Why is this so hard for everyone to understand? Why is the idea of wanting to unplug our computers before bedtime so alien to everybody? Running a computer all day to mine a Bitcoin yields nothing to the world except a big finite number and some CO2.
Money is needed as a way for people to handle the flow of resources, not just for handling more money. Dollars can also be handled electronically. They do not consume natural resources when printed except for the piece of paper. A dollar doesn't derive its value from a scarcity of paper.
Mining Bitcoins is environmentally destructive. As time goes on and the keys get exponentially sparser, the system nominally sustains expansion of its monetary base by surfing on Moore's Law forever- which is a failure point since electrical power is becoming the rate limiting factor to Bitcoin production. Bitcoins are a currency that requires cotinuous destruction of real resources just to sustain its monetary base.
These comparisons to running a bank branches are weird. It's not as simple as the "total energy consumed per dollar/Bitcoin transaction". We need bank branches because the public actually has dollars to put in them. Bitcoins are mined by suckers within the scheme, immediately enter the financial stratosphere, and are rarely seen by the public afterwards, simply because they're volatile and not safe long-term investments. Skyscrapers wouldn't disappear or go dark if people used Bitcoins instead of dollars. Bank branches will not close; the public need for them will still exist.
The inherent energy inefficiencies in transferring and handling ordinary money within bank branches is generally considered a nuisance, not a founding principle behind the currency's supposed value. People want dollars because they can be traded, not because finding them consumed someone a lot of work. The energy inefficiencies involved with handling money itself are generally considered to be a nuisance, something to avoid. but now we're sowing a new currency based on the kilowatt-hours that must be wasted by minting it. A Bitcoin economy makes resource scarcity worse to deal with, and it's a bad currency with no usefulness to the vast majority of us.
Bitcoin mining is for suckers. It barely covers the cost of electricity. Plowing through large swaths of finite numbers, chugging along 24/7 puzzling away, is the stupidest excuse imaginable for damaging the environment. Can we just move to a system where you freeze a block of dry ice, launch it into space, and get a newly minted Bitcoin?
1. something 2. something else 3....memories degrade the more you remember them.
4. But memories don't degrade the more you remember them.
5. Therefore memories are not computable.
I just read your post and was going to reply but I forgot what point you were making. I kept thinking about it too long. What really pissed me off though is that you had the nerve to insult my mother or my religion or something. Just know for the rest of my life, I'll be keeping an eye on you, and you'd better be looking over your shoulder.
People who say stupid things piss me off. Yeah, it doesn't compute, I know.
E = mc^2 specifically applies only to objects that have nonzero mass and are at rest with respect to the observer. Photons are massless and move at the speed of light.
The general equation is E = sqrt((mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2) for rest mass m and momentum p. If a particle has mass and is at rest, then p=0 so E=mc^2. If a particle is massless, then m=0 so E=pc.
(The "m" here refers to rest mass m0, not the "relativistic mass" m* which is defined as m* = m0 / sqrt(1-(vc)^2)). Relativistic mass is best thought of as a fake concept to hide the ugly sqrt denominator. People can imagine things getting heavier when they're moving, and can keep saying "Einstein discovered E=mc^2". But it still has division-by-zero problems with massless particles, and things don't really "get heavier" when they move, so if you try to avoid thinking in terms of m* you won't get as confused. Neither m nor m* makes E=mc^2 work with photons.
Imagine if a bundle of photons could gather and form a "black hole". The hole and its event horizon would be constrained to move at the speed of light, which you can't, since you have mass. so you might easily escape its event horizon- you wouldn't have time to fall in before the thing was gone. Real black holes have mass and don't move at the speed of light relative to anybody.
My own Atari cartridges have been floating in the Pacific garbage patch for 30 years. If you find my Combat cartridge floating around you can keep that one.
Considering the fucking lawyers will get most of that settlement, kindly STFU. Settlement amounts are offset for the legal teams. Any moron knows that.
If their lawyers were to take 100% of the cash, or even if it all got incinerated in a firestorm near a water faucet, that family would still have gotten some revenge on a stupid drilling company that still deserves to have a few million dollars carved out of its ass.
Aruba Petroleum has about 15 employees and reports earnings of $50 million of revenue per year. This settlement sets them back by just three weeks of fracking. Someone needs to be waterboarded in fracking fluid.
So heaven is available to anyone whether or not they follow your God's law?
That's completely correct, sir. The heavens can no longer discriminate against people who have preexisting sins. See heaven.gov to see whether you qualify for a plan that has a maximum deductible of 5000 years in purgatory before you are 100% guaranteed entrance into heaven.
