Boy, it's really bad. Sad because bitcoin was a good concept, but the execution has been terrible. Just look at a chart of the USD/bitcoin exchange rate over the last year or so:

https://mtgox.com/trade/history

This asset has "gone parabolic", i.e. experienced an exponential increase in relative value. Like silver did just before coming crashing down the other week. I realize that during that time the US dollar has decreased in value marginally relative to other currencies and more significantly relative to commodities, but this sort of instability in value relative to one of the most significant baseline currencies (and therefore, relative to any other currency or even relative to hard assets like gold) doom bitcoin to me.

It's clear that bitcoin was set up in a way to promote massive early speculation in bitcoin. The awarding of a fixed amount of bitcoin per unit time regardless of the amount of resources being devoted to bitcoin mining has now created a situation where those mining before have an excess of an asset they need to pawn off on some greater fools, and where mining bitcoin is essentially worthless because there is so much competition for a small number of bitcoins awarded per unit time. As a result, bitcoin has simply become an arbitrary asset to speculate on - like a super-silver, but with no industrial use and no jewelry applications.

To show how worthless this is as a currency, in a 48-hour timeframe according to that same chart linked to above, the exchange rate has varied between $8 per bitcoin and $6.60 per bitcoin (i.e. it has lost almost 20% of its value in 48 hours). During the same 48 hour period, in one of its highest volatility phases in decades, silver has changed in value by about 5-6%, and gold by about 1% in US dollar terms.

The US dollar is imperfect in many ways, but there's a bunch of smart economists that work to create some relative stability in its value in terms of goods and services it buys so that it's useful as a currency, can be invested to generate returns, loaned out, or exchanged for goods and services.

The more I see of this, the less likely I would ever be to use bitcoin for anything. The value is too unstable and the management of the bitcoin economy too poor.

Something tells me when they heard that RSA encryption was named after Rivest, Shamir and Adleman they would think it was part of a Jewish conspiracy.

.. because you are including non-phone devices there (tablets and media playing devices) that run iOS. So yes, by that metric, iOS is still ahead of Android. If you look at iOS in the smartphone market, it's not.

This guy wasn't a "suspect" in a crime. He was a self-declared combatant in a war. We don't believe he did something, he told the whole world that he did it, then gathered together armed men to make war against the US in Afghanistan, then fled into Pakistan where they believed they could continue that war with less direct threat of intervention from the US.

And I don't think you are going to convince anybody that the life of a mass murderer whose goal is to impose a morally devoid system like Sharia on the West and impose the Caliphate around the world, killing non-Muslims as he goes, is just as valuable as the life of your average human being.

The Slashdot D2 discussion system sucks. Turn it off in your account options and use the old D1. That's what I do. I much prefer to be able to see all the comments at one time.

Lots of Android tablets came out that didn't have Honeycomb and thus weren't really ready to be used as tablets. They are fun for hackers in some cases (like the G Tablet) but not ready for prime time. The only Honeycomb tablet out so far is the Motorola Xoom. The Xoom fails in epic fashion on price - it has similar hardware specs as my $300 G Tablet for twice the price. I would never buy it because I'd feel like a huge sucker.

Apparently Honeycomb needs a bit more polish before it's ready.

But until Google lets other manufacturers come out with Honeycomb tablets, or releases the Honeycomb source code, we aren't going to have Android tablets that have mass appeal.

This doesn't really require a particularly in depth analysis, or any conspiracy theories or anything else.

So true. I used to love Discovery and Science Channel. The History Channel was great, even though they used to have lots of filler WW-II documentaries - but hey, who ever gets tired of watching Panzers rolling over the French countryside and Messerschmitts and Spitfires shooting each other down?

I got through graduate school by watching this stuff in my downtime. That was several years back now, so I guess before things really went down hill. Discovery in particular seems to have very little to do with Discovery these days. I used to enjoy the occasional chop-and-hack-at-cars-and-motorcycles show, but it gets dull really fast. And the logging shows - well, I just can't wrap my head around the appeal of some of this stuff.

Grr, posting too early in the AM. 10 Sv would take around 6 minutes not 90 seconds. Still pretty damn close to "instadeath".

Hehe, minor conversion error.

100 rem is 1 Sv, not the other way around. 1Sv of exposure is around the threshold for radiation poisoning and 8-10 Sv is considered untreatable with death guaranteed to follow shortly thereafter.

So a room at 100Sv/hour would give a guaranteed fatal exposure within about 90 seconds. Radiation poisoning would onset after 30 seconds of exposure.

So you can safely say that 100 Sv/hour is about the threshold for "instadeath".

Somebody's obviously been to more than a few Renaissance Faires.

Yes, the service is 105Mbit. The question was about the *cap*, not the data rate of the service. The cap is not 250 gigabits, it's 250 gigabytes.

This article is awful. Terribly written, incoherent and obviously inaccurate.

This sounds like an extension of previous quantum state "teleportation" via entanglement. These are interesting phenomena, but cannot be used to transmit information faster than the speed of light.

It's not really quite clear what the breakthrough is here. But I'm fairly certain it doesn't involve a group velocity (i.e. information transmission) greater than c.

Right, why do you need a toilet when you can just take a leak on the reactor to cool it down?

Clearly they mean bytes, not bits. 5 hours of full bandwidth usage would be about 1890 Gbit, or roughly 235 GB of usage, so there is a mistake in the summary and the story itself.

So yeah, it's annoying, but not as bad as they made it sound.

I agree, this is fucking ridiculous. The rule with browsers has always been "wait for the point release or the 0.5 release for stability". Now Mozilla has done away with those niceties - so FF4 is a steaming pile of instability still and they are going to call the bugfix release FF5. This is retarded. It's Firefox 4.1. I fear this new naming convention is going to drive everybody away. The only way I can be won back right now is a stabilized version of FF4. I still love Firefox 3.6, and am still running it on my desktop at home, but I can't stick with that forever.