namelost

What happened to the people who were behind cover?

Say your bank lends you $1000, into your bank account.

The bank's assets and liabilities balance out. The new deposit is a liability and the loan is an asset. The bank's total deposits rise by $1000. Because normal deposits count towards M2 money, and this new deposit appeared out of thin air, the M2 rises by $1000. New money has been created.

Banks do have to make sure that they meet their capital and reserve requirements, e.g. if they find themselves short they can increase their reserve by taking out a loan from the central bank.

Anybody can create dollars. If you take a loan out from a bank you are creating a dollar. If you make a payment on your loan you are destroying a dollar.

For Assange this is a life and death situation. Sure the US will have to promise not to execute him, but nobody can stop them keeping him in conditions where he wishes he was dead. Just ask Manning. So I maintain that Assange is acting rationally regardless of whether he is "right" or "wrong".

The context is whether Assange's behaviour is rational. If it is impossible to determine whether an extradition request has been filed, then he has to assume that one has been filed. So in fact the burden of proof is the other way around.

Who knows. It is obvious why the US initially did not want to extradite Assange from the UK, because such an extradition would seem to have a low chance of success and even if it did work it would take a very long time. The UK may be a five eyes country but it also has a strongly independent judiciary.

To speculate, perhaps the US's original plan was to waiting for Assange to make his own way to a more pliant jurisdiction, and the whole Sweden case caught the US by surprise as well.

As soon as Assange ended up in the Ecuadorian embassy, the US would have had no incentive to file for extradition.

While I think Assange has a good case against an extradition to the US, the chances of him successfully fighting it are not 100% and if I were in his shoes I would not risk it.

That is a very strange notion of freedom (albeit pervasive). Everybody has the freedom to shoplift but no one has freedom from the consequences of shoplifting.

In essence the iPad is made for people who never learned how to use normal computers.

If you are a person who would mash the delete key once per character to delete a line of text (e.g. my parents) then perhaps the excruciating text selection is not really a negative, as text editing on computers was "always" excruciating. The simplified user experience, is however a positive.

That is different, such laws are unenforceable because they have been ruled to be so by a court. The problem is with laws that are unenforced, but are still enforcable. If the situation of having unenforced laws becomes normalized, then legislatures will indeed not "waste time" removing them, and such laws will be only unenforced until some official decides they don't like you.

You don't know how good you have it. Try using Inkscape on a Mac.

Before Electron, the quality of the average cross-platform app was generally atrocious. e.g. lack of support for retina displays, menu bars attached to the window, system fonts totally missing, non-system file pickers, ugly homegrown font rendering...

Electron is amazing and as much as people like to shit on it, it has raised the quality bar considerably.

No matter how benign an ad looks, it is probably still loading a ton of javascript from dubious places. Ads are a perfect distribution system for malware, and the best strategy is to just disable the whole thing as comprehensively as possible.

I'd rather my favourite website goes offline than my bank account gets hacked.

I agree. The problem with the X is that every new feature comes with a downside. It has a edge-to-edge screen but the notch is really ugly in landscape mode. It has Face ID but no Touch ID. It has wireless charging at the cost of a fragile glass back.

It is a phone beset by compromises, the only thing it does reliably is broadcast that you are rich enough to buy a $1000 phone.

British English has at least two pronunciations of money that I know of, /mʌni/ and /mʊni/

It is very problematic, e.g. how would you develop such a system? No city is going to allow you to break traffic laws to train an autonomous ambulance. At best you could make one for rural areas. I think the problem is probably AI-complete and would require human-like abilities of abstraction to train.

Over-obsession with carbohydrates/sugar intake is a health fad. One simply can't expect health fads to be uniformly distributed across the planet.

People like to eat white rice, because they've been doing so for thousands of years with no ill-effects. The question is how can we improve nutrition education in the west so that people don't think that they are going to get diabetes from eating rice.

Stripe maintains a big list of prohibited businesses. Some of these are honest consumer protection. Others are there to try to instil Christian values into our money, for instance you may not use Stripe to sell sex toys.

If you ask Stripe, they'll tell you that these restrictions are there because of the requirements of Stripe's partners. And that is exactly the problem.

If we are heading towards a cashless society (and we are), then we need an electronic payment system that does not consult the Bible before deciding whether to allow your payment or not.

The thesis of the article is that if bandwidth requirements are too high, then people will stop running full node wallets on their laptops, thus reducing the number of full nodes in the network.

In reality, you would have to be insane to store bitcoins with a C++ program permanently connected to and broadcasting your IP address to a p2p network.

Now, it may be that many bitcoin nodes are run by insane people who do exactly that, but if the foundation of Bitcoin's security is that its users have no understanding of computer security, then the whole thing is doomed to failure anyway.

It doesn't matter. Once you have made a commitment to pay a share of something, you pay it.

What would you price the reputation of the UK at? I hope more than £39bn. All the other countries of the world are watching the UK's actions.

You say to your friends, "Let's share the cost of dinner". Then when you decide you don't like the dinner, walk out halfway through, leaving your friends to pick up the bill for what you ordered.

Once word gets round, not only your friends but nobody is going to go out to dinner with you ever again.

Tunnels are dangerous. Elon is proposing to build really narrow tunnels that are hard to evacuate and then allow every random vehicle inside it. Yes it's on a sled but who is certifying that my fellow tunnelgoers' vehicles won't leak fuel, spontaneously catch fire, or find some other special way to kill me?

Elon has some good ideas and some stupid ideas, this is of the latter category.

They are suggesting going digital-out (on the source) to digital-in. No analog.

But as pointed out Audio Hijack does the same thing virtually with a kernel extension.

That doesn't mean you should short it. Bitcoin is casually up 6% today, in recent history it has had daily gains in excess of 20%. It can rise by multiple percent in a few minutes.

You would have to be completely nuts to short it, regardless of what you think it is going to do in the medium-term.

Then employ someone to do it for you?

What if we got rid of them all? It turns out that when you remove demarcations between pedestrians and vehicles, people end up in hospital:

https://www.dezeen.com/2017/10/09/exhibition-road-accident-r...

Who would have thought?

Would you prefer only the Russian government had access to this technology? By making the technology publicly available we can all fully understand its power. It's mathematics, and mathematics cannot be suppressed no matter how much you want it to be.

The opening book was removed from Stockfish ages ago. Do you mean tablebases?

The Bitcoin community I once knew is truly dead, if making purchases is an "unproven use-case" and the desire to do so on other chains is met with such hostility.

Fortunately among the other cryptocurrencies are communities that have not yet been compromised by greed.

> Increasing block size results in longer validation times as well as slower block propagation

Processing more transactions requires more resources. That's not a bad thing. One might note that currently Bitcoin Cash is usable as a medium of exchange, whereas Bitcoin is not.

They can reduce the bandwidth requirements by implementing e.g. compact blocks.

The volatility of Bitcoin has been decreasing over time.