That's interesting. With a little bit of testing different distances and some extrapolation it looks like 360 PPI would be good enough for me.
At which distance?
Well, when I use a 100 PPI screen the line looks perfectly straight from 160 cm and out. I'd like to be able to sit as close as 45 cm if I want to.
100 * 160/45 ~= 360 PPI
Forgot the factor there. By the way I'd like to be able to move in as close as 30 cm when I'm using a phone or tablet, so for those I suppose I would need more than 500 PPI for it to be good enough.
Some open source projects would benefit from proper managers who can stop them from shooting themselves in the foot.
Or a bigger revenue stream that can help them stay motivated to burn hours on boring tasks. Of course it's going to take years if they average a tiny number of hours per month because the developer(s) are bored with it.
There are already several apps that do this. The way they work is you have to "arm" the app. Next, you trigger the emergency function in a preset way, for example by discreetly unplugging the headset from the headphone jack.
Having an always on emergency button would probably not work because it would lead to too many false alarms.
To be fair, I work in a bunch of languages and I know the modulo in c and c++, but have not come across it in others. If someone asked me for a python version, I would probably fail unless it was %. The point is Modulo is not that commonly used in interpreted languages.
It is %, but the basic problem is that any employer that asks you to bang out a piece of code without access to documentation is asking you to do a ridiculously artificial thing. Who cares if the applicant knows that the modulo operator is % in Python? It takes less than 20 seconds to look up.
It would be better to hand applicants a small program that has one bug and several problematic things about it and have the applicant first debug it and then suggest improvements and refactorings.
It's sometimes compared to the Mig-21. Cheap to operate and maintain, sturdy enough to use roads as runways, at least the A/B/C/D versions. Brazilian engineers will get to co-design the Gripen E if they want to, so it's likely to be a compromise between Swedish, Brazilian and possibly Swiss needs.
Well, I don't know what his net worth is, but assuming it's an average middle class net worth he has just been sentenced to life in poverty. Personal bankruptcy is not a good option, because in Sweden that just means you keep all your debt and you are not allowed to buy anything but life's basic necessities until all of your debts are payed off.
Some interesting information about the case: The man was the most active uploaders on one of the biggest Swedish torrent trackers, SweBits. He went under the handle "Marcil". The police and the intellectual property industry private investigators got Marcil's IP address from an anonymous person who claimed to be part of the torrent community. The judgement speculates that Marcil was outed by someone who was jealous of his status in the torrent community.
The front man of the intellectual property industry in Sweden, Henrik Pontén was personally involved in the case and in the trial.
So then what is the point of the numbers? Well, I think the facts speak for themselves.
I hope the industry will forgive a large part of Marcil's debt after some time when they judge that the example has been properly made.
What really happened was that the norwegian IRS said that the bitcoin does currently not have any status as a currency in Norway and will be taxed as an asset.
They very clearly state that bitcoins have not been banned as a currency, only that it's status still has to be decided by Finanstilsynet (almost like SEC, but with a broader mandate).
The Norwegian IRS does not have the authority to claim it is a currency or not, only Finanstilsynet. All they do is tax what they see as an asset until Finanstilsynet gives other directions.
Quite different heading than the/. heading. Translated it just means "Bitcoins are to be taxed".
Yup, this is basically good news for Bitcoin since it means it won't be regulated as a currency. And Norway is a tiny, tiny market so it's fairly inconsequential.
And yet the price of Bitcoin is falling on this news. Talk about a nervous market!
If someone makes a bunch of profit on Bitcoins, how is Norway going to know if the person doesn't self report?
Also, how are capital gains taxed there? In the US, capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than most normal income, so if the choice is between normal income and capital gains, I'll take the latter every time (since I'm in the US).
If someone sells Bitcoin for currency there is really nothing different about it from any other asset trading.
The tax authority will do research, create a list of Bitcoin exchanges and than request information from each exchange about any and all Norwegian citizens that trade and about any and all trades that they have made.
