There is nothing inherit bitcoin to force banks to keep a reserve, but neither is there with physical cash. There's no reason a government couldn't impose the same restrictions on a bitcoin bank operating in it's country. Of course, bitcoin makes it easier to run a bank like this, but it also provides a way for anyone to check how much BTC they actually have in reserve.
Of course, this isn't the only way to generate 'money' like that. Admittedly my understanding of this is only basic, but I thought most governments had given up trying to control the money supply anyway? That they couldn't control it because there was always new ways of creating cash substitutes?
For your second question, each bitcoin transaction has a transaction fee associated with it (which can be zero). It is up to each individual miner to decide which transactions to include in the block, and currently they give a higher priority to ones with a higher transaction fee. As to who gets this fee? The miner who solves the block gets all of the transaction fees as well as the new coins. My understanding is that even now, free transactions are on the way out. The current standard fee is 0.01 BTC for reference. The idea is that as time goes on, most of the reward will switch to transactions fees over new coins.
As for bots, it's not true to assume that there is no opportunity cost for mining. As they mine, it becomes more likely that they will be detected. Every 10 minutes or so, you need to start working on the latest block (or else everyone else will ignore your chain). Then there is the increased resource usage (most malware tries to stay under the radar so it doesn't get noticed and removed). They could mine slowly of course, but this makes it easier for the legitimate network to outhash them.
If we look here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison an E7300 can do 7.8 Mhash/s. That's running fult tilt, and it would be very noticable if your PC was doing that 24/7. Let's say that you can run it at 10%, and the computer is on for half the day, so 5% (keep in mind laptops are outselling desktops, so I don't think this is so unreasonable). Now we're down to 400 khash/s. The total current network hashing power is roughly 2 Thash/s now, and increasing rapidly. You'd need 5,000,000 bots to equal that, and even then the reward would only reduce by half. Now CPU mining is very inefficient compared to GPU mining, but high performance GPUs are rare and most of your bots won't have them. It would certainly reduce that figure though. The point I'm trying to make, is that it's not as easy to do as you might think at first.
Presumably though, once the music is in iTunes and the iPod, he doesn't have that structure anymore does he? No instead you have to sort by artist/album etc or create playlists.
Its not true that is not measureable. Indeed some of the first (surprisingly accurate) measurements in 1798: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cavendish-lab.jpg
And you are quite right that you weigh differentatly depending on whether you are on a mountain or in a valley, but this different isn't quite insignificant. Thats not to say thats the only way the gravitational field changes though (moving further from the centre of the earth. It's something worth looking up).
Actually, you may be disappointed if you buy SSDs for the boot speed. HDD manufacturers have done a remarkable job optimizing that. And in the case of an OS like Vista, the benefit from an SSD's low latency is dwarfed by the benefit from an HDD's raw read speed. Those 640GB Caviar drives are apparently one of the fastest booting HDDs/SSDs. (unless you go incredibly high end)
SSDs have been proven enormously helpful for games, though; especially games where you can't possibly store all the textures in memory, such as... Crysis.
I think your post is either terribly misinformed, or you are overstating yourself. I have no idea how can say a 320GB platter drive (and there are 500GB ones now too...) could possibly hope to outperform all but 'incredibly high end' drives. Look at the OCZ Vertex, or G.Skill Falcon (or the supertalent drives etc based on the same controller). The smaller sizes are around the price of a velciraptor (admittedly smaller though, but still large enough for vista + some apps), and they blow the velciraptor out of the water. Don't just take my word for it:
http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews.php?/storage/ocz_vertex_120gb_sata2_ssd/7
And that crap about it being enormously helpful? Sure it definitely is desirable, but not even that benchmark you posted is fair for crysis (as they admit in the article...). For the vast majority of the time, SSDs only improve load time (note your floppy RAID array does not count).
The US Army already makes a training simulator like you describe. At first it was a modified version of Operation Flashpoint I believe. Now they have developed their own solution which is based on top of America's Army (the PR FPS). Even their own solution like lots of games uses the unreal engine however (2.0, then 2.5 and 3 for the upcoming version).
Unless they have chaned this in, oh, one year it is actually one hour for the tech free, and two for the tech assisted. While I could have used a CAS calculator (but did not), I don't remember thinking it would have helped that much. An in any case, those very same skills were tested in the other exam. The assisted exam allows you to simply show if you understand, what are fundamentally I believe, the more important concepts.
