Then they are loaded back onto tankers and shipped around the world, with all profits going to the Chinese government.
What makes you think we hate the Chinese government so much that we would let all those profits going to the oil companies? There are no "our" oil companies. The oil companies would betray American interests and work to the detriment of America as easily as the international oil companies. In fact these oil companies have more than a century of manipulating our governments, our industries,our societies, our media. They had formed secret cartels to destroy the public transportation infrastructure of America. They have insidiously worked to increase urban sprawl to enrich themselves. They have whipped up public opinion to get us into wars.
The oil industry saw how easily we beat Iraq in 1992 booting Saddam out of Kuwait. They salivated at the idea of throwing Saddam out, installing a puppet and get all the Iraqi oil at cheap rates for their cronies. We are still paying the price for that war in terms of money and in terms of hostility to America from the Middle East.
Between the multinational oil companies and China, I would say the oil companies are the bigger threat. China has to fight a nuclear war to beat us. Oil companies would corrode us from inside out feeding on us like a wasp nymph feeds on a live but sedated pray.
Crude oil is not as safe as solar energy or wind energy. The oil industry should pay the full cost of making it as safe as the renewables, not just in transportation. But also in extraction, in waste by products, pollution in extraction, pollution by use, pollution in transportation, in every aspect, the oil industry should pay the full true cost of being as safe as solar. That is the true free market of level playing ground.
It is true pipelines would transport oil using less carbon emissions compared to rail transport. But they also reduce transportation costs, thus allow more oil to be used and allow oil to undercut renewable sources of energy. So it makes sense to oppose the pipelines. Any single rail accident would spill far less oil than a spill or break in the oil pipeline. And these accidents would create enough pressure to make the rail transport of oil safer.
Every bit of bitcoin that ever passed through MtGox can be tracked, can be tracked both downstream from MtGox easily and can be tracked upstream too with some minor difficulty. But the trail will start and end in Bitcoin private keys and the user ids associated with those keys. If MtGox is a government regulated bank, if it has enforcement powers and subpoena powers it will be able to find the actual offenders and recover the money.
With proper countermeasures (that you would certainly take if you were doing something illegal) it would be pretty much impossible to match money to person.
Qualifiers like "with proper countermeasures", "when it is done right", "if used in sufficient quantity" etc make the entire sentence meaningless. Anytime some one does get caught, you would just say "nah, he did not take proper countermeasures", "he didn't do it right", "he did not use it enough" etc.
So let us change it to reasonable countermeasures. And throw in a law enforcement agency with great power and resources, and throw in entities like MPAA, RIAA and the copyright shakedown artists, what countermeasures would be reasonable and sufficient?
My guess is, they won't use decoded dead blocks to track down assassins, it is hard work, but nothing more than glory as the paydirt. But torrent downloaders be on guard, they are gonna get you.
Most people think bitcoin is an anonymous digital cash, totally untraceable. But the basic fact is, bitcoin is the very opposite of anonymity. All the transactions of all the people are public and is verified by multiple entities. Bit coin blocks are like pages of a bank ledgers and multiple copies of are floating around the world, copied and replicated.
The only anonymity the users have is the notion, these bitcoin wallets exist only in the bitcoin universe and it can not be linked to real life entities. This is a big assumption to make. Whenever bitcoin universe intersects real universe there is potential for the anonymity to be broken. A vendor delivering goods maintaining records like "bitcoin wallet xxx placed order for yyy delivered to address zzz" will link the wallets to real identities and clues.
I thought "These blocks go well into the past, so people who have conducted illicit transactions in the past also have their wallets linked to the transactions. These can not be erased or modified. Multiple copies of the blocks exist. So the law enforcement can catch them years from now". More informed slashdotters explained that those "expired" blocks have been purged from most miners. Only their final checksums were carried forward. So past transactions to buy drugs or something can not be decrypted.
But NSA and other agencies have been sucking up internet traffic like a giant vacuum. They know more about the value of the blocks being validated (Mining is a misleading term. Mining is repeatedly validating the block till the checksum meets a criterion). Those blocks exist in the vault.
So yes, every time a drug dealer or a hired assassin gets nabbed and his/her bitcoin wallet gets decoded, all the wallets that dealt with him will be recovered. The web will grow. There is potential for a very large number of people to be caught by the law years after their "illegal" activity happened. If it is a time bound offense they might be lucky. But there is no statuette of limitation for murder and other higher felonies. Bitcoin blocks might turn out to be a huge law enforcement tool after all.
But most likely to catch illegal downloads than drug dealing, given the tenacity and connections of MPAA and RIAA.
