I didn't remember reading anything about Belgium in any of Douglas Adams' books, so I went looking it up. Here's the result: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_the_Universe_and_Everything#Censorship
So basically, in the US edition, the censors replaced "Fuck" by "Belgium", a reference to the original radio series (which I'm too young to have witnessed) in which Belgium was the most offensive word in the galaxy. One learns something new every day.
Saying "we don't really know how this coin is created" displays the author's fundamental misunderstanding of the phenomenon. You don't need to know the exact technical details- and I don't either- to understand that the process of bitcoin production is clearly defined and entirely transparent (for those who *do* understand the technical details).
While you're technically correct, BC is in fact plagued by a dangerous level of intransparency, only it doesn't stem form how the coins are created (or exchanged), but from the people holding the power in the BC universe. A large majority of all the BitCoins ever created are not actively being traded. Are they lost, or are early adopters hoarding them? If yes, who are these early adopters? Will they be sensible enough to slowly let their hoards trickle into the system, inducing a healthy level of inflation for a long time to come, or will they fall victim to greed and sell it all when push comes to stove, destabilizing the currency? Same thing with the current miners. Who are they, and will they use the power that comes with owning a large number of BC wisely? Who are the people managing the exchanges? Will they manage to weather the relentless flood of hacking attempts? Who are the people contributing to the code? When faced with the need to adopt to an ever-changing reality (like the scalability issues that are starting to rise), will they always keep their ranks closed, or will incompatible forks eventually divide the community and the currency? Worst of all, who are the people using the currency? How will they react/vote with their wallet on changes such as forks? We know for a fact that a significant percentage of the BC trading volume consists of illegal activities. This currency, like all fiat currencies, is worth just as much as the credibility of the people behind it. Now, I know a lot of people may think <insert national government of choice> is a joke, but for most values of <national government of choice> in developed countries, I'd say they're a lot more credible than the dark ecosystem behind BitCoin!
TL;DR version: I feel Steve Forbes hit the nail on the head about the lack of transparency, but for the wrong reason.
It's just these inquisitive little goo balls dropping the Undelete button into the red liquid so that World of Goo Corporation will be destroyed.
Everyone is crazy but me!
Dear slashdot, I present to you exhibit A: a Belgian who buys into all the propaganda produced by a certain Flemish party founded by former nazi collaborators. They're every bit as batshit crazy as "the Christian right" (with apologies to moderate Christians) in the USA, only they have somewhat less political weight.
My point being : you Americans don't know what you're complaining about.
I've lived in Brussels for 6 years and now I've been living in an American city of similar size for another 6. You know what, big boy? Let's swap. I come back to Brussels, you come live here. Don't forget to send me pictures of your face when you discover:
- It's much less safe here. I don't personally know anybody who got robbed at 500 meters from the Grote Markt. I personally know at least 2 people who got robbed at similar places in this city. Not only are your chances of being robbed higher, the chances are higher that the robber is carrying a gun (not to mention the chances of you dying in the process). You dare me to go walk at night in Molenbeek? (A bad area in Brussels that is poor, has a very high immigrant population, and is an ongoing obsession of the extreme right.) Believe me or not, I did that. Although it was a profoundly scary experience, I didn't get robbed. Now your turn to go walk in one of the bad neighborhoods here. Good luck dodging the bullets in the ongoing drug wars - you'll be lucky to get out alive.
- Your health insurance (which is a for-profit company) decides whether you are worthy of getting an expensive medical examination or procedure done.
- If you count health insurance as tax (like in Belgium), then the US tax rate is suddenly very close to what you pay in Belgium.
- Your internet and mobile phone connections are half as good and twice as expensive.
- Food is cheap, sure, if you have a taste for plasticky cheese, rubbery chicken and hamburger meat full of hormones. If you want to eat tasty and healthy like any self-respecting Belgian, you'll be paying more for it than in Belgium.
