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If I had any friends at all, I wouldn't be getting so many black eyes.

I'm wondering, instead of using red/green switches at intersections, maybe we can have the cars drive through diffraction plates set up around the intersection. Then the wavefunction of you and car can spread out into the intersection via diffraction and arrive randomly into one of several quantum states (outbound lanes) which head toward your destination. If we made cars and their drivers out of bosons instead of fermions, it might work. Only one fermion can occupy any given quantum state. So with fermionic cars, there's always a small probability of quantum entanglement within the intersection between you and some other guy trying to make a left.

There are many arguments against adding the IDE, but I don't agree with this one. People said the same thing when Google came out with Gmail. "We've already got hotmail and yahoo and a million other free email services. Why do we need another?" If this tool is good enough or simple enough to use that it becomes ubiquitous, then it doesn't matter what's already out there.

Lots of people accuse psychiatrists in general of running a fraudulent pseudoscience. Aside from the issue of whether it's true or not, the accusations seem mostly to come from people who have recently stopped taking their meds cold turkey.

What do you know about "the Tea Party phenomenon" that this guy doesn't?

The client had a separate network off the Internet hence physical presence was required to access the contents needed to build/deploy that particular internal site. Machines were loud, even behind the closed door. Naturally the place was completely filled with coffee beans of all kinds in all stages of processing, and just after an afternoon there both my boss and I smelled like coffee - the scent was transferred to his car so it still smelled like coffee the next day I stepped into that car.

What's more unusual is that it was running a rather old Red Hat distro (for its time even; Fedora was already out for nearly two years at that point) and they only gave me the root account. No XFree86, so a 80x25 terminal on a 13" CRT screen, and of course no way to install anything else aside from what's there (Apache/PHP and vi (not vim) for editing). I can't even remember how I got the skeleton project files onto that machine, might have been a 3.5" floppy, I really forgot about that part.

At that time I felt like I was thrown back a few years back, but thinking about this now it would have been a stranger experience today.

OK, I think you see the point, that wasting electricity is one reason why the life of the bitcoin protocol should be kept as short as possible. A better-designed protocol might not need this phase of heavy computation at all. Instead of paying money to an electric company, you might do something else with it to get new "coins". The challenge there would be getting around the need for a certifying authority.

Uh huh. Me and 97% of climate scientists.

Why is this so hard for everyone to understand? Why is the idea of wanting to unplug our computers before bedtime so alien to everybody? Running a computer all day to mine a Bitcoin yields nothing to the world except a big finite number and some CO2.

Money is needed as a way for people to handle the flow of resources, not just for handling more money. Dollars can also be handled electronically. They do not consume natural resources when printed except for the piece of paper. A dollar doesn't derive its value from a scarcity of paper.

Mining Bitcoins is environmentally destructive. As time goes on and the keys get exponentially sparser, the system nominally sustains expansion of its monetary base by surfing on Moore's Law forever- which is a failure point since electrical power is becoming the rate limiting factor to Bitcoin production. Bitcoins are a currency that requires cotinuous destruction of real resources just to sustain its monetary base.

These comparisons to running a bank branches are weird. It's not as simple as the "total energy consumed per dollar/Bitcoin transaction". We need bank branches because the public actually has dollars to put in them. Bitcoins are mined by suckers within the scheme, immediately enter the financial stratosphere, and are rarely seen by the public afterwards, simply because they're volatile and not safe long-term investments. Skyscrapers wouldn't disappear or go dark if people used Bitcoins instead of dollars. Bank branches will not close; the public need for them will still exist.

The inherent energy inefficiencies in transferring and handling ordinary money within bank branches is generally considered a nuisance, not a founding principle behind the currency's supposed value. People want dollars because they can be traded, not because finding them consumed someone a lot of work. The energy inefficiencies involved with handling money itself are generally considered to be a nuisance, something to avoid. but now we're sowing a new currency based on the kilowatt-hours that must be wasted by minting it. A Bitcoin economy makes resource scarcity worse to deal with, and it's a bad currency with no usefulness to the vast majority of us.

Bitcoin mining is for suckers. It barely covers the cost of electricity. Plowing through large swaths of finite numbers, chugging along 24/7 puzzling away, is the stupidest excuse imaginable for damaging the environment. Can we just move to a system where you freeze a block of dry ice, launch it into space, and get a newly minted Bitcoin?

Of all ways to attack Republicans, you're ranting about "Monopoly Money"??? Back to Twitter with ye!

Until the IRS realizes the irich guy never paid the income tax on that penny.

Have you asked Google?

I just read your post and was going to reply but I forgot what point you were making. I kept thinking about it too long. What really pissed me off though is that you had the nerve to insult my mother or my religion or something. Just know for the rest of my life, I'll be keeping an eye on you, and you'd better be looking over your shoulder.

People who say stupid things piss me off. Yeah, it doesn't compute, I know.