In the server world these days we don't run things on physical hardware usually, we run it in a VM. The less resources a given VM uses, the more VMs we can pack on a system. So if you have some crap code that gobbles up tons of memory that is memory that can't go to other things.
First - I write this as the sort of programmer who agrees with you in principle. I make my code as light and tight as possible.
But as a programmer, I get pissed when SysOps bitches me out for making tradeoffs that drastically improve performance - Such as trading off RAM for CPU usage. RAM comes cheap. Storage comes cheap. Hell, even CPU time comes cheap, but when you take a 24-core 256+GB behemoth, and oversubscribe to the point that nothing runs well on them? Don't blame the programmers, bro, look in the frickin' mirror.
VMs can indeed save admins a ton of work. They make HA possible, they make backups trivial, they minimize physical machine babysitting, they make spinning up a test bed truly a joy. No doubt, best tech ever when dealing with a large number of light workloads you'd like isolated from each other.
Programmers have a job to do, just like you do. And when that involves serving up a lot of data to a lot of users, yes Virginia, that takes resources. Go ahead and run my SQL instance as a VM for all the benefits mentioned above - But until you give me a beefy box at 1:1 provisioning, don't you dare look my way when I bring the box to its knees by actually using those resources.
So, you just input the opcodes directly, do you? You don't even need the mnemonics of assembly language because all you deal with is a culture-free head that scans along an infinite tape.
As a matter of fact, I can... But not your point, I know.
Your real point seems to fault CS for primarily using English, the second-most spoken language on the planet. Okay, fair point - Convince everyone to switch to Mandarin, and I'll play along for the sake of efficiency.
Because like it or not, this does boil down to efficiency; If everyone on the planet would just pick a single language and stick with it, we'd all have it a whole lot easier. Hell, let's even pick a designed language like Esperanto, so no one has "home court advantage" - $Deity knows I'd give my left nut to actually have everyone use a language without a million and seven historical irregularities.
But no, instead of learning from our mistakes in the real world, instead let's try to turn the most successful monoculture ever to arise in the history of humanity, into just one more polyglot disaster; where the ability to share earth-shatteringly good ideas becomes more a matter of imaginary lines on a map than of technical prowess.
Please, just watch Louis.
I've seen that one before. Pretty good, and really makes a person stop and think. Except... It kinda misses the point. Yes, my culture gives me something of an advantage in life - Because we won. And yes, we had our bad-old-days, when "winning" meant someone else lost. But we've moved past that, and have invited everyone to the party.
The problem there comes from everyone else still trying to "win" by dragging western culture down to their level. Yes, you can have capitalism. Yes, you can have democracy. Yes, you can have the role of religion marginalized in your political system (though sadly, we all still have quite some way to go in that regard). Yes, you can have English. That combination won, long long ago. Stop fighting it, rather than joining the winning team.
(which only exist because of pervasive systemic racism and segregation, by the way), your knee-jerk reaction is that it's just bullshit?
Okay, so moving beyond "language", what prevents any English-speaking American black/hispanic/female learning to program the same damned way any white male programmer did? And no, I don't mean "college" (I have yet to meet a single good programmer who didn't already have the fundamentals down well before college). I mean pick up a book on programming, read it, read it again, fall in love with the subject, and spend the rest of their lives honing their skills?
And for reference, before you say that I have an advantage because of the "culture" targeted by that book - For me, "that book" meant the GW Basic language reference manual (old-style three-ring binding and all). About as "culturally accessible" as your car's service manual. Nothing but the facts - This function takes these parameters and does whatever with them. And before you say "you had a computer and that book", I actually encountered that book and my first PC in my third grade classroom, spending as long after school every day as they would let me stay, to learn how to use it.
The learning environment of the more advanced computer science classrooms has supported the culture of these students and often made others to feel as "outsiders," as if their concerns, perspectives, were not valued in the field.
You nailed it, friend. That one quote pretty much demonstrates the entire problem with all these BS "discriminatory profession" arguments, whatever the profession.
Someone's "culture" has fuck-all to do with programming; and their concerns and perspectives have no value to a computer. Simple as that.
You need the ability to think logically. You need the ability to break big problems down into small ones, and small ones down into individual comparisons and actions that don't even look like "problems" anymore. You need the ability to see past what people say they want, and give them what they actually need. You need the ability to think of every possible way the process could go wrong, and handle that even if it will realistically never happen. And finally, relating back to "culture", you need to lose the filters most people view the world with and cut right to the root of the situation - You need to work around culture, around "perspectives", not "embrace" them.
