In many places (at least in Europe), electricity companies offer electricity at varying rate. This is typcially used by those needing a lot of electricity, such households using electric heating or factories. If you have an electric boiler for hot water (common in Europe in rural areas since natural gas is available on-site mostly only in cities or near gas fields), you can heat the water during a few hours the electricity company supplies you at the low rates (the contract usually specifies a minimum amount of hours per day that the electricity company has to supply you at the low rate) and then use it during the day.
If bitcoin miners would get electricity contracts with variable rates, both side could profit: The miners could cut costs by mining only during off-peak hours (maybe 20 hour per day). The electricity company would profit by demand being more even. At noon, the electricity would got to household for cooking and air conditioning, at other times it would got to the miners.
In the US, this model works well for other energy-intensive industries, such as aluminium smelting. Why not do the same for bitcoin mining?
Well-working cryptocurrencies seem like a good alternative, to Paypal and international wire transfers.
If bitcoin transaction fees were still as low as they used to be, businesses would offer it as an alternative to Paypal, etc.
If one of the other cryptocurrencies that have lower transaction fees would be as widely used as bitcoin, businesses would offer it as an alternative to Paypal.
So, there are legitimate uses, and it remains to be seen if cryptocurrencies will be used that way. But the reasons this is not currently happening are not a problem in the concept of cryptocurrencies. There was a time when many organization started accepting payments or donations in BTC; they stopped due to the high fees. I guess they are now waiting for one cryptocurrency to become dominant (and still have fast transactions at low fees), and will then accept payments in whatever cryptocurrency that would be
There also is "Grand Perfection. The pattern resembles "Semper Augustus" mmore closely than that on "Lilyflowering Marilyn", however, it is red at the bottom, and mostly white at the top, while on "Semper Augustus", the colors were more evenly distributed.
Anyway, both can be bought at a few cents per bulb in bulk these days.
I case you want to diversify from your cryptocurrencies investments:
Unfortunately, "Semper Augustus" is no longer available
The "Lilyflowering Marilyn" is a currently available, somewhat similar looking tulip. However, while it has the same colors, and a pattern somewhat resembling that of "Semper Augustus", the pattern on "Semper Augustus" was finer.
If you already got rich with cryptocurrencies, and have a bit of money to spend: The characteristic patterns on "Semper Augustus" we a side effect of a virus infection. There already way some research in which virus exactly; I guess most of the work is done, and with a bit of extra effort (and money), one could recreate "Semper Augustus" or a lookalike.
If that many minerss dropped out, bitcoin would become unuseable instantly and permanently. Mining difficulty adjusts very slowly; so after that many miners dropping out, mining would take two years per block for a while.
With about 2000 transactions per block, BTC could handle only 1000 transactions per year, with the usual 5 confirmations, it would take 10 years for a transaction to be confirmed..
Also, if the value doesn't drop instantly, 51%-attacks become easy. Just like it happened with Bitcoin Gold recently.
The power issue could be solved. There are alternatives to proof-of-work. I don't think BTC will move to them within reasonable time (just see how they handled the block size controversies, Segwit, etc). But other cryptocurrencies will, and could then make BTC irrelevant.
Is this model of cheap electricity up to a certain limit per household a US thing?
Normally one would expect good to become cheaper when bought in bulk. Especially for something like electricity, where the infrastructure for delivery has a substantial cost (so it is much more expensive to deliver x units to y housholds, with their wiring and meters each, than delivering x*y to a single bulk consumer).
Also unlike cooking and air conditioning, which tend to require electricity at a set time, bitcoin mining is very flexible. So the electricity companies could offer them flexible rates depending on current spot prices. Then miners could switch off their rigs during peak electricity demand, and mostly mine when there is excess electricity available (during times of low demand, or high supply). That way they would even help stabilize the network,
One can reasonably argue that the tulip bubble already started in the early 1920s. Back then it was mostly limited to the tulip Semper Augustus, though. In 1923 those were already trading at over 1000 florins per bulb, equivalent to about a 5 years salary for a skilled worker. The big crash happened in February 1937. That's 10 years of tulip bubble.
Your quote of 106 M USD is for launching up to 12,000 kg to GTO (2014 quote).
To compare launch prices a bit more information is needed.
