How many of those are available purely in case Israel or the US blows half their centrifuges up/damages them?
I would expect a *lot* of overengineering in Iranian reactor & supply chain design, they could easily just start with the ones that are dual use and go from there.
Ah, but your computer is not a "portable electronic device with a touch screen".
His might not have been but *mine* was. Any of a myriad of laptops released prior to 2010, including 4 year old toughbooks had touchscreens. They were definitely 'portable' and 'electronic devices' and had 'touch screens'.
Install skype and you seem to have what this patent describes as far as I've gotten into it.
I am not thai, but my thai peers have suggested that this is because when the decision was made, there was a competent government in power that could be trusted to operate the flood control mechanisms in that country properly. There was an election fairly recently and the government which was elected had other concerns - hence what happened.
"unfairly receiving help during tests for mandatory fluff classes that will have no effect on your future."
This is abhorrent - there may be examples of cheating that would be appropriate but I would like to call you out for such flagrant unethical behaviour.
While the rational thing to do would be to sit down with developers from all walks of life, talk to them to find out what they don't like about the current GPL, and then fix it
That is *precisely* what the massive GPL3 consultations were.
As far as I'm concerned, the first company that re-figures out that every support person should have a secretary or a team of secretaries is probably going to be the next google.
Barter systems suffer from a coincidence of wants problem -- systems like bitcoin remove that problem and allow for longer-term economic planning to occur by all actors involved, also it inevitably leads to the use of some object as a shorthand for value(=cigarettes, booze or whatnot) which inevitably leads to IOUs of that object(IOU 1 beer), at which point we might as well be using something like money/ripple.
Plus at least for physical objects, it leads to hoarding physical objects that might actually be valuable in other contexts, which is the biggest problem capitalism has imho. At least in the case of bitcoin, it's just mathematical objects that are hoarded mostly.
You lost me there. There is no 'true value' - shells, dust particles, crypto hash results...all of this only has value insofar as it is accepted on the market as such, and insofar as it provides a medium of exchange
Oh its' definitely flaky. But too flaky for what? 130M marketcap? Perhaps. But for all we know this is all a beta-test for 'microsoft money' -- the open source terms on bitcoin permit microsoft to basically take the code, embrace & extend and own the whole network. Every mistake that's made, every fix that's produced, every problem every solution brings us closer to a world without banks as we know them today and have for recent history. Good or bad.
The thing about the world is that most people on it aren't americans. Right now they have to use the USD because it's the de facto standard -- but if something could replace it in a way that kept everyone honest(see, for example, bitcoin) -- there would be some incentives to switch to it to larger and larger degrees.
Bitcoin isn't perfect -- hell, it's probably going to fail. But something like it could very well be 'the thing' that the 6 billion other people would be willing to work for. It's mostly a social and technical problem at this point.
I find it hard to believe that you think that the 'extra energy' used to compute bitcoin block chains and whatnot counts but electricity used to light, heat, and produce physical banks somehow does not.
"it wasn't even backed by anything physical - not even a piece of paper."
Like the US dollar, the only thing that any currency can have going for it is what it will fetch in the public market. Right now that includes 'real' dollars, and a whole myriad of services from the odd local coffee shop to air conditioner repair. Sure it's a small economy compared to the economy of a large country, but it's actually about the size of a small country at this point. Or at least was before this flash-crash - we'll see what happens after the dust settles.
And you're right this is the beginning -- but where bitcoin has failed, others are waiting in the wings and we will learn from their mistakes with any luck. Plus, at least some of the apparatus surrounding bitcoin is free software - we can always recompile and start over. The stakes are big enough that even if every single cent of value in bitcoins is wiped out a dozen times effore we get it right, it will pay for itself within a decade. The banking system is a 400 year+ scourge on humanity, and they need all the competition they can get.
Also calling it a ponzi scheme is a really, really big stretch -- especially the bigger and more involved the system gets. It *did* resemble one when the exchanges were less common. But one thing is for sure - it resembles a ponzi scheme no less than the current USD.
