Firstly, we would expect the vast majority of people exchanging bitcoins for dollars not to be criminals. This means the DEA should have no basis of requesting a warrant for simply being a Bitcoin user, unlike for an address that receives drug money. Secondly, of all the criminals that use Bitcoin, we would expect drug sellers to be a (sizable) minority. There would pedos, spammers, hackers/assassins for hire, pimps, etc. It's like investigating ALL customers that walk into a bank for ALL known crimes: you might catch some drug dealers, but it's not a very effective way to do it.
That was a silly argument then, and it still is. In 15 century England the "money" used for paying taxes consisted of tally sticks, a special made wood currency that could be purchased for the sole purpose of paying taxes. Part of the initial capital of the Bank of England constituted of such sticks.
The government can demand taxes be paid in any currency, but it will always sell it to get what the government really needs, products and services. So the argument "but I can pay my taxes with it" is vacuous. As long as you have valuable stuff, you can buy whatever currency you need to pay your taxes. Always. Conversely, there's nothing a government can do to entice the society to use it's currency, short of using force, because the government can only debase it's currency, but never create wealth for the holders.
The PKI used is 256bit ECC, roughly equivalent to 3072bit RSA using best known attacks. ECC is a problem studied for well over 2 decades, and it's unlikely that a major break will come about from non-world famous mathematicians. The largest ECC key cracked via brute force had 112 bits. In short, maybe the US government can crack the PKI, but I doubt they would disclose that capability for such a trivial target.
A implementation bug is very possible and likely. Last year an integer overflow allowed someone to spend more than he had and he end up with a huge positive balance, much larger than the sum of all bitcoins in existence. When (not if) that happens again, expect major panic.
if my computer crashes and i lose my kids photos it doesn't mean i suddenly lose all my life savings
If you are too inept to securely backup a small file, then you can employ a 3rd party service to do it for you. The point is you don't have to. In the existing system, I would much rather manage my wealth using my computer, and send money to whomever I like away from the prying eyes of the banks, IRS, DHS, CIA,... . But I can't.
To mail cash to an online drug dealer, you need to know his address. Follow the money trail they say. Well, cryptocurrency breaks the money trail and it's a significant development, your reluctance notwithstanding. If successful, schemes such as Bitcoin might challenge current methods of law enforcement up to the point where some laws become anachronistic and unenforceable.
There was a word mix-up in my post. What I meant was: during his PhD a candidate should seize the unique opportunity of learning vast amounts of stuff useful for his future career. That is, a PhD should be a PhD regardless of the price, since it should be mainly individual effort involved and if you were right the individual would not have any incentive to cheat. The price/paycheck correlation is the major point of the steady "stream of/. articles ranting about how our education system is all wrong".
There's a damn good reason why fresh PhD grads are hired for technical research and not some 50 year old hobbyist.
Sure. Trouble is, the vast majority of PhD grads don't get into technical research, and in fact many of them end up in positions that a 50 year old hobbyist could fill. An advanced degree has become required for doing non-creative, 6-month apprenticeship type of jobs, and the employers can get away with it because of the oversupply of the labor market. This means allot of money and man-years wasted, and clearly points to the bubble in the formal education market.
I'm a bit baffled why you think "signaling higher commitment" is some kind of silly thing
It's a very silly thing when you are risking 4 years of your life and your financial freedom just to prove to the employer you have no other career option. School should be for learning, or at least that's the theory. The actual reasons to go to school currently are: - signaling, in the economic sense; the more elitist (expensive) the school, the better the signal - peering with future professionals in the field; ditto - learning
No one is denying getting a degree correlates with getting a nice paycheck. Problem is the cost are inflating fast while at the same time learning isn't getting any better. We're in full bubble mode, with signaling and peering driving the price of education when learning alone can't.
not strictly a matter of them already being more capable/dedicated in order to be accepted to very selective graduate programs, but the vast amount of learning that occurs in the process of doing independent study and research.
Why then the school price/salary correlation ? Surely a candidate will seize the unique opportunity of learning vast amounts of useful stuff in his future career, as opposed to say, skimming along a cheap PhD ?