The current Falcon 9 can launch 8,300 kg to GTO (without recovering the boosters) or up to 5,300 kg (recovering the boosters). Falcon 9 launch (with booster recovery) is 62 M USD (2016 quote).
There is no general rule here. It depends on countries and individual laws.
The GPDR explicitly states that it applies to data from people who are in the EU. Including non-EU citizens that happen to be in the EU, excluding EU citizens that happen to be outside the EU.
Other laws apply differently. E.g. many countries tax their citizens even when outside the country. The US goes unusually far in taxing even US citizens that never lived in the US (and demanding a large sum of money for getting rid of US citizenship). Most criminal law applies depending on where the crime was comitted, but some laws are applied depending on the nationality of the victim or accused, even if the crime happened outside the territory of the state that made the law.
There is an option in the thunderbird "View" menu to always display messages as plain text.
For those who want some middle ground, there is a "Simple HTML" option beside it that disables active content and remote loading, but otherwise displays HTML.
I use thunderbird on Debian GNU/Linux. My two main issues are:
It crashes once in a while, mostly when I click the send button after putting much effort into writing a long reply. I have learned to save the draft once in a while (or compose the text in a text editor, then copy it into thunderbird) in such situations now, but sometimes I forget. The crashes don't happen very frequently, on average about once per week, but can still be very annoying.
While the junk filter is ok for email, there is no support for junk filtering or even just killfiles in the newsreader.
The situation depends a lot on which games you like. For me, GNU/Linux is sufficient for gaming these days. I like transport simulations (such as Train Fever (AFAIR it was initially Windows-only, but that was a long time ago) and Transport Fever, historic grand strategy games (such as the Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis, Victoria and Crusader Kings series, economy/city builders, especially, when they have an interesting transport system (such as Cities: Skylines, Widelands). Round-based fantasy strategy games, especially those with a complex magic system (such as Dominions 3, 4) It has been years since I used Windows for games (when I was playing Overlord II a few years ago - I haven't played it in a while, but it got ported to GNU/Linux since).
The article states "According to the Worldwide Rail Organisation (UIC), the first high-speed train service began in 1964 - Japan's Shinkansen or bullet train. There had been significant speed records set before in Europe "
However, invention is not the same as regular service. And while most of the development happened in Europe (such as the 210 km/h German EMU record in 1903, the 1930s German and British steam records, the 1950s electrical engine records in France), the South Manchuria Railway was the fastest in Asia, and the Japanese high-speed system was initially built on experiences from (and by people with a background in the) South Manchuria Railway, run mostly by Japanese in China.
Randy Lewis is still active in the spider-goat research field. His group has had a small herd of about 30 of them at Utah State University for years. Current research seems to focus on separating the silk from the milk.
Since the deregulation only applies to variants that could have been created using traditional breeding, to create a new type of walking corn plant you'd need a preexisting walking corn plant.
However there should still be potential for profiting from deregulation while profiting when making dangerous stuff - you just have to stay within species bounds
The article is about plants, but an example from animals comes in handy: Killer bees. With CRISPR you could easily create them (as in fact real-life killer bees were created using traditional breeding). Or you could use CRISPR to go more directly for the intended result - increased honey production - that in a traditional breeding experiment resulted in killer bees instead.
Spider or goat dna is apple would mean transgenic plants. Those are still regulated.
The deregulation only applies to using CRISPR to create plants that could also have been created using traditional breeding.
The main advantage of using CRISPR that way is that it saves a lot of time and effort. Instead of doing a large number of breeding experiments and then selecting those that happen to have the desired comibination of genes one can now directly go for the desired result.
While the award is always given to someone who helped advance free software, there are many such people, and giving the award also sends a political message. The FSF is surely aware of that and gives the award accordingly.
IMO, clearly the main message of this award is that FSF wants to emphasize the importance of software freedom in implanted medical devices.
People always have a choice of refusing to use non-free software, usually at the cost of some convenience. In many areas (e.g. compilers) free software is so great that there is no such cost. In others areas it might be high. For implanted medical devices that cost is particularly high, usually the user's life or health.
To few people are aware of the issue, and too few are working on improving the situation. Giving the award to someone who has been working on the issue for a decade might help improve that a little bit.
