"OK, so what is it about Bitcoin that makes it so hard to create a safe exchange?"
Because Bitcoin only solves the transaction problem, it's a crypto-currency.
What is necessary is public & distributed account balances without any single point of failure. crypto-banking instead of crypto-currency.
But this is antithetical to the libertarian instincts of the ideological proponents, and the criminal instincts of the practical users who actually use the currency to transact instead of to speculate about itself.
And the WSJ's editorial position is, inevitably, to rescind all remaining, token and wimpy regulatory authority without any prior market changes.
Especially anything which would actually promote authentic economic competition which would reduce profits of current wealthy and powerful entities and people.
What will the results from that be? Obviously, instead of a captured regulator, unrestrained monopoly wealth extraction, and an increased equity price.
When North Korea starts putting the nukes on the launch pads, I don't think South Korea is going to sit around and debate whether they'll limit themselves to a cyber attack instead of an all-out air-raid.
The NIF is designed from front to back as a nuclear weapons project. The vast majority of its runs are dedicated to "NNSA" activities, the division of DOE for nuclear weapons engineering.
In particular, the NIF is used to calibrate the simulation codes used for the thermonuclear secondary. The lasers are there to ionize an outer 'hohlraum' which emits soft X-rays, simulating a fission primary. There are no difficult nuclear problems in a H-bomb, but there are difficult radiation and fluid mechanical problems.
Now that they have this thing they're trying to greenwash the project by trying to find something else to do with it.
In India, you can't get electricity some of the time no matter what you want to pay. The marginal utility to the country to increased electricity production is substantially higher than in developed countries which already have reliable, full capacity infrastructure.
It's not compatible with the standard because the standard can't handle the capability. Any incompatibility isn't gratuitous.
http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger
"30 A" public charging station: 7 kW Tesla supercharger: 120 kW
Because their non-standard charging station can't charge anything but Tesla because the other cars couldn't accept it either. Tesla has an extremely high current charging system not compatible with the standards.
It isn't reducing the number of possible charging stations for non-Tesla cards, it isn't increasing the number of them. They're putting out a much more impressive technology.
And some of the charging stations have standard J-1772 connectors. http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger/gilroy
When there are millions of Tesla cars on the road, Tesla will have the money to build many strings of charging stations and expand capacity on the existing ones.
Tesla's supercharger however is proprietary because it delivers far more power than the standard mechanism permits and it is intimately linked with the battery & its control system in the car.
Their goal should be: "How do we make a fantastic interface for a desktop operating system made for business software". And actually implement it. (I personally have some ideas with alternate mice). And write and sell that business software.
Yes, Microsoft will not be able to displace the Oracle database. That's not my plan.
It's all the other lousy Oracle, and other enterprise vendor, software which I think Microsoft should make a go at. I am inflicted with Oracle corporate application software.
Message: put as much serious investment there as they do with Office, instead of making a me-four tablet and phone, a me-two search engine.
Microsoft always was, and always will be a Business Software company. It's time they got really good at it.
Office is the only area where Microsoft has the will to lead and define, culturally, emotionally and intellectually.
"pivot to Devices and Services" -- That's Ballmerese for "doubling down on your core incompetencies"
Why is Microsoft trying so hard to compete against highly capable Apple and Google? It's a symptom of 15 years of typical Ballmerist "ooh, shiny.. gimme! I want one too!!!"?
They just aren't institutionally set up to do so.
Plan for incoming Microsoft CEO:
0) Assume your predecessor was wrong about everything until proven otherwise.
1) Halt the re-org until you know what you're doing.
2) in addition to "Devices and Services", how about, uh, ***Business Software***???? Now that I work in a mid-large company there is all sorts of ugly and junky application software whose capabilities and quality makes Microsoft Office seem like, oh, a properly-working HAL 9000.
