And there is no concept of a BitCoin representing some amount of energy - you can't get the energy back. It's simply a mechanism to restrict the supply without requiring a centralized issuer.
Yes. It seems like that aspect has two purposes: 1. To spread initial ownership of the wealth: anyone with a computer can start generating bitcoins 2. To introduce the coins over time, rather than have them all appear in a big bang. It seems that the maths is designed so that the production of Bitcoins slows exponentially over time.
However the FAQ does say that we would expect various economic factors to conspire such that the cost of generating Bitcoins approaches the value of the Bitcoins produced -- so that trading becomes a more profitable exercise than generating Bitcoins. Does that mean that the whole system plays into the hands of the energy companies?
i doubt bitcoin users want any gov't involved in bitcoins. Most of them are anarchists.
It seems inevitable that for Bitcoin to become ubiquitous, that government gets involved. One day, somebody will rip someone else off, to the tune of a few thousand dollars' worth of Bitcoins. The wronged party will turn to the courts.
If the courts say "GTFO, it wasn't real money and it was your own stupid fault for not using real money", then Bitcoin is doomed as a mainstream option. If the courts say "Yep, you had a contract, you were ripped off, we'll use the power of the State to compensate you and punish the wrongdoer", then the goverment is involved in Bitcoin. State regulation, to the extent the maths allows it, will follow.
Aside, of course, from the complete lack of anything resembling deposits, loans, or reserves (fractional or otherwise).
Of course there's nothing to stop you from lending people bitcoins, demanding some rate of interest.
There's nothing to stop you offering a service whereby you look after their Bitcoins, offering them, by way of a legal contract, some security over and above what they get by keeping it in their Bitcoin wallet. Your depositors would probably expect to get some interest on their savings with you.
Once a decent number of people were using your service to look after their Bitcoin savings, you'd probably realise that you had more Bitcoins lying around than you ever needed to honour withdrawals at any one time, so you'd probably be tempted to invest that spare money, so that you could offer your savers a higher rate of interest, since that's what your competitors are doing.... and now you're a bank.
If Bitcoin becomes a success as a currency, this *will* happen. Keeping 10,000 Bitcoins in a "wallet" on your PC is akin to keeping $10,000 under your mattress.
I'll be fascinated to see the legal test case when someone breaks a contract involving a decent amount of Bitcoin. I imagine most people want some kind of legal recourse against their bank screwing them over. Either the courts won't recognise the currency, and all confidence in it will be lost -- or the courts will recognise it and the currency will gain a huge boost in consumer confidence.
Following that, the rest of the "system" will poke their nose into Bitcoin use -- money laundering investigators, the taxman, etc., which as far as I'm concerned is as it should be. We'll end up with more or less the same economics as we have now, except that direct "cash" payments over the Internet (or any other data transmission mechanism) become easy.
For example, being able to save immediately before a difficult jump in a platformer would ruin the challenge, and result in a boring game of { save; jump; while(!success) { load; jump; } }
If save anywhere would make your game boring, you've made a boring game. What exactly is supposed to be fun about having to press a key at exactly the right millisecond to make a stupid jump and have to repeat it three thousand times until you get it right?
I can't think of any genre of game that wouldn't be made less interesting by save-anywhere. Replace my "jump" with any tricky maneuver you like. Take a tactical shooter, where the challenge is to find a safe vantage point to take out a group of enemies with a sniper rifle. With quicksave/load hotkeys, you could instead blaze in, and just restore every time you get hit. Game the save system, keep only the short slices of gameplay where you fluked a kill, break the game.
A game like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time embraces the "instant try again" mechanic -- but keeps things interesting by rationing it.
What exactly is supposed to be fun about having to press a key at exactly the right millisecond to make a stupid jump and have to repeat it three thousand times until you get it right? That's the kind of boring, repetitive crap that's been typical of the console market and the consolised PC market.
