We can compare it to rolling dice, where the dice can be loaded to shift the percentages. If we put a weight on the 1, we might roll a 1 half the time and randomly get 2 through 6 the rest of the time. In quantum mechanics we can preform calculations that change how the dice are loaded. Ideally, we can load the die so strongly that 2 through 6 are driven down to zero percent, and 100% of the time we "randomly" roll a 1.
Depending on the particular problem and the particular technology used, certain parts of the computer might not be working with a perfect-clean 100%. Particular parts of the computer might have the dice loaded to 99.9% randomly roll a particular result. Obviously we don't want a computer that's oly 99.9% right:D
Different kinds of quantum computers deal with that in different ways. The simplest example is a quantum computer that works on a beam of photons or something. A beam of light might contain a trillion photons per nanosecond. If 99.9% of those photons randomly come out on the right answer, the right answer obviously lights up brightly. The 0.1% of photons lighting up the various wrong answers will be too dim to notice.
For some quantum calculations they use the very simple technique of just running it a dozen times or something. There's basically a 99% chance you'll get a dozen matching correct answers, and a 1% chance you'll get eleven matching correct answers and one random error that you throw away. There is a minuscule chance you'll get (and throw away) two or possibly three garbage results out of the dozen, but the only way you would ever get a wrong answer from that is if the same wrong answer came up seven or more times at once, and mathematically that won't happen a million or billion years.
However for a "real" desktop-type quantum computer, there's a much more complicated and powerful technique they would build in.... error correcting bits and error correcting codes. By adding in a few extra bits, the computer can automatically spot and correct any random wrong values as soon as the appear. All of the automatic error correction stuff might make the computer something like 50% bigger or maybe twice the size, but it can easily match the (effectively zero) error rate of standard computers.
A South monopole or a North monopole would get pulled towards the earth's North or South pole. If we want it to keep going around in orbit we better make it an East or West monopole:)
Listen to what you're saying. You don't even care that the science is correct. All you care about is imagining malicious intent, seizing on any shred of FUD that could plausibly support some global-conspiracy-theory.
Are you suggesting he used fictitious data? No. Are you suggesting he used inaccurate data? No. Are you suggesting any errors in any of the calculations or other work? No. Are you suggesting the graph altered the outcome or the validity of research? No.
Exactly what "deception" are you suggesting he intended? Exactly what falsehood are you suggesting he deliberately wanted people to believe? And why?
You would not accept this from an anti-global warming person. You'd roast them for it.
If it altered the results you would have a point. But it didn't alter the results.
Maybe the graph should have been labeled in more detail, but that is a ludicrous nit-pick as "evidence" for some global conspiracy theory. If you dig through a hundred papers in any field I'm sure you'll find a couple of illustrations that could use better or more detailed labeling. You don't roast them over the coals for it when it doesn't materially affect anything.
Roast them for what? For using accurate data and writing a paper with correct conclusions?
When you start letting in a bunch of knobs you can turn until you get the answer you expect
He wasn't twiddling a knob to get a particular result.
Carbon dating has been directly and indirectly validated as accurate for dates prior to 1950. No one uses carbon dating data after 1950 because those results are known to be inaccurate. Atmospheric nuclear tests altered Carbon-14 levels enough to skew post-1950 carbon dating results.
Same thing here. Tree ring temperature data has been directly and indirectly validated as as accurate for dates prior to 1960. No one uses tree ring temperature data after 1960 because those results are known to be skewed. No one is engaging in any deception about that.
In any case, basic physics makes the whole denialism thing moot. The earth already has 50 degrees of warming from the natural gas levels in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases warm the planet for the same reason the inside of a car tends to get hot when parked in the sun. Visible sunlight comes in through the glass, it hits the inside surface, and it becomes infrared radiation. The infrared gets trapped inside by the glass. Visible sunlight comes in through the atmosphere, it hits the earth's surface, and it becomes infrared radiation. The infrared gets trapped inside by CO2 and other gases.
It's basic physics. The effect is real, it's undeniable, there's no dispute over it at all. It's just predicting the size of the effect that is extremely complicated, and predicting secondary climate effects is even harder. But it's impossibly to deny the basic effect is real. More CO2 has the effect of trapping more heat. And no one disputes that humans are causing CO2 levels to rise.
Scientists may reasonably disagree over the size of the effect. Politicians (and the public) may reasonably disagree over what (if anything) we should do about it. But denying that it's real is just plain wrong. And theories that ten thousand scientists are in some vast conspiracy to perpetrate a hoax is ridiculous.
So when the goal of the trick is to "hide the decline", which definition do you think is most applicable?
Again, "hide the decline" is three words clipped out of context. Whether it is a scientist engaging in deception, or denialists engaging in deceptive quote mining, depends entirely on what was actually being discussed.
What occurred was that decades of tree ring data was tossed out because it didn't fit thermometer temperatures
Right. Tree ring data going back something like a thousand years has been checked and cross-checked in a multitude of ways. It has been validated by weather and scientific temperature readings from the earliest existing such records through to 1960, and it has been validated by a multitude of other methods running back before direct temperature readings began.
From 1960 to the present tree right values are still mostly accurate, but they show a slow steady divergence from actual temperature readings.
It's no secret that tree ring data begins to lose accuracy after 1960. Scientists are openly trying to pin down the exact reason. There aren't many things that could reasonably be responsible for that sort of slow steady impact on global tree growth rates... it seems pretty obvious to me it will almost certainly be due to some aspect of atmospheric pollution levels. But as I said, scientists are busy researching the cause.
However the point here is that scientists know that something systematically throwing off tree ring data from 1960 on.
So, what is a the scientifically proper thing to with data when part of your data set verifies as accurate, and you know that something is throwing off the data after a certain point?
Well obviously you keep the known-good data and you discard the known-bad data.
It's quite common and normal in science to have multiple data sets, where various data sets have gaps or only cover certain ranges. You use the overlaps to cross-validate each data set, and you patch together the best available data for each range.
This whole climategate thing is a joke. The data supports global warming, the fuss here is over a graph patching together the best available data over different ranges in a perfectly honest attempt to present an accurate temperature graph over a complete time range.
He could have thrown out the post-1960 data and just drawn the exact same graph up to 1960, but he quite reasonably felt the graph would be more visually useful if it included temperature up to today. Filling in accurate modern temperatures was no intent to deceive anyone. The fact that tree ring growth rates begin to slightly diverge from temperatures is a well known issue in the climate field, and it is an area of active research.
