Pretty much all the power needed for a transaction is going to be the mining (a transaction isn't valid unless a miner has entered it into a block).
That is incorrect. The validity of a transaction depends only on how it relates to the transactions that precede it. Mining simply keeps track of the "official" history of transactions, to guard against double-spend attacks.
So we can do a quick-and-dirty calculation; if we assume:
And that's another problem: the energy used for mining depends on the hashrate, not transaction rate. It's true that increasing popularity of Bitcoin rises both, but trying to calculate "energy per transaction" on that basis is pretty much the same as trying to calculate "drowned people per litre of ice cream consumed" on the basis that warm weather increases both.
You can easily have secrecy in a vote by mail scene by using two envelopes. The outer one contains both your proof of ID and the inner envelope, and the inner envelope contains your vote and no markings. The whole package arrives at the election office, the outer envelope is opened, your ID is checked against a list, and the inner envelope is put to the ballot box unopened. Once all votes have been cast, the ballot box is shuffled, the now anonymous inner envelopes are opened and the votes counted.
The Bitcoin network uses about $35 worth of energy to process a single transaction.
This seems extremely unlikely, since processing a transaction means transmitting a few hundred bytes and doing doing some simple cryptography and database lookups.
Now, I don't know how much energy a single credit card transaction uses, but given the transaction fees that processing companies charge, I'm willing to bet that it's far, far less than $35 worth.
Yet for some reason you think this logic doesn't apply to Bitcoin transactions.
7000 people will die of the influenza in Liberia this year. That's nearly ten times the number of people that have died from Ebola.
Which is why things like Swine Flu get worldwide attention.
I know you've seen a lot of scary made-for-TV movies and what-not,
An argument from condescension? How very logical of you.
but despite that, there is no disease that can penetrate a hazmat suit.
That depends on the specifics of the hazmat suit in question, of course. Even airtight with its own supply isn't necessarily good enough since you might be contaminated when taking it off. And most are far from airtight, since that basically cripples you - apart from the bulk, you can't sweat.
Period.
Spelling out "Period" simply signals your argument didn't sound convincing on its own, even to you.
If my wife contracted this, I'd put on the suit and go right in and give her a hug. There would be absolutely no risk to me. None, zero, nadda.
Well then, the medical professional talked about in this article must have been a fool then, and treated his patients without this foolproof hazmat suit of yours.
Explain to me how some leftover vials of a pathogen from decades ago has any relevance to this case beside pointing out the already obvious fact that there is a tiny but non-zero chance someone might do something stupid.
Smallpox vials going missing without anyone noticing shows an institutional culture that doesn't take deadly pathogens seriously. Why should it be any different with ebola?
Cut out the sissy NIMBY scaremongering.
Using "sissy" in an argument implies that you're letting machismo play a role in your judgement, hopefully consciously but more likely subconsciously, which is not appropriate in the context of disease control.
Good thing you're not solving real problems. What. A. Fucking. Waste.
How much energy is spent fighting against counterfeit cash? And do you perhaps think point-of-sale systems and credit/debit card systems or wire transfers require none? And armored trucks for moving money, those surely require no fuel?
Re:We need a better "press" 4 collective sensemaki
on
The CIA Does Las Vegas
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't agree that the only way to fix the issue is by the communist path. You don't need a complete re-distribution to fix things, you only need to dismantle a very small number of monopolies (including financial monopolies).
But you do need to accept, once and for all, that economy can't be left to itself. Otherwise you'll get the same push to deregulate, followed by new monopolies and economic ruin. And that means that "communism" and "socialism" need to stop being boogeymen and become social and economic options that can be mixed with other options as needed, without this being a slippery slope to Stalinism and gulags.
Are you this stupid to compare long working hours and ability to quit any time to being literally worked to death?
They can quit any time, and then do what? Beg for a job in another factory that's just as bad?
Chains are always the most effective when they're invisible. Slavery is a crude form of a few dominating the many. Our current society looks nicer on the surface, but the underlaying mechanic is still the same: exploitation based on coercion. We have simply hidden the violence needed to keep such a system going in our property laws, ready to be used on anyone who opts out of the game yet refuses to voluntarily starve, and legitimated as defending someone else.
