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Comment Re:Guess I'll have to use google wallet or paypal (Score 1) 34

I dipped my toes into the Bitcoin world, just to say I'd done it... My $0.1245 worth of bitcoin is now worth $0.0955 Yeah, that's a lot better than keeping my money in a bank...

It's a good thing they value it in dollars, because the value of a dollar never changes, and that's how we know our money is safe in a bank.

Comment Re:Golf logic (Score 2) 937

IMHO, everything that people do can be explained by the ultimate goal of enjoying. If you do something because it makes rational sense, then perhaps you're the kind of person that enjoys rationality. I certainly get a kick out of doing math and science, and I try not to make the excuse that I'm doing it for some obscure higher purpose. People also tend to feel good when they help others, it's just what has kept mankind alive. If you say you exercise to keep yourself fit for work, then perhaps it's the work/money/status that you just happen to enjoy.

It's a good point about values, though. The question "why" is generally meaningless as it only leads to other questions "why", but the chain can end at some ultimate value -- I do $x because of money/friendship/hookers/blackjack -- but values are personal, and don't necessarily mean anything more than "I happen to enjoy money/friendship/hookers/blackjack, and that's that. In fact, forget the money and the friends."

Comment Re:Great... (Score 1) 82

Slowing the aging process doesn't add 20 years of the worst health at the end of the life but would extend each portion of the process.

IE, if the aging process was truly slowed 30% you'd get 30% longer years at 30, 40, 50 or whatever, not 20-25 years extra in the shape you'd be at 90.

I guess it depends on when this technique is applied. If you're an old geezer now, chances are you won't enjoy any more years with the 20-year-old-you's physique.

Comment x86? (Score 1) 47

As this wasn't clear from skimming the articles, should I assume this is the old 32-bit x86 or x86-64? Because the latter has been around for 11 years, which is a geological time in computing, and we should really move on. Of course for something really embedded you'd want an ARM or a microcontroller, so there would be little point in keeping the x86 32-bit.

Comment Re:IS *NOT* ANONYMOUS (Score 1) 134

It depends on what you mean by altcoins. There are several newer cryptocurrencies with a fresh start, instead of cloning the Bitcoin codebase and changing a few parameters/algos, and these take the privacy aspect to a new level. I'm mostly familiar with Boolberry and Monero, both of which share a common Cryptonote ancestry.

However, Bitcoin's cash-like privacy is probably good enough for many people. You can trace the movements of cash via serial numbers, but this in itself is a fair amount of work, and you also need to figure out connections between the serial numbers and specific people. It's pretty much the same with Bitcoin, the hard work is in finding these connections, and if you use something like Tor, or otherwise know what you're doing, you can enjoy a cash-like privacy.

Comment Re:What can possibly go wrong? (Score 1) 134

It just might work. Hell, people once bought pet rocks.

I was going to buy some of the pet rocks, but I heard the latency really sucks when using them for international money transfer, it was, like, way over 10 minutes to other continents. The privacy and fungibility aspects were also questionable. I wonder if they would be good for beating some clue into people who don't understand Bitcoin...

Medicine

In France, a Second Patient Receives Permanent Artificial Heart 183

Jason Koebler (3528235) writes One of the most important goals of transhumanist medicine—possessing a perfectly healthy heart—has so far remained elusive. This week, we came a step closer when for the second time ever, a French company implanted a permanent artificial heart in a patient. More than just pumping blood, future artificial hearts will bring numerous other advantages with them. They will have computer chips and wi-fi capacity built into them. We'll control our hearts with our smart phones, tuning down its pumping capacity when we want to sleep, or tuning it up when we want to run marathons. The patient who received the first of these hearts, though he survived for 76 days, died after the heart "stopped after a short circuit, although the exact reasons behind the death were still unknown."

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