The phrases "trick" and "hide the decline" certainly can be interpreted out of context in a nefarious manner, but in context the problem he was discussing was that part of his data set had a known problem showing a known FALSE SIGNAL decline in post 1960 temperatures. The "trick" he used was to use real and accurate temperature measurements to accurately present temperatures up to the present day. It was a "trick" to avoid awkwardly ending an illustration at 1960.
He wasn't fabricating or falsifying data. He was just trying to make the illustration more useful and give it a more full context by showing up-to-today temperatures.
It did create the possibility that someone might get the impression that the tree ring data ran up to today, but that obviously was not the intent. There would no purpose in that. The fact that post 1960 ring data diverges is no secret, and acknowledging it does not refute a planetful of other data all confirming warming.
The fact that the illustration went up to present day did not alter or misrepresent the scientific results.
The entire bruhaha is quote mining thousands of emails to find a few choice words to fit a global-conspiracy-theory that tens of thousands of scien
Note that how things should be is a completely different subject from what current law actually does say. Unfortunately those two subjects tend to bear little resemblance to each other when it comes to copyright law.
If he had a thousand infringing files, a judgement in the range of $250,000+ is far more likely than $1000, but only in instances where he has uploaded those files and the MAFIAA can convince a judge that multiple individuals downloaded those files.
Incorrect. As I said the law specifically allows the RIAA to completely bypass the issue of actual damages, and instead claim statutory damages. Statutory damages are dollar amounts written directly into law. I'm going to gloss over some minor details, but for the situation we are discussing the law says the statutory damage award must be a minimum of $750 and a maximum of $150,000 for each copyrighted work infringed.
If a case involves 1000 infringing files, the law does not permit a $1000 award. If 1,000 separate copyrights were infringed then the law mandates a minimum three-quarters of a million dollars damage award.
Again, I'm not talking about "should" here. I'm not arguing this is reasonable, that it's fair, that it's just, I'm not even claiming it's sane. I am stating that it is true. This is what is written in US law.
In fact it's even worse that that. We haven't even mentioned criminal law. Copyright industry lawyers have literally been writing the text of copyright legislation for decades, and then clueless legislators pass it as written. And of course being employed by the copyright industry, that law is written to be as biased as possible in favor of industry interests. And being lawyers, they of course are skilled at slipping in innocent-looking legal language to twist the law in obscene ways. In 1998 congress passed the NET act which contained a clause redefining the term "financial gain". They redefined "financial gain" to apply even when there is no money involved, and they redefined it such that it covers essentially all P2P infringement. This swept virtually all P2P infringement under the criminal infringement statutes. Criminal statutes that were originally intended to target major commercial manufacturing infringement operations. Almost everyone who has ever touched P2P is technically guilty of a felony, and subject to up to one or more years in federal prison. This criminal law is virtually never enforced, but the fact that people haven't been arrested and convicted for it does not alter the fact tens of millions of people technically are guilty of this felony, and could be arrested and imprisoned for it. Just a handful of P2P ordinary transfers is sufficient to qualify you for criminal "financial gain" copyright infringement.
Again, I'm not arguing this is how things should be. I'm stating this is what is currently written in US law.
One million copies of the same work would still only count once
Yeah, I was casually assuming each file represented a different song. Writing "per song" would have been more accurate.
Also, all the parts of a compilation or derivative work only count as one work, so if you copied an entire album, that only counts once no matter how many individual songs are in it.
The fact that there's an "album" copyright overlapping each of the individual song copyrights creates some interesting legal ambiguities. However as far as I'm aware the RIAA has been pressing cases based on individual song copyrights, and I believe the courts have been dealing with P2P cases on that basis.
If someone were to download a torrent of an album I have little doubt the RIAA would assert the dozen or so individual song copyrights. It would be interesting to see the defendant counterclaim he was downloading the album and that the individual song claims were redundant claim inflation.
If that did work, it would be interesting to see if the one-infringement counterclaim would fly when someone individually downloaded each song from an album from P2P, where P2P is effective treating each song as a separate work.
And if that does work, then there's the question of someone who specifically downloads two or three songs that happen to appear one the same album. Could he claim he merely partially infringed a single work? If not then you have the nonsensical case that downloading *all* the songs from an album could result in lower damages than downloading just some of the songs.
And then there's the fact that the same song is often released on different albums. Could the RIAA claim three songs infringe the copyrights on three different albums, while the defendant points to a different album that happens to contain those three songs? Given the large number of songs that have been released in different combinations on multiple albums, it becomes a mathematical nightmare. One side could cherry-pick albums to minimize the songs-on-an-album-overlap and maximize the number of album infringements claimed, while the other side could cherry pick a different set of albums to maximize the songs-on-album-overlap to minimize the number of albums infringed. There would be an exponentially large number of ways to group the songs onto cherry-picked albums. It could become an effectively unsolvable math problem just trying to determine the minimum and maximum counts would be for "number of albums infringed" if you're free to arbitrarily group songs onto cherry picked albums like that.
Are you aware of any P2P cases specifically dealing with the issue of grouping multiple song files into a single-album infringement?
Accusing someone of a "trick" is indeed an indictment. However as you obviously know, making an indictment does not mean the accused did anything wrong.
The word "trick" can mean a method of deception. The word "trick" can also mean a clever method for reaching a correct result.
For example when I need to multiply by 5, I sometimes use the trick of actually taking half the number and multiplying by 10. Like 8686*5... take half of 8686 is 4343... multiply by 10 is 43430. 8686*5 is indeed 43430. There is no intent to deceive in that "trick", and the final result is legitimate and correct.
One possibility is that the scientist was discussing a deception he was committing. Another possibility is that highly biased highly motivated people went digging through thousands of emails and found a few rare occasional phase which, out of context, could be interpreted is a way which fit their prejudices. Words or phrases which could be (innocently or maliciously) misrepresented to the public to paint Global Warming as a vast conspiracy and hoax.
So the question here is, do you actually care which side is engaging in misrepresentation? Are you actually interested in discussing what the scientist was actually writing about? Are you interesting in determining whether he was actually engaging in deception or whether he was actually handling the data in a proper and scientifically legitimate manner?
The only damages the RIAA can reasonably claim for you having pirated music is around $1/song.
No. In the US (and most other countries) the law says they can sue you for "actual damages" or for "statutory damages". In the US that is going to mean $750 to $150,000 per file. He has 60 gigs, and says maybe 10% could be infringing. That works out to around a thousand files. That means statutory damages can range from a minimum three-quarters of a million dollars, up to $150 million.
All without needing to demonstrate one cent of actual damages.
