To be fair MtGox is actually very well managed, I don't mean to indicate that they're not up to par, I think their 80% dominance is perfectly justified. It's not like they're an inferior product that's putting all competitors out of business simply because they were first.
There are multiple exchanges, it just happens that MtGox has the 'Microsoft monopoly'. They're the de facto standard, primarily because they were one of the first to hit the scene, their service is for the most part 'good enough', there was enough widespread adoption that people are familiar and comfortable with it, and there's no one else who's got something significantly better to entice people to switch.
I know my cat would probably murder me if I tried to put it in a microwave, so in that sense no it's not particularly safe for you to microwave your cat. If you meant would it be safe for your cat, then sorta. I suppose you could probably expose it to 3-5 seconds of microwaves without any particularly ill effects, maybe a slight sunburn (do cats even get sunburns?), but any more than that and it would probably start getting serious damage. If you figure an average microwave can heat a burrito from frozen solid to 'too hot to eat' in about 75 seconds, then there's definitely enough energy to make your cat all explodey and dead in the same time frame.
For this to be a successful avenue of attack you have to be sure that the servers you want to target are actually located at the bunker you're attacking. By accounts this one datacenter is not the only one they operate, the others are all similarly sequestered in bunkers. Sure you can break into a bunker given enough time and effort, there is no such thing as an impenetrable fortress. However you can make the efforts required to break in unfeasible, and this is even doubly so if you're not even sure that once you get in, you'll be able to find what you're looking for.
I mean, even the great firewall of china allows users to access data outside of china (albiet with state filtering and what not).
I don't know if this is a good thing or not that they haven't got better access considering their penchant for building nukes and what not, but with better access to information outside their own borders they probably would have had a working missile system 5-6 years sooner. If not from simply having access to that kind of information from the internet, then the benefits of better education for the potential scientists in the country.
At the exchange rate of Bitcoin, a government could simply buy all the currency in the system and ruin it for everyone. It would take a couple hundred million dollars, which is barely blip on the radar compared to the budget of a typical industrialized nation. You would not need to buy all the currency, either; just buying a significant fraction of it would destabilize prices and drive people away.
First, this requires that people are willing to sell, and if a single entity was buying up Bitcoins at that massive of a scale, you can bet the price (due to demand) would skyrocket. Then if the government effectively 'destroyed' said currency by not reintroducing it to the system, the value of the coins in the system (presuming a stable demand similar to what already exists), would remain high as the supply of coins would be drastically reduced. A government doing something like that would temporarily destabilize the market place, but wouldn't in any significant way impact the long term viability of bitcoins as a currency, if bit coins could bounce back from their 2011 market bubble, then obviously their viabilty as a currency can survive a period of temporary instability.
The demand for Bitcoin is predicated on the existence of exchanges that allow Bitcoin to be traded for fiat currencies. Those exchanges are easy targets for a government wishing to ban Bitcoin within its borders.
This would be a much more successful avenue of attack for a government trying to shut down bitcoins, however I think that it would be difficult to completely eradicate conversion between fiat currencies and bitcoins. All it takes is for one government to allow such a conversion to their local fiat currency, and you can convert that to litterally any other currency in the world. Sure it might take more hoops, but I'm sure there are more than a few nations that wouldn't mind some extra influx of value to their currency should a large portion of the world ban digital currency to fiat conversion.
So I know this is Fox News we're talking about here, but where exactly does one draw the line between a failure to check your sources, and becoming a tabloid?
At $11/hr I know quite a few people that would be willing to stand around and get in people's way while they're trying to go about their business, errr I mean protest for you.
"Voted upon by everyone participating in the network"... So does that mean I can buy 0.001 bitcoins and have equal voting power? And therefore that I can create a million shill accounts? Or is voting weighted by total number of bitcoins possessed?
Voting power is determined by how many processor cycles you're dedicating to mining the next block, it's not a 'how many coins do I have' or a 'one vote per one voice' kind of system, it's a 'how much am I actively contributing to the system as a whole'.
On a slight tangent, I can't help but think that it'd be interesting to see a democratic political system where the amount of contribution you make to the good of society affected how much influence you had on the political process. Course I don't realistically see such a thing as workable on a national scale. Just food for thought I guess.
If so, let me be the first to say I welcome our new martian overlords. Just please don't be the wussy kind of martians that die easilyto earth's microbial organisms.
