I think you are vastly overstating the deflation rates likely to be seen with Bitcoin. Once new bitcoins stop being generated, the deflation rate will equal the growth rate of goods and services paid for using bitcoins plus the natural loss rate of bitcoins.

Because the number of bitcoins will be (essentially) fixed, every additional credit that needs to be represented will require a corresponding reduction in average value of a bitcoin to allow the sum total of all bitcoins to be large enough to cover that additional credit.

Add into that the natural loss of bitcoins to things like forgotten passwords, deaths while holding bitcoins that cannot be recovered, loss of computing equipment, hard drive crashes, etc, and I think you get the total deflation rate of the currency.

Normal economic growth is something lie 2% - 7% per year isn't it? So let's assume that deflation due to economic growth is 2% - 7% or so. Now add in the deflation due to loss - 5%? - and you get a deflation rate that caps out in the low teens.

This is quite a bit less than the 50% deflation rate that you cited, and the economic effects are considerably easier to bear.

Essentially under bitcoin all goods and services become very similar to rapidly-improving technology products - say, iPhones. People decide to spend $200 on an iPhone this year and then a year later they find that they could have either gotten the same iPhone for 50% less had they waited, or complain that if they had waited they could have gotten a much better iPhone for the same $200.

This is very similar to how all goods and services would seem with a deflationary currency - you'd always have to balance the current value of the good or service versus the future value of the currency you are spending it on. This doesn't mean that nobody would spend bitcoins or that it would be so onerous to do so that people would nearly starve themselves to death rather than spend a coin. It just means that there would be a little bit more care put into purchasing decisions - just like people put more care into deciding when to buy their iPhone than when to buy their $200 pair of sunglasses.

Would a world where everyone thought much harder about how to spend their money wisely, and correspondingly were less incented to spend and more incented to save, be a bad thing? I doubt it, but then again, I don't think we'll ever know. Certainly bitcoin isn't going to achieve the level of success necessary to test these waters, but this is for technical reasons (I've written at length in the past on the technical problems built into the bitcoin protocol - in short, it requires a volume of data transfer that cannot be sustained by any end-user which means that the pipe dream of people exchanging the currency pseudo-anonymously without requiring intermediaries is impossible).

In essense, bitcoin is self-defeating beause it requires popularity in order to be viable, but popularity makes it unusable by end-users, and end-user features are what would make it popular; therefore, it can never get beyond a low transaction count, speculator hoarding stage. That's where it is now and that's as far as it will go.

In my experience, GUIs are the messiest and most difficult part of an application to get right. All that stuff that's just slinging bits around memory under the covers? That's the easy part. The part that faces the user and has to deal with thousands and thousands of possible user actions? Very hard to get right.

You can go and read a Wikipedia article on just about any "complex" algorithm and understand and implement it in the nice safe vaccuum of non-user-facing code quite easily. But providing a consistent, coherent, complete, and bug-free user experience? That is freaking hard.

Or do you think that there is some other reason that free operating systems like Linux are wonderful at everything except GUIs?

My E-350 system is fanless. Not even a case fan.

It's in the only "big boy" word processor that matters: emacs.

transpose-chars is an interactive compiled Lisp function in
`simple.el'.

It is bound to C-t.

(transpose-chars ARG)

Interchange characters around point, moving forward one character.
With prefix arg ARG, effect is to take character before point
and drag it forward past ARG other characters (backward if ARG negative).
If no argument and at end of line, the previous two chars are exchanged.

The difference between an Intel-only world and an Intel-AMD world would not be very great at this point. x86 development is already a walking corpse and there will not be significant advances in x86 performance ever again, regardless of whether or not AMD is in the market. x86 will only get about 50% faster than the current top of the line i7. The costs to moving the x86 performance bar have become high enough and the x86 market outlook is stagnant at best with mobile devices taking center stage. x86 does not compete in that market and even if it did, it would be lower performing parts with vastly less power usage, not parts faster than current x86 fastest parts.

The point being, x86 is not getting significantly faster, ever. It's done. 50% faster than the fastest current core i7 is the fastest x86 will ever be. It will get cheaper but never faster. It doesn't matter if AMD is in the market or not, this fact is true either way.

AMD has seen the writing on the wall: there is very little incentive to spend the money required to further the state of the art in x86. Intel is slowing down its development pace on x86 and AMD is as well; there simply isn't much money in making faster x86 processors because they have already achieved sufficient speed for 95% of what 95% of consumers do with x86 CPUs 95% of the time.

What would be the point of sinking huge funds into becoming more competitive in a market that is going to become increasingly irrelevant going forward? Mobile devices are the trend and x86 does not compete there. Aside from Intel, which has momentum built up that will take a little while to wind down, x86 development is in the process of stagnating. It's quite clear when major x86 CPU announcements are now years apart instead of less than a year like they used to be. This trend will continue.

Hope you are satisfied with the current crop of i7 processors because x86 is not going to get significantly faster, at least not at the consumer level.

AMD will instead focus on trying to compete in a segment of the x86 market that may remain relevant over the long term: SoCs for embedded applications. I think it's a smart move because it's the market that AMD has the best chance of being competive in.

I predict that the fastest x86 CPU will ever be made will be no more than 50% faster than the current fastest Core i7. Intel's development dollar momentum will carry us through to that but nobody, including Intel, is going to be willing to invest significantly more in x86.