Yeah, I expected you to go down that path since it's the standard criticism to the Ryan voucher plan and nothing to do with what's under consideration here. This isn't about vouchers to purchase health insurance this is about a cash substitute that can only be used to purchase treatment.
I checked quote a few links on that through Google, and all of them say it's about vouchers to purchase insurance. In fact once of the links I checked was Ryan's own website where he himself says quote "a voucher with which to purchase insurance".
And beyond that, what you describe makes absolutely no sense. The majority of people aren't sick and wouldn't need to use even a fraction of the voucher in any given year, while on the other hand a $10,000 dollar voucher would have exactly ZERO VALUE for someone who requires a $40,000 surgery if they don't have $30,000 of their own cash in hand. It's not like you can use it to buy one-fourth of a surgery, and then go home and band-aid your organs back into your body.
Ryan's plan to control health care costs is to deny heath care to anyone with an existing heath issue (voucher or no voucher no insurance company is going to sell them coverage), and to deny health care to anyone who can't afford the price difference between his voucher and an actual insurance plan.
The plan you described would far worse, giving effectively no health care at all to anyone who has anything much more serious than a broken arm. You can't buy a voucher's worth of a surgery and go home. You can't cure a cancer worth of treatment.
It's the same reason the Republican proposals about "tax-free health savings plans" are ridiculous. Lots of people die without ever needing it, while anyone who actually does need it gets effectively no care the moment the surgery or effective treatment costs more than they've personally saved up. The whole issue with heath care is that you don't need it until you need it, and the moment you so need it... some drunk driver hit&runs you or you get some nasty disease or your baby is born needing surgery to repair a heart defect... then it's the rare huge bill all at once. One that can't be covered by a savings account, and which doesn't begin to be covered by giving everyone a voucher, unless those vouchers were pooled together as insurance payments.
Porsche fanatics will tell you that the 911's rear engine placement is actually an advantage in terms of traction during corner exit, so long as you are not foolish enough to lift the throttle in mid-turn.
Swell advice, so long as the universe is not foolish enough to present you with a hazard requiring you to back off on the gas.
It's not that the public education system doesn't teach these things.
Actually anything related to biology and evolution is a bit of a special case in that most high schools in the United States fail to teach a decent basic understanding of the subject. It's a very regional thing. Some parts of the country on usually do teach it, and other parts are abysmal. In some cases school boards, principals, and "science" teachers actively subvert the subject pushing anti-science creationist misunderstanding. And in all too many other cases, school boards, principals, and individual teachers gloss over biology or avoid it entirely to avoid the problem of irate clueless parents who come in screaming against it.
You receive half your DNA from each parent. Without crossover, there'd be only 4 possible children per parent pair.
That "4 possibilities" applies for each chromosome-pair that is inherited. Humans inherit 23 chromosome-pairs, each of which multiplies the number of combinations by 4. So even without considering the possibility for crossover, the number of different possible children works out to over 70 trillion.
Here's a link to a story containingh a video of the pose-and-photograph-mode. It doesn't have any "upskirt" shots, but it pretty well shows how absurd the entire issue is.
68.58% of the readers here have some level of OCD. Slashdot could run a story on some guy who says his turd looks like Jesus, and most Slashdot readers would have no choice but to click on it.
Vortex, Your experiment is a very poor design, fatally flawed. What is your controlled source for mutations? As far as I can see, you have none.
Mutations occur naturally, in every living thing. It is statistically impossible to not have new mutations in each individual that is born.
Thus this is not an experiment demonstrating evolution, which would require a source of beneficial mutations.
The "source" is life. Mutations are unavoidable in living things. Mutations are random, so it is unavoidable that some of them will be "beneficial", (where "beneficial" or is largely determined by the current enviornment).
You are simply redistributing existing genetic traits in descendant populations.
It would require DNA analysis to specifically identify the genetics, but presumably there were no tailless mice in his original population:D
In reality, evolutionary "science" will never actually be a branch of science until we have the ability to conduct experiments testing Darwin's key hypothesis: that RANDOM MUTATIONS provide beneficial variations upon which natural selection can act. That appears to be dozens, if not hundreds, of yeas off.
Only if you're posting from the 1800's or something. We've had the technology to do genetic sequencing for decades. The experiments you describe have been done, multiple times by different research teams, and have in fact repeatedly confirmed natural random mutations and natural selection producing creating beneficial new genes with new useful information for new valuable abilities. Off the top of my head, the two best documented experiments proving the evolution of new beneficial genes (and beneficial new abilities) would be e. coli evolving the ability to digest citric acid, and an experiment where some other bacteria evolved nylonase genes. (Note that the evolution of nylonase was first observed happening naturally downstream from nylon factories, but that evolution was later replicated in controlled laboratory experiments with a different species.)
So assuming you're posting from the 19th century or something, then yeah some day in the 20th century evolutionary "science" might actually become a branch of real science when we have the ability to conduct those experiments.
P.S. From everyone here in the 21st century, we send our greetings. You should come visit, or even join us and stay if you like:) Not only has evolution become a real proven science, we've even had men walk on the moon, and we've got this cool internet-thing where anyone with questions or doubts about evolution can go to this Google place and look up all the experiments that have been done confirming evolution.
Nylonase-generating organisms are merely speculated to have evolved a gene change via a beneficial mutation. None has been observed
Your information is out of date. After the discovery of natural evolution of nylonase in the wild, controlled laboratory experiments were conducted. We have in fact observed the evolution of nylonase in controlled experiments. Read the paper that was published on it.
the mutation has not been observed through gene sequencing before- and after-mutation populations, nor a mutagen identified. Indeed, until sequencing is perhaps a milllon times faster than today, such observation is virtually impossible.
First of all, I have no idea why you would expect some mutagen to be identified. Mutations naturally occur all the time. If a mutagen is applied it merely inflates natural mutation rates.
Secondly, you appear to be posting from a "today" which is some time in the mid 1980's or early 1990's. The speed and cost of gene sequencing has already improved by a factor in the ballpark of a million. There are commercial labs where you can get your entire human genome sequenced for a few thousand dollars. So yes, scientists obviously have been sequencing these genes, and they have identified the exact origin gene sequence, and identified the simple mutations that occurred in the evolution of nylonase. In one case a T was inserted into a largely repetitive gene sequence resulting in a frame shift.
Eventually it will be possible to conduct such experiments. Not today.
Yep, eventually. In like the late 1990's or early 2000's. Some time far far in the future when we have actual experimental proof of evolution in action, lol. Eventually we might even have personal computers and some sort of internet-thingie where we'll be able to go to some magical search engine-invention-thingie where we can find out stuff and all check what sort of evidence exists.