Instead of throwing themselves up in a pathetic siege against highly capable, wealthy and motivated, Apple and Google, why not shoot for a much softer target: Oracle (other than the relational database). People hate them more than Microsoft and their products are poor.
Microsoft's primary focus should be "Diversified Business Software": there is a large range of software across many areas with much lower existing standard capability and quality than in the consumer market. MS has the scale to attack this heavily, could actually be good here, and make money consistently.
3) Windows. Oy vey. Microsoft will remain a primary business software company forever. Deal with it. So, a plan.
* Release Windows 7.5, backporting all the internal improvements of the Win 8 series which can fit, keeping the Win 7 interface. Expect all your business to upgrade to this, and skip Win 8. It will be the new XP, and you'll support it for at least a decade. Deal with it.
* Release Windows 8.5 with slightly-less bogosity, and lower your expectations.
* Much more seriously, go to the Research group and academia and work exceptionally hard to make a truly great, innovative, non-touch desktop interface, possibly including other physical input modalities (alternate mice, hardware, who knows?) Make Windows 9 (or 10) a really big deal. Not different for merely the sake of difference, but unmistakably GOOD. Recognize the physical realities of the world and humans.
| The California electricity crisis is a demonstration that you can screw up deregulation in a really bad way. But it's not a demonstration that deregulation is inherently bad or problematic.
Inherently bad, no, but problematic certainly.
Deregulation proceeded the way that free-market deregulation promoters wanted it to happen and the theoretical way it should: lowering the power of the local monopolies in favor of a (theoretically) competitive free-market. Generating assets were divorced from the consumers of them in order to create a deeper market. It turned out horribly.
Clear failures of the application deregulatory ideology are frequently retroactively declared to be "wasn't actually deregulatory". The warnings of the opponents of deregulation, even if they turned out to be right, get ignored the next time through as well. {eventually people got wise to Communists making the same type excuses}
The most pure 'theoretically' deregulatory environment is "let utilities do whatever they want", such as charge people extreme amounts for what are in practice essential services. Like threaten to turn off the juice to a hospital right before cardiac surgery unless they wired money to the CEO. Don't want that? Well, that will have to be regulated.
Texas (whose companies cheated Californians out of money) politicians mocked California without any empathy. They claimed (falsely) that the problem was entirely California's 'enviro-nazi' regulations preventing supply from meeting demand during the dot-com boom. (false).
Texas later drank its own hallucinogenic flavor-aid and deregulated its own electricity. Survey says?
During the California crisis, municipally owned utilities (such as LA's large DWP) which had not been subject to deregulation similarly had no supply shortage and maintained stable rates.
The argument from the opponents of electricity deregulation, namely that it is a scheme to extract money from the average user for the benefit of a small number of wealthy, private owners without any compensatory benefit, is correct.
Saddam Hussein in Iraq accumulated an effective military by paying the USSR hard currency from oil sales, creating a secular military dictatorship internally, rewarding loyal military people well, and agreeing to being to be a Soviet ally.
In 1990 most of its military hardware was Soviet.
Back to the original topic. In the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranians flew US F-4's and F-14's (purchased prior to the revolution obviously) and the Iraqis had Soviet and a few fairly modern French aircraft. The F-14's performed very well versus the Iraqi aircraft. In the Gulf War I, Iraqi pilots sometimes engaged (to their detriment) some US aircraft but always ran away from the F-14.
| Because his goal is to ensure that no one finds themselves in a position where they're using a binary without sources. Someone in that position is not free, and the GPL is his tool to ensure that doesn't happen.
Ah yes, that freedom: the sort of freedom that you don't get a say in.
| With a BSD-licence project, developers can choose to ignore GCC and fork LLVM instead, so neither GCC nor LLVM benefits.
In practice, not hypothetical theory, what has happened? The more modular nature of LLVM and license which was attractive to Apple for its proprietary needs has also attracted contributors to LLVM, which hasn't been significantly forked. Apple's contribution plus other contributors plus LLVM's technology is attractive and constructive.
