touchofevil

This site claims that a single Nano transaction taking 0.112 Wh vs a Bitcoin transaction taking 950kWh. (note Wh vs kWh) https://isnanogreenyet.com/

Check Nano's FAQ regarding "Is Nano vulnerable to attacks?" here https://nano.org/en/faq

This is one reason why I think Nano (Nano.org) will eclipse Bitcoin for pure transfer of value transactions. Nano uses a block lattice that doesn't require mining. The transactions are instant and feeless b/c of this. There is a tiny bit of PoW on the sender's device to prevent spam transactions.

You sound a lot like me. I have had tons of trouble making myself work, even on my passion projects that I have invested significant amounts of my own money in. I would recommend that you read Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield. He was a chronic procrastinator who turned things around. I would combine this with renting a desk at a coworking space and keeping regular work hours, though they might only be four or six hours per day (8 is too much if you are actually working).

RaiBlocks was distributed using a captcha faucet. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1381323.msg14252334#...

I've worked in the visual effects industry for many years and this is incredibly interesting. In vfx to create a face replacement, we would have to create a 3D model of a head and then texture it with photos/scans of a the desired face. Then we would 3D track this cgi head onto an actor in the shot and then animate the face either by hand or using motion capture data from the stand-in actor's face. Then you'd light and render the cgi head and composite it into the shot.

This video shows the process: https://youtu.be/rsPq2qp_Z-E

And here's an article about it: https://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/di4d-in-la/

It's pretty incredible that there's a completely different way to do a head swap. Of course, the vfx method gives the artist complete control over what the face/head does.

It seems like one of the disadvantages of Satoshi being anonymous is that Bitcoin wasn't trademarked, which allows for forks like Bitcoin Cash to use the name Bitcoin. I think this is kind of an interesting case of why trademarks are important as having both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash must be very confusing to new users on Coinbase.

If you're interested in cryptocurrencies that use DAG like Iota, also check out Raiblocks. Raiblocks.net

Full Disclosure: I own some Raiblocks.

It may be that your bank is charging you an international transaction fee and that is the second charge you are seeing. This happened to me the other day with Coinbase. If you buy from Coinbase with a credit card the transaction actually gets processed in London. Some American banks will charge you a 3% fee for this international transaction. So it will look like Coinbase has charged you twice, but actually the second charge is from your bank.

I can attest to the fact that LA rents have gone insane in the last maybe 5 years. A run-down 1 bedroom apartment in a working-class neighborhood of LA (Palms) without central air and no dishwasher will rent for $1700/month at the minimum. I'm currently apartment hunting in LA and it's brutal.

I don't think that letting people who are interested in Tezos know about a coin with very similar features is "pumping" the currency. Tezos has some really interesting features, but they have stumbled with the ICO and delayed their release. As someone who was waiting for Tezos to launch I was excited to hear about Cardano and I'm sure there are other Tezos enthusiasts here who are happy to learn about the existence of similar coin. To say that I'm "pumping" the coin implies that I will dump the coin, when I'm really just interested in the Tezos technology, which is also present in Cardano.

If you like the idea of Tezos, have a look at Cardano. It has on-chain governance voting, formal verification, and the ability to upgrade the protocol without the need for hard forks. Basically, all the stuff that got me interested in the Tezos project.

https://www.cardanohub.org/en/what-is-cardano/

In the interest of full disclosure, I do own some Cardano.

I'm proposing that the concept of states is obsolete now and we need to move to what I'd call a "unified America" policy, where we get as close as possible to a majority rule system of democracy. The best way I can think of to achieve that is to abolish the Senate and the electoral college.

If you think our current system of governance is working well, then please say so. If you think our system isn't working well, then please let me know how you propose to fix it.

This whole idea of "coastal elites" and "flyover states" is just a tool that those with real power (corporations and special interests) are using to divide Americans so that they are easier to control. If you were the NRA looking to make sure that "bump stocks" don't get banned after a gunman shoots hundreds of people in Vegas using them, where would you focus your resources? On the Senate, of course! Because the House can't do anything without the Senate's approval and influencing 41 Senators is a lot easier than trying to influence hundreds of members of the House.

It's the same with the presidential election. If you're the NRA, what's easier for you to influence? A popular vote or our current electoral college system where only a few swing states matter?

If you're saying that the electoral college and the Senate are a means of protecting those in the "flyover states", then I would just you how that's working out? Do you think "Wyomingers" are the ones who are going to benefit from repealing the estate tax? The House, Senate, and Executive branch are all controlled by Republicans who should, in theory, be advocating for "Wyomingers" and yet they seem to only be working on behalf of the interests of the wealthy, special interests, and corporations.

Just abolish the states all together as far as I'm concerned and let's have one unified America, which would be much harder for special interests and corporations to influence.

Here's my proposal for tweaking the USA's current government so that it better represents the will of a majority of Americans: 1) abolish the Senate 2) end the electoral college 3) end gerrymandering 4) reform campaign financing.

Because it's harder to corrupt a "pure" democracy. If you have a policy that is bad for the population at large, but good for your own interests, in a "pure" democracy then you will have to convince a majority of the voters to vote against their own interests.

Yes, and this would be fine if the senate did not exist. But the senate can kill anything that the house proposes. So Wyoming has undue influence over what the (correctly balanced) house tries to make law.