In fairness, yes, you can call the modern world of IT largely a "boys' club", and yes, we tend to behave in ways that most of the modern corporate world would consider slightly over the line. But not because we don't welcome women - Simply because we don't have any around that we need to hold our tongues around. And perhaps more relevantly, the women I have worked with (in IT, not "worked with" in the sense of figuring out an accounting project's requirements) tend to give it right back to the guys. Funny thing about making a living breaking through filters... It doesn't matter what gender you start, you end up largely lacking filters altogether.
That statement stands on its own. $10M? For a company (well, a division of EMC, anyway) whose very existence depends on their reputation and ability to keep secrets safe?
As much as I damn both the NSA and corporate greed in general, I find TFA borderline unbelievable. Now, I find it a lot more believable that the NSA "paid" $10M plus a "gentleman's agreement" to allow the children of the entire executive board of EMC to continue taking in oxygen from the atmosphere...
While valid, you need to understand the magnitude of the continuing education involved.
I live with a medical professional. She needs to do quite a few CEs every year to keep her license, though realistically she would do it anyway to do her job well. But when I say "quite a lot", that means reading a weekly 4-6 page trade journal and spending one afternoon every six months or so at posh "seminars" where they wine and dine her on her employer's dime, oh and it has a quiz at the end to make it officially "educational".
As a programmer, I could literally spend every nonwork hour - Including those I currently use for sleep - Learning about new technologies, new laws that affect my trade, new trends that the PHBs will look for next time I need a job... And still slowly fall behind. We manage to stay relevant only by specializing, though at the same time staying generalist enough to carry on a conversation with our peers in other specialties.
Don't make me laugh by comparing the two. I may have no licensure requirement to keep my skills up, but if I put in the same amount of time as she does, I'd find myself unemployably useless within five years, while she remains at the top of her game.
Since Bitcoin is deflationary, it makes more sense to stockpile (or hoard) it than to spend it. That is also what makes it more like a commodity than a currency.
The biggest problem with the whole "deflationary" argument - And indeed, with any inflationary economy? We have a finite amount of resources on-planet. And while I certainly have high hopes of our species eventually making it off-planet (for real, not this "Billions to get a few guys to the moon for a few days" crap) - it sure as hell won't happen in my lifetime, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise.
So whenever we talk about why such-and-such a system (gold, Bitcoin, even fiat currencies such as the USD currently wavering on the edge of "negative inflation") "can't" succeed because deflation encourages hoarding, keep in mind what you really talk about - Money exists to make it easier to buy "stuff". If more money exists than stuff to buy with it, the stuff becomes more expensive. Inflation of a currency essentially just measures the inverse of the corresponding deflation of reality.
Guess what? Reality always wins. As soon as you have 100 people desperately in need of 99 cheeseburgers, inflation approaches infinity, but you still only have 99 cheeseburgers.
When you talk about people hoarding Bitcoins, you conveniently gloss over the fact that people could just as well hoard gold and ammunition and canned goods and quality hand tools and clothing - And make no mistake, some people do, but most of us would rather just go about our daily business of living. Will some people hoard BTC? Yep. So what? Most won't.
Finally, you also need to consider the rate of deflation, vs the yield on reasonably safe investments. If you can make 8% investing vs deflation of 3%, only an idiot would choose to hold the currency instead of the investment.
"about nothing" - FTFY. The only thing that you can reliably buy with BTC is other currencies.
That seems like an awfully lot of "About nothing" , then. Yes, Bitcoin merchants tend to sell services rather than goods just by virtue of the sort of people who have actually heard of it; but I stopped counting sites listed on that page selling physical product at 300, and that included at least a dozen "general purpose" stores and 25-30 C2C markets (online BTC flea-markets, basically).
Besides, why would you want to spend BTC on a cup of coffee if that same BTC will double in price within a year?
I know you wouldn't believe it from reading the average Slashdot post about Bitcoin, but not everyone using Bitcoin does so as speculation. Some of us just really want to see the success of a currency outside the control of any of the irresponsible jackasses currently in charge of global fiscal policy.
Unsurprisingly, Germany seems like a real hotbed of BTC use - Imagine that, the single most responsible economy on the planet right now, and what do they get for it? "Thanks for bailing out Greece and Cyprus, can you get started on that check for Slovenia?"
