Nope, that's completely wrong. Your wallet is just a bunch of keys taking mere kilobytes on your hard disk. A light client does just enough synchronization to figure out what your balances are and post transactions. No need to download the entire blockchain, and no need to store anything on anyone else's servers. If your hard disk crashes and you didn't back up your keys, nobody can ever use those bitcoins again (unless someone figures out how to crack the system, for example using quantum cryptography at some point in the future).
No, only a small minority of users actually function as a node in the blockchain.
There are three categories of users: 1. Those who just have an account with a bitcoin broker. The broker manages their coins, the users don't even have a bitcoin client 2. Those using their own wallet (hardware or software) using a light client that does just enough synchronization to figure out what your balances are and post transactions. 3. Miners and other enthousiasts who run a full bitcoin node that actually stores the entire blockchain (currently more than 160 GB)
Strange how the constitution is considered extremely important when it comes to allowing people to have guns, yet it is thrown out the window when it comes to communications privacy. Why does the US even have a constitution if they can shove it aside so easily?
Finding loopholes in the constitution... think about that for a moment.
That kind of reminds me of a short story by Iain Banks, "Descendant", part of "The State of the Art". Astronaut in an intelligent mechanical suit after a spaceship crash, trying to get to a base hundreds of kilometers away, the suit doing its best to keep him alive while doing most of the walking itself.
I actually like that trend: it means I can keep wearing my old jeans, which were undamaged once upon a time when I bought them but have now improved to the much more classy holey version.
The catch here is that, "all the energy in the universe," may not be hitting you as you fall through the event horizon, but a lot will, more than likely enough to give you a Bad Day. You're only down from "infinity" to "the horizon observable over the black hole's future," still a pretty big number.
Indeed, that's another thing I was wondering about but forgot to mention.
For spinning black holes, which I believe means most of them, or at least the big ones we could think of entering in the non-spaghetti state, there are actually two event horizons, and it might be possible to leave from the zone in between them.
Wow, you learn something new every day, thank you!
We're talking about Model 3 here. It starts at $35k. Yes, I know, for the moment you can only buy the more expensive version, closer to $50k, but it will be available at $35k once production has ramped up. Subtract fuel savings and you're well under $30k. Not quite 1% territory.
I'm not in the field either, but I hope someone can explain this a little better since the actual paper is behind a paywall and the oversimplified and popularized Motherboard article doesn't make any sense.
Motherboard says that the laws of the universe, outside of black holes, are supposedly deterministic. That's news to me, I thought quantum mechanics dealt with probabilities and there was no way to predict what part a particle will take. The universe plays dice all the time, it only appears to be deterministic on a large scale when the probabilities of the individual particles average out to a largely predictable macroscopic result.
Then, what does it mean when they say your past is destroyed? Let me get this straight, you fall into one of these special black holes, you survive (which, I assume, includes your memories), yet your past is "destroyed"? I imagine they mean that the laws transfer to a different coordinate system where your past is no longer at negative time coordinates but simply nowhere at all. Which isn't really that unusual. Just use a different coordinate system (one tied to your body) and the past will be there again, still inaccessible at the usual negative coordinates (but formulas for describing your current environment will be very complicated). Pretty sure that's what they meant, right?
OK, what about the unlimited futures? Again, I though quantum mechanics already gave us those. I guess it means that the future will be a lot more undeterministic than usual?
Finally, the big discovery seems to be that you won't be destroyed by all the energy of the universe falling through the event horizon at the same time as you, thanks to the expansion of the universe. But what about spaghettification? Won't you still be killed by the enormous differential gravitation even if you survive the radiation at the horizon? How does the charge of the black hole prevent that from happening?
Thanks in advance to anyone who can clear this up a bit more.
Cameras are great, indeed. I just hope they're not going to mandate automatic backup braking with current backup sensors. Mine go "bip bip bip bip BEEEEEEEEP" when I'm still 40 cm from anything. If the car then refuses to move further, parking is going to become very difficult.
