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Over the last few weeks, bitstampUSD has moved from 6% to 14% on this chart. My guess is that only accelerates that process.

http://www.bitcoincharts.com/charts/volumepie/

Digging through the details in the original article that treehugger links to, it appears that the size of this deposit is not entirely characterized, but that it probably corresponds to approximately 9 years of global lithium production at current rates. (228K tons, with usage of 25K tons per year).

The flaw in the argument is that BitCoin is not (currently) a unit of account (we don't price contracts or goods or services in BTC), and is (nearly) infinitely divisible.

So even if 90% (or 99%) of all BTC is being hoarded, the other 10% (or 1%) can be divided up for use in transactions. That much speculations will cause wild gyrations in value and massive short term volatility, but the people using BTC to transact JUST DON'T CARE.

I really don't care if I'm buying my $1000 flat screen with 1 BTC or 0.0001 BTC. Neither does the merchant. I bought the BTC, sent it to the merchant, and the merchant sold it so quickly that the value didn't change much, and we are happy.

So that's the short term. In the long run, the volatility might decrease as the total market capitalization increases to 10x or 1000x of its current value.

Then we can start to think about using it as a unit of account. If we do, we may enter a deflationary spiral, but by then BTC will already be used in an enormous swath of the economy.

So I interpret Krugman's argument not so much that BTC CAN'T take over the world, but that it SHOULDN'T take over the world. (I'm not sure if I agree. Many economists have been arguing over this point for decades, and I'm not smart enough to sort it all out.)

One way you can hedge against bitcoins is by making a bet on betsofbitco.in. I could, for example, register a bet that bitcoin will have a value of under $10 USD by the end of May 2013.

However, you are limited by your ability to find a counterparty. Of course, willingness to find a counterparty is a limit in most forms of short or put. Judging by some of the current odds on other bets, finding counterparties to small bets of large swings downward might not be that hard. That particular forum seems to think that bitcoin will go up. Of course getting paid in bitcoin for your bet that bitcoin will drop might be a problem...

> Outside of Moore's law graphs (which he didn't discover), his predictions quickly veer off course into crazy land

I think Ray Kurzweil would agree with you. That's why he uses language like "the intuitive linear view" and "the historical exponential view" [1]

The whole POINT is that the predictions sound crazy. But the reason why he gathers such a following is because, unlike most "futurists", who make bold predictions for decades in the future only to slink away and hide when the time comes to for a test, Kurzweil welcomes rigorous evaluation of his past predictions. [2]

You can read through second link there and decide for yourself. He laboriously goes point for point and evaluates (in 2010) how he did in his earlier predictions from decades before. I gotta say, it's pretty impressive.

So the reason people listen to him is because his future predictions are even MORE crazy, but it's hard to argue with an 87% accuracy rate. Even his failures aren't WAY off the mark.

1 - http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns 2 - http://www.kurzweilai.net/predictions.php

The first link is a study that found a correlation between skim milk consumption and acne in teenage boys. It by no means conclusively shows causation. Perhaps teenage boys who have a hormone condition which leads to acne also have taste preferences which cause them to enjoy skim milk more, or perhaps skim milk really causes acne to teenage boys. The point is, we don't know.

The second and third links talk about a study for a prostate cancer drug and a human androgen hormone. The word "milk" does not appear on either of those pages.

Please make an effort to be more careful in your citations. When one adopts the tone and form of authority, by citing links to official looking urls, people sometimes take the advice offered without fact checking. And in this case, it could cause people to stop consuming dairy and start consuming something else, with unknown effects.

edit: The P-Value for skim milk was the only one lower than the .05 significance level. So even in the cited study, there does not appear to be a correlation between whole, 2%, or 1% milk with acne.

The reason to attend MIT or Harvard (as an undergraduate) is not to take MIT or Harvard classes. It is to hang out with MIT or Harvard students, have discussions after class with MIT or Harvard undergraduates, grad students, and professors, be challenged by having those people as peers. It is to have an entire network of well connected people all over the globe in the highest reaches of every organization on Earth for free upon graduation. Lastly, (and perhaps least), it is to have a piece of paper that certifies that you are smart and work hard.