I can easily envision three ways in which USD could become worthless:
1) Molecular-level replicators. We will have them in the next few decades.
2) A systematic "stay the course" approach to the current totally-fucking-insane fiscal policy of The US government, eventually making our money about as valuable as Reichsmark or Zimbabwean dollars.
3) Confidence crash. USD has value not so much because it can be spent as it does because of confidence in a group of inbred whackjobs most Americans consider little short of "enemies of the state". But hey, wouldn't want the wrong lizard getting in, now would we?
* Just one specific peeve - You can buy just about anything with BTC today. Really, paying your taxes counts as just about the only thing you can't do with it.
Sorry, holograms are not encoded in a simple 2D plane.
We have people mistaking TFA as suggesting we live in a Star Trek holodeck. Bogging the explanation down with even more technical details didn't really seem like the best approach to making a simple analogy most folks could understand.:)
In the interest of accuracy, however, I thank you for clarifying that point.
It would be akin to me buying your dye pack stained dollars and giving you clean dollars for a commission and not bothering to keep records or conform to any regulation.
You have made a presumption of taint on the original funds. Although he may have run afoul of AML guidelines, actual money laundering requires the funds derive from criminal activity. You can't "launder" your newly cashed IRS-reported paycheck by playing poker with the boys, even if you had exactly the intent of hiding where your specific bills came from. No crime = no laundering.
That said, I got sloppy here, because FinCEN actually said "transmission", not "laundering" - Though same idea, this goes back to the distinction I made in my second sentence. AML guidelines amount to "what the Treasury wants, the Treasury gets", and have zero basis in logic. For example, in order for that particular offense to stick, the Treasury would need to accept that Bitcoin counts as money (currency specifically accepted by the government); yet somehow I don't think they'll let me pay my taxes for this year in BTC.
we can't get permits from the city to replace our server room UPS
If the city has any say whatsoever in what hardware you can run in your server room - short of, say, a rooftop mounted Howitzer - you seriously need to GTFO out of that city ASAP.
Wow. I really just can't even imagine how they justify that. "No. You don't need to upgrade your UPS. If the power goes out for more than nine minutes, you just have to pay the penalties specified in your SLAs. Suck it, taxpayer!"
So, tell me again why this guy doesn't think what he's doing falls under any kind of regulatory enforcement?
Because if you take my $50 bill and give me two $20s and a $10, we call that "making change", not "money laundering".
Casascius exchanged Bitcoins for other Bitcoins, plus a small fee for the cool novelty token. He didn't exchange BTC for USD, or vice-versa, or anything even remotely similar to that. He made frickin' change (albeit more literally than normal).
That said - I still have one first- and one second-gen Casascius 1BTC coins somewhere around here. They already traded at a good premium over their exchange rate, this news should send their collectable value through the goddamn roof! Thanks, FinCEN - I still hope you all choke to death on a bowl of hyena semen, but this time, you've really done me a solid!
Until everyone does it and the pricing structure changes.
People tend to have a lot of misconceptions about the energy industry. End-suppliers, like your utility company, don't care about the absolute price at which they sell* - They hedge their entire supply, and charge a more-or-less fixed margin on top of that. They don't make more or less when the actual supply price goes up or down.
Now, on the supply side, you have multiple layers of demand loading. You have the dirt-cheap baseline load, then you have some spare capacity in the baseline systems (usually not that much, on the order of 20-25%), then you have easy-to-online spare capacity (often from some form of short-term storage), and finally you have peak load generation (normally-offline gas turbines, in general). Of course in reality you have far more tiers than that, but you get the idea.
All of those cost money to maintain, whether they feed the baseline or the peak. The peak costs more because you essentially have generation capacity sitting idle all but 5% of the time, yet it needs to pay 100% of the bills to own and maintain it. So even there you don't have the suppliers making out like bandits.
Disclaimer - I can only speak for the US market. They may have something radically different in Japan, but overall, I would bet my eyeteeth they still use some form of hedging to maintain relatively fixed margins.
* While technically true, price does tend to affect how much effort end-users put into conservation. So believe it or not, your utility would rather offer you cheaper power, because they make the same margin per KWH whether you use all LED lighting or you heat your patio with a hair-dryer running 24/7.
Wouldn't this just change the hours when peak usage occurs and result in the power company expanding peak hour charges or increasing the charges across the board?