- You're having recurring bad dreams of your grandkids coming home telling you all about the earth being only 3000 years old. (That's what you reap from sowing ignorance and lies.)
- It's full of black people! And they speak a language your school English is powerless against - you won't understand a word during your first year or so. And because of the social inequality, they're statistically more likely to be poor, on drugs, and into crime. Now I don't mind some color on the street, and they're often friendlier than the whites once you start to understand their dialect and culture a bit, but I'm not so sure how well an obvious xenophobe like you will adapt.
- Did I mention the beer? THE BEER! The horror! Ohmygod! *panic attack*
This assumes malice from their part - in the age of ubiquitous pre-installed personal firewalls and advanced packet analysis, it would be hard to mistake a thoroughly firewalled machine for a compromised one. So if they're BOFHs, then sure, they might do what you say. Our ITers are more of the pragmatic sort. We have followed the strategy I outlined in GP, and I'm sure they must know by now that we're blacklisting them, but it appears that they consider this a fair response, ie. if we have the knowhow to detect their scans despite the fact that our machines were largely unaffected, and block them right away, then we're probably not the security liabilities they're looking for. This is a large-ish network with a lot of technically challenged users so they have weaker links to go after.
Bottom line is that it doesn't necessarily need to be a war - we seem to have come to an unspoken understanding and have a good relationship with them. Seeing the scans pop up in our logs and occasionally make a newly-connected network printer crash is somewhat irritating, but we grin and bear it; it's a good challenge from time to time and it keeps us well-prepared for outside attacks. From their side, I'd imagine we might be giving them some headaches by requiring exceptions in their firewall rules for the unique kind of work we do, but we make up for that by being one of the few corners on campus where they never have to deal with the networking equivalent of "broken coffee-cup holders".
Our ITers are doing the same thing; they claim HIPAA regulations require them to. Although I suspect they're a bit overzealous, it's really not worth getting into trouble with them over this. The same thing probably goes for you; they can argue your presence on their network automatically makes you subject to the same checks (which I believe is actually true). The only thing you can do is make sure that all your services are secure and up-to-date and that everyone with access to your computers has taken basic securty training (how to create and maintain safe passwords, how to identify phishing e-mails,...) That and installing a fail2ban (or something like that) and blacklisting the IP address(es) they use for scanning. Although the latter could be interpreted as bypassing "necessary" safety checks, you can just claim ignorance: "oh, I thought that was a compromised machine, and knowing how important security is, I dutifully blacklisted it." If the attacking machine is on the hospital network, don't forget to drily report it as "probably compromised" at the time of blacklisting, else pleading ignorance does not sound realistic. They'll probably answer "don't worry, we're testing", but that doesn't mean "lower your shields, we're testing"; the latter would be pretty weird. It's up to them to change IP address if they want to play cat-and-mouse.
See, we're on a completely different page here. I'm not arguing on a technical level, I'm arguing on a human level. If you want me to make a statement on the technical side of the thing, I'd say BC is technically mostly sound, but not perfect like you would make it seem. Most importantly, there are the scalability issues. There is also the theoretical vulnerability against a well-coordinated attack by a huge botnet (though I personally think BC's attractiveness for illegal operations disincentives this).
Then there are the "semi-soft" issues. There is the risk of forking; disaster was averted during a recent incident, but that doesn't mean it will be averted every time. There is the risk of legal crackdown: the very properties that have libertarian theoreticians drooling all over bitcoin make it attractive for illegal operations and money laundering in particular. Bitcoin is secured against some forms of naughtiness, but it is not a darknet: law enforcement can easily figure out you're using it and with a little bit more effort link different transactions to the same entity. Firewalls can be made to block it (and circumvented and counter-circumvented). But... but... that's not fair? Well, neither are the DMCA and the Patriot Act, kid. If bitcoin really takes off big time, lawmakers will soon have a bigger incentive to regulate the daylight out of BC than they had for voting the DMCA into law. And then there is the cap on the number of coins and the reality of data loss, which make it inherently deflationary. To paraphrase bitcoin.it 's FAQ, there's no telling what this will do to the currency, and there is a finite risk that it will lead to its downfall. Surely you know deflationary commodities don't have the best track record. The FAQ further argues that the (near-)infinite divisibility may mitigate this problem, but this argument is disingenuous: you can divide BCs all the way down to satoshis but that changes nothing to the fact that the BCs/satoshis in your wallet are increasing in value, incentivizing hoarding.
