The liquor store.

Of course that'd make you a martyr. If you're willing to die rather than say you believe in a particular set of boogeymen, absolutely. Not saying there's anything wrong with someone who'd rather die than feign beliefs, but there's no practical benefit to that, whether she insists on it or not. I lean pretty far toward hard agnosticism (you know, the "brain in a vat" & related crap), but I'm pretty comfortable saying she's dying for no legitimate purpose... but who knows what her thoughts all were here. Maybe she just wanted some type of Jizya-like status -- I could understand threatening to let a government kill you because you might be put in a reduced tax bracket and be released of conscription obligations. Not wanting to say "rock on, Allah, my rock" in court, though? Eh.

It's a terrible, threatening precedent, sure. I'm sympathetic toward the cause of being able to believe as you please without your government killing you for it. The individual woman, though - not really. I'll troll so far as to say the ideal outcome of this would be the state following through with the execution, followed by the closet Christian population rising in arms against the government, bringing global fundie numbers way down. Doesn't matter who wins so long as everyone fighting fights for boogeymen.

You know, though, I think there's an angle missing in a lot of these stories -- like who the woman actually is and why I should care about her death, or the death of everyone in Southern Sudan for that matter. Yeah, she's human, just like Hitler, so what? It's always about the state and their actions, their thought processes and laws, then the response of unrelateds. If my bud Jimbo Ayzaqyyola (I call him Allah for short) were tried and sentenced with the same results (but reverse which religious fanatics are in power) in Canada, I'd defend him, because Jimbo's a cool guy - came over for a minor plumbing issue, then freely helped me disassemble and learn about my water softener because he likes eradicating ignorance - and because he's an enjoyable, helpful fellow who did no wrong by me, shouldn't be killed, and should probably be killed for in defense of. That, I think, is a rational reason for an uprising - the "they're killing him because he disrespected Jesus" thing is secondary and frankly unimportant: it doesn't really matter why they're going to kill Jimbo if I'm reasonably sure Jimbo's a fine fellow. Maybe he catches his maid stealing from him and cuts off her hands and uses them to replace his front door knockers -- well, I'd still have to say Jimbo shouldn't go to prison because Jimbo's in my mental trust club and the laws can go fuck themselves.

This is why I don't think all these massive, consolidated governments work -- we dump the community trust thing and start insisting we need to define absolutely every "bad" action in a 200,000 page law book nobody could possibly read in its entirety before dying - they're hard as Hell to understand and frequently misinterpreted or incorrectly applied, while punishment severity seems to be assigned randomly to crimes, where possessing LSD ends up being declared worse than double homicide. It's a junk system coming out of utopian minds where a government can govern 200,000+ people and do a better job at it than a judicial system made up entirely of 100 lightly-armed guys who walk around threatening to kill people when they do something obnoxious and sometimes pulling the trigger. And it's a double-solution there, because then these odd men who aspire to shoot and protect won't kill homeless loiterers for entertainment. ..... What're we talking about?

I've got to stop visiting this subforum. That whole situation is stupid beyond expression (I really have no sympathy for the woman willing to die a martyr). What's a "Sudanese activist," anyway? The chanting Islamists aren't "activists"? You can't be too disenfranchised and apathetic if you're in the streets cheering for a woman's killing because she changed religion and commits "adultery." Sounds like over-activists to me.

Heh, my family still considers my marriage to be adultery. I didn't attend the reunion that year, but I hear it caused a minor stir when a close family member requested we be added to the family registry. It's not "real" unless the government blesses it. Jeez - we aren't even gay! Luckily, nobody's enforced the Anabaptist punishment for adultery on us, yet. I can't imagine I'd do anything but laugh straight through the execution.

Hell, if the KFC guy's rising from the dead to command a legion of minutemen to storm the White House, maybe there is a chance of an "American Spring."

Whoa, friend. You're nearing blasphemy. Just like the "head" of all religions, Jesus appeared to all people, but every single one of them rejected His teachings, as well as God. Only a handful of Jews realized Him. Every single pre-European Native had God appear to them in some way, but they all rejected Him and eventually forgot about the whole affair. That's why every single "Jesus-separated" nation had no followers, and why the same's true of Islam, Hinduism, etc. You may be tempted to believe every religion's bullshit just because no isolated nation adopted the religious beliefs of any other nation, but fuck you, that's clearly wrong because Jesus.