Not really - In fact, it could potentially eliminate having an actual peak period if enough companies did it, by smoothing the demand curve out over a much longer period of time.
Looks like 6 cars can offset about 2% of this office's power usage. Hardly 'powering' the whole office.
You misunderstand - Businesses don't pay for electricity like residential users. They pay by usage per demand timeslot. So they may pay a rate of $0.05/KWH for 80% of the day, $0.12/KWH for another 18%, then for the remaining 2% (around 15 minutes) that shoots up to $0.45/KWH.
This study found that you can run the entire building for those 15 peak demand minutes on six cars. Those 15 minutes amounts to way more than 2% of the business' electric bill (more like 10-15%), however, thus the huge net savings.
Next up: Why not just do this using batteries--never mind the cars?"
Simple answer: It costs a decent amount of money to buy and maintain a large battery array. Anyone in charge of a medium sized corporate server room can attest to that.
By "letting" workers plug in their electric vehicles, the company not only gets to bill it as a perk of the job, but they get to push 100% of the expense of maintaining those batteries onto their workers.
I read the FTA and I didn't get any proof that we were living in a simulation at all.
Because it doesn't claim that. Hologram != Simulation.
The FTA is throwing around the word hologram, but IMHO that is a bit a stretch. Or maybe I don't know the official scientific definition of a hologram.
It just means that our universe seems to have more dimensions than it really does, for certain purposes. By analogy with a visual hologram, which looks 3d but all the depth information resides entirely in the interference patterns encoded in a 2d image.
It doesn't have anything to do with a holodeck or the universe as a simulation or even really invalidate the laws of physics as we currently know them. At best, it might mean that someday (a long, long time away) we can find a way to cheat certain of those laws that exist only as emergent behavior from the actual underlying system.
Nokia may or may not be liable to this tax. The rule of the land you have to follow.
You've just hit on the real problem here, but not how you meant it.
Yes, each culture has its own "rule of the land" that foreign investors need to follow. In the case of India, that means "Grease every palm you see or everyone from the PM down to the beat-cop will make your life hell". And that holds true in a great many places, not just India (though India seems to have institutionalized that practice to a degree that completely dwarfs any other nominally-1st-world nation).
Unfortunately, since Nokia also does business in the US, and the US has this curious delusion that we can impose our laws on the rest of the world, obeying this Indian "unwritten law" would put Nokia in violation of the FCPA. That then puts everyone in an awkward situation.
I fully expect we'll start seeing more and more companies simply skip the US market entirely to avoid dealing with our bullshit. We resemble the guy at the party giving away free cocaine at this point - Grudgingly popular, but no one hangs out with him the next day.
All of you. En masse. Find a real job, and move on.
Now if only we could get people to treat the TSA the same. At least I, for one, can take personal credit for a public shunning... But no one else seems to care.
I "almost" got killed twice past two weeks by people who either don't care or are unwillingly to adhere to traffic laws and decent courtesy.
You amount to a small pink distraction on the side of the road. Very few people, if any, "want" to kill you. At least one in ten, however, won't even notice you.
Never forget that, when you trust "right of way" to keep your spleen on the correct side of your abdominal wall.:)
You may die "in the right", but that won't make you any less dead. Nor do I mean to malign any particular group (*cough* teenage girls *cough*) - It could happen to any of us. One brief moment of distraction, and Mr. Right-of-way has become a new hood ornament.
...Though hopefully, they haven't reproduced yet, or they've merely condemned the next generation to consider it a good idea to cross without looking both ways.
/ And if you consider trolling, you don't know me very well.:)
Tesla wasn't on the list?! What is the Senator trying to say?
+500 insightful!
Seriously, a senator wants to know about high-tech exploits, and doesn't ask the single highest tech auto manufacturer in the US today about it? That just screams "Agenda!".
"Perjury" doesn't mean they called Hotfile's CEO mean things and ate the last cupcake. It means Warner Brothers committed a fucking crime. Hotfile can settle all it wants, that doesn't make WB's actions any less of a crime.
So, anyone taking bets on the temperature of Hell when we see formal charges filed here?
Slashdot Mirror
In the server world these days we don't run things on physical hardware usually, we run it in a VM. The less resources a given VM uses, the more VMs we can pack on a system. So if you have some crap code that gobbles up tons of memory that is memory that can't go to other things.
First - I write this as the sort of programmer who agrees with you in principle. I make my code as light and tight as possible.
