If you're flying ANYTHING in a manner where a millisecond response time matters, you're flying wrong. If you're flying CLOSE ENOUGH to things that a millisecond error in your response is critical, you're flying too close or completely off the flight plan.
This is why we don't take chances with air-traffic-control. It's not unusual for planes to be MILES away from each other and still be called a "near miss". At the sorts of speeds you're talking about, you cover WAY TOO MUCH space too quickly to be able to "get out of the way" - you should just not be within miles of each other.
As such, even UAV's are subject to the same kinds of safety distances. This one obviously a) wasn't on a flightplan, b) was straying off its flightplan or c) was misdirected by (or ignorant of) the local equivalent of air-traffic-control.
One day a drone will hit a passenger-carrying aircraft. One day a passenger jet will take off with both engines hatches undone, causing an engine failure and potential fire in both engines when it snaps off and damages the engine (London Heathrow, last week). One day someone will get on a plane and bomb it (not 9/11 - think Lockerbie back in the 1980's!). These things will all happen. The way we reduce casualties is NOT to ban planes (although, obviously, that works perfectly!!), but to apply controls. In this case, the controls already exist and are in place. If people didn't follow them? Take away their UAV pilot's licence.
Smaller competitors who want to get into the market. Effectively, price controls like this will freeze out the competition. How? Well, say Apple are making 200% profit on everything they sell because they have price-fixed. You now can sell at 200% profit and compete with them (and thus become part of the cartel yourself), or you can try to undercut them. But they have a huge market, to themselves, with huge profit margins, complete control of the market (because they are all agreeing to price at whatever they want) and lots and lots and lots of spare cash to keep you out / buy you up.
Because of this, you also get a lack of competition (what's the point of competing if you can all agree to just set prices to X and no-one "wins" the market for having a better product?), the market stagnates and the customer gets screwed - not by the raised prices (as you say, that's up to the customer) but because the market is so closed that they either pay lots or DON'T get the products at all. It's also a pretty good way to kill off the technology and (thus) competitors who rely on book sales to sell reading devices, etc.
A company sets its own prices. That much is certain. But they should not be getting into groups and DECIDING how much the customer pays between them collectively, with no reference to how much it costs to supply the product itself, and no consumer interest. It's illegal for a reason. It destroy markets, stifles innovation, removes competition, and makes everything a big game to make money with no regard to consumers at all. And, at the end of the day, it becomes "pay lots, or get nothing", which isn't a technique that benefits taxpayers either. Yes, you get greater tax revenue from profits (you hope!), but you also get less people spending money and less money available to spend on other things for those that do.
The point is that the market is bigger than a company, even a government. Harming the market DIRECTLY harms the stability of the economies of world governments. Thus it is illegal.
There's nothing stopping a company with a patent licensing its patent ONLY for 10 bajillion dollars even though it costs next to nothing to manufacture. That's just business. Nobody's stopping that. But colluding with competitors to price other competitors and your own customers out of the market is in nobody's interest - not even the companies that do it, or their shareholders!
The heaviest material? Really compatible with space travel fuelled by some of the world's most expensive fuel at great expense. Part of the problem of space is not that "we can't do that", it's that "it's so FECKING expensive to do it the way we would on Earth".
There's nothing stopping us shipping an entire biodome up to Mars, with enough food for a million people. It's just a question of weight (and, thus, cost). The point of the very first manned Mars mission is going to be to get there, not to prove we can start industry there. As such, things like huge amounts of lead are a luxury we can ill afford.
That, and most of the radiation that's damaging can actually be stopped by a bit of aluminium foil. The problem isn't that we *couldn't* shield from it, it's that we can't afford to. And pioneers often have to suffer for the title of being "first", I'm afraid (e.g. Madame Curie).
The bigger problem is the legality over what is basically a health and safety issue that, if we'd worried about it in the past, we'd never have let anyone go up Everest, fly to the Moon, etc. etc. etc.
These people are going to get irradiated. There's nothing practical that we can do to stop that. Many of the Apollo astronauts had eye problems related to radiation exposure in later life, it's just a simple fact of going outside the Van Allen belts (and, hell, flight attendants probably get more radiation in a year than ANYONE who works in a radiology department).
We just have to make sure they understand the risk. But I'm sure that Scott understood the risk of the Antarctic, that Hillary understood the risk of Everest, and so on. There will be people more than willing to do it. And in 100 years time, in any luck, space travel could be commonplace to the point where we finally do "solve" most of those problems through finally getting the money / incentive to actually prevent them. But at the moment, it's just a legal issue to make sure these people understand just how much simple things (like invisible radiation) can scupper their lives on a remote planet.
You won't be shooting much video on it, it's an unofficial hack and has a lot of problems.
But in certain areas, this is useful. Think astrophotography, where it's common to "video" the telescope image (with suitable equatorial mount) to form image stacks that can then be processed to form a single, high-quality, composite image. You can get photos of Saturn's rings, say, that are at magnifications impossible to see in the telescope itself or to get a steady shot of through the atmosphere.
Sure, you could just "take lots of images", but when building such an image stack, a video (especially a raw video without MPEG artefacts) gives a more easier-to-process stack and hundreds of times more images to work with to get a better final composite.
And astrophotography is exactly the kind of area that will tear apart the camera to get good images (e.g. removing IR filters, etc.)
The physicists? You mean the biologist whose name is the only one splattered all over it who has now withdrawn from further projects?
If you've seen the credentials, post them. Give us all a good laugh.
I don't need to provide my credentials. I have none in the field of physics (maths, maybe, but not physics). The difference is that I've NEVER claimed to be well-respected scientist whose opinion on an ENTIRELY new technology should just be taken as read.
And it's still a lot easier to prove a positive than a negative, no matter how difficult even proving a positive can be. That's kind of my point.
Just because Joe Bloggs says that something is bunk doesn't automatically make it right or wrong. (So what I say means nothing at all, I've already said I'm not a physicist. If you really want to get into this, what are YOUR credentials?) But, of course, if Joe Bloggs happened to be a world-renowned expert in the chosen field who work is both respected and reproducible by his peers, then it carries infinitely more weight.
So far, the only people to back E-Cat are the owners/investors - i.e. people with a vested interest in misrepresenting the product. And there's no ONE person with any decent reputation who's stood up and said "Woah, that look interesting". Not one. And in order to find someone who DOES do that, you have to allow demonstrations which are useful from a scientific viewpoint.
Again, there's a million pounds that says it's a hoax. And NOTHING that says it isn't. Compare and contrast to the situation about "psychic powers" etc. where - again - scientists have offered a million pounds and NOT ONE PERSON has stepped up and been able to demonstrate them. And 90% of them just won't even agree to take part in a controlled test, let alone sit through one.
You are confusing ignorance with disbelief. The fact you miss is that myriad people, myself included, would be interested in seeing a device that performs as the E-Cat promises. The fact that we can't, because "we're not allowed", "we don't understand", "we don't have the credentials", etc. just means that it's going to be called bullshit from day one.
P.S. I have relatives in Bologna, including those who go to that university. Want to know quite how many of them have ever heard of even the demonstration, let alone the person involved?
Six reputable scientists? Where? Names, histories, qualifications? The only ones I see involved were from dubious backgrounds and/or part of the scam. To be reputable, you also have to be independent and well-published, not just "Call me Dr" which just takes a few years of study in the chosen area.
Demonstrations? Where? When? Who was present?
Because as far as I can tell, the University of Bologna want nothing to do with him (and that's where his biggest demos supposedly happened / were to happen) and everyone else who's seen it was dubious (though there is talk that there were a couple of stooges in the audience who later went on to write about things that NOBODY ELSE present had seen in the demo).
In a court of law, you have to prove beyond reasonable doubt. That hasn't happened, or people wouldn't be calling it a hoax. And if they judge by people who were present and took photos? Well, most of them didn't see a damn thing in any of the demonstrations, and certainly nothing that they'd attest in a court of law was anything but a demonstration under uncontrolled conditions.
It's EASY to prove a positive. It's impossible to prove a negative. Even courts recognise this. Thus, the burden of proof is really on the E-Cat people to prove they can do it, not everyone else that they can't. (i.e. Please prove that I CAN'T turn off all the lights in the world just by blinking - the only way you can get close is to have me co-operate yet "fail" to do so X amount of times, or to admit it - but it still wouldn't be acceptable proof that I *CAN'T*, just that I *DIDN'T*. But to prove I *CAN* do it, all I have to do is do it once, under controlled conditions).