FSF doesn't have just an ideology of helping free software, it has an ideology of hurting proprietary software.
Clang and LLVM are technically superior because they've been heavily modularized. FSF actively didn't want to do this with GCC and made it difficult because they wanted to make it difficult for GCC to be used with external tools, which hypothetically, could have been non-free software.
Yes, the LLVM license & design, in contrast to GCC, permits Apple to integrate it with proprietary Xcode, but it also aids tools development from academics and free software writers.
The facts are that GCC was there first, and precisely because of the political attitude of FSF which resulted in technical kneecaps flowing from that, other parties spend lots of money to develop a technically superior, and politically superior product. And today, a proprietary company with enormous bags of money is paying highly skilled people to develop slightly-less free open-source software.
FSF and GCC had its purpose and ideology exposed to the world, a significant community, and it lost. With a more compromising attitude FSF would have found Apple contributing significant resources to GCC--after all it was the original part of NextSTEP and early MacOS development.
I think GCC is very impressive and have used it for decades. Soon enough, though the future will be LLVM.
Slashdot Mirror
"OK, so what is it about Bitcoin that makes it so hard to create a safe exchange?"
Because Bitcoin only solves the transaction problem, it's a crypto-currency.
What is necessary is public & distributed account balances without any single point of failure. crypto-banking instead of crypto-currency.
But this is antithetical to the libertarian instincts of the ideological proponents, and the criminal instincts of the practical users who actually use the currency to transact instead of to speculate about itself.
And the WSJ's editorial position is, inevitably, to rescind all remaining, token and wimpy regulatory authority without any prior market changes.
Especially anything which would actually promote authentic economic competition which would reduce profits of current wealthy and powerful entities and people.
What will the results from that be? Obviously, instead of a captured regulator, unrestrained monopoly wealth extraction, and an increased equity price.
When North Korea starts putting the nukes on the launch pads, I don't think South Korea is going to sit around and debate whether they'll limit themselves to a cyber attack instead of an all-out air-raid.
The NIF is designed from front to back as a nuclear weapons project. The vast majority of its runs are dedicated to "NNSA" activities, the division of DOE for nuclear weapons engineering.
In particular, the NIF is used to calibrate the simulation codes used for the thermonuclear secondary. The lasers are there to ionize an outer 'hohlraum' which emits soft X-rays, simulating a fission primary. There are no difficult nuclear problems in a H-bomb, but there are difficult radiation and fluid mechanical problems.
Now that they have this thing they're trying to greenwash the project by trying to find something else to do with it.
In India, you can't get electricity some of the time no matter what you want to pay. The marginal utility to the country to increased electricity production is substantially higher than in developed countries which already have reliable, full capacity infrastructure.
In India, increased electricity available to use will certainly improve the general economic performance for decades.
It's not compatible with the standard because the standard can't handle the capability. Any incompatibility isn't gratuitous.
http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger
"30 A" public charging station: 7 kW
Tesla supercharger: 120 kW
Because their non-standard charging station can't charge anything but Tesla because the other cars couldn't accept it either. Tesla has an extremely high current charging system not compatible with the standards.
It isn't reducing the number of possible charging stations for non-Tesla cards, it isn't increasing the number of them. They're putting out a much more impressive technology.
And some of the charging stations have standard J-1772 connectors.
http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger/gilroy
The Tesla superchargers are much more powerful than the standard allows, but Tesla automobiles still accept the standard charger.
Tesla invested in a much higher capability than the standard allows and supports the standard.
What else do you want?
The charging stations could use the standard system, but if only Tesla vehicles will be charging there, what is the point?