Fundamentally, the elite schools are in no danger from these online education initiatives. It is the state schools, community colleges, and for profit schools that are in danger. If a school can't figure out a value add beyond simple education (which the elite schools have had for centuries), that school is in trouble.

These might replace other kinds of capacitors, but at the listed energy density, there is no way they are going up against cell phone batteries or car batteries. According to wikipedia, the lithium iron phosphate battery has an energy density of 220 mWh/cc. These are weighing in at 1.36 mWh/cc, according to the article.

And existing battery chemistries can already charge fast enough such that the limiting factor for electric car recharge times is the grid. My Nissan Leaf can charge most of the way in 25 minutes at a L3 charging station. But PG&E levies enormous fees for people who want to pull down that kind of power, so there isn't a single operable L3 station in the whole bay area.

As a person who signed up to buy the Nissan leaf early, and a current owner, I was also pretty upset about this, at least until I got the car.

The noise that is makes is barely audible from within the car. It is a very faint whistling / turbine sort of noise, and I have to turn it on and off to get my passengers to hear it, even with the windows open.

Additionally, there is a switch to turn it off if one hates it. However, after driving this car daily for a few months, I wish it were louder. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten stuck behind a pedestrian or biker who is proceeding directly down the middle of a street or parking lot, and has no idea I am behind them. I creep along at 5 miles an hour, and I can either honk at them (very rude), or just wait for them to notice me. They usually figure it out after 30 seconds or so, and many times they jump and do a double take when they realize I "snuck up" behind them. A little more artificial noise would eliminate this problem.

Anyone who thinks that solar will only double in install base by 2035 hasn't been paying attention. If it is, as the article says, up to 2% now, then by 2035 it should be up to a very large percentage of our current output.

The total amount of solar installed grew by 100% in 2010 http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/14/us-energy-solar-id...

The historical rate of growth for solar has been more like 33%. http://solarisforever.com/category/compound-average-growth-r...

Therefore, one has to ask, what is going to change? There are billions of dollars invested in scaling as quickly as possible. Are we going to run out of silicon? Unlikely. Are we going to run out of rare earths? Nope. Are we going to run out of space or demand? Perhaps, but not for a long time. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to google for the sources to back those statements up so that I can make my ultimate point in a reasonable amount of text.

33% growth is doubling in a bit over 2 years. 10 doublings is a factor of 1024. So it is pretty reasonable to think that solar output will be well over 100% of our current output by 2035, and perhaps as much as 2000%.

In short - Wrong. Your link claims exactly the opposite if you dig deeper.

The top stack exchange answer links to an article which states that fructose is in fact a chronic toxin in quantity, but that high fructose corn syrup is no worse than sugar or honey or maple syrup or many other common sweeteners. This is consistent with Lustig's claims. Read it for yourself. http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=6501

Lustig claims that consuming a glucose only sweetener, such as maltose or dextrose or glucose should be lead to better health and weight loss when compared to a fructose glucose mix, such as sugar or high fructose corn syrup.

Speaking from my personal experience, I lost 3 inches off my waist while exercising less over a period of 2 months after switching all fructose sources EXCEPT whole fresh fruit out for dextrose.

It must not come with legislative powers, because at $70K per night, that's only $25.55M a year. The GDP of Lichtenstein is 5.05B according to a quick google search (google for "lichetenstein gdp" and you get a result from google public data sources). I'll pay $25.55M for the right to tax the people of Lichtenstein for one year! Even if I only raise taxes 1%, that's a cool $25M profit!

The article incorrectly states that the Nissan Leaf needs a gearbox. In fact, it has a single reduction gear and an AC induction motor, just like the Tesla Roadster. (Well, ok, not as powerful...) As a Leaf owner, I can tell you it makes for a very interesting torque curve. From 0-30 it is VERY fast, from 30-60 it is pretty average, and from 60-90 it is dog slow acceleration.

A small plug for my startup. We created a page partnering with the red cross where folks can donate to the relief effort. http://www.fundly.com/redcrossjapan From there you can donate or get involved via facebook.

They claim it at $30/barrel, (42 gallons in a barrel according to google calculator), which makes it about $0.7142 per gallon of produced fuel (wholesale). Factor in distribution and retailing markups and taxes and you are probably going to double it or more, but still.

