hannibal5

Like the article says, ZFS is pretty damn good.

Keystore where the "engine" is ZFS works mighty well and is reliable. There is little need for simple solutions like MongoDB if the filesystem rocks.

This is not stupid article. The journalist in question used these few people just to add human interest in a story full of statistics.

1. Increasing number of Japanese have just casual sex.

2. Increasing number of Japanese don't have sex (with other human) at all.

There is statistical data from several surveys backing this up.

Wrq ZpPnyro with high probability. Look at what he has done, where he lives and how he writes.

For a more clearer picture, look at this graph:

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1460zig12-hourztg...

Bitcoin is deflationary and has enough actual use to support small trading volume even without speculators. It's perfect vessel for speculators and bubbles, but the long trend is pretty obvious. I suspect that it will grow until it has reached all of it's potential users and potential speculators.

It has actual use as currency for bad stuff, money laundering and avoiding currency restrictions like in China for example, so I think the exchange rate will grow for some time. I suspect that grey economy might support money supply worth of 200-300 billion at least. Government interventions might cut it into much smaller number though. Virtual currency has little value if you can't interact with the rest of the economy.

It's not path to cyberanarcist-utopia, but it's not clearly useless either. I think it might find it's niche or be replaced with something similar.

That would be worse for China because the value of CNY would skyrocket stopping their exports. Value of USD would plummet helping US exports.

Besides, China and foreigners are not anywhere near the biggest buyers of US debt. Fed is. Chinese and Japanese had actually five month net selling period earlier this year.

If you pay your home in cash that's true.

But if you have to borrow money for that 0% rent, it's not that simple.

Some Lisp or Smalltalk guru steps in and says that they already did that in 80's in 7, 6, 5, 4, ...

Sounds very reasonable assumption.

House prices are fundamentally tied to the income of people living in the area. There can be ups and downs but eventually it all comes back to fundamentals. Labor's share of national income has been in steady decline in all OECD countries since mid 70s. Smaller part of GDP will be available to be spend to housing.

The Guardian is also independent. It is owned by the Scott Trust and has been consistently loss making. The Scott trust turned into The Scott Trust Limited in 2008, but the same independence is maintained. Of course, the problem is that The Guardian may run out of the money eventually.

In America, increasing the minimum wage would help the majority of poor who are working poor.

Delayed gratification is the single most important measurable personality trait that determines success later in life. IQ is less important than delayed gratification. High IQ and other traits are just potential for success. Delayed gratification is what turns these traits into success.

>It is important to realize that there is a heavy strain of racial superiority thinking in the English upper class. As far as I know, there is nothing similar anywhere in Europe today.

If we put weight on genetics, English style slow social mobility class system would be the worst kind.

Some biologists have theorized that rigid class system has kept the genetic differences between classes minimal. Lowest peasants have same amount of genetic advantages and disadvantages as upper class because there was minimal mixing between them. In the modern times when class structure collapses and social mobility increases it will be different. Successful and beautiful people move to big cities where they meet each others and mate (Finland and Nordic countries have high social mobility). New upper class will form that self selects it's members based on personal traits and performance. This would mean that new upper class will be more beautiful, fit and intelligent and genetic disadvantages will concentrate on lower classes. In other words, if genetics is important, giving equal opportunity to all children and high social mobility will create upper class with better genetics.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/22/social-...

Single member districts and plurality vote make it very hard.

Only if there is huge local support in some areas this could happen. For example Tea Party could break from Republicans and get several representatives.

There could be also bounty for finding backdoor or weakness in Truecrypt.

> but this chart and story don't accurately represent the US market for mobile data.

It says it's for prepaid in the title. Its not inaccurate just because it does not measure what you want it to measure.

Overall geographic size adds logarithmic cost to the physical network but big networks also gives scale benefits that might be bigger.

>and to the fact that it costs more to build a network than it does in small, densely populated European countries.

No. Finland has population density 16/km^2, United States has 34.2/km^2

It's not ever correct for urban areas. Population density in Helsinki (urban area) is 1800/km^2 spread out American city like LA has urban area density 3200/km^2.

The number of cell towers is related to number of people using the services. If you have densely populated area you add them more close to each other because ether has bandwidth limits. The cost increases only if the population density is so low that towers are not utilized even when they are as sparsely placed as possible.