And all the pseudo-physics crap (inverse square laws etc.) you have in your post? Sorry, all bullshit. Every line. Nobody but a moron would think that claims like that were made by reputable scientists in the last 100 years (we invented quantum mechanics over a hundred years ago, so please don't give me this "as a youngster" crap unless you're over 100 years old). You've either been listening to crap nutters, or you've misunderstood.
Next you'll be telling me that scientists "don't know" how bees manage to fly and all that other crap that gets spouted as science rather than just the remainders of popular urban myths that sound cool at the dinner table.
E-Cat is, was and always will be a fraud. I'll lay money on it. Prominent scientists already have (over a million dollars!). At this point, you could make more money by proving these scientists wrong than you ever could by marketing the result of the prototype.
So at what point aren't "matched pads" repeats of the original pads, or devices which would repeat the results of the original pad?
This is my point - these pads aren't "random", because if they were they'd perform differently in two different devices. In which case, their results are surely trivially capturable and, thus, reproducible if you digitally capture the performance of a single example?
It's the old "if you can read it, so can anyone else with the same equipment, and so can you 'fake' it with sufficient knowhow" DRM problem
The problem is that to be accepted in an area of science that's basically nothing more than a consequence of the maths, you have to show the maths that generate the results you expect.
I'm a mathematician. I don't claim to understand 1% of 1% of quantum mechanics at all. But it comes from a mathematical model that happens to have real-world consequences that are weird and wonderful. When we then tested for those consequences, we found out that they exist in nature. Which, to a scientist mind, kind of hints that the maths must have been at least somewhat correct (or at least on the right lines).
I have my own understanding and theories, but I would also have to state, quite clearly, that quantum physics isn't really "physics". This isn't Newton seeing an apple fall and realising there's a force at play. This is someone (probably THE most famous genius) sitting down for decades with almost unsolvable equations that make absolutely no sense until they realise that it works if you have 11 dimensions, or if space and time are two different elements of the same thing, etc. And that was back in the 1900's when quite a lot of physics and maths we enjoy now didn't even exist.
Then you go out and measure in real life and you find that, actually, it turns out that your theory fits what happens in the world, not the other way around.
As such, I don't for a second think that I can just posit a hypothesis (theory is a slightly stronger word in any science) and have any concept of if I'm talking gibberish or not. The maths of quantum mechanics is horrendous and complicated and quantum theorists spend more time in front of the blackboard than they do the LHC.
If you wish to contribute, even if you don't intend to be taken seriously, it's only proper to get yourself a decent grounding in not just "hey, there's something smaller than an electron and weird stuff starts to happen at that scale, I bet I can guess what else happens", but in WHY that's so and HOW we got to that point. And in anything quantum, that means understanding the maths behind it.
As someone with a degree in maths, I tell you now, you're going to need a decent grounding in quite a lot of basic physics and huge amounts of maths and that "real world intuition" will basically be next-to-useless until the very end. That's not to mention the level of things like calculus and linear algebra you'd need to even get close to learning how we got to all of the old "wrong" models, let alone the newer ones.
This doesn't mean that wild ideas and theories have no merit, it's just that you're theorising about something that you probably don't understand the basics of. I know I don't. And I *can* read the mathematics and, given enough time, understand it.
It just comes across to any mathematician or physicist as someone who is looking at a car for the first time and saying "You know, I bet if you made the whole thing ten times bigger, it would go even faster" or "If it goes that fast with four wheels, imagine what it'll do with 10!".
In a way it reminds me of the Moon conspiracy theorists. They can come up with a million weird and wonderful things that intuition says "must be wrong". But it turns out that a few simple tests or bits of maths show them to all be nonsense. "The shadows are wrong" - fine, go out into the street on a sunny day and try hard to replicate them. If someone can replicate something that's "wrong" in the space of ten minutes, then maybe you are reading far too much into the image, or commenting on something you just don't understand.
Seriously, just on that page there are some 16 equations, and that's not even a millionth of what you need to understand where those equations come from.
Honestly, I DON'T understand quantum mechanics at all. I believe it, because it's accepted as the best self-consistent theory we have that has made verif
Not really. Work in a garage for a month, you see all kinds of weird damage come in.
And this wheel is basically a cut-open barrel. Punch it on the outside and it makes a dent on the inside. It's rolling across a rocky landscape, after being basically dropped onto the planet. It probably bumps down a lot more rocks than you realise and even more than NASA ever plan, the chances of finding a level surface to wander over that doesn't have a hidden 10cm drop onto rock for at least one of the wheels hidden behind is slim. And it weighs quite a bit. Not to mention loose things getting inside the wheels and basically being inside a small tumble-dryer.
A dent in the wheel would be the least of my worries, to be honest. And there's no way you can actually tell that the dents go from inside-out or outside-in, it's an very common optical illusion. And even if the dents go "the other way", there's no way to tell from the photos that they line up - those wheels are basically taking the shape of whatever they roll over so you might find the dent going "in" is right next to a similar bend in the metal going "out".
But never let the facts stand in the way of some mad conspiracy theory, eh?
If you don't raise taxes, companies sit on a fortune doing nothing but letting the banks earn them a bigger fortune. None of this benefits the average person.
If you raise taxes, the luxury products that such companies sell will undoubtedly become more expensive or of lower quality. However, the country then has a lot of money it's sitting on that it can't just let earn interest (government money doesn't work like that for very long) and it has to spend. Some percentage of that will find its way into healthcare or education or crime prevention or SOMETHING that the average person will benefit from.
It's really just a question of who should be sitting on a stockpile of money and pumping that back into themselves? The government, or a company that makes iPads?
Given that I'm on a geek website, I was expecting a flurry of corrections, actually. Maybe Slashdot isn't the geek hangout that I thought any more. Maybe we're all just naysayers following everyone else because "Bitcoin is stupid" or whatever.
I've barely looked into Bitcoin myself and don't mine and wouldn't come close to some of the insane setups I've seen documented for mining even if I did.
Something like 90,000 unique Bitcoin addresses seen every single day. Bear in mind, that's not "90,000 users" so much as "90,000 transactions to/from unique addresses for that day". Something like 80,000 GH/s. That's a lot of oomph being put in by clients for a long time. Go googling for mining setups, or exchange rates (there are BUCKETS of individual exchange websites for Bitcoin alone), or anything related to bitcoin and you find tons of results. And just about every single news provider in the world has run half-a-dozen stories on Bitcoin already.
Someone, somewhere, most probably geeks / overclockers/etc. is pumping away at Bitcoin for most of the day, sending or receiving money or generating coins. Just because you're not one of them, doesn't mean it's not happening.
SETI@Home / BOINC would kill to have those people running their software instead.
I've decided to stop paying my tax. Turns out most of that money goes to warmongers and making weapons. And I won't pay my phone bill. Turns out that that part-funds illegal phone competitions.
Guess who I'll be hurting more.
(P.S. Also the reason why I'm in fits of hysterics when a DVD tells me I'd be supporting terrorists if I pirate it - ironic given the criminals I'd supported by buying it in the first place)
World of Warcraft accounts. Steam's new Trading Card beta (with RARE FOIL CARDS!) Trading cards in general. Achievements in games. XP in game networks. "Levelling up".
There's any amount of intangible things that people will pay real money for. That's the incentive. It's not that *I* would pay X amount of money for whatever it is, but that *SOMEONE ELSE* would pay it. That makes it valuable.
Why they buy it is up to them. To complete their collection? To get one over on their friends? To say they have one? Who cares? People buy junk all day long every day ("acre of land on the Moon", "name a star", etc.).
The difference is between those who see the item itself as valuable, and those who see possession of the item as a way to extract value from it (i.e. I think it's baloney as a currency, but someone will give me £20 for it, so I'll happily pay £15 and make a profit).
Does the share of Microsoft that you have actually GIVE you anything? Or is it a speculative holding that only has value because someone else has TOLD you it has value? Is it really any different until you get into owning literally millions of shares and get a say on the board?
Something is only worth a value when someone else is willing is pay that for it. And why they are willing to pay for it is not a huge part of selling it, or being some kind of middleman (except possibly as market research). I can't explain why people want to buy iPhones or iPads for commercial use, but there is an awful lot of money to be made in producing them and selling them to that industry.
I can't explain why people will pay for the next DLC in a game that was released with less content than all their competitors with DLC available on release day. But, for sure, if I could make money from it, I would.
I hold a fraction of a Bitcoin. Literally. A fraction. I bought it recently and will hold onto it to see if it holds value. I don't really care what people will do with a Bitcoin I sell them so long as, in a few years, it's worth more than I paid for it.
