I never taught my eight year old son any standards of measurements, only the functions of calculating volume, and he was able to accurately compute the internal volume of the bathtub, refrigerator and minivan in about 30 minutes.  Once a child understands the process, the next obvious question was, "how do I measure the length, Dad?"  He did it in feet, using the tape measure that his grandfather gave him for Christmas. 

Granted, my son actually does have an IQ in excess of 130, so this doesn't actually disprove your BS theorem, but I still say you're full of crap.

http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

With "Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A)" what stops the Python and Perl hackers from doing it their own way?

Even less than I can, and I havn't had much luck in that department.

And they live in a nation that clings to the American Standard.  Whether or not you might think ill of that or not is irrelevant.  And teaching the American Standard isn't, and shouldn't be, a core requirement in any state either.  Kids should be taught the basics of measurement, not taught measurement systems.  They can be introduced to them, so that they are aware of the different systems, but no one really knows these kinds of things until they are old enough to need them.  Neither a kilometer nor a mile means much in the context of the average 8 year old.

The reasons to learn the metric system for scientific studies is obvious, but the metric system is easy enough for a teen or an adult to learn.  Teaching it to grade school children is what makes no sense.  They have no frame of reference in which to use it.  It's like forcing them to memorize the declaration of independence.  To what end?  So they can recite it to the grands on the 4th of July?  The document exists, and can be referenced.  Rote memorization is an utter waste of educational resources, particularly time.

It is regulated, the metric system isn't a core educational requirement in any state, nor should it be.  Try to keep your statist propoganda under wraps, you'll sound more credible.  I wouldn't want your to lose your job at the Justice Department, and then some other agent would have to monitor us.  At least I know who you are.

Talk about failure, then.  The primary purpose of the public education system in the United States is not to educate children, nor is it to provide them a means to a job.  It's designed to indoctrinate the middle class children into the lifestyle that is consistant with mass production, and to limit their free thoughts.  This is from the founder of public education himself.  He was a true 'progressive' who believed that 'over education' of the masses can only lead to unhappiness in adulthood, since they were going to be stuck working in a factory or a refinery anyway.

Publicly dress down the teacher, the principal and the school in general.  Hopefully in front of the kids classmates, and then announce that the son will be withdrawn and homeschooled.  And that they will be receiving a letter from your lawyer about their failure to perform with your tax funds, and that you will be expecting a refund for their wasted money.

How's that?

Wait, What?

I'm sure that I'm older than you, and I learned both American Standard and Metric in grade school.  I can use both fine, but I hate using metric, and have not felt the need to teach it to my own (homeschooled) children.  If they foresee a need to learn it, they can learn it in a couple of days, or carry a pocket reference on their trip to Euroland.

How do you know that it's not happening?  I am aware of a great deal of micro-hydro power systems being installed across my state, some privately while others are locally public/private ventures.  None larger than 10 kw, that I know of.  There are hundreds of sutible micro-hydro sites in Kentucky, and many of them have already been bought up for this purpose.  Many of the old locks are being converted or circumvented for this end.  Even the local power company has gotten into the micro game, and retrofitted the McAlpin Locks & Dam (which routes river barge traffic around the Falls of the Ohio) into a 10 Mw hydro.  There are also solar power contractors that are installing roof systems in my city, I had one come out and give me a quote last year.  Granted, that's not quite the same as power sharing with my neighbor, but grid-tied green power is both legal and growing around here.  With grid-tie, the power utility then becomes an intermediary broker, but there is nothing preveting me from dealing directly with my next door neighbor.


The free market is actually quite good at planning.  This may be counter-intuitive, but hsitory bears it out.  Much better at planning than central planning has ever been over any extended period of time.

On it's initial presentation, it appears potentially deflationary.  The problem that I have with it, already, is that it is an even more complex algo than Bitcoin presently uses, which has many co-dependent parts that function together.  You're algo may appear functional, and may even be functional for decades, but the odds of a more complex algo resulting in a failure of many sorts is increased even over Bitcoin, which again is not a small risk.  On it's face, I think that I can see a potential method of exploitation of the algo, so that the results are ever inflationary.  Could still be better than fiat currencies, but I doubt that it's going to be better than Bitcoin's highly predictable algo.  It's that kernal of doubt that will prevent me, and others, from seriously considering it.  Ever.

This is, beyond doubt, the most ironic (and accurate) statement that Keynes ever made concerning his own field of study.

If a version of bitcoin is established that inflates forever, I'll ignore it.  If somehow such a thing were imposed upon Bitcoin, I'll abandon it.  I'm sure I'm not alone.  Perpetual inflation as a monetary model is only possible with continuous economic growth, which is a physical impossibility so long as humanity (and thus the economy) is constrained upon this planet's surface.