LMGTFY
http://www.teslamotors.com/charging#/basics
Public charging station adapter (J1772, 80 amp capable)
http://www.mynissanleaf.com/wiki/index.php?title=Charging_System
All LEAFs have a SAE-J1772 Level 1/Level 2 charging port.
http://cmaxchat.com/?tag=kilowatt-hour
The Ford C-Max Energi uses a J1772 compatible charge station
When there are millions of Tesla cars on the road, Tesla will have the money to build many strings of charging stations and expand capacity on the existing ones.
actually they have.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDE-AR-E_2623-2-2#VDE-AR-E_2623-2-2
Tesla's supercharger however is proprietary because it delivers far more power than the standard mechanism permits and it is intimately linked with the battery & its control system in the car.
Yes, it's called NASA, and in particular NASA Advisory Council, and a parallel, independent, council from the National Academy of Sciences.
A politician with pork on his mind doesn't give a crap about any of them.
Their goal should be: "How do we make a fantastic interface for a desktop operating system made for business software". And actually implement it. (I personally have some ideas with alternate mice). And write and sell that business software.
Yes, Microsoft will not be able to displace the Oracle database. That's not my plan.
It's all the other lousy Oracle, and other enterprise vendor, software which I think Microsoft should make a go at. I am inflicted with Oracle corporate application software.
Message: put as much serious investment there as they do with Office, instead of making a me-four tablet and phone, a me-two search engine.
Microsoft always was, and always will be a Business Software company. It's time they got really good at it.
Office is the only area where Microsoft has the will to lead and define, culturally, emotionally and intellectually.
"pivot to Devices and Services" -- That's Ballmerese for "doubling down on your core incompetencies"
Why is Microsoft trying so hard to compete against highly capable Apple and Google? It's a symptom of 15 years of typical Ballmerist "ooh, shiny.. gimme! I want one too!!!"?
They just aren't institutionally set up to do so.
Plan for incoming Microsoft CEO:
0) Assume your predecessor was wrong about everything until proven otherwise.
1) Halt the re-org until you know what you're doing.
2) in addition to "Devices and Services", how about, uh, ***Business Software***???? Now that I work in a mid-large company there is all sorts of ugly and junky application software whose capabilities and quality makes Microsoft Office seem like, oh, a properly-working HAL 9000.
Instead of throwing themselves up in a pathetic siege against highly capable, wealthy and motivated, Apple and Google, why not shoot for a much softer target: Oracle (other than the relational database). People hate them more than Microsoft and their products are poor.
Microsoft's primary focus should be "Diversified Business Software": there is a large range of software across many areas with much lower existing standard capability and quality than in the consumer market. MS has the scale to attack this heavily, could actually be good here, and make money consistently.
3) Windows. Oy vey. Microsoft will remain a primary business software company forever. Deal with it. So, a plan.
* Release Windows 7.5, backporting all the internal improvements of the Win 8 series which can fit, keeping the Win 7 interface. Expect all your business to upgrade to this, and skip Win 8. It will be the new XP, and you'll support it for at least a decade. Deal with it.
* Release Windows 8.5 with slightly-less bogosity, and lower your expectations.
* Much more seriously, go to the Research group and academia and work exceptionally hard to make a truly great, innovative, non-touch desktop interface, possibly including other physical input modalities (alternate mice, hardware, who knows?) Make Windows 9 (or 10) a really big deal. Not different for merely the sake of difference, but unmistakably GOOD. Recognize the physical realities of the world and humans.
| The California electricity crisis is a demonstration that you can screw up deregulation in a really bad way. But it's not a demonstration that deregulation is inherently bad or problematic.
Inherently bad, no, but problematic certainly.
Deregulation proceeded the way that free-market deregulation promoters wanted it to happen and the theoretical way it should: lowering the power of the local monopolies in favor of a (theoretically) competitive free-market. Generating assets were divorced from the consumers of them in order to create a deeper market. It turned out horribly.