But as a programmer, I get pissed when SysOps bitches me out for making tradeoffs that drastically improve performance - Such as trading off RAM for CPU usage. RAM comes cheap. Storage comes cheap. Hell, even CPU time comes cheap, but when you take a 24-core 256+GB behemoth, and oversubscribe to the point that nothing runs well on them? Don't blame the programmers, bro, look in the frickin' mirror.
VMs can indeed save admins a ton of work. They make HA possible, they make backups trivial, they minimize physical machine babysitting, they make spinning up a test bed truly a joy. No doubt, best tech ever when dealing with a large number of light workloads you'd like isolated from each other.
Programmers have a job to do, just like you do. And when that involves serving up a lot of data to a lot of users, yes Virginia, that takes resources. Go ahead and run my SQL instance as a VM for all the benefits mentioned above - But until you give me a beefy box at 1:1 provisioning, don't you dare look my way when I bring the box to its knees by actually using those resources.
So, you just input the opcodes directly, do you? You don't even need the mnemonics of assembly language because all you deal with is a culture-free head that scans along an infinite tape.
As a matter of fact, I can... But not your point, I know.
Your real point seems to fault CS for primarily using English, the second-most spoken language on the planet. Okay, fair point - Convince everyone to switch to Mandarin, and I'll play along for the sake of efficiency.
Because like it or not, this does boil down to efficiency; If everyone on the planet would just pick a single language and stick with it, we'd all have it a whole lot easier. Hell, let's even pick a designed language like Esperanto, so no one has "home court advantage" - $Deity knows I'd give my left nut to actually have everyone use a language without a million and seven historical irregularities.
But no, instead of learning from our mistakes in the real world, instead let's try to turn the most successful monoculture ever to arise in the history of humanity, into just one more polyglot disaster; where the ability to share earth-shatteringly good ideas becomes more a matter of imaginary lines on a map than of technical prowess.
Please, just watch Louis.
I've seen that one before. Pretty good, and really makes a person stop and think. Except... It kinda misses the point. Yes, my culture gives me something of an advantage in life - Because we won. And yes, we had our bad-old-days, when "winning" meant someone else lost. But we've moved past that, and have invited everyone to the party.
The problem there comes from everyone else still trying to "win" by dragging western culture down to their level. Yes, you can have capitalism. Yes, you can have democracy. Yes, you can have the role of religion marginalized in your political system (though sadly, we all still have quite some way to go in that regard). Yes, you can have English. That combination won, long long ago. Stop fighting it, rather than joining the winning team.
(which only exist because of pervasive systemic racism and segregation, by the way), your knee-jerk reaction is that it's just bullshit?
Okay, so moving beyond "language", what prevents any English-speaking American black/hispanic/female learning to program the same damned way any white male programmer did? And no, I don't mean "college" (I have yet to meet a single good programmer who didn't already have the fundamentals down well before college). I mean pick up a book on programming, read it, read it again, fall in love with the subject, and spend the rest of their lives honing their skills?
And for reference, before you say that I have an advantage because of the "culture" targeted by that book - For me, "that book" meant the GW Basic language reference manual (old-style three-ring binding and all). About as "culturally accessible" as your car's service manual. Nothing but the facts - This function takes these parameters and does whatever with them. And before you say "you had a computer and that book", I actually encountered that book and my first PC in my third grade classroom, spending as long after school every day as they would let me stay, to learn how to use it.
The learning environment of the more advanced computer science classrooms has supported the culture of these students and often made others to feel as "outsiders," as if their concerns, perspectives, were not valued in the field.
You nailed it, friend. That one quote pretty much demonstrates the entire problem with all these BS "discriminatory profession" arguments, whatever the profession.
Someone's "culture" has fuck-all to do with programming; and their concerns and perspectives have no value to a computer. Simple as that.
You need the ability to think logically. You need the ability to break big problems down into small ones, and small ones down into individual comparisons and actions that don't even look like "problems" anymore. You need the ability to see past what people say they want, and give them what they actually need. You need the ability to think of every possible way the process could go wrong, and handle that even if it will realistically never happen. And finally, relating back to "culture", you need to lose the filters most people view the world with and cut right to the root of the situation - You need to work around culture, around "perspectives", not "embrace" them.