To return to the fully soft issue, why would people lose confidence? Well, in addition to all of the above, one reason could be the intransparent powers that govern bitcoin (early adopters + miners + exchanges + a flourishing black market...) Some people will argue that the current global monetary system is not a whole lot better, but the evil you know...
Bottom line: history is strewn with the bones of technically sound ideas that failed in "unforeseen" ways because of these kind of "details". Bitcoin holds some promise, but it hasn't been in existence for long enough to prove itself (which makes it quite ridiculous of you to compare it to gold), and has some pretty major challenges to overcome before we can be reasonably sure of its continued existence on the time scale of our life expectancy.
Also food for thought: most "stock investing 101" books contain warnings that companies founded on bleeding edge technologies typically go bust, only to see a more finely polished "2.0" version of the same technology taking the world by storm in the hands of other companies.
What??? You asked for its failure mode. My answer is perfectly correct. You didn't ask about the likelihood for the failure mode to occur. Which I would estimate differently for gold and for BitCoin, I should add.
Now you're switching to an entirely different question: "why would people lose interest?" Though a better question would be "why not?" People are known to be prone to lose interest in stuff; it's part of the reason why phenomena such as fashion waves, fads and bubbles exist. No, they haven't lost interest in gold, but they have in things like Beanie Babies, Tulip Bulbs, and more pertinently, all of these fine currencies.
BTW, I'm impressed by how you use strong words like "proven" and "fact" but precede them with "could" so that they essentially say nothing. Ever considered a career as a politician, lawyer or lobbyist?
Enron was a company. When companies run out of money they close because they can't pay their debts. What is the failure mode of bitcoin? What is the failure mode of gold for that matter?
This is so totally wrong I first thought it was a parody. On closer inspection, it does appear like they mean it. Unfortunately, that doesn't make it any less wrong. They're open-source and printable, which would make them trivial to counterfeit. Yes, real bills could readily be identified given a computer with internet, but if you have that, what's the point of the paper? You're not "off-grid" anymore and validating the bill would be just another bitcoin transaction. Now, buying stuff from "someone who is new to bitcoin" with counterfeit PrintCoins? Genius!
I don't get your sig. Almost all the public domain works on the kindle are for free (2005 out of 2073 to be precise). It's not that they will get rich charging for this one. Or is the way you phrased it some kind of American pop culture reference?
+1 on good earplugs. There's not much that beats the Howard Leight Max earplugs in this respect. Comfortable, dirt cheap and you might as well be deaf when wearing them. Only complaint is that in the beginning, the eerie silence might be a bit uncomfortable, like someone could sneak up on you any time;) Review (including sonogram) from an EU seller.
Dude, how on earth can you get it all so badly wrong? Is this a subtle postmodernist troll or something? Sorry if it isn't, starting a discussion on a scientific subject with "IMHO" sets off my bullshit alarm.