It's speculated that in one of the Lost Books, God tried to convert single-celled organisms. It was only out of constant frustration that he decided to make the entirely unique, unable-to-be-genetically-traced humans.

 wow wow wow great investigation, guys. Glenn Beck is the pedo mastermind behind Bitcoin for sure and definitely killed a few interns.

One of the unpleasant things about Windows... maybe someone will correct me here (please, please, please!), but I've never found a way to have stuff which'd automatically save to C:/ automatically go to, say, O:/ - you know, stuff which heads to appdata or "My Documents" and other such stuff in "Users." -On the Windows side, that is. Obviously, I tell Core (that always makes me think I'm at some fitness forum...) to use O:/ - but I'm not going to look up every single program to see if there's possibly (unlikely) a way to have saved data moved over to O:/

That's why I have to constantly open WinDirStat for my SSD (if I haven't made it clear by now -- it's a really slick program).  There's just so much junk on my copy of Windows, now... but I can't just wipe it anymore without all sorts of issues. All my software's on the O:/ HDD, but all the "vital components" are on the C:/ - which I can't store the blockchain or anything other than the enormous mass of DLLs and Doze files on... so if I wipe it, I lose all those referenced DLLs and similar subcomponent files. You know - and these subcomponents... maybe a piece of software references 10MB worth of data on C:/, so it's ridiculous to have that so "importance-biased."

It's an unpleasant situation. Even if I upgrade my hard drive, I have AT LEAST 200 unique pieces of software throughout my Medusa-like hard drive compound (ha - I don't even think they'd all fit in most PC cases), so I'd be looking at literally days or maybe even weeks to bring them all back to being usable. It's for a similar reason I'm not particularly fond of Steam.... it's difficult to manipulate files -- yeah, I can just redownload the file from them, but on my 3G Sprint connection, it took me a week just to download Empire:Total War a couple weeks ago. I see, you know, some of the Core devs saying stuff like "oh, well the blockchain is only as big as Diablo 3" - but I obviously rely on my primary means of income and expenditure a Hell of a lot more than Diablo 3, so it's kind of important that it's not as cumbersome.

... There are so many things I hate about Windows.... .... maybe time to switch and become one of those assholes who tells everyone else they're the devil if they don't, too.

Maybe. Was he so worried about Paul and so full of himself that he thought he really needed to publicly "switch positions"? I'm tempted to think he just kind of "bunkered down" in thought and decided he needed to support the mainstream candidate to defeat Obama or Hillary, as if he could've changed the election. I really don't understand why he bucked Paul. It offends at least a significant minority of his viewers, but doesn't have much impact outside.


....

Maybe he is just full of himself. Didn't he want to create some pixie-dust all-suburban White paradise? Glennbeckistan or Jesustown, something like that? I guess that dream died.... so maybe he's just looking to make money -- it's kind of his job, after all.

^ to expand on that very legitimate point with some extra quips: the US is extremely biased against anyone not running as a Democrat or Republican. It is effectively a two party system. It favors the establishment to a high level compared to European countries (where there are so many parties that they can form coalition governments, something absolutely foreign to us), and this socioeconomic discrimination is implemented mostly by states interested in maintaining their power structure, not the federal government. You hear about maybe the "Libertarian Party" or "Green Party" fielding a candidate for president, but only on the best of years do they manage to get access to 48 of the 50 US states, while the fourth-largest Green Party made it on 37 states in 2012, up from 25 in 2004. In many states, they can't even get write-in status. Even if you're outside the US, go ahead and subscribe to one of these third party's newsletters. The entire time while the Republicans and Democrats are raising funds for their campaigns, the third-party candidates spend twice as much effort on achieving something so basic as ballot access, and they spend millions on it every other year. It's absolutely unjustified, but they wonder why voter turnout is so low and the youth are actively ignoring the elections "politically apathetic."

In some other cases, the political parties, which are effectively government institutions at this point, barred Paul supporters (Republican-affiliated) from attending conferences, partly because Paul committed the highest of treasons by suggesting US foreign policy was partly responsible for 9/11, because terrorists obviously just hate us for our freedoms. This is tantamount to election-fixing.

