Cool. Let's start with you list absolutely anything you can think of that you feel cannot be a free market and that the government absolutely must be involved in and then let's get the government out of everything else. Then we can talk again.

There are several factors, the chief amongst which is that health insurance is heavily regulated, creating high barriers to entry and suppressing competition. Employer provided healthcare also tends to lead to people not examining the actual cost of their healthcare leading to higher prices. Employer provided insurance arose, of course, from government wage control legislation.

That is something worth looking at. There are ways I could start the miner if needed (VNC, SSH etc) so if the other functionality is already there...

No, I haven't done the numbers. So take it for what it is, a musing about the economics of mining. ASIC sales may stall as difficulty climbs (possibly quite steeply), possibly leading to not all that many on the market operating at slim profits. Without sales, there will be no more ASICs to keep pushing the difficulty incredibly higher, it will level out at being slightly profitable. GPUs are just a guess. For me, the loss would be marginal as I'm simply not using much electricity that I wouldn't be anyway and my video card is a sunk cost. I don't imagine anyone would be insane enough to keep GPU mining at a huge loss.

As the browser does not put a widget on my screen next to the Bitcoin Spinner and exchange rate icons, I disagree.

It might be good to generalize it to more broad functionality though.

Precisely.

I think latest theory is that the real Robin Hood was a thug who took the money of others and spent it. The popular fairy tale is nice though.

I'll take a look. The widget may still be on the cards though.

Yes, yes I did copy it from Karl Marx :rolleyes:

It's more subtle than that. Any vote an individual makes in a state which already is definitely one way or another is wasted since it can't affect the outcome. A vote for a third party sends a message that that third party has views which have some support and in a non-swing state, is possibly the most logical way to vote (assuming you don't actually support one of the big two).

Then again, if you find the current big-two candidates completely abhorrent, you may want to vote third party anyway. Really, you have to consider all the parts in play and any pat answers probably indicate a lack of thought.

When in the Course of human events... yada yada yada.

Nice try.

It all sounds so nice and agreeable and friendly. The reality was that the king was a thug who took what he wanted because he could and your new kings are thugs wearing suits.

So I've been using GUIminer for a while now and while it's perfectly a perfectly fine application, I find it doesn't totally match my needs. I'd really like to be able to monitor my hash-rate on my mobile device and to be able to start and stop the service from a widget (I often game and forget to re-enable the miner afterwards).

So I'm thinking of putting together an android widget and have a small service running instead of guiminer. The widget would communicate with the service, reporting back the hash rate, any issues and allowing the user to stop or start the actual miner client itself.

Does anyone have any input or ideas towards this? I'll announce on here when it's ready.

Edit: Just to be clear, this wouldn't mine on the Android device itself, merely be an interface to it.

Haha. Fair enough. Come back in five years and we'll see where you stand.

But at least by voting for Obama, he can lock in the "lack of substantial amounts of money".

Sorry, that was a little ambiguous. I mean that running against testnet is wasteful (assuming that you are reasonably confident that your operations will be valid).

Still trying to comprehend all the factors but it seems to me like there's a bit of a bubble in the whole ASIC thing. This will cause the profitability to drop off quickly as the first orders come in and are put online. This will cause the some of the asic producing companies to go out of business. Several will dump asics for cheap. ASIC mining will continue barely profitably (since ASIC production is determined solely by desire to mine bitcoins, unlike GPU production), some of us will continue to GPU mine at a marginal loss.

Completely. Just goes to show that just because you're smart, doesn't mean you're not dumb.

As to an alternate internet, unless you're looking for redundancy, there's no reason you couldn't run a separate network on top of the existing internet. A while back I considered the idea of special routers you could plug into your internet connection to allow religious groups (or other interested parties) to create a completely "separate" "internet" only accessible to others with similar ideals and beliefs if provided with a key from a central authority. Not my bag though.

Bullshit.