As a grad student in engineering that has seen nearly all his friends at the BS, MS, and PhD levels all able to find good paying, stable jobs
Let me guess, all your friends have a PhD thesis in the exact domain their employer is active ? It surely couldn't be cherry-picking by the employers in a high unemployment situation where workers desperately try to signal their higher commitment to the profession and ability to follow instructions, with only marginal improvement in their skills from said degrees ? The later would surely explain why the exact same curricula gets you widely different salary outcomes depending on how expensive the school was.
Darlington's output is closer to 28TWh annually (3.5GW @92%) so using your method it's about 4 years repayment vs 7.5. So you are quite correctly comparing this solar plant with a definitely botched nuclear project (6000$/KW overnight, a frequent example of the anti-nuclear crowd), and finding that on-paper solar is 50% more expensive than botched nuclear. My point exactly ! What about 2000$/KW overnight nuclear, which was definitely proven possible if not typical ? What about solar cost overruns when trying to scale from 50MW to 5GW (if it's to have any significance) ? Would a 75 billion loan guarantee be required ?
"Nominal net" sure doesn't seem to indicate "peek".
Pardon the English lesson, but that's exactly what it indicates. Nominal implies the rating on the nameplate, the output power when running in nominal conditions, just like a 100W nominal light bulb will draw that amount of power only when on, and like a1000MW reactor will generate 92% of the time (average for the aging US fleet). A little arithmetic will solve this conundrum: if you divide the proposed figure of 480GWh/year to the number of hours per year, you will get 55MW average power. I just realized my 33 MW is off probably because it ignores the sun tracking abilities of the heliostat - in the desert land is cheap so up to a point you can pair lower power density with lower capital costs, by spacing heliostats so that they don't cast shadows on each other at low solar angles. With the revised figures you propose this project is still 3 to 7 times more expensive than nuclear, in government guarantees alone. The high energy prices in some specific location have little relevance in the abstract; investing in such high cost, speculative projects as opposed to proven cheap technology is a sure way to maintain those high prices for the foreseeable future.
I think nuclear is very close apple to green-apple comparison. No CO2 emissions during operation, unlike gas; the cost of generated electricity is dominated by capital costs (~80% for nuclear), unlike gas; the solar plant will not be free to operate either. Comparing the projected (optimistic) cost of the project with known botched nuclear projects is exactly my point: if it looks so bad on paper even if everything goes as planed, why take the trouble of building it ? Is there any risk that it will cost less ? Oh, I forgot, all sorts of wacky business ideas start to make sense when the costs of failure are socialized to me and you.
So this really doesn't seem to out of the realm of possible
Whoa there cowboy. When you hear things like "enough energy for X households", you can usually it's the greens trying to pull a fast one. Bear with my metric blabber for a moment...
The facility is rated at "110MW" in the article. It doesn't say what kind of MW (electric, thermal, peak, average), so I'm going to assume the most common kind: peak electric, the same way PV are rated: the electric output of the unit when operating at optimal perpendicular direct sunlight of 1KW/m^2. However the sun does not shine all day at max power (24KWh/day/m^2), and there are some cloudy days even in the desert, a good spot in Nevada can get about 7KWh/day/m^2 average year-round. So the average electrical power output of the plant is closer to 33MW. Mind you, this figure assumes the molten salt storage is perfectly efficient, and energy can be dispatched evenly throughout the 24h period as if generated on the spot. Also, only scheduled downtimes in cloudy days, no wasted sunny days.
Well then, the capital costs of the project come down to 23.000$/KW in government guarantees alone. The investors are most likely required to risk their own capital, but the article is silent on that. At the same time, nuclear costs 2000 to 5000$/KWh including decommissioning All in all, we are looking at a capital cost 5 to 11 times higher than nuclear, in loan guarantees alone. Even if the plant is rated 110 MWe average, which I very much doubt and which it must actually prove in operation, it's still more expensive in a perfect scenario than a botched nuclear project. `Nuff said.
On the same vein, there's a seems to be an edit war going happening right now over the entry for Vodka in the Russian Wikipedia. The hostilities have completely engulfed an unmapped Siberian outpost.
I take it you are against compulsory vehicle registration and license plates ? Or maybe that spectrum blocks should be auctioned in secret ? Nobody knows who is in the plain, car, or on the phone. The car itself, plane, or mobile network, as represented by the owners, should have limited expectations of privacy. From what I understand a list a flights was released, not a passenger list.
