Apparently moisture farmers and 'vaporators can be a real thing on Mars.

Perhaps the water is being insulated by the eddy of plastic trash in the central Pacific?

That's what bank safety deposit boxes are for. Offsite, hard to break into, more or less fireproof through sheer mass, even if the building around it burns. Ask the bank about how thick the walls are, though. Class 3 is recommended (12 inches thick concrete), with additional outside fireproofing.

"When four men sit down to talk conspiracy, three are government agents and the fourth is a fool."
-- Russian proverb

> Tape isn't dead, but it's not worth it for small quantities

The cheapest LTO-6 drive on NewEgg is $1500, and Sony has the tapes for $18/TB. External hard drives are running about $35/TB. So you need ~90 TB for cost crossover on sheer data volume, not considering usability and reliability. So I would agree, with those kind of prices, you might want to *start* thinking about tape when you get to 100 TB, because 1 drive isn't very reliable. It might work for backup storage, since you can get by with a broken tape drive for however long your backup cycle is.

> That is completely self-referential.

Nope. A "bitcoin" unit is just an entry of 1.0000 in the transaction ledger known as the "block chain". The block chain is just a bunch of files listing every bitcoin transaction ever. My copy is 36 GB at the moment.

The Bitcoin Network is what makes it possible to write new transactions into the ledger in a secure way. Secure means nobody can rewrite old entries in the ledger, and everybody can verify the contents are correct. Only the person with the private cryptographic key to an address can send the balance in that address to someone else. Without the network, the ledger could not be updated, making the balances recorded there useless.

> First, a Bitcoin in of itself has no real-world value.

Neither does a UPS shipping label. It's the network of trucks and distribution centers that give the shipping token (the label) value. They are what enable moving a package from one place to another. That's a useful service, and hence people are willing to pay for the label.

Similarly, a bitcoin is merely an entry of 1.0000 units in a big distributed ledger (the block chain). It's the network of relay nodes and miners that give the bitcoin token value. They are what enable moving monetary value from one place to another. That's a useful service, and hence people are willing to pay for the tokens. Other parts of the ecosystem add more usefulness, and thus more value. Websites, wallet software, custom hardware, smartphone apps, exchanges, merchants who accept bitcoin, etc.

The transaction protocol also includes a scripting language, so you can make your money programmable. How useful is that? People have only touched the surface of what you can do with that capability.

My son is just about to turn nine, and he is really enjoying the programming section on Khan Academy. The site was originally designed as a math curriculum but is rapidly expanding into other fields. It is free, and it uses JavaScript with immediate visual feedback while teaching them the basic concepts of programming. There are step by step instructions and helpful hints to help guide them through the concepts, but having some occasional parental help is sometimes required. Overall, though, I have been pretty impressed with it.

One thing though: I would make sure they learn how to type first as that will greatly help their ability to program.

Except the Bitcoin Network already runs at 324 Petahash/second, and each hash computation requires many floating point operations - 128 rounds of applying a complex hash function on several hundred bytes of data. Aurora competing for bitcoins won't make a significant difference in the network hash rate, it is too puny. The network already runs at ~1 million petaflops by dint of custom designed mining chips that perform the necessary calculations in hardware, massively parallel in each chip. Then you aggregate server rooms full of these chips into a mining farm.

Where'd you get that newfangled hearin' aid?? I needs me one.

That theory has been put forth, and probably has often been true, but it falls down when it comes to state offices -- where statewide, approval rating was in the toilet, yet the same people got re-elected.

There's also the problem of low turnout. In my SoCal town, the same guy has had a monopoly on the mayor's office for years, yet is widely hated. So how did he stay in office? In the last election while I lived there, less than 2% (yes, TWO percent) of registered voters actually voted. Or at least that was what was reported to the SoS office... there were irregularities sufficient that an investigation was scheduled, but nothing ever came of it.

I'm reminded of a tale from the 1972 Presidential election, from someone I knew who was doing a door-to-door survey: When asked their views, most people espoused typical conservative points. But the final survey question was: Who do you think would make a good president? And the most common answer, even from very conservative voters, was "Teddy Kennedy" (then the most liberal man in all of politics). The conclusion from the survey's data was that most voters didn't actually know what a given candidate stood for, but they sure as hell knew the names. (Mind you this was back when most of these voters would remember JFK firsthand.)

Here in Montana, if someone has an abysmal rating, they're likely to get voted out. One might offer a correlation with the much better educational level...

More than an advantage; in California, it's a shoo-in.

At the last major election before I moved back out of CA -- I forget the year, mighta been 2010 -- public satisfaction with elected state officials was just 13%.

Yet *100%* of incumbants got re-elected. (I checked every race listed on the Secretary of State site. There were NO exceptions.)

If that ain't name-recognition at work, well, you tell me.

And yes, CA has more than its fair share of yellow-dog Democrats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The term originated in the late 19th century. These voters would allegedly "vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for any Republican".

Small world :) I'd like to see pricks like that one's pet shyster get disbarred, but not likely to happen very often.