In Heaven you will sit around passing a bong back and forth with God until the end of time, with occasional teeth cleanings. Gold and Platinum plans are available that include options for 72 virgins, or for your own planet to rule over, or for the next in a series of afterlives as an elephant, then as a tapeworm, then as Ted Nugent, then as a cricket, and on and on until you achieve Enlightenment with an endless supply of meth and the memory of your life as Ted Nugent to serve as a guide.
Say, for instance, that I preach that your particular God sucks donkey balls, would he/she hold that against me?
If you like your particular religion, you can keep it. (Of course that's assuming that people wouldn't tolerate a religion where their God sucks donkey balls anyway- which it turns out, is false.)
We all know a human would, but what about a God?
Well that's the whole point- we obviously can't rely on God to fix the situation on his own behalf. He has his own interests, and would obviously like to discriminate against atheists and heretics, and keep them from entering heaven. After all hey arrive confused and with awkward questions for Him- especially assholes like Stephen Hawking who will instantly start quizzing Him about quantum gravity. He sees it as a waste of His endless time. That's why we needed to make it a law, with a mandate on God to allow all individuals into heaven. Even guys with more money than God now have to face the fact that this is working. So folks, just remember to check out heaven.gov or go to Hell.
If you approach a gas station in New Jersey and the guy standing next to the pump is 300 lbs overweight, be careful- it could be an ex-governor. Make sure to pull in slowly, give him some clearance, and fill up with 93. He may give you a strange piece of metal as a "gift". If it doesn't enter your skull at high velocity, take it (WTC steel, baby!). Then hand him a nice tip. Otherwise you might have to put the gas cap back on yourself a few blocks up the road- i.e. "self-service".
You can't be serious, making an insinuation like that on a good man.
Governor Christie is just concerned about the changes in traffic patterns that would be triggered by allowing electric cars to enter the state's vehicle markets unimpeded. Christie has a vision for the future of New Jersey and it is deeply important to him that municipal leaders across the state share his enthusiasm and goals. Enforcement along these lines would be impeded. Specifically, if the governor were to block off lanes to a bridge within a mayor's district, and everyone was driving electric cars, the smog wouldn't be as good for intimidating or disciplining the mayor. Clearly the traffic issues need more study.
I would volunteer for that one-way mission to Mars!
Of course the trip better not take too long, because of the Alzheimer's progression. If I get there too late, I might make a fool out of myself on the mission:
"Hi, Mars, Bob Flemstein, big fan! I know you're crazy busy with us suicidal visitors and everything, but...could you sign? I don't wanna be that guy, but..."
Anyone with even 5 minutes of experience writing multithreaded code will realise that no shared memory, and message passing is far superior as a method of thread synchronisation.
Anyone with even 5 days of experience will come up against a task where it isn't an option.
Good idea- replicate and rev up a natural system, and just farm the P from sewer plants in Jurassic Park. You ever run across a pile of dinosaur shit? It ain't pretty, but sometimes when I get the munchies I think of all that delicious P I could have scooped off, probably more P than those bags of Cheetos in my closet.
There are two problems with higher-order processing CAPTCHAs like that. One is the small problem set. A human at the website has to actually think of those connections between plugs and sockets, or umbrellas and rainstorms, or pizza and ovens, or hair and shampoo, etc. So the problem space is small. Then, blindly guessing answers still yields a decent success rate. Your particular example can be guessed with a success rate of 1 in 256.
Blurring a pair of words from a dictionary onto each other automatically generates millions of possible challenges, and random guessing won't work as well- at least some image analysis is needed.
My own idea for a CAPTCHA is to use images from Google Street View. Show random street view images of a bunch of houses, and ask, "what's the house number"? That would probably take a while to crack, long enough for me to dump my startup site's shares before all the porn gets leaked- if not for those assholes at Google interfering.
Actually, if you do a google image search and actually look at SnapChat's "CAPTCHA", it's unbelievable, like a piece of work from the nineties.
It shows you nine images and asks you to select the ones where the ghost appears. (Random selections net 1 success in 512 right there, and they probably won't show you zero, one, eight, or nine ghosts, increasing success rates to 492 to 1.)
Notice that a ghost or its impostor is always the only white shape in the image. (Sometimes there are also a few white stars, moons, etc.) To improve from random guessing, isolate the white blob, select its center of mass, transform the outline into polar coordinates, perform a Fourier transform, prepare a vector from the Fourier coefficients, and all the ghosts will cluster together in that vector space. (There will also be a star cluster, an apple cluster, a tree trunk cluster, a top hat cluster, a full moon cluster, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this so hard for everyone to understand? Why is the idea of wanting to unplug our computers before bedtime so alien to everybody? Running a computer all day to mine a Bitcoin yields nothing to the world except a big finite number and some CO2.
Money is needed as a way for people to handle the flow of resources, not just for handling more money. Dollars can also be handled electronically. They do not consume natural resources when printed except for the piece of paper. A dollar doesn't derive its value from a scarcity of paper.
