The processing power devoted to Bitcoin mining is approaching two orders of magnitude more than Titan [wikipedia.org].
Why did you drag this "Titan" thing pop out of the woodwork? It's a lump of ironmongery designed by a committee and funded by a bunch of small-dicked gun nuts. Nothing interesting there.
Anyway, no comment on some verifiable figures for the size of the Bitcoin network, so it's safe to assume that you don't know the answer. Probably something hugely overblown if it's got such little verifiable about it. Or something that's not ever going to be legal because it's obviously being done clandestinely by people with something to hide. It'll be gone within a couple of years.
"I want a camera that I can use when the accident is someone else's fault and I can pretend doesn't exist when the accident is my fault?"
So, what he needs is a covert camera. And if necessary an overt camera for the $BLACKHAT$ to find and chuck the card from. The encryption is a side issue.
Sometimes the technically flashy solution is less effective than the simply devious.
Biblical scholars (as opposed to the nutjob putting up this award)
While this is a really weird story, I wouldn't start from the assumption that the guy is a nutjob. In the descriptions, I can't see where the Liars-for-Jesus are going to cheat. Cheat they will assuredly do - it's in the job description - but I don't see where they'll do it. Maybe in the "pick a judge from this list I've already prepared" provision ; maybe in the details of this "minitrial" process. Both of those seem ripe for abuse.
Just because Liars-for-Jesus are completely delusional on one point (biblical inerrancy, almost invariably of the King James version) doesn't mean that they're complete lunatics. Some certainly are, but there are also some dangerous ones too.
To me, Genesis is a collection of myths with a spiritual truth to be discerned from them
I normally find it to be rather sharp-edged for use as toilet paper, and your fingers go through it too easily. But it's is one of Genesis' greater contributions to humanity.
It might also be an old DNS server no one is using or remembers they have up.
Which is just a different form of administrative incompetence.
Proposals have been forwarded to use open DNS resolvers to DDoS open DNS resolvers to force their admins to fix their problems. Which is probably not going to help much where the actual problem is simple ignorance. If the person doing the "administration" of a system doesn't even know what DNS resolution is, then blowing them away for running an open resolver isn't actually going to do anything much more than annoy them.
Nope. I play Civilisation like it's 1988 and Elite like it's 1983.
Which modern games do you think will have an interesting enough gameplay to still be played in 30 years? I mean, I'd have to work hard to remember the name of a recent game. Is the new Duke Nukem out yet - it seems like that one has been waiting forever?
for a joke to be effective, it needs to be recognisable as a joke. Your (near) namesake Marijke sometimes tripped up over this too. Gone, but not forgotten (partly because she died in possession of several of my books).
Five, maybe ten, years ago, the same claim was made concerning SETI@home. That was a project which had a lot of nerd support, and was intellectually respectable, so people like admins for university networks could (and did) put the client onto blocks of thousands of machines which would otherwise be idle during lectures. And if the $LIBRARY$ (or whereever else) got to turn down the heating for X $$$$/day while turnng up the mains utilty usage for a simialr amount... well that's "swings and rounabouts" in terms of the final bill. But because of the intellectual respectability of SETI@home, and to a different degree it's successors like Climate@home, that was an administrative choice which could be reasonably defended in a budget meeting.
Bitcoin mining doesn't have that cachet. So I suspect that it would be a much harder "sell" (or "defense", when found out) than $SCIENCEPROJECT$@Uni.
IF (and it is an "if") Bitcoin mining can turn a profit, then the beancounters of such institutions may well go for it. And as a clear-headed financial decision, I'd anticipate hearing about it on Slashdot.
I haven't heard of such deployments. So I suspect that they don't exist, or are very clandestine if they do exist. Now, if you've heard of such things, that's fine ; educate me by providing links to such evidence.
I'll grant you an "out" though : it's entirely conceivable that the increased power of recent machines compared to five to ten years ago may mean that the Bitcion network represents more teraflops (particularly GPU teraflops) than SETI@home etc provided. Which is one metric of size" ; but in terms of mindshare and "buy in" in terms of systems voluntarily and deliberately involved... I am not convinced. "Size" isn't a well defined term on it's own.
Considering some of our target reservoirs are as narrow as 20 feet,
Wow, you've got some thick reservoirs! I was reminiscing a couple of days ago about a geosteering job I did trying to run an 8.5in drill bit along a 6in storm sand deposit. But that was a bit extreme.