The people who got in early on it did exactly the same and the largest single wallet address (not the largest single Bitcoin wallet which is impossible to determine) holds something ridiculous like 400,000 BTC worth millions. So lots of other people also think it has value. And there are marketplaces that will GIVE you that value, in cash, products or services, for a Bitcoin. That's the point. Otherwise it would be just a number. People say your bank account is just a number - it is. But it's a number that people are willing to exchange for goods or services, that's what makes it valuable.
Sure, we're all gambling on the future of the market (not the currency, necessarily, and hell, I'd rather have had Bitcoin than Zimbabwean dollars a few years ago), but while it has value (i.e. someone willing to convert to "real" money or tangible goods), then it will still *be* valuable.
The primary motivation, I think, behind owning Bitcoin is to have anonymised currency based on number-crunching that you can generate yourself from nothing more than computer hardware and a connection to the Internet. That appeals to all kinds of people from geeks to overclockers to mathematicians to kids with no pocket money to datacentre and network owners (when the Bitcoin return on the cost of number crunching crosses a point that makes it profitable, you can be sure that Google will use all their idle time to do it! At the moment, that point is long gone and not likely to reappear until all the Bitcoins are mined) right up to criminals.
You can buy an ASIC-based bitcoiner miner, now, that will pay for itself at current market rates within a year. After that it's sheer profit, even including the electricity used to run it (the ASIC-based miners give the most return on the lowest power). Sure, it's a few grand to buy one and the price of Bitcoin could crash. But it could also go through the roof. So if you have a few grand
You can have as many wallets as you like and a wallet can generate as many "addresses" as you want to receive money on. Outsiders have no idea that two distinct Bitcoin destinations aren't in fact the same wallet.
Additionally, only the network as a whole really knows where the transactions are coming from, an individual Bitcoin user doesn't (otherwise it would be pointless!). It's peer-to-peer so somewhere, some peer knows what IP generated that transaction. But without having control of a vast proportion of the whole network, down to the IP level, there's no way to reliably trace anything back to a "real" IP, person, wallet.
Transactions are logged. But with wallet addresses. And you can tell what wallet addresses should have how much money in each. But you can't tell which wallet addresses are the same address, nor where they come from, nor who owns them. A transaction will just appear in the blockchain and come from several thousand peers almost simultaneously who share the information across the network and even the first one on the list isn't necessarily the client who first saw the transaction.
And those clients are private peer-to-peer clients. If my client was the first to see your transaction, you'd have to raid ME to get the IP information from my systems - and what are the chances of a random Bitcoin user having full network traces of all the actions on their network, going back to the transaction you're interested in, by the time you find them?
Transactions are basically sent to random people in the swarm. They talk to more random people and eventually the network all sees the transaction. Finding out which Bitcoin address first saw the transaction is nigh-on impossible even with complete knowledge. Raiding them and finding information on their systems that links back that transaction to an originating IP is incredibly unlikely even if you could do that. And if they used Tor or a proxy to initiate the transaction? You're stuffed.
Even collection of funds? They can publish any number of Bitcoin wallet addresses that secretly correspond to a single wallet and anyone who sends them money will NEVER KNOW where it's going. The transaction goes into the swarm and after a while, all clients agreed that wallet address X has amount Y in it. The total wallet, though, might have several million addresses associated with it and even the last client on the route to informing that wallet of a received transaction won't ever know that it's talking to the wallet holder.
No matter what you think of it as a currency, Bitcoin is a fabulously-designed anonymous transaction protocol. About the only threat is one entity holding 50% of the hashing power, but that just gives them the power to control the block chain, not identify users.
There's any number of ways, it's just a matter of how careful you are.
Control a botnet, use that, make sure the botnet can't be traced back to you.
Use public wifi in random locations at random times. Pretty damn easy to do even if you're broadcasting a static MAC - those sorts of places rarely have proper logs.
Use tor, proxies, intermediaries (shell servers bought with Bitcoin etc. would be hard to trace, etc.). There are any number of ways.
But the important thing is to be careful and watch the trail that you're leaving. Anyone with half-an-IT-brain should be able to do that, if they really want to. The fact that others are caught, whenever you hear the story, is normally down to some boasting or weak link in the chain where they got sloppy.
It's not like criminal forensics at a crime scene where it's almost impossible to cover your tracks. You are in control of every packet you send from every location and what it contains and what information that can be linked to. It's just a question of knowing that and not getting cocky / sloppy.
That said, it's still quite impressive that (if they exist) this person has managed to do so for this long.
If you want all-wooden gear and solid plastics like you'd use in an office, then making room for a cable / box isn't difficult. Hell, computer desks have existed for decades. Look into schools, where they have some lovely (and ludicrously expensive) desking solutions for IT suites.
The problem is that most home furniture ISN'T like that. If it is wooden, it's quite ornate and not really suited to drilling huge holes in for cables and power strips. And the rest of it is fabric, leather, and other materials that don't bode well for permanent electrical installation.
The fact of the matter is that most people dangle cables because most furniture doesn't incorporate them (and they do exist, don't kid yourself, but they are rare precisely because nobody wants them or the hassle - the closest you really get are the integrated horrible American idea of "lazeeboys" or whatever they're called with sound systems built in), and that's on their own head.
Building a fabric sofa, for example, with power ports on it that needs to cope with kids jumping on the sofa, drinks being spilled on it, etc. etc. isn't something that a company wants to take liability for. From a liability point of view, you're looking at IP67 sockets with tough metal housings integrated into a relatively flimsy supporting structure that is soft and moves a lot. You're also exposed to the problems of fire and fire retardant materials which probably makes it quite expensive before you start. And then you have to cater for every possible combination of layout (i.e. where do you pull the power lead out of the back of the sofa to, how long can it be, etc.?), heatflow, etc. There's a reason that 99.9% of the electrical items in your house use solid materials for the main electricity-carrying-parts and fabric only for covers (at a suitable distance, e.g. lampshades) and not for the main parts.
There's just too much to take account of. Sure you can do it. Sure, an electrician who was handy with tools would get it done right in his own home. But selling them to the general public is a bit of a liability nightmare. And, to be honest, they make the furniture look damn ugly, whereas a socket can be tucked out of the way when you're finished with it.
Similarly, I want to wire my shed at the bottom of my garden. To pay an electrician to do it properly will cost a fortune and involve digging a 65 foot long trench and dropping a very expensive armoured cable into it, fitting a fuse box, wiring into the house mains, losing a lot of electrical power because of the voltage drop at such a distance, lots of waterproofing and compliance testing and all sorts.
My solution? I bought a caravan "commando connector" socket, such as are used on building and caravan sites, and will have it fitted and certified by an electrician. It's waterproof and the only bit that needs to be "certified" to be legal. It's not the local government's business unlike if I have a permanent installation to the shed (which is actually illegal in my jurisdiction unless a qualified electrician signs off on the whole installation).
What you plug into it? That's up to you. Sure, if I kill someone, I'll be sued, but I don't have to check in with every wiring change or have huge underground cables dug in and certified in order to use it.
Then I can buy pre-made extension cables and pre-made socket adaptors to give you normal sockets on the other end. If one breaks? I buy another. I don't need it recertified. Not an ideal permanent solution, but it does what I need it to and requires the minimum of certification and regulation on my part (all the equipment is tested elsewhere before I buy it, etc.). And I can plug in a lamp or a charger or a tool in while in the shed and not have to worry about it. And I don't have to think when digging over the garden beds about what's running underneath them.
The fact is, electrical certification has some serious consequences and costs to it. And in Europe at least, you would have
So basically, all these fancy energy-saving methods we've been implementing lately have been wiped out by things that are EVEN WORSE for the grid than what we had.
Electric cars, supercapacitors, etc. all add to PEAK usage. Between 5:30 and 6:00 everyone is going to be putting their 8KW charger on, even if only for a second, and raising peak time usage (which means that even more capacity has to be brought online - sometimes for hours before and after - to cope with demand and we'll be "even more" idle throughout the rest of the day).
And, shockingly, the only plants that can really handle those are the old-fashioned, always-on, slow-to-ramp-up-and-down, coal, oil, gas and nuclear plants. Or HUGE inefficiencies from renewables.
I just find it ironic that at the time we're pushing for low power, variable, "always on" supplies, we're pushing for gadgets that need high peak load, or high load for a LONG time generally.
The point is that threatening legal action costs the person you're threatening. Not everyone even has a few hundred dollars to retain a lawyer no matter how briefly. Yes, you might "get it all back" but at great risk even if you are completely innocent and the charges are groundless.
A threatening letter from a lawyer doesn't have to go through another expensive lawyer. Sure, if you try to get clever, you can dig yourself in deeper, but the fact is that if you can't afford to fight the case, then you sure as hell can't afford to do anything at all - even the simplest of letters from your lawyer will not make the case go away every time, but will cause huge bills unless you find a no-win, no-fee lawyer.