Historically, a day was defined as 1 earth rotation. An hour was 1/24th of a day, a minute as 1/60th of an hour, and a second as 1/60th of a minute. Hardly very arbitrary, is it? Problem is, turns out that there are constant fluctuations and drift on the length of a celestial day (and year). This is very impractical because there are no known clock mechanisms (bar the solar system itself) that can catch these fluctuations, so humanity needed a more solid definition of time for entirely irrelevant tasks such as performing precise scientific measurements and keeping GPS sattellites in sync. Common off-the-shelf clock mechanisms couldn't be used for this purpose because they also fluctuate too much. Instead, we redefined the lenght of a second based on an immutable physical property: the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. Cesium was "arbitrarily" chosen because of atomic clock engineering and accuracy considerations, the hyperfine transition was "arbitrarily" chosen because it is not too easy to skew, directly relates to a physical constant and can be measured in a reasonably convenient way, and the number 9,192,631,770 was "arbitrarily" chosen to make the SI second as close as possible to the then-best estimate of the average duration of the celestial second (1/86400 of a day). Then we redefined the SI minute, hour, day,... based on that physically immutable(*) second. Problem is, that didn't stop the earth rotation and solar system from fluctuating. And that's why we have leap seconds now and then; to keep our non-arbitrary SI-based time in sync with the arbitrary vagaries(+) of the solar system.
(*) Well, pretty immutable for the practical applications you're going to care about. There's always room for improvement.
(+) To be precise, orbital mechanics are well-understood so in that sense they're not random.(#) Problem is, it's a chaotic system, so no matter how precise we measure all the boundary conditions, a simulation of the solar system will over time deviate more and more from reality. That's why leap seconds are based om measurements.
(#) If you look even deeper into the subject, there are solar winds and weather-dependent tidal effects contaminating the whole shebang with fluctuations we can't even predict a few weeks in advance because they're complex. So yeah, arbitrary.
Agreed, but it still will cost more than twice as much as making the same plastics from oil. Replacing oil with renewables for a lot of energy production purposes (most importantly heating and ground transportation) is much cheaper than replacing oil with renewables for the purpose of producing plastics.
To be clear, my GP post was a quip. The US dollar is backed by more than violence. It is backed by a very large number of people (and not only Americans) willing to trade goods for it. Whoever disagrees with this may say "it's worth nothing to me", but then I'll say "fine, give it to me then, I'll happily trade it with people who disagree with you". Or they may say "point, but I wouldn't keep my savings in it; it's constantly losing value, and it may collapse any time... any time now..." but its stability is not so bad (especially compared to BitCoin), and the powers that be aren't so stupid that they will hurt people's trust in the currency enough to cause huge fluctuations.
In the end, that's a lot of circular reasoning, but so are other things in life; how are you going to compile a compiler without a compiler? Most fiat currencies were bootstrapped by the gold standard, and at some point, it was decided the gold wasn't necessary anymore.
While BTC as currency is volatile, other currencies suffrer from this too as pretty much every currency is not backed by anything (except US army going down on your ass etc).
At the risk of sounding cynical, the US army going down on your ass definitely classifies as "something" to me...
Oh my, you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about, do you? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence#.22You_can.27t_prove_a_negative.22
The phrase "You can't prove a negative" is a quip that is meant to express the more formally correct "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". It does not mean that any statement with "no" or "wrong" cannot be argued in favor of; that would be silly because all statements can be expressed as the negative of another statement. What it does mean is that, if there would be no data on anthropogenic climate change, then that absence of data can not be taken for evidence that anthropogenic climate change does not exist (and neither that it does exist). However, there happens to exist quite a large body of data, and it happens to speak in favor of anthropogenic global warming. So the only thing the climate change denialists can do is pound the evidence ("prove us wrong" indeed). That's what they are trying to do, but from a scientific point of view, they've never been able to make a dent. The public opinion point of view is a different matter; as you just demonstrated, ignorant people can be told just about anything. Scientifically spoken, there is no controversy.
Hell no! You have a funny definition of "fact", tovarish.
Also, next time you try to insult your opponent for lacking intelligence, it might be slightly more convincing if you try to do so in a grammatically correct sentence.
Literally? So that means, if you are exposed to sunlight, you acquire a repulsive force field that makes it impossible for anyone to touch you? That's a cool superhero power, man!
Slashdot Mirror
Oooh, that would be too good to be true. All the tulip fields... ruined!