Mining Bitcoins is environmentally destructive. As time goes on and the keys get exponentially sparser, the system nominally sustains expansion of its monetary base by surfing on Moore's Law forever- which is a failure point since electrical power is becoming the rate limiting factor to Bitcoin production. Bitcoins are a currency that requires cotinuous destruction of real resources just to sustain its monetary base.
These comparisons to running a bank branches are weird. It's not as simple as the "total energy consumed per dollar/Bitcoin transaction". We need bank branches because the public actually has dollars to put in them. Bitcoins are mined by suckers within the scheme, immediately enter the financial stratosphere, and are rarely seen by the public afterwards, simply because they're volatile and not safe long-term investments. Skyscrapers wouldn't disappear or go dark if people used Bitcoins instead of dollars. Bank branches will not close; the public need for them will still exist.
The inherent energy inefficiencies in transferring and handling ordinary money within bank branches is generally considered a nuisance, not a founding principle behind the currency's supposed value. People want dollars because they can be traded, not because finding them consumed someone a lot of work. The energy inefficiencies involved with handling money itself are generally considered to be a nuisance, something to avoid. but now we're sowing a new currency based on the kilowatt-hours that must be wasted by minting it. A Bitcoin economy makes resource scarcity worse to deal with, and it's a bad currency with no usefulness to the vast majority of us.
Bitcoin mining is for suckers. It barely covers the cost of electricity. Plowing through large swaths of finite numbers, chugging along 24/7 puzzling away, is the stupidest excuse imaginable for damaging the environment. Can we just move to a system where you freeze a block of dry ice, launch it into space, and get a newly minted Bitcoin?
Of all ways to attack Republicans, you're ranting about "Monopoly Money"??? Back to Twitter with ye!
Until the IRS realizes the irich guy never paid the income tax on that penny.
Is there any technical reason why the desktop Firefox can't / won't support ChromeCast???
Have you asked Google?
1. something ...memories degrade the more you remember them.
2. something else
3.
4. But memories don't degrade the more you remember them.
5. Therefore memories are not computable.
I just read your post and was going to reply but I forgot what point you were making. I kept thinking about it too long. What really pissed me off though is that you had the nerve to insult my mother or my religion or something. Just know for the rest of my life, I'll be keeping an eye on you, and you'd better be looking over your shoulder.
People who say stupid things piss me off. Yeah, it doesn't compute, I know.
E = mc^2 specifically applies only to objects that have nonzero mass and are at rest with respect to the observer. Photons are massless and move at the speed of light.
The general equation is E = sqrt((mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2) for rest mass m and momentum p. If a particle has mass and is at rest, then p=0 so E=mc^2. If a particle is massless, then m=0 so E=pc.
(The "m" here refers to rest mass m0, not the "relativistic mass" m* which is defined as m* = m0 / sqrt(1-(vc)^2)). Relativistic mass is best thought of as a fake concept to hide the ugly sqrt denominator. People can imagine things getting heavier when they're moving, and can keep saying "Einstein discovered E=mc^2". But it still has division-by-zero problems with massless particles, and things don't really "get heavier" when they move, so if you try to avoid thinking in terms of m* you won't get as confused. Neither m nor m* makes E=mc^2 work with photons.
Imagine if a bundle of photons could gather and form a "black hole". The hole and its event horizon would be constrained to move at the speed of light, which you can't, since you have mass. so you might easily escape its event horizon- you wouldn't have time to fall in before the thing was gone. Real black holes have mass and don't move at the speed of light relative to anybody.
My own Atari cartridges have been floating in the Pacific garbage patch for 30 years. If you find my Combat cartridge floating around you can keep that one.
Considering the fucking lawyers will get most of that settlement, kindly STFU. Settlement amounts are offset for the legal teams. Any moron knows that.
If their lawyers were to take 100% of the cash, or even if it all got incinerated in a firestorm near a water faucet, that family would still have gotten some revenge on a stupid drilling company that still deserves to have a few million dollars carved out of its ass.
Aruba Petroleum has about 15 employees and reports earnings of $50 million of revenue per year. This settlement sets them back by just three weeks of fracking. Someone needs to be waterboarded in fracking fluid.
I guess you don't have a microwave.
You mean they actually put clocks on the walls of solitary confinement cells?
Until they go beep-beep-beep at 6 AM.
So heaven is available to anyone whether or not they follow your God's law?
That's completely correct, sir. The heavens can no longer discriminate against people who have preexisting sins. See heaven.gov to see whether you qualify for a plan that has a maximum deductible of 5000 years in purgatory before you are 100% guaranteed entrance into heaven.