Of course the award also sends other messages. With the recent dispute between SFLC and SFC, by giving the award to the executive director of the SFC, the FSF is also sending a message that they support the side that takes a tougher position on GPL enforcement.
While the award has mostly been given to those who advanced free software by writing code, it was always considered an award for those who advance free software, including those who do so in ways other than coding.
When Lawrence Lessing got the award in 2002 it wasn't for writing code.
As you could know by reading the summary, someone who worked to promote free software in the area of implanted medical devices, where previously only non-free software existed. The award has previously been given to people who did similar things (e.g. for 3D graphics drivers, Wifi drivers) by coding or advocacy.
Well, the FSF is definitely important when it comes to Free Software. This is their main award. It is given to people who did a lot to advance free software, often to some who brought free software into an area where previously only non-free software was available. Sometimes it is given to people who did so by writing code, sometimes to people who do so by advocacy, sometimes to people who did both.
Some past examples that I had known before include:
2000 Brian Paul, bringing freedom to 3D graphics drivers
2002 Lawrence Lessig, for promoting understanding of the political dimension of free software
2004 Theo de Raadt, bringing freedom to WiFi drivers
2015 Werner Koch, advancing free encryption software
But there are people on the list whose name I had never heard before.
While I hadn't known about Karen Sandler's work promoting free software for implanted medical devices before, successful work on such a cause would make her perfectly fit into the list of people who received the award.
By now, the patents for the ARM architectures up to ARMv5 should indeed have expired (current is ARMv8). ARM needs to keep extending the instruction set with new patented stuff to keep control. So I guess you could make a free ARM-compatible code as long as you either always stay 20 years behind on the current ARM version, or try to come up with an incompatible extension of the ARM architecture. The first doesn't look good if you want to have free cutting-edge technology. The second one looses most of the benefits of ARM compability, so you'd better choose some other established architecture, such as RISC-V instead.
Meltdown and Spectre are huge issues for Microkernels. For details see the answer to a question to one of the Hurd developers after the end of the FOSDEM 2018 talk on Hurd's PCI arbiter (minute 31:19 of the video)
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Typically the problem is peak consumption.
In many places (at least in Europe), electricity companies offer electricity at varying rate. This is typcially used by those needing a lot of electricity, such households using electric heating or factories. If you have an electric boiler for hot water (common in Europe in rural areas since natural gas is available on-site mostly only in cities or near gas fields), you can heat the water during a few hours the electricity company supplies you at the low rates (the contract usually specifies a minimum amount of hours per day that the electricity company has to supply you at the low rate) and then use it during the day.
If bitcoin miners would get electricity contracts with variable rates, both side could profit: The miners could cut costs by mining only during off-peak hours (maybe 20 hour per day). The electricity company would profit by demand being more even. At noon, the electricity would got to household for cooking and air conditioning, at other times it would got to the miners.
In the US, this model works well for other energy-intensive industries, such as aluminium smelting. Why not do the same for bitcoin mining?
Well-working cryptocurrencies seem like a good alternative, to Paypal and international wire transfers.
If bitcoin transaction fees were still as low as they used to be, businesses would offer it as an alternative to Paypal, etc.
If one of the other cryptocurrencies that have lower transaction fees would be as widely used as bitcoin, businesses would offer it as an alternative to Paypal.
So, there are legitimate uses, and it remains to be seen if cryptocurrencies will be used that way. But the reasons this is not currently happening are not a problem in the concept of cryptocurrencies. There was a time when many organization started accepting payments or donations in BTC; they stopped due to the high fees. I guess they are now waiting for one cryptocurrency to become dominant (and still have fast transactions at low fees), and will then accept payments in whatever cryptocurrency that would be
There also is "Grand Perfection. The pattern resembles "Semper Augustus" mmore closely than that on "Lilyflowering Marilyn", however, it is red at the bottom, and mostly white at the top, while on "Semper Augustus", the colors were more evenly distributed.
Anyway, both can be bought at a few cents per bulb in bulk these days.
I case you want to diversify from your cryptocurrencies investments:
Unfortunately, "Semper Augustus" is no longer available
The "Lilyflowering Marilyn" is a currently available, somewhat similar looking tulip. However, while it has the same colors, and a pattern somewhat resembling that of "Semper Augustus", the pattern on "Semper Augustus" was finer.
