Stumbled upon this thread. I forgot how dedicated the community was to information. Thread could be about ways to blow up the Pentagon, and so long as planning the idea out was complicated enough to grab some folks' attention, it'd get a well-thought-out response.

The idea of releasing a pirates-only copy with mining malware attached is probably the most fascinating idea. If it could bypass AV (which everyone assumes is a false positive on torrent sites if there's a scene name attached, anyway), an auto-switching GPU miner could make for an interesting pay-to-play->"free"-to-play model. It might even be able to keep up public opinion if it only operated while the game was running, even if it wasn't disclosed.

This could also be useful for the slew of free app developers and could probably be built into FLOSS applications with most users running the un-modified, official "malware"-containing version. Frankly, it'd be an improvement over thinking up new ways to mislead users into installing adware during application installation (making the "do not install" button gray and on the bottom, with the "install adware" button in black and on top, or only having the "do not install" button appear as a small hyperlink in what looks like an EULA).

I'm guessing it's a case of getting way more money out of far fewer users. Unsure how else continued console development could be explained unless they're really expecting to recapture former console glory days.

The rapid release cycle is probably contributing significantly toward developers being unable to take full-advantage of the hardware. Games don't really seem properly optimized, and the framerates in many latest-gen games is shockingly low. I remember playing... I think it was MGS4
(whatever one had the weird jiggling-boob Asian women... or I guess that's pretty much all of them) on PS4, and the FPS was regularly and noticeably low, which seemed so bizarre to me - and for a console to have stuttering video on a game made specifically for it and supposedly tested. I'm not really sure when "it usually doesn't stutter and plays above 15FPS more often than not" became acceptable for consoles. Meanwhile, if you looked at, say, Final Fantasy 7 vs Final Fantasy 9 for PSX, the tweaks and optimizations are really kind of shocking - that they were both made for the same system with the same specs. -Or you could look at early games for Amiga 1200 and then look at Payback, which is so well-rendered on such antiquated hardware, it's unbelievable.

Burning Rubber (1993, Amiga)

^Is that a compact station wagon?

Xtreme Racing (1995, Amiga)


Payback (2001, Amiga)


Final Fantasy 7 (1997, PSX)

^That tree shadow... I don't even (fun fact: FF7 was the most expensive game ever produced at the time)

Final Fantasy 9 (2000, PSX)

While Xbox may've made news from companies executives resigning after abysmal Xbone sales (MS has managed to push out only a bit over 5M), the PS4 hasn't done too much better. Sure, Sony's sold over 3x as many units as the Xbone, but this is still just a little over a tenth of PS2 units sold, and a bit over a fifth of PS3s sold, while the PS4 is now nominally two years old.

The Wii was released in 2006 and remains the most recent console to ever sell more than 100M units (barely), never able to match the number of PSX units sold. Isn't it strange that against Moore's Law, the significant increase in population and discretionary spending, and how gaming is allegedly becoming more "mainstream" each year, consoles (both hand-held and static home units) have been fairly consistently underselling their counterparts of ~a decade ago?

Honestly, I can think of more than a few PSX and PS2 games which are far superior in my mind than the best the PS3, PS4, or Xbone have offered. Are consoles a dead market? Is there going to be a PS5 or Xbox.... Two?

Whoa, whoa, whoa - everyone knows smoking is good for work productivity. People who aren't smoking aren't stressed enough. People who aren't over-stressed aren't working hard enough. Management 101

Idunno. He's so human in speaking... I don't think he's even capable of changing the tone of his message because it's really HIS tone and message. I guess that's why he can't be a politician. It'd be like coaching Ron Paul... and then you get some ad coming out where he endorsed whats-his-name (Amit Singh?) I still remember a quote from... "TEX MESSSXT?!" Like - someone clearly wrote a script he was supposed to follow, and it was like watching a five-year-old at a school play trying to pretend they're the Duke of Butthamburg with a straight face. -Or that line, which was absolutely hilarious (mostly for the wrong reasons)... "You'd have to smoke a joint as big as a telephone pole to get high off hemp!" Ron obviously didn't write that line and he wasn't able to deliver it in any believable way, even though it's the only quote I remember from whatever speech or rally that was.

You can have it changed to this:


-Just PM a mod. Maybe you should've picked a truly exceptional image for your avatar like I did. My guy would cum on your cat's face and cut off its ears.

^That's obviously not fair. The network isn't being well-utilized, and Gavin's already started campaigning for increasing the block size limit 20x (to solve a currently-non-existent problem). -And you can't really look at the mining cost at all since Bitcoin could operate exactly the same with just one AMD K6 mining. Anyway, I think the scarier numbers to look at involve the costs to relay the transaction queue and blockchain, which definitely won't be trending toward zero any time soon.

Umm... Do the Bitcoin ATMs kiosks "transaction facilitators" more than a couple companies want to become ubiquitous not count? Do all the full nodes operating not count? Online wallet services? What about block explorers?

I doubt mining takes up more than ~20% of electricity consumption if Bitcoin were looked at as carefully as other trade mediums in that article.

FSP's significantly older than BTC, fwiw. I had the pleasure of meeting Ian at a BTC conference in FL a few months ago. Signed a pledge of intent, but then my job hunt ended abruptly soon after (thank God). Was kind of surprised they came to a fairly low-key crypto conference... I've been hearing about Ian and the FSP for more than my entire adult life, so really putting a face to it was kind of..... .... disturbing.

