maybecudbthis
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/volumepie/


ETA: Thanks to psy for correcting title.

If you dump old age, you have to multiply suicide.

New car sales are way up, and related manufacturing is actually still pretty strong in MI - it's just foreign companies now own all the component manufacturers used in "American" autos. The Japanese and Italians own just about all automotive component manufactories in the state. However, now all the subcomponents are actually made in factories overseas, so really "American" cars are merely "assembled in America," with the majority of true profit being sent to the foreign nations. What has happened is that US factories are expected to operate on razor-thin margins, buying overpriced, low-quality sub-components overseas (the US factories are expected to do QC for the foreign companies, too...). Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, and some other "foreign" auto manufacturers actually now use many components assembled in the US where they previously did not - it's just that none of the sub-components come from the US, anymore, but are instead imported. The lion's share of profit is leaving America, and we've wound up in a bizarre, historically un-American position of being the exploited rather than the exploiters. - But it's just the effects of the nationally-cherished ideal of greed. Still, somehow the American public gets hyped up every time they hear a new manufacturer is going to start assembling products in the US. Hoo-fucking-ray.

I worked for a time, fairly recently, producing automotive compressors. Everything, down to the bits and tubings were made by subsidiary companies of the parent company which owned us, though the components were actually all made in the country of the company's headquarters, so only what was absolutely necessary for the label was "Made in USA." The subcomponents were not selected for use based on merit, but chosen simply because the parent company owned a manufacturer making the part, and built factories back home, where they were not feeding the US supply so much as the US factory was feeding the Japanese companies demand. Still... MI has retained a lot of the jobs related to automotive manufacturing, and many are actually in a phase of rapid expansion right now. A local Brembo plant (a factory formally being owned by Hayes Lemmerz, and before that, American) and the compressor plant nearby are both rapidly expanding their workforce right now, to a such an extreme where there simply aren't enough people around to employ. While these corporations are rapidly expanding, the expansion seems to be focused on more rural areas, because these localities suck ass at negotiating and are happy to give them a few acres, permission to destroy the road infrastructure, and pay nothing in taxes in exchange for offering the residents jobs, with the local government hoping they can use this "score" to justify raising property taxes, so residents end up paying these foreign fucking factories (whether they work there or not) just to exist, which just continues to fuel this idea that employers are some deity for the lowly to worship, instead of it being an equal exchange of labor for wages.

Anyway, the steel industry would've been fucked no matter what. I'm not sure if any major factory in MI works with steel anymore. We're on to aluminum, car-related and elsewhere.

You clearly never used my Pen & Paper Exchange back in its hayday. It used high-tech proprietary BirchWood hardware to match multiple orders every month. We were highly-connected, utilizing bleeding-edge payment processors such as Where's The Fucking Money and I'm Standing in the DTW Lobby but I Don't See You to rapidly handle irregular customer orders.

It's in my resume.

Would you find it acceptable for yourself to bid up forum ad slots with socks? I now can't help but notice you've never explicitly stated you won't. Should it raise a red flag for me that you have not explicitly stated you won't bid up ad slots with socks, or would it be reasonable to assume you would not, considering your reputation? You've never explicitly stated (AFAIK) you will not sell our PMs to Google. Should I now assume it would be acceptable for you and Hearn to negotiate a deal where our "private information" is for sale to them?

Are you turning into a robot, theymos, where a binary answer is required for substantial moral judgment? How could you possibly reconcile your creativity with belief in binary morality? Have you become an adherent to iron-fisted order, seeking to ascend to the level of a robot slave? Or what - does calling an action "a bit shady" qualify as really pushing the limits of moral judgment on your part?

Are you really that cynical?

Really, though, salesmen of every corporate business are encouraged to engage in much worse sales tactics on a daily basis. Yeah, we hold people we respect and trust to a higher level, but this isn't some damning, horrible evil we need to shoot him in the face for.

I get pissed off every time I have to talk to one of those shill "just following orders" shitheads at a corporate call center (speaking as someone who worked at one... for a day). I think we care, as a community, about this incident so much because we're more worried about a trend toward full-blown sociopathy, not over caring about this single incident in itself. I think we'd all prefer the status quo Garr we have faith in, than face a trend of evidence proving humanity as a stinking pile of filth, where everyone we trust has just managed to cover their tracks better.

That said, I've done worse with a Hell of a lot more and never caught even a small fraction of the flak Garr's caught over the last day. Maybe it's because Garr's held to a higher standard. - Or because I rapidly fluctuate between total indifference and full-blown outrage to a point where communicating with me is always futile.    

Hello, friend. I have added this quote (modified) to the compilation of off-color phrases I will prattle off when I am old and alcoholic. I am always testing new word combinations and sentence structures, but sometimes there are far superior combinations to be learned from others. Thank you for that.