There was a time in biology when the movable type made it really cheap to produce books with lots and lots of words. But pictures were very expensive. Botonists everywhere needed an unambiguous way to describe the plants to do the taxonomy and create the cladograms and genus-species classifications. So they came up with tons and tons of terms, like striated, ligule, periole, orbiculer, pinnatisect,... ( You can see the whole glorious set here ).
Then with the advent of lithography to replace the woodcuts, the price of including diagrams in books started falling. So one would think the botonists everywhere shouted hallelujah and thanked the providence. No. There was serious opposition to these line drawings of simple plant forms to describe the species. They railed that the pictures were a distraction. Pictures are ambiguous(!), Images do not have the clarity of description afforded by the precisely defined technical terms. Pictures are for kids. Not for serious scientists. It took quite a bit of time for images to become common in botony books.
Now a days other than providing a rich source of words to stump the adults and torture small children preparing to be the spelling bee and to weed out the slackers in botony 101, there does not seem to be much use for these terms. (Well, I am not a botonist, and I am sure an army of them are going to rise up and roast me here.)
Power point was a novelty, and suddenly every one can produce slides and make presentations. Most people suck at content creation, and no amount of transition animation and font choices is going to make them better. Good communicators will excel in using power points. Bad ones will suck even with the chalkboard.
I agree most power point presentations are a waste of time. Most of them have very little content. Most of them suck big time. Where I disagree is, blaming the tool for the sins of the tool wielder.
It is alleged that he frequents a web discussion forum and is using his old dorm addresses as his user name. (Would like to know how it feels if papparazzi camp out in my front yard, that is all).
Australia, Ireland, Singapore etc are supposedly allies of the USA. Two bit countries like Cayman Islands and Lichtenstein help MNCs to shift money around, allow corrupt despots of third world countries to launder their ill gotten money through corruption. They also let MNCs to dodge taxes. Countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are our allies in war against terror.
How long can this go on? Every one from the rich 0.1% of Americans, MNCs, two bit countries, supposed allies are all taking pot shots at America in every which way they can. It is time for the Atlas to shrug. The Atlas is not some super duper individual super achiever. It is the middle class of America that is the only one paying their taxes, and supplying canon fodder.
In the case of Zune Microsoft entered the market late, went up against entrenched opposition of iPod and failed. But they routinely used to enter the market late, and fight against the entrenched players and win. They won against Wordstar, Lotus 123, Wordperfect, dBase III, Turbo Pascal, Netscape... Allow the early guys to duke it out, and walk in after the market stabilizes and eat them alive... This was done again and again.
They also had enough money to have a long war of attrition against the video game makers in xbox. They were able to drive Sun out with their money. Then their luck/charm/talent ran out.
I don't see what is so special about mathematicians skimming over stuff and not sweating the small stuff. Many project planning meetings we treat lots of stuff as black boxes and proceed with some simple assurance that it would do what the team says it will do. The post processing guy would have a very nebulous idea of the geometry core team's claims. Nobody understands what the mesh maker says anyway. Then there are the mathematicians from the solver group. Upside down triangles, dots crosses some time three integral signs lined up like sails of some old ship.. Eventually we understand enough of it to make it work most of the time. Even after the project is done and the feature has been shipped and the user story has been marked complete and independently verified by the user proxy, nobody understands how the mesher meshed it nor how the solver solved it.
I have relatives who work for Microsoft who use the same gym Steve Ballmer uses. He does not have any sidekicks hanging around him, nor does he project any kind of superior airs there. Quietly shows up and works on some free machine, wipes the equipment with a towel like everyone else before leaving. I am not disputing "he throws chairs" or "shouts at the directors" etc. Both could be true.
I think Ballmer inherited a very large unwieldy and nearly ungovernable organization. All the real genii had either cashed out, burnt out or were pushed out. Near monopoly status meant every one is producing huge torrents of revenue and it was difficult to cull out the wheat from the chaff. Those who remained and got promoted were the third or fourth echelon of talent who excelled in office politics and political intrigue. Much of the credit the media heaped on him in the early were undeserved and so is most of the scorn heaped on him.
One small comfort for these consumers would be, "Well, this IP address that downloaded prOn via tor and paid for it using bitcoins stolen from MtGox was assigned to my home address, I don't dispute that. But some one using Xfinity wifi account piggy backed on my router without my permission and did that. It must be that way. *I* would never do such a thing. And one the neighborhood kid was seen walking around with eyes glued to the smartphone screen oblivious to everything. He must have done it."
