Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: Where does the money come from?

David Webb,

To answer your serious question seriously, Bitcoin is in a weird state. Some people want it to be money. Which works best by having as stable a value as possible and being useful to buy things. i.e. a "medium of exchange" and a "store of value". Call these people users.

However some people see Bitcoin as an investment. They want wild swings in value. Well OK, they probably don't want it to go down (unless they want to buy more of it) - but they do want the value going up continually. They're your investors.

A worry for Bitcoin is that a large chunk of the miners might sabotage the use as money lot in order to keep dollar values high to maximise their investments (in both mining rigs and coin). And by doing so, kill the golden goose.

Sometimes your user/investor might be the same person. I've seen some Bitcoin defenders trying to make the "it's better than fiat money" argument, but then being unable to stop themselves from smugly saying, "and look how much the value went up last week!"

So the dollar value of a Bitcoin only matters when you convert one into "real money". And I believe turnover in these exchanges is quite low. So the price is set by the next person in line willing to buy.

So the answer to your question is that like any investment, it's only worth what someone is willling to pay you for it now. Which is why it once went from being worth over $1,200 to around $50, in about 2 days.

However, again, if it has the ability to survive long-term then today's worthless asset might go back to having the same value as yesterday if you're willing and able to wait long enough. Half the banks nearly went bust in 2008 because they were holding mortgage backed securities that nobody trusted. So they went from being worth something like 98% of their face value to nothing overnight. Nowadays, those mortgages are mostly still being paid off - and so most of those assets are still probably worth 95-98% of face value - though I don't know what price they sell for.

So, in the same way (and to undermine my own anti-Bitcoin argument), if the Bitcoin economy still continues - it doesn't mattter so much what they're worth in dollars. If people will accept your Bitcoins for stuff, and can spend those with other people, then the Bitcoin economy could conceivably continue forever. I don't know how big the Bitcoin economy is. Or whether people use them like a currency by pricing in Bitcoins, of if you're always charged the dollar value at the time of transaction. That, and whether there are enough non-criminal uses to keep it going, will determine if Bitcoin lasts.

Re: A job in the Ecuadorian embassy?

2nd broom cupboard along, behind the toilet on the left.

Re: Yes, can I spec my self driving car

Thomas Steven 1,

NO! NO! NO! NO!

Not get into car. Alarm clock comes on with Thunderbirds music. Bed tilts up and pours you down a chute to the garage. Where you're loaded in through the roof of your car.

Possibly pouring you into your trousers as well. In which case you also need Wallace and Grommit music.

Some sort of auto-breakfast machine seems very important as well.

Re: GNU TERRY PRATCHETT

Crassus* in 1st Century BC Rome got rather rich (and unpopular) with a similar trick. He had a personal fire brigade. He'd turn up with a team of firefighting slaves and a lawyer at your fire. Would you like to sell me this property? Say for a third of its value? No? Well OK then, me and my firefighting slaves will be over there watching it burn, in case you change your mind...

*He of killing off Spartacus and Triumvarate with Caesar and Pompey fame. They did the generalling, and he did the vast wheelbarrows of cash for bribing.

Re: achieve fusion

That's why the correct dose of toasties is 2. You cook number one and plate it up, cutting it in half. Then you cook toastie 2. At the point this hits the plate, and is cut in half, then and only then are you allowed to consumer toastie 1.

Unless you've foolishly put tomatoes in it, or made the awesome (but deadly) jam toastie. In which case, give it another hour.

Re: Looks like Snoopy to me.

Surely it's a cashew?

For comparison, here's a picture of a giant space duck.

I mean, who wants to do business with people who do stuff like that?

I don't know. Lots of people do business with Oracle.

OK admittedly you did say, "<bold>wants</bold> to do business with"...

See also: Apple, Microsoft etc.

This is the kind of thing you can get away with if you're a dominant player, or customers are locked into your stuff. I can't see it going down too well in open source land, and from a non-dominant company though.

Re: pah!

Mandolin soup is delicious. It's just the bits in it can be a bit stringy...

Re: How much are they taxed?

There apparently used to be a lot of shennanigans with paying a portion of players' wages into foreign trusts and companies ten years ago, but I think most of that's been stopped now. It would be funny if they were on PAYE, but I assume they're contractors. There also used to be a distinction in the way players got paid for "image rights", merchandising cash and their playing wages - another area ripe for possible tax exploitation.

There was some sort of system to recognise that foreign players who came here to play Wimbledon say, probably shouldn't be paying tax here, as they're not really "working" here, so much as playing a 2 week international tournament that happens to be in South London. As I understand it, this got abused and so was changed.