A system of this size with accelerators would exceed easily 10PF, although I am not sure whether the particular workload to be ran on this beast would be suitable for any kind of accelerators (anybody has an idea on that?).
Most of the work will be processing seismic data, which is highly parallelisable. Start with a microphone and an air gun ; fart the air gun into water and record the echoes with the microphone. Then invert the recording to get a first guess at how far down the contrasts of acoustic impedance are - which reflect the acoustic energy. A relatively simple task.
But... you need to record the sound source from the air gun - because the shape of the input waveform (unsurprisingly) affects what you get as a recording at surface. So, you've two tasks to do.
Now, you have a third microphone, positioned somewhere other than the first microphone. Three processing tasks. And if you're at sea, you also need to track the actual positions of the air gun and each geophone. So that's more data streams to process, but still highly parallelisable.
A typical marine seismic spread will have 8 or 16 streamers of geophones (microphones, waterproofed) with several hundred geophones per streamer ; you'll steam to and fro across your target area taking a "shot point" every 10m or so, and you'll shoot several thousand kilometres of lines per survey. It adds up to a lot of data.
Your first guess at the positions of the acoustic impedance changes will give you a first model of the geology (you've yet to assign acoustic impedance changes to geological events), but those will imply that acoustic energy is reflected back into the overlying beds, effectively becoming small sound sources themselves, so you've got to re-calculate what those sound sources do for your re-constructed sound waves in your data volume ; so you've got to re-process the whole volume to see if the sounds recorded actually match up to the ones calculated, and if not, you have to adjust your model. And then the geologists get involved, pointing out faults, or equating two volumes of rock as having the same origin, and so implying the question "Do they have the same properties, and if not, why not?"
That's going to take you back to re-processing the data time and again to see if the revised model is appropriate. That gets very iterative, if not particularly interactive.
Now I have a question: what is TACC going to do with so many Xeon Phi accelerators not delivering the promised performance? Will intel provide them with the second generation of MICs for free or will that upgrade cost another big chunk of taxpayers money?
Acronym soup. Unintelligible. There is probably a worthwhile question in there, but it's lost in the sludge.
Long before (typically a decade or several before) you get to putting a drill bit into the ground, you need to find the oil. For which you need seismic data, some serious number crunching to analyse that data, and a lot of brain sweat.
You mean nobody at Monsanto owns a yacht, or a mansion on every continent?
Probably only MBAs and other such parasites. The actual people who provide the intellectual capital to the company are unlikely to be startlingly well paid.
And I doubt that many MBAs have mansions on the Antarctic continent.
So.... why are we wasting the most powerful computer on non renewable sources of energy?
Firstly "we" are not doing anything with this computer. A bunch of businessmen have decided to try to make more money for their shareholders by investing the investor's money in this exploration tool. I believe that this company has been working in hydrocarbon exploration and production for quite a while - certainly longer than I've been alive and probably longer than you've been alive, so there's probably a pretty good chance that they've got a good idea about how to go about it. (Actually, I've worked in exploration for Total ; they do know WTF they're doing, at least as well as any other random oil company.)
Hunting for big oil just seems... wrong.
Tell you what : if you stop using it - completely - then just possibly they will stop trying to make money by selling it to you, and instead will move on to doing something more interesting with their money.
(Incidentally, this computing power is likely to be more useful on lots of little exploration projects than on big projects. Big discoveries tend to not need really detailed planning to make a profit on - but small ones do need that sort of nit-picking attention to details to ensure they're developed in a profitable manner.
Go and revise some basic level - as in teenage schooling - chemistry. Dumping limestone (essentially calcium carbonate) into a river is, if it does anything, going to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. But it's not actually going to do very much. If you dumped it into acidic river water (mine drainage, or peat bog drainage) then you'd get a little CO2 out, but not a large amount. Most river waters are, if anything, a touch alkaline.
People proposing mining asteroids aren't proposing returning the materials they mine to Earth.
Actually, some of the reporting of the prospects for asteroid mining does sound as if the reporters think that returning materials to Earth is part of the point. There's not a huge amount of point to reporting that your 200km "mountain of iron" contains several thousand tonnes of platinum or gold, other than to make people think about selling the "precious metal" on Earth.
