected. Extreme examples of parallelism in the tracks could be the result of either ice rafts or floating debris, such as a log, but be the exception rather than the rule. In such cases, one would also expect to have divergences near the end of the trails as the rocks became free of the debris(or as the ice breaks up).
The cracked and dried pattern may not be formed in a single step but rather may be the accumulated effect of many wetting and drying cycles over time. One would then expect the pattern not to be found in the same degree on the trails since the smearing disrupts the chunking of the mud by breaking it down into finer parts, much like the way a freshly tilled garden patch will not immediately return to the caked, cracked look it had before after merely a single rainfall.
Yes, and removing a single hair will never make a person bald either, right? Any attempt to define limits has to set them somewhere and the arbitrary but still effective choice of our societies in general for 'adulthood' is around 18 years old. The finer differences in individual minors are left at the discretion of parents, which is far more effective than trying to do it with taxpayer money. If you're mature enough to play a graphic game at 17 without letting it get inside your head you should probably be mature enough to be able to explain that coherently and convincingly to your parent/guardian. Conversely there are many over 18 who are probably not of a mental constitution to play games like this without it affecting them but we can't babysit everyone for life either.
The real problem has nothing to do with age specifications, but rather is caused by overprotective console makers who make the executive decision for all adults everywhere that no one can play a game of a certain rating, which then distorts that end of the rating spectrum and produces these kinds of uproductive controversies.
Sometimes the device needs to be reinvented at a different level, i.e. by digitising the content instead of the physical interface. After all, the true innovation leading to mass adoption and success was not the book but the printing press, before which they already had books, it just took years to carefully copy onto animal skin. The printing press just made it easier to get the words onto the pages in the first place, a lesson ebook readers could take a lesson from.
Agreed. Sometimes the device needs to be reinvented at a different level, i.e. by digitising the content instead of the physical interface. After all, the true innovation leading to mass adoption and success was not the book but the printing press, before which they already had books, it just took years to carefully copy onto animal skin. The printing press just made it easier to get the words onto the pages in the first place, a lesson ebook readers could take a lesson from.
disclaimer: shameless proponent of <a href="http://www.crowdspirit.com/idea/cheap-ultra-low-power-digital-book-with-pages">crowdspirit</a>
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Are you? I have a brand new laptop that came with Windows Vista business and it most certainly is slow. On a core 2 duo with a gig of ram both XP and Ubuntu zip around with fluid ease while with Vista it crawls under the burden of some mysterious unassigned task.
The additional resources required to run a new Operating System would be a fair price to pay if it came with new and useful features but whatever they are I have yet to find them, and trust me I have looked. This will probably be the OS I have to support at work in a few months and I want to know it inside and out, especially anything that will make my life easier.
My wireless card periodically disables itself, a 'feature' apparently peculiar to the windows wireless service which offers no apparent method to return control to the Access Connections program Lenovo spent so much time writing to be useable and effective with their hardware. Again, under Ubuntu my card worked flawlessly from the default install and doesn't drop out even if I leave it running for a week under the full torrent-load of a raft of new distros.
But the thing I dread most of all coming into my organisation is those permission dialogs. The very first one I ever got asked for my permission to continue because 'an unknown program has requested to perform an unknown action'. To this, I am expected to click yes for my programs to run properly, a lesson that will quickly be learned by every single user in my organisation and which will immediately render that entire layer useless.
So to get Vista to run reasonably in my organization I will be disabling aero, disabling file indexing, and disabling UAC, which leaves me with a thoroughly bloated, less stable, insecure, and unfamiliar Windows XP, all because our primary software vendor is forcing us via end-of-lifecycle policies to upgrade whether we like it or not. If you want to talk about something that's annoying and stupid, there you have it.
Finally, I challenge you to sit in any organisation's help and support centre on the first day of Vista deployment and explain to the %60 of people who call about why the shutdown button only hibernates how hilarious it is. Quite frankly, if any other vendor did this to our organisation we would never purchase anything from them again.
