gosh, Jeff Buckley - so so beautiful

pop

What is A BitCoin?

What is "A bitcoin"?

Seems to me to be the biggest confusion i run across when trying to explain bitcoin to people.

Sites in plenty explain what "bitcoin" is but that leaves some people still confused.

Some of the confusion comes from thinking there are "coins".

There aren't any really - there are no "coins" in bitcoin.

I explain it like this

"A bitcoin is (at the time of writing) 1/25th the reward paid for confirming the validity of a block of bitcoin transactions"

Not so long ago it was 1/50th the reward.

In the not too distant future it will be 10/1250th the reward. It will get smaller until there are only rewards from transaction fees.

At any point in time there is also an exchange rate such that you could say:

"1 bitcoin is USD$150"

but there are still no bitcoins so to speak.

The decimal point in a bitcoin balance is in a way quite arbitrary. It set a starting point for an exchange rate.


bitcoin - whoever Satoshi Nakamoto is he/she/them and Adam Black should get a Nobel Prize for something absolutely stunning in it's brilliance - but otherwise i'm sure he/she/they are entitled to The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator, Visionary and Genius.

pop

ps

Buy with bitcoin? Sure you can!

Donate to us with Bitcoin

 

 

192hsjPnNqHEfiNEaLYaFyoyMxwRgTS6tn

DropBox - slimy, insidious bastards who own a cool app

So ok i finally gave in and bought a smartphone.

It's not that i gave in really. It's because soon i will have a valid reason to own one - that i will be relocating to another country and i'll not have a job.

It's a South East Asian country and one thing they do have is cellphone coverage.

So anyway a smartphone looks like a sensible investment - GPS, translator, access to my data no matter where i am. Well, that's the theory.

I've been migrating into the cloud for about 3 years. Maybe "migration" isn't the best term - let's think of it more as setting up residence there - i'll pretty much never really trust any of them - so as well as having everything in the cloud i still have multiply backed up originals in 2TB disks located in two countries. If i could mount those safely somewhere it would be even better.

Back to my new smartphone. I detest Apple as a company (even more than i detest Microsoft and way more than i detest google) so i went with a Samsung.

The new Galaxy S4 is about to be released so i figured that S3s would be in that sweet spot of being still very useful but not so expensive - i got one for just over AUD$400.

The only hiccup was that my SIM card was too big but a quick trip to a local chinese phone shop soon trimmed it down to size.

I spent the weekend setting it up and playing with it.

Because i have already established myself in the cloud (google, Microsoft, Amazon, skype, VOIP, yahoo - you name it) and all my contacts, feeds, docs and all my thousands of photos are already on line, i was very quickly up and running with full access to everything i have access to on my desk and lap tops.

You could say that i'm way ahead of most people - in fact i am pretty sure i am (if you allow for the fact that 90% of the crap available as "apps" is games and low-brow "entertainment" and i don't have any of that).

So, pre-installed on my shiny new S3 is DropBox.

I'd tried DropBox on my desktop - sharing between work and home but i was not very impressed - in fact i thought it was rubbish compared to what i have with skydrive and google drive so i'd uninstalled it.

But i thought i'd give it another try on the smartphone. Ah slick - very slick - very well integrated into the phone.

And then i got an email saying i could have 48GB of free storage if i carried out 5 of 7 steps....

Of course no matter how you cut it one of those steps is to rat on a friend by coughing up their email address - a hot lead so to speak.

Of course i just used one of my many email addresses (i literally have an infinite number of them as i made the good investment of a low cost domain presence through goDaddy - as well as all the others - gmail, outlook, yahoo and lots of others all managed through my gmail account)

So now i'm being bombarded by very clever marketing spam from dopbox - both sides.

And get this - that so-called "free"48GB is only free for 24 months.

Talk about an insidious bunch of slimy crooked scum - they lure you into using as much on line space as they can possibly get you to use - and then they'll drop a big rental fee on you - when you're committed.

Well DropBox let me tell you that your business model might work with dumb people who have more money than sense - but anyone with any skill whatsoever (or the right app which will indeed soon appear) - will use the free 2GB as a staging location for their camera managed through their other systems.

I've shared my DropBox with my other more powerful and more generous systems - and now it's just a folder.

DropBox reminds me of Excite - was my absolutely favourite search engine and way better than google at the time but they rushed to monetize it. The rest is history.

If you want to dominate the market you have to have deep pockets and a long term strategy. Only once you have killed off all the real competition should you think about how to make money from things.

DropBox - cool and nicely integrated app owned by a bunch of impatient marketing clowns.


pop

Mini Robot - powered by your phone

awesome!


p

Honesty about dishonesty

Are you honest?

Really?

I don't think so

watch and see



ps i found this on blogs.psychcentral.com

pop

Feats of memory anyone can do

p

This will cause a stir

but isn't it pretty practical advise?

Princeton Alumna To Female Princeton Students:

Find A Husband Before Graduation

...

…For most of you, the cornerstone of your future and happiness will be inextricably linked to the man you marry, and you will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you.

...

Wyler, Grace. Princeton Alumna To Female Princeton Students: Find A Husband Before Graduation. http://au.businessinsider.com. 2013-03-30. URL:http://au.businessinsider.com/princeton-women-husbands-princetonian-2013-3. Accessed: 2013-03-30. (Archived by WebCite^® at http://www.webcitation.org/6FVE3tCAP)

p

one of your genes might be the human species lifeboat

I guess that's the idea behind "go forth and multiply" (not to be confused by this or with this sort of multiplication)

(extinction threat population rules seem right now no longer to apply)

just think though

one of your genes or one of the genes of one of your offspring

might be the saviour of all the other genes, or at least some

you might just be the human species lifeboat (kinda like these fire ants)

...

"all other priorities rescinded"

perhaps that's the underlying issue with conservatives versus liberals

liberals try at least to associate themselves with the whole of creation (and all of its genes)

conservatives just pretend to, or don't bother


:-)

pop



yes that's 5 prime to 3 prime



5 prime to 3 prime remember

(Okazaki fragments)





more DNA Replication

see also Crucial step in human DNA replication observed for the first time

p

Peak Oil is Dead

Wile, Rob. Peak Oil is Dead. http://au.businessinsider.com. 2013-03-29. URL:http://au.businessinsider.com/death-of-peak-oil-2013-3. Accessed: 2013-03-29. (Archived by WebCite^® at http://www.webcitation.org/6FTij3hH1)

 “peak oil” became the boogeyman of the U.S. economy

i guess he must have been a bit like van Gogh

so anything Peak Oily will be worth something

pop

Ants prove that humans need not be very bright at all

the results show us that people need only expend an ant size part of their neurological system to feeding themselves and their families

the rest we can play with at will :-)

AUTHORNAME. Robot ants successfully mimic real colony behavior. http://www.plos.org/. 2013-03-29. URL:http://www.sciencecodex.com/robot_ants_successfully_mimic_real_colony_behavior-109486. Accessed: 2013-03-29. (Archived by WebCite^® at http://www.webcitation.org/6FTNPZ7Qb)

i guess that the ants have a funny chemical switch connected to their direction - once they have filled the switch and closed it they turn around and follow the same strategy

cool

pop