So you promote private jets because it provides the likes of you with employment ? Oh, the fallacy of "job creation". How about if keep your pay-check but instead of piloting you can mow some rich dude's lawn, and the copious resources wasted for giving him an incremental comfort over business class be employed for, you know, vaccines or irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa ?
this is a private person doing something privately with their earned fortune
Air space is a limited public good, and using it opens you to public inspection. It's the air space above MY lawn you are using. Even if the info was not available before, there's nothing immoral in releasing it, and the expectation for privacy is unreasonable in the context. You can make use your earned fortune in the privacy of your own property just fine.
Well, that's exactly how it should go. Given a certain level of wealth division in a society, the rich should be forced to pay their (higher) externalities. I consume more of nature's limited resources, you consume less, but we are created equal so I pay you for the privilege. The price of a certain resource caries important information into the market, and it allows the market to allocate it efficiently. If we agree the capacity of the ecosphere to absorb carbon dioxide is limited, with potential disastrous effects when exceeded, then we need to efficiently make use of the available margin. A method to accomplish that is via carbon caps or taxes, as opposed to 'just own it and go with it' method you propose, i.e a land-grab (resource-grab) by those in the best position to grab it (having the largest SUV, private jet, yacht etc.) despite having a no more legitimate claim on said resource than the average bushman or eskimo.
I think my rant was a bit unclear, and the accusations are without merit. To summarise, in a gold based system, there's no way to "amplify" phisical gold. The amount of high powered money/MB in the system is thus fixed. The same is true for bitcoin, and not true for fiat currencies.
I'm not saying that banking is impossible with gold (it's how it has originated), or that fractional reserve banking and thus bank runs are not possible. Since there's no central bank to enforce or even verify minimal reserves, there's nothing to stop an infinite expansion. It's however plausible that, assuming a completely unregulated market, that consumers will demand 3rd party auditing for the private banks, and a mutual insurance scheme equivalent to FDIC. This will thus force the banks to maintain minimal reserves and require sound collaterals, which will clearly curb the infinite credit expansion.
how are they going to forbid me to say "OK, I've got this debt claim, I'll give you that if you give me the bitcoins/something else I want to have"?
You can sell your claim to bitcoins to anyone who will accept it, but not to anyone who accepts bitcoins. This is a major split from fiat currency where, thanks to the involvement of the government, a claim on a dollar "deposited" in a bank is a dollar. The private bank has the government-given right to print new dollars, where as in the bitcoin system no one can fool the crypt algo - not even the creators themselves.
The notion of monetary expansion cannot be separated from government involvement. A bank accepting bitcoins will not be able to create new bitcoins, and the claims on the deposited bitcoins will be a curency of it's own. Just like in 18th-century United States, where multiple gold-backed dollars where circulated by private banks.
If a bitcoin is $8 now, even if let's say it rises to $20
Hijacking the thread to point a major flaw of Bitcoin: It's an inherently deflationary currency. Because it aims to be 100% distributed, there's no central mint that controls the bitcoin supply. To prevent inflation, the system is designed with a hard limit on the total amount of coins in circulation. This means that "mining" for coins will be get progressively harder until it will become virtually impossible to find new coins.
The engineers behind the project might not see deflation as a flaw, but an economist most likely does. The immediate consequence is that when bitcoins start to be traded in the real world for goods and services, the relative value of a coin will increase. If bitcoins gain popularity and their penetration increases by say 20% a year, the market will quickly attract speculators who will see hoarding of bitcoins as a high return investment, and they will hold on to those bitcoins for as long as the high returns will continue. As with any deflation, this will create artificial scarcity of money and halts economic trades: deflationary money "do not want" to be spent. Of course the high returns are nothing more than a bubble that will burst at some point, and the market becomes engulfed in coins from investors wanting to make an exit. The cycle could then resume - but of course other speculators will try to ride the bubble making the value of a bitcoin highly speculative and random.
The penetration of bitcoins in the real economy will undoubtedly be hampered by it's widely fluctuating value, and it will create an opportunity for speculators to extract undue profits from honest economic agents. An online store will be unwilling to sell for bitcoins inventory that was purchased for dollars for fear that it might not recoup his costs at tomorrow's bitcoin parity.