I could not find prepaid provider in Finland with strict limits for data transfer. For example in Saunalahti mobile prepaid 0.861 EUR/MB (maximum cost is 1.9 EUR/day, after that data transfer is free). In other words, you get unlimited data transfer for ~$57 per month.

If we want to limit climate change to +2°C, we must leave 80% of hydrocarbons into the ground. This option is not showing in the prices of energy companies. It's just not going to happen.

Bruce Schneier also changed his PGP key to 4096-bit short time ago when he started to deal with Snowden leaks.

Nirvana fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

I think expanding the life to 100-130 years might be possible in next 20-30 years for people in private jet category.

I don't think we can get to the point where person can live over 90 years old and has his cognitive capabilities intact and here is why:

If you hang around with old people in their 80's and 90's who are still exceptionally smart and have retained their faculties, you can still see how their cognition has changed. Brains might change only slightly after they reach their peak around 25, but we still carry the baggage of previously learned stuff. We don't have the so called "fresh eyes" anymore.

We see our current situation filtered trough our past experiences and I think this emotional and cognitive crystallization just goes on even with fully healthy brain. Using machine learning terminology, human brain can't backtrack from previously learned and their learning bias only increases. If our brains only increase their bias and specialization over time, learning stuff that is outside that field becomes more difficult and we lose the ability to adapt to big changes that will happen.

Majority support is not what defines national interest.

You are confusing political opinions to the workings of US government.

If the FBI has been tracking down SilkRoad for years, I find it completely reasonable that they finally find the location of the server just based on traffic analysis. I'm sure that FBI or NSA runs number of exit and intermediate nodes to collect statistical correlations from traffic and track down hidden services given enough time (there is even public research that shows how it can be done: http://epub.uni-regensburg.de/11919/1/authorsversion-ccsw09....).

All that said, its even more likely that they found his identity other way. He seems to have slipped from time to time. I think most people underestimate the amount of boring and tedious chores they must do year after year if they want to conceal their identity from FBI who is actively searching them online. It seems that the main theme in revealed identities seems to be reusing usernames or using the same email in two different contexts that link person to his anonymous identity.

No. This is perfectly ordinary for US. If I had signed anti-apartheid petition, I might have been denied entry in the 80's.

>borderline-rogue surveillance agency

That's not the opinion of the government. It's the job of the people to change the policy of the government. NSA surveillance is government run activity and foreigners speaking against it can be denied visa.

As forefinger I find the naivety of US citizens towards their government disturbing. NSA is not borderline-rogue as long as the White House and the Congress are on the same boat.

There is nothing out of proportion here compared to previous decades. There is nothing out of ordinary in denying visa from someone writes and works against the national interest of US.

Visas have been denied from communists, peace activists, greens, anti-apartheid activists and homosexuals in previous decades. Surveillance critics fit this group just fine.

There is nothing out of the ordinary here. Prior criminal convictions, affiliation with unsuitable political parties or organizations or poor character are valid justifications for denying entry according to US law.

It has been used against communists, peace activists, anti-apartheid activists, greens and homosexuals in previous decades. Now it's surveillance critics who don't get in.

assuming that space traveler had the incredible amount of energy to accelerate long periods of time, interstellar medium would be the limiting factor. There would be upper limit (say 90-99% of the speed of the light) and after that particles, molecules and dust in the space would bee too energetic for the space ship to stay intact.

BTC is not currency or security. BTC is treated as any other asset outside currencies and securities. Person must pay taxes for capital gains but they can't do tax deductions from losses. Taxes hit every time BTC is used to buy something.

Mined bitcoins are taxed as earned income.

In many EU countries insurance companies and banks can't do social network analysis of your public Facebook profile or buy your private data from Facebook.

Some countries have laws that limit the use of the information in public records. Even if some party is allowed to collect the information, like phone company, they are not automatically allowed to use the data in any way they please.

There is also huge difference of having access to data you need and keeping and collecting records of people using publicly available data.

US has very backwards privacy laws. Basically once your data is out there anyone can do anything they please with it. This does not mean that this should be the case or that rest of the world acts like this.

Elizabeth Warren has answers:

The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class with Elizabeth Warren https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A

Everyone should watch the video. She answers for the question of having more cars etc.