Unfortunately, all of this just adds to the volatility, which will ultimately keep sane, stable, financially-minded people out of the BitCoin market.
Between it's questionable tax and accounting status, and the normal (considerable) risk in currency exchanges and commodity markets* which Bitcoin amps up to eleven... There was never any significant chance of such people becoming the majority players in the Bitcoin market in the first place.
* Even though there is considerable, if imperfect, information with which to make judgement calls in these markets.
Which proves what exactly? That you can use Google and throw statistics around with abandon? Because it doesn't prove the OP's assertion to be correct. (In fact, given the ratio of drivers to accidents - it shows rather the opposite.)
This writer makes a fundamental mistake: believing that if full driverless technology is not perfect or at least near-perfect, it is therefore unacceptable.
Is it a mistake? Or your unsupported bias against human drivers?
there are a lot of really bad drivers out there, and even a flawed automatic system could do a better job
That's a claim I keep hearing... but I don't buy it. For all the really bad drivers supposedly out there, in a wide variety of road conditions, lighting, weather, etc... there's doesn't seem to be nearly as many accidents as all the handwaving and bile would lead an outside observer to believe.
NASA didn't invent the computer. However, in the 1950s computers were room-sized assemblies of hardware. NASA and the Air Force were the only two entities that needed computers that were smaller than that (the Air Force to put in missiles, NASA to put in spacecraft).
And the Navy (to put in missiles as well as shipboard), and the Army (to put on missiles and mobile launching equipment), and all four services to put on aircraft...
The Block I Apollo computer was the driver for integrated circuits, and hence the grandfather of all of today's desktop computers (called "microcomputers" back in the old days, when "non-micro" computers meant the Univacs and 1103 and the other big iron of the day.
Well, yes... and no... Integrated circuits were originally developed for the DoD, which refused to become an early adopter for various reasons, so their availability to NASA was something of an accident. Not to mention the Block I AGC was based directly on the Polaris MKII Guidance Computer...
Then you compare walking speed to rover motion speed.
Why would I compare minimum performance of one to the maximum performance of the other? I'm seeking to perform an honest comparison, not to handwave, bullshity, and blow smoke - while simultaneously making myself look even more ignorant with each sentence I type. That's your schtick, and you've got it down cold.
Yes, there's huge assumptions there - like "humans will perform to their usual and proven standard".
What proven record?
I gave an example of just that - but those examples are inconvenient to you as the prove the falsehood of your thesis. So you snipped them.
I am far from ignorant. We use to chat on usenet back in the day. You were a lot more objective as I recall.
If you're not ignorant, you're doing a damn fine job of doing everything possible to make yourself appear to be so. You have yet to supply any evidence of lack of objectivity, which is pretty much par for the course... Like most ignorant loons, you snip away the parts inconvenient to you (those that prove you false), and just repeat what you said before, just with more smoke and handwaving.
What part of "smashing the economy of one of their largest markets, severely damaging the economy of the balance, while also doing grave damage to their own, is something the Chinese aren't stupid enough to do" is too complicated for you to grasp?
If the rovers mass budget and cash budget where comparable to a manned mission, they too would have got the job done in five days. Apples and Oranges.
In some fantasy universe where the main limits on robotic performance is cash and mass, sure. But that's not the universe we live in. Here in the real world, the limitations on robotics are technological - despite the fact that over many decades, by many organizations, many, many, times to amount that's been spent on manned space has been poured into computation and robotics research.
Lets not also forget that there are a huge amount of assumptions in that "a human could have done it 5 days". Like say no need to wear a space suit. We were on the moon for a lot of days. And quite frankly didn't get much done at all.
Yes, there's huge assumptions there - like "humans will perform to their usual and proven standard". Doubly so, since those standards have been proven repeatedly - even in space suits. For example - forty years ago, men could travel over ten times as fast as the rovers. They didn't need to stop for days to figure out a way around a rock, or how to approach a target, or how to get unstuck (and the humans *did* get stuck). And as far as not accomplishing much? That's just further evidence of your ignorance, or bias, or both.
Concrete was a useful technology. I'm not sure that's true of manned space flight. For a fraction of the money you can send a robot.
Sure, a robot is cheaper, but you get what you pay for. Steve Squyres (you know him, he's the guy in charge of Spirit and Opportunity) once noted that what the rovers had accomplished in five years could have been done by humans in a mere five days. (In fact, the total mileage covered by both rovers is less than one days traverse by one of the lunar rovers.) Robots are great when you want to mindlessly collect great heaping mounds of the same data, day after day... But at anything much more than that, they're still far inferior to people. (Which is why all three rovers to date aren't actually robots - they're teleoperated.) And there's nothing on the horizon to think that'll change anytime soon.