As much as I like the idea of a distributed and truly democratic currency, I don't think bitcoin is it, even assuming all other technical aspects are flawless. An effective currency must not be deflationary, and the money supply must expand with the size of the underlying economy - this is a key role that the central bank plays in almost any country. Any engineer looking into creating a new currency should understand this undertaking is essentially an economic feat, not a technical one, and should consider Keynes' General Theory as mandatory reading.
While this is obviously not aimed at desktops, couldn't this version of windows run on ARM-enabled desktops?
And if not desktops, maybe TVs, info-kiosks, ATMs etc. = semi-embedded machines with a limited scope and not really needing 100% backward compatibility. It's enough for a few critical pieces of software to be recompiled. Smart, internet enabled TVs and refrigerators ruining Android might become a huge growth market in the near future, and Microsoft clearly wants a piece.
Also, let's not forget about dynamic translation. Android applications themselves aren't naive ARM, rather JIT-compiled bytecode. I don't see why Microsoft can't take the same route as Apple (Rosetta) and reinvent Windows on ARM, while keeping low-performance backward compatibility for performance insensitive applications.
“I fell victim to a company that cold-called and fed me all the patter about viruses, and because I’m a computer Luddite they were phenomenally persuasive,” reported reader Cougar J. “I ended up going for their ‘Diamond’ option at £199.99. Now I’m petrified because I gave them all my credit card details and they also accessed my computer virtually.”
To support parent, here is an example of a person who could have easily fall for a myriad other "persuasive" phone calls. I say 200 quid is a great bargain for a priceless piece of education: don't give your credit card number and personal details to random callers. Being a computer Luddite has nothing to do with it, it's plain old stupidity.
I'm right now totally in favor of nuclear energy, but we need to all understand the very significant risks, and try to mitigate them as much as possible.
But we do, and we have. Newer reactor designs are inherently safe, don't need active cooling and don't have the nasty tendency to go critical or release explosive hydrogen. Someone needs to articulate this to the public - in the real world that lays outside our basements it's heresy to claim that nuclear is clean and actually good for the environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, we would expect the vast majority of people exchanging bitcoins for dollars not to be criminals. This means the DEA should have no basis of requesting a warrant for simply being a Bitcoin user, unlike for an address that receives drug money.
Secondly, of all the criminals that use Bitcoin, we would expect drug sellers to be a (sizable) minority. There would pedos, spammers, hackers/assassins for hire, pimps, etc.
It's like investigating ALL customers that walk into a bank for ALL known crimes: you might catch some drug dealers, but it's not a very effective way to do it.
That was a silly argument then, and it still is. In 15 century England the "money" used for paying taxes consisted of tally sticks, a special made wood currency that could be purchased for the sole purpose of paying taxes. Part of the initial capital of the Bank of England constituted of such sticks.
The government can demand taxes be paid in any currency, but it will always sell it to get what the government really needs, products and services. So the argument "but I can pay my taxes with it" is vacuous. As long as you have valuable stuff, you can buy whatever currency you need to pay your taxes. Always.
Conversely, there's nothing a government can do to entice the society to use it's currency, short of using force, because the government can only debase it's currency, but never create wealth for the holders.
The PKI used is 256bit ECC, roughly equivalent to 3072bit RSA using best known attacks. ECC is a problem studied for well over 2 decades, and it's unlikely that a major break will come about from non-world famous mathematicians. The largest ECC key cracked via brute force had 112 bits. In short, maybe the US government can crack the PKI, but I doubt they would disclose that capability for such a trivial target.
A implementation bug is very possible and likely. Last year an integer overflow allowed someone to spend more than he had and he end up with a huge positive balance, much larger than the sum of all bitcoins in existence. When (not if) that happens again, expect major panic.
if my computer crashes and i lose my kids photos it doesn't mean i suddenly lose all my life savings
If you are too inept to securely backup a small file, then you can employ a 3rd party service to do it for you. The point is you don't have to. ... . But I can't.
In the existing system, I would much rather manage my wealth using my computer, and send money to whomever I like away from the prying eyes of the banks, IRS, DHS, CIA,
To mail cash to an online drug dealer, you need to know his address. Follow the money trail they say. Well, cryptocurrency breaks the money trail and it's a significant development, your reluctance notwithstanding. If successful, schemes such as Bitcoin might challenge current methods of law enforcement up to the point where some laws become anachronistic and unenforceable.