Cheap gasoline limited only by area (not even land area, since presumably you could produce this in sea water) and sunlight? Sounds too good to be true. Anyone have a corroborating source other than the globe and mail?

The reason is that carbs aren't the problem. Fructose is (largely) the problem. Refined grains (and refined sugars made from grains) shock the insulin system by causing a blood sugar spike (which can be especially bad for diabetics), but they don't cause long term effects. Fructose, on the other hand, which is found in ENORMOUS amounts in both HFCS, table sugar, and "fruit sweetened" things (and in small amounts in fresh fruit) causes kidney issues, must largely be metabolized into fat before being burned, puts a load on the liver, increases appetite and more. I've lost and kept off weight with no effort simply by learning some very basic biochem and switching in glucose, dextrose and maltose for fructose and sucrose.

For more informations (and scientific peer reviewed papers that back me up), I'd recommend googling for "fructose metabolism". There is also a great lecture about fructose on youtube called "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Joules are joules, but what you are failing to account for is the form the joules might take. If the enemy hits the caps and they explode, an amount of energy equal to one projectile launch is liberated.

If, on the other hand, you take out a magazine, you liberate an amount of energy equal to all the shots the ship is capable of taking ALL AT ONCE.

The energy necessary to fire all those shots is probably still on board, but it is likely in the form of a nuclear pile in the reactor, which is shielded up the wazoo. Even if the ship is running a conventional generator, diesel fuel doesn't have a tendency to explode in quite the same way as gunpowder.

A slightly more informative article, which references the paper published in nature (unfortunately, I couldn't find a copy of that that wasn't behind a paywall).

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101124/full/news.2010.630.ht...

Note that the photons weren't made into matter. They were made into a Bose-Einstein Condensate, which is where all of the component particles share quantum properties and interact with the rest of the universe in "lockstep".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensat...

While it's a good idea to move ssh to a different port, if only to stop the annoying doorknob rattling in your log files, you should not pick an ssh port over 1024. Ports over 1024 are unprivileged ports, and if someone could somehow convince your ssh server to die, they could start up a counterfeit one and collect your password. A port under 1024 requires root access to be able to open it.

Of course, this only applies to linux systems where you don't trust local unprivileged users. Or software that you are running as an unprivileged user. So every system.

Batteries have a current limit that is defined based upon the capacity of the battery. Typical low-cost lithium iron phosphate batteries (which is the chemistry looks like they are using here) usually claim a top current limit of 10C, which would allow a full charge in just over 6 minutes. Really great lithium phosphate batteries can give you a current limit of 30C or higher, which basically means your charging times are limited by how large you want your battery wires to be. This is true for most electric cars.

The only reason a Tesla Roadster can't charge in 2 minutes is because Tesla didn't want to / couldn't engineer a low cost solution that dealt with customers buying two packs (one for the garage, one for the car), which were connected by a wire doing thousands of amps at many hundreds of volts. That kind of connection can be literally explosive, much less potentially fatal to creatures that use electricity to regulate their internal fluid pumps. It's all about how fast you can shove electrons down a wire, and very little to do with the batteries themselves for this kind of pack. Rewiring a pack in parallel to put out / accept that kind of current is trivial.

stolen from slashdot, which stole it from the comments in tfa:

Translated from this page: http://adacemobility.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/das-wunder-von... [wordpress.com] "Technical Data Audi A2 DBM * * Subject Empty weight (including driver) 1260 kg Perm. Total weight 1600 kg Battery lithium-iron-polymer (260 Ah/380 V) cell voltage of 3.8 volts Battery weight about 300 kg Charging time about 4 hours due to mains phase current in the household (380) battery requires 6 minutes (future solution) Life time 2500 charge cycles (without loss of capacity) = Service life target: 500,000 km Top speed 160 km / h 5-speed sequential gearbox (race gear: shifting without the clutch) E-motor 300 Nm torque" So, the 6 minute charge is future/theoretical limits of the battery. The actual time is 4 hours; which is still very impressive. Sincerely, Neil

The reason CPUs aren't getting any faster is only tangentially mentioned in the article. Yes, it is heat dissipation. But why then did they get faster for so many decades?

