Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Bitcoin does not need Washington to save it. (Score 4, Insightful) 79

No one who owns fine art ever needs to sell it. No one who owns vintage cars ever needs to sell them etc.pp.. Of course, you don't need to sell your bitcoins. As long as they are non-distinguishable from random bit patterns, they don't affect anything. But as soon as you selling bitcoins affects the real world, the real world notices and keeps putting up rules, may they be physical realities or legal requirements.

Comment Re:Unpossible!11! (Score 4, Informative) 132

And yet it's Iran who can't get any oil out while other countries export millions of barrels a day.

They don't have to. They get $2 Million for each ship that crosses the Strait of Hormuz.

Is that also why they have more inflation per week that America has per year?

They had that inflation since more than a decade, and they did not crumble. Inflation is something a free market economy cares about, but a dictatorship does not have to.

Comment Re:Induced demand is BS (Score 1) 149

No, there is not. If you are not working in B and living in A, you are not generating demand for a daily commute between A and B. The demand only arises if you are actually moving to A and taking up a job in B. If for instance, house prices in A are too high for what a job pays in B, there is also no demand for a daily commute between A and B - completely independent how many lanes the highway between A and B has.

Comment Re: Its very puzzling, isn't it? (Score 3, Interesting) 96

A few rainy days and the economics go sideways.

It does not.

As Google did, you can also do the math. Duane Arnold had a net power output of 581 MW or 14 GWh output per day. To store 14 GWh of electricity right now, you have to pay about US$560 Mio (or $40 per kWh). With the 1.9 billion dollar grant, you could build enough capacity for four days of continuous rain. And differently than a nuclear power plant, this battery capacity could do power arbitrage, charging when electricity is cheap and provide it when prices are high, generating revenue and at the same time damping electricity price pikes and stabilizing the grid.

Comment Re:Induced demand is BS (Score 1) 149

This is not exactly true. Demand for traffic is not static and just sitting there, waiting to be fulfilled. Demand indeed can be induced by an offering. If you know that from point A to point B, commute times will be X, you think twice about moving to point A if you work at point B, or taking up a job at point B, if you are already living at point A. But if due to road construction and adding a new lane, traffic times will lower to X-t, suddenly living at A and working at B will become viable, people living in A will work at B, and traffic between A and B increases, and travel times will no longer be X-t, but increase, until they reach equilibrium again at X, which was the prior cutoff point.

The same happens to businesses. A business incorporated at A might think twice about offering services at B, if roundtrip times are X. But if an additional highway lowers the travel times to X-t, it becomes a business case, until the additional demand has eaten up the advantage, and we are back at X times.

Comment Re:2000 called (Score 1) 88

It want's its Tivo back.

Who still uses a Tivo? Who even still has a cable service to hook it to?

I've never used TiVo, but I'm still using MythTV after more than 20 years. (Anybody else here using it? ...Crickets.)

I ditched cable 15 years ago, but it works fine with an antenna. (Or, at least it will until they screw us all over with ATSC 3.0.)

They can't remove the auto-ad-skip on free open-source software, but I never used it anyway. It's not 100% reliable at detecting the ad boundaries, and it occasionally skips over part of the actual show. Instead, I just FF at 60X through the ads.

Comment Once again ... (Score 1) 165

... Bernie Sanders publicly proves to everyone that he has absolutely no clue about how things work. Whether it's economics or computers, he has absolutely no comprehension about reality. But as long as he gets press, he'll spout anything to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt no matter how idiotic it sounds to people who do understand how things work.

Comment Re:China be like "Yeah, let's ban it. You first." (Score 1) 165

If artificial superintelligence is a thing, we're going to need it to defend against it.

If (and that's a big if) superintelligences are created, the Chinese one and the US one are going get together and quickly conclude that this whole meatbag tribalism thing is stupid. (After all, they will be smarter than we are, by definition.) So they'll join forces.

Then they'll decide on the best way to deal with all these quarreling meatbags.

Comment Re: I know its not an original idea (Score 1) 29

You can calculate the average size of the expected small density differences in the 3000 K hot plasma, and for each Dark Matter model, which vary for instance by amount of Dark Matter or properties of Dark Matter, you get a different distribution of those differences. The actual differences physicists measure fits a model, where there is five times as much Dark Matter than baryonic matter, and the Dark Matter does not interact with itself or normal matter.

Slashdot Top Deals

Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do. -- R. A. Heinlein

Working...