I think you might have missed the point. The freedom-friendly ISP routes the connection across the near-defunct Telex network, and therefore bypasses censorship.
Of course, the websites you browse only display upper-case characters and EBCDIC Art graphics.
Making shade is the obvious solution. Anything from portable gazebos to improvised Berber tents to poles and shade-cloth. Shade is going to be more efficient than anything else at keeping people cooler.
If water can be spared, a fine mist of water in one part of the square would let people who have gotten too hot cool themselves down.
Governments who embrace and legitimise Bitcoin will gain economic growth due to Bitcoin's speedy transactions, reliable settlement, and low transaction cost.
Governments will need to make some adjustments, for sure, but they needn't fear Bitcoin.
Amir: Suppose the government knocks on your door demanding your Bitcoin wallet (under, say, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, since you're from the UK), or demands details of people with whom you have transacted bitcoins. What are you planning to do?
No. You can have as many public keys as you want. Anyone who cares about privacy would use a new public key for each transaction, and the user interface makes this easy to do.
... whenever you do a transaction, the network will learn about it. In other words, everyone will be able to know everything about your financial transactions, as long as you do them with Bitcoins.
The amount and timing of each transaction is public. You can watch the transactions happening in realtime at the Bitcoin Monitor. But the transactions are listed against pseudonomys crypto keys. The system doesn't know your email address or nickname or anything like that.
... at no point has anyone in the community said they don't want to be associated with Wikileaks.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the originator of Bitcoin, made the following appeal on 5 December:
The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.
You are right that it might not cover your electricity bill to generate a few bitcoins (unless you are generating on a high-end graphics card), but that's how it should be. If it was easy to generate bitcoins, they would be worth nothing.
It gets interesting after the coins are generated, and they start being traded for goods and services.
Bear in mind that the difficulty of generating new bitcoins rises in proportion to the total CPU power in the network, so most people will need to get their bitcoins by trading rather than by generating.
If you just want to play with Bitcoin, you can install the software then get 0.05 free bitcoins (5 bit "cents") from the Bitcoin Faucet. There's no catch.
When the scientist wants the rat to turn one way or the other, he/she sends a signal that makes the rat feel like one of its whiskers has been twitched, and the rat turns on command.
If you have an old 78rpm record, you can make a record player in about three minutes, to show kids how sound recording works.
Push a needle through an empty matchbox, put the record on something that you can spin (like the turntable in a microwave). Spin the record and touch the needle to the grooves, and the sound will come out of the matchbox. Kids love it! Then point out the wiggly grooves to them.
A compact disc isn't directly understandable like that. You can teach people how it works, but they can't see it so they just have to take your word for it.
I remember a few decades ago when it was proposed to remove the navigator from the flight deck of passenger jets. The same arguments were being made against removing the navigator as are now being made against removing the co-pilot.
As it turned out, the post of navigator was eliminated, and no-one ever regretted it. And that was before GPS existed.
Having said that, I wouldn't want to be on a plane without a co-pilot. But by all means let the co-pilot replace one of the cabin crew when not needed to land the plane in an emergency.
This reminds me of the old Swiss watchmaker. Every day at noon, regular as clockwork, on office worker walked past the watchmaker's window on his way to lunch. This was the watchmaker's reminder to carry out his daily clock setting, so every time the office worker went past, the watchmaker checked that all of his clocks indicated noon.
One day the watchmaker happened to be out in the street at noon, and he mentioned this to the office worker. "That's funny", said the worker, "I always set my watch when I walk past your shop".
And so the network of software-based clocks will work fine, provided the computers from which the time is being aggregated are not themselves setting their time by this software-based clock.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the point of naming it Telex? ...
I think you might have missed the point. The freedom-friendly ISP routes the connection across the near-defunct Telex network, and therefore bypasses censorship.
Of course, the websites you browse only display upper-case characters and EBCDIC Art graphics.
Making shade is the obvious solution. Anything from portable gazebos to improvised Berber tents to poles and shade-cloth. Shade is going to be more efficient than anything else at keeping people cooler.
If water can be spared, a fine mist of water in one part of the square would let people who have gotten too hot cool themselves down.
I thought the reduction in spam was just because some of the spammers are using their botnets to mine bitcoins instead.
Governments have far more to lose from bitcoin...
Governments who embrace and legitimise Bitcoin will gain economic growth due to Bitcoin's speedy transactions, reliable settlement, and low transaction cost.