Detroit should actually be better off from the Fed's actions to inflate the monetary supply. It's a major debtor, so the real value of its debt should be decreasing while collecting inflation-adjusted property taxes.

Detroit's been a running joke in MI for years (look up Fox 2 Detroit segments -- you'll think you're watching Comedy Central), but truth is, the city gave up on large sections of the city, everywhere government (or voluntary aid) is most needed, the same way Chicago has (VICE recently did a good segment on Chicago's method of segregating services called "Chiraq"). They've segregated and discriminated services based on how "bad" the area is, trying to focus on "nice" areas and trying to let unchecked poverty, removal of government services/maintenance, and access to guns be a solution to poverty. It's a long-term plan, and I suppose we'll never really know if bankruptcy was part of it. Urban Detroit has a small handful of semi-functional fire engines, while suburban Detroit, with a much lower population density, has access to the services you'd expect from the high property taxes Detroit levies, including a fleet of brand new engines.

Ultimately, it's really not funny. It's a tragedy. Detroit has more-or-less bankrupted the entire state (itself semi-regularly having government stand-downs where legislators refuse to approve the state budget because they always have to raise taxes and cut services -- Republicans want to cut services to make up for the deficit, Democrats want to raise taxes) to the point where most rural roads would be safer to drive on if they were dirt roads rather than paved. The potholes in roads are big enough where you have to drive in the center of the road or likely need to call a tow truck. In Winter, non-urban areas are effectively non-driveable, losing tons of revenue because people literally can't drive to work unless communities are able to scrounge up their own voluntary fleet of ice-removal trucks at 4am before people start to commute. -But we're still paying more in taxes and fees.

ETA: Mixed up local channels -- Fox 47 is Lansing, Fox 2 is Detroit

ops wrote a novel not even on-topic

Online games have always been better suited to casual play because casual games are generally made with low-enough computational requirements that almost any device can play them, which is great for on-the-go devices where the market primarily is. The other reason casual games' (which would be called "simple" if not for marketing) low requirements have become so successful is because they can be played on cheap-o off-the-shelf PCs with onboard or entry-level graphics, which really dominate the market. These people, who are generally not particularly interested in deep games (or would have something suitable to play them), have finally been catered to again (they were catered to before gaming PCs simply because deep games were technologically near-impossible to create).

One of the more interesting trends coming out of the rise of simple games is the marketing and sale of flash games on PCs. Flash games are fantastic because it's so easy to port to a standalone app considering swf games can otherwise just be downloaded from an online game site to be played offline with any of many swf players. It's really fantastic for small developers, because it allows them to design and develop within their budget without enormous innovation-destroying barriers to entry (the barriers to entry for non-portable and even some portable dedicated game devices are usually very high, even if it's just the console themselves, which usually cost hundreds, whereas almost every potential game dev/designer already has a PC and Internet connection they can use). They can work their way up through this. Game devs are starting to see they can still make flash games, but make them more deep, with larger files, and sell offline versions of their games (which would be too large to have played for free on online flash sites) for PC and sometimes phones. Unlike companies such as Zynga and Popcap (though Popcap's started seeing the benefit of creating unique, deep games, rather than the slew of mundane hidden object games they had popped out like they were making novelty "oriental" toys), which just stick to simple (and generally horribly-evil Pavlovian-type) games, there are a good few companies using simple games as a diving board into deeper games.

OTOH, I consider simple games to be akin to slapped-together romance novels or "reality" shows in their respective medium. They're popular, but fail to really do anything meaningful except allow people to pass time, and I think the popularity of simple products for mediums capable of great depth is really a shame, and hurts the image of the mediums. They fail at creating true engagement, therefor can push no message (even if they try), and ultimately fail at creating social change or making any difference in the lives of those who play/read/watch them. It's pretty easy to find arguments against bashing simple games online, but it's usually coupled with the argument that encouraging simplicity is a good way to bring new people into gaming as a medium of interaction - but I think with such bad examples of what the medium can do, it's very likely more harmful than good. To argue in favor of encouraging simple games, I think, is disregarding the strong human tendency toward stereotyping. If you find that 5/5 of the people who've last robbed you are plumbers, you'll very likely distrust all plumbers - and I think, then, if you find the last 5/5 games you've played were time-wasters instead of a character-contributing activity, you'll assume the media as a whole is a waste of time (that said, there will always be a market for it for obvious reasons -- but people playing Angry Birds or Temple Runner outside of work breaks and at the DMV are committing a crime against humanity as far as I'm concerned). With older media like television and books, we all know there is depth to be found, and there's enough of a market established where everyone with common, cheap equipment can easily find and use these deep products (unlike with game platforms, all televisions can play virtually all its media -- having a 480p or lesser TV doesn't automatically mean you can't enjoy the depth of new products released on the medium). With games, though, there just aren't as many people convinced that a game can engage them because they've stereotyped it based on what they've seen or played, the vast majority being simple, usually Pavlovian, time-wasters. Games do this, again, because they're designed for the majority of people, a majority which has stereotyped games (and it's games' fault, not potential users') as being time-wasters designed for breaks or children.

