Humans are social creatures. They have a need to belong, to be in a group. If you exclude all 'brands' from your identity, you become a loner. Also, people of exceptional talent create exceptional, popular works. Its unlikely your talent is as exceptional, and so few of the things you create from scratch, as "your own brand" can be better than you can find if you seek.
So, instead, people find things they like and gather around them. They build upon them, make them better, expand on them, add personal touches. Very few can create something both original and notable enough to create a following after their own brands. Most find common theme to unite them as a group - follow something established. Are they all losers?
Please note: the brony society is big and rich and can provide quite a bit in means of social interactions and interests.
The fact the social interactions don't involve beer and sports on TV doesn't mean they are adversely affected.
So, you have a hobby: say, art involving metalworking. You can try going with your original ideas and get maybe 20 people interested in your custom minted coins. Or you can mint an Equestrian Bit, get featured on Equestria Daily and get thousands views and quite a few orders.
You have a hobby: hiking. You can gather a company of hiking friends and discuss routes and equipment on your trip, and eventually seek common subjects, maybe hi-tech gizmos. Or you can gather a bunch of hiking bronies and sing pony songs on campfire stops, discuss fanfics, and joke about pony stuff.
It's only when ponies replace other hobbies they become a problem. If they add to them, they are nothing but a boon.
Most users would be mining on CPU power, and that means very poor chance to get any results while wasting enormous amounts of electricity.
You should look at the Mining hardware comparison. Summarizing: Best Xeon setups get 66Mhash/s and most common desktop setups go 1-10Mhash/s
Meanwhile, FPGA mining devices reach 1000-10,000Mhash/s and ASIC ones get order of 10,000-60,000 at powers like 600W.
Now to get power comparable to a single ASIC rig you'd need roughly 1000 customers running 24/7 or 33,000 customers running 5h a week.
33,000 CPUs running at full power, zero energy saving, to produce results comparable with a 600W appliance. This is to stay moderately competetive and get *some* ROI.
While the cost is distributed between the customers, the real cost - the amount of energy wasted - is staggering.
You select the target with your iris and eye gestures, recognized by cybereye or goggles. Target gets a highlight/targetting frame. You move the gun so that the reticle (based on gun-mounted camera) on your HUD enters the defined targetting frame. The moment the gun detects the match (reticle enters the frame = the gun is aimed at the target), it fires, hitting the highlit target.
This is how a smart gun is supposed to work. Not some shmancy safety feature.
Still, they'd have an awfully difficult time restricting charcoal, raw iron, or diesel oil. Moreover, owning a gun-producing factory is perfectly legal but prohibitively expensive. They restrict stuff to make things they want restricted prohibitively difficult to obtain (be it due to price, availablity, or legal requirements). We proceed into territory of more ubiquitous, common, necessary in day-to-day- life. The point where these meet is what is legal and obtainable - push it one way oranother and the reach changes. It's a moving frontline, banning more is just as hard as getting into more generic territory with manufacture.
If you want to make a smoothbore single-shot, sure, that's easy. Now if you want a rifled barrel, a bolt and bolt carrier for semi-auto gas-operated rifle... a simple garage-style lathe won't be enough, and you'll need a lot of skill with non-CNC equipment.
It's all about availablity. This whole endeavor is so that you wouldn't need three years of training in metalworking to make a functional semiautomatic gun.
Remember, slippery slope: a massive ban of everything would be difficult. OTOH, tightening the screw gradually, restricting them part-by-part would be much more "doable" - note how nowadays modding of AK-47 is a special puzzle of what parts must be domestically produced and what you are not allowed to include. IIRC, getting a pistol grip for it is nearly impossible. That way, regulation by regulation, this could be done without getting the public outrage.
The high-profile ones who can afford a smuggled gun and ammo don't bother mugging people in dark alleys.
The small-time ones lack contacts and money to get smuggled guns. Note obtaining guns locally illegally is nearly impossible, the trade is very heavily regulated and there are too few gun owners with too good security for a small fish bandit to rob to steal their gun - besides, why risking robbing a guy who has a gun while there are so many who don't have one?