If you told me what sort of game you enjoy, I'm sure I could find an aspect of it that I could call boring. People's tastes vary.
All my friends and I are gamers since the 80s. And most of us find the current game generation to be horrid outside of indie gaming or rare gems.
Hmm, but an indie nowadays has a similar market to a mainstream game in your heyday. So just enjoy the indie games, and let the mainstream get on with it.
10 years ago, a good chunk of gaming was done on PCs because consoles were crap - standard def, too-small TVs, and the like, so people bought nice high-end PCs and invested in them.
... And 20-30 years ago, a good chunk of gaming was done on consoles because home computers were crap. Arcade cabinets had the best graphics because they had expensive custom hardware; consoles played second fiddle, but could at least handle sprites with some aplomb; home computers were in distant third place.
I don't see this as a console related thing. There's nothing about console hardware that prevents arbitrary saves -- modern consoles have plenty of storage.
Rather, it's a game design thing. It's about usability, challenge and player satisfaction. For example, being able to save immediately before a difficult jump in a platformer would ruin the challenge, and result in a boring game of { save; jump; while(!success) { load; jump; } }
Sure, they get it wrong often. But that's not because of any constraints brought about by the format.
OK, I can believe that in some way, PC gaming is affected by "consolitis" - but by the same token, console gaming has been affected by "PCitis". Console gaming is dominated by first-person / over-shoulder shooters nowadays; a leak from the world of PC gaming which (to me) isn't particularly welcome.
FPSs with a PC heritage are probably the reason dual-analogue joypads became the norm; that's a mixed blessing because it improved the arena shooter (compare the analogue Geometry Wars with the 8-directional Robotron), but it resulted in standard console joypads that are far from optimal for traditional console games such as Street Fighter.
>> It works at those altitudes, because the sunlight is more intense... and because water boils at a lower temperature at the lower atmospheric pressure.
And it works at sea level because the concentrated sunlight gets really fucking hot.
Alright, it works at altitude with a smaller collector:P
True, although for making a cup of tea, you want the water as hot as you can get it, and boiling represents that temperature. I suppose you might say, you can't make a decent cup of tea at altitude, because you can't get the water hot enough.
In cooking, you might be boiling the liquid in order to reduce it, and lower atmospheric pressure means you can achieve that with less energy.
In the Himalayas, parabolic mirrors around this size are commonly used to boil kettles of water for tea/cooking.
It works at those altitudes, because the sunlight is more intense (less having been absorbed by the atmosphere), and because water boils at a lower temperature at the lower atmospheric pressure.
Comment explaining how it can't possibly work, from a games geek who insists on 100FPS with single frame latency, in 3... 2... 1...... despite actual paying customers being satisfied with OnLive, from what I hear.
I even have friends in the UK using the US servers, finding the lag occasionally annoying but not a deal breaker.
It takes me back to the old days, of my misspent youth, when we grabbed somebody's Postscript fractal generator demo, set the number of iterations to something dubiously suitable to even the desktops of the time(it worked; but took about ten minutes) and then sent it to every postscript-capable printer we could locate across our school's network...
Hah. I once found a very short piece of Postscript which ray-traced a reflective sphere on a chess board. So I sent it to the office printer. I assumed I'd crashed it, but sure enough, 3 hours later, out pops the picture.
Hmm, except it's not a very satisfying speed experience on my machine, so it sort of undermines what I previously knew -- which is that a modern Javascript interpreter on a modern machine is pretty damn quick.... and "real applications" generally aren't all that CPU intensive. Google Docs is a good demonstration that running real applications in Javascript is a reasonable thing to do.
One thing that's sort of neat is how they've used the Google Maps libs for navigation. Check the source -- it loads the Maps JS directly from the Maps URL.
It's nice, although not as quick as all that on my machine.
But what does this demonstrate? Anyone interested knows you can display arbitrary graphics using HTML5 canvas. Anyone with any sense knows you can calculate a view of a Julia set in Javascript. Add the two together, and it's inevitable that this demo would be possible.