Courts are quite reasonable in this regard. You just write back a letter that says "I have received your letter dated XX/XX/XXXX. I believe it to be without merit." (or similar). That's it. Just send it back. Let *them* take *you* to court if you're sure you're innocent. There, THEY have to prove YOU did it. With expensive lawyers and to a legal standard. And once you get there, junior lawyers will often jump for the chance to advise on a case for free. Once it's in court, your legal fees will be paid if you're victorious and it will be stupidly expensive if not so you have nothing to lose. Hell, if you are forced to take out a loan to hire a lawyer, it can often happen that the other side has to pay the loan too. And you will KNOW that it's time to hire a lawyer or face worse problems.
However, before it gets to court, there's no point settling unless you are guilty (and sometimes not even then) as it will only be to your detriment. Settlement paperwork often has clauses that say you were guilty and accept that you did it. It's then an irrevocable fact of law that you can't ever contest. This is also why "no comment" exists, and why you have the right to say nothing when arrested, and why you SHOULD say nothing until a lawyer arrives. However, if you are innocent, there's no harm in saying "No, I didn't do that, etc." By letter, being silent is easily confused with ignorance, disregard, attempts to evade justice, etc. so you just write back and say, in effect, "Nope".
Even if settle only to get away from the case, you are forever taking responsibility for that event. If it later comes up in another case that "if you did X, then you must have done Y" (i.e. if you downloaded that tune at that time on that day, then that MUST have been you driving your car past your house a minute earlier, etc.) then you are stuffed.
Until something lands in court, you don't need a lawyer. It may be prudent if you can afford it, but lots of people can't. And in the same way you don't need a lawyer to go over your terms and conditions of every service you use, or approve everything you say to a sales person, you don't need a lawyer in the early stages of response to threats like that.
I have been threatened with court several times. Funnily, it's never actually happened.
First, over a mobile phone contract (with phone) that never arrived at my door, was never signed by me, and I phoned up to REPORT IT MISSING / STOLEN. They wanted to force me to pay for the contract (for the whole year!), pay for the missing phone, pay for any replacement, etc. They threatened all sorts, in writing and on the phone. I wrote back, stated my side, and let them get on with it.
I can see it from their point of view - I ordered a phone, it might have arrived and I've done a runner with it. Sure. I get that. It's a valid case that there might be a simple answer to or that might need taking to court to get to the facts of the matter.
They harassed me for a month with letters and phone calls and after a while, I just stopped answering or answered only with "Sorry, your company has threatened me with legal action. Therefore, I will not discuss the issue."
In the end, I had the bank force a refund of my money that they'd taken (with zero problems, actually, it took only ten mi
"there are infinitely many pairs of primes that are less than 70 million units apart"
It just means that the individual primes in the pairs must be 70 million units apart (from each other) or less. (and where the hell did "unit" come from? Do they mean integer?)
Not that single primes must be. Not that one pair from the next must be. You could have twin prime pairs at any interval so long as the other half of the pair is within 70 million integers.
Unless I'm reading it wrong. The thing about maths is, you have to be VERY precise and not leap into assumptions without testing them very, very, very thoroughly first. 99.99999% certain isn't good enough for a mathematician.
I could rant too, but I just need to pick up on something.
Current estimates of WHAT WE KNOW NOW, just for Uranium, with current technology and current prices? Gives us about 700 years of nuclear power. If we haven't found something else by then, we're in trouble. And that's JUST Uranium.
Oil? In terms of usefulness for energy production, we'll be lucky to get 100. Damn lucky.
Flying is pretty safe when done right. We got there in the end. Space travel is pretty safe when done right. We got there too. And we got there by government intervention. It's not good enough to write off a technology because people mishandle it - we have to find ways to make mishandling impossible and/or impose extremely severe penalties for mishandling, with billions of guidelines for what to do and what not to do. Fact is, 50 years ago we were still putting asbestos in buildings materials. It took a LONG time to learn that it was stupid and even longer for government to stop it happening. But abandoning all housebuilding until we sort the problem wasn't really an option.
Some countries don't need nuclear power. Granted. Some do. Exports from the US can't covert the world. And there's a question of efficiency. Although the US *might* be able to produce all its own energy - at what cost? Not just environmental (apparently, that's our grandchildren's problem, as always), but sheer financial. Not much scales as nicely as nuclear, or we wouldn't still be using it. When you "need" Gigawatts, you have two choices - fossil or nuclear. The renewables are an interesting distraction at the moment, but we could really argue that until Uranium runs out.
And, to be honest, nobody cares about yours or my opinions. They mean nothing. What matters is that it's possible to make an AWFUL lot of money out of nuclear by providing a product that people are willing to pay through the nose for (electricity) DESPITE the huge amount of infrastructure, planning, waste disposal, and safety concerns. No nuclear power station has ever not been profitable for the people running it.
The trick is not to argue over how to supply people with megawatt-hours of electricity to their house. We have any number of ways to do it, and they all cost about the same in the long run. The trick is to work out how to stop people requiring megawatt-hours of electricity each in the first place. Because that's madly-unsustainable in the long-term until we have some other technological breakthrough.
Fact is, until then, we're like someone in the 1920's arguing over what blend of petrol is more efficient in our non-catalytic-convertor cars, while still making a big mess for others to clear up through what is basically laziness and greed.
Never really "got" MMORPG's. My brother was mad on MUD's back in his university days and I kind of got that. You would literally stumble into the person who was building all the rooms, quests, objects, etc. and it was usually a small team who created things INSIDE the game, so they were having fun as well (I don't doubt there was a lot of coding involved, but a lot of actions performed actually worked in-game as some in-game "magic" or similar). They were playing Minecraft, basically, and everyone else was inside their dungeons. And they were free, and run by people who lovingly created them.
The next fad was the Diablo's etc. Basically an MMORPG set in a formulaic plot. Nothing bad about that the first few times through, and they are still quite fun to play even with the poor-equivalents today(e.g. Torchlight etc.). But no real huge amounts of replayability without someone else there to play with. And they were pay-for, but professional and well-polished, but limited and repeating.
But MMORPG's, they kind of take the worst of everything. Let's have lots of random idiots. Let's have restrictions on what you can do. Let's have a financial incentive to make you spend as long as possible getting to the things you want to do. Let's have no "creators", no change to the set-down mechanics of the world, except in some far-off office where they come up with insane ideas without much player feedback.
Let's instead have the story evolve very, very slowly and in huge pay-for leaps and people get little choice about whether it was good or not, or whether they pay or not. There's no feedback. No people with interest in the state of the world, only the economy (which, as we all know, can be a disaster even in real-life). You're paying to play a Diablo with a bunch of random people whose co-operation you require, who are all also paying. And every time there's a significant change in the world, you have to pay again or be stuck in the timewarp of "old".
I couldn't really see the attraction, and the people I know who do spend a fortune on WoW tend not to have been exposed to the games of old (like MUDs etc.), hell some of them I'd barely class as gamers - they are mainly just socialising while button-bashing and the gaming is second. Nothing wrong with that, but Facebook-in-Second-Life is not what I want.
The "serious" gamers I know are infinitely more likely to spend their money on non-subscription games and equipment. They might well buy a pack of games for their LAN party, and upgrade to the next version as a one-off payment if it's good enough (or even just to play it together as friends), but an ongoing subscription model just isn't their thing.
And the people I do know who did play WoW etc. have all given it up, and their only real "catch" to doing so is losing their accounts/characters/whatever. Without exception, though, they do give it up and just abandon what they had in there after a while, whether through financial problems, or time problems, or the breakup of their favourite group, or just sheer exhaustion at the virtual world (especially prevalent at "pay-for-the-next-expansion" time).
The free-to-play ones aren't really popular with the gamers I know either. I think the whole free-to-play concept is great - as a teenager, I would have been hooked and no doubt WOULD have ended up spending money (hell, even as it is, I've made money just playing free-to-play games to play the game and then selling the random junk I was awarded). But it attracts even more idiots, and profiteering. And with free-to-play, you are willing to suffer slight bugginess or changes or restrictions that you wouldn't accept elsewhere.
Like anything else, I don't get "subscription" payments. Of course I don't mind paying but an automatic payment on a schedule? I don't see the incentive for the creators to keep creating after a while. They earn just as much between updates as they do immediately after them.
The same reason people keep gym memberships going and why most gym
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If you're flying ANYTHING in a manner where a millisecond response time matters, you're flying wrong. If you're flying CLOSE ENOUGH to things that a millisecond error in your response is critical, you're flying too close or completely off the flight plan.