In the US the cat is out of the box - too many guns "out in the wild" and any ban will remove them from hands of citizens while leaving them in hands of bandits. Here the regulation is old, and in the "times of communism" armed robbery was a good way to go to prison for a long, long time - say what you want, the police was *very* efficient - so most people just turned in any leftover guns from IIWW and so nowadays guns are simply out of reach of small-time bandits.
In this solution the stress on the gun is relatively minor and it really could fire multiple bullets. The bullets are actually tiny rockets - they contain propellant they burn as they fly.
The disadvantages are low power at point blank and short range, and obviously increased complexity and price of the rounds - which could be 3D printed just the same but not easy to make.
In these places ammo is strictly controlled too. It's difficult to obtain illegally - purchase from a legal gun owner can get said owner ears deep in shit so that's not a viable avenue for common street criminals - and the high-profile ones can afford smuggled guns of high quality, don't need printed ones.
In other words: if you can obtain ammo illegally, you don't need a printed gun, you can get a real one illegally.
Depends on the size of the plastic. I assure you a 9mm round embedded in a 1mx1mx1m of ABS with only canals for the bullet and firing pin will not make the entire block of plastic explode.
I imagine the design could be quite viable as a revolver where the whole drum with rounds and barrels built in is replaceable and each round has its own single-use barrel. Reloading involves replacing the whole drum.
What I find would be quite difficult though is getting your own rounds made from scratch / from generic parts with reasonable efficiency.
Unfortunately depending on a technicality of law that is easily overturned (the fact that only the lower is regulated) will not get you far. Restricting sales of most gun parts (and even ammo!) wouldn't be hard.
Only assuring every part of the gun can be made personally or from parts too generic to be easily banned (as they are too common in day-to-day non-weapon applications) will assure the government won't stop your production ability with a simple act like restricting sale of receivers.
Restricting sale of 3/4" plumbing pipe will be much harder than restricting sale of rifled barrels.
They require only generic parts that are obtainable off-the-shelf and needed in hundreds of applications - impossible to regulate (and also available as parts of generic appliances one can dismantle).
It's not about "do it without use of any factory products", it's about "do it with products the government is unable to restrict."
Gas power plants are simply expensive though - gas is expensive, which is a waste.
Also, while spike in demand for power is a rare thing, an unexpected drop due to malfunction is fairly common and then the surplus energy is wasted until the power grid catches up (pumps get started, furnaces temperature is reduced.)
There are also unexpected spikes in power supply from wind turbines. I could write a book of gripes the energy people have against that...
For this to happen people would need to start withdrawing gold from the bank valuts en masse. Which is unlikely to happen, because these with biggest owners know that if shit hits the fan they will be left out in the cold. So, bank manager goes to prison, meanwhile 300 billionaires are left with half of their fortunes gone. Does the bank manager in prison somehow return their gold? Does the sudden crisis and crash in economy profit any of them? Nope, none of the participants are interested in straightening this out because none know who would be hurt the worst.
This is one huge ugly elephant in the room nobody is willing to look at because the moment they do the elephant will make elephant-sized shit on the carpet. Let the virtual gold lie next to real gold and as long as you don't start checking if it's virtual it won't vanish - nobody really knows whose gold is real and whose is virtual, so in case yours is virtual - do you really want to know?
...also, there's several times more ETFs for gold than actual gold was mined in the history. Whose ones are based on gold that has mysteriously gone missing or otherwise got "created" is not entirely sure, but unless you want to be sure you own that gold, you better own a valut.
I switched because you failed to provide any solid arguments: Just vague "The same as".
Now, do bitcoins suffer from the same shortfall as gold does?
You mean they require expensive valuts to store? You mean their deposits are controlled by government? You mean transporting an amount of several million BTC requires extreme security measures, disruptive convoys and an army of security? You mean they are easy to fake by hollowing out and pouring alternative alloy of similar density inside? You mean purity of a bitcoin can't be easily established except by expert with specialist chemical equipment? You mean the gold mining process causes contamination of environment with quicksilver? You mean they can't be sent quickly over-the-wire instead of having to deliver them as physical entities to the recipient?