Eventually it may be possible. But not today. Because you're posting from like 1981.
I strongly disagree with fraud, and in particular fraudulently misrepresenting what people have said.
Harvardâ(TM)s Stephen Gould16 quite clearly recognizes the difference between evolution and mutations.
Fraud. Gould recognizes the difference between evolution and mutations the same way he recognizes the difference between a drop of water and atoms.
Gould's position is that mutations do accumulate over time, just like water atoms accumulate in the air. Gould's argument is basically that water atoms accumulate in the air over a week and hit a threshold "quickly" condensing into rain over an hour. Gould's position is that mutations do accumulate in a population over millions of years and they reach a threshold where they "quickly" (over tens of thousands of years) come together by Natural Selection transitioning to a new species. You have millions of rare mutations, then a collection of say a thousand rare mutations come together by Natural Selected where all individuals have those thousand (formerly rare) mutations.
Your link grossly misrepresents Gould's argument, and grossly misrepresents out-of-context the quotes they take from him.
But then Gould asks himself, âoeHow can such processes change a gnat or a rhinoceros into something fundamentally different?â Answering his own question in a later article, Gould17 simply says: âoeThat theory [orthodox neo-Darwinian extrapolationalism], as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy.â
That is gross FRAUD. They took two unrelated quotes from Gould and claimed one is an answer to the other. Gould's positions is that rhinoceros and gnats did evolve by mutations, and it was obviously a rhetorical question to discuss how that evolution happened when he said "How can such processes change a gnat or a rhinoceros into something fundamentally different?â. The second quot is NOT him "answering" the first quote "question". The second quote is Gould making a grandiose statement that smooth and steady dead in favor of his idea of uneven surges of strong rapid selection.
Answers in Genesis is perpetrating a gross fraud to misquote Gould. Gould's position is that many small mutations *do* combine resulting in all of the "large" changes of evolution. Answers in Genesis is taking carefully selected Gould quotes wildly out of context and surrounding them with their own fraudulent descriptive text trying to reverse the meaning of what Gould was actually saying.
After Answers in Genesis gets done misrepresenting Gould's words, they proceed to claim "Gould is far from an isolated example" grossly misrepresenting another quote:
Lewin quote:The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macro-evolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No.
And Answers in Genesis cut the quote off there. However in Lewin's very next sentence says "the two can more probably be seen as a continuum ". Again, Answers in Genesis is fraudulently misrepresenting what he was saying. The Answers in Geneisis author is either clueless what Gould and Lewin were actually talking about, or the author was deliberately misrepresenting the subject being discussed. The subject those people was a within evolution argument whether Natural Selection is steady and smooth, or if selection and speciation tends to occur in surges. The subject is whether there is something akin to a phase change like when water atoms relatively quickly condense into raindrops. No, there is no doubt that raindrops are compo
Here's something to think about though. If everyone were able to print money, money would be worthless. It would be completely over inflated and totally worthless. Why would I take money you printer when I can print my own? I think the same holds true of bitcoin. Someone with a bunch of computers laying around can just generate bitcoin all day long and cash it in. That seems, to me, to make the currency essentially worthless.
You comment is entirely based on an "if" assumption. And if your "if" assumptions were correct, then your conclusions would be correct. However you might note that BitCoins aren't worthless, demonstrating that your "if" assumptions must be mistaken somewhere.
BitCoins are not worthless, BitCoins are not having the wild inflation you predicted, and in fact BitCoins are currently undergoing the opposite of inflation. Their value has been greatly increasing. The growth in demand for BitCoins is far outstripping the supply of BitCoins.
BitCoins are a sophisticated, well designed, and functioning system. It doesn't have the flaws you think it has.
The part you are missing is that the generation of new BitCoins requires computation, it is competitive and it is adaptive. If I recall the production rate of BitCoins is something like one every 15 minutes on average. For the sake of argument lets assume there are currently a hundred people trying to generate BitCoins, and they each have 10 GPU cards working on it. That's probably very underestimated, but it gives us a nice round that it currently requires 1,000 GPU cards of computing power to "print" one new BitCoin every 15 minutes. Ok, so you go out and buy 1,000 GPU cards and set them all to work "printing" new BitCoins. That is enough power to generate one new coin every 15 minutes, but that is in addition to the other people trying to generate new BitCoins. So you have increased the total coin production rate to two coins every 15 minutes. You plan works great for a few hours, but the system is adaptive. The system only wants ONE coin every 15 minutes, and it adapts. The computation required to generate a coin will double, bringing the total production rate back down to one every 15 minutes.
You bought 1,000 GPUs and you're paying for the electricity to run them, but now it takes you a half hour on average to generating one new BitCoin. And as more people join the network, and they work on generating BitCoins, then the computation required to generate one new BitCoin will double again. Your 1,000 GPUs will only be generate a new BitCoin once an hour.
The generation of new BitCoins is competitive and adaptive. No matter how much processing power you use trying to "print money", the rate adapts such that one person "prints" one new coin every 15 minutes. The more people who try to do it, the more hardware and electricity and time it takes to generate new coins. The competitive nature means that the cost in electricity to "print money" will very quickly increase to match the value of the "money you're printing", meaning there is zero profit in trying to "print money".
In fact a lot of people are running BitCoin software for ideological or hobby reasons, meaning that the hardware and electric costs are actually higher than the value iof the BitCoins being generated. Trying to print BitCoin money is actually a financial loss.
It's funny how everyone here is acting like BitCoin is this super important thing that is gaining widespread acceptance. Go out on the street and ask someone what bitcoin is and they'll probably look at you funny followed by a "What's a bitcoin?"
You're right that almost no one has ever heard of a BitCoin, almost no one will accept BitCoin as monetary payment. However it is extremely significant in that BitCoin is a radically novel form of money, that it is a currency entirely based upon mathematics, that it is independent of any of any government, and that it has a number of qualities that
Slashdot Mirror
We can compare it to rolling dice, where the dice can be loaded to shift the percentages. If we put a weight on the 1, we might roll a 1 half the time and randomly get 2 through 6 the rest of the time. In quantum mechanics we can preform calculations that change how the dice are loaded. Ideally, we can load the die so strongly that 2 through 6 are driven down to zero percent, and 100% of the time we "randomly" roll a 1.