They achieve the high densities by using atmospheric air for oxygen. Basically they are rusting iron and reversing the rusting using electrolysis. Which means not only you need to keep the iron molten, you need to vent it to atmosphere too! Other molten metal batteries are sealed, allowing for better thermal insulation.
I wonder if people are working on charged liquid electrolytes based batteries. If I could drain the electrolyte from the discharged battery, refill it will charged electrolyte much like filling gasoline into a tank. Must be a dumb idea because I have not seen any excited posts about it. May be the energy density is so very poor for these charged electrolytes.
Electric motors are extremely efficient, over 99% in converting electricity to mechanical energy. So you don't have to lop off so much for the efficiency of the electric motor. But, how much of the energy in the battery can be actually extracted is the question. If the energy densities quoted were based on "available energy" you don't have to account for it. But if it is based on some theoretical value based on how much can be packed in, without worrying about how much of it will come out, then you need to account for that loss.
This is the true reason the prize went unclaimed: A lonely researcher from a poor religiously vegetarian family from the South Indian town of Saivakkadu developed such a chicken and was about to claim the prize. But Tyson food spies found out about it, bought the invention from the inventor by out bidding PETA and have rolled the process into production some three years ago. Suddenly all those animal cruelty sneak videos from the chicken farms reduced greatly in volume. Coincidence? I think not. Tyson finds it far more profitable to peddle vegetarian lab grown petri dish meat as the real thing instead of selling it to wimpy vegetarians susceptible to temptation as ethical meat. Look how uniform all those chicken legs and thighs packed in plastic. Nature is going to be that uniform?
Think about it people.
Lab meat is here. On your table. Already.
Carbon fiber trailer, aerodynamic body, central driver seat etc are gimmics.
A high efficiency power source, mediated via battery and electric motor is really interesting technology. The locomotives made the switch to diesel electric from steam in 1940s very very swiftly. In just one decade the steam engines were gone. The electric motors are ideal things to turn the wheel. Their torque peaks at zero rpm, exactly when it is needed. IC engines via clutch + transmission + gear box is a hack. But trucks have been using synchromesh transmission and gear box for all these years. Even without a battery in the middle, constant rpm diesel engine producing electricity would have been simpler than the complexity of the gearbox. That is exactly how locomotives work.
It is high time diesel-electric or micro-gas turbine + electric trucks are designed at least experimental platforms.
How do you measure market share? By units sold? Can one sale of a cheap 6 inch tablet gets the same weightage as a high end 11 inch tablet? Or by percentage of sales volume in dollars? Or share of profits made?
Or by number of eye-ball-minutes sold to advertizers?
Their K-cup patent has expired. They might pipe dream about migrating all their users to more expensive DRM protected coffee machines. But it will die like Vista. And it will give the generic K-cup makers, who have just 8% of the market now, a new lease on life. Eventually like Microsoft they will tuck their tail between their legs and come out and compete in a level playing field. But these top honchos who dream up these things will do a few power point presentations, do some hustle to make bonus, cash out the stock options and will go out looking greener mountain to roast something other their share holders. Dump the stock now if you own it.
No way Billy! Ikea never sells anything with a name like Robust. It would be something more like Gesaalt, or Ivani or Kompactor or something. Never a simple word like Robust.
Jean-Michel Claverie: 'We thought it was a property of viruses that they pack DNA extremely tightly into the smallest particle possible, but this guy is 150 times less compacted than any bacteriophage [viruses that infect bacteria].
I am sure this scientist is going to be perplexed by this too. this . I expect him to say, "I expect the human torso to be kind of roundish in cross section and two hands hanging by the side. But this guy is over compacted. We don't understand any thing anymore."
Slashdot Mirror
Then they are loaded back onto tankers and shipped around the world, with all profits going to the Chinese government.
What makes you think we hate the Chinese government so much that we would let all those profits going to the oil companies? There are no "our" oil companies. The oil companies would betray American interests and work to the detriment of America as easily as the international oil companies. In fact these oil companies have more than a century of manipulating our governments, our industries,our societies, our media. They had formed secret cartels to destroy the public transportation infrastructure of America. They have insidiously worked to increase urban sprawl to enrich themselves. They have whipped up public opinion to get us into wars.
The oil industry saw how easily we beat Iraq in 1992 booting Saddam out of Kuwait. They salivated at the idea of throwing Saddam out, installing a puppet and get all the Iraqi oil at cheap rates for their cronies. We are still paying the price for that war in terms of money and in terms of hostility to America from the Middle East.
Between the multinational oil companies and China, I would say the oil companies are the bigger threat. China has to fight a nuclear war to beat us. Oil companies would corrode us from inside out feeding on us like a wasp nymph feeds on a live but sedated pray.