Clear failures of the application deregulatory ideology are frequently retroactively declared to be "wasn't actually deregulatory". The warnings of the opponents of deregulation, even if they turned out to be right, get ignored the next time through as well. {eventually people got wise to Communists making the same type excuses}
The most pure 'theoretically' deregulatory environment is "let utilities do whatever they want", such as charge people extreme amounts for what are in practice essential services. Like threaten to turn off the juice to a hospital right before cardiac surgery unless they wired money to the CEO. Don't want that? Well, that will have to be regulated.
Texas (whose companies cheated Californians out of money) politicians mocked California without any empathy. They claimed (falsely) that the problem was entirely California's 'enviro-nazi' regulations preventing supply from meeting demand during the dot-com boom. (false).
Texas later drank its own hallucinogenic flavor-aid and deregulated its own electricity. Survey says?
http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2012/01/25/electric-deregulation-turns-ten-in-texas/
During the California crisis, municipally owned utilities (such as LA's large DWP) which had not been subject to deregulation similarly had no supply shortage and maintained stable rates.
The argument from the opponents of electricity deregulation, namely that it is a scheme to extract money from the average user for the benefit of a small number of wealthy, private owners without any compensatory benefit, is correct.
| Actually, that's (proven) not true. Money only works up to a (surprisingly low) point
I've heard a CEO say exactly this in response to questions from an employee about bonuses and stock compensation.
Notably, it didn't seem to apply to him, when applied in much much larger quantity.
Compaq computer starts shipping in March 1983.
http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html
However, it was started in 1982, after Apple started the Macintosh project.
Iraqis engaged Iranian F-14's and lost heavily.
Egypt & Syria engaged Israeli aircraft and lost heavily.
Vietnam war was fairly even until late.
Missile seekers today are much much much much better than in 1968.
Saddam Hussein in Iraq accumulated an effective military by paying the USSR hard currency from oil sales, creating a secular military dictatorship internally, rewarding loyal military people well, and agreeing to being to be a Soviet ally.
In 1990 most of its military hardware was Soviet.
Back to the original topic. In the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranians flew US F-4's and F-14's (purchased prior to the revolution obviously) and the Iraqis had Soviet and a few fairly modern French aircraft. The F-14's performed very well versus the Iraqi aircraft. In the Gulf War I, Iraqi pilots sometimes engaged (to their detriment) some US aircraft but always ran away from the F-14.
| Because his goal is to ensure that no one finds themselves in a position where they're using a binary without sources. Someone in that position is not free, and the GPL is his tool to ensure that doesn't happen.
Ah yes, that freedom: the sort of freedom that you don't get a say in.
| With a BSD-licence project, developers can choose to ignore GCC and fork LLVM instead, so neither GCC nor LLVM benefits.
In practice, not hypothetical theory, what has happened? The more modular nature of LLVM and license which was attractive to Apple for its proprietary needs has also attracted contributors to LLVM, which hasn't been significantly forked. Apple's contribution plus other contributors plus LLVM's technology is attractive and constructive.
Right.
FSF doesn't have just an ideology of helping free software, it has an ideology of hurting proprietary software.
Clang and LLVM are technically superior because they've been heavily modularized. FSF actively didn't want to do this with GCC and made it difficult because they wanted to make it difficult for GCC to be used with external tools, which hypothetically, could have been non-free software.
Yes, the LLVM license & design, in contrast to GCC, permits Apple to integrate it with proprietary Xcode, but it also aids tools development from academics and free software writers.
The facts are that GCC was there first, and precisely because of the political attitude of FSF which resulted in technical kneecaps flowing from that, other parties spend lots of money to develop a technically superior, and politically superior product. And today, a proprietary company with enormous bags of money is paying highly skilled people to develop slightly-less free open-source software.
FSF and GCC had its purpose and ideology exposed to the world, a significant community, and it lost. With a more compromising attitude FSF would have found Apple contributing significant resources to GCC--after all it was the original part of NextSTEP and early MacOS development.
I think GCC is very impressive and have used it for decades. Soon enough, though the future will be LLVM.
The disadvantages of capitalism combined with the disadvantages of socialism.