Of course, the problem is that such a society is fundamentally unstable: everyone hates living under someone else's thumb. Our current method of placating the masses is a promise of social mobility: if you work harder than everyone else, you can become one of the exploiters instead the exploited. But the problem with that is that it's a threat to those currently on top: for everyone who rises to the ruling class, someone else must fall, otherwise the hierarchy will flatten and erode the associated privilege. So they do everything in their power to stop social mobility and make the hierarchy steeper. The final stages are what we're seeing now: all the wealth concentrates on top, people at the bottom get heavily in debt, and finally you get a revolution when desperation reaches a critical level (or an oligarchy if those on top are smart enough to pay basic maintenance for the system their position depends on). But a revolution simply changes who's at the top, it doesn't solve the real problem - the concept of a social pyramid - so it'll just be the same system of exploitation in a shiny new package.
This is what happened to Russian revolution: Lenin and later Stalin were all too happy to use Tsar's methods to wield Tsar's power, so how could the end result be anything but Tsarism under a new name? And as Putin keeps demonstrating, the form of the system might have changed but the spirit is still quite intact.
There's actually a long story behind this, and Von Braun was actually arrested because Hitler suspected he was a traitor. Von Braun was a visionary who just loved rockets and wanted to land on the moon and colonize space. The Nazis were a funding means-to-an-end for his rocketry studies. After the Nazis tried to arrest him and his team, he escaped with some equipment and top scientists to defect to the allies.
So no, it's not at all accurate to speculate that Von Braun was a Nazi or into that whole ideology.
Heinrich Himmler betrayed Hitler near the end of the war. Would it therefore be inaccurate to speculate that Himmler was a Nazi, or at least had sympathy for the ideology?
Well no, sometimes the monsters are actually real.
But those who fight them should still take care not to become monsters themselves. It's hard to not see a frightening similarity between Hitler's attempt to take his country with him in the last days of the Fourth Reich, and the US's - and the USSR's - policy of taking the world with them - MAD - in the Cold War. How much of it was the superpower's own inherent evil, and how much was absorbed from Nazi Germany during the war?
That's one of the nastier aspects of cultural evolution: fighting an opponent exerts pressure on you to fall on his level. Nazis terror bombed London, so the Brits firebombed Dresden. An aspect of Nazism managed to seep into the British Empire precisely because they were mortal enemies, just like an aspect of it seeped into the United States, and later an aspect of Soviet-style communism - the omnipresent surveillance systems that are apparently impossible to dislodge.
I'm not sure if such contamination can be prevented, and that rises some serious questions about whether using warfare to deal with rogue nations is not unlike trying to stop Ebola by wrestling the victims to the ground.
Likely translation: He tried to shake the movie company down for a few weeks worth of work rather than a day or two, and they told him to piss off, then contacted someone more reasonably inclined. They obviously got the permits, meaning that someone was able to do the work in just a few days.
Or someone pulled the assessment from their ass for quick cash.
Look at it from another direction - debt can be used as leverage. Businesses do this all of the time. Since people aren't businesses, that leverage can buy a better lifestyle instead of simply improving income.
The problem is that this doesn't work. You can use debt for investment and then pay it back from the profits. You can't use debt to increase your quality of life because that doesn't increase your income, so any extra you spend today you have to make up by spending less tomorrow.
The problem with US economy - and increasingly the EU economy - is that they get this exactly the wrong way around: the Government is prevented from investing by austerity measures while households are expected to upkeep demand by going ever deeper into debt. The result is crumbling infrastructure and stagnant economy that can't recover due to small incomes keeping demand down and crippling debt eating any upward fluctuations.
At this point, it might be best to just double mininum wage, cancel all debt and nationalize any financial institutions that collapse as a result. This quagmire isn't going to dissolve until its causes - wages too low to keep up demand without going into debt - are solved and the detritus cleared.
No, they aren't. A nation who's citizens can't afford to have children is doomed. And not in a generation but immediately, since said citizens have no reason to care about the future since there isn't any.
Fixing an infected tooth is a TOUGH CHOICE, but still a CHOICE.
No, it isn't. If you don't do something to it, you get blood poisoning and die. Also, constant pain is crippling.
A kidney stone is a TOUGH CHOICE, but still a CHOICE.
No, it isn't. If you don't do something to it, your kidneys will be damaged and you will die.
Life is all about choices. Make good choices early on and life is easier in the long haul. Make bad choices and then you whine about how much is wrong with the world.
Life is all about choices. You've chosen to lie to others and possibly yourself to justify avoiding responsibility for anything. And when the cumulative effect of such choices starts to show, for example in the form of economy collapsing under the weight of debt, you whine on Slashdot how it's the fault of everyone else and their irresponsible choices.
In other words, a typical Conservative who thinks the world is maintenance-free.
People just finally saw through the lie that the "American Dream" is: Yes, anyone can win. But not everyone. It's like the lottery.