I didn't remember reading anything about Belgium in any of Douglas Adams' books, so I went looking it up. Here's the result:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_the_Universe_and_Everything#Censorship
So basically, in the US edition, the censors replaced "Fuck" by "Belgium", a reference to the original radio series (which I'm too young to have witnessed) in which Belgium was the most offensive word in the galaxy. One learns something new every day.
Saying "we don't really know how this coin is created" displays the author's fundamental misunderstanding of the phenomenon. You don't need to know the exact technical details- and I don't either- to understand that the process of bitcoin production is clearly defined and entirely transparent (for those who *do* understand the technical details).
While you're technically correct, BC is in fact plagued by a dangerous level of intransparency, only it doesn't stem form how the coins are created (or exchanged), but from the people holding the power in the BC universe. A large majority of all the BitCoins ever created are not actively being traded. Are they lost, or are early adopters hoarding them? If yes, who are these early adopters? Will they be sensible enough to slowly let their hoards trickle into the system, inducing a healthy level of inflation for a long time to come, or will they fall victim to greed and sell it all when push comes to stove, destabilizing the currency? Same thing with the current miners. Who are they, and will they use the power that comes with owning a large number of BC wisely? Who are the people managing the exchanges? Will they manage to weather the relentless flood of hacking attempts? Who are the people contributing to the code? When faced with the need to adopt to an ever-changing reality (like the scalability issues that are starting to rise), will they always keep their ranks closed, or will incompatible forks eventually divide the community and the currency? Worst of all, who are the people using the currency? How will they react/vote with their wallet on changes such as forks? We know for a fact that a significant percentage of the BC trading volume consists of illegal activities. This currency, like all fiat currencies, is worth just as much as the credibility of the people behind it. Now, I know a lot of people may think <insert national government of choice> is a joke, but for most values of <national government of choice> in developed countries, I'd say they're a lot more credible than the dark ecosystem behind BitCoin!
TL;DR version: I feel Steve Forbes hit the nail on the head about the lack of transparency, but for the wrong reason.
It's just these inquisitive little goo balls dropping the Undelete button into the red liquid so that World of Goo Corporation will be destroyed.
Everyone is crazy but me!
-the dotslashing Sign Painter.
My point being : you Americans don't know what you're complaining about.
I've lived in Brussels for 6 years and now I've been living in an American city of similar size for another 6. You know what, big boy? Let's swap. I come back to Brussels, you come live here. Don't forget to send me pictures of your face when you discover:
- It's much less safe here. I don't personally know anybody who got robbed at 500 meters from the Grote Markt. I personally know at least 2 people who got robbed at similar places in this city. Not only are your chances of being robbed higher, the chances are higher that the robber is carrying a gun (not to mention the chances of you dying in the process). You dare me to go walk at night in Molenbeek? (A bad area in Brussels that is poor, has a very high immigrant population, and is an ongoing obsession of the extreme right.) Believe me or not, I did that. Although it was a profoundly scary experience, I didn't get robbed. Now your turn to go walk in one of the bad neighborhoods here. Good luck dodging the bullets in the ongoing drug wars - you'll be lucky to get out alive.
- Your health insurance (which is a for-profit company) decides whether you are worthy of getting an expensive medical examination or procedure done.
- If you count health insurance as tax (like in Belgium), then the US tax rate is suddenly very close to what you pay in Belgium.
- Your internet and mobile phone connections are half as good and twice as expensive.
- Food is cheap, sure, if you have a taste for plasticky cheese, rubbery chicken and hamburger meat full of hormones. If you want to eat tasty and healthy like any self-respecting Belgian, you'll be paying more for it than in Belgium.
- You're having recurring bad dreams of your grandkids coming home telling you all about the earth being only 3000 years old. (That's what you reap from sowing ignorance and lies.)
- It's full of black people! And they speak a language your school English is powerless against - you won't understand a word during your first year or so. And because of the social inequality, they're statistically more likely to be poor, on drugs, and into crime. Now I don't mind some color on the street, and they're often friendlier than the whites once you start to understand their dialect and culture a bit, but I'm not so sure how well an obvious xenophobe like you will adapt.
