All scientific laws are predictions. Or at least abstractions over prediction. "If you drop a ball from a height h, it will accelerate at 9.8 m/s and have a velocity v."
If anything, your point supports the validity of treating Moore's law as testable science instead of delineating between science and non-science.
Bitcoin can work in principle, but then, so can a printed fiat currency. The bitcoin system would have to be very finely tuned to inflate at the rate of "natural" wealth destruction, just like the printed fiat currency. Obviously, measuring "natural" wealth destruction is difficult on econometric grounds, and thus becomes a political issue. This would be true whether bit coin or paper money is floating around.
Here's the thing: if an economy is to remain strong, its outputs must actually be useful. But things break down over time. The rate at which they break down takes value out of the economy, as those things are no longer useful. If the supply of money does not reflect this loss of value, then the holders of money get paid scarcity rent. They would get paid more value (in terms of today's labor) for their dollar than they put in for it. Rents are market distortions!
The problems we face are n-fold. First, the post-War economy was predicated on making "disposable" goods. The value of the outputs of the post-War economy is now zero. Second, the post-War generation is still alive, and its savings are propping up the capital markets. This is a problem, because their dollar does not match up with their contribution to society now. In other words, if a dollar is supposed to be a store of value, backed by the value of their labor, their dollars "should be" worthless. It is as if they are now counterfeiters, since their dollars are backed by now worthless labor.
The result of this situation is inflation in real terms. Their money was sequestered in the capital markets, but is now being set free in the common markets as they retire. And it is a huge chunk of change.
I'm a poor in America. I bought a used 25$ tv about two years. I saved for years to buy a 300$ laptop. I'll have to save for 5 years to finish my BA in math. I haven't spent a single dollar that wasn't for food, housing, or electricity in over a year. I don't have a phone or car or an air conditioner.
The dollars are stretched, and the situation is getting worse.
Bingo!
Reintroducing the gold standard would introduce massive market distortions, due to scarcity rent. This is why the gold standard is a political position, and not an economic one.
That is a prescription for a reversion to nationalist vassalage.
Life was never easy. Globalization has made it easier for billions of people.
I read an interesting paper about gold once. The thesis was that if gold is money as defined by economic theory, then mining gold provides ZERO economic utility in the long term, and negative utility in the short term, since introducing more of the material to the market is inflationary. Of course, the conclusion was that since people mine gold and profit from it, gold is not money.
Also, using gold as money re-introduces the scarcity rent which lead to and sustained feudalism. A re-introduction of the gold standard is just a power grab.
Semiconductor production is hardly a niche market. Sure, you might not hear about them much, but Sun, IBM, Lenovo, Intel, Samsung, Apple, Google, and all the others have to go somewhere for their hardware. Why re-invent the wheel at significant cost when TI and Motorola already have a production line for what you need?
Positive externality.
If you're willing to pay for vellum, you might as well get a fountain pen (which will look fantastic on vellum and great on every other kind of paper)
This is a good point.
On balance, I would suggest a fountain pen for the requirements the asker mentioned. A Pelikan with a fine point would work perfectly well for about $100. (Schaeffer used to make some pretty decent disposable, refillable pens, for about $12. That's how I got my start in fountain penmanship) I've had my Pelikan since 2004. Actually, I'm on my second one, but when the first one broke, I emailed Pelikan's American distributor about how mine broke (it fell a few feet and hit the edge of a metal trash can, cracking the celluloid), and they sent me a new $100 pen for free. Also, you can de-burr a fountain pen with the kinds of tools any wood working or cooking nerd would own: a diamond-surface hone. Just write on the hone for thirty seconds and the nib's tip will be smooth. And also, a fountain pen lets the user cultivate some style. Pressing harder makes the nib's tip flex more, and the line traced ends up being wider. This is very nice for readability. Note how only the crappiest of fonts are as heavy in the horizontal direction as the vertical.
As a matter of fact, people ask about pens on
It's not merely ideology.
Free trade is (more-or-less) impossible with a planned economy. The planners can manipulate prices to effectively control the global market. Closing trade with the Soviet bloc was meant to prevent that.
On the plus side, there was never really a large threat of armed conflict with the Soviet bloc. Carving up the third world to increase each bloc's resource endowments was about the only source of armed conflict.
You evidently don't understand how business development works.
Demanding 100% ROI in six years is not realistic. At a nominal 8% return, it will take about 9 years to recover their money. And that's nominal (i.e., assuming a "normal" rate of return based on the empirical average). Youtube just became profitable. So it will nominally pay for itself in 9 years.
On the other hand, acquiring Youtube turned Google into a media company. Have you noticed how Google is using resources to combat copyright infringement of movies recently? Why do you think that is? To drive users to legitimately licensed Google owned media distribution channels, which will increase the rate of return of the investment.
They also control a massive content distribution infrastructure, putting pressure on other distribution networks. Cable television companies are finding that they must lower their prices for all of their services in order to compete with the internet -- the largest legitimate chunks of which are represented by Youtube, Netflix, and Hulu. Eventually, the cable companies will be nothing but ISPs with perhaps some "premium" content for subscribers. But even that is doubtful -- the media companies are much better off selling licenses to anybody who wants them. Including Google. The only thing keeping the cable companies at all relevant is their valuable networking infrastructure.
Either way, Google gets more eye balls on their pages and more licensing deals for Youtube distribution.
They bought a lot more than 1.65B worth of market power.
Then keep it in a Faraday cage, like the OP does.
No, the probability distribution is fixed at the time it is sampled.
For example, if I generate a random password from a uniform distribution of letters, I can end up with a "the" in the middle of it. That does not make it more likely that any given string will follow the "the". As I said, the entropy is a property of the distribution from which a password is drawn.
Consider the sequence of values:
"the aaa"
"the aab"
"the car"
"the zzz"
What is the probability that "car" is chosen from this list, given that it is uniformly distributed? It is 1 in 26^3, assuming the alphabet is entirely lowercase; not 1 in the number of three letter nouns and adjectives. For the latter to hold, we would have to be drawing uniformly from:
"the ace"
"the bat"
"the car"
"the red"
etc.
You seem to be confusing the underlying probability distribution from which a password is sampled with some kind of conditional probability relating the occurrence of a string to the underlying probability distribution. But that is a non-issue. The attacker doesn't have even partial information with which to compute Bayesian statistics. He doesn't know a priori that "the" is a part of your password, and he doesn't know which underlying probability distribution you chose to use.
dude, exclamation marks are totally unhip. ellipses, on the other hand...
Y'see, reusing a string does not significantly add entropy. That is why zip compression works.
Not quite. Entropy is a property of the probability distribution from which a sample (i.e., a password) is drawn. Whether or not reusing a string adds entropy depends on the underlying distribution.
Zip is designed to be most effective on text and other probability spaces where repetition is likely. Zip will not work so well when drawing upon a uniform distribution. On the contrapositive, using a repetition will increase entropy to the extent that a repetition is unlikely with respect to the underlying distribution.
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!
