If logic is invalid in a certain argument then it is fully valid to use logic in that argument.

This was a wonderful post. It was all the good things: insightful, informative and interesting. I thank you for it.

Energy utilization, information transmission and matter transformation define the scalar value with which evolution of a life form may be measured. Thus we can actually ascribe or define an "upward" or "increasing" direction.

We utilize more energy than any other life form.

We transmit (store/retrieve/communicate) information in gargantuan quantities (the electrons participating in the internet have a measurable combined weight at any given moment, there are so many of them/so much of it). Other life forms pretty much just use DNA/RNA to transmit their information, and few of them communicate with more than chemical markers.

We transform matter on a planetary scale, rivaling that of flora: from space I think we look like coral.

We are hella evolved, and yes, if the stars are where we must go to continue to live and flourish, then I would argue that evolution - at least in a gravitational field - has a definite direction, and that direction is up!

Trees, man.

Upward!

But truly, the proper preposition is probably, "forward".

I'm just splitting hairs again ;) - you are actually right that there is no teleological aspect to evolution and so no 'direction' - but in a certain sense, from a certain perspective, there clearly is a vector.

Watson, what kind of application should I write with your API?

Although they offer similar functionality, horsepower and a car is different from horses and a cart.

The solution to an exploding basket is to have more than one and to spread your eggs evenly between them: we need more places and planets

Reading this document is like reading the mind of the collective consciousness of the economy. This is perhaps the closest thing to a genuine "conspiracy" we are going to see and it's riddled with disagreement and apparent contradictions (or at best logical knots). For example, FTA:

So if they are of the same class that doesn't mean they are the same and also if they are of a different class that doesn't mean they are different. OK then...
Now I must admit that I haven't read T whole FA yet and if you have then you are amazing, so the confusion is probably mine, but the fact that there is no consensus on, I think, any of the sections says something in and of itself.

Wonderfully put! An argument and example a lawyer (like the Chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology) would love...wait a minute, why is there a lawyer heading my science committee?

oversimplified we can just say that twitter is being rosy because they should and twit cleaner is being not-so-rosy because they should. Let us then just average the claims and call that closest to the truth since both entities are skewing towards their favor.

And the result:

163.5 million active monthly

74 million monthly

I fairly understand that for there to be value in bitcoin there must be scarcity and that this scarcity is created via the mining mechanisms. But what I wonder is if there be any other way to create value for a virtual currency?

I ask because to me the most interesting thing about virtual currencies and specifically bitcoin is NOT the mining aspect, but rather the distributed database. The fact the hosting or provision of the database is fundamentally bound to the value-creation process seems to be the problem here. The problem seems not to necessarily be virtual currency or distributed databases themselves. The problem seems to be that value creation is based on artificial scarcity which can be manipulated through collusion.

There has to be another way to establish value for a virtual currency.

Probably. And he lived in the country from which he leaked it. I think his attitude is actually quite heartening. I wonder if, like me, when he thinks of the United States he thinks not only of the abstract bureaucratic entity and its questionable activities, but that he thinks of the actual people that entity consists of and is made by. You know; his friends, family, neighbors, shopkeepers, etc. He probably thinks that most people would drop these charges and move on, and he may be right. But entities, yes, they don't drop charges. I'm not trying to oppose your point, but I think his optimism is reasonably warranted.

If your tire gets a leak, you shouldn't waste time or energy on punishing the nail - you should fix the tire and drive more carefully and maybe avoid that road you had just gone down.

The analogy can go further, but that's as far down that road as I'm prepared to go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_pendulum

There is so much redundancy in the universe. It looks chaotic to us, but I think that really everything is just looping (orbiting/spinning) asynchronously so it appears that all this complicated random stuff is happening, but really it's all just a crap-ton of super-simple systems interacting. I think that science and reality are so obvious sometimes that we just can't see them - like air. The ancients knew that there was wind, that they could blow paper off a table and that it was hard to breath at high altitudes, but they didn't know until Empedocles (500–435 B.C.) used a clepsydras, or water-thief, to discover air that these were truly the same things.

And gravity, the overused example, was thought by the ancients to be a set of unrelated actions and happenings - to quote Disney's "the Sword and the Stone"

Merlin: Don't take gravity too lightly or it'll catch up with you.

Arthur: What's gravity?

Merlin: Gravity is what causes you to fall.

Arthur: Oh, like a stumble or a trip?

Merlin: Yes, it's like a stumble or a- No, no, no, it's the force that pulls you downward, the phenomenon that any two material particles or bodies, if free to move, will be accelerated toward each other

I believe I get a little bit of TMS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation ) from them, which might explain all these exceptional drawings of horses that I keep making from memory.

I would say the onus falls upon the user. In the absence of accepted standards or regulating entities I think it's buyer beware man. On the other hand, If you have standards dictating required operational parameters, then it's quite obviously the developer or designer I think. My post is over simplified and ignores the hardware/software integration question, but I think I'm on the right track. At least by slashdot standards. I welcome argument and rectification.

FTA: "...spreading efficiency is highly correlated with the network heterogeneity..."

Basically obvious, but is this a negative or positive correlation? For example, disease spread has a positive correlation with decreased heterogeneity. Does their model follow or depart from this? Probably follows, but inquiring mind wants to know!