Now, how about using Web sockets to set up some kind of P2P network whereby if someone else is viewing the same region as you are, your machines collaborate on the calculations...
Indeed, and also funicular railways, which are hauled uphill and lowered downhill by cables, making them sort of halfway between a ropeway and a railway.
However even these need a lot of groundwork, to provide an even track -- whereas a few pylons will let you string a cable across extremely uneven terrain.
I just can't get past how tremendously short-sighted it is to buy an eBook at current rates.
It depends on your reading style.
Some people buy a novel, read it, then give it to a charity shop. For them, only the last step is lost -- now certainly that warm and fuzzy feeling counts for someone, and the life of the book after donation is significant in the wider scheme of things, but for the original buyer it's not a hugely degraded experience, which might be compensated by the convenience of reading on an ebook platform.
Or, there's technical titles -- O'Reilly books and the like -- which are obsolete within 5 years. Realistically, my 1st edition Programming Perl is only good for throwing away, so an electronic version of it would have been just as good. With electronic versions, too, it becomes realistic for the publisher to include lifetime updates in the price of the book.
Just make sure they stay clear of areas where "fireworks" are going off.
Packet loss is to be expected in Avian Carrier Protocol, but that's why we layer TCP on top of it. You'd want to bump up your connection/retransmission/etc timeouts somewhat...
Slashdot Mirror
And there is no concept of a BitCoin representing some amount of energy - you can't get the energy back. It's simply a mechanism to restrict the supply without requiring a centralized issuer.
Yes. It seems like that aspect has two purposes:
1. To spread initial ownership of the wealth: anyone with a computer can start generating bitcoins
2. To introduce the coins over time, rather than have them all appear in a big bang. It seems that the maths is designed so that the production of Bitcoins slows exponentially over time.
However the FAQ does say that we would expect various economic factors to conspire such that the cost of generating Bitcoins approaches the value of the Bitcoins produced -- so that trading becomes a more profitable exercise than generating Bitcoins. Does that mean that the whole system plays into the hands of the energy companies?
That depends on your own position.
The BBC has a right wing bias. It's just that the rest of the media has an even more right wing bias.
i doubt bitcoin users want any gov't involved in bitcoins. Most of them are anarchists.
It seems inevitable that for Bitcoin to become ubiquitous, that government gets involved. One day, somebody will rip someone else off, to the tune of a few thousand dollars' worth of Bitcoins. The wronged party will turn to the courts.
If the courts say "GTFO, it wasn't real money and it was your own stupid fault for not using real money", then Bitcoin is doomed as a mainstream option.
If the courts say "Yep, you had a contract, you were ripped off, we'll use the power of the State to compensate you and punish the wrongdoer", then the goverment is involved in Bitcoin. State regulation, to the extent the maths allows it, will follow.
Aside, of course, from the complete lack of anything resembling deposits, loans, or reserves (fractional or otherwise).
Of course there's nothing to stop you from lending people bitcoins, demanding some rate of interest.
There's nothing to stop you offering a service whereby you look after their Bitcoins, offering them, by way of a legal contract, some security over and above what they get by keeping it in their Bitcoin wallet. Your depositors would probably expect to get some interest on their savings with you.
Once a decent number of people were using your service to look after their Bitcoin savings, you'd probably realise that you had more Bitcoins lying around than you ever needed to honour withdrawals at any one time, so you'd probably be tempted to invest that spare money, so that you could offer your savers a higher rate of interest, since that's what your competitors are doing. ... and now you're a bank.
If Bitcoin becomes a success as a currency, this *will* happen. Keeping 10,000 Bitcoins in a "wallet" on your PC is akin to keeping $10,000 under your mattress.
I'll be fascinated to see the legal test case when someone breaks a contract involving a decent amount of Bitcoin. I imagine most people want some kind of legal recourse against their bank screwing them over. Either the courts won't recognise the currency, and all confidence in it will be lost -- or the courts will recognise it and the currency will gain a huge boost in consumer confidence.
