You are confusing the cost of the drugs and the cost of the prohibition of drugs. Its a bit like molesting someone and then complaining that they aren't stable later in life.

AFS (in OpenAFS) stands for Andrew File System. Andrew, as in Andrew Carnegie, as in Carnegie Mellon, not MIT.

So might you, his father was from Kenya, not Mississippi

From...http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~ramsey/Probability/PokerHands.html

This hand has the pattern AAAAB where A and B are from distinct kinds. The number of such hands is (13-choose-1)(4-choose-4)(12-choose-1)(4-choose-1). The probability is 0.000240.

I have an answer for why wouldn't this work. It takes about 60 minutes under ideal conditions to drive from a camp in BRC to the edge of the playa where you get on the little 2 lane highway. Packing times for an average carload of burners hitting the road is about 5 +- 3 hours. The ability of any group to predict when they can head out is highly variable given that they can really only choose when to start packing. Having 30 minute windows is a recipe for disaster. Nobody would hit their window. There would be disputes about what window we were currently in, etc. Practically, to anyone ever in exodus, this idea is patently absurd despite the solid mathematics. The problem is that the mathematically model used to do this analysis is woefully simplified from the actual complexities of exodus. Everyone ever been in exodus would know this. That's perhaps why burners keep suggesting you try it before trying to tell everyone else. There are perhaps 1000 burners who understand queueing theory better than this guy. Why do you think you understand something about the situations that we don't?

If you have ever been in the core of a major theme camp, you will recognize this situation instantly. Running a major theme camp is a huge undertaking with a 5 or 6 figure budget and a lot of complex engineering. Last year, our camp had 4000 amps of power distributed over 3 acres. There was a water system for processing several 1000 gallons of grey water, a full gourmet kitchen and facilities for 300 people. Every year some newbie comes up and tells us we are doing something wrong and we should do it differently. What they don't understand is that we tried their approach several years ago and it doesn't work for reasons that might not be so obvious. After awhile, it gets tiresome re-explaining the same things to different newbies each year and the crew starts getting jaded and starts just telling people if they don't like it, don't camp here anymore. Basically, this guy is getting the same response, just at a playa wide level.

Well, the population of the towns of Gerlock and Empire would be financially devastated if they did that. See, up road 447 is basically a few ranches and some old mining towns full of older folks who have lived there for decades and are now largely stuck there. Empire was largely supported by a gypsum mine that closed 3 years ago. If BM didn't occur once a year and inject about $5-10m into their economy, those towns would entirely collapse. The BORG is sensitive to that but over the last few years local government officials have become more and more greedy (the brand new $75,000 police cars for a town of 500 people didn't help). If the BM decides to pull up stakes and move, that area will be ruined and the locals will suffer greatly.
Also, the Black Rock Desert isn't really something that needs protecting. The leave-no-trace ethic is more of a political statement than a practical effort at 0 trace. Many people have misinterpreted this into an absurd standard. The rest of the year on the Black Rock Desert is largely unused except for the occasional small rocket launch, attempt at a land speed record, or a filming commercial that usually leaves about as much trash behind afterwards as the week of BM does. Largely due to the fact that they don't have to care if they litter as the local government is dependent upon them to get a bit of $$ to help support a largely failing local economy. Its absurd to think 50,000 people can be in one place for a week without leaving any mark. Its also absurd to think that BM isn't the closest thing that we have in the US to a true leave-no-trace event. If you've ever been around after a large event and seen entire stadiums covered in trash after a 2 hour concert, then the bit of trace BM leaves after a week is absolutely amazing. If you want to blast them for that, they you are entirely missing the point (perhaps they are too), but the ones that put the idea of leave no trace in to their head have accomplished their goals and then some. Its the cleanest gathering of people in the US every year when measured by the amount of trash or trace left afterwards. That's actually pretty amazing.

Right, cause this never happened...in the last 12 months?

http://www.bbc.com/news/busine...

Look, people are involved and people are fallible and technology can't really prevent that. BTC as a protocol is solid and wasn't comprised. The very immature institutions that have sprung up around BTC are currently failing at their task that you have every right to criticize them. Hopefully the market will sort out some winners that can function in their institutional roles in the BTC ecosystem safely and securely.

But don't confuse BTC for a bank and right now don't confuse it for a currency. Currently, BTC is a commodity because of its volatile value against fiat currencies. Someday that might change at which point BTC begins behaving like a currency. It fills/will fill a real need for many people, probably not you but others and that's what really matters here. When the BTC institutions can behave in as secure and trustworthy a way as other financial institutions (and really is that a very high bar anymore) then it will be very much like any other currency with a measurable market cap and liquid exchanges. Until then its volatile and probably only for miners and speculators (and gamblers).

And a ponzi scheme always needs an increasing amount of money to keep going (ie next year more $$ needs to go in than last year). That doesn't seem to be a feature of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Ask any miner and they've gone through peaks and valleys due to volatile prices and changing difficulties that brings the system into balance. It always balances out, the good and the bad (ie bad you paid 47 BTC for a ASIC miner in August 2013 that probably will never mine 47 BTC, good your other 147 BTC are now worth 80k USD). Its hard and rare to get rich honestly with BTW but you can make a bit of extra cash right now and that's a feature of a healthy and growing market.

Bzzzzt....sorry but you are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off there. A pure EV can go about 3-4 miles/ kwh. An ICE at 33 kwh per gallon of gas / (40 miles / gallon) is about 0.8 miles / kwh. In addition, electric power generated in a central location is generated about 3x as cleanly. So an EV has about 1/10th the carbon footprint on a millage basis. So that's what, the equivalent of 400 miles to the gallon? Oh, and I forgot about the fact that ICEs waste 90% of their power in inefficiencies against the ideal and an electric motor is usually about 75% efficient. Basically, an EV produces 1/10th the carbon footprint of an ICE based upon mileage. But kept telling people that EVs don't help too much. You are really a credit to the human race.