No, one is physical hardware and one is software but they will both eventually become obsolete. At some point you have to say enough is enough. Sure you CAN continue to support and fix and patch things that are 'obsolete' by modern standards, but you have to ask why bother? Sure you CAN fix up a 1989 dodge stratus when it breaks and make it work again, but the parts are likely hard to come by, expensive, and the car isn't exactly a classic or otherwise valuable, so the question becomes is it worth it?
I know I'm over simplifying things here, but if someone wanted to 'release' lost bitcoins, they'd need the wallet file, in which case they'd no longer be lost. The wallet could be encrypted, but that's not really a lost wallet so much as a wallet locked up inside a safe that you don't know where the key is for. When bit coins are 'sent' what's really done is they are signed with a public key that matches the private key in your wallet file. For them to travel onto somewhere else you have to process them with your private key and resign them with the public key of where they're going next. Given current cryptographic complexities, the processing power to crack 'unspent' bitcoins would be so high, that it would be financially more profitable to devote those resources to mining new coins than to 'steal' them.
It will be a long time until BitCoin reaches the maximum number of coins in circulation, specifically around 2140, and at the time, the number of bitcoins will be approximately 21 million. Since each bitcoin is currently divisible up to 8 decimal places, that means that when those last bitcoins are mined, there will be about 2.1 quadrillion individually accountable units of bitcoin currency available for use. That means that there is a controlled inflation value until 2140, and only after that point would deflation be inevitable. If we're still using bitcoins in 2135 or whenever that becomes a serious concern I'm sure some enterprising fellow will create a bitcoin clone, and encourage users to switch (which they will if they realize their money can only depreciate in value).
Considering the gross world product for 2011 was just about $79 trillion USD, (or if we include the currently smallest common division of US currency in our calculations, the penny, we have aproximately 7.9 quadrillion individual units of currency) I think the number of potential bitcoins is plenty to compete with any other world currency. Especially since although the GDP figures above are listed in USD, the actual distribution of GDP is in USD, CAD, Euros, Yen, and whatever other currencies you can think of.
My gut feeling is that the 'badass' code is probably either legacy settings they intended to include but decided not to for whatever reason, or it is a feature that they were going to unlock at some point in the future. I doubt that they included that setting specifically for moders, it's likely that moders just happened to be the ones who discovered it.
Most ISPs in the US provide an e-mail address with them. I suppose you don't have to check it regularly, but as with any business type relationship, it's probably a good idea to at least pay some cursory attention to alerts and things (besides advertising crap) that they send you, and e-mail is (to me anyways) preferable than actual mail.
BAN anonymous calls or otherwise hiding their numbers and identities. I can't think of a single legitimate reason why a call should be anonymous.
I can think of a few, say for example you are a delivery driver for a local pizza place. Now you need to get in touch with the customer while on the road for some reason (maybe you're not sure where their address is because it was misentered by the person taking the order, or maybe the customer isn't answering their door despite your knocking, or they happen to be in an apartment complex that won't let you inside without a key and doesn't have a door buzzer. A quick phone call could alleviate all of those problems, but it's unlikely that you'd use a company phone for that task, you'd likely use your own cell phone. Well, do you necessarily want some random stranger to know your cell number?
Seriously, +1 Internets to the first person who can put a positive spin on this one. Wow. Just wow.
By requiring all TVs to use one of our new Freedom Choice cable boxes we can provide a better over all customer experience, features such as our on screen channel guide can now be utilized on all your TVs. Think of it as an upgrade for your TV.
From the standpoint of the employer there is certainly some risk in hiring someone with a criminal background, however I think most employers go too far in using background checks to weed out prospective employees. Even if someone has a sex crime on their record, every company I've worked for has had a zero tolerance policy on sexual harassment, and made it very clear to all employees. Enforcing that policy of zero tolerance should get any troublemaker fired just about immediately, the company only risks a lawsuit if they didn't properly enforce their own policy. Heck, as a hiring manager a single entry on a criminal record does not to me indicate a significant risk of repeat offense, in fact I'd be more worried that without a job they're likely to re-offend.
Only $20 burger I ever bought was in an all American food challenge and included 3 half pound patties with cheese, bacon, onion rings in between each layer, and a 3 layer bun. It came with a side platter of cheese fries, and if you could eat the whole thing in 30 minutes you got half off, a tee-shirt for the place, and your ignoble picture hung on the wall under the challenges. But that's about the only time I can see myself paying $20 for a burger (and technically I only paid $10 for it so, even then).