-And all the US media wants to talk about is a few White guys scared off at polls by "Black Panthers." Hurrdurrrr.

Hm. As much a bent toward believing outlandish conspiracies as I have, I don't imagine he's getting memos from Upstairs telling him to re-evaluate his opinion. Maybe he's just addicted to cocaine? You kind of have to be to be a talk show host, yeah?

You know, I went to markdown.com on the basis that it's a Hell of a domain name for that, and a can of tuna caught my attention. It's big draw is that it's pole-caught. It got me wondering why people (including myself, to an extent) are so attracted to low-tech, inefficient methods, and all I could come up with is that there's some kind of Nietzchean appeal to supporting a guy who goes out and does exactly what he wants to do (and knows how to do) against all odds. It's almost like a Luddite protest purchase -- or maybe it's just a desire to try something different... unsure.

Don't mean to hijack, but I'd love some additional details on how HTML loads but CSS doesn't. With a spotty Internet connection, I suffer from this everywhere with fair frequency (BTCTalk is actually pretty good about it, whereas I frequently have the issue with BitFinex and some other "heavier" sites).

(this all assuming that's what happened and a "bad" version was cached)

I "don't like it," but we'll bring some new people and money into the fold. I can tell you there are a good many Americans in rural areas who love Beck more than Jesus and Reagan put together, and Bitcoin's about as well-known in the hills and plains as transgenders.

Oh. Don't let them see this thread.

I would love to live through a general election where the only two guys on the debate floor are Jim Traficant and Jesse Ventura. The US would have >80% voter turnout and I'd suspect we'd actually bring in tourist dollars to see the two up there. Whether they'll be inspirationally refreshing or constantly brawling (or both), Idunno, but it'd be great fun.

I've totally butchered my thought process, here. I know what I mean, but I'm really sucking at explaining this (sorry), and then I threw in the CoinJoin example which isn't directly related, but something else entirely. I was, at first, thinking about gambling sites. Generally, you buy your chips (off-blockchain bitcoin IOUs), do a bunch of micro-transactions off the blockchain on the gambling site, then cash out (or, more likely, do nothing because you're out of IOUs). You have relatively "chunky" inputs instead of a bunch of micro-transactions floating around - but in a higher-fee future, it may be reasonable to want larger everyday purchases off the blockchain, too.

Payment processors and online wallets should be similar -- similar to Paypal in this regard, too (where it works best if it's pre-funded). Blockchain.info or whatever would hold relatively large inputs - and I'd be very surprised if they don't currently hold relatively large inputs compared to all funded inputs - because you don't want to keep using a client for every little purchase. You don't want to deal with the time and effort, and you don't want to pay unnecessary fees, so you put maybe 10 "normal purchases" worth of bitcoin into this online wallet.

[Separate but related idea] Assuming there are a bunch of companies willing to accept blockchain.info IOUs instead of bitcoins, you do not need (and probably don't want) these kinds of everyday transactions on the blockchain, and when the merchant receives the coins, they probably aren't going to immediately cash these IOUs out for coins. Instead, they'll probably wait until, say, 50 purchases have been made, or a week elapses, or whatever other kind of procedure they've made to find a balance between the drawbacks of working on the blockchain and the risks of working off -- so you have "chunky" outputs as well as "chunky" inputs.

[Another separate idea] What if fees start ballooning due to use growth while block size isn't increased? The market's going to correct for this, right? Nobody wants to pay a $1-equiv fee for the privilege of being able to buy a cup of coffee at the gas station, but with off-chain transactions, they don't have to, so I'd guess they'll start moving toward those redeemable IOUs, where they can pay far, far lower fees while still being able to redeem their coins if they so choose - but they'll probably be inclined to wait for a number of off-blockchain inputs before they redeem them for a "chunky" output of controlled coins to their privkey, and in that case, assuming the previous given ideas are legit, you'd end up with relatively chunky inputs and outputs in sendmany transactions from a few major players in the market (payment processors, online wallets).