In fairness, yes, you can call the modern world of IT largely a "boys' club", and yes, we tend to behave in ways that most of the modern corporate world would consider slightly over the line. But not because we don't welcome women - Simply because we don't have any around that we need to hold our tongues around. And perhaps more relevantly, the women I have worked with (in IT, not "worked with" in the sense of figuring out an accounting project's requirements) tend to give it right back to the guys. Funny thing about making a living breaking through filters... It doesn't matter what gender you start, you end up largely lacking filters altogether.
that's a surprisingly low number.
That statement stands on its own. $10M? For a company (well, a division of EMC, anyway) whose very existence depends on their reputation and ability to keep secrets safe?
As much as I damn both the NSA and corporate greed in general, I find TFA borderline unbelievable. Now, I find it a lot more believable that the NSA "paid" $10M plus a "gentleman's agreement" to allow the children of the entire executive board of EMC to continue taking in oxygen from the atmosphere...
I notice you vaguely said 'medical professional.'
Only because getting specific would make it too easy for my coworkers to ID me, generally not a good idea.
Suffice it to say, she makes twice what I do as a mid-career dev - Know a lot of nurses and respiratory therapists you could say that about?
While valid, you need to understand the magnitude of the continuing education involved.
I live with a medical professional. She needs to do quite a few CEs every year to keep her license, though realistically she would do it anyway to do her job well. But when I say "quite a lot", that means reading a weekly 4-6 page trade journal and spending one afternoon every six months or so at posh "seminars" where they wine and dine her on her employer's dime, oh and it has a quiz at the end to make it officially "educational".
As a programmer, I could literally spend every nonwork hour - Including those I currently use for sleep - Learning about new technologies, new laws that affect my trade, new trends that the PHBs will look for next time I need a job... And still slowly fall behind. We manage to stay relevant only by specializing, though at the same time staying generalist enough to carry on a conversation with our peers in other specialties.
Don't make me laugh by comparing the two. I may have no licensure requirement to keep my skills up, but if I put in the same amount of time as she does, I'd find myself unemployably useless within five years, while she remains at the top of her game.
Since Bitcoin is deflationary, it makes more sense to stockpile (or hoard) it than to spend it. That is also what makes it more like a commodity than a currency.
The biggest problem with the whole "deflationary" argument - And indeed, with any inflationary economy? We have a finite amount of resources on-planet. And while I certainly have high hopes of our species eventually making it off-planet (for real, not this "Billions to get a few guys to the moon for a few days" crap) - it sure as hell won't happen in my lifetime, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise.
So whenever we talk about why such-and-such a system (gold, Bitcoin, even fiat currencies such as the USD currently wavering on the edge of "negative inflation") "can't" succeed because deflation encourages hoarding, keep in mind what you really talk about - Money exists to make it easier to buy "stuff". If more money exists than stuff to buy with it, the stuff becomes more expensive. Inflation of a currency essentially just measures the inverse of the corresponding deflation of reality.
Guess what? Reality always wins. As soon as you have 100 people desperately in need of 99 cheeseburgers, inflation approaches infinity, but you still only have 99 cheeseburgers.
When you talk about people hoarding Bitcoins, you conveniently gloss over the fact that people could just as well hoard gold and ammunition and canned goods and quality hand tools and clothing - And make no mistake, some people do, but most of us would rather just go about our daily business of living. Will some people hoard BTC? Yep. So what? Most won't.
Finally, you also need to consider the rate of deflation, vs the yield on reasonably safe investments. If you can make 8% investing vs deflation of 3%, only an idiot would choose to hold the currency instead of the investment.
"about nothing" - FTFY. The only thing that you can reliably buy with BTC is other currencies.
That seems like an awfully lot of "About nothing" , then. Yes, Bitcoin merchants tend to sell services rather than goods just by virtue of the sort of people who have actually heard of it; but I stopped counting sites listed on that page selling physical product at 300, and that included at least a dozen "general purpose" stores and 25-30 C2C markets (online BTC flea-markets, basically).
Besides, why would you want to spend BTC on a cup of coffee if that same BTC will double in price within a year?
I know you wouldn't believe it from reading the average Slashdot post about Bitcoin, but not everyone using Bitcoin does so as speculation. Some of us just really want to see the success of a currency outside the control of any of the irresponsible jackasses currently in charge of global fiscal policy.
Unsurprisingly, Germany seems like a real hotbed of BTC use - Imagine that, the single most responsible economy on the planet right now, and what do they get for it? "Thanks for bailing out Greece and Cyprus, can you get started on that check for Slovenia?"