To be fair, everyone could win as long as there was badly defended land to steal. And even after they run against Pacific, everyone still can win by simply sharing the fruits of economic growth - or technological development if nothing else. American Dream really only died with Reaganomics and exploding income inequality.
C++ needs to be interpreted or compiled prior to running. Does that mean that C++ is not a programming language, because it is just an input to a compiler or interpreter?
CSS3 is not a programming language. No more then HTML is.
Of course they are. They can be used to tell the computer to perform some task (render a logical structure with a particular formatting). They just aren't Turing complete.
Well then, Iranian homosexuals have the same rights as everyone else there: they can avoid gay sex or die. And Jews in Nazi Germany were perfectly equal: after all, they could live if they weren't Jewish.
If you must lie to yourself, shouldn't you still have enough self-respect to use a bit less transparent bullshit?
Israel is sure doing a good job in that area creating more enemies, if that is their intention, the plan is working.
They've spent decades - most of their existence - surrounded by enemies. At this point, an end to the hostilities and siege mentality would be a threat to established powers that be. Just as happened in the US after Cold War, really.
Slashdot Mirror
That is incorrect. The validity of a transaction depends only on how it relates to the transactions that precede it. Mining simply keeps track of the "official" history of transactions, to guard against double-spend attacks.
And that's another problem: the energy used for mining depends on the hashrate, not transaction rate. It's true that increasing popularity of Bitcoin rises both, but trying to calculate "energy per transaction" on that basis is pretty much the same as trying to calculate "drowned people per litre of ice cream consumed" on the basis that warm weather increases both.
You can easily have secrecy in a vote by mail scene by using two envelopes. The outer one contains both your proof of ID and the inner envelope, and the inner envelope contains your vote and no markings. The whole package arrives at the election office, the outer envelope is opened, your ID is checked against a list, and the inner envelope is put to the ballot box unopened. Once all votes have been cast, the ballot box is shuffled, the now anonymous inner envelopes are opened and the votes counted.
I didn't know cold_fjord has kin in Russia. Small world, eh?
This seems extremely unlikely, since processing a transaction means transmitting a few hundred bytes and doing doing some simple cryptography and database lookups.
Yet for some reason you think this logic doesn't apply to Bitcoin transactions.
Which is why things like Swine Flu get worldwide attention.
An argument from condescension? How very logical of you.
That depends on the specifics of the hazmat suit in question, of course. Even airtight with its own supply isn't necessarily good enough since you might be contaminated when taking it off. And most are far from airtight, since that basically cripples you - apart from the bulk, you can't sweat.
Spelling out "Period" simply signals your argument didn't sound convincing on its own, even to you.
Well then, the medical professional talked about in this article must have been a fool then, and treated his patients without this foolproof hazmat suit of yours.
Would you want your family to be anywhere near you when you're dying of a highly contagious and extremely deadly disease?
It seems illogical to honor your heroes in a way that risks the very cause they are fighting for.
Smallpox vials going missing without anyone noticing shows an institutional culture that doesn't take deadly pathogens seriously. Why should it be any different with ebola?
Using "sissy" in an argument implies that you're letting machismo play a role in your judgement, hopefully consciously but more likely subconsciously, which is not appropriate in the context of disease control.
How much energy is spent fighting against counterfeit cash? And do you perhaps think point-of-sale systems and credit/debit card systems or wire transfers require none? And armored trucks for moving money, those surely require no fuel?
But you do need to accept, once and for all, that economy can't be left to itself. Otherwise you'll get the same push to deregulate, followed by new monopolies and economic ruin. And that means that "communism" and "socialism" need to stop being boogeymen and become social and economic options that can be mixed with other options as needed, without this being a slippery slope to Stalinism and gulags.
They can quit any time, and then do what? Beg for a job in another factory that's just as bad?
Chains are always the most effective when they're invisible. Slavery is a crude form of a few dominating the many. Our current society looks nicer on the surface, but the underlaying mechanic is still the same: exploitation based on coercion. We have simply hidden the violence needed to keep such a system going in our property laws, ready to be used on anyone who opts out of the game yet refuses to voluntarily starve, and legitimated as defending someone else.
Of course, the problem is that such a society is fundamentally unstable: everyone hates living under someone else's thumb. Our current method of placating the masses is a promise of social mobility: if you work harder than everyone else, you can become one of the exploiters instead the exploited. But the problem with that is that it's a threat to those currently on top: for everyone who rises to the ruling class, someone else must fall, otherwise the hierarchy will flatten and erode the associated privilege. So they do everything in their power to stop social mobility and make the hierarchy steeper. The final stages are what we're seeing now: all the wealth concentrates on top, people at the bottom get heavily in debt, and finally you get a revolution when desperation reaches a critical level (or an oligarchy if those on top are smart enough to pay basic maintenance for the system their position depends on). But a revolution simply changes who's at the top, it doesn't solve the real problem - the concept of a social pyramid - so it'll just be the same system of exploitation in a shiny new package.