> First, why not use the obvious countermeasure here. When you
> create an encrypted volume, you should enter 2 keys, not
> justone. One will unlock your drive, another will appear to unlock
> your drive, but in fact deletes the contents of the disk entirely.

That would have to be built into the device. I can't take a normal device and make the above happen. For any normal hard drive or other storage mechanism, I would expect that the forensics people already know to read the raw data off of the device onto their own device (backing it up at the same time), and then they can operate on it using whatever program they want. There would be no way to force their program to delete the data or modify it in any way regardless of the decryption key you gave them. The program would produce exactly one of two results given any decryption key: successful decryption (you gave them the correct key), or unsuccessful decytpion (you gave them the wrong key).

The best you could do would be to have a form of ecryption that could somehow produce two different, meaningful sets of decrypted results given two different decryption keys. AFAIK there is no such cryptographic system in existence. It would be an incredible feat to be able to encrypt two sets of plaintext to the same ciphertext for which the original independent plaintexts could be recovered using two different decryption keys.

That being said, it would be a pretty awesome cryptography scheme that could do this from the perspective of allowing a user perfect secrecy with their data.

It sounds like you are trying to convince everyone, including yourself, that you were better off to choose a G2 over a G3.

There is no merit to your argument. The G3 bug you mentioned was real but it was fixed by Intel's firmware update, which is why you haven't heard anything about it.

There is nothing wrong with the G3 that would suggest that the G2 is a more reliable option. There is little to recommend the G3 over the G2 either, except price and availability.

I personally own two G2's, one G3, a real old skool PATA 32 GB SLC SSD from Mtron (perhaps the very first performant SSD), a cheap-o Kinston value series SSD, and a super duper cheap-o "SSDFactory" 32 GB PATA SSD direct from China that I bought because it was the only thing that would work in my ancient Panasonic Y2 laptop.

Not one of these drives has experienced any problem of any kind, and I've had some of them upwards of 2 years.

I would never buy an OCZ drive though. They are terrible.

You really should read something, anything before bothering to spend the time to post.

The 520 is faster at every metric (random read/write and sequential read/write) than the Intel controller based drives.

It also had a full year of vetting by Intel before being released, and they are putting the same 5 year warranty as their other drives; there is no reason to believe that it will not be as reliable as Intel controller based drives.

The only thing that doesn't compare favorably with this drive is the price.

Wrong. It is consoles that killed the arcade, PERIOD. You do not need to look any further than that.

Is this really true?

Too bad. I really liked that place. Haven't lived in NYC for years but in the mid-2000's I like going to the Mott St. arcade. It was the last true arcade experience I ever had, and probably ever will have.

I was in Japan in 2001 and really enjoyed the great selection of really good arcades.

I looked forward to repeating this experience when I went back to Japan at the end of 2010 and unfortunately, it seemed that the arcades were all gone. Yes there were the pachinko machines and win-a-prize machines but the good arcades were all gone.

I disagreew with the poster's assertion that home consoles caught up to arcades in the late 80's and early 90's. In fact it wasn't until the PS2 in 2001-ish that home consoles became consistently as good as or better than arcade games.

R.I.P. arcades. They were a major part of my young life but they are gone now; nothing lasts forever.

I agree with you on the terrorism point. I really enjoyed the high speed rail in Japan the two times I visited there, and it would be awesome if we could have such a thing in the USA. I personally would rather spend 16 hours getting from coast to coast on a comfortable, clean, safe train than 6 on an airplane, but only if it really is safe. Japan has managed to run their high speed service for over 40 years without a single crash fatality (OK one unfortunate soul was killed after getting stuck in the doors once, but that was not due to a crash).

However, as I rode on the bullet train in Japan I just couldn't help think that if it were in the USA, it wouldn't take long for some mentally imbalanced person to spend a night welding some scrap metal to the tracks and then the first train of the new day would fly off the tracks in a spectacular and deadly crash. I honestly don't know why nobody has ever sabotaged the tracks in Japan (the group that released Sarin in the Tokyo subway surely would have had produced more devastating results if they'd sabotaged a Shinkansen line), but I feel pretty confident that it will happen in the USA if we ever get high speed trains.

Sad but true.

If you think that all medical costs in the USA are not already being shared out among the whole population, then you are missing the most important point of the issue and should stop now and revisit your premises and redraw your conclusions.

The government *requires* that health care be provided to everybody - at least, a form of health care: emergency care; and since all health care, if left long enough, *becomes* emergency care eventually, just about everyone ends up costing *something* under this system.

This requirement is imposted on hospitals in a few ways:

1) They must accept all patients for emergency care where the patient's needs are serious or life threatening, until the patient is stabilized (and some never are, ending up in expensive intensive care), and which point they can ostensibly be transferred to a government-funded hospital, but even that can be very difficult as these hospitals push back very hard as their funding is very limited.

2) They must exercise every option, no matter how expensive, to save a patient's life, regardless of the circumstances, unless the patient has signed a document saying that they want to be allowed to die, and even then it can be difficult for the doctors to know if they can allow this to happen for fear of being sued. Patient's families are given the authority to decide whether to continue care for terminal patients, and since the cost to the families is nothing, they always ask for everything to be done. These costs are borne by everyone.

We're already paying for everything, just in the least efficient and least fair way possible.