Commonwealth Bank!
*Note to non-australians: This is a joke, or atleast, I hope it is. It has to do with their advertisements, which use that catch phrase.
The GP provided the qualifier, provided I don't redistribute it. The GPL only covers when you distribution, so provided the GP is being truthfull, he would respect the GPL. Take your trolling elsewhere.
You might want to make that a few _billion_ songs (5 billion as on June 2008 according to wikipedia). Thats atleast 5 billion in turnover right there (the itunes plus tracks were slightly more, different regions also pay more as well). I think BB would love to a slice of that action.
Persoanlly I prefer to give money direct to the developers when I can. Even on steam (which is quite nice IMHO), I'm sure they (valve) take a stake too.
One game I did this for was World of Goo (which just went gold btw). In you pre-order, you also get a preview of the game which is mindnumbingly awesome.
Disclaimer: I don't work for 2dboy, nor am I affliated with them in any other way then being a big fan.
Thats already $93,000/y at @15/month in subscription fees alone. I'm sure that the number would be much higher with an actual native linux port (wine is nice, but its theres no guantee its still going to work in a month). I'm sure that WoW atleast could hire one programmer to work on the linux port + support costs.
Did you install the NVIDIA binary drivers? Also, make sure you don't use XGL because then that is the only app that can control the 3D card. I can't remember off the top of my head what the alternative is.
One thing is for sure though, ATI are worse then NVIDIA at this, or atleast, where the last time I looked (~6 months ago last time). I've used XGL and its descendants since their inception. First I used a 9600 Mobility Pro, which had reasonable support in the driver (performance wise). Never chips had _horrible_ performance. It was atleast close to windows, but I never performed concrete measurements between the two. Don't get me wrong though, getting the driver installed in the first place was an excercise in self-flagellation. Then, they never supported things as well as NVIDIA (certain extensions where missing in the drivers). The drivers would falsly report their capabilities (just listing everything under the sun). Even recently when they finally annouced they had got the XGL replacement support in, and it worked great, well guess what. It didn't work. ATI has been promising the heavens with their drivers for _years_ now. Each time its been, comon guys, it will be awesome soon. Personally, I'm not taking their word on anything untill I see it in the flesh (or bits in this case;) ).
Of course, they have made strides, and looking back have progressed far. The journey ahead is long, and they still (AFAIK) have not released all specs for their cards (specifically the R700 series). I like many others, wait for the day when ATI makes some drivers/community produces good drivers from specs, before prasing them too much. I can only hope that that day comes soon.
The truth about 12V rails is that it is designed to in some way mitigate a failed component drawing tons of power. Virtually all PSUs only have 1 12V, and then just stick current limiters (or just lie), and call them seperate rails. Infact, often having one rail that can supply slightly less current than two is better. This is because your not juggling what components to put on which rails (e.g. CPU on 12V1, GPU + HDD on 12V2).
A power supply with multiple real/faked rails provides little benefit to the end user. All it does it require you to get a higher rated power supply, so you have enough rails + amps so that one does not go over the limit while others have ample extra capacity.
Also, just because having one rail can sound like a really bad idea, after all sometimes it might even be 50+ A, many very good power supplies use this (such as Seasonic) layout.
I know! I had to buy a really expensive CD player to get rid of all that jitter. I guess those hundred dollar players are not so bad when your listening to techno. However I once tried to listen to Strauss of one and at first I thought I had forgotten to put green marker around the edge of the CD. Fortunately I realised that I just needed to buy a Cambridge Azur 840C (only $2300! What a bargain) and a Benchmark DAC1 (Only $1690! I almost fell out of my chair). Of course, I then realised I only had enough money to buy some Koss KSC-75 (trash at a trashy price, $49.00). But not one ounce of jitter, and the sound was so pure and smooth! I know that as soon as I can buy something nicer in that department I will be in audio heaven, I've heard you can even ascend!
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing inherit bitcoin to force banks to keep a reserve, but neither is there with physical cash. There's no reason a government couldn't impose the same restrictions on a bitcoin bank operating in it's country. Of course, bitcoin makes it easier to run a bank like this, but it also provides a way for anyone to check how much BTC they actually have in reserve.
