I'm pointing out that people were writing about the heat in Australia many, many years ago.
Does data get refuted by a poem? No, of course not.
If you read the report, on p. 37 they comment that the dataset covers 35 years (1973-2009). The conclusion is based on that dataset. However, a poem written over 100 years ago suggests that conditions in Australia were well known even then. So... is there really a trend? There may be in the data, but the data doesn't span the time period of the poem.
I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror - The wide brown land for me!
No, but it can rely on the fact that the damage any such attack would do to Bitcoin would definitely not be in any mining pools interest. It's not even a prisoner's dillema, it's just bad all round.
True - if that miner wanted a long-term relationship. If they wanted to manipulate the price then cash out and fly on their pre-booked tickets to Majorca then maybe not so much. Because that's never happened before.
This is the real fundamental flaw in all unregulated fiat currencies. Fiat currencies are worth something because , by law, there is a governed amount of money and no other competing monies which themselves are not also so governed
Fiat currencies are worth something because you have faith in the issuer.
Here's how it works: A US dollar note is essentially an IOU from the US government. We trust that IOU far more than one from Shady Bob down in that dark alley over there, because we have faith that the US government will be there tomorrow. We can't say the same thing about Shady Bob.
Who determines the number of dollars in circulation? Actually, we the people do: As the value of our economy rises, so does the requirement for paper notes to measure the value of the economy. Sure, the government of the day can play silly buggers and increase or restrict the availability of notes or value to have a stimulus or damping effect, but these are short-term measures.
The fundamental flaw in any currency - fiat or not - is faith in the government and economy. Suppose for a minute the entire US government collapsed. Not just the current occupant of the White House; the entire "thing" we call government. The value of a US dollar note would drop rapidly to zero because the faith in the government had gone. So all those gold bars you have stashed in your basement would still retain value, right? Right next to the laptop with your digital wallet and your 70 bitcoins. Nope. You can have all the gold in the world, but I'm not parting with any of my food or water for it, because at that instant gold has no value to me. But your bitcoins - oh, wait... the government collapsed, electricity is sporadic and the internet is down. Nope, your bitcoins have no value to me, either.
My wife is morbidly obese. She for years has tried to lose weight with various diets and drugs. These had temporary weight loss effects, but all ultimately failed.
Why? Was my wife of inferior moral fiber and simply unable to follow through? Is she simply someone who needs to eat from a smaller plate, sit further away from the table, exercise more, eat less sugar, eat less carbs, eat more carbs, follow some arcane points system?
Nope. None of that works.
I'm a software engineer. Failure is a daily occurrence, and when we fail and study the failure, we learn the underlying problems and then we have success; and I've constantly encouraged my wife to keep trying. And she has; for over 10 years.
Two years ago, she contacted a weight counsellor / psychologist in Florida. In that time, they have peeled back the layers of her life, looking for the real, underlying problems. And, they found them. Who knew, for example, that being sexually abused as a 4yo child for years would cause problems? Who would have thought that when the attacker (a family "friend" next door) said things like "you would look prettier if you lost a bit of weight", it causes problems like gaining weight to try and make the pain go away? Why on earth would a narcissistic mother cause problems - especially when a 4yo comes to her bleeding from the vagina and covered in semen, and the mother simply wipes it away and says it never happened?
My wife's weight is far from something to be ashamed of. Instead, it's the mark of a person who came through some of the most horrendous things you can imagine - and lived.
The reason all the diets and drugs failed? Denial of the past and the problems in it. Simply becoming an adult doesn't mean the past will not affect you.
The future? Looking good. Since breaking through and working through all of her past, the underlying need to eat compulsively has gone. Guess what? She's loosing weight without a restrictive diet, drugs, surgery - whatever.
Obesity isn't a "disease" or anything like that. It's the symptom of something else. Medical dollars are best spent for people who are ready to lose the weight AND deal with their pasts by supplying them with competent psychologists, not the latest diet pills.
why someone can just say a bitcoin is worth X dollars
Because it is a commodity, and the market price of a commodity is determined by the intersection of the supply and demand curves for that commodity.
