On the Internet nobody knows that you're unemployed.

Lennier ended up on a small farm located on an earth-like planet way on the outskirts of Grid Epsilon and lived a happy, if uneventful, life with his trusty space-collie as his most trusted friend.

You don't have to be a Michael Straczynski to know that B5 had a "beginning of the story" and an "end of the story". One of the best decisions that Mr. Straczynski ever made was to allow the story to end (and end grandly I also have to say).

Too many cheap crap-hounds (*cough*couch*abrams*cough*) try to extend a story as long as they are able to squeeze money out of it and are eventually revealed to have no idea what they were doing or where they were going with it. Straczynski told a really great story that ended i a really great way. Live and art have to move on.

A 4 TB slowish seagate hard disk can be had for about $160ish if you look around. Five of them are $750. An inexpensive bod tower such as a TowerRAID 4 Bay eSATA RAID runs about $150. Get two of them.

Total cost is around $1100 and the solution is expandable .

>. All the transactions of all the people are public and is verified by multiple entities

Oh really? So you know *all* the principle entities of Mt. Gox? You know just where they were storing/investing that HALF A BILLION DOLLARS ? You know the names of the independent accounting agency that oversaw that HALF A BILLION DOLLARS ?

You know none of that and very little else.

Why who ever would have thought that when you give have a f!@kig BILLION dollars to a more than less anonymous source(s) by anonymous means and with no oversight - why who every would have thought that maybe - just maybe - someone would be tempted to just walk the hell away with Half a BILLION??

You know who didn't think that way? Some chump wanna-be geeks with too much disposable income and too little common sense.

>What gives you the right to say 'Bitcoin was designed as a vehicle to steal' ?

I'm guessing that it has something to do with the fact that you are giving your hard-earned money to an unknown source to be looked over by unknown people by unknown means???

Hey but that's just me - please feel free to send me any extra money that you have and I'll be sure to protect it for you and even give you a return on your investment when the price goes up! Hey - whata deal

>Another indication that we are in a simulation is that quantum physics shows us that wave functions collapse when we observe them....

I just wanted to say that whole paragraph was frankly brilliant. Especially the part about the side-channel attack via observer effects.

>If the simulation is completely perfect, then it also must have a near infinite amount of memory as well, or else little inconsistencies would be manifest and detected.

Not really. In our universe the smallest known particle (that we now know of) is (I think) a quark. Let's say that the programmers live in a universe which is more "information dense" and thus has a pleathora of smaller particles than quarks (really I think this must be pretty much a requirement for a parent universe - one in which the programmers live). So now the programmers have several orders of magnitude (or perhaps many more) of possible storage which they can use to simulate every particle we can perceive or be affected by. Let's say that the simulation was designed to run for a million years and that we are the center of the simulation (certainty there must be a finite timeframe) then the parent universe "computing machine" only (heh) has to simulate quarks, photons, neutrinos - whatever in a million year volume of "our space". Thus the amount of memory needed in the parent universe is indeed finite and, if the parent universe were indeed more "information rich" than our own such a simulation certainkly would be in the relm of possibility for the beings living within it.

>If we are living in a simulation there's really not a lot we can assume about what's going on outside.

I beg to differ. We can probably infer a lot. For instance:

- Considering the amount of injustice, starvation, and people killed in wars we can assume that the programmers are indifferent to us , much as we would be indifferent to the millions of bacteria colonies killed off when we test a new antibiotic.

- We can infer that time runs much slower for the programmers (or perhaps that they are almost unimaginably long lived and patient) because why run a simulation that only runs in real-time?

- We can infer that (unless the simulation started very recently and is going to end in a relatively short time that the universe that the programmers live in is far more information dense than our own. The number of particle interactions which need to be simulated is limited by the light cone in the time frame from which the simulation (i.e. our earth) starts to the time that it ends. Unless this period is relatively short ( a thousand years, a million years??? ) then the number of particles which need to be simulated is enormously large. If that were the case then the "programmers" must live in an entirely different kind of universe with more dimensions than 3 (or 11 of you go string theory - whatever) otherwise there would be no room in the parent universe to keep the simulation machine. So either our "simulation" is going to be short lived or the programmers are unimaginably different from us.

I bet there are a lot of other things one could reasonably infer as well.

A couple of thoughts come to mind: one is what the nature of the simulation (if we accept the simulation argument for a moment ) tell us about the nature of the programmers? Certainly we know that, considering the tens of millions killed in our various recent world wars as well as the millions of innocent children who starve to death every year, that the whatever the "programmers" of our universe are, they have no more consideration for us as we would for various cultures of bacteria killed off to test a new antibiotic. I wonder what else we could infer about the "programmers" simply by observing our own world.

Secondly I wonder if it would be somehow possible for the beings inside the simulation to "hack" the simulation itself somewhat how a computer virus in our machines can cause unexpected/unwanted/unplanned for behaviors in our computer systems. What would you have to do to corrupt and possibly take over the program running the simulation of our universe?

Even were we to imagine some technology and technology advanced civilization capable of simulating an entire world, the minds within them, and anything that such minds can perceive and be affected by (i.e. we can perceive and be affected by atoms, electrons, quarks, etc but we can not perceive or be affected by an atom or particle say 100 million light years away) - even if we postulate such an enormous computing capacity - the capacity has to be finite. Even were the "computer" running the simulation the size of a world or a star or a galaxy, it is still a finite thing. Thus the simulation (the amount of our universe which we can perceive) must be "digitized" somehow - it can not go on forever and must break down at extremely small scales. So there must be a smallest "distance" or "time unit" and things like that in the universe in which we live. If we lived in a universe where the physics was "analog" or "fractal" (for want of a better word) where regardless of how small a time period we look at (or a distance or an energy unit) there can always be something smaller this would entirely disprove the simulation(I think) theory as the capacity of the computing machine needed to create such a universe would be infinite leaving no room for the "programmers". In our universe we do live with a physics which has smallest possible units of distance, time and energy which does not prove or disprove the simulation theory but does give one something to think about.

FWIW - I actually come here to read the stories. I find most of the comments these past 5 years or so to be not usually worth the effort :(
I have always come here for interesting tech news however the past several years have seen me come a LOT less often due to the deteriorating quality of the main page submissions as well as the lack of insight in the majority of the comments.

What they gave you - believe it or not - was Ibuprofen IV. Morphine will not take away the pain of kidney stones (it's that bad!) but massive ibuprofen takes the pain away in a really short time. Been there done (and screamed) that.

Penn and teller are most definitely NOT a reputable source. They are an "infotainment" show.

.... with far too much time on their hands and far too little psychological stability to completely ruin a forum for thousands. I think many, if not most of us, have seen that happen - one bad apple and all that. Add in the social media awareness of P.R. firms (or special interest groups) who will hire paid commenters to astro-turf a particular point of view and you have a recipe for mass incommunication.

I welcome restrictions on who can comment and what someone can say such that we raise the signal to noise ratio and tone down the inanity, the crazy and the spam. I think we have left the era of unrestricted speech in much the same way that we once left the era of unrestricted radio communications. Just as we once started licensing in order to make use of the airwaves for everyone, we now have to monitor and moderate in such as way so as outlandish ideas ideas will not be restricted but outlandish people will be.