I'm pretty sure I'd die if I tried to go anywhere on a liter of gasoline, but I can go almost anywhere without giving half a damn on a liter of alcohol. Your argument is illogical.

If you have an old keyboard (or a new one you dislike), you may also be able to spit between the keys for a similar effect. The same shared routes which cause ghosting can also cause a pseudo-random string of keys to go out when conductive liquid is spilled (generally, no harm comes of this so long as you let the keyboard dry if you need to use it for something else). Old-school password generation.

I still dream of Sealand... What an amazing TPB internship opportunity the world missed out on.

That would suck... always being pulled into the atmosphere, sitting on our ceilings and suddenly needing to run extension cords for everything. Better fix yer roof, Jim -- that thing gives now and you'll be floating out into space.

I wonder what some of the earliest solutions to that'd be. Can't use large electro-magnets most places anymore without major destruction... tethers are too manual and complicated for our LCDs... maybe stuff people inside "normal air" balloons with a helium outer balloon short-term. Hot air would be "rising down"..... though I'd guess it'd be pretty likely to pop since it'd probably be pushing against something solid.

Would be pretty cool if the atmosphere could keep all our water in, and then we'd have land toward the center of Earth (assuming it doesn't slowly explode) and a giant ocean on the "inside lining" we're all floating to.


uhhhh.... @OP - nobody can really answer that. Don't ever trade on fundamentals unless it's paying a dividend. There're too many known unknowns, unknown unknowns, and unknowns we claim to be able to predict based on numerology, chartism, and gut feelings. It's just something to talk about where everyone can pretend to be an expert, like how CNBC talking heads ramble on about the implication of "consumer confidence indices" - don't take it too seriously, though.

Sort of glad to see more people are coming forward with this issue. It's a really bizarre problem occurring for over a year. No idea on which program is changing permissions on the file.

Permabull here, hodling more coin than cash. Work at work when price is in shitter, work on side-projects when price peaks. If price collapsed or continues stagnating, it wouldn't be worth the hassle to cash out, and I'd be too busy at work to sing the permabull chorus. Only the ballsiest of ballers work on Bitcoin projects during low-hype seasons, but they're the ones critical to the success of the rest of us freeloaders.

After working at a couple "high-end" factories, I can confidently say EVERYTHING is crappily-made, and all labels, like "food-grade," are utterly meaningless. Don't trust ANYTHING any manufacturer (or paid "third party") claims. You may as well go with whatever's cheapest unless you've experienced a particular company's real returns policy and can factor its value in.

A good, but challenging, question. I would say it is unlikely, unless smartphones end up making up many of the nodes, where older smartphones were shown to be blendable. -But, if you were to only blend certain critical components, then absolutely. Any CAT/coax cable could be blended, and obviously a telephone wire can.... I'm not sure about the newer fiber cabling, though.... probably.

I mean... You could blend a GPU and knock out its active cooling capability, but I doubt a Blendtec could truly disable a GPU in 30s of blending. A rack-mounted server wouldn't even fit, but a RPi would be annihilated. ... So it depends.... I think at least a significant percentage of the network would blend, but Ethereum would ultimately survive the attack.

Craigslist + escrow + Bitcoin + Namecoin + integrated Namecoin web hosting. Basically, it's Bitcoin with much more functionality baked in (allowing nodes to host much more content than current [already-overworked] BTC nodes do), but uses Ether as the currency with horribly-named, arbitrary sub-units.

Don't think too hard about it (its blockchain will be quite different than BTC's -- they don't expect everyone to download "the Internet," so it necessarily becomes a much more complex system) -- it allows the network to host, basically, the Internet, but tries making this a much less burdensome process for regular users by baking in certain features the devs find to be critical in a trustless web society. They're basically trying to "facilitate" a new decentralized Internet with the coin by aligning incentives so moving away from the current centralized model is profitable for most involved. It'll be interesting to see if it can actually scale.

(... basically)

It's so similar in mechanics and premise, it almost seems ridiculous to buy 4 if you have 3. I don't have anything bad to say about it, though. Some of the additions seem useless (not many situations you'd want an elephant if you found one), but they don't detract. Fun & engaging, stays that way for a long time. Got my ass handed to me over and over in the Himalaya missions.

I heard of an interesting use case recently. Apparently, mechanical keyboards are excellent for the deaf due to the increased tactile feedback, dramatically improving their rate and accuracy in some cases.

000425 is now live. Some nameserver issues remain, but are being hammered out with time. If it doesn't load for you, try again in 10-20m. Bug reports appreciated, but it'll take me a few weeks to get a hotfix out if needed.

Oh -- the casino will probably not unlock unless your game is set before March 2nd, 2010. If this is the case, you'll have to restart or live-edit the game and set CasinoUnlocked to 1, which should allow you access to the casino when you next visit the "Main" screen.

There's a "secret" way of speeding up the game by double-clicking the time text box -- this sets speed at 20x. It's "unsupported." I don't want to encourage idling (a game genre I'm pretty sure is inherently evil), mostly because I think that's a failure on my part to make the game engaging, though I don't mean to suggest it's terribly engaging in its current existence...


000425 will be pushed within the next couple hours, ideally. Things are close enough to ready - just changing over servers. In the meantime, it's likely the site will be inaccessible. I'll post when ready.

One of the things an escrow agent should be aware of if they're newish is the surprisingly high number of instances where sellers try to provide fake escrow addresses. -So they'll actually set up an escrow contract through someone legit, have the agreement made up, and then the seller sends the buyer a PM fake-quoting the escrow agent providing a phony escrow address. Sellers should never trust an escrow address not sent directly by the escrow agent, even n-of-m parts.

