base698

http://guardiannews.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That's the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it's dramatic, it's a person (non-abstract), and it's news that's cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated.

I think that's where we disagree. If it's actively used for money laundering or illicit things it will always have some value if the volume is high enough to offload. The biggest positive use is transmitting money to the third world without getting screwed by Western Union or warlords.

I don't understand why people keep saying you can't do anything with them.... https://bitcoin.it/wiki/trade + Silk Road, Word Press, and Reddit. Only the investment side. Sending money anywhere without an intermediary, to my knowledge, has never been tried. This is the closest thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala

The Fed didn't, but FinCen did a couple of weeks back: http://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/pdf/FIN-2013-G001.pdf

Right now they are divisible to 8 decimal places and the code allows for more if needed in the future. You can send as little as 0.00000001.

The "article" compares 5 years lawn expenses to 1 year military expenses. The $700K dollar figure is supposed to get a reaction. Being intentionally misleading is usually a bad sign.

$203 bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html

Not to mention the motor in the Model S is the size of a medium sized watermelon, giving you TWO internal combustion-engine sized spaces for storage. Two trunks, how is that not awesome?

Like cash? Is cash to be hated because it's used by street gangs and in weapons traffic? A lot of the miners are open source as is the standard bitcoin client. Both have been mulled over by countless people. Most of the concerns you've outlined are basic computer security. Everyone should know you should never open executables in email, fall back on skepticism when opening links etc. The network posts how many G/Hash/second it's currently running at, so you could calculate if it's being used for nefarious purposes. I was accusing you of conflating a single persons computer security with the security of bitcoin. A lot of people in the media make the mistake of implying bitcoin is insecure because exchanges or online services are hacked. It's kind of like saying cash is insecure because a bank is robbed or a person is mugged in walking through a bad neighborhood.

That's like saying cash is stupid because people steal ATMs. Bitcoin is something specific. It isn't the exchanges that sell them or the hackers that try to steal bitcoins.

As an idea it's pretty fucking brilliant. The most world changing ideas usually aren't understood at first. Think about when the internet started gaining traction and you'd hear pundits saying it was a fad that would be gone by 2004. Tech dot coms survived their bubble and generated quite a few billion dollar businesses that immense practical value. From the NY Times today: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/business/media/bubble-or-no-virtual-bitcoins-show-real-worth.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Here are a couple of things that made me realize it had immense practical value. An acquaintance was recently selling a software library online. He was accepting PayPal, and had made about $200K in short order. PayPal froze the account and made him jump through a ton of hoops to get it back, which took him months. He was terrified as it was to be his money to live off on. This can't happen with Bitcoin. You can send and receive with no risk of chargeback or account freeze. Taking more than $10,000 in and out of the country requires red tape, not so with this. If you want to buy prescription drugs or illicit drugs through the mail you can do that to. Visa wants to say you can't donate to Wikileaks? Tough shit. Want to send a donation to a war torn village in Africa but the transfer fees eat up all the money? bitcoin to the rescue. Granted it's highly probably this is all speculation and could be another dutch tulip, but the use case and the tech is compelling. Shorting would be good as a hedge for those who already made a lot of money with it and are afraid of the tax implications of selling off half a million in bitcoin, but given that there isn't much history for how to set the options it would be a wash. There are however exchanges that you can short.

It isn't just regs... http://www.kivasystems.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car Not to mention Dropbox, Automated Call Routing, Gmail, and similar systems eliminate the need for IT in most businesses... Spend a small monthly fee and eliminate a $50K office worker

I still don't know how to rectify the fact that there are huge economic opportunities to be had, but a lot fewer of the slots. IE, Google and Apple employ far fewer workers than a similar size company would have in the past. This air of hand waving in the face of permanently losing a whole class of blue collar jobs is pretty striking. Our society has not transitioned into a creator economy and there are millions that are waiting for the non-thinking jobs to come back. In 10 years we'll lose a whole other class of blue collar jobs and probably start in on the white collar jobs. Those people can't all be drug dealers or prostitutes.

When I lived and worked in the city this year it was common for 23 year olds with little experience to ask for 130k. The tech scene is booming.

I'm no expert on proxy, and only have about a dozen wingsuit BASE, but it seems to me to be a super shallow flight to hit that ridge, resulting in what looks like no outs. Can someone with more experience there confirm? Given the recent incident at that site month, seems like a good hypothesis.

One of the greatest applications for this is visibility of all the canopies relative to you. Imagine having a 3D view of every other canopy in the sky at all times. No more collisions or swoopers running into you from above... Of course everyone would need to use it.

Off the top of my head: Farm subsidies, ethanol subsidies, bank subsidies. Legal pressure on companies like Napster that created an alternate distribution model that people clearly wanted but ultimately shut it down for Apple to recreate 3 years after. Allowing Monsanto to wield their power to force farmers to only use Monsanto seed. Legal help for companies that do nothing but file software patents without building actual products. The law suits of which siphon money off the small companies actually trying to build products. Etc. etc. Commoditizing labor so middle America can no longer have a hope of having a decent wage, but yet not change the education system to fix this new reality. Seriously it looks like we are gaming the system to go back to feudalism for the bottom 40%.

The rioters in London were so effective because they could use technology. I can imagine in the modern world if an insurgency did start it could be massively effective using such organizational tactics.

^^ No kidding, but I want an actual number. I want an analytical analysis of it so you can say definitively a wingload of 1:1 on a 150 flies X fast and has a glide ratio of Y.

Well the issue now that anyone that comes on DZ.com or asks anyone if they can safely downsize from say a 170 to 150. There are lots of pilot issues to take into account, based on their experience, however there is no concrete data on any of this stuff. You know a 150 at 1:1 is faster than a 170 at 1:1, but how much faster? 1%, 2%, or 20%? If someone had a graph with wingloading vs canopy speed for every size canopy as well as one for a given weight at many different canopy sizes vs size. You could say exactly that a 120 for Person A @ 200 lbs is X MPH, whereas their 150 they are currently jumping is X MPH. Everyone seems to have anecdotal evidence at best of a person they know at X wingloading getting hurt. I just think people could make more informed decisions about downsizing if they had this data.

Weights. Low wind and take the average various headings.

Are there any solid numbers on canopy speed at various wing loadings. A lot of people have GPS's now for wing suiting. As well as gadgets that calculate descent rate. I'm curious what a Sabre 120 at 1:1 versus a Sabre 170 at 1:1 is. I think the Sabre 120 would definitely be faster but with some interpolation you could get good predictions on what a downsize would do.

I was aware of the riser having slack and I watch that on every jump while packing (especially since I was having at least 1 toggle fire a day).

What kind of handle did he have? I remember that being the cause when it happened. I've landed with a knot in the bridle before but just on a terminal BASE jump. If the bridle were staged it would prevent it no matter the handle. Seems like two things have to happen. 1) Bridle gets ahead of PC. 2) Bridle Knots on PC On sub terminal jumps since the airspeed is lower I've never seen that happen. At high airspeed seems like the bridle would get ripped out. Check out the deployment here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTEG3fF_0G4 At 2:13 you can see the bridle leading the PC. It's not as exaggerated as I've seen but still kind of the point. It just seems like fixing both issues instead of just one is the better idea.

Is it possibly because they are 99% of PC's? Another question. Who decided the long bridle thing? It seems to me that is a practice that came from BASE when people were doing lower jumps on skydiving rigs. The longer bridles came from needing extra snatch force and the wingsuit crowd picked it up since they were deploying at higher speeds. Seems to me there are all these entanglement issues/reserve rides with long bridles. Have there been groups of people that went back to short bridles to try that out?