- Did I mention the beer? THE BEER! The horror! Ohmygod! *panic attack*
This assumes malice from their part - in the age of ubiquitous pre-installed personal firewalls and advanced packet analysis, it would be hard to mistake a thoroughly firewalled machine for a compromised one. So if they're BOFHs, then sure, they might do what you say. Our ITers are more of the pragmatic sort. We have followed the strategy I outlined in GP, and I'm sure they must know by now that we're blacklisting them, but it appears that they consider this a fair response, ie. if we have the knowhow to detect their scans despite the fact that our machines were largely unaffected, and block them right away, then we're probably not the security liabilities they're looking for. This is a large-ish network with a lot of technically challenged users so they have weaker links to go after.
Bottom line is that it doesn't necessarily need to be a war - we seem to have come to an unspoken understanding and have a good relationship with them. Seeing the scans pop up in our logs and occasionally make a newly-connected network printer crash is somewhat irritating, but we grin and bear it; it's a good challenge from time to time and it keeps us well-prepared for outside attacks. From their side, I'd imagine we might be giving them some headaches by requiring exceptions in their firewall rules for the unique kind of work we do, but we make up for that by being one of the few corners on campus where they never have to deal with the networking equivalent of "broken coffee-cup holders".
Our ITers are doing the same thing; they claim HIPAA regulations require them to. Although I suspect they're a bit overzealous, it's really not worth getting into trouble with them over this. The same thing probably goes for you; they can argue your presence on their network automatically makes you subject to the same checks (which I believe is actually true). The only thing you can do is make sure that all your services are secure and up-to-date and that everyone with access to your computers has taken basic securty training (how to create and maintain safe passwords, how to identify phishing e-mails,...) That and installing a fail2ban (or something like that) and blacklisting the IP address(es) they use for scanning. Although the latter could be interpreted as bypassing "necessary" safety checks, you can just claim ignorance: "oh, I thought that was a compromised machine, and knowing how important security is, I dutifully blacklisted it." If the attacking machine is on the hospital network, don't forget to drily report it as "probably compromised" at the time of blacklisting, else pleading ignorance does not sound realistic. They'll probably answer "don't worry, we're testing", but that doesn't mean "lower your shields, we're testing"; the latter would be pretty weird. It's up to them to change IP address if they want to play cat-and-mouse.
Here's hoping our ITers aren't reading this ;)
See, we're on a completely different page here. I'm not arguing on a technical level, I'm arguing on a human level. If you want me to make a statement on the technical side of the thing, I'd say BC is technically mostly sound, but not perfect like you would make it seem. Most importantly, there are the scalability issues. There is also the theoretical vulnerability against a well-coordinated attack by a huge botnet (though I personally think BC's attractiveness for illegal operations disincentives this).
Then there are the "semi-soft" issues. There is the risk of forking; disaster was averted during a recent incident, but that doesn't mean it will be averted every time. There is the risk of legal crackdown: the very properties that have libertarian theoreticians drooling all over bitcoin make it attractive for illegal operations and money laundering in particular. Bitcoin is secured against some forms of naughtiness, but it is not a darknet: law enforcement can easily figure out you're using it and with a little bit more effort link different transactions to the same entity. Firewalls can be made to block it (and circumvented and counter-circumvented). But... but... that's not fair? Well, neither are the DMCA and the Patriot Act, kid. If bitcoin really takes off big time, lawmakers will soon have a bigger incentive to regulate the daylight out of BC than they had for voting the DMCA into law. And then there is the cap on the number of coins and the reality of data loss, which make it inherently deflationary. To paraphrase bitcoin.it 's FAQ, there's no telling what this will do to the currency, and there is a finite risk that it will lead to its downfall. Surely you know deflationary commodities don't have the best track record. The FAQ further argues that the (near-)infinite divisibility may mitigate this problem, but this argument is disingenuous: you can divide BCs all the way down to satoshis but that changes nothing to the fact that the BCs/satoshis in your wallet are increasing in value, incentivizing hoarding.