This is why we don't take chances with air-traffic-control. It's not unusual for planes to be MILES away from each other and still be called a "near miss". At the sorts of speeds you're talking about, you cover WAY TOO MUCH space too quickly to be able to "get out of the way" - you should just not be within miles of each other.
As such, even UAV's are subject to the same kinds of safety distances. This one obviously a) wasn't on a flightplan, b) was straying off its flightplan or c) was misdirected by (or ignorant of) the local equivalent of air-traffic-control.
One day a drone will hit a passenger-carrying aircraft. One day a passenger jet will take off with both engines hatches undone, causing an engine failure and potential fire in both engines when it snaps off and damages the engine (London Heathrow, last week). One day someone will get on a plane and bomb it (not 9/11 - think Lockerbie back in the 1980's!). These things will all happen. The way we reduce casualties is NOT to ban planes (although, obviously, that works perfectly!!), but to apply controls. In this case, the controls already exist and are in place. If people didn't follow them? Take away their UAV pilot's licence.
Smaller competitors who want to get into the market. Effectively, price controls like this will freeze out the competition. How? Well, say Apple are making 200% profit on everything they sell because they have price-fixed. You now can sell at 200% profit and compete with them (and thus become part of the cartel yourself), or you can try to undercut them. But they have a huge market, to themselves, with huge profit margins, complete control of the market (because they are all agreeing to price at whatever they want) and lots and lots and lots of spare cash to keep you out / buy you up.
Because of this, you also get a lack of competition (what's the point of competing if you can all agree to just set prices to X and no-one "wins" the market for having a better product?), the market stagnates and the customer gets screwed - not by the raised prices (as you say, that's up to the customer) but because the market is so closed that they either pay lots or DON'T get the products at all. It's also a pretty good way to kill off the technology and (thus) competitors who rely on book sales to sell reading devices, etc.
A company sets its own prices. That much is certain. But they should not be getting into groups and DECIDING how much the customer pays between them collectively, with no reference to how much it costs to supply the product itself, and no consumer interest. It's illegal for a reason. It destroy markets, stifles innovation, removes competition, and makes everything a big game to make money with no regard to consumers at all. And, at the end of the day, it becomes "pay lots, or get nothing", which isn't a technique that benefits taxpayers either. Yes, you get greater tax revenue from profits (you hope!), but you also get less people spending money and less money available to spend on other things for those that do.
The point is that the market is bigger than a company, even a government. Harming the market DIRECTLY harms the stability of the economies of world governments. Thus it is illegal.
There's nothing stopping a company with a patent licensing its patent ONLY for 10 bajillion dollars even though it costs next to nothing to manufacture. That's just business. Nobody's stopping that. But colluding with competitors to price other competitors and your own customers out of the market is in nobody's interest - not even the companies that do it, or their shareholders!
The heaviest material? Really compatible with space travel fuelled by some of the world's most expensive fuel at great expense. Part of the problem of space is not that "we can't do that", it's that "it's so FECKING expensive to do it the way we would on Earth".
There's nothing stopping us shipping an entire biodome up to Mars, with enough food for a million people. It's just a question of weight (and, thus, cost). The point of the very first manned Mars mission is going to be to get there, not to prove we can start industry there. As such, things like huge amounts of lead are a luxury we can ill afford.
That, and most of the radiation that's damaging can actually be stopped by a bit of aluminium foil. The problem isn't that we *couldn't* shield from it, it's that we can't afford to. And pioneers often have to suffer for the title of being "first", I'm afraid (e.g. Madame Curie).
The bigger problem is the legality over what is basically a health and safety issue that, if we'd worried about it in the past, we'd never have let anyone go up Everest, fly to the Moon, etc. etc. etc.
These people are going to get irradiated. There's nothing practical that we can do to stop that. Many of the Apollo astronauts had eye problems related to radiation exposure in later life, it's just a simple fact of going outside the Van Allen belts (and, hell, flight attendants probably get more radiation in a year than ANYONE who works in a radiology department).
We just have to make sure they understand the risk. But I'm sure that Scott understood the risk of the Antarctic, that Hillary understood the risk of Everest, and so on. There will be people more than willing to do it. And in 100 years time, in any luck, space travel could be commonplace to the point where we finally do "solve" most of those problems through finally getting the money / incentive to actually prevent them. But at the moment, it's just a legal issue to make sure these people understand just how much simple things (like invisible radiation) can scupper their lives on a remote planet.
You won't be shooting much video on it, it's an unofficial hack and has a lot of problems.
But in certain areas, this is useful. Think astrophotography, where it's common to "video" the telescope image (with suitable equatorial mount) to form image stacks that can then be processed to form a single, high-quality, composite image. You can get photos of Saturn's rings, say, that are at magnifications impossible to see in the telescope itself or to get a steady shot of through the atmosphere.
Sure, you could just "take lots of images", but when building such an image stack, a video (especially a raw video without MPEG artefacts) gives a more easier-to-process stack and hundreds of times more images to work with to get a better final composite.
And astrophotography is exactly the kind of area that will tear apart the camera to get good images (e.g. removing IR filters, etc.)
The physicists? You mean the biologist whose name is the only one splattered all over it who has now withdrawn from further projects?
If you've seen the credentials, post them. Give us all a good laugh.
I don't need to provide my credentials. I have none in the field of physics (maths, maybe, but not physics). The difference is that I've NEVER claimed to be well-respected scientist whose opinion on an ENTIRELY new technology should just be taken as read.
And it's still a lot easier to prove a positive than a negative, no matter how difficult even proving a positive can be. That's kind of my point.
Just because Joe Bloggs says that something is bunk doesn't automatically make it right or wrong. (So what I say means nothing at all, I've already said I'm not a physicist. If you really want to get into this, what are YOUR credentials?) But, of course, if Joe Bloggs happened to be a world-renowned expert in the chosen field who work is both respected and reproducible by his peers, then it carries infinitely more weight.
So far, the only people to back E-Cat are the owners/investors - i.e. people with a vested interest in misrepresenting the product. And there's no ONE person with any decent reputation who's stood up and said "Woah, that look interesting". Not one. And in order to find someone who DOES do that, you have to allow demonstrations which are useful from a scientific viewpoint.
Again, there's a million pounds that says it's a hoax. And NOTHING that says it isn't. Compare and contrast to the situation about "psychic powers" etc. where - again - scientists have offered a million pounds and NOT ONE PERSON has stepped up and been able to demonstrate them. And 90% of them just won't even agree to take part in a controlled test, let alone sit through one.
You are confusing ignorance with disbelief. The fact you miss is that myriad people, myself included, would be interested in seeing a device that performs as the E-Cat promises. The fact that we can't, because "we're not allowed", "we don't understand", "we don't have the credentials", etc. just means that it's going to be called bullshit from day one.
P.S. I have relatives in Bologna, including those who go to that university. Want to know quite how many of them have ever heard of even the demonstration, let alone the person involved?
Sorry, but rubbish.
Six reputable scientists? Where? Names, histories, qualifications? The only ones I see involved were from dubious backgrounds and/or part of the scam. To be reputable, you also have to be independent and well-published, not just "Call me Dr" which just takes a few years of study in the chosen area.
Demonstrations? Where? When? Who was present?
Because as far as I can tell, the University of Bologna want nothing to do with him (and that's where his biggest demos supposedly happened / were to happen) and everyone else who's seen it was dubious (though there is talk that there were a couple of stooges in the audience who later went on to write about things that NOBODY ELSE present had seen in the demo).
In a court of law, you have to prove beyond reasonable doubt. That hasn't happened, or people wouldn't be calling it a hoax. And if they judge by people who were present and took photos? Well, most of them didn't see a damn thing in any of the demonstrations, and certainly nothing that they'd attest in a court of law was anything but a demonstration under uncontrolled conditions.
It's EASY to prove a positive. It's impossible to prove a negative. Even courts recognise this. Thus, the burden of proof is really on the E-Cat people to prove they can do it, not everyone else that they can't. (i.e. Please prove that I CAN'T turn off all the lights in the world just by blinking - the only way you can get close is to have me co-operate yet "fail" to do so X amount of times, or to admit it - but it still wouldn't be acceptable proof that I *CAN'T*, just that I *DIDN'T*. But to prove I *CAN* do it, all I have to do is do it once, under controlled conditions).
And all the pseudo-physics crap (inverse square laws etc.) you have in your post? Sorry, all bullshit. Every line. Nobody but a moron would think that claims like that were made by reputable scientists in the last 100 years (we invented quantum mechanics over a hundred years ago, so please don't give me this "as a youngster" crap unless you're over 100 years old). You've either been listening to crap nutters, or you've misunderstood.
