I work at one such company. We recently setup openstack and plan to eventually use it for our production environment. But ec2 will still stay in the picture. Both for services were the end user needs more direct access to the machine and for failover purposes. I just don't know that openstack means the end of ec2.

Can I get "things we've been capable of doing for decades but haven't" for $1000 please.

On a serious note, we do recognize that things like "the skywheel" (e.g. halo?) will be plausible once space mining finally gets going, right?

I like you.

What is it If I enter your house and take photo's of your photos? On a quick look in florida, unless you break something (vandalism) or the owners are home it would be classified as 810.08 Trespass in structure or conveyance which is a 2nd degree misdemeanor, which has a prison term of not greater than 60 days. So based on your conclusion he should be looking at about the same. Not the 10 years the OP presented.

No one has issue with Afghanistan. The OP is more than likely talking about Iraq. Whom we were literally lied to and told they had ties to al-qaida, and then oops we misunderstood the report - but they have "weapons of mass-destruction1!!!!!" oops, we misread that one too, "but sadam is torturing his people!!", oops, turns out they weren't asking for help.. "ohhh.... okay well then I guess we need to stick around to clean up. "

can you imagine having died and learned that was the reason? That there wasn't one, never was, but now more need to die because of the mess we created by being there wrongfully in the first place? Can you imagine that the vast majority of our current debt is because of the massive amount being pumped into the war in iraq? And you're going to defend it?

Lesson Learned - don't report the security holes you discover. Apparently it would have just been better to exploit or sell it.

Hmm. I think you missed my thought process. I am talking about how to motivate kids into wanting to learn about computers/programming. Not learning programming outright via games, or worse teaching people HOW to program games. I think a programming game would never be fun enough to honestly captivate a kid. They really aren't much better than math games... And trying to get kids to program their own games would only lead to confusion and frustration, and likely turn them off from programming.

And no one will *ever* go from messing with game files to programming, say, path finding algorithms in assembly; without having decided to dig into some level of formal learning first. That isn't my goal in my post, either.

My reasoning is that in leaving some room for people to customize and manipulate games there is a higher chance that a youth will at least try to learn enough to create an advantage for themselves, like they have since the invention of PC games... And thus in doing so they will not only gain motivation to take it to the next level, but gain at least some tools in the process.

IMO games are the key. I know I learned most of what I know because of games.

Either trying to hack online games or dicking around with configs and custom content on PC games, I was learning. Trying to write macros to automate mundane gaming tasks. I was learning.

Also, I know every programmer out there will want to bash my face in for this, but excel is also very good to learn from. And a lot of games stand to gain from doing a bit of heavy analysis, or at least tracking, in excel. You learn how to deal with IF and ELSE statements, arrays, tables, lookup, AND/OR logic, strings concatenation and variables. And the framework for doing so in excel is not nearly as intimidating. Most non-programmers can make handy things in excel, that if you broke all the cell into variables and functions into code, would look a whole like a real program, they just don't know it.

At some point during all of this I got curious about "Real" programming and kept looking at C. And while I never fully learned C to a usable level I learned about pointers and memory allocation/addresses/pointers/cleanup/etc. At some point I wanted to get into linux since it seemed more programming friendly. I choose gentoo by pure coincidence, and from bootstrap+compile kernal I learned even more.

All because of games. But the problem becomes that over time it has become harder and harder to hack games; both web and PC based. So many measures in place to stop people from doing it, and even threats of bans. I feel like this is bad for our future. Like the one thing games stood to give to society is diminished by pettiness.

So... for me it is not that I do not believe in it. I truly feel that we need to do better at achieving a low impact on our environment, yes.... But what I *do* have a problem with is that we can't even accurately predict the weather on the day of the prediction (just yesterday morning I was fooled into thinking it would be in the 80's - we didn't pass the 60's) much less act like we know what long term effects these "remedies" will create. What happens if we do actually artificially slow global warming only to figure out after the fact that by doing so we've created a much bigger problem? As it stands the earth will survive global warming. It has plenty of times before, and will continue to do so. So long as someone doesn't fuck with it's natural cycles. People will too, if we prepare for it correctly.

IMO we should do better to limit our consumption (which has the unfortunate effect of not using the GDP as a measure of success) and start figuring out how to optimize our survivability for the impending climate issues. And allow it take it's course. At the extreme we could stop building normal structures and focus that money/energy on floating cities with sustainable habitats. Just start with an extendable platform, and all new construction goes there... We have the technology and ability to do this. So why not?

WTF is wrong with you? Some people on this planet are shitty, yes. But that doesn't mean the entirety of humanity should be wiped out, all because you don't like it. And that sentiment doesn't make me a "saint" either. Merely someone who isn't so egotistical that thinks I should do whatever the **** I feel like simply because other people are assholes. Get over yourself.

Yes - which is the why I suspect that the very few people who have enough capitol to make something like that happen don't do it. It was actually my last sentence in my previous post - that in playing with RL money like that you too loose out, so the profit means very little. It is something of a catch 22. Though, I made a pretty serious typo =/ What I meant to say was that playing with bitcoin like this doesn't effect your dollar; only the bitcoin. So crashing bitcoin in exchange for dollars wont have that same catch 22.

To accomplish the same in dollars/gold/etc you would need billions - likely more, as apposed to millions. Plus, in the process of playing this game with real money, the crash hurts yourself - so to some degree it wouldn't be a worthwhile maneuver for the very few with that amount of cash, unless you simply wanted to see a country burn. But a crash in bitcoins for the exchange of "real life" money wouldn't bother the antagonist one bit. That actually has been done before - black wednesday. This was also technically done with the housing market between 2004 and 2006. Though, not by a single individual, but the mechanics are the same. But, simply imagine one super rich person (rather than lots of barely rich people) flipping all of the homes for an inflated price - they are the one keeping the supply low and thus artificially increasing the price. get a little scared, stop buying so many up, all of a sudden prices start dropping back down - boom, crash. They would have made a large amount off all of it, and once the market came back up they would be set.

That said, if enough people tolerate the bitcoin market long enough to get the price up to a point where it would be too costly to game it, and distributed well enough to be stable, it will work. But I have a hard time imaging this will ever happen; at least so long as people keep gaming it, and ruining the market confidence needed to get there.

gold and diamonds *could* be used to do the same. As a matter of fact, it was recently revealed that Russia has been sitting on a diamond pit since the 60's, simply because they didn't want to crash the market (I'm sure there was more than that incentive at play there...)

Cash has been played this way before - it was called black wednesday. The main difference however, is that it takes a very substantial amount of cash to accomplish the same effect (we're talking the difference between ~50m and several billion)

But something else to consider is that with bitcoin you dollar is still worth the same. but crash USD and you aren't exactly helping yourself.

A little dramatic today, aren't we?

Honestly, I agree that BitCoin will fail. I thought the flaw was already apparent - people can game it for profit. It's as simple as having enough money to buy up tons of them, causing the relative value to go up, and then selling them all off at once. Causing the price to crash, so I can start all over once the dust settles.

I called that before it even happened, and people looked at me like I was a tard. Yet, it happened. And it will happen again, just as soon as people start buying into again. And If I can come across a mere ~$50M I'll be the one to do.

Going forward when I see a youtube comment asking if the video was recorded by a calculator I'll know it's a serious question.