Depending on the particular problem and the particular technology used, certain parts of the computer might not be working with a perfect-clean 100%. Particular parts of the computer might have the dice loaded to 99.9% randomly roll a particular result. Obviously we don't want a computer that's oly 99.9% right :D
Different kinds of quantum computers deal with that in different ways. The simplest example is a quantum computer that works on a beam of photons or something. A beam of light might contain a trillion photons per nanosecond. If 99.9% of those photons randomly come out on the right answer, the right answer obviously lights up brightly. The 0.1% of photons lighting up the various wrong answers will be too dim to notice.
For some quantum calculations they use the very simple technique of just running it a dozen times or something. There's basically a 99% chance you'll get a dozen matching correct answers, and a 1% chance you'll get eleven matching correct answers and one random error that you throw away. There is a minuscule chance you'll get (and throw away) two or possibly three garbage results out of the dozen, but the only way you would ever get a wrong answer from that is if the same wrong answer came up seven or more times at once, and mathematically that won't happen a million or billion years.
However for a "real" desktop-type quantum computer, there's a much more complicated and powerful technique they would build in.... error correcting bits and error correcting codes. By adding in a few extra bits, the computer can automatically spot and correct any random wrong values as soon as the appear. All of the automatic error correction stuff might make the computer something like 50% bigger or maybe twice the size, but it can easily match the (effectively zero) error rate of standard computers.
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A South monopole or a North monopole would get pulled towards the earth's North or South pole. If we want it to keep going around in orbit we better make it an East or West monopole :)
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Listen to what you're saying. You don't even care that the science is correct. All you care about is imagining malicious intent, seizing on any shred of FUD that could plausibly support some global-conspiracy-theory.
Are you suggesting he used fictitious data? No.
Are you suggesting he used inaccurate data? No.
Are you suggesting any errors in any of the calculations or other work? No.
Are you suggesting the graph altered the outcome or the validity of research? No.
Exactly what "deception" are you suggesting he intended? Exactly what falsehood are you suggesting he deliberately wanted people to believe? And why?
You would not accept this from an anti-global warming person. You'd roast them for it.
If it altered the results you would have a point.
But it didn't alter the results.
Maybe the graph should have been labeled in more detail, but that is a ludicrous nit-pick as "evidence" for some global conspiracy theory. If you dig through a hundred papers in any field I'm sure you'll find a couple of illustrations that could use better or more detailed labeling. You don't roast them over the coals for it when it doesn't materially affect anything.
Roast them for what? For using accurate data and writing a paper with correct conclusions?
When you start letting in a bunch of knobs you can turn until you get the answer you expect
He wasn't twiddling a knob to get a particular result.
Carbon dating has been directly and indirectly validated as accurate for dates prior to 1950. No one uses carbon dating data after 1950 because those results are known to be inaccurate. Atmospheric nuclear tests altered Carbon-14 levels enough to skew post-1950 carbon dating results.
Same thing here. Tree ring temperature data has been directly and indirectly validated as as accurate for dates prior to 1960. No one uses tree ring temperature data after 1960 because those results are known to be skewed. No one is engaging in any deception about that.
In any case, basic physics makes the whole denialism thing moot. The earth already has 50 degrees of warming from the natural gas levels in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases warm the planet for the same reason the inside of a car tends to get hot when parked in the sun. Visible sunlight comes in through the glass, it hits the inside surface, and it becomes infrared radiation. The infrared gets trapped inside by the glass. Visible sunlight comes in through the atmosphere, it hits the earth's surface, and it becomes infrared radiation. The infrared gets trapped inside by CO2 and other gases.
It's basic physics. The effect is real, it's undeniable, there's no dispute over it at all. It's just predicting the size of the effect that is extremely complicated, and predicting secondary climate effects is even harder. But it's impossibly to deny the basic effect is real. More CO2 has the effect of trapping more heat. And no one disputes that humans are causing CO2 levels to rise.
Scientists may reasonably disagree over the size of the effect. Politicians (and the public) may reasonably disagree over what (if anything) we should do about it. But denying that it's real is just plain wrong. And theories that ten thousand scientists are in some vast conspiracy to perpetrate a hoax is ridiculous.
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So when the goal of the trick is to "hide the decline", which definition do you think is most applicable?
Again, "hide the decline" is three words clipped out of context. Whether it is a scientist engaging in deception, or denialists engaging in deceptive quote mining, depends entirely on what was actually being discussed.
What occurred was that decades of tree ring data was tossed out because it didn't fit thermometer temperatures
Right. Tree ring data going back something like a thousand years has been checked and cross-checked in a multitude of ways. It has been validated by weather and scientific temperature readings from the earliest existing such records through to 1960, and it has been validated by a multitude of other methods running back before direct temperature readings began.
From 1960 to the present tree right values are still mostly accurate, but they show a slow steady divergence from actual temperature readings.
It's no secret that tree ring data begins to lose accuracy after 1960. Scientists are openly trying to pin down the exact reason. There aren't many things that could reasonably be responsible for that sort of slow steady impact on global tree growth rates... it seems pretty obvious to me it will almost certainly be due to some aspect of atmospheric pollution levels. But as I said, scientists are busy researching the cause.
However the point here is that scientists know that something systematically throwing off tree ring data from 1960 on.
So, what is a the scientifically proper thing to with data when part of your data set verifies as accurate, and you know that something is throwing off the data after a certain point?
Well obviously you keep the known-good data and you discard the known-bad data.
It's quite common and normal in science to have multiple data sets, where various data sets have gaps or only cover certain ranges. You use the overlaps to cross-validate each data set, and you patch together the best available data for each range.
This whole climategate thing is a joke. The data supports global warming, the fuss here is over a graph patching together the best available data over different ranges in a perfectly honest attempt to present an accurate temperature graph over a complete time range.
He could have thrown out the post-1960 data and just drawn the exact same graph up to 1960, but he quite reasonably felt the graph would be more visually useful if it included temperature up to today. Filling in accurate modern temperatures was no intent to deceive anyone. The fact that tree ring growth rates begin to slightly diverge from temperatures is a well known issue in the climate field, and it is an area of active research.
The phrases "trick" and "hide the decline" certainly can be interpreted out of context in a nefarious manner, but in context the problem he was discussing was that part of his data set had a known problem showing a known FALSE SIGNAL decline in post 1960 temperatures. The "trick" he used was to use real and accurate temperature measurements to accurately present temperatures up to the present day. It was a "trick" to avoid awkwardly ending an illustration at 1960.
He wasn't fabricating or falsifying data. He was just trying to make the illustration more useful and give it a more full context by showing up-to-today temperatures.