I wonder if some day we'll finally figure out that our "unused junk DNA" portions actually contain an entire copy of something resembling the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
Can you give me one good reason why a simple game that does not need any fancy new capabilities of new hardware, should not be able to run on older devices? Any reason why a perfectly working 7 year first generation iPad must be trashed? (Other than "Apple must make money")
I know I'm "stupid" because I jump through all those hoops to keep my software compatible even though Apple intentionally makes it a pain to do so, and even though it hardly makes me any more money (the latter being all that matters, right?). I know I'm "stupid" to put any effort into supporting some of my poorer users who love my games but can't afford to buy a new device while their old device is still in perfect working order. I know it's "stupid" to hang on to old, perfectly working hardware instead of sending it to a landfill in some Asian country for children to take apart to recycle their toxic components. I know it's "stupid" to pass older devices onto younger children to use. No, everybody must buy new tablets, even our six year old!
I wish everybody would be as stupid as I am, it would be a lot better for the planet. But now Apple has decided that I'm not even allowed to support those older models anymore. Even though there's absolutely no technical reason for it.
That's not the problem, Apple explicitly tells you how to take the notch and rounded corners into account so the app looks good on any device.
A bigger problem is that it's now impossible to code for older devices. I still have friends and family with older iPads running iOS 6. I made sure all my apps remained compatible, which means using an older version of xCode. But now Apple is simply making it completely impossible to support older devices, period.
I know some people will say that coding for older devices does not make economic sense anyway as they only represent a tiny fraction of sales. That may even be sound advice for a company trying to make money. However, it's quite another thing to tell developers they are not even allowed to make that choice anymore. That's planned obsolescence, pure and simple.
You've got to love the title of the actual article: The random walk of cars and their collision probabilities with planets. As if that were somehow a normal field of study, generalized so it can be applied to other cars as well.
Well, that's exactly what they did: run a zillion simulations (with slightly different initial condidtions) to determine the probability of a collision in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, they know now...
Nope, that's completely wrong. Your wallet is just a bunch of keys taking mere kilobytes on your hard disk. A light client does just enough synchronization to figure out what your balances are and post transactions. No need to download the entire blockchain, and no need to store anything on anyone else's servers. If your hard disk crashes and you didn't back up your keys, nobody can ever use those bitcoins again (unless someone figures out how to crack the system, for example using quantum cryptography at some point in the future).
No, only a small minority of users actually function as a node in the blockchain.
There are three categories of users:
1. Those who just have an account with a bitcoin broker. The broker manages their coins, the users don't even have a bitcoin client
2. Those using their own wallet (hardware or software) using a light client that does just enough synchronization to figure out what your balances are and post transactions.
3. Miners and other enthousiasts who run a full bitcoin node that actually stores the entire blockchain (currently more than 160 GB)
Strange how the constitution is considered extremely important when it comes to allowing people to have guns, yet it is thrown out the window when it comes to communications privacy. Why does the US even have a constitution if they can shove it aside so easily?
Finding loopholes in the constitution... think about that for a moment.
And they cured him of ALS!
That kind of reminds me of a short story by Iain Banks, "Descendant", part of "The State of the Art". Astronaut in an intelligent mechanical suit after a spaceship crash, trying to get to a base hundreds of kilometers away, the suit doing its best to keep him alive while doing most of the walking itself.
I actually like that trend: it means I can keep wearing my old jeans, which were undamaged once upon a time when I bought them but have now improved to the much more classy holey version.
Well, there goes my attempt at the 2^8 days read in a row achievement...
I would ever call him a chik!
o, it makes sese.
Log live Xi Jipig!
It's getting them to join you into that black hole that's going to be the hard part...
The catch here is that, "all the energy in the universe," may not be hitting you as you fall through the event horizon, but a lot will, more than likely enough to give you a Bad Day. You're only down from "infinity" to "the horizon observable over the black hole's future," still a pretty big number.
Indeed, that's another thing I was wondering about but forgot to mention.
For spinning black holes, which I believe means most of them, or at least the big ones we could think of entering in the non-spaghetti state, there are actually two event horizons, and it might be possible to leave from the zone in between them.
Wow, you learn something new every day, thank you!
We're talking about Model 3 here. It starts at $35k. Yes, I know, for the moment you can only buy the more expensive version, closer to $50k, but it will be available at $35k once production has ramped up. Subtract fuel savings and you're well under $30k. Not quite 1% territory.