Next you'll be telling me that scientists "don't know" how bees manage to fly and all that other crap that gets spouted as science rather than just the remainders of popular urban myths that sound cool at the dinner table.
E-Cat is, was and always will be a fraud. I'll lay money on it. Prominent scientists already have (over a million dollars!). At this point, you could make more money by proving these scientists wrong than you ever could by marketing the result of the prototype.
So at what point aren't "matched pads" repeats of the original pads, or devices which would repeat the results of the original pad?
This is my point - these pads aren't "random", because if they were they'd perform differently in two different devices. In which case, their results are surely trivially capturable and, thus, reproducible if you digitally capture the performance of a single example?
It's the old "if you can read it, so can anyone else with the same equipment, and so can you 'fake' it with sufficient knowhow" DRM problem
But to be a useful one-time pad, don't you have to be able to repeat the results to decode the message?
You've been reading too much XKCD.
The problem is that to be accepted in an area of science that's basically nothing more than a consequence of the maths, you have to show the maths that generate the results you expect.
I'm a mathematician. I don't claim to understand 1% of 1% of quantum mechanics at all. But it comes from a mathematical model that happens to have real-world consequences that are weird and wonderful. When we then tested for those consequences, we found out that they exist in nature. Which, to a scientist mind, kind of hints that the maths must have been at least somewhat correct (or at least on the right lines).
I have my own understanding and theories, but I would also have to state, quite clearly, that quantum physics isn't really "physics". This isn't Newton seeing an apple fall and realising there's a force at play. This is someone (probably THE most famous genius) sitting down for decades with almost unsolvable equations that make absolutely no sense until they realise that it works if you have 11 dimensions, or if space and time are two different elements of the same thing, etc. And that was back in the 1900's when quite a lot of physics and maths we enjoy now didn't even exist.
Then you go out and measure in real life and you find that, actually, it turns out that your theory fits what happens in the world, not the other way around.
As such, I don't for a second think that I can just posit a hypothesis (theory is a slightly stronger word in any science) and have any concept of if I'm talking gibberish or not. The maths of quantum mechanics is horrendous and complicated and quantum theorists spend more time in front of the blackboard than they do the LHC.
If you wish to contribute, even if you don't intend to be taken seriously, it's only proper to get yourself a decent grounding in not just "hey, there's something smaller than an electron and weird stuff starts to happen at that scale, I bet I can guess what else happens", but in WHY that's so and HOW we got to that point. And in anything quantum, that means understanding the maths behind it.
As someone with a degree in maths, I tell you now, you're going to need a decent grounding in quite a lot of basic physics and huge amounts of maths and that "real world intuition" will basically be next-to-useless until the very end. That's not to mention the level of things like calculus and linear algebra you'd need to even get close to learning how we got to all of the old "wrong" models, let alone the newer ones.
This doesn't mean that wild ideas and theories have no merit, it's just that you're theorising about something that you probably don't understand the basics of. I know I don't. And I *can* read the mathematics and, given enough time, understand it.
It just comes across to any mathematician or physicist as someone who is looking at a car for the first time and saying "You know, I bet if you made the whole thing ten times bigger, it would go even faster" or "If it goes that fast with four wheels, imagine what it'll do with 10!".
In a way it reminds me of the Moon conspiracy theorists. They can come up with a million weird and wonderful things that intuition says "must be wrong". But it turns out that a few simple tests or bits of maths show them to all be nonsense. "The shadows are wrong" - fine, go out into the street on a sunny day and try hard to replicate them. If someone can replicate something that's "wrong" in the space of ten minutes, then maybe you are reading far too much into the image, or commenting on something you just don't understand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_quantum_mechanics
Seriously, just on that page there are some 16 equations, and that's not even a millionth of what you need to understand where those equations come from.
Honestly, I DON'T understand quantum mechanics at all. I believe it, because it's accepted as the best self-consistent theory we have that has made verif
Not really. Work in a garage for a month, you see all kinds of weird damage come in.
And this wheel is basically a cut-open barrel. Punch it on the outside and it makes a dent on the inside. It's rolling across a rocky landscape, after being basically dropped onto the planet. It probably bumps down a lot more rocks than you realise and even more than NASA ever plan, the chances of finding a level surface to wander over that doesn't have a hidden 10cm drop onto rock for at least one of the wheels hidden behind is slim. And it weighs quite a bit. Not to mention loose things getting inside the wheels and basically being inside a small tumble-dryer.
A dent in the wheel would be the least of my worries, to be honest. And there's no way you can actually tell that the dents go from inside-out or outside-in, it's an very common optical illusion. And even if the dents go "the other way", there's no way to tell from the photos that they line up - those wheels are basically taking the shape of whatever they roll over so you might find the dent going "in" is right next to a similar bend in the metal going "out".
But never let the facts stand in the way of some mad conspiracy theory, eh?
If you don't raise taxes, companies sit on a fortune doing nothing but letting the banks earn them a bigger fortune. None of this benefits the average person.
If you raise taxes, the luxury products that such companies sell will undoubtedly become more expensive or of lower quality. However, the country then has a lot of money it's sitting on that it can't just let earn interest (government money doesn't work like that for very long) and it has to spend. Some percentage of that will find its way into healthcare or education or crime prevention or SOMETHING that the average person will benefit from.
It's really just a question of who should be sitting on a stockpile of money and pumping that back into themselves? The government, or a company that makes iPads?
Given that I'm on a geek website, I was expecting a flurry of corrections, actually. Maybe Slashdot isn't the geek hangout that I thought any more. Maybe we're all just naysayers following everyone else because "Bitcoin is stupid" or whatever.
I've barely looked into Bitcoin myself and don't mine and wouldn't come close to some of the insane setups I've seen documented for mining even if I did.
But:
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses
Something like 90,000 unique Bitcoin addresses seen every single day. Bear in mind, that's not "90,000 users" so much as "90,000 transactions to/from unique addresses for that day". Something like 80,000 GH/s. That's a lot of oomph being put in by clients for a long time. Go googling for mining setups, or exchange rates (there are BUCKETS of individual exchange websites for Bitcoin alone), or anything related to bitcoin and you find tons of results. And just about every single news provider in the world has run half-a-dozen stories on Bitcoin already.
Someone, somewhere, most probably geeks / overclockers /etc. is pumping away at Bitcoin for most of the day, sending or receiving money or generating coins. Just because you're not one of them, doesn't mean it's not happening.
SETI@Home / BOINC would kill to have those people running their software instead.
I've decided to stop paying my tax. Turns out most of that money goes to warmongers and making weapons. And I won't pay my phone bill. Turns out that that part-funds illegal phone competitions.
Guess who I'll be hurting more.
(P.S. Also the reason why I'm in fits of hysterics when a DVD tells me I'd be supporting terrorists if I pirate it - ironic given the criminals I'd supported by buying it in the first place)
World of Warcraft accounts.
Steam's new Trading Card beta (with RARE FOIL CARDS!)
Trading cards in general.
Achievements in games.
XP in game networks.
"Levelling up".
There's any amount of intangible things that people will pay real money for. That's the incentive. It's not that *I* would pay X amount of money for whatever it is, but that *SOMEONE ELSE* would pay it. That makes it valuable.
Why they buy it is up to them. To complete their collection? To get one over on their friends? To say they have one? Who cares? People buy junk all day long every day ("acre of land on the Moon", "name a star", etc.).
The difference is between those who see the item itself as valuable, and those who see possession of the item as a way to extract value from it (i.e. I think it's baloney as a currency, but someone will give me £20 for it, so I'll happily pay £15 and make a profit).
Does the share of Microsoft that you have actually GIVE you anything? Or is it a speculative holding that only has value because someone else has TOLD you it has value? Is it really any different until you get into owning literally millions of shares and get a say on the board?
Something is only worth a value when someone else is willing is pay that for it. And why they are willing to pay for it is not a huge part of selling it, or being some kind of middleman (except possibly as market research). I can't explain why people want to buy iPhones or iPads for commercial use, but there is an awful lot of money to be made in producing them and selling them to that industry.
I can't explain why people will pay for the next DLC in a game that was released with less content than all their competitors with DLC available on release day. But, for sure, if I could make money from it, I would.
I hold a fraction of a Bitcoin. Literally. A fraction. I bought it recently and will hold onto it to see if it holds value. I don't really care what people will do with a Bitcoin I sell them so long as, in a few years, it's worth more than I paid for it.
The people who got in early on it did exactly the same and the largest single wallet address (not the largest single Bitcoin wallet which is impossible to determine) holds something ridiculous like 400,000 BTC worth millions. So lots of other people also think it has value. And there are marketplaces that will GIVE you that value, in cash, products or services, for a Bitcoin. That's the point. Otherwise it would be just a number. People say your bank account is just a number - it is. But it's a number that people are willing to exchange for goods or services, that's what makes it valuable.