3 words:
trippleentry accounting. If it's successful, bitcoin will be the biggest thing to hit accounting practises and economic stability since the 15th century.
You count your postman and butcher and 50 people at work that significantly? If they count against that number, then it seems you're probably investing FAR too much in these people who are essentially on the fringe of your life.
Mabye if you live in a large city, and you use walmart or whatever as your butchery. But why not make friends with your butcher and postman? Even if 1% of their clientel forms good friendships with them, it's good that *someone* does. It's always good to have at least some 'regulars', and likewise, it's good to be a 'regular' to at least someone. Someone needs to make sure that your butcher isn't suicidal, might as well be you. There are enough people around us that we can all pick about 10-20 or so, it sounds like a reasonable maximum number.
Secondly, by assembling a reactor pile that goes critical (i.e., it maintains a self-sustaining chain reaction), you really are creating radiation that would not occur naturally (except in very very rare and small cases like the Oklo natural reactor).
This is absolutely untrue. Even Fe eventually decays: that radiation would be emitted as it did so. It would absolutely occur 'naturally'.
but there's no way we'll be able to process all of this interesting data because Moore's law is simply way too slow as compared to advances in biochemical technologies.
And yet tens of if not hundreds of millions of handheld supercomputers are being sent out yearly. The processing power/storage capacity exists to do this stuff, we just need to make and encourage the use of p2p computing apps boinc style on all platforms, and solve the various energy related problems keeping people from turning their computers off in general. I don't know how many places have windows boxes just sitting idle, how many people have cellphones that just sit waiting for a call half the time. All that is computing power that could be used for these endeavors.
Slashdot Mirror
How many of those are available purely in case Israel or the US blows half their centrifuges up/damages them?
I would expect a *lot* of overengineering in Iranian reactor & supply chain design, they could easily just start with the ones that are dual use and go from there.
Ah, but your computer is not a "portable electronic device with a touch screen".
His might not have been but *mine* was. Any of a myriad of laptops released prior to 2010, including 4 year old toughbooks had touchscreens. They were definitely 'portable' and 'electronic devices' and had 'touch screens'.
Install skype and you seem to have what this patent describes as far as I've gotten into it.
I am not thai, but my thai peers have suggested that this is because when the decision was made, there was a competent government in power that could be trusted to operate the flood control mechanisms in that country properly. There was an election fairly recently and the government which was elected had other concerns - hence what happened.
"unfairly receiving help during tests for mandatory fluff classes that will have no effect on your future."
This is abhorrent - there may be examples of cheating that would be appropriate but I would like to call you out for such flagrant unethical behaviour.
While the rational thing to do would be to sit down with developers from all walks of life, talk to them to find out what they don't like about the current GPL, and then fix it
That is *precisely* what the massive GPL3 consultations were.
As far as I'm concerned, the first company that re-figures out that every support person should have a secretary or a team of secretaries is probably going to be the next google.
If you want to know how it would turn out, look to Saskatchewan. We manage just fine.
Do you know java? COBOL?
Barter systems suffer from a coincidence of wants problem -- systems like bitcoin remove that problem and allow for longer-term economic planning to occur by all actors involved, also it inevitably leads to the use of some object as a shorthand for value(=cigarettes, booze or whatnot) which inevitably leads to IOUs of that object(IOU 1 beer), at which point we might as well be using something like money/ripple.
Plus at least for physical objects, it leads to hoarding physical objects that might actually be valuable in other contexts, which is the biggest problem capitalism has imho. At least in the case of bitcoin, it's just mathematical objects that are hoarded mostly.
True, but there's a good reason for this.
or something of a true value.
You lost me there. There is no 'true value' - shells, dust particles, crypto hash results...all of this only has value insofar as it is accepted on the market as such, and insofar as it provides a medium of exchange
Right now, there's no way to turn Bitcoins into dollars.
This isn't true. There are non-mtgox exchanges, they just aren't very liquid/prominent.
is far too flaky.