It did create the possibility that someone might get the impression that the tree ring data ran up to today, but that obviously was not the intent. There would no purpose in that. The fact that post 1960 ring data diverges is no secret, and acknowledging it does not refute a planetful of other data all confirming warming.
The fact that the illustration went up to present day did not alter or misrepresent the scientific results.
The entire bruhaha is quote mining thousands of emails to find a few choice words to fit a global-conspiracy-theory that tens of thousands of scien
The onus should be on the MAFIAA to...
Note that how things should be is a completely different subject from what current law actually does say. Unfortunately those two subjects tend to bear little resemblance to each other when it comes to copyright law.
If he had a thousand infringing files, a judgement in the range of $250,000+ is far more likely than $1000, but only in instances where he has uploaded those files and the MAFIAA can convince a judge that multiple individuals downloaded those files.
Incorrect. As I said the law specifically allows the RIAA to completely bypass the issue of actual damages, and instead claim statutory damages. Statutory damages are dollar amounts written directly into law. I'm going to gloss over some minor details, but for the situation we are discussing the law says the statutory damage award must be a minimum of $750 and a maximum of $150,000 for each copyrighted work infringed.
If a case involves 1000 infringing files, the law does not permit a $1000 award. If 1,000 separate copyrights were infringed then the law mandates a minimum three-quarters of a million dollars damage award.
Again, I'm not talking about "should" here. I'm not arguing this is reasonable, that it's fair, that it's just, I'm not even claiming it's sane. I am stating that it is true. This is what is written in US law.
In fact it's even worse that that. We haven't even mentioned criminal law. Copyright industry lawyers have literally been writing the text of copyright legislation for decades, and then clueless legislators pass it as written. And of course being employed by the copyright industry, that law is written to be as biased as possible in favor of industry interests. And being lawyers, they of course are skilled at slipping in innocent-looking legal language to twist the law in obscene ways. In 1998 congress passed the NET act which contained a clause redefining the term "financial gain". They redefined "financial gain" to apply even when there is no money involved, and they redefined it such that it covers essentially all P2P infringement. This swept virtually all P2P infringement under the criminal infringement statutes. Criminal statutes that were originally intended to target major commercial manufacturing infringement operations. Almost everyone who has ever touched P2P is technically guilty of a felony, and subject to up to one or more years in federal prison. This criminal law is virtually never enforced, but the fact that people haven't been arrested and convicted for it does not alter the fact tens of millions of people technically are guilty of this felony, and could be arrested and imprisoned for it. Just a handful of P2P ordinary transfers is sufficient to qualify you for criminal "financial gain" copyright infringement.
Again, I'm not arguing this is how things should be. I'm stating this is what is currently written in US law.
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One million copies of the same work would still only count once
Yeah, I was casually assuming each file represented a different song. Writing "per song" would have been more accurate.
Also, all the parts of a compilation or derivative work only count as one work, so if you copied an entire album, that only counts once no matter how many individual songs are in it.
The fact that there's an "album" copyright overlapping each of the individual song copyrights creates some interesting legal ambiguities. However as far as I'm aware the RIAA has been pressing cases based on individual song copyrights, and I believe the courts have been dealing with P2P cases on that basis.
If someone were to download a torrent of an album I have little doubt the RIAA would assert the dozen or so individual song copyrights. It would be interesting to see the defendant counterclaim he was downloading the album and that the individual song claims were redundant claim inflation.
If that did work, it would be interesting to see if the one-infringement counterclaim would fly when someone individually downloaded each song from an album from P2P, where P2P is effective treating each song as a separate work.
And if that does work, then there's the question of someone who specifically downloads two or three songs that happen to appear one the same album. Could he claim he merely partially infringed a single work? If not then you have the nonsensical case that downloading *all* the songs from an album could result in lower damages than downloading just some of the songs.
And then there's the fact that the same song is often released on different albums. Could the RIAA claim three songs infringe the copyrights on three different albums, while the defendant points to a different album that happens to contain those three songs? Given the large number of songs that have been released in different combinations on multiple albums, it becomes a mathematical nightmare. One side could cherry-pick albums to minimize the songs-on-an-album-overlap and maximize the number of album infringements claimed, while the other side could cherry pick a different set of albums to maximize the songs-on-album-overlap to minimize the number of albums infringed. There would be an exponentially large number of ways to group the songs onto cherry-picked albums. It could become an effectively unsolvable math problem just trying to determine the minimum and maximum counts would be for "number of albums infringed" if you're free to arbitrarily group songs onto cherry picked albums like that.
Are you aware of any P2P cases specifically dealing with the issue of grouping multiple song files into a single-album infringement?
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The sheer idiocy of pretending that all of the people in any one occupation are exactly the same will become clear if you actually think about it.
You are presuming he is capable of thinking clearly about it.
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Accusing someone of a "trick" is indeed an indictment. However as you obviously know, making an indictment does not mean the accused did anything wrong.
The word "trick" can mean a method of deception.
The word "trick" can also mean a clever method for reaching a correct result.
For example when I need to multiply by 5, I sometimes use the trick of actually taking half the number and multiplying by 10. Like 8686*5... take half of 8686 is 4343... multiply by 10 is 43430. 8686*5 is indeed 43430. There is no intent to deceive in that "trick", and the final result is legitimate and correct.
One possibility is that the scientist was discussing a deception he was committing. Another possibility is that highly biased highly motivated people went digging through thousands of emails and found a few rare occasional phase which, out of context, could be interpreted is a way which fit their prejudices. Words or phrases which could be (innocently or maliciously) misrepresented to the public to paint Global Warming as a vast conspiracy and hoax.
So the question here is, do you actually care which side is engaging in misrepresentation? Are you actually interested in discussing what the scientist was actually writing about? Are you interesting in determining whether he was actually engaging in deception or whether he was actually handling the data in a proper and scientifically legitimate manner?
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The only damages the RIAA can reasonably claim for you having pirated music is around $1/song.
No. In the US (and most other countries) the law says they can sue you for "actual damages" or for "statutory damages". In the US that is going to mean $750 to $150,000 per file. He has 60 gigs, and says maybe 10% could be infringing. That works out to around a thousand files. That means statutory damages can range from a minimum three-quarters of a million dollars, up to $150 million.
All without needing to demonstrate one cent of actual damages.
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Without the Gold Rush California may not have developed anywhere near as much as it has.
If I were I rightwingnut I'd toss in some quip about "and nothing of value would have been lost".
Oh wait, if I were a right wingnut I wouldn't have a sense of humor.