Game streaming, if it (... or decent ISP infrastructure) ever takes off, might end up being the bridge between people unwilling to buy $1k+ in computer equipment required to play many of the deep, or at least complex, modern games. What would be interesting is a cheap open-source game console with rights secured to stream (through emulation) "exclusive" games from other console manufacturers' last-gen and previous games, as well as play/stream PC games, like Steam Box meets OnLive. In exchange for dramatically lower up-front costs than announced Steam Boxes, the box is able to stream games it's unable to run locally in a type of online rental format. There's no reason you then couldn't purchase a first-gen "Stream Box" and forever play the latest games, at least in the box's max resolution, while always being able to make up-front investments in buying the hardware upgrades needed to purchase the games to play locally if you want. You can technically do this with a PC now, but the process isn't well-streamlined (there's no rent-to-own options in streaming services AFAIK, and I don't know of any company than OnLive [and arguably MMOs, I guess] doing game streaming at all -- libraries are often extremely limited because the companies are using unlimited subscription models and buying the rights to stream games instead of using a more consignment-like model), and OTC PCs are often still unnecessarily big and ugly to set in a living room. If Steam or another deep-pocketed company were able to do that, I think it would open the floodgates of innovation. But... for now, it seems like closed-source clunkiness with piss-poor options to buy/play games and high barriers to entry for potential software designers/developers will be reality for a good while longer. However, the current F2P (P2W) and license-buying model for games and expensive upfront model for hardware (because they have to be able to play all games with cutting-edge technology locally) are both extremely primitive... it won't be with us forever. Everyone buying expensive hardware frequently going unused is horribly inefficient, and it'll change. Incidentally, Bitcoin (or a "lighter" cryptocurrency) would be perfect for an online pay-on-demand or rent-to-own structure of game streaming.

Lunatic trait is best trait.

Backyard rocks will always have more exclusive games than these machines ever will, and there is no easier platform on which to develop and design new releases. Furthermore, games designed with the rock are highly modifiable largely because open-source code is mandatory. Rocks are not effectively regulated or controlled by any entity or multi-gopoly on Earth.

The wild commercial success of so-called "video game platforms" is only one of many reasons the open-source community has always been doomed to obscurity. ... But we can at least fight.

Onward, Luddite arsons!

Oh, man, and do I want to stomp on those assholes who've been releasing always-on DRM in games which end up pirated, anyway. Dumbest shit I think I've ever heard of in any industry - almost as bad as Sony BGM's clusterfuck, except it's turning into "industry practice" with games (as well as productivity software -- and yeah, all major software is cracked no matter how obnoxious the DRM is). Fuck that.

Here are some games I could think of off the top of my head with always-on DRM:
Diablo III (last always-on DRM game I'll ever pay for. Cracked [playable offline], allegedly private servers now, too)
Starcraft II (cracked, LAN & multiplayer through private servers)
SimCity (always-on DRM caused an absolutely horrible launch similar to Diablo III's, and yep - it's cracked, playable offline)
Command & Conquer 4 (cracked, playable offline)
Ubisoft's "bad Uplay experiment" (all cracked afaik -- Ubisoft publicly committed to ceasing use of always-on DRM in their games last year)


So... It prevents pirates from playing the game for a few days, and then they spend a few days downloading, and then.....? Well - yeah, the legitimate customers forever have to put up with servers going down for maintenance, not always having an Internet connection (hello - I exist! In instances where I buy before playing a game, I do frequently end up pirating the game I just bought to get rid of DRM hassles [or back in the day, because I lost the case with the CD key on it]), and sometimes even lag. Lag in a single-player game... 

Even MMO devs have had their server software reverse-engineered, where free private servers are created and often run comparably to the server software made by the company which designed the freakin' game (when SOE converted most of their MMOs into pay-to-wins, free servers ended up offering a far-superior service). MMOs, though, have a much greater piracy-free shelf-life (up to a decade, compared to days with non-MMOs) due to just how much is required to be done. That's not to say private servers are made for pirates, though.

I'll never go back to consoles simply because it's too difficult to pirate their games reliably, and I don't trust corporate developers enough to release games without time-wasting and intrusive DRM schemes. I couldn't even use the Xbone, because I only have a usable Internet connection for maybe half the day (and even then, it's 2-60kb/s). Some of this gen's consoles were very close to being piracy-free, and many have to use old firmware to play pirated games. Incidentally, my first "significant" BTC purchase was a soft-modded Wii. So... Idunno... not even really any reason to be angry -- as a minority (at least in the US) unable to play always-on games, I'm ignored. The minute I "ignore" them to snag a modified copy of the software I can actually use, it's criminal. Go figure.