Oh its' definitely flaky. But too flaky for what? 130M marketcap? Perhaps. But for all we know this is all a beta-test for 'microsoft money' -- the open source terms on bitcoin permit microsoft to basically take the code, embrace & extend and own the whole network. Every mistake that's made, every fix that's produced, every problem every solution brings us closer to a world without banks as we know them today and have for recent history. Good or bad.
The thing about the world is that most people on it aren't americans. Right now they have to use the USD because it's the de facto standard -- but if something could replace it in a way that kept everyone honest(see, for example, bitcoin) -- there would be some incentives to switch to it to larger and larger degrees.
Bitcoin isn't perfect -- hell, it's probably going to fail. But something like it could very well be 'the thing' that the 6 billion other people would be willing to work for. It's mostly a social and technical problem at this point.
I find it hard to believe that you think that the 'extra energy' used to compute bitcoin block chains and whatnot counts but electricity used to light, heat, and produce physical banks somehow does not.
"it wasn't even backed by anything physical - not even a piece of paper."
Like the US dollar, the only thing that any currency can have going for it is what it will fetch in the public market. Right now that includes 'real' dollars, and a whole myriad of services from the odd local coffee shop to air conditioner repair. Sure it's a small economy compared to the economy of a large country, but it's actually about the size of a small country at this point. Or at least was before this flash-crash - we'll see what happens after the dust settles.
And you're right this is the beginning -- but where bitcoin has failed, others are waiting in the wings and we will learn from their mistakes with any luck. Plus, at least some of the apparatus surrounding bitcoin is free software - we can always recompile and start over. The stakes are big enough that even if every single cent of value in bitcoins is wiped out a dozen times effore we get it right, it will pay for itself within a decade. The banking system is a 400 year+ scourge on humanity, and they need all the competition they can get.
Also calling it a ponzi scheme is a really, really big stretch -- especially the bigger and more involved the system gets. It *did* resemble one when the exchanges were less common. But one thing is for sure - it resembles a ponzi scheme no less than the current USD.
while there are advantages in this, disadvantages far outweigh them
[citation needed]
3 words: tripple entry accounting. If it's successful, bitcoin will be the biggest thing to hit accounting practises and economic stability since the 15th century.
facebook is the establishment.
You count your postman and butcher and 50 people at work that significantly? If they count against that number, then it seems you're probably investing FAR too much in these people who are essentially on the fringe of your life.
Mabye if you live in a large city, and you use walmart or whatever as your butchery. But why not make friends with your butcher and postman? Even if 1% of their clientel forms good friendships with them, it's good that *someone* does. It's always good to have at least some 'regulars', and likewise, it's good to be a 'regular' to at least someone. Someone needs to make sure that your butcher isn't suicidal, might as well be you. There are enough people around us that we can all pick about 10-20 or so, it sounds like a reasonable maximum number.
How many bitcoins would you need to make your client also compatible with ripple / trade Bitcoin with ripple nodes, give or take?
"A rival to bitcoin might appear...or has other benefits."
Like...Ripple. Ripple already is a bitcoin rival, although a smaller one but it definitely has other benefits.
Fuck the MPAA.
Secondly, by assembling a reactor pile that goes critical (i.e., it maintains a self-sustaining chain reaction), you really are creating radiation that would not occur naturally (except in very very rare and small cases like the Oklo natural reactor).
This is absolutely untrue. Even Fe eventually decays: that radiation would be emitted as it did so. It would absolutely occur 'naturally'.
but there's no way we'll be able to process all of this interesting data because Moore's law is simply way too slow as compared to advances in biochemical technologies.
And yet tens of if not hundreds of millions of handheld supercomputers are being sent out yearly. The processing power/storage capacity exists to do this stuff, we just need to make and encourage the use of p2p computing apps boinc style on all platforms, and solve the various energy related problems keeping people from turning their computers off in general. I don't know how many places have windows boxes just sitting idle, how many people have cellphones that just sit waiting for a call half the time. All that is computing power that could be used for these endeavors.
What, and credit cards/cash/cheques are?
If you still live in a country where cash is anonymous consider yourself lucky.
But who controls when more than 21 million get to be printed?