I'm not in the field either, but I hope someone can explain this a little better since the actual paper is behind a paywall and the oversimplified and popularized Motherboard article doesn't make any sense.
Motherboard says that the laws of the universe, outside of black holes, are supposedly deterministic. That's news to me, I thought quantum mechanics dealt with probabilities and there was no way to predict what part a particle will take. The universe plays dice all the time, it only appears to be deterministic on a large scale when the probabilities of the individual particles average out to a largely predictable macroscopic result.
Then, what does it mean when they say your past is destroyed? Let me get this straight, you fall into one of these special black holes, you survive (which, I assume, includes your memories), yet your past is "destroyed"? I imagine they mean that the laws transfer to a different coordinate system where your past is no longer at negative time coordinates but simply nowhere at all. Which isn't really that unusual. Just use a different coordinate system (one tied to your body) and the past will be there again, still inaccessible at the usual negative coordinates (but formulas for describing your current environment will be very complicated). Pretty sure that's what they meant, right?
OK, what about the unlimited futures? Again, I though quantum mechanics already gave us those. I guess it means that the future will be a lot more undeterministic than usual?
Finally, the big discovery seems to be that you won't be destroyed by all the energy of the universe falling through the event horizon at the same time as you, thanks to the expansion of the universe. But what about spaghettification? Won't you still be killed by the enormous differential gravitation even if you survive the radiation at the horizon? How does the charge of the black hole prevent that from happening?
Thanks in advance to anyone who can clear this up a bit more.
in fright WiFi
Is that WiFi for people who are afraid of flying?
Cameras are great, indeed. I just hope they're not going to mandate automatic backup braking with current backup sensors. Mine go "bip bip bip bip BEEEEEEEEP" when I'm still 40 cm from anything. If the car then refuses to move further, parking is going to become very difficult.
They will be in LEO, pings will be a lot quicker, possibly quicker than cable over long distances.
Common for SpaceX, yes...
I wonder if some day we'll finally figure out that our "unused junk DNA" portions actually contain an entire copy of something resembling the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
Or maybe it's this Barbie?
(Barbie-obsessed mother is saving so her daughter, 13, can have surgery to look like the doll just like she did)
Can you give me one good reason why a simple game that does not need any fancy new capabilities of new hardware, should not be able to run on older devices? Any reason why a perfectly working 7 year first generation iPad must be trashed? (Other than "Apple must make money")
I know I'm "stupid" because I jump through all those hoops to keep my software compatible even though Apple intentionally makes it a pain to do so, and even though it hardly makes me any more money (the latter being all that matters, right?). I know I'm "stupid" to put any effort into supporting some of my poorer users who love my games but can't afford to buy a new device while their old device is still in perfect working order. I know it's "stupid" to hang on to old, perfectly working hardware instead of sending it to a landfill in some Asian country for children to take apart to recycle their toxic components. I know it's "stupid" to pass older devices onto younger children to use. No, everybody must buy new tablets, even our six year old!
I wish everybody would be as stupid as I am, it would be a lot better for the planet. But now Apple has decided that I'm not even allowed to support those older models anymore. Even though there's absolutely no technical reason for it.
That's not the problem, Apple explicitly tells you how to take the notch and rounded corners into account so the app looks good on any device.
A bigger problem is that it's now impossible to code for older devices. I still have friends and family with older iPads running iOS 6. I made sure all my apps remained compatible, which means using an older version of xCode. But now Apple is simply making it completely impossible to support older devices, period.
I know some people will say that coding for older devices does not make economic sense anyway as they only represent a tiny fraction of sales. That may even be sound advice for a company trying to make money. However, it's quite another thing to tell developers they are not even allowed to make that choice anymore. That's planned obsolescence, pure and simple.
You've got to love the title of the actual article: The random walk of cars and their collision probabilities with planets. As if that were somehow a normal field of study, generalized so it can be applied to other cars as well.
Well, that's exactly what they did: run a zillion simulations (with slightly different initial condidtions) to determine the probability of a collision in the future.
I love the title of that article: "The random walk of cars and their collision probabilities with planets"