In one of his videos I he was standing in an empty parking lot shouting into a megaphone that Bed Bath & Beyond would never go bankrupt. I think he did the same thing in front of Lehman brothers (minus the megaphone).
I'm currently finishing up a live wallpaper for Android and after that I'll be looking for remote contract work. I'm an ex-Activision-games-programmer currently specializing in C++ based Android apps. I have years of experience with 3D graphics and real-time audio programming.
If you need something fast and memory-efficient done on Android (or Windows/Console), I'm your man.
I can confirm the 1/3 size dose (the strips are 3 mg and I take one third of that, 1 mg), I take it from time to time when I get insomnia and that seems to be the sweet spot.
This will be make or break for me as well. I'm able to code C++ with Visual Studio (and Visual Assist X) and compile it directly in the IDE with vs-android.
The only thing that could make be switch over would be a robust NDK debugger.
If you watch SC2 on GSL with Tasteless and Artosis, you'll see that even "nerd" is no longer pejorative. The greatest compliment they know is "nerd baller". They refer to themselves and the audience as "nerds" all the time, but in a totally friendly way. It's almost a badge of pride.
Do you really think the congresspeople saying "Well I don't know how it works!? I'm not a nerd!" We're really using it as a compliment, though? And as the Stewart clip points out, why couldn't they have just said "expert"? It's clear they were at best making backhanded compliments -- at worst they were intentionally framing it as "here's some weird arcane thing that only nerds care about, not normal people like us!"
"If you watch SC2 on GSL with Tasteless and Artosis"
I haven't the slightest clue what that even means, you nerd.
It's a point of pride, but only between other nerds. They're taking it back. It's also because "geek" got co-opted by people who aren't actually geeky, so we needed a more specific word for "the type of person who would watch the GSL".
Well, let's say you sleep 6 hours a night, and some one asks you: "If you slept 2 hours less each night, image what you could accomplish with that extra two hours every day. Just start sleeping 4 hours a night and eventually you'll get used to it!".
For some of us 10+ hours is a biological necessity, I've tried forcing myself to sleep exactly 8 hours a night for two weeks at a time and it destroys me mentally, every waking hour is torture because I'm so sleep deprived.
I really like the concept of "metacurrency" that this article talks about. This is exactly the area I think Bitcoin will be most successful. I don't ever see it replacing the dollar, or even credit cards. The one thing that Bitcoin really excels at is the instantaneous transfer of unlimited amounts of money from one place in the world to another. Rick Falkvinge talks about this a bit in his "four drivers" series: http://falkvinge.net/2011/06/18/bitcoins-four-drivers-part-t...
I think eventually Bitcoin will compete with (or maybe replace) Paypal/Dwolla. But its killer app is long-distance point-to-point money transfer.
Problem is, PayPal et al work in government-backed currencies. You can expect that when someone pays you $1 over PayPal, you'll get $1 worth from it (regardless of how many Euros you'd get for that dollar). However, with Bitcoins you'd be running into the issue of a double exchange. First you'd have to trade your dollars for Bitcoins, transfer the Bitcoins, then trade them back into dollars. You'll always get 1BC when someone sends you 1BC, but from the time that BC is bought to the time it's converted back to dollars, the currency could be worth a lot more (or a lot less).
Dollars are not inherently better, but at least I can immediately spend one and get a soda from the gas station. Until Bitcoin reaches that point, people will be sending dollars over Paypal.
That's why I said "eventually", the user-base isn't quite there yet. I could see people just keeping $50-$100 in Bitcoin permanently to use for small transactions, much like I always have $100-$200 in cash in my wallet for small purchases, or $1000-$3000 in my bank account just as a buffer.
I don't see that happening anytime soon though with the huge volatility.
Needing two exchanges instead of one is a disadvantage in the short term, but a big advantage in the long run, because the receiver of money can whatever exchange they prefer, rather than they expect to be most popular with their audience. In essence, Bitcoin is an open protocol for electronically transferring wealth.
Yes but Hawala requires that the agents trust each other. A Hawala-like network could be built by agents who do not trust each other. Users of the network would not have to deal with Bitcoin at all.
I don't know if such a system will come into being but it seems like most of the pieces are already in place. The biggest problem would be converting local currencies into and out of Bitcoin.
There's a portion of internet users who have decided that they really really hate Bitcoin and go out of their way to denigrate it and downvote anyone who doesn't share their views. I can understand the people who are skeptical, because Bitcoin definitely has its problems, but this seething hatred mystifies me...
Well, it did get a little crazy this summer with all of the articles and meta-observation about how viable the currency was vs "is HN being used to pump and dump the value".
It still was a fascinating thing to think about from a software point of view, IMO.
"The one thing that Bitcoin really excels at is the instantaneous transfer of unlimited amounts of money from one place in the world to another."
I'm being somewhat pedantic here but Bitcoin is absolutely terrible at this, because Bitcoins are inherently not unlimited.
On a less pedantic note, I'm not sure Bitcoin is any better than the alternative of a Bitcoin-free world for your example usage. Lots of "real" US Dollars these days are little more than bits in a database that can be transferred easily across the world, and that's true with or without Bitcoin.
I don't think they are "effectively unlimited" either, perhaps closer to "effectively dividable forever", which might not be true, not sure. However, once they are in full circulation they will be a deflationary currency, and giving someone a sliver of a bitcoin that's worth as much as what a full bitcoin was worth at X time in the past is not the same as adding more bitcoins.
I remember one of my economics professors always pre-pending "All other things being equal" before, relating any theories. I keep that in mind every time I start thinking about anything to do with economics, the pile of assumptions on how things are going to work is usually problematic.
Unlimited for the purpose of moving currency. Right now just trying to move a million dollars by Bitcoin will move the market significantly and likely one party will get screwed.
All the wholefoods in NYC (that I've been to anyway) have done this. You know the voice that tells you which register to go to? That guy used to work (maybe still does?) at the one on 7th and 24th, and his job was to direct people to check outs.
Bitcoin? No way. We might as well use Facebook credits. Getting Aunt Martha to trust some sketchy form of 'money' to make an online payment is going to be exceptionally difficult. Imagine suing for damages in bitcoins -- it's not a legal currency anywhere. It's a digital version of trading goats.
In order to be a real alternative to PayPal, Bitcoin will have to avoid the problems that digital gold currencies had, since it's far more similar to them than to PayPal. What were those problems? Accounts differ.
The digital gold currencies had exactly one problem: they worked like cash, but without the necessary decentralization and untraceability. So, people started using them like cash, including for illicit purposes, but the services remained subject to centralized shutdown and seizure.
In one of his videos I he was standing in an empty parking lot shouting into a megaphone that Bed Bath & Beyond would never go bankrupt. I think he did the same thing in front of Lehman brothers (minus the megaphone).