Of course, this isn't the only way to generate 'money' like that. Admittedly my understanding of this is only basic, but I thought most governments had given up trying to control the money supply anyway? That they couldn't control it because there was always new ways of creating cash substitutes?
For your second question, each bitcoin transaction has a transaction fee associated with it (which can be zero). It is up to each individual miner to decide which transactions to include in the block, and currently they give a higher priority to ones with a higher transaction fee. As to who gets this fee? The miner who solves the block gets all of the transaction fees as well as the new coins. My understanding is that even now, free transactions are on the way out. The current standard fee is 0.01 BTC for reference. The idea is that as time goes on, most of the reward will switch to transactions fees over new coins.
As for bots, it's not true to assume that there is no opportunity cost for mining. As they mine, it becomes more likely that they will be detected. Every 10 minutes or so, you need to start working on the latest block (or else everyone else will ignore your chain). Then there is the increased resource usage (most malware tries to stay under the radar so it doesn't get noticed and removed). They could mine slowly of course, but this makes it easier for the legitimate network to outhash them.
If we look here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison an E7300 can do 7.8 Mhash/s. That's running fult tilt, and it would be very noticable if your PC was doing that 24/7. Let's say that you can run it at 10%, and the computer is on for half the day, so 5% (keep in mind laptops are outselling desktops, so I don't think this is so unreasonable). Now we're down to 400 khash/s. The total current network hashing power is roughly 2 Thash/s now, and increasing rapidly. You'd need 5,000,000 bots to equal that, and even then the reward would only reduce by half. Now CPU mining is very inefficient compared to GPU mining, but high performance GPUs are rare and most of your bots won't have them. It would certainly reduce that figure though. The point I'm trying to make, is that it's not as easy to do as you might think at first.
For the curious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7PRHu6pN9k
I believe it is: http://belowtheline.cc/ Both sites are quite similar however
DSL can absolutely not run anywhere near 20 miles. And even if it did, you would only be able to sync at dialup speeds anyway...
Have you considered trying tomato? My understanding is that WDS is supposed to work much better in that.
Too late... http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/3/14/234939/956
Presumably though, once the music is in iTunes and the iPod, he doesn't have that structure anymore does he? No instead you have to sort by artist/album etc or create playlists.
Its not true that is not measureable. Indeed some of the first (surprisingly accurate) measurements in 1798: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cavendish-lab.jpg And you are quite right that you weigh differentatly depending on whether you are on a mountain or in a valley, but this different isn't quite insignificant. Thats not to say thats the only way the gravitational field changes though (moving further from the centre of the earth. It's something worth looking up).
Hehe. :)
Actually, you may be disappointed if you buy SSDs for the boot speed. HDD manufacturers have done a remarkable job optimizing that. And in the case of an OS like Vista, the benefit from an SSD's low latency is dwarfed by the benefit from an HDD's raw read speed. Those 640GB Caviar drives are apparently one of the fastest booting HDDs/SSDs. (unless you go incredibly high end)
SSDs have been proven enormously helpful for games, though; especially games where you can't possibly store all the textures in memory, such as... Crysis.
I think your post is either terribly misinformed, or you are overstating yourself. I have no idea how can say a 320GB platter drive (and there are 500GB ones now too...) could possibly hope to outperform all but 'incredibly high end' drives. Look at the OCZ Vertex, or G.Skill Falcon (or the supertalent drives etc based on the same controller). The smaller sizes are around the price of a velciraptor (admittedly smaller though, but still large enough for vista + some apps), and they blow the velciraptor out of the water. Don't just take my word for it: http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews.php?/storage/ocz_vertex_120gb_sata2_ssd/7 And that crap about it being enormously helpful? Sure it definitely is desirable, but not even that benchmark you posted is fair for crysis (as they admit in the article...). For the vast majority of the time, SSDs only improve load time (note your floppy RAID array does not count).
The US Army already makes a training simulator like you describe. At first it was a modified version of Operation Flashpoint I believe. Now they have developed their own solution which is based on top of America's Army (the PR FPS). Even their own solution like lots of games uses the unreal engine however (2.0, then 2.5 and 3 for the upcoming version).
Unless they have chaned this in, oh, one year it is actually one hour for the tech free, and two for the tech assisted. While I could have used a CAS calculator (but did not), I don't remember thinking it would have helped that much. An in any case, those very same skills were tested in the other exam. The assisted exam allows you to simply show if you understand, what are fundamentally I believe, the more important concepts.