In case anyone cares, the first soft moon landing was on January 31, 1966 by the Soviet lander Lana-9. It still boggles my mind how they were able to achieve that without anything remotely resembling a modern computing device.
There were plenty of good analog designers available back then.
They probably basically used one or several analog control systems to control the descent based on signals from a radar and one or several gyros. The landing sequence could have been terminated on landing by a simple mechanical switch.
Come to think of it, the Moon is just about close enough that they could potentially have landed it by hand if the craft was sending back it's radar signal and gyro signals to Earth.
one man's decision could potentially destroy most of civilization.
I hope that isn't as true as Hollywood makes it out to be. Multiple authentication requirements, etc. are hopefully even stronger than they claimed they were _before_ Dr. Strangelove was released.
Turning back to antiquity, wasn't it Caesar who essentially tanked Rome? Though, "we" (civilization) will be taking the barbarians down hard with us if the nuclear option gets out of control.
No, Caesar changed Rome from a republic to an Empire. You could say he laid the ground works for the imperial Rome that we most often think of.
The fall of Western Rome was a drawn out process that took at least a couple of centuries, so you can't blame it on any one person. Rome probably fell for reasons not much different from why the Soviet union fell. It was too large an empire and way too reliant on central planning.
You do realize that quantum mechanics were met with similar derision? Heck, Einstein never really accepted the notion, and that's as great a scientist as we've ever had. It took years to devise experiments that could validate quantum mechanics' existence.
This isn't to say that this theory is right or wrong, merely that groundbreaking theories almost invariably will look like "mathematical fancy" to most people (especially those with "get off my lawn!" syndrome) and will be met with confusion or denial by a lot of others, including respected scientists. It's crazy, but it might just work. Remember: the universe wasn't designed so that our puny minds would find it logical or straightforward. It just is.
Another thing that can happen is that scientists apply doublethink. So for example, many scientist simultaneously believed for about 200 years that everything that happens boils down to small particles interacting through direct contact (aka bouncing off of one another) and that Newton's theory of gravity, which relies on attractive forces in empty space, were both valid. Think about it for a while. How do you get an attractive force by bouncing stuff of other stuff? Well, here are some attempts at squaring that circle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_explanations_of_gravitation.
Many scientists today believe that the universe is deterministic, even though the math, which is supported by mountains of evidence, require it to have all sorts of uncertainties built-in.
I don't mean to diminish the suffering of anyone in earlier centuries, but the 20:th is special in that was the first century in which one man's decision could potentially destroy most of civilization.
Fine, but I didn't hear anyone suggesting that starting another cold war and then ending it, in order to harvest the leftover nuclear material, ought to be on the table in terms of possible future energy strategies.
This was a one time deal that only made sense given the outrageous history of the 20:th century.
"...looks like we're getting closer to the RepRap being able to print all of its parts."
Sure, assuming it can print an Millermatic 140 arc welder and an Arduino.
Look, nature has already solved this problem, so we know something about the complexity and difficulty involved. We have cows that print milk and copies of themselves, chickens than print eggs and copies of themselves, grass that prints grain and copies of itself, etc. These things consists of millions of cells, each about as intelligent as an Arduino. Good luck creating something like that with a few hundred parts!
My own wild pet idea is to completely replace the traditional professor with a lecturer and a researcher. The lecturer would teach undergrad classes, and the researcher would advise master's and PhD students (and teach grad-level classes/seminars in their specialty). It's a win for everyone: undergrads get better instruction, and researchers aren't distracted by teaching.
Sure, if you keep in mind that the undergraduate degree is the new high school diploma, that suggestion is kind of a no-brainer.
The only problem is that researchers will miss out on the challenge of explaining their theories to more or less random people (aka students). This could be a pretty serious problem, because one of the main points of constructing theories is to come up with ways through which average people can reason about difficult problems.
Indeed. The slow-down has been happening for about a decade now. My personal indicator is that once a year or so, I think about upgrading my CPU. For the last few years, I have not been able to find anything significantly faster. That used to be no problem. I have to admit that I quite like this trend. Maybe we can no start to build better software?