Most of these are the primary reasons why gold was replaced with notes. The story of loss of binding of the paper money value to gold backing it is a later case, and considering what that change brought, it's very, very arguable it was an improvement.
And if divisibility of bitcoin onto two 0.5BTC units (similar to $1 into two 50-cent units) makes it cease to be currency, could you enlighten me HOW? Or is it the case that dollar granularity is limited at $0.01, while bitcoin granularity can go all the way down to floating point precision? AFAIK, major stock markets use far deeper granularity than $0.01 in their trades, so I really don't see your point.
And could you please stop replying to your own posts and start attaching your replies to posts you actually reply to?
Bitcoin can be divided into two 0.5BTC pieces, or into 10,000 0.0001BTC pieces harmlessly and it doesn't cease to be a currency that way. Now try to divide your bag of potatoes in such a way that you can easily cash out exactly 0.23BOP (BagOfPotatoes) in exchange for your ice cream.
Yes, these all prevent disastrous consequences at cost of significant losses (I hope you realize the total loss between pumping water and recovering that energy by releasing it?) The flywheels contain minutes of power, which is barely sufficient to start the pumped-storage turbines, and these barely contain what is needed to contain shortages until an additional block of a coal power plant is started. Starting/extinguishing a boiler of a coal power plant is several days, increasing it by 10% is many hours. Yes, supply doesn't run at peak, but it runs way above the momentary lows of demand, and enormous amounts of power are wasted on lossy rapid access storage methods.
Gold is immune to oxidation and very malleable (which increases contact surface), and that causes superior conductivity of gold-plated contacts compared to copper. Resistivity of contacts covered with gold is indeed much lower than that of copper contacts.
Slashdot Mirror
Humans are social creatures. They have a need to belong, to be in a group. If you exclude all 'brands' from your identity, you become a loner. Also, people of exceptional talent create exceptional, popular works. Its unlikely your talent is as exceptional, and so few of the things you create from scratch, as "your own brand" can be better than you can find if you seek.
So, instead, people find things they like and gather around them. They build upon them, make them better, expand on them, add personal touches. Very few can create something both original and notable enough to create a following after their own brands. Most find common theme to unite them as a group - follow something established. Are they all losers?
Please note: the brony society is big and rich and can provide quite a bit in means of social interactions and interests.
The fact the social interactions don't involve beer and sports on TV doesn't mean they are adversely affected.
So, you have a hobby: say, art involving metalworking. You can try going with your original ideas and get maybe 20 people interested in your custom minted coins. Or you can mint an Equestrian Bit, get featured on Equestria Daily and get thousands views and quite a few orders.
You have a hobby: hiking. You can gather a company of hiking friends and discuss routes and equipment on your trip, and eventually seek common subjects, maybe hi-tech gizmos. Or you can gather a bunch of hiking bronies and sing pony songs on campfire stops, discuss fanfics, and joke about pony stuff.
It's only when ponies replace other hobbies they become a problem. If they add to them, they are nothing but a boon.
Note: five hours a week regardless of what system you have. And the game can't be too graphically intensive because the GPU will be busy mining...
Most users would be mining on CPU power, and that means very poor chance to get any results while wasting enormous amounts of electricity.
You should look at the Mining hardware comparison. Summarizing: Best Xeon setups get 66Mhash/s and most common desktop setups go 1-10Mhash/s
Meanwhile, FPGA mining devices reach 1000-10,000Mhash/s and ASIC ones get order of 10,000-60,000 at powers like 600W.
Now to get power comparable to a single ASIC rig you'd need roughly 1000 customers running 24/7 or 33,000 customers running 5h a week.
33,000 CPUs running at full power, zero energy saving, to produce results comparable with a 600W appliance. This is to stay moderately competetive and get *some* ROI.
While the cost is distributed between the customers, the real cost - the amount of energy wasted - is staggering.
You select the target with your iris and eye gestures, recognized by cybereye or goggles. Target gets a highlight/targetting frame.
