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Comment Self-building network? (Score 1) 113

One thing I've been thinking about.. Everyone here assumes that the charging stations need to be placed out before the network of quads can start doing it's thing.

But, if you had some special mapping drones, lighter and longer reach, with terrain mapping fly out first, then make the charging stations modular..

The network could create a map of the area and build itself until it reached the target. And increasing network capacity would consist of adding more chargers and quads at the entry point,and the network could scale itself up. And when done, it can pack itself back together.

Comment Re:Forcing strong passwords in the first place. (Score 1) 211

Hash collisions...

MD5: 128bit. 2^128. 3.40282366920938463463374607431768211456 Ã-- 10^38 combinations
SHA1: 160 bits. 2^160. 1.461501637330902918203684832716283019655932542976 Ã-- 10^48 combinations
SHA-256: 256 bits. 2^256. 1.1579208923731619542357098500868790785326998466564056403... Ã-- 10^77 combinations.
SHA-512: 512 bits. 2^512. 1.340780792994259709957402499820584612747936582059239337... Ã-- 10^154 combinations.

Big numbers. Comparison numbers:
estimated number of atoms in the Earth: 1Ã--10^50 atoms
estimated number of atoms in the Milky Way galaxy: 2.9Ã--10^76 atoms
estimated number of atoms in the universe: 1Ã--10^80 atoms

The chance of a random hash collision, even factoring in birthday attack, is extremely small. It's also not a problem, even if it happens. As it is paired with a login name, you don't suddenly have person A logging in as person B.

And as noted, the length of a hash is fixed for the algorithm.

Comment Re:Start with scalable technologies! (Score 1) 274

As someone who hasn't written such a scalable app, but have been interested in the issues around it, this was more or less my first thought too.

App part is usually just "throw hardware at it", but DB part can be really hairy. You can get far on a one machine DB, but once you need to go past that, you got trouble. Unless you've already taken that into consideration.

Also, it's good to be familiar with the common problems and workarounds for scaling. Caching is one such thing. Often you got several possible ways to do things, and some of them lends themselves better to scaling than others. Often with little or no extra work. Or it's just a small tweak to functionality, hardly noticeable that's needed. But something that will be a royal PITA to change later on.

So my advice: Get familiar with scaling problems and solutions, keep them at the back of your mind when creating the site, but don't go out of your way. Not yet, at least. Maybe take time to make easy "hook" areas in the code where you can insert scalability later (f.x design things so it's easy to move parts of it to RPC later on, and make it easy to later add caching to areas).

Comment Re:Defintion of Pyramid Scheme (Score 2) 595

I'd just like to point out that gold have had the same characteristic, in the beginning it's easy to mine/wash/find, but as time goes it's getting harder and harder as all the easy spots are cleared out. And it's only economical to mine those harder spots out because the value of gold have risen.

Would you say gold is a pyramid scheme, because it was easier in the beginning? Bitcoin is in many ways digital gold, where the rarity comes from the resources it takes to "extract" bitcoins. Gold itself is not currency, but can be bought and sold. And also have fluctuations in value.

Personally I think bitcoin will be doomed in the long run, since there's a max limit to amount of coins, and coins will slowly fall out of the system (if the cryptographic wallet key is lost, all coins in that walled will be unable to be moved to a new address - and with time and Murphy's law, more and more coins will be rendered inactive).

Comment Re:Will increased exposure make the market rationa (Score 1) 140

but for now there is no scarcity at all.

Then why don't you just drum up a few hundred thousand bitcoins and sell them? You'll be bloody rich, AND you will have the pleasure of crashing BitCoin market and show everyone how right you are and how wrong they were.

From here:

Currently, 25 bitcoins are generated every 10 minutes. This will be halved to 12.5 BTC within the year 2017 and halved continuously every 4 years after until a hard-limit of 21 million bitcoins is reached within the year 2140.

To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they're generated too fast, the difficulty increases.

So the supply is rather fixed globally. If the demand is higher than the supply, there will be scarcity, and prices will rise. They might bounce up and down while the market adjusts, but as long as the demand is higher the average price will rise, until it's high enough that the demand is at the same level as the supply.

Comment Re:I have a Galaxy Note (Score 1) 320

I got the Note 2 and I can use it one handed just fine.

But, your test is actually invalid, because it makes wrong assumptions.

with the tips of your fingers holding the far edge

That's not needed, finger tips just needs to be beyond the balance point at the middle of the back. Combine that with resting the phone edge to theflat of the hand, and you actually got a pretty decent grip.

Comment Re:It begins, the horrible Asteroid B-movie. (Score 1) 409

It starts, with a killer asteroid hurling towards the earth.

Our hero is summoned, and immediately springs into action.

He sets out with his trusty weapon to save the world from the danger of the week.

After a long and awesome journey, he finally reach his destination.

Finally there, he slowly takes aim, breathes, and fire at The Killer Meteor. The meteor, alerted to his presence, fights back. What follows is a long action sequence only slowing down now and then so our hero can do manly poses.

After a long battle, and lots of shooting and fishing was done, there was only a small fragment left, just enough to spend the CGI budget, and show everyone how dangerous The Killer Meteor could have been.

No one was killed, and the world was again saved thanks to our hero.

The End.

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