Obviously, off-chain transactions increase the "tps" of "Bitcoin" because they're just shuffling IOUs around on a server like Paypal or VISA, but it also can "actually" increase the tps (and by tps, I'm referring to the number of unique outputs, not the number of "actual transactions" since Bitcoin isn't bound to only do one transaction per "transaction") of Bitcoin by encouraging the bundling of transactions into sendmany's with larger (relative to now) inputs and outputs, maybe very significantly. Tx fees encourage that kind of bundling, which allows Bitcoin to effectively fit more transactions in a block while also decreasing the associated costs full nodes bear for an overly-bloated blockchain. The idea here was that the stated max tps is affected (and I'd suggest significantly) by behavior not discouraged by the liberal max block size and continual increases, when a higher tps (and all the savings which go along with that increased efficiency) would probably be achieved with conservative adjustments to max block size.

So Cuba's pretty much the last country on Earth to receive a physical connection to the rest of us? Wow. That's a pretty impressive story on it, actually. http://transdeuce.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/why-did-alcatel-lucent-win-the-alba-1-fiber-optic-cable-contract-with-cuba-and-venezuela/

Instead of a 20 mile cable from the US, they have to pay to go all the way to Venezuela.

If the maximum block size were left alone, isn't it reasonable to assume payment processors (along with other efficiency solutions like CoinJoin) will effectively increase network efficiency (more transactions per kb, less strain on full nodes for the same number of transactions), especially as the "minimum" fee per transaction increases to have a high probability of being included into the next block?

Maybe it's experimentally 7tps, but that's a measurement based on how users are currently behaving moreso than the actual code, right? VISA does everything on its own with very standard scripts - there's no well-known way for customers to use credit a certain way to increase tps on VISA's network. With Bitcoin, though, users' behavior may be able to dramatically increase tps, and higher "effective minimum" fees (to likely be included in the next block) could effectively increase the tps.

It was 500kb prior. Maybe even lower when max size was first implemented... I wasn't around way back then.

I must be missing something here.

According to the Bitcoin Wiki:
VISA can do 8,500 tps.
Paypal can do 100 tps.
Bitcoin can do 7 tps.

A block can contain 1MB of data. 1MB is the equivalent of 1,048,576 bytes.

Stealing from DH's post:

Sendtoaddress=(40+180+50) bytes
Sendmany=(40n+180+50) bytes, where n is # of outputs

1,048,576-180-50=1,048,346 (block size remaining after overhead & input)
1,048,346/40=26,209 (#transactions able to be included in block assuming one input)
Block target conf. time = 600 seconds.
26,209/600=43.68 transactions per second

Will be lower, maybe 30-35tps - payment processors like BitPay will probably not be able to always send from just one input. However, they're really the only ones in the position to "bulk-pay" outside online wallet services. They also have the ability to design their services to prevent low-value cash-outs by attaching service fees if the person doesn't meet some threshold -- say you arbitrarily charge BTC.001 if the withdrawal request is for less than BTC.02.

Payment processors and online wallet services are in a unique to dramatically increase Bitcoin's tps by dramatically increasing network efficiency, allowing more transactions per block, decreasing fees for users, increasing the value of a kilobyte with regards to mining fees (BitPay sure wouldn't want to miss a block affecting 5,000 customers), and decreasing associated costs of an unnecessarily enormous blockchain (bandwidth, storage, processing) and putting off the "we gotta increase the block size again" debate for another couple years.

Don't make guests point at and scan workers' chests. That's ridiculous. RFID will do. Use NFC for the door. You have a giant block of technology there, what the Hell would you be pressing on a bunch of buttons for?!

Room locator - great for conferences when you come home wasted (or are otherwise aloof). Instead of inaccurate GPS, you could plant RFID chips in the room numbers, where software tells the guest which direction he should be walking.

Actual cell phones may be unreasonably expensive considering there's no reason for guests to be connecting to third-party cell towers or using most other phone technology. You can strip GPS, cell tower connection hardware (obv. incl. antennas), unnecessary interface ports, remove the cameras and most sensors, along with some other stuff, I'm sure. Calls would route through a WiFi or a more reasonable solution like BT (ZigBee might be preferable... good luck figuring that out, though).

What is BitPay buying to incur such massive capital costs?