You move the gun so that the reticle (based on gun-mounted camera) on your HUD enters the defined targetting frame.
The moment the gun detects the match (reticle enters the frame = the gun is aimed at the target), it fires, hitting the highlit target.
This is how a smart gun is supposed to work. Not some shmancy safety feature.
Upon pushing the trigger a display on the gun prompts:
Are you sure you wish to fire this gun?
[ok][cancel]
Still, they'd have an awfully difficult time restricting charcoal, raw iron, or diesel oil. Moreover, owning a gun-producing factory is perfectly legal but prohibitively expensive. They restrict stuff to make things they want restricted prohibitively difficult to obtain (be it due to price, availablity, or legal requirements). We proceed into territory of more ubiquitous, common, necessary in day-to-day- life. The point where these meet is what is legal and obtainable - push it one way oranother and the reach changes. It's a moving frontline, banning more is just as hard as getting into more generic territory with manufacture.
If you want to make a smoothbore single-shot, sure, that's easy. Now if you want a rifled barrel, a bolt and bolt carrier for semi-auto gas-operated rifle... a simple garage-style lathe won't be enough, and you'll need a lot of skill with non-CNC equipment.
It's all about availablity. This whole endeavor is so that you wouldn't need three years of training in metalworking to make a functional semiautomatic gun.
Remember, slippery slope: a massive ban of everything would be difficult. OTOH, tightening the screw gradually, restricting them part-by-part would be much more "doable" - note how nowadays modding of AK-47 is a special puzzle of what parts must be domestically produced and what you are not allowed to include. IIRC, getting a pistol grip for it is nearly impossible. That way, regulation by regulation, this could be done without getting the public outrage.
I wonder how viable electric primer - spark-based maybe? - would be.
The high-profile ones who can afford a smuggled gun and ammo don't bother mugging people in dark alleys.
The small-time ones lack contacts and money to get smuggled guns. Note obtaining guns locally illegally is nearly impossible, the trade is very heavily regulated and there are too few gun owners with too good security for a small fish bandit to rob to steal their gun - besides, why risking robbing a guy who has a gun while there are so many who don't have one?
In the US the cat is out of the box - too many guns "out in the wild" and any ban will remove them from hands of citizens while leaving them in hands of bandits. Here the regulation is old, and in the "times of communism" armed robbery was a good way to go to prison for a long, long time - say what you want, the police was *very* efficient - so most people just turned in any leftover guns from IIWW and so nowadays guns are simply out of reach of small-time bandits.
There is always the option of Gyrojet.
In this solution the stress on the gun is relatively minor and it really could fire multiple bullets. The bullets are actually tiny rockets - they contain propellant they burn as they fly.
The disadvantages are low power at point blank and short range, and obviously increased complexity and price of the rounds - which could be 3D printed just the same but not easy to make.
In these places ammo is strictly controlled too. It's difficult to obtain illegally - purchase from a legal gun owner can get said owner ears deep in shit so that's not a viable avenue for common street criminals - and the high-profile ones can afford smuggled guns of high quality, don't need printed ones.
In other words: if you can obtain ammo illegally, you don't need a printed gun, you can get a real one illegally.
Depends on the size of the plastic. I assure you a 9mm round embedded in a 1mx1mx1m of ABS with only canals for the bullet and firing pin will not make the entire block of plastic explode.
I imagine the design could be quite viable as a revolver where the whole drum with rounds and barrels built in is replaceable and each round has its own single-use barrel. Reloading involves replacing the whole drum.
What I find would be quite difficult though is getting your own rounds made from scratch / from generic parts with reasonable efficiency.
And what's the situation with AK-47?
Unfortunately depending on a technicality of law that is easily overturned (the fact that only the lower is regulated) will not get you far. Restricting sales of most gun parts (and even ammo!) wouldn't be hard.
Only assuring every part of the gun can be made personally or from parts too generic to be easily banned (as they are too common in day-to-day non-weapon applications) will assure the government won't stop your production ability with a simple act like restricting sale of receivers.
Restricting sale of 3/4" plumbing pipe will be much harder than restricting sale of rifled barrels.