It will be interesting to see if Linspire, like SUSE, will see a comparable market share rise in this version because of the patent protection. As frustrating as the implicit validation of an obviously groundless threat is, it is worth pointing out that the actual value of the deal has nothing to do with legal protection and everything to do with marketing.
Not, of course, referring to the negative publicity of the deal being made in the first place, which is read only by IT nerds anyways, but the combined value of some kind of flag to differentiate themselves from 'all the other linuxes' in the mind of confused non-technical decision makers and the possibility for a tiny toe-hold in MS-dominated solutions providers via holding Microsoft's endorsement.
Recently when, as is my usual practice, I spent some time berating one of our Microzombie monovendors for their lack of open source options my hapless victim, a low-level sales rep, hurriedly assured me that they were going to be offering some SUSE solutions. "It's the only Linux with legal protection from lawsuits" he excitedly told me. Point number one on his list of selling points. Not to mention the first time that vendor had ever mentioned Linux. Novell and Linspire have definitely sold their souls to the devil, but the devil did give them a decent marketing package in return.
If you sell an idiot $5 cables, you only get $5 from him.
If you sell an idiot $7,000 cable, you get $7000 from him.
This proves that $7,000 cables are superior to $5 cables.
Where is my million? In the pockets of 143 idiots.
Slashdot Mirror
Can someone please Wiki this so that there can be some systematic collaboration?
A method of doing this effectively is discussed here, where the success of the system is not dependent on a particular value for bitcoins, but only that they have some value at all.
Mod parent up--this is a seriously professional production, and it was funded through an online Bitcoin bounty to boot. Digital currency in action!
80,000 WOW gold = 65 BTC as of March 16
To get you up to speed:
While completely un-user-friendly at present (just take a look at Bitcoin.org whenever it comes back up), BitCoin is a phenomenon of significant scale:
Value of BitCoins in current circulation: > 5 million USD
Quantities traded daily on exchanges: in the 10's of thousands of dollars' worth daily
Bitcoin transactions on the network itself: around 10,000 BTC per hour
Computational power of the BitCoin network: 186 Ghash/sec (about 42,000 quad core CPU's, or around 2 petaFLOPS)
Active nodes right now on the p2p network: >2,600
Security: vetted by leading cryptographers as many orders of magnitude better than online banking. Cheating on a single transaction with BitCoins you already own requires you to outpace those 2 petaFLOPS above. Usurping the entire network requires you to beat the *cumulative* cycles of the network over it's whole existence. "Stealing" someone else's coins without direct access to their keys: laughable to even try and compute.
Mining/where BitCoins come from: don't be confused by this, it is as irrelevant to using them as the paper money engraving and printing process is to using cash. Many people seem to get hung up on it as the primary source of getting bitcoins, which it isn't by a long shot.. TL;DR: an open, competitive process is used to "create" the coins, with increased competition resulting in increased security so that the more valuable bitcoins become the more secure they will get. In practice this means that the cost of creating coins stays reasonably close to the market value of them. In paper money this would be like if 5$ worth of security features actually went into each individual $5 bill as opposed to the few cents that goes into the most secure paper currency, and then $100 worth of security into each individual $100 bill. Now you begin to understand why BitCoin is so much more secure than traditional banking.
Privacy: individual transactions are public, but can be split over an arbitrary # of addresses, and nobody knows who owns any addresses so in practice all transactions are completely anonymous with regards to the receiver, and you would have to be watching all connections to a given node to catch a spend, identical to traffic analysis plus discovery powers on a traditional bank. Unlike a traditional bank, BitCoin happily works over Tor and other anonymisation protocols.
And finally, the eternal question of whether BitCoin is going to seriously succeed or end up on the fringe: This is silly to pontificate on. BitCoin, like anything else on the internet, will succeed if we cause it to succeed, and fail if we ignore it. It takes a lot of hard work to establish a digital currency, and whether people put that in or not all across the web will determine what happens to BitCoin. The underlying math is provably secure; thanks to the copyfight we know that the p2p network can't be taken down by authorities. Now we just have to see if an open transaction standard that allows anyone to participate can, like the web before it, gain enough traction to matter.