What the Hell, guys... undervolt that shit. Blow the inch of dust off the heatsink. Plug the case fans back in. Take it out of your attic. >90*C 24/7?

100*C is the point where hardware failure is imminent on these. Just because there's a thermal limit doesn't mean you can run it 5*C under the absolute maximum 24/7/365. Just because throttling doesn't kick in doesn't mean it's safe. GPUs have one key advantage over ASICs, and it's a big one -- GPUs have great resale value relative to ASICs and FPGAs. Even if cryptocurrencies become a historical footnote within the next few years, GPUs still have a market. Don't throw that away for a few pennies more a day in revenue. 

I don't understand how it's possible for you to get a GPU to run at 100*C. Do you overvolt the cards, run them in a sealed styrofoam box, and set the fan speed to minimum? 

BFL forced a refund because the buyer complained. The buyer did not request it. The buyer was refunded the nominal amount he paid even though they had the buyer wait for months, well past when they were supposed to deliver.

CGminer couldn't do anything with the 5850s I ran. They were ASUS, and only ASUS Smartdoctor (a really horrible program) would work on them. Check for overclocking tools from your manufacturer and see if that works.

rg's generally responsive on IRC. I don't remember where he holes up, though. Might just try pming rg on freenode.

Conf time is indirectly determined by difficulty, with difficulty roughly determining how many hashes are required to solve a block (thus, roughly how much time is required to solve a block).

Difficulty is determined by the target confirmation time (10 minutes) and the time it's taken to solve the past 2016 blocks. With 2016 blocks each with a target confirmation time of 10m, Difficulty should adjust about every two weeks, and is meant to adjust so it always takes roughly 10 minutes to solve a block. Because we're in a period of rapid network hashrate growth with the release of ASICs, it should actually take significantly less than 10 minutes to solve a block the closer we get to the next time difficulty corrects, but also means difficulty will correct sooner than the target of two weeks. (I'm sure someone has stats, but for the past month, it's probably been something like 10-12 days for each set of 2016 blocks instead of the target 14 days)

A target confirmation time of 5m instead of 10m would require halving the difficulty.

Trivia: Cryptocoins are subject to a kind of "spiral of death" if hashrate plummets. If, say, 75% of hash power dropped from the network a day after the difficulty is adjusted, it would take (13*3), or 39 days for difficulty to adjust to that sudden drop. Confirmations would take an excessively long time to confirm, possibly eroding faith in Bitcoin and causing a kind of "hash run," where even more hash power drops off until it's nearly impossible to confirm transactions anymore, leading to abandonment (or maybe some kind of fork).

Trivia2: Changing the target confirmation time is a protocol change and relatively difficult to have accepted.

Trivia3: I'm tired as dog-shit, and someone else should be much more able to assist you than I (and hopefully correct any misinfo I gave). Good night!

Has it been there for a while?

Sorry. I write like a shithead, sometimes.  I'll try to clarify some points I wrote particularly poorly.

When I was talking about expense to confirm double-spends, I was referring to the cost to compromise the Bitcoin network by making up a "dangerous" percentage of the total network hash rate. Network hashrate is dramatically higher now than when 6-conf suggestion was made (that is, when it was decided that 6 confirmations would be implied as "safe" by the Bitcoin client's graphics). It would likely cost millions, now, to get 3 confirmations on a double-spend, whereas it may've taken just a few thousand USD in hardware or hashpower leases far in the past. In this sense, the network is dramatically more secure, now, as it would be extremely expensive to successfully pass off a double-spend as legitimate through multiple block-solvings.

By conf time, I was just referring to the target confirmation time of a block (currently 10m). If you reduce it (say, to 5m), you are decreasing the amount of hash-power required to solve a block (exactly by half compared to what's required with a 10m target conf time). By doing so, it would be twice as easy to pull off a one-conf attack, which many would consider legitimate for smaller transactions. (but, again, this is still now prohibitively expensive even if it's twice as easy to pull off than now... one-conf probably won't be accepted as "legitimate" by most merchants selling something of significant value, so it's kind of a moot point).

The orphan argument I only picked up from others -- I haven't seen stats on it, so I'd take your word on it since I don't have any counter-examples.

ETA: Btw, don't consider me some type of authority on this stuff. I've always shied away from the technical underpinnings of BTC -- ADD, maybe. Bigger block sizes (more transactions allowed per block) might be considered a favorable option of ensuring speedy transaction processing because it doesn't introduce risks at all. Increasing block size 2x would have the same (eventual) effect as having 2x as many blocks, but wouldn't introduce the arguable risk of making merchants more vulnerable to one-conf double-spends (keeping in mind that one-conf double spends are 2x as computationally easy, and thus effectively 2x as cheap with half the conf time).