Who the hell pays for porn?
Pedophiles.
I wonder what would the proponents of anonymous cash say when some kid will be raped live in exchange for bitcoins.
Regarding learning "useful stuff" during a career
There was a word mix-up in my post. What I meant was: during his PhD a candidate should seize the unique opportunity of learning vast amounts of stuff useful for his future career. That is, a PhD should be a PhD regardless of the price, since it should be mainly individual effort involved and if you were right the individual would not have any incentive to cheat. The price/paycheck correlation is the major point of the steady "stream of /. articles ranting about how our education system is all wrong".
There's a damn good reason why fresh PhD grads are hired for technical research and not some 50 year old hobbyist.
Sure. Trouble is, the vast majority of PhD grads don't get into technical research, and in fact many of them end up in positions that a 50 year old hobbyist could fill. An advanced degree has become required for doing non-creative, 6-month apprenticeship type of jobs, and the employers can get away with it because of the oversupply of the labor market. This means allot of money and man-years wasted, and clearly points to the bubble in the formal education market.
I'm a bit baffled why you think "signaling higher commitment" is some kind of silly thing
It's a very silly thing when you are risking 4 years of your life and your financial freedom just to prove to the employer you have no other career option. School should be for learning, or at least that's the theory. The actual reasons to go to school currently are:
- signaling, in the economic sense; the more elitist (expensive) the school, the better the signal
- peering with future professionals in the field; ditto
- learning
No one is denying getting a degree correlates with getting a nice paycheck. Problem is the cost are inflating fast while at the same time learning isn't getting any better. We're in full bubble mode, with signaling and peering driving the price of education when learning alone can't.
not strictly a matter of them already being more capable/dedicated in order to be accepted to very selective graduate programs, but the vast amount of learning that occurs in the process of doing independent study and research.
Why then the school price/salary correlation ? Surely a candidate will seize the unique opportunity of learning vast amounts of useful stuff in his future career, as opposed to say, skimming along a cheap PhD ?
As a grad student in engineering that has seen nearly all his friends at the BS, MS, and PhD levels all able to find good paying, stable jobs
Let me guess, all your friends have a PhD thesis in the exact domain their employer is active ? It surely couldn't be cherry-picking by the employers in a high unemployment situation where workers desperately try to signal their higher commitment to the profession and ability to follow instructions, with only marginal improvement in their skills from said degrees ? The later would surely explain why the exact same curricula gets you widely different salary outcomes depending on how expensive the school was.
Darlington's output is closer to 28TWh annually (3.5GW @92%) so using your method it's about 4 years repayment vs 7.5. So you are quite correctly comparing this solar plant with a definitely botched nuclear project (6000$/KW overnight, a frequent example of the anti-nuclear crowd), and finding that on-paper solar is 50% more expensive than botched nuclear. My point exactly !
What about 2000$/KW overnight nuclear, which was definitely proven possible if not typical ? What about solar cost overruns when trying to scale from 50MW to 5GW (if it's to have any significance) ? Would a 75 billion loan guarantee be required ?
"Nominal net" sure doesn't seem to indicate "peek".
Pardon the English lesson, but that's exactly what it indicates. Nominal implies the rating on the nameplate, the output power when running in nominal conditions, just like a 100W nominal light bulb will draw that amount of power only when on, and like a1000MW reactor will generate 92% of the time (average for the aging US fleet).
A little arithmetic will solve this conundrum: if you divide the proposed figure of 480GWh/year to the number of hours per year, you will get 55MW average power. I just realized my 33 MW is off probably because it ignores the sun tracking abilities of the heliostat - in the desert land is cheap so up to a point you can pair lower power density with lower capital costs, by spacing heliostats so that they don't cast shadows on each other at low solar angles. With the revised figures you propose this project is still 3 to 7 times more expensive than nuclear, in government guarantees alone.
The high energy prices in some specific location have little relevance in the abstract; investing in such high cost, speculative projects as opposed to proven cheap technology is a sure way to maintain those high prices for the foreseeable future.
I think nuclear is very close apple to green-apple comparison. No CO2 emissions during operation, unlike gas; the cost of generated electricity is dominated by capital costs (~80% for nuclear), unlike gas; the solar plant will not be free to operate either.