Sources: http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/ http://twitter.com/bitcoineconomy https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page
"Anything and everything fuels conflict in Africa. At most, this is throwing a match into a raging fire."
But what can we, as a world community, do about it? We can't just barge in a la Iraq and impose our own order. This is something the African people have to do for themselves.
There are real and practical ways for "we as a world community" (=powerful first worlders) to make a difference, but we may not like the answers: they invariably involve giving up our artifical hegemony in world trade to actually allow economic participation by third world countries as true peers. Sit down some time with an expert 3rd world economist(yes, there are lots of them). He or she will tell you plainly that the problem is not ignorance as to what to do. It is powers that be having the will to implement what needs to happen. And until we make that requirement for change an ultimatum to our leaders, any other actions will be impotent and ineffectual.
Really, who gives a shit anymore?
I do. Statements like
Hell, if it wasn't somethign else they would just kill each other for the hell of it
are the entire problem, and voice the very perspective that could successfully keep Africa in its current state for the next 200 years. Have we really not yet learned?
It's not the consumers of the world's fault that the Africans have absolutely no respect for the concept of rule of law or privet property, and are driven by greed to covet whatever they can sell. The correct saying should be "anytime a material of value is found in Africa, the locals will murder each other to steal it and sell it." this is true of minerals on the international market, as well as their neighbors corn on the domestic market. People in other nations shouldn't feel bad for profiting from bad government on the part of Africans.
I strongly suggest that you reexamine your statement with an eye to detect lurking ethnocentrism. Here's a tip: begin by presuming "the Africans" to be exactly the same as you or I, and ask what underlying complexities may be in play that you are missing.
So is the problem our farm subsidies, or the failure of the third world to enact their own tariffs and subsidies to protect their own agricultural base? With the current price of transport, countries which have maintained local production, rather than increased dependency on foreign trade for foodstuffs, are far better positioned.
"their own tariffs and subsidies" are explicitly prevented by every agreement our first world countries have ever signed with them, backed up by all the might of our powerful governments(military and economic), all in the name of "free trade" measured by a standard we ourselves fail against. Anyone who really believes that the worsening situation of third world economies is somehow due to them being stupid needs to pull their head out of their ethnocentric ass.
That the drive would be Blu-Ray compatible, not the disc
instarx, what if I were to tell you that this rock keeps away tigers?
In short--let IP-based methodologies shoot themselves in the foot. None of them can compete with an effective model based on actually providing widespread availability on purpose. If any large software corporation, for example, started publishing a set sales cap after which their software becomes free(as in speech), or implemented some other realistic association between the cost of production and the cost to consumers, the marketing value of a company actually doing something for the general public would be unmatchable. Never underestimate the power of "Don't be evil". Marketing an image is far easier and cheaper when that image doesn't have to be faked.
Which is itself an example of the Chuck Norris Facts meme.
The earliest reference I believe would be this quote
An effective way to do this with Compiz (available only for linux, sorry windows nerds) is to leave the whole system on default, garish whites and blacks, then use either built-in inversion or a custom palette to tuen it to your choosing. This is particularly effective for those obnoxious websites that refuse to accept your custom stylesheet.
Simply display any copyrighted material on your person and then have the *AA use the DMCA to sue the bastards out of existence!
Rather than being moved by wind in the absence of standing water or by ice in its presence, why couldn't the rocks have been moved by standing water in the absence of ice, the water itself being driven by wind? The presence of the water would reduce the friction through buoyancy and also provide more pushing force via wind-initiated currents. Such currents would tend to prevail in similar directions within localities but differ between them, would allow situations where small rocks but not large ones move, and would tend to leave the stakes unaffected. Extreme examples of parallelism in the tracks could be the result of either ice rafts or floating debris, such as a log, but be the exception rather than the rule. In such cases, one would also expect to have divergences near the end of the trails as the rocks became free of the debris(or as the ice breaks up).
The cracked and dried pattern may not be formed in a single step but rather may be the accumulated effect of many wetting and drying cycles over time. One would then expect the pattern not to be found in the same degree on the trails since the smearing disrupts the chunking of the mud by breaking it down into finer parts, much like the way a freshly tilled garden patch will not immediately return to the caked, cracked look it had before after merely a single rainfall.