I can easily envision three ways in which USD could become worthless:
1) Molecular-level replicators. We will have them in the next few decades.
2) A systematic "stay the course" approach to the current totally-fucking-insane fiscal policy of The US government, eventually making our money about as valuable as Reichsmark or Zimbabwean dollars.
3) Confidence crash. USD has value not so much because it can be spent as it does because of confidence in a group of inbred whackjobs most Americans consider little short of "enemies of the state". But hey, wouldn't want the wrong lizard getting in, now would we?
* Just one specific peeve - You can buy just about anything with BTC today. Really, paying your taxes counts as just about the only thing you can't do with it.
The easy way to avoid the presumption of taint is
...To have a legal system that actually considers us innocence until proven guilty?
That is why those rules exist in the first place and why governments will come down hard on sites which attempt to side step those rules.
All the more reason to give full support to any currency that makes such unconstitutional powers a moot point.
Sorry, holograms are not encoded in a simple 2D plane.
:)
We have people mistaking TFA as suggesting we live in a Star Trek holodeck. Bogging the explanation down with even more technical details didn't really seem like the best approach to making a simple analogy most folks could understand.
In the interest of accuracy, however, I thank you for clarifying that point.
It would be akin to me buying your dye pack stained dollars and giving you clean dollars for a commission and not bothering to keep records or conform to any regulation.
You have made a presumption of taint on the original funds. Although he may have run afoul of AML guidelines, actual money laundering requires the funds derive from criminal activity. You can't "launder" your newly cashed IRS-reported paycheck by playing poker with the boys, even if you had exactly the intent of hiding where your specific bills came from. No crime = no laundering.
That said, I got sloppy here, because FinCEN actually said "transmission", not "laundering" - Though same idea, this goes back to the distinction I made in my second sentence. AML guidelines amount to "what the Treasury wants, the Treasury gets", and have zero basis in logic. For example, in order for that particular offense to stick, the Treasury would need to accept that Bitcoin counts as money (currency specifically accepted by the government); yet somehow I don't think they'll let me pay my taxes for this year in BTC.
we can't get permits from the city to replace our server room UPS
If the city has any say whatsoever in what hardware you can run in your server room - short of, say, a rooftop mounted Howitzer - you seriously need to GTFO out of that city ASAP.
Wow. I really just can't even imagine how they justify that. "No. You don't need to upgrade your UPS. If the power goes out for more than nine minutes, you just have to pay the penalties specified in your SLAs. Suck it, taxpayer!"
So, tell me again why this guy doesn't think what he's doing falls under any kind of regulatory enforcement?
Because if you take my $50 bill and give me two $20s and a $10, we call that "making change", not "money laundering".
Casascius exchanged Bitcoins for other Bitcoins, plus a small fee for the cool novelty token. He didn't exchange BTC for USD, or vice-versa, or anything even remotely similar to that. He made frickin' change (albeit more literally than normal).
That said - I still have one first- and one second-gen Casascius 1BTC coins somewhere around here. They already traded at a good premium over their exchange rate, this news should send their collectable value through the goddamn roof! Thanks, FinCEN - I still hope you all choke to death on a bowl of hyena semen, but this time, you've really done me a solid!
Until everyone does it and the pricing structure changes.
People tend to have a lot of misconceptions about the energy industry. End-suppliers, like your utility company, don't care about the absolute price at which they sell* - They hedge their entire supply, and charge a more-or-less fixed margin on top of that. They don't make more or less when the actual supply price goes up or down.
Now, on the supply side, you have multiple layers of demand loading. You have the dirt-cheap baseline load, then you have some spare capacity in the baseline systems (usually not that much, on the order of 20-25%), then you have easy-to-online spare capacity (often from some form of short-term storage), and finally you have peak load generation (normally-offline gas turbines, in general). Of course in reality you have far more tiers than that, but you get the idea.
All of those cost money to maintain, whether they feed the baseline or the peak. The peak costs more because you essentially have generation capacity sitting idle all but 5% of the time, yet it needs to pay 100% of the bills to own and maintain it. So even there you don't have the suppliers making out like bandits.
Disclaimer - I can only speak for the US market. They may have something radically different in Japan, but overall, I would bet my eyeteeth they still use some form of hedging to maintain relatively fixed margins.
* While technically true, price does tend to affect how much effort end-users put into conservation. So believe it or not, your utility would rather offer you cheaper power, because they make the same margin per KWH whether you use all LED lighting or you heat your patio with a hair-dryer running 24/7.