To return to the fully soft issue, why would people lose confidence? Well, in addition to all of the above, one reason could be the intransparent powers that govern bitcoin (early adopters + miners + exchanges + a flourishing black market...) Some people will argue that the current global monetary system is not a whole lot better, but the evil you know...
Bottom line: history is strewn with the bones of technically sound ideas that failed in "unforeseen" ways because of these kind of "details". Bitcoin holds some promise, but it hasn't been in existence for long enough to prove itself (which makes it quite ridiculous of you to compare it to gold), and has some pretty major challenges to overcome before we can be reasonably sure of its continued existence on the time scale of our life expectancy.
Also food for thought: most "stock investing 101" books contain warnings that companies founded on bleeding edge technologies typically go bust, only to see a more finely polished "2.0" version of the same technology taking the world by storm in the hands of other companies.
What??? You asked for its failure mode. My answer is perfectly correct. You didn't ask about the likelihood for the failure mode to occur. Which I would estimate differently for gold and for BitCoin, I should add.
Now you're switching to an entirely different question: "why would people lose interest?" Though a better question would be "why not?" People are known to be prone to lose interest in stuff; it's part of the reason why phenomena such as fashion waves, fads and bubbles exist. No, they haven't lost interest in gold, but they have in things like Beanie Babies, Tulip Bulbs, and more pertinently, all of these fine currencies.
BTW, I'm impressed by how you use strong words like "proven" and "fact" but precede them with "could" so that they essentially say nothing. Ever considered a career as a politician, lawyer or lobbyist?
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fundamentals.asp
HTH.
Enron was a company. When companies run out of money they close because they can't pay their debts. What is the failure mode of bitcoin? What is the failure mode of gold for that matter?
Umm... people not wanting it anymore?
This is so totally wrong I first thought it was a parody. On closer inspection, it does appear like they mean it. Unfortunately, that doesn't make it any less wrong. They're open-source and printable, which would make them trivial to counterfeit. Yes, real bills could readily be identified given a computer with internet, but if you have that, what's the point of the paper? You're not "off-grid" anymore and validating the bill would be just another bitcoin transaction. Now, buying stuff from "someone who is new to bitcoin" with counterfeit PrintCoins? Genius!
See also.
I mean, other than the obvious reference to the first sentence of the work, which doesn't strike me as particularly funny.
(n/t)
I don't get your sig. Almost all the public domain works on the kindle are for free (2005 out of 2073 to be precise). It's not that they will get rich charging for this one. Or is the way you phrased it some kind of American pop culture reference?
You insensitive clod! Depending on where you live, double glazing can decrease your power bill and the country's carbon emissions by a lot.
+1 on good earplugs. There's not much that beats the Howard Leight Max earplugs in this respect. Comfortable, dirt cheap and you might as well be deaf when wearing them. Only complaint is that in the beginning, the eerie silence might be a bit uncomfortable, like someone could sneak up on you any time ;) Review (including sonogram) from an EU seller.
too bad I'm out of points
Dude, how on earth can you get it all so badly wrong? Is this a subtle postmodernist troll or something? Sorry if it isn't, starting a discussion on a scientific subject with "IMHO" sets off my bullshit alarm.