Escrow sites may see cases as described by ic3, though I've never heard of one (yet).

000425 getting closer to being ready. Won't finish these two days off, but have another two coming up in less than a week and there's no holiday in it. This update has a relatively large amount of media (it's over a whole megabyte - might be two by the time it's ready!), so will be moving to a better web host I received a year's service free from, courtesy of Hypernia's StableBox.

Have been working with the audio system today and fixing some minor cosmetic issues with text from play-testing. I won or lost a bet, I think... the first "step" of the music played, and the "Loser" sprite flashed green... even though it's supposed to be red. -And the "WGSE" logo doesn't appear even though it's in the same batch of "make visible" as everything else and there's nothing abnormal about it.

For now, WGSE will have a simple payout scheme. There's a 50% chance of receiving 1x bet, and if you pass that roll, another 50% chance of that multiplier being 2x, then 50% of 4x, then 50% of 8x, then 25% of 16x. You have to pass each roll to go to the next multiplier roll. Luck slightly modifies the numbers you have to roll under.

Soo... 50% 0x, 20% 1x (+20%EV), 10% 2x (+20%EV), 5% 4x (+20%EV), 2.5% 8x (+20%EV), .625% 16x (+10%EV). EV is 90% of your bet (ignoring luck modifiers), then, I think.... that's how it works, right?

There're some extras I wanted to add, but I'll probably not get to them by the time I'm finished with user debt.

0004 is most current. I have a bunch of new stuff written up, but there're a few things I need to finish before releasing. With little free time, this is difficult. To be complete before release:
*Finish up writing in payout table for WGSE, bug-test music generator (if it works out well, I might end up being taken in by a side-project with a "perpetual music generator")
*Complete the lending mechanics which were originally slated for 0004

Eventually, I need to instance everything, too. Right now, almost everything's hard-coded in the game, which makes a good number of things very time-consuming to scale. Then again, there's a fair chance development will stop completely on the release of 000425. OTOH, I might have my work hours cut after Christmas, which'd give me more time to do this.

Have the ends, with regard to a one-payer healthcare system in other countries, justified the means to enforce it?

I wouldn't make the ridiculous claim that the healthcare market in the US is a free market approach, but definitely a crony capitalist approach. It's extremely disorganized (as a result of intimidatingly-thick pricing books?), and as a result, nearly a quarter of health expenditure ends up in administrative fees, not too dissimilar from many US-based charities. Healthcare for those in between Medicaid coverage and genuinely good private insurance is awful, the worst among high-GDP industrialized nations (even though we have excellent training of medical professionals, some of the greatest medical innovation, and unmatched ability to handle a large number of people needing major, complicated operations). Canada has superior healthcare ratings while spending ~half as much on the same operations. Consumers in the US can't get good cost estimates on six-figure operations nor have reasonable ability to compare costs prior to any medical procedure. An American, for example, probably wouldn't know a simple allergy prick test costs $hundreds, $thousands or $tens of thousands depending on where it's done, and how would they?

Can free market healthcare resolve these issues? Are there any examples of a post-industrial country with free market healthcare?

I don't see why the poor would be hit. Assuming the poor are debtors, they're fine (assuming the economy doesn't sympathetically collapse due to ). Pensioners are screwed if they're mostly holding USD-denom bonds and other USD-denom debt, but assuming they have a diversified basket, at least wouldn't be wiped out.

ETA: I take that back. The government would probably be one of the last to abandon the USD. If welfare amounts aren't adjusted MUCH more frequently than they are now, it could be devastating to the poor and economy at large.

Somewhat, possibly. Income-tied welfare and tax burden makes working more hours come in at a significantly lower take-home rate. For those on full-time at minimum wage who take advantage of welfare offered, they may actually effectively reduce their take-home pay by working more and/or at a higher pay rate. This effect is more severe the more dependents you have and creates a kind of wall you run into going from lower class to higher class where your nominal pay rate is increasing but your take-home is barely moving. "Middle class" is a bit of a myth.... I guess it exists from ~$80k-120k/yr, ~2x above median income of FT workers in the US.

Assuming one dependent and filing HoH, someone earning $17k/yr (EITC sweet spot) should expect ~$21.2k take-home after EITC + ~$30k/yr in welfare benefits (mostly Medicaid, keeping in mind Medicaid in most states is outrageously superior to most private insurance plans) for a total of ~$51.2k/yr. This isn't matched until you're making >$60k annually, while earning more than is allowed for Medicaid will massively decrease effective pay rate. Factoring in compound interest, many people would be better off "deferring" pay raises until they can earn enough to get over the hump. The only real exceptions are if you have no kids or genuinely value health insurance very low compared to its costs, where losing Medicaid coverage while being excepted from the individual mandate might be preferable (~$35k-$50k/yr for this example). In the latter case, the point where the individual mandate kicks in would be the "wall" where you wouldn't want to have your pay increased (unless it comes with a reduction in hours). Of course, welfare cut-offs, allowances, and conditions vary wildly state-to-state -- YMMV. In some states, incentives are very strange... for example, you can't have more than $xxxx in a bank account in many states, so you have to immediately spend it, or take it out as cash, or possibly buy bitcoin (depending on how various states' welfare departments rule on it)... I'm sure it was a well-intentioned rule originally, though.

ETA: US census data (2010) shows 89.57% of US workers earn <$80k. I'd consider consider the middle class to make up ~4%* of US workers ($80-120k), upper class ~6.5%* (>$120k). Therefor, I don't believe in the 99%, but rather the 89.57%. ....
*US census doesn't create sub-groups for people earning >$100k/yr.