I don't know about that. Price performance per watt-dollar is still pretty much on track. You can get the equivalent of your old CPU with a built-in GPU for a fraction of what you payed years ago. You can buy a phone that mops the floor with a PS3 graphics wise.
You'll know the slowdown has started when the Apple CEO comes on stage to present new stuff and the highlights are all about industrial design. We're getting there, for sure, but there are still probably several more years left of very rapid improvement in performance per watt-dollar followed by many years of slow improvement.
Somebody more familiar with bitcoin can answer this for me, undoubtedly, but based on my limited understanding, if the wallet file is lost or destroyed, the coins within it are effectively gone, correct? If so, then at some point there's an expected loss over time (fraction of the population who don't back up their wallet, expected size of wallet, drive failure rate), and at some point that's going to intersect with the size at which the pool expands, so that the total supply of bitcoins over time actually decreases. Theoretically, we'd hit some point where bitcoins are just being destroyed through loss. The situation will be exacerbated with thefts and personal storage.
Yep, that's correct. Bitcoin is designed to be ridiculously scarce in the long run.
I recently had a discussion about whether or not the spike in BTC is a bubble or not and came to some interesting conclusions.
From what I can tell, essentially a bubble burst occurs when prices have become so inflated that people are priced out of buying in. This creates a lack of buyers, causing the sellers to dramatically drop their prices. For example, if I buy a house for $100,000, and then sell it for $150,000, then they sell it at $250,000, etc, etc. Eventually the price gets so high that people just won't buy the house. Leaving the last buyer to take the hit and sell at a loss (if he chooses to sell).
BTC is somewhat different though. It is divisible to 8 decimal places (infinitely divisible in theory, just need to update the clients). So people can never be "priced out" of the market, they can just buy a smaller slice of the pie if they desire. This is unlike a house where I (typically) can't buy just a fraction of it.
So the only thing I can say for sure, is that we cannot be sure whether or not the rapid rise in BTC value is a bubble which will burst or not.
That's a common misconception. The divisibility of the asset just means that a trader is priced out of the market gradually instead of instantly.
Go to http://bitcointicker.co/ and open the all time view. Notice how the current skyscraper has been built on tiny volumes compared to historical trading. What do you think is going to happen when someone decides to sell off something like 100k BTC?
Man, when this cash cow comes crashing to the ground its going to make a huge ass hole. Yes, it will come crashing down and I think it will be soon.
Bitcoins are a nice idea but people are not treating them like money. They are treating them like stocks and commodities. They are not commodities, they are coins and coins are supposed to be spent.
So when the fall does happen, and it will, then maybe we can start using them for what they are supposed to be used for. An not hording them like bunch of fucking dragons.
If people treat Bitcoin like a commodity and do so with success then Bitcoin is a commodity and not a currency.
The deflationary nature of Bitcoin and the fact that transactions can't be reversed pretty much guarantees that it will never be used as a currency, but those two features could be strengths if you think of Bitcoin as virtual gold.
Tons of people said that when the price spiked from $4 to $20.
The grandparent didn't specify, but I think he's talking about day trading. If you sell now at $1000 and buy back at $500 you'll have doubled the amount of Bitcoin that you own, assuming it falls down to $500 and assuming you have the nerve and patience to wait for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Google is close to unusable unless you manually set it to show recent results. Old stuff on the internet is mostly noise and rot.
I bet more than 95% of everything older than 3 years is noise and rot that nobody has any use for.
That's interesting. With a little bit of testing different distances and some extrapolation it looks like 360 PPI would be good enough for me.
At which distance?
Well, when I use a 100 PPI screen the line looks perfectly straight from 160 cm and out. I'd like to be able to sit as close as 45 cm if I want to.
100 * 160/45 ~= 360 PPI
Forgot the factor there. By the way I'd like to be able to move in as close as 30 cm when I'm using a phone or tablet, so for those I suppose I would need more than 500 PPI for it to be good enough.
