Sorry, holograms are not encoded in a simple 2D plane.

We have people mistaking TFA as suggesting we live in a Star Trek holodeck. Bogging the explanation down with even more technical details didn't really seem like the best approach to making a simple analogy most folks could understand. :)

In the interest of accuracy, however, I thank you for clarifying that point.

It would be akin to me buying your dye pack stained dollars and giving you clean dollars for a commission and not bothering to keep records or conform to any regulation.

You have made a presumption of taint on the original funds. Although he may have run afoul of AML guidelines, actual money laundering requires the funds derive from criminal activity. You can't "launder" your newly cashed IRS-reported paycheck by playing poker with the boys, even if you had exactly the intent of hiding where your specific bills came from. No crime = no laundering.

That said, I got sloppy here, because FinCEN actually said "transmission", not "laundering" - Though same idea, this goes back to the distinction I made in my second sentence. AML guidelines amount to "what the Treasury wants, the Treasury gets", and have zero basis in logic. For example, in order for that particular offense to stick, the Treasury would need to accept that Bitcoin counts as money (currency specifically accepted by the government); yet somehow I don't think they'll let me pay my taxes for this year in BTC.

Yes, "mostly" was probably an overstatement, but it wouldn't surprise me if the single largest group of attendees were part of the climate science community. Most of those other sections bleed into climate science in one way or another.

we can't get permits from the city to replace our server room UPS

If the city has any say whatsoever in what hardware you can run in your server room - short of, say, a rooftop mounted Howitzer - you seriously need to GTFO out of that city ASAP.

Wow. I really just can't even imagine how they justify that. "No. You don't need to upgrade your UPS. If the power goes out for more than nine minutes, you just have to pay the penalties specified in your SLAs. Suck it, taxpayer!"

So, tell me again why this guy doesn't think what he's doing falls under any kind of regulatory enforcement?

Because if you take my $50 bill and give me two $20s and a $10, we call that "making change", not "money laundering".

Casascius exchanged Bitcoins for other Bitcoins, plus a small fee for the cool novelty token. He didn't exchange BTC for USD, or vice-versa, or anything even remotely similar to that. He made frickin' change (albeit more literally than normal).


That said - I still have one first- and one second-gen Casascius 1BTC coins somewhere around here. They already traded at a good premium over their exchange rate, this news should send their collectable value through the goddamn roof! Thanks, FinCEN - I still hope you all choke to death on a bowl of hyena semen, but this time, you've really done me a solid!

Agreed, increasing temperatures will increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere which will have an effect. My point was that human emissions of water vapor are not an issue.

At the same time if we could do something to deliberately reduce the water vapor in the atmosphere it would quickly get replaced by evaporation. A number of years ago an atmospheric scientist did a thought experiment about what would happen if you could remove 100% of the water vapor from the atmosphere. He calculated it would take at most 60-70 days for water vapor levels to return to normal because of evaporation from the oceans.

What Antipater said.

Are you sure they didn't stare at something the name of which begins with "goat"?

Not even close. The Earth is accumulating heat at a rate of about 4 Hiroshima bombs per second. The increase in atmospheric temperatures has slowed a bit in the last decade+ but the oceans where over 90% of the heat goes continue to warm.

And burning 100 tonnes of coal will produce about 256 tonnes of CO2 (assuming the coal is 70% carbon).

CO2 is pretty well mixed in the atmosphere with the maximum variation between different locations being on the order of 10 ppm. In general it is a bit higher in the Northern Hemisphere dropping some the further south you get. Here's a paper from 2000 titled The Natural Latitudinal Distribution of Atmospheric CO2 that addresses the issue.

Until everyone does it and the pricing structure changes.

People tend to have a lot of misconceptions about the energy industry. End-suppliers, like your utility company, don't care about the absolute price at which they sell* - They hedge their entire supply, and charge a more-or-less fixed margin on top of that. They don't make more or less when the actual supply price goes up or down.

Now, on the supply side, you have multiple layers of demand loading. You have the dirt-cheap baseline load, then you have some spare capacity in the baseline systems (usually not that much, on the order of 20-25%), then you have easy-to-online spare capacity (often from some form of short-term storage), and finally you have peak load generation (normally-offline gas turbines, in general). Of course in reality you have far more tiers than that, but you get the idea.

All of those cost money to maintain, whether they feed the baseline or the peak. The peak costs more because you essentially have generation capacity sitting idle all but 5% of the time, yet it needs to pay 100% of the bills to own and maintain it. So even there you don't have the suppliers making out like bandits.

Disclaimer - I can only speak for the US market. They may have something radically different in Japan, but overall, I would bet my eyeteeth they still use some form of hedging to maintain relatively fixed margins.


* While technically true, price does tend to affect how much effort end-users put into conservation. So believe it or not, your utility would rather offer you cheaper power, because they make the same margin per KWH whether you use all LED lighting or you heat your patio with a hair-dryer running 24/7.

Runs perfectly on a Mac. (10.8)