Governments will need to make some adjustments, for sure, but they needn't fear Bitcoin.
But how good will the new architecture be for processing Bitcoin blocks?
That's why some of AMD's current high-end GPUs are hard to find.
Amir: Suppose the government knocks on your door demanding your Bitcoin wallet (under, say, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, since you're from the UK), or demands details of people with whom you have transacted bitcoins. What are you planning to do?
Every time you mine a bitcoin, a central banker somewhere feels a little twinge.
No. You can have as many public keys as you want. Anyone who cares about privacy would use a new public key for each transaction, and the user interface makes this easy to do.
... whenever you do a transaction, the network will learn about it. In other words, everyone will be able to know everything about your financial transactions, as long as you do them with Bitcoins.
The amount and timing of each transaction is public. You can watch the transactions happening in realtime at the Bitcoin Monitor. But the transactions are listed against pseudonomys crypto keys. The system doesn't know your email address or nickname or anything like that.
... or is some thing that they can say the eula says we don't have to pay out any thing ...
There is no EULA. It's completely peer-to-peer. You don't register, you just run the open source client.
Fortunately, they say that they'll be shipping commercial devices within three months
Yep. The first delivery is already booked for April 1st.
Seriously, read the Bitcoin technical paper. It's short and easy to read.
... at no point has anyone in the community said they don't want to be associated with Wikileaks.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the originator of Bitcoin, made the following appeal on 5 December:
You are right that it might not cover your electricity bill to generate a few bitcoins (unless you are generating on a high-end graphics card), but that's how it should be. If it was easy to generate bitcoins, they would be worth nothing.
It gets interesting after the coins are generated, and they start being traded for goods and services.
Bear in mind that the difficulty of generating new bitcoins rises in proportion to the total CPU power in the network, so most people will need to get their bitcoins by trading rather than by generating.
If you just want to play with Bitcoin, you can install the software then get 0.05 free bitcoins (5 bit "cents") from the Bitcoin Faucet. There's no catch.
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency that is fairly cash-like. It was discussed on Slashdot in July.
The exchanges are currently trading one bitcoin for US$0.27, way up on $0.06 around the time of the slashdot article (charts are here).
Well of course, the intention is to divert taxpayers' money into the "legal music download" industry.
It has also been done the other way around. Live rats can be remotely controlled by humans, using signals sent to an implant in the rat's brain.
When the scientist wants the rat to turn one way or the other, he/she sends a signal that makes the rat feel like one of its whiskers has been twitched, and the rat turns on command.
If you have an old 78rpm record, you can make a record player in about three minutes, to show kids how sound recording works.
Push a needle through an empty matchbox, put the record on something that you can spin (like the turntable in a microwave). Spin the record and touch the needle to the grooves, and the sound will come out of the matchbox. Kids love it! Then point out the wiggly grooves to them.
A compact disc isn't directly understandable like that. You can teach people how it works, but they can't see it so they just have to take your word for it.
Here's a corresponding piece by a male: "Sex Tips For Geeks: How To Be Sexy" written by none other than "Mr Cathedral and Bazaar" Eric Raymond.
...this is just going too far.
I remember a few decades ago when it was proposed to remove the navigator from the flight deck of passenger jets. The same arguments were being made against removing the navigator as are now being made against removing the co-pilot.
As it turned out, the post of navigator was eliminated, and no-one ever regretted it. And that was before GPS existed.
Having said that, I wouldn't want to be on a plane without a co-pilot. But by all means let the co-pilot replace one of the cabin crew when not needed to land the plane in an emergency.
I think it's funny that at 0:46 in the video they get the message "Please upgrade to a modern browser".
They can be washed...
That would be money laundering.
This reminds me of the old Swiss watchmaker. Every day at noon, regular as clockwork, on office worker walked past the watchmaker's window on his way to lunch. This was the watchmaker's reminder to carry out his daily clock setting, so every time the office worker went past, the watchmaker checked that all of his clocks indicated noon.
One day the watchmaker happened to be out in the street at noon, and he mentioned this to the office worker. "That's funny", said the worker, "I always set my watch when I walk past your shop".
And so the network of software-based clocks will work fine, provided the computers from which the time is being aggregated are not themselves setting their time by this software-based clock.
And I have a reference book on my bookshelf whose spine carries the bold text "The Latex Companion". Takes a bit of explaining.
Fine solution. Ignore the patents-copyrights. Go Pirate Party!
Even the Pirate Party advocates changing the law, not breaking it (it's already broken).