That's interesting. With a little bit of testing different distances and some extrapolation it looks like 360 PPI would be good enough for me.
At which distance?
Well, when I use a 100 PPI screen the line looks perfectly straight from 160 cm and out. I'd like to be able to sit as close as 45 cm if I want to.
160/45 ~= 360 PPI
Easy to verify: Display this at 1:1.
If you can see a step in the line, you don't have high enough resolution yet.
That's interesting. With a little bit of testing different distances and some extrapolation it looks like 360 PPI would be good enough for me.
Some open source projects would benefit from proper managers who can stop them from shooting themselves in the foot.
Or a bigger revenue stream that can help them stay motivated to burn hours on boring tasks. Of course it's going to take years if they average a tiny number of hours per month because the developer(s) are bored with it.
There are already several apps that do this. The way they work is you have to "arm" the app. Next, you trigger the emergency function in a preset way, for example by discreetly unplugging the headset from the headphone jack.
Having an always on emergency button would probably not work because it would lead to too many false alarms.
To be fair, I work in a bunch of languages and I know the modulo in c and c++, but have not come across it in others. If someone asked me for a python version, I would probably fail unless it was %.
The point is Modulo is not that commonly used in interpreted languages.
It is %, but the basic problem is that any employer that asks you to bang out a piece of code without access to documentation is asking you to do a ridiculously artificial thing. Who cares if the applicant knows that the modulo operator is % in Python? It takes less than 20 seconds to look up.
It would be better to hand applicants a small program that has one bug and several problematic things about it and have the applicant first debug it and then suggest improvements and refactorings.
It's sometimes compared to the Mig-21. Cheap to operate and maintain, sturdy enough to use roads as runways, at least the A/B/C/D versions. Brazilian engineers will get to co-design the Gripen E if they want to, so it's likely to be a compromise between Swedish, Brazilian and possibly Swiss needs.
Well, I don't know what his net worth is, but assuming it's an average middle class net worth he has just been sentenced to life in poverty. Personal bankruptcy is not a good option, because in Sweden that just means you keep all your debt and you are not allowed to buy anything but life's basic necessities until all of your debts are payed off.
Some interesting information about the case: The man was the most active uploaders on one of the biggest Swedish torrent trackers, SweBits. He went under the handle "Marcil". The police and the intellectual property industry private investigators got Marcil's IP address from an anonymous person who claimed to be part of the torrent community. The judgement speculates that Marcil was outed by someone who was jealous of his status in the torrent community.
The front man of the intellectual property industry in Sweden, Henrik Pontén was personally involved in the case and in the trial.
So then what is the point of the numbers? Well, I think the facts speak for themselves.
I hope the industry will forgive a large part of Marcil's debt after some time when they judge that the example has been properly made.
What really happened was that the norwegian IRS said that the bitcoin does currently not have any status as a currency in Norway and will be taxed as an asset.
They very clearly state that bitcoins have not been banned as a currency, only that it's status still has to be decided by Finanstilsynet (almost like SEC, but with a broader mandate).
The Norwegian IRS does not have the authority to claim it is a currency or not, only Finanstilsynet. All they do is tax what they see as an asset until Finanstilsynet gives other directions.
Nettvalutaen Bitcoins beskattes
Translated
Quite different heading than the /. heading.
Translated it just means "Bitcoins are to be taxed".
Yup, this is basically good news for Bitcoin since it means it won't be regulated as a currency. And Norway is a tiny, tiny market so it's fairly inconsequential.
And yet the price of Bitcoin is falling on this news. Talk about a nervous market!
If someone makes a bunch of profit on Bitcoins, how is Norway going to know if the person doesn't self report?
Also, how are capital gains taxed there? In the US, capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than most normal income, so if the choice is between normal income and capital gains, I'll take the latter every time (since I'm in the US).
If someone sells Bitcoin for currency there is really nothing different about it from any other asset trading.