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the barrel of the gun having limited life
I suspect the railgun barrel will have quite a long life, at least compared to whatever it's pointed at.
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Yeah, I expected you to go down that path since it's the standard criticism to the Ryan voucher plan and nothing to do with what's under consideration here. This isn't about vouchers to purchase health insurance this is about a cash substitute that can only be used to purchase treatment.
I checked quote a few links on that through Google, and all of them say it's about vouchers to purchase insurance. In fact once of the links I checked was Ryan's own website where he himself says quote "a voucher with which to purchase insurance".
And beyond that, what you describe makes absolutely no sense. The majority of people aren't sick and wouldn't need to use even a fraction of the voucher in any given year, while on the other hand a $10,000 dollar voucher would have exactly ZERO VALUE for someone who requires a $40,000 surgery if they don't have $30,000 of their own cash in hand. It's not like you can use it to buy one-fourth of a surgery, and then go home and band-aid your organs back into your body.
Ryan's plan to control health care costs is to deny heath care to anyone with an existing heath issue (voucher or no voucher no insurance company is going to sell them coverage), and to deny health care to anyone who can't afford the price difference between his voucher and an actual insurance plan.
The plan you described would far worse, giving effectively no health care at all to anyone who has anything much more serious than a broken arm. You can't buy a voucher's worth of a surgery and go home. You can't cure a cancer worth of treatment.
It's the same reason the Republican proposals about "tax-free health savings plans" are ridiculous. Lots of people die without ever needing it, while anyone who actually does need it gets effectively no care the moment the surgery or effective treatment costs more than they've personally saved up. The whole issue with heath care is that you don't need it until you need it, and the moment you so need it... some drunk driver hit&runs you or you get some nasty disease or your baby is born needing surgery to repair a heart defect... then it's the rare huge bill all at once. One that can't be covered by a savings account, and which doesn't begin to be covered by giving everyone a voucher, unless those vouchers were pooled together as insurance payments.
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Porsche fanatics will tell you that the 911's rear engine placement is actually an advantage in terms of traction during corner exit, so long as you are not foolish enough to lift the throttle in mid-turn.
Swell advice, so long as the universe is not foolish enough to present you with a hazard requiring you to back off on the gas.
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We're even more doomed as a species if you don't think about it.
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It's not that the public education system doesn't teach these things.
Actually anything related to biology and evolution is a bit of a special case in that most high schools in the United States fail to teach a decent basic understanding of the subject. It's a very regional thing. Some parts of the country on usually do teach it, and other parts are abysmal. In some cases school boards, principals, and "science" teachers actively subvert the subject pushing anti-science creationist misunderstanding. And in all too many other cases, school boards, principals, and individual teachers gloss over biology or avoid it entirely to avoid the problem of irate clueless parents who come in screaming against it.
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You receive half your DNA from each parent. Without crossover, there'd be only 4 possible children per parent pair.
That "4 possibilities" applies for each chromosome-pair that is inherited. Humans inherit 23 chromosome-pairs, each of which multiplies the number of combinations by 4. So even without considering the possibility for crossover, the number of different possible children works out to over 70 trillion.
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Here's a link to a story containingh a video of the pose-and-photograph-mode.
It doesn't have any "upskirt" shots, but it pretty well shows how absurd the entire issue is.
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Meesa have three words for yousa, and two of them are "Jar".
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68.58% of the readers here have some level of OCD.
Slashdot could run a story on some guy who says his turd looks like Jesus, and most Slashdot readers would have no choice but to click on it.
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Vortex, Your experiment is a very poor design, fatally flawed. What is your controlled source for mutations? As far as I can see, you have none.
Mutations occur naturally, in every living thing. It is statistically impossible to not have new mutations in each individual that is born.
Thus this is not an experiment demonstrating evolution, which would require a source of beneficial mutations.
The "source" is life. Mutations are unavoidable in living things. Mutations are random, so it is unavoidable that some of them will be "beneficial", (where "beneficial" or is largely determined by the current enviornment).
You are simply redistributing existing genetic traits in descendant populations.
It would require DNA analysis to specifically identify the genetics, but presumably there were no tailless mice in his original population :D
In reality, evolutionary "science" will never actually be a branch of science until we have the ability to conduct experiments testing Darwin's key hypothesis: that RANDOM MUTATIONS provide beneficial variations upon which natural selection can act. That appears to be dozens, if not hundreds, of yeas off.
Only if you're posting from the 1800's or something. We've had the technology to do genetic sequencing for decades. The experiments you describe have been done, multiple times by different research teams, and have in fact repeatedly confirmed natural random mutations and natural selection producing creating beneficial new genes with new useful information for new valuable abilities. Off the top of my head, the two best documented experiments proving the evolution of new beneficial genes (and beneficial new abilities) would be e. coli evolving the ability to digest citric acid, and an experiment where some other bacteria evolved nylonase genes. (Note that the evolution of nylonase was first observed happening naturally downstream from nylon factories, but that evolution was later replicated in controlled laboratory experiments with a different species.)
So assuming you're posting from the 19th century or something, then yeah some day in the 20th century evolutionary "science" might actually become a branch of real science when we have the ability to conduct those experiments.
P.S. From everyone here in the 21st century, we send our greetings. You should come visit, or even join us and stay if you like :) Not only has evolution become a real proven science, we've even had men walk on the moon, and we've got this cool internet-thing where anyone with questions or doubts about evolution can go to this Google place and look up all the experiments that have been done confirming evolution.
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Nylonase-generating organisms are merely speculated to have evolved a gene change via a beneficial mutation. None has been observed
Your information is out of date. After the discovery of natural evolution of nylonase in the wild, controlled laboratory experiments were conducted. We have in fact observed the evolution of nylonase in controlled experiments. Read the paper that was published on it.
the mutation has not been observed through gene sequencing before- and after-mutation populations, nor a mutagen identified. Indeed, until sequencing is perhaps a milllon times faster than today, such observation is virtually impossible.
First of all, I have no idea why you would expect some mutagen to be identified. Mutations naturally occur all the time. If a mutagen is applied it merely inflates natural mutation rates.
Secondly, you appear to be posting from a "today" which is some time in the mid 1980's or early 1990's. The speed and cost of gene sequencing has already improved by a factor in the ballpark of a million. There are commercial labs where you can get your entire human genome sequenced for a few thousand dollars. So yes, scientists obviously have been sequencing these genes, and they have identified the exact origin gene sequence, and identified the simple mutations that occurred in the evolution of nylonase. In one case a T was inserted into a largely repetitive gene sequence resulting in a frame shift.
