Bitcoins now consume $100+ of electricity to make?
No, the energy cost is about 20c. But the investment in hardware required to get them at that price is about $2500 and would need to be ammortized into your calculations of costs over a reasonably short period (as the viable lifespan of that hardware can probably be measured in months at this point of time).
Semantics. The coins do not exist in the market until the mining is done.
Not semantics. You can't produce bitcoins because there is nothing you or I can do that will change the number of bitcoins that exist in the long term. Sure, we could acquire a huge number of ASICs and start mining, and we'd likely accumulate a huge pile of them. But all this will do is move them out of the hands of others who would have acquired them, the total number of bitcoins generated will remain the same as if we had taken no action at all. Therefore we didn't produce anything, we just moved stuff around.
You don't have to be a professional economist to recognize that a "currency" that collapses and loses half its value in the space of minutes is a bad investment.
Shrug. I said a few weeks ago that the value of bitcoin seemed to be approximately correct at about $70-$80. If it's been higher in the interim, that's just because some speculators made bad purchase decisions. Chart... looks to me like the current value is about right and the recent highs were a bubble. I'd wait a little to see if the price drops further before making a buy decision, but now doesn't look like a good time to sell. Bubbles happen, but don't affect the validity of the underlying instrument.
It will simply get exponentially harder, which will increase the bitcoin actual, objective worth
Does that not sound like a pyramid scheme to you?
No, actually that sounds like the *opposite* of a pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes get exponentially harder to find new buyers for because the good they sell, membership of the scheme, becomes exponentially easier to acquire as the scheme grows, causing a crash of value of the memberships over time. Bitcoin becomes exponentially harder to acquire new coins over time, which should cause an increase in value. Or to put it another way: the problem with pyramid schemes is that they have no limit to their growth so eventually they grow faster than the demand for them. Bitcoin has a hard-and-fast limit to growth.
If this was true we would not have just seen a $100 drop.
We haven't seen a $100 drop. We've seen a bubble caused by speculators inflate the price by about $150 over the course of about 3 weeks, and a correction back to a figure closer to the long term average value. See this chart. The line at the bottom is the 200-day average value, which is basically a lagging indicator of the actual value once all the short-term fluctuations have been taken out. It has barely budged; it certainly hasn't dropped at any point recently.
And that is why no one takes Change.org serious. You are using a government website designed for you to petition the governement about important government policies [...]
Really? Because the copy on change.org itself suggests otherwise. It describes itself as "the world's largest petition platform, empowering people everywhere to create the change they want to see," not a narrow site restricted to issues the US government is involved in. Of the three example uses quoted on their 'about' page, one is about applying pressure to privately held corporations; their aim is apparently "making governments and companies more responsive and accountable". It also appears to be privately owned, and not run by or in association with any government.
Or alternatively, you can do Machine/Take Snapshot from the GUI, then revert to the snapshot when the machine gets fubar'd. This means people don't unexpectedly lose stuff if they try saving things, and only requires a few moments of intervention periodically.
I've also done intersting stuff along the lines you talk about with VMware (I think it would also be possible with VirtualBox), where I set up a.vmdk file that uses another vmdk as a reference, and only stores the blocks that are changed. So you can have several virtual machines all with common data but without wasting disk space by duplicating it. Unfortunately, it all gets a little fucked up if you try to modify the base image, but it works well enough if you have a static base you can work from.
If my math is right, at 4.5M copies sold as of 12/2011, 0.06% of people in the world play at least Starcraft 2 (and that's assuming all 7B people in the world have a computer). So no, "99.99% of people who don't play any of those games" isn't true.
Not to mention the fact that at least 3 times that many have probably pirated it.
They did something like that with hotspots in the UK - the Digital Economy Act means that businesses can be liable for the infringements of people using their connection, which is a serious concern for all those places that used to provide customers with free wifi.
[Citation needed]
I've read the Act, and see nothing in it that sounds like it will have this consequence. It appears that they may have a legal obligation to notify their customers of allegations they receive concerning infringements, with fines as a court considers "proportionate" for failing to do so. However, by my reading of the Act, they can avoid this obligation by offering a free service with no associated terms and conditions (the definition of an ISP makes reference to a "subscriber", which is defined as somebody with whom the ISP has entered into an agreement to provide service and who is not reselling the service, so if there are no T&Cs there is no agreement, no agreement means not an ISP AFAICT).
The only thing about the arrangement that surprised me is that the MPs were so open about the change in the law being about copyright. I'd have expected them to instead use child porn as an excuse, but they didn't: The Digital Economy Act is an entirely open effort to strengthen copyright law.
The Act was the last Bill introduced by a government who knew they had no hope of reelection. They really didn't care about dressing it up -- they knew that by the time the next election came around, we'd mostly have forgotten about it.
But that's not a java library - it's a java veneer on top of a native library.