Historically, a day was defined as 1 earth rotation. An hour was 1/24th of a day, a minute as 1/60th of an hour, and a second as 1/60th of a minute. Hardly very arbitrary, is it? Problem is, turns out that there are constant fluctuations and drift on the length of a celestial day (and year). This is very impractical because there are no known clock mechanisms (bar the solar system itself) that can catch these fluctuations, so humanity needed a more solid definition of time for entirely irrelevant tasks such as performing precise scientific measurements and keeping GPS sattellites in sync. Common off-the-shelf clock mechanisms couldn't be used for this purpose because they also fluctuate too much. Instead, we redefined the lenght of a second based on an immutable physical property: the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. Cesium was "arbitrarily" chosen because of atomic clock engineering and accuracy considerations, the hyperfine transition was "arbitrarily" chosen because it is not too easy to skew, directly relates to a physical constant and can be measured in a reasonably convenient way, and the number 9,192,631,770 was "arbitrarily" chosen to make the SI second as close as possible to the then-best estimate of the average duration of the celestial second (1/86400 of a day). Then we redefined the SI minute, hour, day,... based on that physically immutable(*) second. Problem is, that didn't stop the earth rotation and solar system from fluctuating. And that's why we have leap seconds now and then; to keep our non-arbitrary SI-based time in sync with the arbitrary vagaries(+) of the solar system.
(*) Well, pretty immutable for the practical applications you're going to care about. There's always room for improvement.
(+) To be precise, orbital mechanics are well-understood so in that sense they're not random.(#) Problem is, it's a chaotic system, so no matter how precise we measure all the boundary conditions, a simulation of the solar system will over time deviate more and more from reality. That's why leap seconds are based om measurements.
(#) If you look even deeper into the subject, there are solar winds and weather-dependent tidal effects contaminating the whole shebang with fluctuations we can't even predict a few weeks in advance because they're complex. So yeah, arbitrary.
Agreed, but it still will cost more than twice as much as making the same plastics from oil. Replacing oil with renewables for a lot of energy production purposes (most importantly heating and ground transportation) is much cheaper than replacing oil with renewables for the purpose of producing plastics.
To be clear, my GP post was a quip. The US dollar is backed by more than violence. It is backed by a very large number of people (and not only Americans) willing to trade goods for it. Whoever disagrees with this may say "it's worth nothing to me", but then I'll say "fine, give it to me then, I'll happily trade it with people who disagree with you". Or they may say "point, but I wouldn't keep my savings in it; it's constantly losing value, and it may collapse any time... any time now..." but its stability is not so bad (especially compared to BitCoin), and the powers that be aren't so stupid that they will hurt people's trust in the currency enough to cause huge fluctuations.
In the end, that's a lot of circular reasoning, but so are other things in life; how are you going to compile a compiler without a compiler? Most fiat currencies were bootstrapped by the gold standard, and at some point, it was decided the gold wasn't necessary anymore.
While BTC as currency is volatile, other currencies suffrer from this too as pretty much every currency is not backed by anything (except US army going down on your ass etc).
At the risk of sounding cynical, the US army going down on your ass definitely classifies as "something" to me...
Oh my, you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about, do you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence#.22You_can.27t_prove_a_negative.22
The phrase "You can't prove a negative" is a quip that is meant to express the more formally correct "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". It does not mean that any statement with "no" or "wrong" cannot be argued in favor of; that would be silly because all statements can be expressed as the negative of another statement. What it does mean is that, if there would be no data on anthropogenic climate change, then that absence of data can not be taken for evidence that anthropogenic climate change does not exist (and neither that it does exist). However, there happens to exist quite a large body of data, and it happens to speak in favor of anthropogenic global warming. So the only thing the climate change denialists can do is pound the evidence ("prove us wrong" indeed). That's what they are trying to do, but from a scientific point of view, they've never been able to make a dent. The public opinion point of view is a different matter; as you just demonstrated, ignorant people can be told just about anything. Scientifically spoken, there is no controversy.
Hell no! You have a funny definition of "fact", tovarish.
Also, next time you try to insult your opponent for lacking intelligence, it might be slightly more convincing if you try to do so in a grammatically correct sentence.
lirerally [sic] became untouchable for 4 days.
Literally? So that means, if you are exposed to sunlight, you acquire a repulsive force field that makes it impossible for anyone to touch you? That's a cool superhero power, man!