But that left people complaining about having to pay 45% tax to the UK government on their Wimbledon winner's cheque. Threats of foreign sportspeople not coming here for events etc. I've lost track of what the situation is now.

Re: RS-25 turbo pump

What size family swimming pool though? Your linked piece doesn't answer that. So I googled a bit more.

There are actually 4 turbo-pumps, 2 low pressure and 2 high pressure for fuel and oxidiser. And they're surprisingly low pressure, fuel goes up to 45 bar, oxidiser only up to 30 bar.

I didn't easily find the answer in a few brief Googles. I think I found total propellant flow at 100% throttle, which is 1409 kg/sec. Which is both oxygen and hydrogen.

Which is quite impressive - given the turbo-pumps only weigh something like 50kg.

To put this into context, the UK rivers authority own 2 extra-large pumps for flood clean up. Each does 500 kg/sec - at much lower pressures too - and each completely fills the loadbed of a large articulated lorry.

The pumpset for Wembley stadium does 60 kg/sec and is 16m long by 800mm wide by 1m high. I happen to know that, because we lost that contract...

Oh, and the oxidiser high pressure turbo-pump is a mere 26,000 horsepower!

The fuel pump is 70,000-odd.

That's 35,000 Citroen 2CVs just to pump the fuel...

Re: ICAN has Cheese?

Agamemnon,

An exccellent post, but I have to ask a vital question. With your cheese and crackers, what do you do about port in the US? Do the Californians produce any? Obviously they're not allowed to call it port, but fortified-wine-for-cheese is just small enough to fit on the bottle. Or there's an Australian vineyard who produce Starboard...

Anyway it's vital to any serious cheese consumption that it be accompanied by a decent bottle, ahem, glass of port.

When I lived in Belgium they maintained that you could fulfill this duty with beer. That any food could be accompanied by the appropriate beer. But I disagree. Lamb is better with a decent red and so is cheese, though port is best for that vital role.

The Belgians did successfully infect me with a love of fruit beers though. Nice to see the US craft breweries havinging a go at them. Not many of the English ones seem to go for it. Though Meantime's raspberry ale was very nice.

Re: Ok Google!

I was given an Echo Dot. And it would be fine for setting reminders or my shopping list - say when cooking and not having hands free. But I just tend to do that on my phone, as most of the time you do have a hand free within a few seconds.

It would be nice for playing my music. The speakers aren't up to much, but you can connect it to better ones via USB. But all it's interested in is Amazon music. It's not interested in interacting with what I own, and just playing from that. So in the end, it's sitting on a table somewhere, while I decide whether to give it away, or if I can find a use for it.

It's also really crap at some things. "Echo, wake me up at 7am with Radio..."

"OK. Alarm set for 7am."

Great, thanks! What if I want to be woken with music? It seems half-finished to me.

Re: Naval Humour

Erm, what are you on about? Oddly enough the officers were well aware of the risk to ships from aircraft in both WWII and the Falklands. But you can't achieve anything if you don't put forces in place. You then do the best you can to deal with the risks.

Keeping Malta going was one of the major reasons that the RN kept pinging ships through the Med, and they succeeded. And by succeeding they were able to bugger up Rommel's supply lines, thus helping to tie down German aircraft in the Med that would otherwise have been in Russia, and also ensuring a victory against Rommel. Which was a precious German Panzer corps that spent its time in the desert, rather than heading towards Moscow.

It should also be pointed out that the RN comprehensively beat the Italian navy, despite being outnumbered for most of the time, and often fighting in areas closer to Italy's airbases. And they did this by being so aggressive that they psychologically dominated their opponents. Of course you may just argue that the Italian officer corps were even worse than the British...

As for the Falklands, again this was fought in an area where Argentina were much closer to their airbases than the RN were. But again the RN psychologically dominated the Argentian navy to such an extent that they only came out to fight once. And basically spent the whole war hiding, after the Belgrano was sunk.

Not a charge that could be levelled against their airforce, who put in a lot of sorties and took a lot of losses.

But, though they made several serious errors, the RN didn't do that disastrously in the Falklands. They kept the Argentian airforce flying low. With a combination of aggressive patrols from the Sea Harriers and the threat of Sea Dart and whatever the army's missile system was called (I've forgotten). That low flying was what caused lots of their bombs not to go off. Admittedly not understanding their own fuses didn't help, but then if you drop your bombs too low and they go off, you blow your own plane up.