I'm quite sure that the actual proponents of the schemes aren't particularly bothered by these reporting issues, but it does seem to interest reporters.
A quick brain check... a 1km diameter asteroid (a much more reasonable size to consider - there are thousands or millions, but only a handful of 100km order asteroids) has a volume of 500 million cubic metres for a mass (if made of metals, density around 5 times water, similar to the bulk Earth) of around 2600 million tonnes. So, if you distributed, say a thousand tonnes of platinum through that mass, you'd still have to go through almost 2600 million tonnes of other stuff to get to it.
Mining "precious" metals generally isn't worth it, unless you're going to make at least some profit on the rest of the stuff you mine, or something has already done a lot of pre-concentration of the target mineral for you. Most gold production is, for example, a by-product of copper mining and processing (because the minerals are associated, and the gold follows the copper through processing, until the copper is improved to electrical standards, which throws the gold out in a pretty concentrated form).
With bug free code you shouldn't be able to crash an OS beyond repair un-intentionally,
I'd disagree with you. If you write code to, for example, escalate privilege to superuser then delete all files in the file system in dictionary order, then with bug-free code, you'll crash your computer. Quite badly.
Code isn't necesarily written to be useful. Running a (useful) hard disk over-writer program on the working file system is perfectly possible. And not recommended.
Since I don't think Twitter has any assets or anything in France, the French government can't do a thing unless they can convince the rest of the EU that it's worth pursuing through other EU assets.
The phrase you're looking for is not "convince the rest of the EU", it's "issue an EU-wide arrest warrent." Notice that the consent, or even lack of disagreement, of other EU nation states is not required.
They can also arrest any twitter exec passing through France, I suppose
... and when such a warrant is issued, and (appropriate) Twitter executive passing through any EU-governed territory is liable to arrest and extradition to the country issuing the warrant (France).
the US does it.
Which does not of course necessarily make it right or proper. However, one thing you can be sure of : since EU countries don't have the death penalty for anything short of treason in time of war, then the arrested executive(s) won't have the "I could be executed" line of appeal to follow.
But in this case... Twitter's network should have the capability of doing approximate geolocation on incoming connections. So, blackhole France ; route traffic from France-based netblocks to/dev/null. Or if that is too severe, just put a big delay (10 minutes ; 1Ks ; whatever) on such traffic. There are a lot of things that Twitter can do to comply with the French law, if they wish to.
Incidentally, several EU states have territory in the Caribbean and the northern part of South America. So, for example, a Twitter executive on a plane that is diverted to Aruba could find him/her self arrested and extradited to France.
And that's just talking about the "mainstream" religions, to say nothing of some of the more modern belief systems.
And to confound your dodgy dichotomy, how about Sikhism, which is definitely a significant religion (around 10^7.5 followers), and established between 1500 and 1600 (Gregorian calendar)?
Not "New Age Fruitloopery", or at least, no more so than every other religion (apart from the CoFSM ; we take the fruit loops of other religions and use them to supply our Beer Volcano, blessed be the Noodly Appendage!)
Slashdot Mirror
Why would police officers assigned to this duty be required to sign out service revolvers for a day in the office?
Why did you drag this "Titan" thing pop out of the woodwork? It's a lump of ironmongery designed by a committee and funded by a bunch of small-dicked gun nuts. Nothing interesting there.
Anyway, no comment on some verifiable figures for the size of the Bitcoin network, so it's safe to assume that you don't know the answer. Probably something hugely overblown if it's got such little verifiable about it. Or something that's not ever going to be legal because it's obviously being done clandestinely by people with something to hide. It'll be gone within a couple of years.
So, what he needs is a covert camera. And if necessary an overt camera for the $BLACKHAT$ to find and chuck the card from. The encryption is a side issue.
Sometimes the technically flashy solution is less effective than the simply devious.
While this is a really weird story, I wouldn't start from the assumption that the guy is a nutjob. In the descriptions, I can't see where the Liars-for-Jesus are going to cheat. Cheat they will assuredly do - it's in the job description - but I don't see where they'll do it. Maybe in the "pick a judge from this list I've already prepared" provision ; maybe in the details of this "minitrial" process. Both of those seem ripe for abuse.
Just because Liars-for-Jesus are completely delusional on one point (biblical inerrancy, almost invariably of the King James version) doesn't mean that they're complete lunatics. Some certainly are, but there are also some dangerous ones too.