So, you **can** say that a bitcoin is worth $X. Now go find someone willing to either buy or sell at that price.
you can create money by "mining" for it with a graphics card
Well, you can go cut down a tree, make a table and sell it. Same thing, from an economics point of view.
It feels like something created by criminal entities which will eventually collapse or found to be fraudulent
Given the murky history of the creation of bitcoins, I can see how you might think this. However, let's suppose that it's true: Bitcoins are the product of criminal entities. What's the payoff? Bitcoins only have value because there is a market for them. It doesn't take much to create a run on the market and drive the price through the floor. Then again, there was the "Bitcoin Bubble" earlier this year; have enough bubbles and you can generate real money.
It's worth reading up on Bitcoins, if only to see that it's the digital equivilent of Tulip mania. Try https://medium.com/money-banking/2b5ef79482cb for a nice overview of the bubble, or Wikipedia.
Personally I like the idea that Warren Buffet proposed. If we are not in a declared war and the US debt exceeds 10% of GDP then all members of congress and the senate should be ineligible for re-election until such time as the debt is brought back to an appropriate level.
It's not exactly hard be in a state of declared war. You know, the "War on Terror" and all that...
Eisenhower said back in 1960:
"Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite."
We all remember the warnings about the military-industrial complex; how many remember the warnings against a scientific elite?
(http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html)
Just over a week ago, we all got an email from Corporate Mobility saying that the Blackberry was being phased out in favour of the iPhone 5. They started popping up around the place a few days ago. Fujitsu made some sort of arrangement with Telstra regarding data plans, too.
It amazes me just how fast the stranglehold BB had has unraveled...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pointing out that people were writing about the heat in Australia many, many years ago.
Does data get refuted by a poem? No, of course not.
If you read the report, on p. 37 they comment that the dataset covers 35 years (1973-2009). The conclusion is based on that dataset. However, a poem written over 100 years ago suggests that conditions in Australia were well known even then. So... is there really a trend? There may be in the data, but the data doesn't span the time period of the poem.
Austronaut:Houston. We've got a problem!
Pedantic nit-pick:
Swigert: I believe we've had a problem here.
Houston: This is Houston, say again please.
Lovell: Houston, we've had a problem.
Double nit-pick: Austronaut? Why pick on Australian Astronauts? What have they done?
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!
Dorothea Mackellar, 1904
Yup; Australia has never been hotter / dryer / ...
No, but it can rely on the fact that the damage any such attack would do to Bitcoin would definitely not be in any mining pools interest. It's not even a prisoner's dillema, it's just bad all round.
True - if that miner wanted a long-term relationship. If they wanted to manipulate the price then cash out and fly on their pre-booked tickets to Majorca then maybe not so much. Because that's never happened before.
This is the real fundamental flaw in all unregulated fiat currencies. Fiat currencies are worth something because , by law, there is a governed amount of money and no other competing monies which themselves are not also so governed
Fiat currencies are worth something because you have faith in the issuer.
Here's how it works: A US dollar note is essentially an IOU from the US government. We trust that IOU far more than one from Shady Bob down in that dark alley over there, because we have faith that the US government will be there tomorrow. We can't say the same thing about Shady Bob.
Who determines the number of dollars in circulation? Actually, we the people do: As the value of our economy rises, so does the requirement for paper notes to measure the value of the economy. Sure, the government of the day can play silly buggers and increase or restrict the availability of notes or value to have a stimulus or damping effect, but these are short-term measures.
The fundamental flaw in any currency - fiat or not - is faith in the government and economy. Suppose for a minute the entire US government collapsed. Not just the current occupant of the White House; the entire "thing" we call government. The value of a US dollar note would drop rapidly to zero because the faith in the government had gone. So all those gold bars you have stashed in your basement would still retain value, right? Right next to the laptop with your digital wallet and your 70 bitcoins. Nope. You can have all the gold in the world, but I'm not parting with any of my food or water for it, because at that instant gold has no value to me. But your bitcoins - oh, wait... the government collapsed, electricity is sporadic and the internet is down. Nope, your bitcoins have no value to me, either.