It is true pipelines would transport oil using less carbon emissions compared to rail transport. But they also reduce transportation costs, thus allow more oil to be used and allow oil to undercut renewable sources of energy. So it makes sense to oppose the pipelines. Any single rail accident would spill far less oil than a spill or break in the oil pipeline. And these accidents would create enough pressure to make the rail transport of oil safer.
Every bit of bitcoin that ever passed through MtGox can be tracked, can be tracked both downstream from MtGox easily and can be tracked upstream too with some minor difficulty. But the trail will start and end in Bitcoin private keys and the user ids associated with those keys. If MtGox is a government regulated bank, if it has enforcement powers and subpoena powers it will be able to find the actual offenders and recover the money.
With proper countermeasures (that you would certainly take if you were doing something illegal) it would be pretty much impossible to match money to person.
Qualifiers like "with proper countermeasures", "when it is done right", "if used in sufficient quantity" etc make the entire sentence meaningless. Anytime some one does get caught, you would just say "nah, he did not take proper countermeasures", "he didn't do it right", "he did not use it enough" etc.
So let us change it to reasonable countermeasures. And throw in a law enforcement agency with great power and resources, and throw in entities like MPAA, RIAA and the copyright shakedown artists, what countermeasures would be reasonable and sufficient?
My guess is, they won't use decoded dead blocks to track down assassins, it is hard work, but nothing more than glory as the paydirt. But torrent downloaders be on guard, they are gonna get you.
If you are going to add a qualifier to Albert Einstein, please at least capitalize it, as in Physicist Albert Einstein like Lord Vishnu or something.
The only anonymity the users have is the notion, these bitcoin wallets exist only in the bitcoin universe and it can not be linked to real life entities. This is a big assumption to make. Whenever bitcoin universe intersects real universe there is potential for the anonymity to be broken. A vendor delivering goods maintaining records like "bitcoin wallet xxx placed order for yyy delivered to address zzz" will link the wallets to real identities and clues.
I thought "These blocks go well into the past, so people who have conducted illicit transactions in the past also have their wallets linked to the transactions. These can not be erased or modified. Multiple copies of the blocks exist. So the law enforcement can catch them years from now". More informed slashdotters explained that those "expired" blocks have been purged from most miners. Only their final checksums were carried forward. So past transactions to buy drugs or something can not be decrypted.
But NSA and other agencies have been sucking up internet traffic like a giant vacuum. They know more about the value of the blocks being validated (Mining is a misleading term. Mining is repeatedly validating the block till the checksum meets a criterion). Those blocks exist in the vault.
So yes, every time a drug dealer or a hired assassin gets nabbed and his/her bitcoin wallet gets decoded, all the wallets that dealt with him will be recovered. The web will grow. There is potential for a very large number of people to be caught by the law years after their "illegal" activity happened. If it is a time bound offense they might be lucky. But there is no statuette of limitation for murder and other higher felonies. Bitcoin blocks might turn out to be a huge law enforcement tool after all.
But most likely to catch illegal downloads than drug dealing, given the tenacity and connections of MPAA and RIAA.
the code running the sight was a mess,
is particularly irritating.
Good points. True 3 digiter. I can almost hear a boss adding, "can you make it a slide and email it to me? I am meeting budget committee next week".
Then with the advent of lithography to replace the woodcuts, the price of including diagrams in books started falling. So one would think the botonists everywhere shouted hallelujah and thanked the providence. No. There was serious opposition to these line drawings of simple plant forms to describe the species. They railed that the pictures were a distraction. Pictures are ambiguous(!), Images do not have the clarity of description afforded by the precisely defined technical terms. Pictures are for kids. Not for serious scientists. It took quite a bit of time for images to become common in botony books.
Now a days other than providing a rich source of words to stump the adults and torture small children preparing to be the spelling bee and to weed out the slackers in botony 101, there does not seem to be much use for these terms. (Well, I am not a botonist, and I am sure an army of them are going to rise up and roast me here.)
Power point was a novelty, and suddenly every one can produce slides and make presentations. Most people suck at content creation, and no amount of transition animation and font choices is going to make them better. Good communicators will excel in using power points. Bad ones will suck even with the chalkboard.
I agree most power point presentations are a waste of time. Most of them have very little content. Most of them suck big time. Where I disagree is, blaming the tool for the sins of the tool wielder.
It is alleged that he frequents a web discussion forum and is using his old dorm addresses as his user name. (Would like to know how it feels if papparazzi camp out in my front yard, that is all).