Course, I'm probably (definitely?) contributing to the accurate stereotype that Americans are overweight fat-asses in doing so. Still I digress, $20 for a plain old burger is nuts.
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To be fair MtGox is actually very well managed, I don't mean to indicate that they're not up to par, I think their 80% dominance is perfectly justified. It's not like they're an inferior product that's putting all competitors out of business simply because they were first.
There are multiple exchanges, it just happens that MtGox has the 'Microsoft monopoly'. They're the de facto standard, primarily because they were one of the first to hit the scene, their service is for the most part 'good enough', there was enough widespread adoption that people are familiar and comfortable with it, and there's no one else who's got something significantly better to entice people to switch.
I mean, it just wouldn't be proper to wear anything under their kilts.
I know my cat would probably murder me if I tried to put it in a microwave, so in that sense no it's not particularly safe for you to microwave your cat. If you meant would it be safe for your cat, then sorta. I suppose you could probably expose it to 3-5 seconds of microwaves without any particularly ill effects, maybe a slight sunburn (do cats even get sunburns?), but any more than that and it would probably start getting serious damage. If you figure an average microwave can heat a burrito from frozen solid to 'too hot to eat' in about 75 seconds, then there's definitely enough energy to make your cat all explodey and dead in the same time frame.
For this to be a successful avenue of attack you have to be sure that the servers you want to target are actually located at the bunker you're attacking. By accounts this one datacenter is not the only one they operate, the others are all similarly sequestered in bunkers. Sure you can break into a bunker given enough time and effort, there is no such thing as an impenetrable fortress. However you can make the efforts required to break in unfeasible, and this is even doubly so if you're not even sure that once you get in, you'll be able to find what you're looking for.
Wish I had mod points, +1 insightful all the way.
I mean, even the great firewall of china allows users to access data outside of china (albiet with state filtering and what not).
I don't know if this is a good thing or not that they haven't got better access considering their penchant for building nukes and what not, but with better access to information outside their own borders they probably would have had a working missile system 5-6 years sooner. If not from simply having access to that kind of information from the internet, then the benefits of better education for the potential scientists in the country.
First, this requires that people are willing to sell, and if a single entity was buying up Bitcoins at that massive of a scale, you can bet the price (due to demand) would skyrocket. Then if the government effectively 'destroyed' said currency by not reintroducing it to the system, the value of the coins in the system (presuming a stable demand similar to what already exists), would remain high as the supply of coins would be drastically reduced. A government doing something like that would temporarily destabilize the market place, but wouldn't in any significant way impact the long term viability of bitcoins as a currency, if bit coins could bounce back from their 2011 market bubble, then obviously their viabilty as a currency can survive a period of temporary instability.
The demand for Bitcoin is predicated on the existence of exchanges that allow Bitcoin to be traded for fiat currencies. Those exchanges are easy targets for a government wishing to ban Bitcoin within its borders.
This would be a much more successful avenue of attack for a government trying to shut down bitcoins, however I think that it would be difficult to completely eradicate conversion between fiat currencies and bitcoins. All it takes is for one government to allow such a conversion to their local fiat currency, and you can convert that to litterally any other currency in the world. Sure it might take more hoops, but I'm sure there are more than a few nations that wouldn't mind some extra influx of value to their currency should a large portion of the world ban digital currency to fiat conversion.
So I know this is Fox News we're talking about here, but where exactly does one draw the line between a failure to check your sources, and becoming a tabloid?
At $11/hr I know quite a few people that would be willing to stand around and get in people's way while they're trying to go about their business, errr I mean protest for you.
His name is Bob, he lives down the street from me.
"Voted upon by everyone participating in the network"... So does that mean I can buy 0.001 bitcoins and have equal voting power? And therefore that I can create a million shill accounts? Or is voting weighted by total number of bitcoins possessed?
Voting power is determined by how many processor cycles you're dedicating to mining the next block, it's not a 'how many coins do I have' or a 'one vote per one voice' kind of system, it's a 'how much am I actively contributing to the system as a whole'.
On a slight tangent, I can't help but think that it'd be interesting to see a democratic political system where the amount of contribution you make to the good of society affected how much influence you had on the political process. Course I don't realistically see such a thing as workable on a national scale. Just food for thought I guess.
If so, let me be the first to say I welcome our new martian overlords. Just please don't be the wussy kind of martians that die easilyto earth's microbial organisms.