There is this... I don't think its upgradable though :(.
Commonwealth Bank! *Note to non-australians: This is a joke, or atleast, I hope it is. It has to do with their advertisements, which use that catch phrase.
The GP provided the qualifier, provided I don't redistribute it. The GPL only covers when you distribution, so provided the GP is being truthfull, he would respect the GPL. Take your trolling elsewhere.
You might want to make that a few _billion_ songs (5 billion as on June 2008 according to wikipedia). Thats atleast 5 billion in turnover right there (the itunes plus tracks were slightly more, different regions also pay more as well). I think BB would love to a slice of that action.
Persoanlly I prefer to give money direct to the developers when I can. Even on steam (which is quite nice IMHO), I'm sure they (valve) take a stake too. One game I did this for was World of Goo (which just went gold btw). In you pre-order, you also get a preview of the game which is mindnumbingly awesome. Disclaimer: I don't work for 2dboy, nor am I affliated with them in any other way then being a big fan.
Thats already $93,000/y at @15/month in subscription fees alone. I'm sure that the number would be much higher with an actual native linux port (wine is nice, but its theres no guantee its still going to work in a month). I'm sure that WoW atleast could hire one programmer to work on the linux port + support costs.
Eh cookies? Lets not get too excited here over nothing.
You mean Russia now has territory near the equator? I wonder when that happened...
Did you install the NVIDIA binary drivers? Also, make sure you don't use XGL because then that is the only app that can control the 3D card. I can't remember off the top of my head what the alternative is. One thing is for sure though, ATI are worse then NVIDIA at this, or atleast, where the last time I looked (~6 months ago last time). I've used XGL and its descendants since their inception. First I used a 9600 Mobility Pro, which had reasonable support in the driver (performance wise). Never chips had _horrible_ performance. It was atleast close to windows, but I never performed concrete measurements between the two. Don't get me wrong though, getting the driver installed in the first place was an excercise in self-flagellation. Then, they never supported things as well as NVIDIA (certain extensions where missing in the drivers). The drivers would falsly report their capabilities (just listing everything under the sun). Even recently when they finally annouced they had got the XGL replacement support in, and it worked great, well guess what. It didn't work. ATI has been promising the heavens with their drivers for _years_ now. Each time its been, comon guys, it will be awesome soon. Personally, I'm not taking their word on anything untill I see it in the flesh (or bits in this case ;) ).
Of course, they have made strides, and looking back have progressed far. The journey ahead is long, and they still (AFAIK) have not released all specs for their cards (specifically the R700 series). I like many others, wait for the day when ATI makes some drivers/community produces good drivers from specs, before prasing them too much. I can only hope that that day comes soon.
Not really...
The truth about 12V rails is that it is designed to in some way mitigate a failed component drawing tons of power. Virtually all PSUs only have 1 12V, and then just stick current limiters (or just lie), and call them seperate rails. Infact, often having one rail that can supply slightly less current than two is better. This is because your not juggling what components to put on which rails (e.g. CPU on 12V1, GPU + HDD on 12V2).
A power supply with multiple real/faked rails provides little benefit to the end user. All it does it require you to get a higher rated power supply, so you have enough rails + amps so that one does not go over the limit while others have ample extra capacity.
Also, just because having one rail can sound like a really bad idea, after all sometimes it might even be 50+ A, many very good power supplies use this (such as Seasonic) layout.
I know! I had to buy a really expensive CD player to get rid of all that jitter. I guess those hundred dollar players are not so bad when your listening to techno. However I once tried to listen to Strauss of one and at first I thought I had forgotten to put green marker around the edge of the CD. Fortunately I realised that I just needed to buy a Cambridge Azur 840C (only $2300! What a bargain) and a Benchmark DAC1 (Only $1690! I almost fell out of my chair). Of course, I then realised I only had enough money to buy some Koss KSC-75 (trash at a trashy price, $49.00). But not one ounce of jitter, and the sound was so pure and smooth! I know that as soon as I can buy something nicer in that department I will be in audio heaven, I've heard you can even ascend!
-Meanas
Well don't worry too much. Its shit. Quite literally.
Well I got one a launch in australia (pre-order), and it came with a nuchuck :). I know two other people that also got one with a nunchuck as well.
Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oh wait...