How long can this go on? Every one from the rich 0.1% of Americans, MNCs, two bit countries, supposed allies are all taking pot shots at America in every which way they can. It is time for the Atlas to shrug. The Atlas is not some super duper individual super achiever. It is the middle class of America that is the only one paying their taxes, and supplying canon fodder.
They also had enough money to have a long war of attrition against the video game makers in xbox. They were able to drive Sun out with their money. Then their luck/charm/talent ran out.
I don't see what is so special about mathematicians skimming over stuff and not sweating the small stuff. Many project planning meetings we treat lots of stuff as black boxes and proceed with some simple assurance that it would do what the team says it will do. The post processing guy would have a very nebulous idea of the geometry core team's claims. Nobody understands what the mesh maker says anyway. Then there are the mathematicians from the solver group. Upside down triangles, dots crosses some time three integral signs lined up like sails of some old ship .. Eventually we understand enough of it to make it work most of the time. Even after the project is done and the feature has been shipped and the user story has been marked complete and independently verified by the user proxy, nobody understands how the mesher meshed it nor how the solver solved it.
I think Ballmer inherited a very large unwieldy and nearly ungovernable organization. All the real genii had either cashed out, burnt out or were pushed out. Near monopoly status meant every one is producing huge torrents of revenue and it was difficult to cull out the wheat from the chaff. Those who remained and got promoted were the third or fourth echelon of talent who excelled in office politics and political intrigue. Much of the credit the media heaped on him in the early were undeserved and so is most of the scorn heaped on him.
One small comfort for these consumers would be, "Well, this IP address that downloaded prOn via tor and paid for it using bitcoins stolen from MtGox was assigned to my home address, I don't dispute that. But some one using Xfinity wifi account piggy backed on my router without my permission and did that. It must be that way. *I* would never do such a thing. And one the neighborhood kid was seen walking around with eyes glued to the smartphone screen oblivious to everything. He must have done it."
They achieve the high densities by using atmospheric air for oxygen. Basically they are rusting iron and reversing the rusting using electrolysis. Which means not only you need to keep the iron molten, you need to vent it to atmosphere too! Other molten metal batteries are sealed, allowing for better thermal insulation.
I wonder if people are working on charged liquid electrolytes based batteries. If I could drain the electrolyte from the discharged battery, refill it will charged electrolyte much like filling gasoline into a tank. Must be a dumb idea because I have not seen any excited posts about it. May be the energy density is so very poor for these charged electrolytes.
Electric motors are extremely efficient, over 99% in converting electricity to mechanical energy. So you don't have to lop off so much for the efficiency of the electric motor. But, how much of the energy in the battery can be actually extracted is the question. If the energy densities quoted were based on "available energy" you don't have to account for it. But if it is based on some theoretical value based on how much can be packed in, without worrying about how much of it will come out, then you need to account for that loss.
Think about it people. Lab meat is here. On your table. Already.
A high efficiency power source, mediated via battery and electric motor is really interesting technology. The locomotives made the switch to diesel electric from steam in 1940s very very swiftly. In just one decade the steam engines were gone. The electric motors are ideal things to turn the wheel. Their torque peaks at zero rpm, exactly when it is needed. IC engines via clutch + transmission + gear box is a hack. But trucks have been using synchromesh transmission and gear box for all these years. Even without a battery in the middle, constant rpm diesel engine producing electricity would have been simpler than the complexity of the gearbox. That is exactly how locomotives work.
It is high time diesel-electric or micro-gas turbine + electric trucks are designed at least experimental platforms.
Or by number of eye-ball-minutes sold to advertizers?
Their K-cup patent has expired. They might pipe dream about migrating all their users to more expensive DRM protected coffee machines. But it will die like Vista. And it will give the generic K-cup makers, who have just 8% of the market now, a new lease on life. Eventually like Microsoft they will tuck their tail between their legs and come out and compete in a level playing field. But these top honchos who dream up these things will do a few power point presentations, do some hustle to make bonus, cash out the stock options and will go out looking greener mountain to roast something other their share holders. Dump the stock now if you own it.
No way Billy! Ikea never sells anything with a name like Robust. It would be something more like Gesaalt, or Ivani or Kompactor or something. Never a simple word like Robust.
Jean-Michel Claverie: 'We thought it was a property of viruses that they pack DNA extremely tightly into the smallest particle possible, but this guy is 150 times less compacted than any bacteriophage [viruses that infect bacteria].
I am sure this scientist is going to be perplexed by this too. this . I expect him to say, "I expect the human torso to be kind of roundish in cross section and two hands hanging by the side. But this guy is over compacted. We don't understand any thing anymore."
And the picture has two contra rotating propellers. It ain't no jet. May be jet black paint could be used. But that about it.