And how is this relevent to the discussion? So instead of having a pretty note in the suitcase he gets to battle the border in person? And that is an improvement how?

Actually French films are rather good. But as another poster said, Americans tend to remake French films. With an example being the original French film, "Anything for Her", being played by Russell Crowe or one you should know... "True Lies". Or did you know about "The Tourist"? I am not going to espouse that French films are superior, they tend to drivel quite a bit at times. However, to say that they have no talent shows that you are ignorant on movies.

We have been going through this phase out (Switzerland) and while I was using "neon" tubes and halogens I am switching to LED's. They are awesome. Low energy, last forever, very bright, and do not generate any heat. IMO LED's have come a very long way in a very short time.

Really Netflix works? So tell me Einstein how much of a presence does Netflix have outside of America, Canada, and the UK? OH NOT MUCH! If they are so much the A players and A team and best on this planet why on earth are they not in the vast majority of countries? Oh wait in the UK they have competition from Love Film. This is what gets me with "american" thinking. And I don't want to stereotypify here because not all Americans are like this.

It reminds me of Walmart who thought they could tromp into whatever country they wanted because they were the best. HA! They had their head handed to them on a platter in Germany. Netflix reminds me of this.

Their idea that you only hire A players is actually not a good idea. The growth of a company relies on innovation and innovation as much as managers dislike it does not come from conformity or some check mark system. My wife who is a fairly high manager knows this all too well. Innovation is a damm nebulous thing that comes from the oddest corners and from the oddest people. What is needed is a mixture of people who are hardworking, and dedicated to the cause. No more, no less.

eh?

Saying that home made amateur porn is love and the rest ain't is being a tad bit over simplistic. Sex is there for the enjoyment, believe it or not. Seriously think about it from a biological perspective. If sex were a pain in the arse (heh heh heh) then we would not be doing it because it would be too much effort. For example imagine our society relied on the fact we needed to lose weight. We would have mucho less people right now because even obese folks want to have sex. Thus because sex is very enjoyable we try to do it however, or wherever we can. Some more, some less. Don't believe, read over the Bonobo monkey, google "bonobo monkey sex". Its a hoot, and if that ain't an example of nymphomania I don't know what is.

Oh that is just a pile of crap. If it is sound it can be copied! We did not talk about resolution because most devices might not have the resolution needed to fool the human being. This is what one calls going forward in time. You talk about how your devices are the "pure" thing, I call BS! For if you went back say 200 years or even 300 years did your piano sound like they do now? This is the entire crux of the argument in that instruments have advanced, and changed with the passing of time. Sounds change, and what sounds appropriate changes as well. No what I hear are people who yell, "get off my lawn I don't want an friggen change because it is not right."

That is the cynicism that gives Americans what they have now. If every American actually felt there was a problem it would stop. The problem is that Americans condone this behavior as a general populace. So you get what you vote for. It is like the stat, "oh I hate Congress, but my guy is doing just fine, the others are the problem." RIGHT!!! It is always the OTHER...

Actually, let me give you a stat.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24998497

Kids today are slower than their parents. Let me give you another thought, when did video games become popular? Interestingly the heyday of tv did not cause kids to become slower or fatter. Driving a car? Well that has been a grand American tradition since the 50's. There is only one thing left... Video games! I am not putting all of the blame on it, but it is too much of a coincidence. And please don't start quoting Correlation does not imply causation, kids are not moving around enough today largely due video games!

Now about older people being fat? Actually yeah that is how it always has been. Look at this stat: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Overweight_and_obesity_-_BMI_statistics

See the interesting trend? As you get older you get fatter. Now here is the problem, young kids are fat, and they are only going to get fatter as they get older.

Sure, but as far as intrinsic utility is concerned it doesn't matter when I get involved with bitcoin ... well, in fact it does: right now the price instability and general uncertainty mean it is far better to not get involved, wait for all this nonsense to sort itself out and join the game once everything is settled, stable, and bitcoin is actually being used purely for its intrinsic utility. In other words, it's better for me to ignore it for a few more years at least.

I think the more interesting part is the fact that we have some decent mathematicians (in this case Adi Shamir among others) are setting about pulling the entire bitcoin transaction graph and doing some serious data-mining on it. The reported result sounds like a mildly interesting result that happened to pop up in the first pass.

Given the advanced tools available these days for graph mining (largely developed for social network analysis among other things) I suspect some rather more interesting results may start coming out soon. What may seem hard to track on an individual basis may fall somewhat more easily to powerful analysis tools that get to make use of the big picture. I bet there's some interesting info on cliques and exchanges that could be teased out by serious researchers with some decent compute power at their disposal. Pseudonymity may be even weaker than you might think.

Well, you won't anymore because the Zimbabwe dollars were discontinued and the country now uses US dollars as its currency because price volatility made continued use of Zimbabwe dollars as a currency effectively impossible.

Now Zimbabwe had inflation not deflation, but the issue of volatility is the same: it makes things ultimately unworkable if it gets too high (even if it moves in a predictable way). When prices change significantly* by the minute and transactions take several minutes to complete then trouble may set in.

* significantly here means, say, double digit percentage change in price every minute. Bit coin is a long way from that currently, but is headed in that direction.

No, no, and again no...

Gasoline tanks are buried in the car and surronded by other crap. If you hit something then you will hit other parts of the car first. THink of the dynamics needed to incite a gasoline tank explosion.

The problem with a tesla is that it has batteries EVERYWHERE along the bottom of the car. So the probability of you hitting the battery is very high. Simply put this is not good because it shows a flaw in the design.

That is not high speed. Let me tell you about high speed... 155 MPH is what I drive on the autobahn. THAT's high speed. 70 is chugging along on the highway at normal speeds.

Being primarily a mathematician and not a computer scientist or engineer I've used Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, Magma and R. I've also programmed in Python, Perl, C, and Java and dabbled in things like Lisp and Haskell.

All the "math" programs on that list are terrible programming languages; they work great as interactive environments for doing (potentially symbolic) computation, but writing code in them? Ugh. If I actually have to write scientific computing code it's going to be in Python using numpy and sympy, or C if I need performance.

All the different math programs all have their strengths and weaknesses: Matlab kicks the crap out of the other for anything numerical or linear algebra related, both for ease of expression and performance; R has far more capabilities statistically than any of the others -- data frames as a fundamental data type make that clear; Magma is incomparable for the breadth and power of its algebra, none of the other come remotely close; Mathematica and Maple are ... well, sort of a poor jack of all trades that do most things but none of it very well.

IMO and I will probably get downgraded because of this comment... WOOOPEEE DOOOO! So you did a nice job, like you said. However, a UI is only a detail. The backend and getting that work is often much more difficult. I get really annoyed by some Silicon Valley types that think I can rewrite an entire enterprise system over a weekend. It involves a bit more than just fancy UI and greenfield database storage.

My guess what went wrong of the the original healthcare website is that it was designed with enterprise in mind and became bogged down in enterprise details. Would not be the first time, and will not be the last time something like this happens.