Nope. I reread everything you wrote. Pure fantasy nonsense. I stand by my comments.
If you can't understand my comments, I find that fact, well... unsurprising.

But do keep in mind, you are the one aiming to change the world. I maintain our status quo is better than any fantasy you might have in your head. It is your burden to convince the world. We don't have the burden of convincing you. All we have to do is ignore you to get our way.

So, bye bye!

Now I'm not saying he is not a scammer. Normally I would say that without a doubt he is. But I keep stumbling on more and more instances of people claiming to produce excess heat using similar experiments.
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-4952167.html

There was a documentary linked about the inventor. I clearly pointed out that he has done unsuccessful, almost scam like, things in the past. But there are also interviews with others purported to be swiss (swede?) experts in the field. They seem convinced something is happening.

I saw your comments on venting heat. You very well could be right. I was thinking of it as a metal box containing 4,700 hundred watt lightbulbs. That makes one hell of an Easy Bake Oven!

The following pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject.
http://xkcd.com/955/

It very well could be. Most hashes aren't designed to be hard to calculate. They are designed to be hard to reverse. If you can meet that goal and be efficient to calculate, that is a feature for most hashing tasks.

I googled but I couldn't find reference to the scrypt algorithm. Is it a serialized version of unix crypt or something? Hash creation is really a black art. That is why the government holds competitions to create and attack them. The biggest potential problem with a new hash is not that somebody mike make it faster to calculate. But that someone might find a trivial way to reverse it or to mathematically reduce its complexity. This is how most hashes like MD4 die.

Again, I have zero information on scrypt or artforz, so I'm not making any specific claims.

Just curious. Where did you get those figures?

I agree with your skepticism, but if there is anything to his reaction, he already claims to have reproduced it 1000 times. (three hundred little cases in that shipping container. Each with three reactors.) repeatability would be the real breakthrough.

It is still in the planning stages. I'm learning some of the bitcoin code details.

There really is no reason that 10 minutes needs to be enforced. I just wanted to not needlessly vary from the bitcoin specification in the initial discussion. The same constraints apply that apply in bitcoin. Once a block is generated, it needs to be replicated to everyone who cares. Other chains have shown that can be done faster than every 10 minutes but I'm not sure what would be optimal.

I have to admit I don't know too much about Script except it was designed to be hard to implement on a GPU. When it comes to depending on the security of hashes, you really want to go with the most tested/abused algorithms. You also want to avoid depending on old algorithms staying secure for too long. SHA-256 is one of the SHA-2 hash series. There is already an open competition for more secure SHA-3 hashes.

However, the proof-of-work is really not being done for extreme security. It is mostly just a random number generator burning electricity over time. What GEM would need is an algorithm that isn't going to be easily broken, but also one that is not too easily optimized. If someone could run the algorithm much cheaper, they could theoretically exceed Koomey's law. I'm not sure the best, but going with the Bitcoin implementation assures GEM wouldn't accidentally do worse than bitcoin.

Yes, you are correct. It would be trivial to scale generation so that different people could choose to generate 1, 10, or 100 GEMs at a time based upon the hashing power they had at hand.

And yes, any initial mapping to dollars would be purely psychological. Any chosen relationship would be mathematically equivalent.

I'm curious, did anyone check to see if these coins came out of MTGox? I mean:
1) Did someone "redeem" them for actual block list BTC so they could transfer them to someone else?
2) Or are they still sitting in a hidden MTGox account?

The first case would seem like a large (maybe international) money transfer.
The second case seems more like speculation.

It agrees with my world view.
Andrew Napolitano himself... Meh.

I'm sorry you choose to believe in something in the absence of all mathematical logic. Certainly you can't subsidize 50% unprofitable businesses based on the profits of the others. Not to mention that to try to do so is just stupid.



I have no idea why. It could be your complete detachment from business concepts and reality as a whole.



The word you used was "reward".



Curiously, I do speak the language, semantics and all. By the way, semantics means "meaning". If you are not capable of writing what you mean, why should I rewarding you with any attention at all?

But if you didn't grasp my meaning, I'm saying directly, the results are exactly what they should be. If you try and fail, I don't care. Don't expect me or anyone else to analyze your failure to try and decide how close you were to not failing. No one gets points for pretending.


I'm quite sure I understand your fantasy world.
I'm quite sure you understand my reality world.
I'm not at all sure you understand your world is a fantasy.

So to be completely clear, let me restate your thesis. You are saying:
    Because we should relieve the successful of credit for their success, (it was only luck)
    Then we should relieve the failures of responsibility for their failures. (it was only bad luck)

I am saying unconditionally, that this argument and the self-referential logic behind it, IS BUNK! Entirely content free. It isn't even sound as wishful thinking. It doesn't even provide an intriguing plot line for a fantasy.