They require only generic parts that are obtainable off-the-shelf and needed in hundreds of applications - impossible to regulate (and also available as parts of generic appliances one can dismantle).
It's not about "do it without use of any factory products", it's about "do it with products the government is unable to restrict."
Gas power plants are simply expensive though - gas is expensive, which is a waste.
Also, while spike in demand for power is a rare thing, an unexpected drop due to malfunction is fairly common and then the surplus energy is wasted until the power grid catches up (pumps get started, furnaces temperature is reduced.)
There are also unexpected spikes in power supply from wind turbines. I could write a book of gripes the energy people have against that...
For this to happen people would need to start withdrawing gold from the bank valuts en masse. Which is unlikely to happen, because these with biggest owners know that if shit hits the fan they will be left out in the cold. So, bank manager goes to prison, meanwhile 300 billionaires are left with half of their fortunes gone. Does the bank manager in prison somehow return their gold? Does the sudden crisis and crash in economy profit any of them? Nope, none of the participants are interested in straightening this out because none know who would be hurt the worst.
This is one huge ugly elephant in the room nobody is willing to look at because the moment they do the elephant will make elephant-sized shit on the carpet. Let the virtual gold lie next to real gold and as long as you don't start checking if it's virtual it won't vanish - nobody really knows whose gold is real and whose is virtual, so in case yours is virtual - do you really want to know?
...also, there's several times more ETFs for gold than actual gold was mined in the history. Whose ones are based on gold that has mysteriously gone missing or otherwise got "created" is not entirely sure, but unless you want to be sure you own that gold, you better own a valut.
And what is the efficiency of pumped storage plants? How many KWh can be recovered per MWh used up on pumping?
I switched because you failed to provide any solid arguments: Just vague "The same as".
Now, do bitcoins suffer from the same shortfall as gold does?
You mean they require expensive valuts to store?
You mean their deposits are controlled by government?
You mean transporting an amount of several million BTC requires extreme security measures, disruptive convoys and an army of security?
You mean they are easy to fake by hollowing out and pouring alternative alloy of similar density inside?
You mean purity of a bitcoin can't be easily established except by expert with specialist chemical equipment?
You mean the gold mining process causes contamination of environment with quicksilver?
You mean they can't be sent quickly over-the-wire instead of having to deliver them as physical entities to the recipient?
Most of these are the primary reasons why gold was replaced with notes. The story of loss of binding of the paper money value to gold backing it is a later case, and considering what that change brought, it's very, very arguable it was an improvement.
And if divisibility of bitcoin onto two 0.5BTC units (similar to $1 into two 50-cent units) makes it cease to be currency, could you enlighten me HOW? Or is it the case that dollar granularity is limited at $0.01, while bitcoin granularity can go all the way down to floating point precision? AFAIK, major stock markets use far deeper granularity than $0.01 in their trades, so I really don't see your point.
And could you please stop replying to your own posts and start attaching your replies to posts you actually reply to?
You really don't get it, do you?
Bitcoin can be divided into two 0.5BTC pieces, or into 10,000 0.0001BTC pieces harmlessly and it doesn't cease to be a currency that way. Now try to divide your bag of potatoes in such a way that you can easily cash out exactly 0.23BOP (BagOfPotatoes) in exchange for your ice cream.
Goddamnit, some people.
Yes, these all prevent disastrous consequences at cost of significant losses (I hope you realize the total loss between pumping water and recovering that energy by releasing it?)
The flywheels contain minutes of power, which is barely sufficient to start the pumped-storage turbines, and these barely contain what is needed to contain shortages until an additional block of a coal power plant is started. Starting/extinguishing a boiler of a coal power plant is several days, increasing it by 10% is many hours. Yes, supply doesn't run at peak, but it runs way above the momentary lows of demand, and enormous amounts of power are wasted on lossy rapid access storage methods.
Gold is immune to oxidation and very malleable (which increases contact surface), and that causes superior conductivity of gold-plated contacts compared to copper. Resistivity of contacts covered with gold is indeed much lower than that of copper contacts.