I mentioned this in a comment last week. Manned spaceflight in the USA is essentially a matter of history, not something we know how to do today. If we wanted (for whatever reason) to go back to the moon, we'd bascially have to start over from scratch.
Except - this story reveals your claim to be bullshit. We have (literally) tons of documentation on how they did it, and that's just the beginning...
After the fall of the Roman empire, knowledge of concrete was lost, and for about 500 years Europeans were walking around Roman buildings and upon Roman roads that they had no idea how to recreate. Right now all our Apollo engineers are dead or dying, and the Astronauts will soon follow suit. Soon there will be no living human who has set foot on another world. Then we will know just how those Medieval Europeans felt when we go look at our old Apollo relics in the museums.
In some fantasy world where we had stopped rocketry and spaceflight development and operations... you'd be right. But here in the real world, we're still flying rockets, we're still developing engines, and electronics, and materials, and... well... pretty much everything required for a moon flight. (In fact, there's a lot of Apollo components that will never see the light of day again because they're obsolete... long since replaced with something better.)
One might as well complain about how nobody has built a Wright Flyer in over a century and how everyone who ever designed of flew one is dead.
(Seriously, how does drivel like this get modded "Insightful", when it's clueless bilge?)
I wonder what would happen when this flow of cash stops.
Somebody else starts buying US debt.
Otherwise, I hope you not thinking of the wingutter theory that China will suddenly sell off all their US holding (with the intention of crashing the US economy.) The wingnutters seem oblivious to the fact that Chinese will never do that - because it would not only crash their own economy, but also that of one of their largest markets, and severely damage the economies of their remaining markets. The Chinese are many things, but they aren't stupid. Their leadership knows full well what will happen if the middle and working class they've created is suddenly out of work.
How about having it PAY FOR ITSELF by moving satellites from LEO to geosynchronous orbit. (This is very expensive as it typically requires an additional booster, I think the cost per pound is at least double that to low orbit). I think this market is on the order of $5B per year.
The cost of the additional booster is offset by the income from getting the satellite into GSO weeks and months ahead of the time it would get there by using your hypothetical space tug. Not to mention the availability of the booster is 100% guaranteed - it arrives in LEO with the satellite. So your market is almost certainly nonexistent.
However, rather than this being a problem, it could be an opportunity...... for the International Space Station to actually be USEFUL.
Sure, if you ignore the fact that the ISS is in a completely wrong orbit for anything involving GSO. Moving your tug there for maintenance and refueling, or worse yet routing the satellites via there, are like shipping from Manhattan to Brooklyn via Shanghai, Boston, and Johannesburg.
, the collapse of civilization would prevent us from leaving the planet for a long long time
We aren't capable of leaving now... so what's the difference?
We can toddle around the front yard for a little bit, but we have absolutely no means of going any further from the house and we'll need to be back inside before nightfall. And when I say "no means", I don't mean "except for investing a few years and a few tens of billions/trillions of dollars on space". I mean, none, nada, zip, nothing. We can no more set up a self sustaining colony off Earth than the Neanderthals could build an iPhone. It's not that we don't have the technology, it's not just that we don't even have the precursors, but that we don't have but the dimmest idea of the known unknowns.
Stephen Hawking may be an eye-wateringly brilliant physicist, but on this issue he's a nutjob.
Why is this such a unknown thing in Leeds? Here in Germany, it's already accepted common knowledge.
Just because it's "common knowledge in Germany", that doesn't make it right. Science isn't built on what's "common knowledge". Your insulting tone and wording lend credence to the theory that you're just pulling from your nether regions.
Further, if you actually read TFA, you'll note that isn't about proteins - it's about ATP, an enzyme. (Something your facile "explanation" doesn't address at all, further raising suspicions as to it's value.)
Not just that... but even in the bigger metro areas they also need to be useful for people who aren't hipsters looking for the latest gastropub or trendy cuisine hotspot. We've had bad results with Yelp and Urbanspoon, and always thought that was because we weren't in a big/dense metro area - until two weeks ago when we spent a weekend in downtown Seattle... and they were *still* pretty much useless because we aren't in the hipster demographic.
But wait, there's more: remember the the atomic clock on a chip that DARPA wanted? I think we now know what they really wanted it for, as you can't implement this kind of indoor inertial navigation (with errors in inches/centimeters) without one.