Unless you're using an extended version of Java that supports the constructs you'd need to communicate directly with the hardware, i.e. pointers to arbitrarily-allocated memory blocks, and I/O instructions, so are you. Java isn't designed as a hardware interface, so you have to use a native hardware interface for such tasks. Is this really a surprise?
If this were really true why are all the high-performance multimedia, mathematics, etc. libraries all still written in C, C++ or Fortran? That's because Java is still magnitudes slower.
Java is slower for these applications because of a few choices made early in the language design that cannot now be undone. One of them is that portability of code is more important than performance, and that therefore mathematical operations must have exactly specified results -- with the result that Java cannot use processor integrated implementations of transcendental functions, among other issues, meaning any code using exponential functions, trig functions, or logarithms runs about 10-100 times slower than native implementations. But you will get the same result on any platform...
But for general purpose logical data manipulation, like 90%+ of real world code, Java is just as good as any other language.
The per-object overhead for Java's Hotspot VM (at least the 32-bit version) is 8 bytes. The per-object overhead for C++ objects compiled with most common C++ compilers for a 32-bit architecture and using virtual methods with public inheritance is also 8 bytes (1 vtable pointer, 1 vftable pointer).
My IT department is still running Java 6 update 5 from 2008. They're too scared to upgrade to any later update levels because no one is going to give them the money to regression test every piece of Java code we've got.
If they'd demanded automated tests of every functional requirement (which has been a standard best practice since some time around the mid 90s, so they aren't likely to have any Java code hanging around from before the industry woke up and realised how important it was), it would be less than a day's work to perform those regression tests, and would likely not take more than a few more days to fix any problems found. The new features would probably make the effort pay back in less than a month.
But they clearly ignored industry practice, presumably in the name of economy and getting the job done quickly, so you're stuck with an unmaintainable obsolete code base. And are probably still writing legacy code today.
The VM will need an update to perform the linking of default methods in interfaces. Other than that I think you're right; it certainly looks as though the lambda function stuff is implementable from a purely compiler perspective (although whether that's how it has actually been done, I don't know).
Well, you got a +5:) but your assumptions about a security manager works and how amd where it is used: are completely wrong. It is trivial to write a Java Application thatbuses a security manager and thus, e.g. restricting it from accessing the internet or certain parts of the file system. Your idea that dangerous methods call the security manager is completely wrong. The VM calls the security manager before said method is executed.
Your assumption that the VM inserts the security manager code is wrong. See, for instance, the source code for java.io.FileInputStream(File). You can clearly see starting at line 128 and continuing to line 131 that this check is performed by the library, not the VM. Similar code is present throughout the Java standard library.
You know you might be onto something there. Let's see the definition of "literal":
A.A adj.
1. a.A.1.a Of or pertaining to letters of the alphabet; of the nature of letters, alphabetical; expressed by letters, written.
Yep, "expressed by letters, written" is clearly true.
2.A.2 Of a translation, version, transcript, etc.: Representing the very words of the original; verbally exact. Also, (the) exact (words of a passage).
At least some biblical translations attempt to represent the words of the original exactly, so this could be true also.
Sure, there are other meaning sof "literal", but who cares about those, right?
I just wanted to ask a question. What does God need with a title?
The Abrahamic religions are memes descended from older memes that had multiple gods. God had a title because there was a need to refer to all gods as a group. The language wasn't changed with the rewrite to monotheistic principles.
Good and evil are concepts from the philosophy of ethics. Religions have a history that is deeply intertwined with that of ethics, as they typically attempt to prescribe an ethical code for their adherents, but ethics as a field does exist independently from religion.
So don't do that. There are other ways of performing backups, and recent versions of Windows are quite happy being deployed with a file level copy onto a newly formatted disk (older versions may have objected, however). Linux has always been happy with this approach.
I'm not clear on exactly what the difference is between a hypervisor+para-API and a normal OS.
None. The paravirtualisation API is pretty much identical to those provided by normal OSs, except that it is designed in such a way that other OSs can easily be rewritten to use it rather than raw hardware features. This pretty-much means that the only real difference is in terms of what kind of features it provides, rather than how it does it.
I just have to say, I'm not quite sure where Xen fits into the picture here. Why do we need it? Why not run something much simpler -- Erlang is a fully memory-safe language where it is impossible for one piece of code to modify the memory in use by another piece of code (because it is a pure functional language, and such operations are basically not possible in a pure functional language), so there is no necessity to protect instances from each other. So why, therefore, does their system not run on base hardware without the hypervisor, thus avoiding the extra abstraction layer?
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Bitcoins now consume $100+ of electricity to make?
No, the energy cost is about 20c. But the investment in hardware required to get them at that price is about $2500 and would need to be ammortized into your calculations of costs over a reasonably short period (as the viable lifespan of that hardware can probably be measured in months at this point of time).