This is what happened to Russian revolution: Lenin and later Stalin were all too happy to use Tsar's methods to wield Tsar's power, so how could the end result be anything but Tsarism under a new name? And as Putin keeps demonstrating, the form of the system might have changed but the spirit is still quite intact.
Heinrich Himmler betrayed Hitler near the end of the war. Would it therefore be inaccurate to speculate that Himmler was a Nazi, or at least had sympathy for the ideology?
But those who fight them should still take care not to become monsters themselves. It's hard to not see a frightening similarity between Hitler's attempt to take his country with him in the last days of the Fourth Reich, and the US's - and the USSR's - policy of taking the world with them - MAD - in the Cold War. How much of it was the superpower's own inherent evil, and how much was absorbed from Nazi Germany during the war?
That's one of the nastier aspects of cultural evolution: fighting an opponent exerts pressure on you to fall on his level. Nazis terror bombed London, so the Brits firebombed Dresden. An aspect of Nazism managed to seep into the British Empire precisely because they were mortal enemies, just like an aspect of it seeped into the United States, and later an aspect of Soviet-style communism - the omnipresent surveillance systems that are apparently impossible to dislodge.
I'm not sure if such contamination can be prevented, and that rises some serious questions about whether using warfare to deal with rogue nations is not unlike trying to stop Ebola by wrestling the victims to the ground.
Or someone pulled the assessment from their ass for quick cash.
The problem is that this doesn't work. You can use debt for investment and then pay it back from the profits. You can't use debt to increase your quality of life because that doesn't increase your income, so any extra you spend today you have to make up by spending less tomorrow.
The problem with US economy - and increasingly the EU economy - is that they get this exactly the wrong way around: the Government is prevented from investing by austerity measures while households are expected to upkeep demand by going ever deeper into debt. The result is crumbling infrastructure and stagnant economy that can't recover due to small incomes keeping demand down and crippling debt eating any upward fluctuations.
At this point, it might be best to just double mininum wage, cancel all debt and nationalize any financial institutions that collapse as a result. This quagmire isn't going to dissolve until its causes - wages too low to keep up demand without going into debt - are solved and the detritus cleared.
No, they aren't. A nation who's citizens can't afford to have children is doomed. And not in a generation but immediately, since said citizens have no reason to care about the future since there isn't any.
No, it isn't. If you don't do something to it, you get blood poisoning and die. Also, constant pain is crippling.
No, it isn't. If you don't do something to it, your kidneys will be damaged and you will die.
Life is all about choices. You've chosen to lie to others and possibly yourself to justify avoiding responsibility for anything. And when the cumulative effect of such choices starts to show, for example in the form of economy collapsing under the weight of debt, you whine on Slashdot how it's the fault of everyone else and their irresponsible choices.
In other words, a typical Conservative who thinks the world is maintenance-free.
Because you listen to inane propaganda like that. I suspect it's behind a lot of America's problems.
And yet they still do, because there's nothing better to be had. The country is failing its citizens.
To be fair, everyone could win as long as there was badly defended land to steal. And even after they run against Pacific, everyone still can win by simply sharing the fruits of economic growth - or technological development if nothing else. American Dream really only died with Reaganomics and exploding income inequality.
C++ needs to be interpreted or compiled prior to running. Does that mean that C++ is not a programming language, because it is just an input to a compiler or interpreter?
Infinity - 1 day will never arrive.
Why not? Imagine Smaug's first appearance being a little dance number set to the Ecstacy of Gold.
Just because you're making a stretched-out money-grab movie doesn't mean you can't make it entertaining.
Of course they are. They can be used to tell the computer to perform some task (render a logical structure with a particular formatting). They just aren't Turing complete.
JavaFX insists on setting component attributes by feeding them Strings containing CSS fragments rather than using setter functions. True story.
Well then, Iranian homosexuals have the same rights as everyone else there: they can avoid gay sex or die. And Jews in Nazi Germany were perfectly equal: after all, they could live if they weren't Jewish.
If you must lie to yourself, shouldn't you still have enough self-respect to use a bit less transparent bullshit?
They've spent decades - most of their existence - surrounded by enemies. At this point, an end to the hostilities and siege mentality would be a threat to established powers that be. Just as happened in the US after Cold War, really.