Mining is pretty much only on AMD graphics cards which nobody in their right mind uses for real graphics. I don't think the two are related. Its probably more due to the number of people playing video games on their PCs.

Yea, I used to have the worst problems with the nVidia drivers on laptop (Quadro 3000M, hell yea) until I realized that the problems were all caused by my weird dev configurations I was using. When I switched back to the lastest gcc version everything magically worked again. I think the drivers are using some weird configuration of the linker or something (maybe caused by the new linker version released a couple of years ago). So some of the driver problems are caused by the fact that we developers tinker with the compiler settings and recompile kernels which create problems with binary blobs even when part of the driver is recompiled on the fly. So try to create a script that resets the standard gcc toolchain (and one that sets it back to your custom settings) and your nVidia driver problems should go away as long as you remember to reset your toolchain when you install GPU driver updates.

Its called a Paper Wallet and they do exist. Even Mt. Gox used them for their cold storage. Which is one of the reasons why people don't believe the tx malleability theory. I've been following BitCoin quite closely lately and /. is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off on these theory and news about bitcoin. Its been quite disappointing as usually /. has much better comments on tech subjects. There are 3 reasonable theories:

• Insiders (due to Theft or Incompetence or bad market positions)
• US Govt seized the cold wallet keys
• Lost cold wallet keys

On February was the largest day in BitCoin history for coin days destroyed. Basically, someone moved a large cache of Bitcoins that hadn't be moved in years (ie the Mt. Gox cold storage). Whoever has those coins knows what happened at Mt Gox but I doubt they got those coins via the TX Mal bug (maybe a small amount was stolen but not anywhere close to ~700,000 BTC). I'll let you guys figure out what actually happened but my guess is the Govt has the cold wallets and have a gag order on Mt. Gox. Using taint tools it should be possible to figure out what happened to all of those coins. If they never moved, its likely the US Govt. has them. If they move and split in complex ways, it more likely that an insider is trying to launder the BTC.

You must be kidding? VS C++ (I use it every day) is easily the worst C++ compiler there is. Hell, Borland compilers from the late 90s still have better C++ standards support than VS C++ today!

This doesn't compile in VC C++

int main(char* argv[]) {

printf("hello world\n");

int c = 0;

return c;

}

but this does...

int main(char* argv[]) {

int c = 0;

printf("hello world\n");

return c;

}

One quick add to that link, they estimate that miners are spending 90% of their mining income on power for their rigs. This ignores ASIC miners where only about 5-10% of the value of the Bitcoins mined gets spent on power (on average, I'm using CA power in the USA so my power rates are probably higher than miners in other parts of the world). Also, ASIC miners are probably 60% miners by hashrate, at least currently and will be more like 95% in the next year. So basically take all the values in that article and divide by 10. Other than that, its pretty accurate. And before you get all hot and bothered about mining again, all the Bitcoin mostly goes to buy the ASIC miners to keep up with the quickly growing mining industry. Take a look at the difficultly charts before buying anything, its a tough business.

You are, its that Bitcoin is far weirder than you seem to understand. Consider for a second what a Bitcoin is...theoretically it is an international currency (that hopefully will be stable one day) that is inherently deflationary. What does that mean to normal people? That a Bitcoin wallet is a swiss bank account they can carry around and control themselves. This is because the new supply of Bitcoin is constantly decreasing so the price of Bitcoins to other currencies should rise over time. This emulates the interest that savings accounts would usually pay. It can also transfer money internationally in a safe way in 1/1000th the time the banks do it. And it solves all sorts of problems with micro-payments. For instance, a coke machine that takes non-paper money (ie CC, Debt Card, other electronic payment etc) isn't really economically viable without Bitcoin. With Bitcoin you could make a machine with a QR code on the front and when you want a coke you send a small amount of Bitcoin to the wallet indicated by the QR code. Now I know this isn't practical due to the time it takes to verify a Bitcoin transaction but you get the idea. Whoever can shrink that transaction time will get very rich.

2/3rds of the world's people currently don't have a stable local currency in which they can save for the future. So Bitcoin enables anyone with a cell phone to have a Swiss Bank Account that they can convert into the local fiat currency each day to insulate them from hyperinflation. Think about how that might someday change how people in the 3rd world live. For the first time, thinking and planning for the future would be rewarded instead of next year's government deciding that all their savings are actually worthless now.

Now I realize that currently the price of Bitcoin is volatile as hell. I understand that currently its a risky investment plaything of traders. But having a stable pool of traders to stabilize conversion rates to other currencies is necessary requirement for any type of currency. And over time the price should stabilize as more players come to the table. The real worry is that the banks figure out that Bitcoin actually competes with their retail banking business. If they ever figure that out, they'll outlaw Bitcoin in a heartbeat. This is the only real risk to Bitcoin based businesses, traders and economies. Hopefully the powers that be will be asleep at the switch on this one. They were for most other business changes that software brought about. Look at the music industry, 14 years after Napster, they still make a fraction of what they made when Napster was around. And yet they still are filing lawsuits against their own customers.

And even in this case, almost nobody uses that composition editor and when they do, its easier to fall back to full code as the composition nodes are so horribly complicated that if you do understand how they work its just easier to write code and do it that way instead. Basically, visual representations of logic and formal language are so poorly suited to the task that they are never used even when you try to find an isolated use case for them. Until visual representation can represent formal language as well formal language, this is a waste of time. The only use is for laying out GUI widgets and that's because GUI widgets are already a visual language. And even then it takes mountains of code to make the widgets, and hook them up to actions on the data model (and whatever else the application does).