Semantics. The coins do not exist in the market until the mining is done.
Not semantics. You can't produce bitcoins because there is nothing you or I can do that will change the number of bitcoins that exist in the long term. Sure, we could acquire a huge number of ASICs and start mining, and we'd likely accumulate a huge pile of them. But all this will do is move them out of the hands of others who would have acquired them, the total number of bitcoins generated will remain the same as if we had taken no action at all. Therefore we didn't produce anything, we just moved stuff around.
You don't have to be a professional economist to recognize that a "currency" that collapses and loses half its value in the space of minutes is a bad investment.
Shrug. I said a few weeks ago that the value of bitcoin seemed to be approximately correct at about $70-$80. If it's been higher in the interim, that's just because some speculators made bad purchase decisions. Chart... looks to me like the current value is about right and the recent highs were a bubble. I'd wait a little to see if the price drops further before making a buy decision, but now doesn't look like a good time to sell. Bubbles happen, but don't affect the validity of the underlying instrument.
It will simply get exponentially harder, which will increase the bitcoin actual, objective worth
Does that not sound like a pyramid scheme to you?
No, actually that sounds like the *opposite* of a pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes get exponentially harder to find new buyers for because the good they sell, membership of the scheme, becomes exponentially easier to acquire as the scheme grows, causing a crash of value of the memberships over time. Bitcoin becomes exponentially harder to acquire new coins over time, which should cause an increase in value. Or to put it another way: the problem with pyramid schemes is that they have no limit to their growth so eventually they grow faster than the demand for them. Bitcoin has a hard-and-fast limit to growth.
If this was true we would not have just seen a $100 drop.
We haven't seen a $100 drop. We've seen a bubble caused by speculators inflate the price by about $150 over the course of about 3 weeks, and a correction back to a figure closer to the long term average value. See this chart. The line at the bottom is the 200-day average value, which is basically a lagging indicator of the actual value once all the short-term fluctuations have been taken out. It has barely budged; it certainly hasn't dropped at any point recently.
Plenty of people perform transactions using bitcoin to pay for goods and services every day and go away happy. How is that a bubble?
The value of bitcoins has ranged between $25 and $250 within the last month. How is that not a bubble?
And that is why no one takes Change.org serious. You are using a government website designed for you to petition the governement about important government policies [...]
Really? Because the copy on change.org itself suggests otherwise. It describes itself as "the world's largest petition platform, empowering people everywhere to create the change they want to see," not a narrow site restricted to issues the US government is involved in. Of the three example uses quoted on their 'about' page, one is about applying pressure to privately held corporations; their aim is apparently "making governments and companies more responsive and accountable". It also appears to be privately owned, and not run by or in association with any government.
Or alternatively, you can do Machine/Take Snapshot from the GUI, then revert to the snapshot when the machine gets fubar'd. This means people don't unexpectedly lose stuff if they try saving things, and only requires a few moments of intervention periodically.
I've also done intersting stuff along the lines you talk about with VMware (I think it would also be possible with VirtualBox), where I set up a .vmdk file that uses another vmdk as a reference, and only stores the blocks that are changed. So you can have several virtual machines all with common data but without wasting disk space by duplicating it. Unfortunately, it all gets a little fucked up if you try to modify the base image, but it works well enough if you have a static base you can work from.
If my math is right, at 4.5M copies sold as of 12/2011, 0.06% of people in the world play at least Starcraft 2 (and that's assuming all 7B people in the world have a computer). So no, "99.99% of people who don't play any of those games" isn't true.
Not to mention the fact that at least 3 times that many have probably pirated it.
Except here, for we have replaced "midnight" with "naan"...
We have? I'm going to have to have words with the owner of the Punjabi restaurant across the street, they close at 9...
You should come where I live. Here, it is a legal requirement that all purveyors of ethnic food be (1) dubious and (2) open until at least 3 am.
Anyone aware that this is being done can easily trick them.
They did something like that with hotspots in the UK - the Digital Economy Act means that businesses can be liable for the infringements of people using their connection, which is a serious concern for all those places that used to provide customers with free wifi.
[Citation needed]
I've read the Act, and see nothing in it that sounds like it will have this consequence. It appears that they may have a legal obligation to notify their customers of allegations they receive concerning infringements, with fines as a court considers "proportionate" for failing to do so. However, by my reading of the Act, they can avoid this obligation by offering a free service with no associated terms and conditions (the definition of an ISP makes reference to a "subscriber", which is defined as somebody with whom the ISP has entered into an agreement to provide service and who is not reselling the service, so if there are no T&Cs there is no agreement, no agreement means not an ISP AFAICT).
The only thing about the arrangement that surprised me is that the MPs were so open about the change in the law being about copyright. I'd have expected them to instead use child porn as an excuse, but they didn't: The Digital Economy Act is an entirely open effort to strengthen copyright law.