Sure, we're all gambling on the future of the market (not the currency, necessarily, and hell, I'd rather have had Bitcoin than Zimbabwean dollars a few years ago), but while it has value (i.e. someone willing to convert to "real" money or tangible goods), then it will still *be* valuable.
The primary motivation, I think, behind owning Bitcoin is to have anonymised currency based on number-crunching that you can generate yourself from nothing more than computer hardware and a connection to the Internet. That appeals to all kinds of people from geeks to overclockers to mathematicians to kids with no pocket money to datacentre and network owners (when the Bitcoin return on the cost of number crunching crosses a point that makes it profitable, you can be sure that Google will use all their idle time to do it! At the moment, that point is long gone and not likely to reappear until all the Bitcoins are mined) right up to criminals.
You can buy an ASIC-based bitcoiner miner, now, that will pay for itself at current market rates within a year. After that it's sheer profit, even including the electricity used to run it (the ASIC-based miners give the most return on the lowest power). Sure, it's a few grand to buy one and the price of Bitcoin could crash. But it could also go through the roof. So if you have a few grand
You've obviously not used Bitcoin a lot.
You can have as many wallets as you like and a wallet can generate as many "addresses" as you want to receive money on. Outsiders have no idea that two distinct Bitcoin destinations aren't in fact the same wallet.
Additionally, only the network as a whole really knows where the transactions are coming from, an individual Bitcoin user doesn't (otherwise it would be pointless!). It's peer-to-peer so somewhere, some peer knows what IP generated that transaction. But without having control of a vast proportion of the whole network, down to the IP level, there's no way to reliably trace anything back to a "real" IP, person, wallet.
Transactions are logged. But with wallet addresses. And you can tell what wallet addresses should have how much money in each. But you can't tell which wallet addresses are the same address, nor where they come from, nor who owns them. A transaction will just appear in the blockchain and come from several thousand peers almost simultaneously who share the information across the network and even the first one on the list isn't necessarily the client who first saw the transaction.
And those clients are private peer-to-peer clients. If my client was the first to see your transaction, you'd have to raid ME to get the IP information from my systems - and what are the chances of a random Bitcoin user having full network traces of all the actions on their network, going back to the transaction you're interested in, by the time you find them?
Transactions are basically sent to random people in the swarm. They talk to more random people and eventually the network all sees the transaction. Finding out which Bitcoin address first saw the transaction is nigh-on impossible even with complete knowledge. Raiding them and finding information on their systems that links back that transaction to an originating IP is incredibly unlikely even if you could do that. And if they used Tor or a proxy to initiate the transaction? You're stuffed.
Even collection of funds? They can publish any number of Bitcoin wallet addresses that secretly correspond to a single wallet and anyone who sends them money will NEVER KNOW where it's going. The transaction goes into the swarm and after a while, all clients agreed that wallet address X has amount Y in it. The total wallet, though, might have several million addresses associated with it and even the last client on the route to informing that wallet of a received transaction won't ever know that it's talking to the wallet holder.
No matter what you think of it as a currency, Bitcoin is a fabulously-designed anonymous transaction protocol. About the only threat is one entity holding 50% of the hashing power, but that just gives them the power to control the block chain, not identify users.
There's any number of ways, it's just a matter of how careful you are.
Control a botnet, use that, make sure the botnet can't be traced back to you.
Use public wifi in random locations at random times. Pretty damn easy to do even if you're broadcasting a static MAC - those sorts of places rarely have proper logs.
Use tor, proxies, intermediaries (shell servers bought with Bitcoin etc. would be hard to trace, etc.). There are any number of ways.
But the important thing is to be careful and watch the trail that you're leaving. Anyone with half-an-IT-brain should be able to do that, if they really want to. The fact that others are caught, whenever you hear the story, is normally down to some boasting or weak link in the chain where they got sloppy.
It's not like criminal forensics at a crime scene where it's almost impossible to cover your tracks. You are in control of every packet you send from every location and what it contains and what information that can be linked to. It's just a question of knowing that and not getting cocky / sloppy.
That said, it's still quite impressive that (if they exist) this person has managed to do so for this long.
Define furniture.
If you want all-wooden gear and solid plastics like you'd use in an office, then making room for a cable / box isn't difficult. Hell, computer desks have existed for decades. Look into schools, where they have some lovely (and ludicrously expensive) desking solutions for IT suites.
The problem is that most home furniture ISN'T like that. If it is wooden, it's quite ornate and not really suited to drilling huge holes in for cables and power strips. And the rest of it is fabric, leather, and other materials that don't bode well for permanent electrical installation.
The fact of the matter is that most people dangle cables because most furniture doesn't incorporate them (and they do exist, don't kid yourself, but they are rare precisely because nobody wants them or the hassle - the closest you really get are the integrated horrible American idea of "lazeeboys" or whatever they're called with sound systems built in), and that's on their own head.
Building a fabric sofa, for example, with power ports on it that needs to cope with kids jumping on the sofa, drinks being spilled on it, etc. etc. isn't something that a company wants to take liability for. From a liability point of view, you're looking at IP67 sockets with tough metal housings integrated into a relatively flimsy supporting structure that is soft and moves a lot. You're also exposed to the problems of fire and fire retardant materials which probably makes it quite expensive before you start. And then you have to cater for every possible combination of layout (i.e. where do you pull the power lead out of the back of the sofa to, how long can it be, etc.?), heatflow, etc. There's a reason that 99.9% of the electrical items in your house use solid materials for the main electricity-carrying-parts and fabric only for covers (at a suitable distance, e.g. lampshades) and not for the main parts.
There's just too much to take account of. Sure you can do it. Sure, an electrician who was handy with tools would get it done right in his own home. But selling them to the general public is a bit of a liability nightmare. And, to be honest, they make the furniture look damn ugly, whereas a socket can be tucked out of the way when you're finished with it.
Similarly, I want to wire my shed at the bottom of my garden. To pay an electrician to do it properly will cost a fortune and involve digging a 65 foot long trench and dropping a very expensive armoured cable into it, fitting a fuse box, wiring into the house mains, losing a lot of electrical power because of the voltage drop at such a distance, lots of waterproofing and compliance testing and all sorts.
My solution? I bought a caravan "commando connector" socket, such as are used on building and caravan sites, and will have it fitted and certified by an electrician. It's waterproof and the only bit that needs to be "certified" to be legal. It's not the local government's business unlike if I have a permanent installation to the shed (which is actually illegal in my jurisdiction unless a qualified electrician signs off on the whole installation).
What you plug into it? That's up to you. Sure, if I kill someone, I'll be sued, but I don't have to check in with every wiring change or have huge underground cables dug in and certified in order to use it.
Then I can buy pre-made extension cables and pre-made socket adaptors to give you normal sockets on the other end. If one breaks? I buy another. I don't need it recertified. Not an ideal permanent solution, but it does what I need it to and requires the minimum of certification and regulation on my part (all the equipment is tested elsewhere before I buy it, etc.). And I can plug in a lamp or a charger or a tool in while in the shed and not have to worry about it. And I don't have to think when digging over the garden beds about what's running underneath them.
The fact is, electrical certification has some serious consequences and costs to it. And in Europe at least, you would have
That's right.
So basically, all these fancy energy-saving methods we've been implementing lately have been wiped out by things that are EVEN WORSE for the grid than what we had.
Electric cars, supercapacitors, etc. all add to PEAK usage. Between 5:30 and 6:00 everyone is going to be putting their 8KW charger on, even if only for a second, and raising peak time usage (which means that even more capacity has to be brought online - sometimes for hours before and after - to cope with demand and we'll be "even more" idle throughout the rest of the day).
And, shockingly, the only plants that can really handle those are the old-fashioned, always-on, slow-to-ramp-up-and-down, coal, oil, gas and nuclear plants. Or HUGE inefficiencies from renewables.
I just find it ironic that at the time we're pushing for low power, variable, "always on" supplies, we're pushing for gadgets that need high peak load, or high load for a LONG time generally.
The point is that threatening legal action costs the person you're threatening. Not everyone even has a few hundred dollars to retain a lawyer no matter how briefly. Yes, you might "get it all back" but at great risk even if you are completely innocent and the charges are groundless.
A threatening letter from a lawyer doesn't have to go through another expensive lawyer. Sure, if you try to get clever, you can dig yourself in deeper, but the fact is that if you can't afford to fight the case, then you sure as hell can't afford to do anything at all - even the simplest of letters from your lawyer will not make the case go away every time, but will cause huge bills unless you find a no-win, no-fee lawyer.