Following that, the rest of the "system" will poke their nose into Bitcoin use -- money laundering investigators, the taxman, etc., which as far as I'm concerned is as it should be. We'll end up with more or less the same economics as we have now, except that direct "cash" payments over the Internet (or any other data transmission mechanism) become easy.
Not if he encrypts the data before sending it to them. Then they don't have the key. They just have a random series of bytes.
The argument goes, they have the "random" series of bytes right there, where they can do all the cryptanalysis and brute-forcing they like.
This as opposed to having it somewhere you can physically secure yourself, behind mechanisms that detect suspicious access patterns.
For example, being able to save immediately before a difficult jump in a platformer would ruin the challenge, and result in a boring game of { save; jump; while(!success) { load; jump; } }
If save anywhere would make your game boring, you've made a boring game. What exactly is supposed to be fun about having to press a key at exactly the right millisecond to make a stupid jump and have to repeat it three thousand times until you get it right?
I can't think of any genre of game that wouldn't be made less interesting by save-anywhere. Replace my "jump" with any tricky maneuver you like. Take a tactical shooter, where the challenge is to find a safe vantage point to take out a group of enemies with a sniper rifle. With quicksave/load hotkeys, you could instead blaze in, and just restore every time you get hit. Game the save system, keep only the short slices of gameplay where you fluked a kill, break the game.
A game like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time embraces the "instant try again" mechanic -- but keeps things interesting by rationing it.
What exactly is supposed to be fun about having to press a key at exactly the right millisecond to make a stupid jump and have to repeat it three thousand times until you get it right? That's the kind of boring, repetitive crap that's been typical of the console market and the consolised PC market.
If you told me what sort of game you enjoy, I'm sure I could find an aspect of it that I could call boring. People's tastes vary.
All my friends and I are gamers since the 80s. And most of us find the current game generation to be horrid outside of indie gaming or rare gems.
Hmm, but an indie nowadays has a similar market to a mainstream game in your heyday. So just enjoy the indie games, and let the mainstream get on with it.
10 years ago, a good chunk of gaming was done on PCs because consoles were crap - standard def, too-small TVs, and the like, so people bought nice high-end PCs and invested in them.
... And 20-30 years ago, a good chunk of gaming was done on consoles because home computers were crap. Arcade cabinets had the best graphics because they had expensive custom hardware; consoles played second fiddle, but could at least handle sprites with some aplomb; home computers were in distant third place.
Things have changed; they will change again.
I don't see this as a console related thing. There's nothing about console hardware that prevents arbitrary saves -- modern consoles have plenty of storage.
Rather, it's a game design thing. It's about usability, challenge and player satisfaction. For example, being able to save immediately before a difficult jump in a platformer would ruin the challenge, and result in a boring game of { save; jump; while(!success) { load; jump; } }
Sure, they get it wrong often. But that's not because of any constraints brought about by the format.
OK, I can believe that in some way, PC gaming is affected by "consolitis" - but by the same token, console gaming has been affected by "PCitis". Console gaming is dominated by first-person / over-shoulder shooters nowadays; a leak from the world of PC gaming which (to me) isn't particularly welcome.
FPSs with a PC heritage are probably the reason dual-analogue joypads became the norm; that's a mixed blessing because it improved the arena shooter (compare the analogue Geometry Wars with the 8-directional Robotron), but it resulted in standard console joypads that are far from optimal for traditional console games such as Street Fighter.
I'd say it works more quickly at those altitudes... would still work at sea level too, just takes longer (much longer if there are clouds.)
Yeah fair enough. I should have said it works with a pretty small dish, in cold ambient temperatures, at an acceptable speed.
>> It works at those altitudes, because the sunlight is more intense... and because water boils at a lower temperature at the lower atmospheric pressure.
And it works at sea level because the concentrated sunlight gets really fucking hot.