Comparing the projected (optimistic) cost of the project with known botched nuclear projects is exactly my point: if it looks so bad on paper even if everything goes as planed, why take the trouble of building it ? Is there any risk that it will cost less ?
Oh, I forgot, all sorts of wacky business ideas start to make sense when the costs of failure are socialized to me and you.
So this really doesn't seem to out of the realm of possible
Whoa there cowboy. When you hear things like "enough energy for X households", you can usually it's the greens trying to pull a fast one. Bear with my metric blabber for a moment...
The facility is rated at "110MW" in the article. It doesn't say what kind of MW (electric, thermal, peak, average), so I'm going to assume the most common kind: peak electric, the same way PV are rated: the electric output of the unit when operating at optimal perpendicular direct sunlight of 1KW/m^2. However the sun does not shine all day at max power (24KWh/day/m^2), and there are some cloudy days even in the desert, a good spot in Nevada can get about 7KWh/day/m^2 average year-round.
So the average electrical power output of the plant is closer to 33MW. Mind you, this figure assumes the molten salt storage is perfectly efficient, and energy can be dispatched evenly throughout the 24h period as if generated on the spot. Also, only scheduled downtimes in cloudy days, no wasted sunny days.
Well then, the capital costs of the project come down to 23.000$/KW in government guarantees alone. The investors are most likely required to risk their own capital, but the article is silent on that. At the same time, nuclear costs 2000 to 5000$/KWh including decommissioning
All in all, we are looking at a capital cost 5 to 11 times higher than nuclear, in loan guarantees alone. Even if the plant is rated 110 MWe average, which I very much doubt and which it must actually prove in operation, it's still more expensive in a perfect scenario than a botched nuclear project. `Nuff said.
On the same vein, there's a seems to be an edit war going happening right now over the entry for Vodka in the Russian Wikipedia. The hostilities have completely engulfed an unmapped Siberian outpost.
...legitimate, accurate content that the all-knowing editors...
Dr. Original Research Troll, I presume ?
I take it you are against compulsory vehicle registration and license plates ? Or maybe that spectrum blocks should be auctioned in secret ?
Nobody knows who is in the plain, car, or on the phone. The car itself, plane, or mobile network, as represented by the owners, should have limited expectations of privacy. From what I understand a list a flights was released, not a passenger list.
So you promote private jets because it provides the likes of you with employment ? Oh, the fallacy of "job creation".
How about if keep your pay-check but instead of piloting you can mow some rich dude's lawn, and the copious resources wasted for giving him an incremental comfort over business class be employed for, you know, vaccines or irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa ?
this is a private person doing something privately with their earned fortune
Air space is a limited public good, and using it opens you to public inspection. It's the air space above MY lawn you are using. Even if the info was not available before, there's nothing immoral in releasing it, and the expectation for privacy is unreasonable in the context. You can make use your earned fortune in the privacy of your own property just fine.
I'm rich, so I can buy my morality
Well, that's exactly how it should go. Given a certain level of wealth division in a society, the rich should be forced to pay their (higher) externalities. I consume more of nature's limited resources, you consume less, but we are created equal so I pay you for the privilege. The price of a certain resource caries important information into the market, and it allows the market to allocate it efficiently.
If we agree the capacity of the ecosphere to absorb carbon dioxide is limited, with potential disastrous effects when exceeded, then we need to efficiently make use of the available margin. A method to accomplish that is via carbon caps or taxes, as opposed to 'just own it and go with it' method you propose, i.e a land-grab (resource-grab) by those in the best position to grab it (having the largest SUV, private jet, yacht etc.) despite having a no more legitimate claim on said resource than the average bushman or eskimo.
I think my rant was a bit unclear, and the accusations are without merit. To summarise, in a gold based system, there's no way to "amplify" phisical gold. The amount of high powered money/MB in the system is thus fixed. The same is true for bitcoin, and not true for fiat currencies.
I'm not saying that banking is impossible with gold (it's how it has originated), or that fractional reserve banking and thus bank runs are not possible. Since there's no central bank to enforce or even verify minimal reserves, there's nothing to stop an infinite expansion. It's however plausible that, assuming a completely unregulated market, that consumers will demand 3rd party auditing for the private banks, and a mutual insurance scheme equivalent to FDIC. This will thus force the banks to maintain minimal reserves and require sound collaterals, which will clearly curb the infinite credit expansion.
how are they going to forbid me to say "OK, I've got this debt claim, I'll give you that if you give me the bitcoins/something else I want to have"?