In Heaven you will sit around passing a bong back and forth with God until the end of time, with occasional teeth cleanings. Gold and Platinum plans are available that include options for 72 virgins, or for your own planet to rule over, or for the next in a series of afterlives as an elephant, then as a tapeworm, then as Ted Nugent, then as a cricket, and on and on until you achieve Enlightenment with an endless supply of meth and the memory of your life as Ted Nugent to serve as a guide.
Say, for instance, that I preach that your particular God sucks donkey balls, would he/she hold that against me?
If you like your particular religion, you can keep it. (Of course that's assuming that people wouldn't tolerate a religion where their God sucks donkey balls anyway- which it turns out, is false.)
We all know a human would, but what about a God?
Well that's the whole point- we obviously can't rely on God to fix the situation on his own behalf. He has his own interests, and would obviously like to discriminate against atheists and heretics, and keep them from entering heaven. After all hey arrive confused and with awkward questions for Him- especially assholes like Stephen Hawking who will instantly start quizzing Him about quantum gravity. He sees it as a waste of His endless time. That's why we needed to make it a law, with a mandate on God to allow all individuals into heaven. Even guys with more money than God now have to face the fact that this is working. So folks, just remember to check out heaven.gov or go to Hell.
If you approach a gas station in New Jersey and the guy standing next to the pump is 300 lbs overweight, be careful- it could be an ex-governor. Make sure to pull in slowly, give him some clearance, and fill up with 93. He may give you a strange piece of metal as a "gift". If it doesn't enter your skull at high velocity, take it (WTC steel, baby!). Then hand him a nice tip. Otherwise you might have to put the gas cap back on yourself a few blocks up the road- i.e. "self-service".
You can't be serious, making an insinuation like that on a good man.
Governor Christie is just concerned about the changes in traffic patterns that would be triggered by allowing electric cars to enter the state's vehicle markets unimpeded. Christie has a vision for the future of New Jersey and it is deeply important to him that municipal leaders across the state share his enthusiasm and goals. Enforcement along these lines would be impeded. Specifically, if the governor were to block off lanes to a bridge within a mayor's district, and everyone was driving electric cars, the smog wouldn't be as good for intimidating or disciplining the mayor. Clearly the traffic issues need more study.
I would volunteer for that one-way mission to Mars!
Of course the trip better not take too long, because of the Alzheimer's progression. If I get there too late, I might make a fool out of myself on the mission:
"Hi, Mars, Bob Flemstein, big fan! I know you're crazy busy with us suicidal visitors and everything, but...could you sign? I don't wanna be that guy, but..."
Is she taking time off?
Where you get your information, Rush Limbaugh?
Anyone with even 5 minutes of experience writing multithreaded code will realise that no shared memory, and message passing is far superior as a method of thread synchronisation.
Anyone with even 5 days of experience will come up against a task where it isn't an option.
Good idea- replicate and rev up a natural system, and just farm the P from sewer plants in Jurassic Park. You ever run across a pile of dinosaur shit? It ain't pretty, but sometimes when I get the munchies I think of all that delicious P I could have scooped off, probably more P than those bags of Cheetos in my closet.
I figured they'd just eat into my xbox time.
That's exactly what reCAPTCHA (which was acquired by Google) does. For example: screenshot of reCAPTCHA [wikimedia.org].
Sigh... I need a better job...
Now where in the world would you say is the safest place to live?
Prison.
There are two problems with higher-order processing CAPTCHAs like that. One is the small problem set. A human at the website has to actually think of those connections between plugs and sockets, or umbrellas and rainstorms, or pizza and ovens, or hair and shampoo, etc. So the problem space is small. Then, blindly guessing answers still yields a decent success rate. Your particular example can be guessed with a success rate of 1 in 256.
Blurring a pair of words from a dictionary onto each other automatically generates millions of possible challenges, and random guessing won't work as well- at least some image analysis is needed.
My own idea for a CAPTCHA is to use images from Google Street View. Show random street view images of a bunch of houses, and ask, "what's the house number"? That would probably take a while to crack, long enough for me to dump my startup site's shares before all the porn gets leaked- if not for those assholes at Google interfering.
Actually, if you do a google image search and actually look at SnapChat's "CAPTCHA", it's unbelievable, like a piece of work from the nineties.
It shows you nine images and asks you to select the ones where the ghost appears. (Random selections net 1 success in 512 right there, and they probably won't show you zero, one, eight, or nine ghosts, increasing success rates to 492 to 1.)
Notice that a ghost or its impostor is always the only white shape in the image. (Sometimes there are also a few white stars, moons, etc.) To improve from random guessing, isolate the white blob, select its center of mass, transform the outline into polar coordinates, perform a Fourier transform, prepare a vector from the Fourier coefficients, and all the ghosts will cluster together in that vector space. (There will also be a star cluster, an apple cluster, a tree trunk cluster, a top hat cluster, a full moon cluster, etc.)