Courts are quite reasonable in this regard. You just write back a letter that says "I have received your letter dated XX/XX/XXXX. I believe it to be without merit." (or similar). That's it. Just send it back. Let *them* take *you* to court if you're sure you're innocent. There, THEY have to prove YOU did it. With expensive lawyers and to a legal standard. And once you get there, junior lawyers will often jump for the chance to advise on a case for free. Once it's in court, your legal fees will be paid if you're victorious and it will be stupidly expensive if not so you have nothing to lose. Hell, if you are forced to take out a loan to hire a lawyer, it can often happen that the other side has to pay the loan too. And you will KNOW that it's time to hire a lawyer or face worse problems.
However, before it gets to court, there's no point settling unless you are guilty (and sometimes not even then) as it will only be to your detriment. Settlement paperwork often has clauses that say you were guilty and accept that you did it. It's then an irrevocable fact of law that you can't ever contest. This is also why "no comment" exists, and why you have the right to say nothing when arrested, and why you SHOULD say nothing until a lawyer arrives. However, if you are innocent, there's no harm in saying "No, I didn't do that, etc." By letter, being silent is easily confused with ignorance, disregard, attempts to evade justice, etc. so you just write back and say, in effect, "Nope".
Even if settle only to get away from the case, you are forever taking responsibility for that event. If it later comes up in another case that "if you did X, then you must have done Y" (i.e. if you downloaded that tune at that time on that day, then that MUST have been you driving your car past your house a minute earlier, etc.) then you are stuffed.
Until something lands in court, you don't need a lawyer. It may be prudent if you can afford it, but lots of people can't. And in the same way you don't need a lawyer to go over your terms and conditions of every service you use, or approve everything you say to a sales person, you don't need a lawyer in the early stages of response to threats like that.
I have been threatened with court several times. Funnily, it's never actually happened.
First, over a mobile phone contract (with phone) that never arrived at my door, was never signed by me, and I phoned up to REPORT IT MISSING / STOLEN. They wanted to force me to pay for the contract (for the whole year!), pay for the missing phone, pay for any replacement, etc. They threatened all sorts, in writing and on the phone. I wrote back, stated my side, and let them get on with it.
I can see it from their point of view - I ordered a phone, it might have arrived and I've done a runner with it. Sure. I get that. It's a valid case that there might be a simple answer to or that might need taking to court to get to the facts of the matter.
They harassed me for a month with letters and phone calls and after a while, I just stopped answering or answered only with "Sorry, your company has threatened me with legal action. Therefore, I will not discuss the issue."
In the end, I had the bank force a refund of my money that they'd taken (with zero problems, actually, it took only ten mi
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html
It's actually an Americanism and not "wrong", so much as "superfluous" (i.e. unnecessary, not incorrect).
I'm not sure it does.
"there are infinitely many pairs of primes that are less than 70 million units apart"
It just means that the individual primes in the pairs must be 70 million units apart (from each other) or less. (and where the hell did "unit" come from? Do they mean integer?)
Not that single primes must be. Not that one pair from the next must be. You could have twin prime pairs at any interval so long as the other half of the pair is within 70 million integers.
Unless I'm reading it wrong. The thing about maths is, you have to be VERY precise and not leap into assumptions without testing them very, very, very thoroughly first. 99.99999% certain isn't good enough for a mathematician.
How long before we can extend this Aliens-wise and get a working motion tracker?
I could rant too, but I just need to pick up on something.
Current estimates of WHAT WE KNOW NOW, just for Uranium, with current technology and current prices? Gives us about 700 years of nuclear power. If we haven't found something else by then, we're in trouble. And that's JUST Uranium.
Oil? In terms of usefulness for energy production, we'll be lucky to get 100. Damn lucky.
Flying is pretty safe when done right. We got there in the end. Space travel is pretty safe when done right. We got there too. And we got there by government intervention. It's not good enough to write off a technology because people mishandle it - we have to find ways to make mishandling impossible and/or impose extremely severe penalties for mishandling, with billions of guidelines for what to do and what not to do. Fact is, 50 years ago we were still putting asbestos in buildings materials. It took a LONG time to learn that it was stupid and even longer for government to stop it happening. But abandoning all housebuilding until we sort the problem wasn't really an option.
Some countries don't need nuclear power. Granted. Some do. Exports from the US can't covert the world. And there's a question of efficiency. Although the US *might* be able to produce all its own energy - at what cost? Not just environmental (apparently, that's our grandchildren's problem, as always), but sheer financial. Not much scales as nicely as nuclear, or we wouldn't still be using it. When you "need" Gigawatts, you have two choices - fossil or nuclear. The renewables are an interesting distraction at the moment, but we could really argue that until Uranium runs out.
And, to be honest, nobody cares about yours or my opinions. They mean nothing. What matters is that it's possible to make an AWFUL lot of money out of nuclear by providing a product that people are willing to pay through the nose for (electricity) DESPITE the huge amount of infrastructure, planning, waste disposal, and safety concerns. No nuclear power station has ever not been profitable for the people running it.
The trick is not to argue over how to supply people with megawatt-hours of electricity to their house. We have any number of ways to do it, and they all cost about the same in the long run. The trick is to work out how to stop people requiring megawatt-hours of electricity each in the first place. Because that's madly-unsustainable in the long-term until we have some other technological breakthrough.
Fact is, until then, we're like someone in the 1920's arguing over what blend of petrol is more efficient in our non-catalytic-convertor cars, while still making a big mess for others to clear up through what is basically laziness and greed.
Never really "got" MMORPG's. My brother was mad on MUD's back in his university days and I kind of got that. You would literally stumble into the person who was building all the rooms, quests, objects, etc. and it was usually a small team who created things INSIDE the game, so they were having fun as well (I don't doubt there was a lot of coding involved, but a lot of actions performed actually worked in-game as some in-game "magic" or similar). They were playing Minecraft, basically, and everyone else was inside their dungeons. And they were free, and run by people who lovingly created them.
The next fad was the Diablo's etc. Basically an MMORPG set in a formulaic plot. Nothing bad about that the first few times through, and they are still quite fun to play even with the poor-equivalents today(e.g. Torchlight etc.). But no real huge amounts of replayability without someone else there to play with. And they were pay-for, but professional and well-polished, but limited and repeating.
But MMORPG's, they kind of take the worst of everything. Let's have lots of random idiots. Let's have restrictions on what you can do. Let's have a financial incentive to make you spend as long as possible getting to the things you want to do. Let's have no "creators", no change to the set-down mechanics of the world, except in some far-off office where they come up with insane ideas without much player feedback.
Let's instead have the story evolve very, very slowly and in huge pay-for leaps and people get little choice about whether it was good or not, or whether they pay or not. There's no feedback. No people with interest in the state of the world, only the economy (which, as we all know, can be a disaster even in real-life). You're paying to play a Diablo with a bunch of random people whose co-operation you require, who are all also paying. And every time there's a significant change in the world, you have to pay again or be stuck in the timewarp of "old".
I couldn't really see the attraction, and the people I know who do spend a fortune on WoW tend not to have been exposed to the games of old (like MUDs etc.), hell some of them I'd barely class as gamers - they are mainly just socialising while button-bashing and the gaming is second. Nothing wrong with that, but Facebook-in-Second-Life is not what I want.
The "serious" gamers I know are infinitely more likely to spend their money on non-subscription games and equipment. They might well buy a pack of games for their LAN party, and upgrade to the next version as a one-off payment if it's good enough (or even just to play it together as friends), but an ongoing subscription model just isn't their thing.
And the people I do know who did play WoW etc. have all given it up, and their only real "catch" to doing so is losing their accounts/characters/whatever. Without exception, though, they do give it up and just abandon what they had in there after a while, whether through financial problems, or time problems, or the breakup of their favourite group, or just sheer exhaustion at the virtual world (especially prevalent at "pay-for-the-next-expansion" time).
The free-to-play ones aren't really popular with the gamers I know either. I think the whole free-to-play concept is great - as a teenager, I would have been hooked and no doubt WOULD have ended up spending money (hell, even as it is, I've made money just playing free-to-play games to play the game and then selling the random junk I was awarded). But it attracts even more idiots, and profiteering. And with free-to-play, you are willing to suffer slight bugginess or changes or restrictions that you wouldn't accept elsewhere.
Like anything else, I don't get "subscription" payments. Of course I don't mind paying but an automatic payment on a schedule? I don't see the incentive for the creators to keep creating after a while. They earn just as much between updates as they do immediately after them.
The same reason people keep gym memberships going and why most gym