You are free to live your life following those tenets. I'm quite certain you will find your life filled with unexplainable "bad luck".
I assure you, however, that bad luck will not be unexplainable to me or others.

[This is a metaphor]
If you jump of a cliff, you are much more "in need" of the ability of flight than I am. If as it turns out you don't receive the reward of flight, you are free to consider that as "bad luck". Fortunately, you will only have to ponder your bad luck for a very short while. The reason you jumped off the cliff has very little bearing on the situation. There is zero difference to gravity if you jumped because you were on crack, of if you jumped because you were testing your handcrafted flight suit. If you don't succeed in flying, it is not gravity's fault.

And it's not my fault either. Not even if I decide to handcraft a working flight suit.

I have to admit I'm still skeptical but it is pretty impressive that actual physicists are still giving him the benefit of the doubt. It seems more and more that there is reason to believe that Pons and Fleischmann were on to something. It is just still not clear exactly what.

The way they are going about things does make it seem fishy, but after the fast fall of their predecessors I can understand their sensitivity to early over exposure.

And as for the generator staying on... as we saw in Japan, with nuclear reactions sometimes bad things happen when the power goes off! If they really were generating 470 Kwh of heat in that little shipping container something needed to circulate the water and vent that heat outside. The system itself was not generating electricity. It was only generating heat.

As luck would have it, the New York Times just published a really interesting article on luck.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/business/luck-is-just-the-spark-for-business-giants.html

It tells me they are a bunch of racist bastards! I bet there are no black people at their rallies either!

(Sarcasm) [Juxtaposition of the Tea Party and Socialists in order to highlight the perils of using induction to extract motives from arbitrarily chosen examples] Annotated for the thinking impaired.

OK, that makes more sense. It was a kind of interesting thread too. Unrealistic, but unrealism permeates this site.


The reason I assumed you were trolling is because the terms you use are hopelessly naive. As I linked earlier, more than 50% of all startup ventures fail within 5 years. That puts a huge amount of money at risk. Mostly the money of those who started the venture. This is as it should be.

If you are loaning money, a "reasonable chance of success" is nowhere near good enough. Bankers are loaning someone else's money. Those people depend on the bankers not to lose their savings. If the bankers lost the loan money on 50% of the loans, it would be a catastrophe that makes the wall street guys look like rocket scientists.

Bankers require basically 100% assurance that the loan with be paid back with interest. They are not business partners sharing risk. They get this assurance by making sure borrowers have skin in the game, and requiring collateral that can be foreclosed on and sold if the borrowers fail to pay back the loan for any reason. If a startup found puts $100,000 worth of cash into his new business and borrows another $100,000 worth from the bank against his home, this is in no way a *reward* for writing a good business plan.


If the above startup fails, the owner loses his $100,000 investment. He must also pay back the loan, even if he has to sell his house to do so. I'm sorry if this sounds to you like "punishment" it isn't. It is what grownups call "consequences".

Venture capital works differently. These folks invest at risk, but they take the lion's share of the business (often ownership) to do so. This means they get the lion share of the reward even if they didn't have the idea and didn't do any work. Risk takes the reward.

If it seems like the above process is kills many ideas before they start, it does. Fortunately, most of those ideas would have failed anyway. Even if the idea was good. Most of those people would have failed anyway. There is a saying in business that goes to start a successful company you need three things: A good idea, balls & money. If you have balls and money you win. Because ideas are trivial to find.

The real world really isn't high school. There are no *awards* for turning in good papers. You actually have to take risk and produce salable things to succeed.



If you borrow money from people, to which you've promised to pay it back. They don't care why you are failing to pay them back. They just expect you to make good on your word. There is no punishment for "bad luck". It does, however, have consequences. Consequences are what keep smart people from doing stupid things.

There is only "punishment" for failing to meet your obligations. Punishment is used to dissuade dishonest people from doing bad things. Like taking other people's money and breaking your promise to pay it back.

Those who fail because of "bad luck" are welcome to bring those facts to their investors. They are also welcome to convince their investors they've learned from their mistakes and the "bad luck" is sure to stop. However, those are your investor's decisions to make because it is they that must live with the consequences of their risk.

I'm sorry the real world seems harsh. It is.

I concede! I can't possibly compete with the superior intellect! Khan!!!!

But I have to ask, WTF does "Do you think they just hand them out to anyone saying they want to restore a theatre?" mean?

LOL! OK, OK, you got me! I've been trolled by the best. I totally thought you were serious until I read this line.


LMAO! You are the master!

You called a loan a "reward". I'm not even convinced we speak the same language.

But quite frankly you aren't saying anything even remotely interesting. It is like badly rephrased arguments from the standard liberal talking points. I've heard them all. They all fall flat. You just happen to make them even less compelling then reading legal boilerplate.

Your philosophy requires the "sanction of your victims" as Rand would put it. You seem incapable of compelling that from anyone. Quite frankly is was amusing to watch your early attempts, but now you just come off as precocious and more than a little tedious.