I normally find it to be rather sharp-edged for use as toilet paper, and your fingers go through it too easily. But it's is one of Genesis' greater contributions to humanity.
Which is just a different form of administrative incompetence.
Proposals have been forwarded to use open DNS resolvers to DDoS open DNS resolvers to force their admins to fix their problems. Which is probably not going to help much where the actual problem is simple ignorance. If the person doing the "administration" of a system doesn't even know what DNS resolution is, then blowing them away for running an open resolver isn't actually going to do anything much more than annoy them.
Of course, the option of repeating the experiment from inside the US isn't available to the complainers. They're not based in America.
No it's not, American! It's an international site. If you want the septic-only version of Slashdot, go to "Slashdot.us", not "slashdot.org"
Nope. I play Civilisation like it's 1988 and Elite like it's 1983.
Which modern games do you think will have an interesting enough gameplay to still be played in 30 years? I mean, I'd have to work hard to remember the name of a recent game. Is the new Duke Nukem out yet - it seems like that one has been waiting forever?
for a joke to be effective, it needs to be recognisable as a joke. Your (near) namesake Marijke sometimes tripped up over this too. Gone, but not forgotten (partly because she died in possession of several of my books).
Bitcoin mining doesn't have that cachet. So I suspect that it would be a much harder "sell" (or "defense", when found out) than $SCIENCEPROJECT$@Uni.
IF (and it is an "if") Bitcoin mining can turn a profit, then the beancounters of such institutions may well go for it. And as a clear-headed financial decision, I'd anticipate hearing about it on Slashdot.
I haven't heard of such deployments. So I suspect that they don't exist, or are very clandestine if they do exist. Now, if you've heard of such things, that's fine ; educate me by providing links to such evidence.
I'll grant you an "out" though : it's entirely conceivable that the increased power of recent machines compared to five to ten years ago may mean that the Bitcion network represents more teraflops (particularly GPU teraflops) than SETI@home etc provided. Which is one metric of size" ; but in terms of mindshare and "buy in" in terms of systems voluntarily and deliberately involved ... I am not convinced. "Size" isn't a well defined term on it's own.
Wow, you've got some thick reservoirs! I was reminiscing a couple of days ago about a geosteering job I did trying to run an 8.5in drill bit along a 6in storm sand deposit. But that was a bit extreme.
Gravity meters, wasn't it?
Most of the work will be processing seismic data, which is highly parallelisable. Start with a microphone and an air gun ; fart the air gun into water and record the echoes with the microphone. Then invert the recording to get a first guess at how far down the contrasts of acoustic impedance are - which reflect the acoustic energy. A relatively simple task.
But ... you need to record the sound source from the air gun - because the shape of the input waveform (unsurprisingly) affects what you get as a recording at surface. So, you've two tasks to do.
Now, you have a third microphone, positioned somewhere other than the first microphone. Three processing tasks. And if you're at sea, you also need to track the actual positions of the air gun and each geophone. So that's more data streams to process, but still highly parallelisable.
A typical marine seismic spread will have 8 or 16 streamers of geophones (microphones, waterproofed) with several hundred geophones per streamer ; you'll steam to and fro across your target area taking a "shot point" every 10m or so, and you'll shoot several thousand kilometres of lines per survey. It adds up to a lot of data.
Your first guess at the positions of the acoustic impedance changes will give you a first model of the geology (you've yet to assign acoustic impedance changes to geological events), but those will imply that acoustic energy is reflected back into the overlying beds, effectively becoming small sound sources themselves, so you've got to re-calculate what those sound sources do for your re-constructed sound waves in your data volume ; so you've got to re-process the whole volume to see if the sounds recorded actually match up to the ones calculated, and if not, you have to adjust your model. And then the geologists get involved, pointing out faults, or equating two volumes of rock as having the same origin, and so implying the question "Do they have the same properties, and if not, why not?"
That's going to take you back to re-processing the data time and again to see if the revised model is appropriate. That gets very iterative, if not particularly interactive.
Acronym soup. Unintelligible. There is probably a worthwhile question in there, but it's lost in the sludge.
They're very wet. You'd do better with olives. Or sunflower seeds. Or even (shock, horror!) oilseed rape.
Citation needed.