You can sell your claim to bitcoins to anyone who will accept it, but not to anyone who accepts bitcoins. This is a major split from fiat currency where, thanks to the involvement of the government, a claim on a dollar "deposited" in a bank is a dollar. The private bank has the government-given right to print new dollars, where as in the bitcoin system no one can fool the crypt algo - not even the creators themselves.
The notion of monetary expansion cannot be separated from government involvement. A bank accepting bitcoins will not be able to create new bitcoins, and the claims on the deposited bitcoins will be a curency of it's own. Just like in 18th-century United States, where multiple gold-backed dollars where circulated by private banks.
If a bitcoin is $8 now, even if let's say it rises to $20
Hijacking the thread to point a major flaw of Bitcoin: It's an inherently deflationary currency. Because it aims to be 100% distributed, there's no central mint that controls the bitcoin supply. To prevent inflation, the system is designed with a hard limit on the total amount of coins in circulation. This means that "mining" for coins will be get progressively harder until it will become virtually impossible to find new coins.
The engineers behind the project might not see deflation as a flaw, but an economist most likely does. The immediate consequence is that when bitcoins start to be traded in the real world for goods and services, the relative value of a coin will increase. If bitcoins gain popularity and their penetration increases by say 20% a year, the market will quickly attract speculators who will see hoarding of bitcoins as a high return investment, and they will hold on to those bitcoins for as long as the high returns will continue. As with any deflation, this will create artificial scarcity of money and halts economic trades: deflationary money "do not want" to be spent. Of course the high returns are nothing more than a bubble that will burst at some point, and the market becomes engulfed in coins from investors wanting to make an exit. The cycle could then resume - but of course other speculators will try to ride the bubble making the value of a bitcoin highly speculative and random.
The penetration of bitcoins in the real economy will undoubtedly be hampered by it's widely fluctuating value, and it will create an opportunity for speculators to extract undue profits from honest economic agents. An online store will be unwilling to sell for bitcoins inventory that was purchased for dollars for fear that it might not recoup his costs at tomorrow's bitcoin parity.
As much as I like the idea of a distributed and truly democratic currency, I don't think bitcoin is it, even assuming all other technical aspects are flawless. An effective currency must not be deflationary, and the money supply must expand with the size of the underlying economy - this is a key role that the central bank plays in almost any country. Any engineer looking into creating a new currency should understand this undertaking is essentially an economic feat, not a technical one, and should consider Keynes' General Theory as mandatory reading.
While this is obviously not aimed at desktops, couldn't this version of windows run on ARM-enabled desktops?
And if not desktops, maybe TVs, info-kiosks, ATMs etc. = semi-embedded machines with a limited scope and not really needing 100% backward compatibility. It's enough for a few critical pieces of software to be recompiled. Smart, internet enabled TVs and refrigerators ruining Android might become a huge growth market in the near future, and Microsoft clearly wants a piece.
Also, let's not forget about dynamic translation. Android applications themselves aren't naive ARM, rather JIT-compiled bytecode. I don't see why Microsoft can't take the same route as Apple (Rosetta) and reinvent Windows on ARM, while keeping low-performance backward compatibility for performance insensitive applications.
“I fell victim to a company that cold-called and fed me all the patter about viruses, and because I’m a computer Luddite they were phenomenally persuasive,” reported reader Cougar J. “I ended up going for their ‘Diamond’ option at £199.99. Now I’m petrified because I gave them all my credit card details and they also accessed my computer virtually.”
To support parent, here is an example of a person who could have easily fall for a myriad other "persuasive" phone calls. I say 200 quid is a great bargain for a priceless piece of education: don't give your credit card number and personal details to random callers.
Being a computer Luddite has nothing to do with it, it's plain old stupidity.
I'm right now totally in favor of nuclear energy, but we need to all understand the very significant risks, and try to mitigate them as much as possible.
But we do, and we have. Newer reactor designs are inherently safe, don't need active cooling and don't have the nasty tendency to go critical or release explosive hydrogen. Someone needs to articulate this to the public - in the real world that lays outside our basements it's heresy to claim that nuclear is clean and actually good for the environment.