The tax authority will do research, create a list of Bitcoin exchanges and than request information from each exchange about any and all Norwegian citizens that trade and about any and all trades that they have made.
In case anyone cares, the first soft moon landing was on January 31, 1966 by the Soviet lander Lana-9. It still boggles my mind how they were able to achieve that without anything remotely resembling a modern computing device.
There were plenty of good analog designers available back then.
They probably basically used one or several analog control systems to control the descent based on signals from a radar and one or several gyros. The landing sequence could have been terminated on landing by a simple mechanical switch.
Come to think of it, the Moon is just about close enough that they could potentially have landed it by hand if the craft was sending back it's radar signal and gyro signals to Earth.
one man's decision could potentially destroy most of civilization.
I hope that isn't as true as Hollywood makes it out to be. Multiple authentication requirements, etc. are hopefully even stronger than they claimed they were _before_ Dr. Strangelove was released.
Turning back to antiquity, wasn't it Caesar who essentially tanked Rome? Though, "we" (civilization) will be taking the barbarians down hard with us if the nuclear option gets out of control.
No, Caesar changed Rome from a republic to an Empire. You could say he laid the ground works for the imperial Rome that we most often think of.
The fall of Western Rome was a drawn out process that took at least a couple of centuries, so you can't blame it on any one person. Rome probably fell for reasons not much different from why the Soviet union fell. It was too large an empire and way too reliant on central planning.
You do realize that quantum mechanics were met with similar derision? Heck, Einstein never really accepted the notion, and that's as great a scientist as we've ever had. It took years to devise experiments that could validate quantum mechanics' existence.
This isn't to say that this theory is right or wrong, merely that groundbreaking theories almost invariably will look like "mathematical fancy" to most people (especially those with "get off my lawn!" syndrome) and will be met with confusion or denial by a lot of others, including respected scientists. It's crazy, but it might just work. Remember: the universe wasn't designed so that our puny minds would find it logical or straightforward. It just is.
Another thing that can happen is that scientists apply doublethink. So for example, many scientist simultaneously believed for about 200 years that everything that happens boils down to small particles interacting through direct contact (aka bouncing off of one another) and that Newton's theory of gravity, which relies on attractive forces in empty space, were both valid. Think about it for a while. How do you get an attractive force by bouncing stuff of other stuff? Well, here are some attempts at squaring that circle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_explanations_of_gravitation.
Many scientists today believe that the universe is deterministic, even though the math, which is supported by mountains of evidence, require it to have all sorts of uncertainties built-in.
I don't mean to diminish the suffering of anyone in earlier centuries, but the 20:th is special in that was the first century in which one man's decision could potentially destroy most of civilization.
Fine, but I didn't hear anyone suggesting that starting another cold war and then ending it, in order to harvest the leftover nuclear material, ought to be on the table in terms of possible future energy strategies.
This was a one time deal that only made sense given the outrageous history of the 20:th century.
"...looks like we're getting closer to the RepRap being able to print all of its parts."
Sure, assuming it can print an Millermatic 140 arc welder and an Arduino.
Look, nature has already solved this problem, so we know something about the complexity and difficulty involved. We have cows that print milk and copies of themselves, chickens than print eggs and copies of themselves, grass that prints grain and copies of itself, etc. These things consists of millions of cells, each about as intelligent as an Arduino. Good luck creating something like that with a few hundred parts!
My own wild pet idea is to completely replace the traditional professor with a lecturer and a researcher. The lecturer would teach undergrad classes, and the researcher would advise master's and PhD students (and teach grad-level classes/seminars in their specialty). It's a win for everyone: undergrads get better instruction, and researchers aren't distracted by teaching.
Sure, if you keep in mind that the undergraduate degree is the new high school diploma, that suggestion is kind of a no-brainer.
The only problem is that researchers will miss out on the challenge of explaining their theories to more or less random people (aka students). This could be a pretty serious problem, because one of the main points of constructing theories is to come up with ways through which average people can reason about difficult problems.