Not just a citation, but some evidence too.
Long before (typically a decade or several before) you get to putting a drill bit into the ground, you need to find the oil. For which you need seismic data, some serious number crunching to analyse that data, and a lot of brain sweat.
Probably only MBAs and other such parasites. The actual people who provide the intellectual capital to the company are unlikely to be startlingly well paid.
And I doubt that many MBAs have mansions on the Antarctic continent.
Firstly "we" are not doing anything with this computer. A bunch of businessmen have decided to try to make more money for their shareholders by investing the investor's money in this exploration tool. I believe that this company has been working in hydrocarbon exploration and production for quite a while - certainly longer than I've been alive and probably longer than you've been alive, so there's probably a pretty good chance that they've got a good idea about how to go about it. (Actually, I've worked in exploration for Total ; they do know WTF they're doing, at least as well as any other random oil company.)
Tell you what : if you stop using it - completely - then just possibly they will stop trying to make money by selling it to you, and instead will move on to doing something more interesting with their money.
(Incidentally, this computing power is likely to be more useful on lots of little exploration projects than on big projects. Big discoveries tend to not need really detailed planning to make a profit on - but small ones do need that sort of nit-picking attention to details to ensure they're developed in a profitable manner.
Not just an AC, but a dumb AC.
Actually, some of the reporting of the prospects for asteroid mining does sound as if the reporters think that returning materials to Earth is part of the point. There's not a huge amount of point to reporting that your 200km "mountain of iron" contains several thousand tonnes of platinum or gold, other than to make people think about selling the "precious metal" on Earth.
I'm quite sure that the actual proponents of the schemes aren't particularly bothered by these reporting issues, but it does seem to interest reporters.
A quick brain check ... a 1km diameter asteroid (a much more reasonable size to consider - there are thousands or millions, but only a handful of 100km order asteroids) has a volume of 500 million cubic metres for a mass (if made of metals, density around 5 times water, similar to the bulk Earth) of around 2600 million tonnes. So, if you distributed, say a thousand tonnes of platinum through that mass, you'd still have to go through almost 2600 million tonnes of other stuff to get to it.
Mining "precious" metals generally isn't worth it, unless you're going to make at least some profit on the rest of the stuff you mine, or something has already done a lot of pre-concentration of the target mineral for you. Most gold production is, for example, a by-product of copper mining and processing (because the minerals are associated, and the gold follows the copper through processing, until the copper is improved to electrical standards, which throws the gold out in a pretty concentrated form).
I'd disagree with you. If you write code to, for example, escalate privilege to superuser then delete all files in the file system in dictionary order, then with bug-free code, you'll crash your computer. Quite badly.
Code isn't necesarily written to be useful. Running a (useful) hard disk over-writer program on the working file system is perfectly possible. And not recommended.
Yet.
Until it was confirmed by being repeated here.
The phrase you're looking for is not "convince the rest of the EU", it's "issue an EU-wide arrest warrent." Notice that the consent, or even lack of disagreement, of other EU nation states is not required.
... and when such a warrant is issued, and (appropriate) Twitter executive passing through any EU-governed territory is liable to arrest and extradition to the country issuing the warrant (France).
Which does not of course necessarily make it right or proper. However, one thing you can be sure of : since EU countries don't have the death penalty for anything short of treason in time of war, then the arrested executive(s) won't have the "I could be executed" line of appeal to follow. But in this case ... Twitter's network should have the capability of doing approximate geolocation on incoming connections. So, blackhole France ; route traffic from France-based netblocks to /dev/null. Or if that is too severe, just put a big delay (10 minutes ; 1Ks ; whatever) on such traffic. There are a lot of things that Twitter can do to comply with the French law, if they wish to.
Incidentally, several EU states have territory in the Caribbean and the northern part of South America. So, for example, a Twitter executive on a plane that is diverted to Aruba could find him/her self arrested and extradited to France.
And to confound your dodgy dichotomy, how about Sikhism, which is definitely a significant religion (around 10^7.5 followers), and established between 1500 and 1600 (Gregorian calendar)?
Not "New Age Fruitloopery", or at least, no more so than every other religion (apart from the CoFSM ; we take the fruit loops of other religions and use them to supply our Beer Volcano, blessed be the Noodly Appendage!)
Important clarification : whose limbs would you break? Yours or someone else's?