If you already got rich with cryptocurrencies, and have a bit of money to spend: The characteristic patterns on "Semper Augustus" we a side effect of a virus infection. There already way some research in which virus exactly; I guess most of the work is done, and with a bit of extra effort (and money), one could recreate "Semper Augustus" or a lookalike.
If that many minerss dropped out, bitcoin would become unuseable instantly and permanently. Mining difficulty adjusts very slowly; so after that many miners dropping out, mining would take two years per block for a while.
With about 2000 transactions per block, BTC could handle only 1000 transactions per year, with the usual 5 confirmations, it would take 10 years for a transaction to be confirmed..
Also, if the value doesn't drop instantly, 51%-attacks become easy. Just like it happened with Bitcoin Gold recently.
The power issue could be solved. There are alternatives to proof-of-work. I don't think BTC will move to them within reasonable time (just see how they handled the block size controversies, Segwit, etc). But other cryptocurrencies will, and could then make BTC irrelevant.
Is this model of cheap electricity up to a certain limit per household a US thing?
Normally one would expect good to become cheaper when bought in bulk. Especially for something like electricity, where the infrastructure for delivery has a substantial cost (so it is much more expensive to deliver x units to y housholds, with their wiring and meters each, than delivering x*y to a single bulk consumer).
Also unlike cooking and air conditioning, which tend to require electricity at a set time, bitcoin mining is very flexible. So the electricity companies could offer them flexible rates depending on current spot prices. Then miners could switch off their rigs during peak electricity demand, and mostly mine when there is excess electricity available (during times of low demand, or high supply). That way they would even help stabilize the network,
Should have been: 14 years of tulip bubble.
One can reasonably argue that the tulip bubble already started in the early 1920s. Back then it was mostly limited to the tulip Semper Augustus, though. In 1923 those were already trading at over 1000 florins per bulb, equivalent to about a 5 years salary for a skilled worker. The big crash happened in February 1937. That's 10 years of tulip bubble.
Your quote of 106 M USD is for launching up to 12,000 kg to GTO (2014 quote). To compare launch prices a bit more information is needed. The current Falcon 9 can launch 8,300 kg to GTO (without recovering the boosters) or up to 5,300 kg (recovering the boosters). Falcon 9 launch (with booster recovery) is 62 M USD (2016 quote).
There are plenty of countries that have laws that apply to people outside their territory.
If you matter to them, they will try to get you.
There are international arrest warrants. Many countries will not hand over their own citizens, but most will hand over citizens of other countries.
They might freeze your bank accounts at banks that do business in multiple countries.
There is no general rule here. It depends on countries and individual laws.
The GPDR explicitly states that it applies to data from people who are in the EU. Including non-EU citizens that happen to be in the EU, excluding EU citizens that happen to be outside the EU.
Other laws apply differently. E.g. many countries tax their citizens even when outside the country. The US goes unusually far in taxing even US citizens that never lived in the US (and demanding a large sum of money for getting rid of US citizenship). Most criminal law applies depending on where the crime was comitted, but some laws are applied depending on the nationality of the victim or accused, even if the crime happened outside the territory of the state that made the law.
There is an option in the thunderbird "View" menu to always display messages as plain text.
For those who want some middle ground, there is a "Simple HTML" option beside it that disables active content and remote loading, but otherwise displays HTML.
I use thunderbird on Debian GNU/Linux. My two main issues are:
The situation depends a lot on which games you like. For me, GNU/Linux is sufficient for gaming these days. I like transport simulations (such as Train Fever (AFAIR it was initially Windows-only, but that was a long time ago) and Transport Fever, historic grand strategy games (such as the Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis, Victoria and Crusader Kings series, economy/city builders, especially, when they have an interesting transport system (such as Cities: Skylines, Widelands). Round-based fantasy strategy games, especially those with a complex magic system (such as Dominions 3, 4) It has been years since I used Windows for games (when I was playing Overlord II a few years ago - I haven't played it in a while, but it got ported to GNU/Linux since).
China may be big, but not as big as the level they reached in those technologies might suggest.
China has more than twice the length of high-speed rail lines than the rest of the world combined.