Alright, it works at altitude with a smaller collector :P
True, although for making a cup of tea, you want the water as hot as you can get it, and boiling represents that temperature. I suppose you might say, you can't make a decent cup of tea at altitude, because you can't get the water hot enough.
In cooking, you might be boiling the liquid in order to reduce it, and lower atmospheric pressure means you can achieve that with less energy.
In the Himalayas, parabolic mirrors around this size are commonly used to boil kettles of water for tea/cooking.
It works at those altitudes, because the sunlight is more intense (less having been absorbed by the atmosphere), and because water boils at a lower temperature at the lower atmospheric pressure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker#Solar_kettles
Comment explaining how it can't possibly work, from a games geek who insists on 100FPS with single frame latency, in 3... 2... 1... ... despite actual paying customers being satisfied with OnLive, from what I hear.
I even have friends in the UK using the US servers, finding the lag occasionally annoying but not a deal breaker.
Why didn't you "hyperlink" to something telling us wtf a hyperlink is?
It takes me back to the old days, of my misspent youth, when we grabbed somebody's Postscript fractal generator demo, set the number of iterations to something dubiously suitable to even the desktops of the time(it worked; but took about ten minutes) and then sent it to every postscript-capable printer we could locate across our school's network...
Hah. I once found a very short piece of Postscript which ray-traced a reflective sphere on a chess board. So I sent it to the office printer. I assumed I'd crashed it, but sure enough, 3 hours later, out pops the picture.
Hmm, except it's not a very satisfying speed experience on my machine, so it sort of undermines what I previously knew -- which is that a modern Javascript interpreter on a modern machine is pretty damn quick. ... and "real applications" generally aren't all that CPU intensive. Google Docs is a good demonstration that running real applications in Javascript is a reasonable thing to do.
One thing that's sort of neat is how they've used the Google Maps libs for navigation. Check the source -- it loads the Maps JS directly from the Maps URL.
It's nice, although not as quick as all that on my machine.
But what does this demonstrate? Anyone interested knows you can display arbitrary graphics using HTML5 canvas. Anyone with any sense knows you can calculate a view of a Julia set in Javascript. Add the two together, and it's inevitable that this demo would be possible.
Now, how about using Web sockets to set up some kind of P2P network whereby if someone else is viewing the same region as you are, your machines collaborate on the calculations...
Doesn't the built in Google Navigation work in mainland Europe?
It works well in the UK, and I have to say I prefer it to the dedicated TomTom unit I used to use.
Wasn't this why Google developed the App Inventor, but then didn't let people actually sell apps developed with it in the App Store?
No, App Inventor, like its ancestor Scratch, is an educational tool.
Railways can manage only very gentle gradients,
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Rack_railway
Indeed, and also funicular railways, which are hauled uphill and lowered downhill by cables, making them sort of halfway between a ropeway and a railway.
However even these need a lot of groundwork, to provide an even track -- whereas a few pylons will let you string a cable across extremely uneven terrain.
I just can't get past how tremendously short-sighted it is to buy an eBook at current rates.
It depends on your reading style.
Some people buy a novel, read it, then give it to a charity shop. For them, only the last step is lost -- now certainly that warm and fuzzy feeling counts for someone, and the life of the book after donation is significant in the wider scheme of things, but for the original buyer it's not a hugely degraded experience, which might be compensated by the convenience of reading on an ebook platform.
Or, there's technical titles -- O'Reilly books and the like -- which are obsolete within 5 years. Realistically, my 1st edition Programming Perl is only good for throwing away, so an electronic version of it would have been just as good. With electronic versions, too, it becomes realistic for the publisher to include lifetime updates in the price of the book.
Just make sure they stay clear of areas where "fireworks" are going off.
Packet loss is to be expected in Avian Carrier Protocol, but that's why we layer TCP on top of it. You'd want to bump up your connection/retransmission/etc timeouts somewhat...