The Act was the last Bill introduced by a government who knew they had no hope of reelection. They really didn't care about dressing it up -- they knew that by the time the next election came around, we'd mostly have forgotten about it.
But that's not a java library - it's a java veneer on top of a native library.
Unless you're using an extended version of Java that supports the constructs you'd need to communicate directly with the hardware, i.e. pointers to arbitrarily-allocated memory blocks, and I/O instructions, so are you. Java isn't designed as a hardware interface, so you have to use a native hardware interface for such tasks. Is this really a surprise?
If this were really true why are all the high-performance multimedia, mathematics, etc. libraries all still written in C, C++ or Fortran? That's because Java is still magnitudes slower.
Java is slower for these applications because of a few choices made early in the language design that cannot now be undone. One of them is that portability of code is more important than performance, and that therefore mathematical operations must have exactly specified results -- with the result that Java cannot use processor integrated implementations of transcendental functions, among other issues, meaning any code using exponential functions, trig functions, or logarithms runs about 10-100 times slower than native implementations. But you will get the same result on any platform...
But for general purpose logical data manipulation, like 90%+ of real world code, Java is just as good as any other language.
The per-object overhead for Java's Hotspot VM (at least the 32-bit version) is 8 bytes. The per-object overhead for C++ objects compiled with most common C++ compilers for a 32-bit architecture and using virtual methods with public inheritance is also 8 bytes (1 vtable pointer, 1 vftable pointer).
My IT department is still running Java 6 update 5 from 2008. They're too scared to upgrade to any later update levels because no one is going to give them the money to regression test every piece of Java code we've got.
If they'd demanded automated tests of every functional requirement (which has been a standard best practice since some time around the mid 90s, so they aren't likely to have any Java code hanging around from before the industry woke up and realised how important it was), it would be less than a day's work to perform those regression tests, and would likely not take more than a few more days to fix any problems found. The new features would probably make the effort pay back in less than a month.
But they clearly ignored industry practice, presumably in the name of economy and getting the job done quickly, so you're stuck with an unmaintainable obsolete code base. And are probably still writing legacy code today.
The VM will need an update to perform the linking of default methods in interfaces. Other than that I think you're right; it certainly looks as though the lambda function stuff is implementable from a purely compiler perspective (although whether that's how it has actually been done, I don't know).
Well, you got a +5 :) but your assumptions about a security manager works and how amd where it is used: are completely wrong.
It is trivial to write a Java Application thatbuses a security manager and thus, e.g. restricting it from accessing the internet or certain parts of the file system.
Your idea that dangerous methods call the security manager is completely wrong. The VM calls the security manager before said method is executed.
Your assumption that the VM inserts the security manager code is wrong. See, for instance, the source code for java.io.FileInputStream(File). You can clearly see starting at line 128 and continuing to line 131 that this check is performed by the library, not the VM. Similar code is present throughout the Java standard library.
You know you might be onto something there. Let's see the definition of "literal":
Yep, "expressed by letters, written" is clearly true.
At least some biblical translations attempt to represent the words of the original exactly, so this could be true also.
Sure, there are other meaning sof "literal", but who cares about those, right?
I just wanted to ask a question. What does God need with a title?
The Abrahamic religions are memes descended from older memes that had multiple gods. God had a title because there was a need to refer to all gods as a group. The language wasn't changed with the rewrite to monotheistic principles.
This is always a problem with fixing flaws in a complex narrative. the explanation always uncover new issues.
And, if you carry on down that kind of line, you end up with this.
Good and evil are religious concepts
[citation needed]
Good and evil are concepts from the philosophy of ethics. Religions have a history that is deeply intertwined with that of ethics, as they typically attempt to prescribe an ethical code for their adherents, but ethics as a field does exist independently from religion.
So don't do that. There are other ways of performing backups, and recent versions of Windows are quite happy being deployed with a file level copy onto a newly formatted disk (older versions may have objected, however). Linux has always been happy with this approach.
I'm not clear on exactly what the difference is between a hypervisor+para-API and a normal OS.
None. The paravirtualisation API is pretty much identical to those provided by normal OSs, except that it is designed in such a way that other OSs can easily be rewritten to use it rather than raw hardware features. This pretty-much means that the only real difference is in terms of what kind of features it provides, rather than how it does it.
I just have to say, I'm not quite sure where Xen fits into the picture here. Why do we need it? Why not run something much simpler -- Erlang is a fully memory-safe language where it is impossible for one piece of code to modify the memory in use by another piece of code (because it is a pure functional language, and such operations are basically not possible in a pure functional language), so there is no necessity to protect instances from each other. So why, therefore, does their system not run on base hardware without the hypervisor, thus avoiding the extra abstraction layer?