Such a clock is useful for all manner of other things too... notably crypto and frequency hopping.
If you don't have the source, you are giving up control.
That's a nice political soundbite - but it's bullshit in this case. Even if you had the source to the weather app... you don't have the servers it pulls data from. Even if you have the server code - you almost certainly don't have a license from the companies providing the data.
Unless you limit your definition of "space program" to "boldly creating ever more impressive publicity stunts"... our space program is doing pretty dang good, and will only improve once Dragon becomes fully operational and we have our own manned access to space.
No, but like us their weapons establishment has been drawn way down (dissipating their experience base) and they're also limited by the current test ban. There's no particular reason to help them, and they've been... less than judicious about who they share technology with in the past, which gives further reason not to help them.
And I really wish people would stop talking about what happened decades ago as if it were in any way relevant to current conditions. (Especially when they're unfamiliar with those conditions.)
Probably for the same reason it's only available for the iPhone 4s (read TFA) - the certification is probably tied to the hardware. (Most likely in this case, the screen.)
The ones I saw had nice sharply-defined edges, but these -- including the nice symmetrical ones -- are noticeably fuzzy around the edges.
The pictures are absolute crap, so there's no real way to tell if the (symmetrical) flakes are actually fuzzy around the edges, or if it's the horrid pixelation, or the focus/depth of field problems, or... well, you get the picture.
(So I wouldn't go on about Instagram, because you haven't a clue what you're looking at or talking about.)
US export control on computers needs to stop. The need for it ended decades ago. All US nuclear weapons were designed with computers below 10 MIPS, and in many cases below 1 MIPS. (The most recent US nuclear weapon design is from the mid-1970s.) The problem isn't getting any harder.
While a computer helps a great deal, the US also had years of experience, a brigade of experienced designers, a well tested and proven set of basic components (especially the primary) and could haul a candidate device out into the desert to set it off and see if the results matched the calculations.
A modern wannabe nuclear state has none of these things.
Thus, it's not about really all about the design.. it's also about testing that design. With a really fast computer you can run a bunch of simulations to test and optimize your design... (Despite their apparent simplicity, there's a lot of subtle complexities in even a basic, unboosted, single stage nuclear weapon.) Thus it's really useful if you want to test your design without letting the whole world know by setting off a real one. It's also extremely useful if you want to produce a small, weaponized, device without years of simulation, non-nuclear experimentation, and nuclear tests.
But there's also a more subtle reason nuclear programs need fast computers (one often missed by those unfamiliar with the issues)... stockpile verification. Remember what I said above about experiments and testing? That doesn't just happen when the device is designed and prepared for service - it also happens while the device is in service to make sure that various age related physical changes to the weapon don't reduce it's yield or reliability or (worst case) dud it entirely. Under the current test ban, such testing has been banned, leaving simulation the only viable option.
There are a couple of places around here where if someone carried one end of the radio link up the side of a mountain, you could get the straight line range needed. (Around 20 miles in this case.) So that's one possible way.
Another big issue is recovering the vehicle to a stable attitude as it comes back into denser air.
But, from reading his blog, it sounds like he didn't do much if anything in the way of testing, he mostly just hoped.
As an undergrad I earned a bit of extra money working in the university library, and was told, on my very first day, that if you don't put something in the right place you might as well throw it away, because it's unlikely anybody will be able to find it otherwise. Now we have Google.
And despite Google... nothing has really changed. Proper keywords, massaging search parameters, and doggedly opening pages hoping *this* one has the information you want has replaced painstakingly trolling through the stacks... but you're still in the same boat. If you're looking for something obscure you found years ago, you'd better remember enough details that Google can find it again. This goes doubly for obscure sites within obscure fields. Presuming the site hasn't gone dark.
Slashdot Mirror
Between it's questionable tax and accounting status, and the normal (considerable) risk in currency exchanges and commodity markets* which Bitcoin amps up to eleven... There was never any significant chance of such people becoming the majority players in the Bitcoin market in the first place.
* Even though there is considerable, if imperfect, information with which to make judgement calls in these markets.
Which proves what exactly? That you can use Google and throw statistics around with abandon? Because it doesn't prove the OP's assertion to be correct. (In fact, given the ratio of drivers to accidents - it shows rather the opposite.)
Is it a mistake? Or your unsupported bias against human drivers?