Eventually it will be possible to conduct such experiments. Not today.
Yep, eventually. In like the late 1990's or early 2000's. Some time far far in the future when we have actual experimental proof of evolution in action, lol. Eventually we might even have personal computers and some sort of internet-thingie where we'll be able to go to some magical search engine-invention-thingie where we can find out stuff and all check what sort of evidence exists.
Eventually it may be possible. But not today. Because you're posting from like 1981.
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See
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/cfol/ch2-means.asp
You may not agree but give it a fair read
I strongly disagree with fraud, and in particular fraudulently misrepresenting what people have said.
Harvardâ(TM)s Stephen Gould16 quite clearly recognizes the difference between evolution and mutations.
Fraud. Gould recognizes the difference between evolution and mutations the same way he recognizes the difference between a drop of water and atoms.
Gould's position is that mutations do accumulate over time, just like water atoms accumulate in the air. Gould's argument is basically that water atoms accumulate in the air over a week and hit a threshold "quickly" condensing into rain over an hour. Gould's position is that mutations do accumulate in a population over millions of years and they reach a threshold where they "quickly" (over tens of thousands of years) come together by Natural Selection transitioning to a new species. You have millions of rare mutations, then a collection of say a thousand rare mutations come together by Natural Selected where all individuals have those thousand (formerly rare) mutations.
Your link grossly misrepresents Gould's argument, and grossly misrepresents out-of-context the quotes they take from him.
But then Gould asks himself, âoeHow can such processes change a gnat or a rhinoceros into something fundamentally different?â Answering his own question in a later article, Gould17 simply says: âoeThat theory [orthodox neo-Darwinian extrapolationalism], as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy.â
That is gross FRAUD. They took two unrelated quotes from Gould and claimed one is an answer to the other. Gould's positions is that rhinoceros and gnats did evolve by mutations, and it was obviously a rhetorical question to discuss how that evolution happened when he said "How can such processes change a gnat or a rhinoceros into something fundamentally different?â. The second quot is NOT him "answering" the first quote "question". The second quote is Gould making a grandiose statement that smooth and steady dead in favor of his idea of uneven surges of strong rapid selection.
Answers in Genesis is perpetrating a gross fraud to misquote Gould. Gould's position is that many small mutations *do* combine resulting in all of the "large" changes of evolution. Answers in Genesis is taking carefully selected Gould quotes wildly out of context and surrounding them with their own fraudulent descriptive text trying to reverse the meaning of what Gould was actually saying.
After Answers in Genesis gets done misrepresenting Gould's words, they proceed to claim "Gould is far from an isolated example" grossly misrepresenting another quote:
Lewin quote:The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macro-evolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No.
And Answers in Genesis cut the quote off there. However in Lewin's very next sentence says " the two can more probably be seen as a continuum ". Again, Answers in Genesis is fraudulently misrepresenting what he was saying. The Answers in Geneisis author is either clueless what Gould and Lewin were actually talking about, or the author was deliberately misrepresenting the subject being discussed. The subject those people was a within evolution argument whether Natural Selection is steady and smooth, or if selection and speciation tends to occur in surges. The subject is whether there is something akin to a phase change like when water atoms relatively quickly condense into raindrops. No, there is no doubt that raindrops are compo
That's why I get my news from Mandeldot and Slashbrot.
News For Nerds, Slightly More Fractal in Nature.
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Here's something to think about though. If everyone were able to print money, money would be worthless. It would be completely over inflated and totally worthless. Why would I take money you printer when I can print my own? I think the same holds true of bitcoin. Someone with a bunch of computers laying around can just generate bitcoin all day long and cash it in. That seems, to me, to make the currency essentially worthless.
You comment is entirely based on an "if" assumption. And if your "if" assumptions were correct, then your conclusions would be correct. However you might note that BitCoins aren't worthless, demonstrating that your "if" assumptions must be mistaken somewhere.
BitCoins are not worthless, BitCoins are not having the wild inflation you predicted, and in fact BitCoins are currently undergoing the opposite of inflation. Their value has been greatly increasing. The growth in demand for BitCoins is far outstripping the supply of BitCoins.
BitCoins are a sophisticated, well designed, and functioning system. It doesn't have the flaws you think it has.
The part you are missing is that the generation of new BitCoins requires computation, it is competitive and it is adaptive. If I recall the production rate of BitCoins is something like one every 15 minutes on average. For the sake of argument lets assume there are currently a hundred people trying to generate BitCoins, and they each have 10 GPU cards working on it. That's probably very underestimated, but it gives us a nice round that it currently requires 1,000 GPU cards of computing power to "print" one new BitCoin every 15 minutes. Ok, so you go out and buy 1,000 GPU cards and set them all to work "printing" new BitCoins. That is enough power to generate one new coin every 15 minutes, but that is in addition to the other people trying to generate new BitCoins. So you have increased the total coin production rate to two coins every 15 minutes. You plan works great for a few hours, but the system is adaptive. The system only wants ONE coin every 15 minutes, and it adapts. The computation required to generate a coin will double, bringing the total production rate back down to one every 15 minutes.
You bought 1,000 GPUs and you're paying for the electricity to run them, but now it takes you a half hour on average to generating one new BitCoin. And as more people join the network, and they work on generating BitCoins, then the computation required to generate one new BitCoin will double again. Your 1,000 GPUs will only be generate a new BitCoin once an hour.
The generation of new BitCoins is competitive and adaptive. No matter how much processing power you use trying to "print money", the rate adapts such that one person "prints" one new coin every 15 minutes. The more people who try to do it, the more hardware and electricity and time it takes to generate new coins. The competitive nature means that the cost in electricity to "print money" will very quickly increase to match the value of the "money you're printing", meaning there is zero profit in trying to "print money".
In fact a lot of people are running BitCoin software for ideological or hobby reasons, meaning that the hardware and electric costs are actually higher than the value iof the BitCoins being generated. Trying to print BitCoin money is actually a financial loss.
It's funny how everyone here is acting like BitCoin is this super important thing that is gaining widespread acceptance. Go out on the street and ask someone what bitcoin is and they'll probably look at you funny followed by a "What's a bitcoin?"
You're right that almost no one has ever heard of a BitCoin, almost no one will accept BitCoin as monetary payment. However it is extremely significant in that BitCoin is a radically novel form of money, that it is a currency entirely based upon mathematics, that it is independent of any of any government, and that it has a number of qualities that
Wasn't there a story once about a turtle racing a rabbit?
I think I heard that one. They both get eaten by a dragon at the end, right?
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