Wouldn't this just change the hours when peak usage occurs and result in the power company expanding peak hour charges or increasing the charges across the board?
Not really - In fact, it could potentially eliminate having an actual peak period if enough companies did it, by smoothing the demand curve out over a much longer period of time.
Looks like 6 cars can offset about 2% of this office's power usage. Hardly 'powering' the whole office.
You misunderstand - Businesses don't pay for electricity like residential users. They pay by usage per demand timeslot. So they may pay a rate of $0.05/KWH for 80% of the day, $0.12/KWH for another 18%, then for the remaining 2% (around 15 minutes) that shoots up to $0.45/KWH.
This study found that you can run the entire building for those 15 peak demand minutes on six cars. Those 15 minutes amounts to way more than 2% of the business' electric bill (more like 10-15%), however, thus the huge net savings.
Next up: Why not just do this using batteries--never mind the cars?"
Simple answer: It costs a decent amount of money to buy and maintain a large battery array. Anyone in charge of a medium sized corporate server room can attest to that.
By "letting" workers plug in their electric vehicles, the company not only gets to bill it as a perk of the job, but they get to push 100% of the expense of maintaining those batteries onto their workers.
TLDR: Money.
I read the FTA and I didn't get any proof that we were living in a simulation at all.
Because it doesn't claim that. Hologram != Simulation.
The FTA is throwing around the word hologram, but IMHO that is a bit a stretch. Or maybe I don't know the official scientific definition of a hologram.
It just means that our universe seems to have more dimensions than it really does, for certain purposes. By analogy with a visual hologram, which looks 3d but all the depth information resides entirely in the interference patterns encoded in a 2d image.
It doesn't have anything to do with a holodeck or the universe as a simulation or even really invalidate the laws of physics as we currently know them. At best, it might mean that someday (a long, long time away) we can find a way to cheat certain of those laws that exist only as emergent behavior from the actual underlying system.
Nokia may or may not be liable to this tax. The rule of the land you have to follow.
You've just hit on the real problem here, but not how you meant it.
Yes, each culture has its own "rule of the land" that foreign investors need to follow. In the case of India, that means "Grease every palm you see or everyone from the PM down to the beat-cop will make your life hell". And that holds true in a great many places, not just India (though India seems to have institutionalized that practice to a degree that completely dwarfs any other nominally-1st-world nation).
Unfortunately, since Nokia also does business in the US, and the US has this curious delusion that we can impose our laws on the rest of the world, obeying this Indian "unwritten law" would put Nokia in violation of the FCPA. That then puts everyone in an awkward situation.
I fully expect we'll start seeing more and more companies simply skip the US market entirely to avoid dealing with our bullshit. We resemble the guy at the party giving away free cocaine at this point - Grudgingly popular, but no one hangs out with him the next day.
Good. You want a new sense of "morale"???
Fucking quit.
All of you. En masse. Find a real job, and move on.
Now if only we could get people to treat the TSA the same. At least I, for one, can take personal credit for a public shunning... But no one else seems to care.
Baaaaah!
I "almost" got killed twice past two weeks by people who either don't care or are unwillingly to adhere to traffic laws and decent courtesy.
:)
You amount to a small pink distraction on the side of the road. Very few people, if any, "want" to kill you. At least one in ten, however, won't even notice you.
Never forget that, when you trust "right of way" to keep your spleen on the correct side of your abdominal wall.
You may die "in the right", but that won't make you any less dead. Nor do I mean to malign any particular group (*cough* teenage girls *cough*) - It could happen to any of us. One brief moment of distraction, and Mr. Right-of-way has become a new hood ornament.
Yes, duh? Any more questions?
...Though hopefully, they haven't reproduced yet, or they've merely condemned the next generation to consider it a good idea to cross without looking both ways.
:)
/ And if you consider trolling, you don't know me very well.
Tesla wasn't on the list?! What is the Senator trying to say?
+500 insightful!
Seriously, a senator wants to know about high-tech exploits, and doesn't ask the single highest tech auto manufacturer in the US today about it? That just screams "Agenda!".
"Perjury" doesn't mean they called Hotfile's CEO mean things and ate the last cupcake. It means Warner Brothers committed a fucking crime. Hotfile can settle all it wants, that doesn't make WB's actions any less of a crime.
So, anyone taking bets on the temperature of Hell when we see formal charges filed here?