That's a claim I keep hearing... but I don't buy it. For all the really bad drivers supposedly out there, in a wide variety of road conditions, lighting, weather, etc... there's doesn't seem to be nearly as many accidents as all the handwaving and bile would lead an outside observer to believe.
That sound you heard is my point whooshing over your head.
And the Navy (to put in missiles as well as shipboard), and the Army (to put on missiles and mobile launching equipment), and all four services to put on aircraft...
Well, yes... and no... Integrated circuits were originally developed for the DoD, which refused to become an early adopter for various reasons, so their availability to NASA was something of an accident. Not to mention the Block I AGC was based directly on the Polaris MKII Guidance Computer...
Why would I compare minimum performance of one to the maximum performance of the other? I'm seeking to perform an honest comparison, not to handwave, bullshity, and blow smoke - while simultaneously making myself look even more ignorant with each sentence I type. That's your schtick, and you've got it down cold.
I gave an example of just that - but those examples are inconvenient to you as the prove the falsehood of your thesis. So you snipped them.
If you're not ignorant, you're doing a damn fine job of doing everything possible to make yourself appear to be so. You have yet to supply any evidence of lack of objectivity, which is pretty much par for the course... Like most ignorant loons, you snip away the parts inconvenient to you (those that prove you false), and just repeat what you said before, just with more smoke and handwaving.
What part of "smashing the economy of one of their largest markets, severely damaging the economy of the balance, while also doing grave damage to their own, is something the Chinese aren't stupid enough to do" is too complicated for you to grasp?
In some fantasy universe where the main limits on robotic performance is cash and mass, sure. But that's not the universe we live in. Here in the real world, the limitations on robotics are technological - despite the fact that over many decades, by many organizations, many, many, times to amount that's been spent on manned space has been poured into computation and robotics research.
Yes, there's huge assumptions there - like "humans will perform to their usual and proven standard". Doubly so, since those standards have been proven repeatedly - even in space suits. For example - forty years ago, men could travel over ten times as fast as the rovers. They didn't need to stop for days to figure out a way around a rock, or how to approach a target, or how to get unstuck (and the humans *did* get stuck). And as far as not accomplishing much? That's just further evidence of your ignorance, or bias, or both.
Sure, a robot is cheaper, but you get what you pay for. Steve Squyres (you know him, he's the guy in charge of Spirit and Opportunity) once noted that what the rovers had accomplished in five years could have been done by humans in a mere five days. (In fact, the total mileage covered by both rovers is less than one days traverse by one of the lunar rovers.) Robots are great when you want to mindlessly collect great heaping mounds of the same data, day after day... But at anything much more than that, they're still far inferior to people. (Which is why all three rovers to date aren't actually robots - they're teleoperated.) And there's nothing on the horizon to think that'll change anytime soon.
Except - this story reveals your claim to be bullshit. We have (literally) tons of documentation on how they did it, and that's just the beginning...
In some fantasy world where we had stopped rocketry and spaceflight development and operations... you'd be right. But here in the real world, we're still flying rockets, we're still developing engines, and electronics, and materials, and... well... pretty much everything required for a moon flight. (In fact, there's a lot of Apollo components that will never see the light of day again because they're obsolete... long since replaced with something better.)
One might as well complain about how nobody has built a Wright Flyer in over a century and how everyone who ever designed of flew one is dead.
(Seriously, how does drivel like this get modded "Insightful", when it's clueless bilge?)
Somebody else starts buying US debt.
Otherwise, I hope you not thinking of the wingutter theory that China will suddenly sell off all their US holding (with the intention of crashing the US economy.) The wingnutters seem oblivious to the fact that Chinese will never do that - because it would not only crash their own economy, but also that of one of their largest markets, and severely damage the economies of their remaining markets. The Chinese are many things, but they aren't stupid. Their leadership knows full well what will happen if the middle and working class they've created is suddenly out of work.
The cost of the additional booster is offset by the income from getting the satellite into GSO weeks and months ahead of the time it would get there by using your hypothetical space tug. Not to mention the availability of the booster is 100% guaranteed - it arrives in LEO with the satellite. So your market is almost certainly nonexistent.
Sure, if you ignore the fact that the ISS is in a completely wrong orbit for anything involving GSO. Moving your tug there for maintenance and refueling, or worse yet routing the satellites via there, are like shipping from Manhattan to Brooklyn via Shanghai, Boston, and Johannesburg.
We aren't capable of leaving now... so what's the difference?