As the process size drops, you can crank up the clock-speed while leaving the total heat dissipation constant. But the heat density is related to the voltage, resistance, and the amount of time the transistors spend partially on or off (we wish they were perfect switches, but they aren't really). So as you switch faster, unless you can lower the resistance or voltage (which requires changing your materials), you probably spend more and more time in a partially on or off state. This means your heat density rises to the point where you are just south of burning things out.

You make some engineering decision about the reliability you want in your chips, and calculate or test how high a heat density you can tolerate. But unless you change your materials so they use lower voltage, or invent new ways to move heat away faster, or use materials that are more conductive, you aren't upping the heat density or clock rate. But you can still make them smaller and use less power total for the same amount of computation.

This is why reversible computing (gives off less heat), diamond substrates (much higher thermal conductivity), microfluidic channels (moves heat away faster), and parallelism (larger chips = more computation) are being explored. And only the last one is practical THIS year.

It's disingenuous of the author to put "QED" on the end of his article as if this was deductively proven in a mathematical proof. He did make a VERY strong case for cell phones not causing cancer through inducing transcription errors or DNA breakage from ionizing radiation. But he didn't even touch on other possible mechanisms for causing cancer, such as spot heating.

Personally, I would guess that if spot heating caused cancer, then the human race would have gone extinct when we discovered fire, but that is neither here nor there. Using terms like "QED" in this context just adds fuel to the fire of the "evolution is just a theory" whackos.

Smartphones, syncing your facebook, twitter, foursquare, etc in an automated way. Using the latest iphone / android app. 4g phones / usb modems / portable wifi points. Going without home internet. Setting up permanent "windows" between offices or houses located in different states / countries using always on video calls. Using robots to telecommute. Building self replicating desktop 3d printers. Using their smartphones to control their home automation. Building wearable computers. Buying 3d televisions. Putting solar arrays on their roofs.

I've barely scratched the surface.

Well, they did say this was for the "forward bases" (read, bases located inside enemy controlled or sympathetic areas). Keep in mind that they also said that for every 24 convoys, they lost on average 1 person. There were probably at least 1 injured for each killed (maybe many injured for each killed). Ignoring any death benefits, how much do you think it costs to keep a marine in a hospital (after airlifting them back to the states or elsewhere in the western world) for a few months and pay for lifetime visits to the VA? 399 to 1 sounds conservative.

Although it's true that in the movie women were basically presented as sex objects, and that in real life, Zuckerburg has a close and presumably non-sexual object with his COO, it's also true that the startup world is insanely male dominated. I've heard that VCs are sexist, and tend to want to fund young single white men, and I've heard other reasons given. But attempting to confine the gender imbalance entirely to the silver screen is disingenuous. We as a community really need to be doing some soul searching about why women aren't found in "man" Jose and silicon valley.

Honestly, the receipts for MOST businesses are fairly predictable (within 10-20%, at least), so why would we think that the government would be any different?

Also, I'm not sure why making government departments beg for money and have to live in the free market is on the face of it a bad thing. Would it be any different than the current system, where politicians beg us for money while promising to allocate our taxes a particular way, but then usually fail to follow through completely on? Having the departments beg for money directly seems more efficient somehow.

Of course, I think what would really suffer is bold new infrastructure programs. People would be willing to allocate money to roads once a couple high profile bridges collapse, but would we ever see a space elevator?

Why is first-class access to the Internet a human right? Isn't "ability to communicate freely" the right, and the Internet just an implementation detail?

I think I'd still rather have a Notion Ink Adam (http://blog.laptopmag.com/hands-on-with-notion-ink-adam-prot...). It's supposed to be coming out Q4 this year, and has a pixelQi screen (combines the best qualities of e-ink and LCD). iPad like price and form factor, runs android, what's not to like?

But then again I already have a Nexus One, so I've clearly drunk the Android kool-aid.

<sarcasm>Because people who earn that much by working are new money, and should be penalized for trying to break into high society. Gotta keep the riff-raff out of the country club, you know.</sarcasm>

On a more serious note, if you make that kind of money for any significant amount of time, you're going to be a member of the investment class pretty soon (i.e. making your money from capital gains) unless you have poor money management skills (or unusual circumstances, like supporting 10 people, or an expensive gambling habit, etc.).