The real problem has nothing to do with age specifications, but rather is caused by overprotective console makers who make the executive decision for all adults everywhere that no one can play a game of a certain rating, which then distorts that end of the rating spectrum and produces these kinds of uproductive controversies.
Sometimes the device needs to be reinvented at a different level, i.e. by digitising the content instead of the physical interface. After all, the true innovation leading to mass adoption and success was not the book but the printing press, before which they already had books, it just took years to carefully copy onto animal skin. The printing press just made it easier to get the words onto the pages in the first place, a lesson ebook readers could take a lesson from.
Disclaimer: shameless proponent of crowdspirit
Agreed. Sometimes the device needs to be reinvented at a different level, i.e. by digitising the content instead of the physical interface. After all, the true innovation leading to mass adoption and success was not the book but the printing press, before which they already had books, it just took years to carefully copy onto animal skin. The printing press just made it easier to get the words onto the pages in the first place, a lesson ebook readers could take a lesson from.
disclaimer: shameless proponent of <a href="http://www.crowdspirit.com/idea/cheap-ultra-low-power-digital-book-with-pages">crowdspirit</a>
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Are you? I have a brand new laptop that came with Windows Vista business and it most certainly is slow. On a core 2 duo with a gig of ram both XP and Ubuntu zip around with fluid ease while with Vista it crawls under the burden of some mysterious unassigned task.
The additional resources required to run a new Operating System would be a fair price to pay if it came with new and useful features but whatever they are I have yet to find them, and trust me I have looked. This will probably be the OS I have to support at work in a few months and I want to know it inside and out, especially anything that will make my life easier.
My wireless card periodically disables itself, a 'feature' apparently peculiar to the windows wireless service which offers no apparent method to return control to the Access Connections program Lenovo spent so much time writing to be useable and effective with their hardware. Again, under Ubuntu my card worked flawlessly from the default install and doesn't drop out even if I leave it running for a week under the full torrent-load of a raft of new distros.
But the thing I dread most of all coming into my organisation is those permission dialogs. The very first one I ever got asked for my permission to continue because 'an unknown program has requested to perform an unknown action'. To this, I am expected to click yes for my programs to run properly, a lesson that will quickly be learned by every single user in my organisation and which will immediately render that entire layer useless.
So to get Vista to run reasonably in my organization I will be disabling aero, disabling file indexing, and disabling UAC, which leaves me with a thoroughly bloated, less stable, insecure, and unfamiliar Windows XP, all because our primary software vendor is forcing us via end-of-lifecycle policies to upgrade whether we like it or not. If you want to talk about something that's annoying and stupid, there you have it.
Finally, I challenge you to sit in any organisation's help and support centre on the first day of Vista deployment and explain to the %60 of people who call about why the shutdown button only hibernates how hilarious it is. Quite frankly, if any other vendor did this to our organisation we would never purchase anything from them again.
It will be interesting to see if Linspire, like SUSE, will see a comparable market share rise in this version because of the patent protection. As frustrating as the implicit validation of an obviously groundless threat is, it is worth pointing out that the actual value of the deal has nothing to do with legal protection and everything to do with marketing.
Not, of course, referring to the negative publicity of the deal being made in the first place, which is read only by IT nerds anyways, but the combined value of some kind of flag to differentiate themselves from 'all the other linuxes' in the mind of confused non-technical decision makers and the possibility for a tiny toe-hold in MS-dominated solutions providers via holding Microsoft's endorsement.
Recently when, as is my usual practice, I spent some time berating one of our Microzombie monovendors for their lack of open source options my hapless victim, a low-level sales rep, hurriedly assured me that they were going to be offering some SUSE solutions. "It's the only Linux with legal protection from lawsuits" he excitedly told me. Point number one on his list of selling points. Not to mention the first time that vendor had ever mentioned Linux. Novell and Linspire have definitely sold their souls to the devil, but the devil did give them a decent marketing package in return.