We can toddle around the front yard for a little bit, but we have absolutely no means of going any further from the house and we'll need to be back inside before nightfall. And when I say "no means", I don't mean "except for investing a few years and a few tens of billions/trillions of dollars on space". I mean, none, nada, zip, nothing. We can no more set up a self sustaining colony off Earth than the Neanderthals could build an iPhone. It's not that we don't have the technology, it's not just that we don't even have the precursors, but that we don't have but the dimmest idea of the known unknowns.
Stephen Hawking may be an eye-wateringly brilliant physicist, but on this issue he's a nutjob.
Just because it's "common knowledge in Germany", that doesn't make it right. Science isn't built on what's "common knowledge". Your insulting tone and wording lend credence to the theory that you're just pulling from your nether regions.
Further, if you actually read TFA, you'll note that isn't about proteins - it's about ATP, an enzyme. (Something your facile "explanation" doesn't address at all, further raising suspicions as to it's value.)
Not just that... but even in the bigger metro areas they also need to be useful for people who aren't hipsters looking for the latest gastropub or trendy cuisine hotspot. We've had bad results with Yelp and Urbanspoon, and always thought that was because we weren't in a big/dense metro area - until two weeks ago when we spent a weekend in downtown Seattle... and they were *still* pretty much useless because we aren't in the hipster demographic.
Such a clock is useful for all manner of other things too... notably crypto and frequency hopping.
That's a nice political soundbite - but it's bullshit in this case. Even if you had the source to the weather app... you don't have the servers it pulls data from. Even if you have the server code - you almost certainly don't have a license from the companies providing the data.
Unless you limit your definition of "space program" to "boldly creating ever more impressive publicity stunts"... our space program is doing pretty dang good, and will only improve once Dragon becomes fully operational and we have our own manned access to space.
Try reading your own messages sometimes - I wouldn't have brought up instagram if you hadn't.
Um, no. Try reading your own messages sometimes. You were discussing the features of the flakes as seen in these images.
No, but like us their weapons establishment has been drawn way down (dissipating their experience base) and they're also limited by the current test ban. There's no particular reason to help them, and they've been... less than judicious about who they share technology with in the past, which gives further reason not to help them.
And I really wish people would stop talking about what happened decades ago as if it were in any way relevant to current conditions. (Especially when they're unfamiliar with those conditions.)
Probably for the same reason it's only available for the iPhone 4s (read TFA) - the certification is probably tied to the hardware. (Most likely in this case, the screen.)
The pictures are absolute crap, so there's no real way to tell if the (symmetrical) flakes are actually fuzzy around the edges, or if it's the horrid pixelation, or the focus/depth of field problems, or... well, you get the picture.
(So I wouldn't go on about Instagram, because you haven't a clue what you're looking at or talking about.)
While a computer helps a great deal, the US also had years of experience, a brigade of experienced designers, a well tested and proven set of basic components (especially the primary) and could haul a candidate device out into the desert to set it off and see if the results matched the calculations.
A modern wannabe nuclear state has none of these things.
Thus, it's not about really all about the design.. it's also about testing that design. With a really fast computer you can run a bunch of simulations to test and optimize your design... (Despite their apparent simplicity, there's a lot of subtle complexities in even a basic, unboosted, single stage nuclear weapon.) Thus it's really useful if you want to test your design without letting the whole world know by setting off a real one. It's also extremely useful if you want to produce a small, weaponized, device without years of simulation, non-nuclear experimentation, and nuclear tests.
But there's also a more subtle reason nuclear programs need fast computers (one often missed by those unfamiliar with the issues)... stockpile verification. Remember what I said above about experiments and testing? That doesn't just happen when the device is designed and prepared for service - it also happens while the device is in service to make sure that various age related physical changes to the weapon don't reduce it's yield or reliability or (worst case) dud it entirely. Under the current test ban, such testing has been banned, leaving simulation the only viable option.
There are a couple of places around here where if someone carried one end of the radio link up the side of a mountain, you could get the straight line range needed. (Around 20 miles in this case.) So that's one possible way.
Another big issue is recovering the vehicle to a stable attitude as it comes back into denser air.
But, from reading his blog, it sounds like he didn't do much if anything in the way of testing, he mostly just hoped.
And despite Google... nothing has really changed. Proper keywords, massaging search parameters, and doggedly opening pages hoping *this* one has the information you want has replaced painstakingly trolling through the stacks... but you're still in the same boat. If you're looking for something obscure you found years ago, you'd better remember enough details that Google can find it again. This goes doubly for obscure sites within obscure fields. Presuming the site hasn't gone dark.