jaekwon

Oh, now I understand mummies.

:)

There is enough landlocked ice to raise sea level by 80 meters or so.

Here's a projection that claims it'll rise 2.5 meters by 2040.

http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2014/07/more-than-25m-sea-le...

Do we know that this isn't a recent phenomenon? I suspect that it might be new, along with methane potholes showing up in Siberia.

I think we know that there have been bouts of global warming that was preceded by release of methane into the atmosphere, followed by 6 to 9 degrees of warming over a long period of time. It fucked with the ecosystem but mammals managed to survive at least two of them.

This appears to be a man-made beginning to one of these warming periods, though it's happening at a much faster rate than ever by orders of magnitude.

http://www.wunderground.com/climate/PETM.asp

So, I think what's scary is that this looks like a massive global extinction event that hasn't happened in 25 ~ 50 million years, and it's starting now, and it's happening faster than it ever has. I dunno, doesn't that scare you a little?

It looks like if we're not unlucky we'll manage to survive (mammals have done it before). Probably scariest is the political turmoil that will result. That's the part that will affect us in our lifetime.

Any experience with it?

I like this sentence...

> The one that produced an observer was observed.

I wonder if it applies in other contexts, specifically, er, quantum decoherence?

Thanks, these are great resources. I'm certainly not the expert!

I suppose the novena is nice because it's fairly open source hardware, and it's designed by Bunnie of the EFF.

One option that might be good is the Novena computer. Anybody have any thoughts on that?

"every other X" usually means, every even or every odd X, like:

... 0 1 0 2 0 3 0 4 0 5 ...

Every other number is 0 above.

No error, it means every other coefficient in the p.g.f. is negative, which is like saying that certain outcomes have negative probability. In the p.g.f. for the double coin example, the coefficient of the monomial for z^0 is 1/4, meaning that the probability of two coins flipping to both tails is 1/4. If the coefficient were negative there, it doesn't make sense intuitively but that's the "magic" when it comes to these magical half coins.

I remember reading things online where people claim that the natural world (probably including what's known in quantum mechanics) is better explained with quaternions.

Oh yay, I'm working my way through that book so I'll look forward to reading that part.

On second thought, it looks what the binomial theorem could be extended such that k (in the paper this is n) goes to infinity, though for values of k greater than n the value is zero.

I'm more intuitive than mathematical. The thing feels like taking a taylor series of a square wave.

On page 67, "According to the binomial theorem," ...

What follows on the right hand side, I'm not sure where that came from.

According wikipedia: (1+x)^n = \sum_{k=0}^n {n \choose k}x^k. If you plug in 1/2 for n, you get a sum from n=0 to n=1/2, not n=0 to n=infinity as in the paper. So, this is confusing :)

You must go beyond FLP impossibility. The problem with just stopping at understanding FLP is that it assumes too little about what is available. No assumptions of synchrony, no assumptions of clocks, then sure, consensus is impossible in the presence of faults. The real interesting question is, what realistic assumptions can I make to overcome FLP? I believe the CAP theorem is similar.

Also, if you're interested in cryptocurrencies or distributed systems with "greedy" participants, that's another class of problem that goes a level beyond byzantine consensus. The difference is that you cannot assume that even the "good" participants are running the officially sanctioned software, but rather you must assume that there may be colluders who attempt to game the network.

Byzantine generals problem + game theory -> ?

I believe the opposite should be true.

The knowledge that resides in my property, whether it be my head or my computer, is my own. I do not grant anybody the right to modify or delete that, and I would not force you to delete your memory or files either.

It is your responsibility to keep your privacy, and those who invade it illegally should be punished accordingly. However, once the information is out there, let it stay out there. The economic and moral-hazard cost of the kind of "data protection" scheme that the author espouses is detrimental.

> Could be safe in agricultural use

Didn't we find that some pesticide(s) is/are (partially) responsible for bee colony collapse disorder?

Whether or not the article is true, why don't you provide more constructive information? Presumably you've read the referenced studies and seen how bad their controls are. Which studies, and why is it bad?

I love this. I would donate, and continue to donate for as long as the interface progresses.

Something I would definitely pay membership for: The ability to see before & after photos for any two points in time, anywhere, with the ability for users to create wiki-like entries on points or sets of points on the globe. I'd just love the ability to learn about what's going around spaceship earth, and there ought to be a way for locals to become more active towards conservation efforts.

Also, if there were a live version some time in the future, it would be cool to have a live globe to see where the clouds are. Severe drought in California, and I've been wanting to see where the clouds are headed.

What are the "terms of reference"? And what the heck happened to the post?

If there were a fully open hardware/software machine, I would give it all of my money.*

*Of budget allocated for purchasing computing devices.

Curious, how "real time" can a large application get in Go by judiciously working with pre-allocated structs and slices? Perhaps if the underlying system libraries don't require much garbage collection, then you can avoid stopping the world for too long.

Good point, and I suppose they really are: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-1244520/The-f...

That's a big if. Vitalik is mostly looking at PoW ATM.

Is there an implementation in the works? Also, if you're the author, find me on #tendermint on freenode. There are some things about PoS that I'd like to share with you.

I would say that the security properties are different, with pros and cons for both. For clarification, Tendermint has strong security independent of external factors, while Bitcoin has simplicity but it is always vulnerable to an external attack -- this is what makes all PoW altcoins vulnerable. Tendermint has pretty strong consensus guarantees, but when it's broken, it's broken and requires manual recovery. Bitcoin has weaker consensus guarantees, as any blockchain fork could become a winner in the future (esp true if large miners form cartels), but it's not brittle and in the case of a fork, the winner can be determined (even for inactive participants) by shoving more work onto it. Finally, Tendermint does require clients to "hook-on" to the correct blockchain fork by a priori knowing a recent correct blockhash before syncing, which is easy to do in practice and only needed after a period of long inactivity.

But the problem is the same problem, and I would counter that the security is if anything stronger than that of Bitcoin. Ever since I studied pre-existing literature on consensus, I no longer see Bitcoin as you probably see it today.

I hear of advances in program obfuscation. They're working on improving performance. Whether they are secure or not, I do not know.

But if it is possible to obfuscate a program, I think it should be possible to create something on an FPGA that is secure and private.

If this were to become a more serious (but still open/free) project, what is the projected speed, in your opinion, that can be achieved by a hobbyist with an FPGA board or similarly available technology, say by the year 2020?

I ask because this seems like one avenue to create a full stack open source/hardware machine whose security can be vetted by the community. I wonder if by 2020 we might be running your core on handsets.

On a related note, I wish I could run a USB stick that runs a ROM-BIOS burned into an FPGA stick. Is that possible today?

priorities. the whitepaper draft was meant to solicit criticism. it hasn't been shot down.

there's no point trying to convince the general crypto community that believes bitcoin is the first solution to the byzantine generals problem. i'll fix that later.

I second the old school research. If you have the funds, get an ACM membership or similar.