Indeed. The slow-down has been happening for about a decade now. My personal indicator is that once a year or so, I think about upgrading my CPU. For the last few years, I have not been able to find anything significantly faster. That used to be no problem. I have to admit that I quite like this trend. Maybe we can no start to build better software?
I don't know about that. Price performance per watt-dollar is still pretty much on track. You can get the equivalent of your old CPU with a built-in GPU for a fraction of what you payed years ago. You can buy a phone that mops the floor with a PS3 graphics wise.
You'll know the slowdown has started when the Apple CEO comes on stage to present new stuff and the highlights are all about industrial design. We're getting there, for sure, but there are still probably several more years left of very rapid improvement in performance per watt-dollar followed by many years of slow improvement.
Somebody more familiar with bitcoin can answer this for me, undoubtedly, but based on my limited understanding, if the wallet file is lost or destroyed, the coins within it are effectively gone, correct? If so, then at some point there's an expected loss over time (fraction of the population who don't back up their wallet, expected size of wallet, drive failure rate), and at some point that's going to intersect with the size at which the pool expands, so that the total supply of bitcoins over time actually decreases. Theoretically, we'd hit some point where bitcoins are just being destroyed through loss. The situation will be exacerbated with thefts and personal storage.
Yep, that's correct. Bitcoin is designed to be ridiculously scarce in the long run.
It's not Windows if you use Firefox, Google, Open Office and Eclipse instead of IE, Bing, Word and Visual Studio?
If Microsoft has open sourced Windows recently and I missed the news then yes, it wouldn't necessarily be a Microsoft platform.
We've played this game before.
I look forward to the first Bitcoin Panic, it should be interesting to see what happens...
You're more than two years late, but you didn't miss much. The fallout consisted of several nerds posting angry messages at forums.
I recently had a discussion about whether or not the spike in BTC is a bubble or not and came to some interesting conclusions.
From what I can tell, essentially a bubble burst occurs when prices have become so inflated that people are priced out of buying in. This creates a lack of buyers, causing the sellers to dramatically drop their prices. For example, if I buy a house for $100,000, and then sell it for $150,000, then they sell it at $250,000, etc, etc. Eventually the price gets so high that people just won't buy the house. Leaving the last buyer to take the hit and sell at a loss (if he chooses to sell).
BTC is somewhat different though. It is divisible to 8 decimal places (infinitely divisible in theory, just need to update the clients). So people can never be "priced out" of the market, they can just buy a smaller slice of the pie if they desire. This is unlike a house where I (typically) can't buy just a fraction of it.
So the only thing I can say for sure, is that we cannot be sure whether or not the rapid rise in BTC value is a bubble which will burst or not.
That's a common misconception. The divisibility of the asset just means that a trader is priced out of the market gradually instead of instantly.
Go to http://bitcointicker.co/ and open the all time view. Notice how the current skyscraper has been built on tiny volumes compared to historical trading. What do you think is going to happen when someone decides to sell off something like 100k BTC?
Man, when this cash cow comes crashing to the ground its going to make a huge ass hole. Yes, it will come crashing down and I think it will be soon.
Bitcoins are a nice idea but people are not treating them like money. They are treating them like stocks and commodities. They are not commodities, they are coins and coins are supposed to be spent.
So when the fall does happen, and it will, then maybe we can start using them for what they are supposed to be used for. An not hording them like bunch of fucking dragons.
If people treat Bitcoin like a commodity and do so with success then Bitcoin is a commodity and not a currency.
The deflationary nature of Bitcoin and the fact that transactions can't be reversed pretty much guarantees that it will never be used as a currency, but those two features could be strengths if you think of Bitcoin as virtual gold.
Tons of people said that when the price spiked from $4 to $20.
The grandparent didn't specify, but I think he's talking about day trading. If you sell now at $1000 and buy back at $500 you'll have doubled the amount of Bitcoin that you own, assuming it falls down to $500 and assuming you have the nerve and patience to wait for it.