The article states "According to the Worldwide Rail Organisation (UIC), the first high-speed train service began in 1964 - Japan's Shinkansen or bullet train. There had been significant speed records set before in Europe "
However, invention is not the same as regular service. And while most of the development happened in Europe (such as the 210 km/h German EMU record in 1903, the 1930s German and British steam records, the 1950s electrical engine records in France), the South Manchuria Railway was the fastest in Asia, and the Japanese high-speed system was initially built on experiences from (and by people with a background in the) South Manchuria Railway, run mostly by Japanese in China.
Randy Lewis is still active in the spider-goat research field. His group has had a small herd of about 30 of them at Utah State University for years. Current research seems to focus on separating the silk from the milk.
Since the deregulation only applies to variants that could have been created using traditional breeding, to create a new type of walking corn plant you'd need a preexisting walking corn plant.
However there should still be potential for profiting from deregulation while profiting when making dangerous stuff - you just have to stay within species bounds
The article is about plants, but an example from animals comes in handy: Killer bees. With CRISPR you could easily create them (as in fact real-life killer bees were created using traditional breeding). Or you could use CRISPR to go more directly for the intended result - increased honey production - that in a traditional breeding experiment resulted in killer bees instead.
Spider or goat dna is apple would mean transgenic plants. Those are still regulated.
The deregulation only applies to using CRISPR to create plants that could also have been created using traditional breeding.
The main advantage of using CRISPR that way is that it saves a lot of time and effort. Instead of doing a large number of breeding experiments and then selecting those that happen to have the desired comibination of genes one can now directly go for the desired result.
While the award is always given to someone who helped advance free software, there are many such people, and giving the award also sends a political message. The FSF is surely aware of that and gives the award accordingly.
IMO, clearly the main message of this award is that FSF wants to emphasize the importance of software freedom in implanted medical devices.
People always have a choice of refusing to use non-free software, usually at the cost of some convenience. In many areas (e.g. compilers) free software is so great that there is no such cost. In others areas it might be high. For implanted medical devices that cost is particularly high, usually the user's life or health.
To few people are aware of the issue, and too few are working on improving the situation. Giving the award to someone who has been working on the issue for a decade might help improve that a little bit.
Of course the award also sends other messages. With the recent dispute between SFLC and SFC, by giving the award to the executive director of the SFC, the FSF is also sending a message that they support the side that takes a tougher position on GPL enforcement.
While the award has mostly been given to those who advanced free software by writing code, it was always considered an award for those who advance free software, including those who do so in ways other than coding.
When Lawrence Lessing got the award in 2002 it wasn't for writing code.
As you could know by reading the summary, someone who worked to promote free software in the area of implanted medical devices, where previously only non-free software existed. The award has previously been given to people who did similar things (e.g. for 3D graphics drivers, Wifi drivers) by coding or advocacy.
Well, the FSF is definitely important when it comes to Free Software. This is their main award. It is given to people who did a lot to advance free software, often to some who brought free software into an area where previously only non-free software was available. Sometimes it is given to people who did so by writing code, sometimes to people who do so by advocacy, sometimes to people who did both. Some past examples that I had known before include: 2000 Brian Paul, bringing freedom to 3D graphics drivers 2002 Lawrence Lessig, for promoting understanding of the political dimension of free software 2004 Theo de Raadt, bringing freedom to WiFi drivers 2015 Werner Koch, advancing free encryption software But there are people on the list whose name I had never heard before. While I hadn't known about Karen Sandler's work promoting free software for implanted medical devices before, successful work on such a cause would make her perfectly fit into the list of people who received the award.
By now, the patents for the ARM architectures up to ARMv5 should indeed have expired (current is ARMv8). ARM needs to keep extending the instruction set with new patented stuff to keep control. So I guess you could make a free ARM-compatible code as long as you either always stay 20 years behind on the current ARM version, or try to come up with an incompatible extension of the ARM architecture. The first doesn't look good if you want to have free cutting-edge technology. The second one looses most of the benefits of ARM compability, so you'd better choose some other established architecture, such as RISC-V instead.
Meltdown and Spectre are huge issues for Microkernels. For details see the answer to a question to one of the Hurd developers after the end of the FOSDEM 2018 talk on Hurd's PCI arbiter (minute 31:19 of the video)
Philipp