No, one is physical hardware and one is software but they will both eventually become obsolete. At some point you have to say enough is enough. Sure you CAN continue to support and fix and patch things that are 'obsolete' by modern standards, but you have to ask why bother? Sure you CAN fix up a 1989 dodge stratus when it breaks and make it work again, but the parts are likely hard to come by, expensive, and the car isn't exactly a classic or otherwise valuable, so the question becomes is it worth it?
I know I'm over simplifying things here, but if someone wanted to 'release' lost bitcoins, they'd need the wallet file, in which case they'd no longer be lost. The wallet could be encrypted, but that's not really a lost wallet so much as a wallet locked up inside a safe that you don't know where the key is for. When bit coins are 'sent' what's really done is they are signed with a public key that matches the private key in your wallet file. For them to travel onto somewhere else you have to process them with your private key and resign them with the public key of where they're going next. Given current cryptographic complexities, the processing power to crack 'unspent' bitcoins would be so high, that it would be financially more profitable to devote those resources to mining new coins than to 'steal' them.
It will be a long time until BitCoin reaches the maximum number of coins in circulation, specifically around 2140, and at the time, the number of bitcoins will be approximately 21 million. Since each bitcoin is currently divisible up to 8 decimal places, that means that when those last bitcoins are mined, there will be about 2.1 quadrillion individually accountable units of bitcoin currency available for use. That means that there is a controlled inflation value until 2140, and only after that point would deflation be inevitable. If we're still using bitcoins in 2135 or whenever that becomes a serious concern I'm sure some enterprising fellow will create a bitcoin clone, and encourage users to switch (which they will if they realize their money can only depreciate in value).
Considering the gross world product for 2011 was just about $79 trillion USD, (or if we include the currently smallest common division of US currency in our calculations, the penny, we have aproximately 7.9 quadrillion individual units of currency) I think the number of potential bitcoins is plenty to compete with any other world currency. Especially since although the GDP figures above are listed in USD, the actual distribution of GDP is in USD, CAD, Euros, Yen, and whatever other currencies you can think of.
My gut feeling is that the 'badass' code is probably either legacy settings they intended to include but decided not to for whatever reason, or it is a feature that they were going to unlock at some point in the future. I doubt that they included that setting specifically for moders, it's likely that moders just happened to be the ones who discovered it.
This is all I have to say on the subject of more Star Wars films.
Most ISPs in the US provide an e-mail address with them. I suppose you don't have to check it regularly, but as with any business type relationship, it's probably a good idea to at least pay some cursory attention to alerts and things (besides advertising crap) that they send you, and e-mail is (to me anyways) preferable than actual mail.
BAN anonymous calls or otherwise hiding their numbers and identities. I can't think of a single legitimate reason why a call should be anonymous.
I can think of a few, say for example you are a delivery driver for a local pizza place. Now you need to get in touch with the customer while on the road for some reason (maybe you're not sure where their address is because it was misentered by the person taking the order, or maybe the customer isn't answering their door despite your knocking, or they happen to be in an apartment complex that won't let you inside without a key and doesn't have a door buzzer. A quick phone call could alleviate all of those problems, but it's unlikely that you'd use a company phone for that task, you'd likely use your own cell phone. Well, do you necessarily want some random stranger to know your cell number?
Seriously, +1 Internets to the first person who can put a positive spin on this one. Wow. Just wow.
By requiring all TVs to use one of our new Freedom Choice cable boxes we can provide a better over all customer experience, features such as our on screen channel guide can now be utilized on all your TVs. Think of it as an upgrade for your TV.
Sincerely,
Your friendly local cable company
From the standpoint of the employer there is certainly some risk in hiring someone with a criminal background, however I think most employers go too far in using background checks to weed out prospective employees. Even if someone has a sex crime on their record, every company I've worked for has had a zero tolerance policy on sexual harassment, and made it very clear to all employees. Enforcing that policy of zero tolerance should get any troublemaker fired just about immediately, the company only risks a lawsuit if they didn't properly enforce their own policy. Heck, as a hiring manager a single entry on a criminal record does not to me indicate a significant risk of repeat offense, in fact I'd be more worried that without a job they're likely to re-offend.
Soylent space is full of people?
Course, I'm probably (definitely?) contributing to the accurate stereotype that Americans are overweight fat-asses in doing so. Still I digress, $20 for a plain old burger is nuts.
It's the same argument that violent video games increases violent crimes. Or that sex education increases teen pregnancy.