LMAO! I meant your opinions are so ill considered and childish as to not be worthy of rewarding with discussion.


But they are not all entitled to consideration.

Yes it is!

But you are wrong about Atlas Shrugged, it was really interesting as a novel. You should pick up the audio version and play it at double speed. You'll be done with it in only 26 hours or so.

There really zero benefit to continuing this discussion. Somethings are so stupid they should be left to die.

African Americans lag behind. Granted. I already addressed this.
Your conclusion is pure politically correct speculation. In 50 years, black children will still inherit that history. Must they still fall behind? Is it my fault? I will be dead long before they are even born.

The Chinese in the west share a similar history but it doesn't seem to be effecting them. I call your self-perpetuating politically correct postulation bunk.



No one anywhere is rewarded for starting a business! They are rewarded for succeeding at business.
No one gets a decent standard of living because they "deserve" it. They earn their decent standard of living by being successful.




Saying you are "qualified to attend" but you are not accepted, is a politically correct way of saying "We don't want you! We've found somebody WE WANT MORE than you."

No one is qualified to "be the best" because they jumped through hoops others told them to jump through. Unless you are competing at Olympic hoop jumping.





I'm clearly saying, if you dug a whole and didn't successfully pull gold out of the hole, it doesn't matter where the fuck you dug the needless hole. It doesn't matter how smart you were before you made your wrong decision. It doesn't matter how much you believed in yourself or how much self confidence you had. It doesn't even matter how prestigious your upbringing. You dug a needless hole! Tough shit! Exxon doesn't get paid for drilling dry holes either.



Obviously, the wilderness disagrees with you. But clearly you are saying, the government should have build a gold miner safety net before it allowed anyone into California to search for gold.

I can't say more strongly that, jumping off a cliff doesn't make you deserving of the ability to fly. You need to beg the tooth fairy for that honor.



Again, how smart and capable you are results in ZERO VALUE TO ANYONE if you don't succeed. Thinking you are awesome does not make you awesome Stuart.



Again, you are an idiot for not acknowledging that others have been or are in those positions and they suck by comparison. And if it turns out they don't suck, you blame them for their own success because they were obviously lucky.


What is the point of this? The bad luck of the guy who made glue that failed to stick and didn't know what to do with it?
Or the brilliant genius of the person who saw a market for glue that didn't stick very well? Neither seem "lucky" in any sense of the word.



This is so circular and stupid I can hardly respond. Steve Jobs leaves an the company fails. Thousands of competent workers jobs go at risk but none of them can stop the fall. Steve Jobs shows back up tells them to stop working on their crappy shit that was going to fail. Then he gives them a direction that will succeed.

You dismiss all of that as luck? BULLSHIT!



I have no fucking idea, but based on everything I've read about him over 30 odd years, I'd say he would probably have taken over Somalia fired the incompetents and made it profitable. Then he would have improved the lives of the Entrean's and be threatening to reform Egypt as well.



Good. Buy their stock.


Again circular non-sense Bill Gates wasn't rewarded because his stuff was better, we all just made him lucky. Even if he was never born we'd be perfectly happy with what we got. But you are telling me that everyone isn't happy with what they got. They deserve better.



We should give money to everyone indiscriminately because maybe they are "the one" who will change our world.

Again I say this is fantasy adolescent bullshit. It is circular and can be used to justify anything. The Unibomber might turn out to be "the one" too! More money for him! We owe it to ourselves to see what he accomplishes so we can all build on it.



I am saying clearly that I think people earn what they deserve based on their personal success. Steve Jobs fired smarter people for being unsuccessful, than most companies hire. That is what successful people do.

That is where "luck" comes from.

This is a mantra not a supported argument. Who should meet these basic needs? Who deserves to have them met?

You certainly can't argue that everyone deserves to have their needs met, but nobody should be require to meet them.
But you can argue that everyone deserves to have their needs met, but everyone must be required to meet them.

That only leaves, some people must be required to meet the needs of others. Who are these blessed people and who are those burdened?


I did this in another thread already. I'm not going to do it again.
But basically those that succeed are indispensable, those that fail are trivially replaceable. There is an endless supply of people who fail. Effort expended is not a measure of value. Success is a measure of value.



People should be scared. The actual odds are horrible. That is why there are rewards for success. Not rewards for risk taking.
http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/failure-is-a-constant-in-entrepreneurship/



Nobody is given what they deserve ever. That is a silly concept. There is no tooth fairy either.



You don't have to be taxed! You just have to HELP! Are you telling me Bill Gates fortune would be better spent if he gave it to the government. Better than if he used it to directly help improve conditions among his fellow mankind? That bastard! Having the hubris to think he should be allowed to decide how best to help people! He is not even a liberal! He's a heartless business man. Who put him in charge?