Well, the real question to me is do we think of people who live in Wyoming as "Wyomingers" and those in CA as Californians? I don't think so. We just think of everyone in the USA as Americans. So why should it be that some Americans (those who live in Wyoming) having outsized voting power over national laws? A minority of Americans is controlling the country via the methods I mentioned. It doesn't seem to be working out very well. We need to make sure that the majority of Americans have veto power over things like electing Donald Trump, the current tax bill, the attempts to end Obamacare.

The Senate doesn't reflect majority rule based on population. California has 38.3 million residents, Wyoming has 600K residents [1] but both states have 2 senate votes. Due to this, Wyoming residents have much greater voting power in the Senate than residents of CA.

Edit: And since bills must be passed by both the House and the Senate, Wyoming residents have much more power over what becomes law than CA residents do. [1] http://www.enchantedlearning.com/usa/states/population.shtml

I completely support this idea. Additionally, I think the USA needs to move away from anything that doesn't reflect majority rule. For example, abolish the Senate, end the electoral college, end gerrymandering, and reform campaign financing.

The USA could be a lot more democratic than it is at present and until that is fixed, you will keep seeing a minority of the population control policies that affect the whole nation.

Interesting. I assumed that spending more time working with Python would be beneficial, but I guess it's not a big deal. This is great to know, as I've been resistant to starting with Ruby/Rails for the reason I described. Thanks!

Of course, but wouldn't one be better preparing themselves for data science by working with python/django on a web app vs working with Ruby/Rails?

Wouldn't Python/Django make more sense in 2018 considering that Python could be used for data science and machine learning? I realize this is a Python vs Ruby question, but if you didn't know either Python or Ruby and were trying to pick between Django and Rails for a project, wouldn't you pick Django in 2018 due to future data science and machine learning opportunities?

I was thinking of using FreeBSD for a large filer as well, but then I learned that you can run ZFS on Ubuntu, which should have better driver support than FreeBSD (at least I would think so). So you may want to consider Ubuntu with ZFS instead. https://www.howtogeek.com/272220/how-to-install-and-use-zfs-...

I use an Aeron and I also have a geekdesk.com sit/stand desk, which I love. If you already have a desk and want to add sit/stand functionality, get a varidesk.com Don't forget to get a standing mat.

I think Apple needs to expand (or as you call it dilute) their core mission. They've become a smart phone company that can't even remember how to build a desktop for professionals. You say that they would be offering an inferior search service compared to Google, but I don't see why that would be the case. In my opinion a search service that doesn't track you is superior to Google (see DuckDuckGo for an example) and if it's built into Spotlight, even better.

Google survives on it's ad-words revenue as far as I can tell. Android only generates money for google through ads (which is again dependent upon tracking the user) and they've never released revenue numbers for Youtube, so we can probably assume Youtube loses money. And even if Youtube makes money, it is still from ads. So if Apple can cut into Google's ad-words business model, they will deal a blow to their chief competitor, Android.

This is an interesting article talking about how Google could fail b/c it is too dependent on ad revenue. https://hackernoon.com/how-google-collapsed-b6ffa82198ee

Apple definitely needs to expand its vision. A major tech player like Apple shouldn't be spending all their time iterating on the iphone and making their laptops a tiny bit thinner. They should really have a serious AR product like the Hololens by now at the absolute minimum. Honestly, Apple seems to think that their mission is to be a computer sculpture company at this point. They are totally obsessed with design to the point that they can't create a usable desktop computer. They've lost the plot.

I don't see how offering ad-free Internet search that's available in the OS (like in spotlight) would be a bad UX experience for the customer. Also, Bing is doing pretty well bringing in 5.6 Billion in revenue in 2016 [0]. And since DuckDuckGo has 21 employees and is doing a pretty good job of providing a search engine, I would think Apple could probably handle putting together a solid search engine fairly quickly. [1] Apple could always add keyword based ads like DuckDuckGo does, so that they can still charge for some ads without tracking their users.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-07-19/microso...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

It would harm Google's primary revenue source Ad-words. Reducing the revenue of your competition is beneficial since they will have less money to fund their competing products with.

Looks like a cool building, but I wonder how much mental bandwidth designing it took up at Apple. The mac mini needs an update, they need to release a Mac Pro that is viable for video pros, and they definitely haven't sold me on their new macbook pros (without mag safe!) Also, where's the Apple equivalent to the Hololens? And what happened to all the rumors about Apple cars and Apple Smart TVs? How are they doing on creating smart home devices?

I'm not sure that they really should make cars, or TVs, but they are basically an amazing phone company at this point and that's about it. Maybe, I don't know, build an ad-free search engine and bake it into all your products so that you can give google a run for their money instead of obsessing over a $5 billion building.

Edit: I forgot about the Apple watch, which I'm a fan of.

I didn't see anything in the article you linked to where Gevers says that the amount ($20 million) the Tezos company would sell itself to the foundation for is excessive. As I understand it, that was always the arrangement. The amount the company would sell itself for was a percentage of the ICO funds raised, I believe.

I do agree that the situation is a shitshow.

I think the foundation probably is legally required to have multiple directors, but you would think that a foundation that raised $500 million from "donors" would give out some information about who two of the three board members are and why/how they were selected.

Regarding your second point, can you provide a source for that? What I've read has alleged that Gevers tried to take a bonus from the ICO funds. "The Breitmans said Gevers had sought to pocket a bonus from the ICO proceeds, whose value had swollen to as much as $400 million because of a rise in the value of bitcoin, and then lied about it to his foundation colleagues." [0]

[0] https://www.finews.com/news/english-news/29289-tezos-johann-...