My wife is morbidly obese. She for years has tried to lose weight with various diets and drugs. These had temporary weight loss effects, but all ultimately failed.
Why? Was my wife of inferior moral fiber and simply unable to follow through? Is she simply someone who needs to eat from a smaller plate, sit further away from the table, exercise more, eat less sugar, eat less carbs, eat more carbs, follow some arcane points system?
Nope. None of that works.
I'm a software engineer. Failure is a daily occurrence, and when we fail and study the failure, we learn the underlying problems and then we have success; and I've constantly encouraged my wife to keep trying. And she has; for over 10 years.
Two years ago, she contacted a weight counsellor / psychologist in Florida. In that time, they have peeled back the layers of her life, looking for the real, underlying problems. And, they found them. Who knew, for example, that being sexually abused as a 4yo child for years would cause problems? Who would have thought that when the attacker (a family "friend" next door) said things like "you would look prettier if you lost a bit of weight", it causes problems like gaining weight to try and make the pain go away? Why on earth would a narcissistic mother cause problems - especially when a 4yo comes to her bleeding from the vagina and covered in semen, and the mother simply wipes it away and says it never happened?
My wife's weight is far from something to be ashamed of. Instead, it's the mark of a person who came through some of the most horrendous things you can imagine - and lived.
The reason all the diets and drugs failed? Denial of the past and the problems in it. Simply becoming an adult doesn't mean the past will not affect you.
The future? Looking good. Since breaking through and working through all of her past, the underlying need to eat compulsively has gone. Guess what? She's loosing weight without a restrictive diet, drugs, surgery - whatever.
Obesity isn't a "disease" or anything like that. It's the symptom of something else. Medical dollars are best spent for people who are ready to lose the weight AND deal with their pasts by supplying them with competent psychologists, not the latest diet pills.
Sweet! Is there a webcam trained on that thing so I can check the status of it daily?
why someone can just say a bitcoin is worth X dollars
Because it is a commodity, and the market price of a commodity is determined by the intersection of the supply and demand curves for that commodity. So, you **can** say that a bitcoin is worth $X. Now go find someone willing to either buy or sell at that price.
you can create money by "mining" for it with a graphics card
Well, you can go cut down a tree, make a table and sell it. Same thing, from an economics point of view.
It feels like something created by criminal entities which will eventually collapse or found to be fraudulent
Given the murky history of the creation of bitcoins, I can see how you might think this. However, let's suppose that it's true: Bitcoins are the product of criminal entities. What's the payoff? Bitcoins only have value because there is a market for them. It doesn't take much to create a run on the market and drive the price through the floor. Then again, there was the "Bitcoin Bubble" earlier this year; have enough bubbles and you can generate real money. It's worth reading up on Bitcoins, if only to see that it's the digital equivilent of Tulip mania. Try https://medium.com/money-banking/2b5ef79482cb for a nice overview of the bubble, or Wikipedia.
Odd how IE11 passes ACID 1, 2 and 3, but some sites break. Maybe the other sites are broken, whilst IE11 is even more standards compliant than ever?
Don't forget, you can also by the Developer version of SQL server for peanuts... I think I saw it on Amazon for $50.
Personally I like the idea that Warren Buffet proposed. If we are not in a declared war and the US debt exceeds 10% of GDP then all members of congress and the senate should be ineligible for re-election until such time as the debt is brought back to an appropriate level.
It's not exactly hard be in a state of declared war. You know, the "War on Terror" and all that...
Tangible assets have value only so long as someone else values them. What you think they are worth is beside the point. Tulips, anyone?
Actually, Tripod created the IDE of what became VB. Microsoft used the Tripod IDE as a visual wrapper around QuickBASIC.
Eisenhower said back in 1960: "Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite." We all remember the warnings about the military-industrial complex; how many remember the warnings against a scientific elite? (http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html)
Just over a week ago, we all got an email from Corporate Mobility saying that the Blackberry was being phased out in favour of the iPhone 5. They started popping up around the place a few days ago. Fujitsu made some sort of arrangement with Telstra regarding data plans, too. It amazes me just how fast the stranglehold BB had has unraveled...