But I don't think that the model can be copied so easily as you might think.  Sure, one can take the code and compete, but then you are starting from a community much smaller than even Bitcoin.  As the system presently exists, security and value come from the network effects.  So any particular merchant or consumer is going to favor the established blockchain, even when he doesn't really know why this is in his own interests, because some will understand this, and the ignorant user will use whatever he has greatest exposure to.  This will always be bitcoin unless and until a competitor with a distinct advantage can be developed, and such an advantage cannot be one that bitcoin itself cannot reasonablely assimulate.  In the long run, I think that we will see both specialized parrallel solutions such as namecoin, and regional solutions.  Yet I think that they will all be tied back into the main bitcoin blockchain in some fashion that allows the other smaller chains to 'piggy back' on the security model of the main blockchain.  But then this kind of co-dependency also solidifies Bitcoin's main chain as the common thread, and thus bitcoin as the currency of international Internet trade.

Considering the shear efficiency of a digital instant message, SMS, an email, or the like; all of which are protocols that can use any form of IP connection as transport infrastructure, including modems over ham radios; I consider the breakdown of bulk transportation a more likely event than the persistant breakdown of the Internet.  It's become so important and so effective a form of communication, that every urban area in the world is going to have someplace in the city supported by some group of people to maintain an effective connection to the rest of the world digitally.  Even if that just means that some places can only get 14.4 kbaud over a well protected ham radio setup powered by a solar array scrounged from those highway traffic displays.  Even a mad max scenario still has the fiber optic cables in the ground, so nothing short of a human extinction level event is going to stop the Internet now, and in not much longer, that will include Bitcoin.  Hell, there are already ham radio sats that use IP protocol.  If it can run on an android phone, bitcoin can probably run on a satelite.

Gold isn't a very good conductor, really.  Both silver and copper are better.  The only property that gold bests the others on, with regard to electronics, is that gold does not corrode.  Thus, gold's conductivity is the same whether it is encased in a protective plastic insulation or spends 100 years at the bottom of the sea.  The written records thing isn't particularly special either.  Lead is just as useful as a archival print medium as gold is, and under the right conditions, hemp paper is superior to both.

The hard part to replicate about bitcoin is the community.  It took two years to build up the community, and I think that it would be difficult to replicate that just by tweaking the code a bit and starting a parrallel blockchain.  That said, anyone is welcome to try it.  If it has features that make it superior to bitcoin, it would probably eventually win.  However, they must be features that are obviously superior to a large percentage of the Internet using population.  I don't really think that is going to happen, myself.  Bitcoin is already very resiliant to attack as well as increasingly useful to Joe Android User in 1st world nations.  There are competing smartphone clients that allow in person transactions (with Internet available) and I don't think it's a far leap before smartphones can transact in person sans Internet via Dash7, ad-hoc wifi or NFC.  Nor do I think we are very far from a system that caters to regular cell phones via SMS or the like, a la M-Pesa; which is actually a huge leap for people in 2nd & 3rd world urban areas, although it might not be quite so useful for 1st world urban areas such as Toyko.  Still, it seems to work out pretty well in NYC.

If you have never seen one generator running in one back yard, with extension cords running to three or four neighbors during a power outage, then you have never really seen this kind of activity in practice.  I have seen it happen on the fly, as a refrigerator takes very little power to run in 24 hours, but most residential refrigerators need to have power at least 10 minutes of every hour to maintain temps.  What people in hurricane country will do, is freeze gallon jugs of seawater for a couple days prior to the hurricane, (they get a warning after all) and will keep those jugs in their freezer to maintain cold between opprotunities to share power.  One decent sized genset can run the compressors on several refrigerators for a straight hour in the morning, in the heat of mid-day, and once more just before dark and the cold mass of the saltwater jug in the freezer and a freshwater jug (or several) in the refrigerator will carry the temps till daylight.  In this way, the cost of capital is lower, because only one guy needs to own the genset; and the costs of fuel are lower, because larger gensets & non-coincidental load sharing are more efficient ways of electrical generation.  The normal way this kind of ad-hoc transaction occurs, is that the neighbors who piggy-back off of the generator owner's genset are providing the (majority) of the gas for this arrangement, while the owner provides the genset and the scheduling.  It is also fairly normal for clothes washing (not machine drying) to be schedualed in a like manner.

If this kind of arrangement were cheaper/better overall as compared to the massive economies of scall that the power company enjoys, we would see this kind of thing happen all the time.  We might yet.

Gold's industrial uses are negligible as compared to it's monetary use value.  Granted, if gold were the price of silver, there would be a lot of uses for it pop up, but realisticly one must consider the industrial use value and the monetary use value as independent variables.  All the industrial use value of gold provides is a backstop against catastrophic monetary value collapse, which bitcoin does not have.  Silver does have many industrial uses for which there is no viable alternative, which is not the case for gold's industrial uses.  For example, silver is both toxic to many forms of bacteria, making it a valuable medical material; while also being fairly non-toxic to human life, contrary to almost all other heavy metals.  Gold is not toxic either, but nor does it have any other chemical properties of note, since it's non reactive.  This does make gold a good choice for conductive connectors, particularly in corrosive environments, but there are other solutions that exist for that.

What phone client was Bruce using in this video?  Mine don't look like that.