My mother regularly says she'd want to die were she in the throws of dementia. It's a sad state of affairs that we give dogs a more humane death than humans...

Confinement is certainly a good thing for some, but jails/prisons seem like the wrong setting for non-violent addiction-related issues. The focus of prisons (from my limited observation) is rarely to rehabilitate.

Do you store your wealth in Beanie Babies, or use them as a means of payment? You talk about "store of value" and "payment network", but that's exactly what a currency is, and a failed currency is a terrible option for either, because it has very unpredictable value.
The algorithm behind Bitcoin is interesting. It's just not a functional currency. The lack of built-in scaling means it would be deflationary purely due to population growth, if nothing else.
I'm not saying Bitcoin has not given us an interesting case study, or possibly laid groundwork for some more functional accounting algorithm, but I have not seen any economically sound argument for its stability.

Did you even read gp before you vomited your opinion to the screen?

He didn't say the threat wasn't rational. He said the person wasn't rational. Big difference. In either case, the desired effect of a death threat is usually a dead person, not a youtube takedown :)

It's like my right to drive, or my right to buy the linguine my grocery store just stopped carrying. They eroded my past :(

Not to mention that while national currencies can be manipulated to affect the economy, Bitcoin floats wherever the masses bid it up/down to. It has all of the instability with none of the control mechanisms and no underlying value. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is inherently deflationary. It's really a disaster of a currency in any financial sense. The only people touting it seem to be ideologues and get-rich-quick types.

Which reminds me -- My partner's brother was reemed by a clueless judge/history teacher at his middle school science fair for not having a control group in his observational study of moss growth across local tree species.... Observational study is awesome, especially when all you care about is correlation between a known and an unknown, rather than causailty. The US school system likes the word "experiment" too much for its own good.

I think gp's problem is with this specific type (U-Pb) of dating.
I don't understand how initial values are determined. (Is there some method by which the original ratio of the two elements is known? Or the proportion of radioactive isotopes?)

But, from the wikipedia article

so it does not sound at all un-tested.

While GP is correct that we cannot experimentally confirm the specific mechanisms here (radioactive Pb decay over one million+ years...) , we have a very good description of radioactive decay across the board (table?) and observational results sound extremely consistent. Direct experimentation is not the only form of scientific evidence, despite what [creationist intelligent_designist whatever_nut] might say.

Most users never encode a single video in their life. (Except for cameras on devices, and who is doing 4k video on thier phone these days?)
And if encoding takes 50x longer, that's 50x the resources Google needs to keep up with the work flow.
So you have it totally backwards.

Not to mention that we are talking about 4k-targetted codecs, so you should be comparing to H.265, not H.264. The additional computations for encoding H.265/VP9 are to reduce bandwidth requirements. If you don't care about bandwidth, feel free to generate a 5GB H.264 video.

Then you've never done anything mission critical and interesting simultaneously ;)

Fault tolerance is a much studied field. Software faults exist with some probability no matter how much work you do.

I agree with you. And if the telephone cables are bad enough, upgrading the system to DSL could involve new lines :(

Looking at the map at
http://www.broadbandmap.gov/sp...
Coverage is pretty spotty anywhere but NJ,DE,RI,CN

http://www.broadbandmap.gov/su...
The above link has data on how many people have service. (What is a SBDD grantee, and does this skew the data?) It claims 93% have local access to >3Mb down on wires, 98% have >3Mb down wireless. (I find the latter figure _very_ hard to believe...)

I use 1Mbit internet. This is the lowest tier service any cable or DSL provider will sell AFAIK (maybe there are still a few 768k DSL lines?). They don't even advertize it. You have to ask for it. I have _never_ found myself inhibited. And that's with downloading IEEE/ACM papers with fair frequency. Pretty much the only things I have to walk away while downloading are lectures, video games, Linux isos, and those damn 8GB Xilinx installers. All of this talk of second class citizens is a load. The problem is not bandwidth, and it sounds like your mother has wiring issues in the house (too many splitters?). If the cable is bad due to bad wiring or because you are on shared bandwidth with the neighbor, get DSL. Contrary to popular opinion, I have always had much more reliable service from DSL providers (they have much more skin in keeping phone lines operational), and I don't share bandwidth with the neighbor (*until far upstream).

update 2: no I read you right. I still disagree with the idea that fault-free software doing anything interesting exists anywhere.

Update: I missed three important letters: cannot :) Please nevermind me :D