Error app? Works fine on my S3. Won't run on x86 platforms (Crosswalk provides the apk for it, but didn't bother uploading).

Time travel bucket list:
*take a radio single from Teriyaki Boyz to Jewish rap publishers of the 80s and tell them it's public domain
*demand a meeting with Queen Cleopatra to introduce a magic vibrating device charged by the sun
*take infant Glenn Beck back to George Washington's doorstep and leave him there. Take adult Glenn Beck to Fox News' doorstep in 2009
*warn Queen Elizabeth II about LaRouche's expose to be released on her cocaine trade so she can cover her tracks
*find toddler FDR, run over his arms while I'm in a wheelchair
*bring AK-47 to Gandhi
*abduct every pope after election with a note signed by God, "Too gay."
*take a bottle of Capri Sun to teenage Albert Einstein and tell him I'm from the future and that this will be his greatest invention
*give Thomas Edison a bottle of Beano so he can have a decent picture taken

Elwar's Clock (ARM only). You can tell that's Ron Paul by the ear hair. I can't really vouch for anything else (especially if you have a wide screen and see I had some... difficulty grabbing the time token properly). Price is pulled from Coindesk and uses the last time (UTC only) they grabbed price for "time" (they grab price each minute, which is roughly how often the app pulls the price). ... The alarm does work, so be careful. ...

Nearby is an all-brick Mason's lodge. They were looking to rent out the basement to a business which wouldn't contribute foot traffic or take up their valuable six parking spaces. Considering we're 20 miles from nowhere in a town of 800-900 people, I have no idea who they were expecting to move in.

The app should sound the alarm if the price moves too much within a small span of time. I always thought it'd be fun to have an alarm clock play you a little story when you woke up, woven from little off-key ad lib type snippets.

Maybe...
Be like Jim Chesterfield. Jim woke up at 7am three days ago with a bad hangover. Jim went to the supermarket where he was assaulted by a large, pale woman wearing only sweatpants and a bra. Jim felt mildly discomforted and retreated to the YMCA where he donated money to unappreciative millennials. Jim then went to work where he was killed after accidentally discharging from his reproductive system onto his boss. The price of Bitcoin is currently server refused connection.

[Stay in bed]               [Face the day]

ETA: I'm bored. I'll see if I can throw you something together within the next few hours using MS Paint and AJAX. ETA2: Oh, missed Reynaldo's post.

"While engaging in the business of selling explosive devices, Mr. Ver stored the explosives in a residential apartment building and mailed the devices via the United States Mail..."

I probably shouldn't get a big grin reading that...

PCR2000 was actually a significant thing. There were quite a few dealers, many professional B&Ms with mail-order. ... That probably shouldn't have weakened my original grin.

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I'm going to be a dick and tell you the emulation experience is far superior to buying FF7 or FF8 in their Windows port form. I've tried both in both forms as well as on PSX and PS2 (I've probably played the series too many times...). With a decent PC, emulators (check out some of the custom shaders for ePSXe) will allow you to enhance the visual experience more than permitted by the ports while also giving you save-anywhere functionality (don't use memory states for FF9 - there's a nasty bug) among some other cool things (I increase FPS to 70 for a slightly faster playing experience). Assuming you have the PSX discs, would suggest you make an .iso of them and play them from that instead of trying to play directly from disc each time (mine are all scratched up beyond use from that ).

Innovation. Even with 3-6% annual inflation, tech prices always come down. This isn't like Ford or Tesla where they make sure their costs are low BEFORE they start manufacture because time is worth so much more in the tech space and competition's rapidly executing ideas, so generally, you get maybe three months between the idea stage and tape-out, and then maybe a month or two after that before you need to start pushing product out the door or face having to redesign your obsolete scrap - and this isn't really something exclusive to ASICs. Everything in tech is rapidly advancing, far faster than could be negated by inflation or colluding competition. With that in mind, I read about Ford's aluminum F-150, and it's just.... that should've happened 10 years ago, because I'm not used to their shit-slow pace. They have an unbelievably slow marketplace. Most cars still use non-variable compressors for A/C. It's basically either on or off, and all that "waste cold" when you don't want it full-blast is ejected. There's almost nowhere else on Earth you can get away with wasting air conditioning but in the auto industry. -And it really did take the government stepping in with efficiency standards the market called unachievable for this to start changing - for variable compressors and aluminum bodies - which is infuriating as a libertarian. I mean, we might still not even have standard seat belts if Ralph Nader weren't such a pretentious dickhead.

Game consoles were very much subject to this from the late 80s to early aughts when the market was still competitive and new tech was rapidly being shoved out for use by hundreds of manufacturers - and just about anything could change the game. AMD's K6 was a game-changer, the ANTIC was a game-changer, Colecovision was even a game-changer. The original XBOX controller was a game-changer... Right? The environment's changed a good bit now, though... revolutionary and comeptitive design died out to mass producing 3-5 consoles seeing who can fit the most low-risk gimmicks into their products. -But even so, prices still don't generally increase because costs to manufacture come down after initial production as sub-component manufacturers figure out SOPs and come up with reliable logistics, which is then, in the spirit of capitalism, used against them by the mass producers to negotiate better prices with a lower margin for the manufacturer than they started with, and once this relationship's established, and there are more of these partnerships formed between companies, manufacturing processes start becoming more streamlined and less wasteful altogether, much of which can be carried over even when you're making something a little more dissimilar than similar, and I think that's a good part of the reason consoles are becoming indistinguishable from small-form computers.

... I think I've gotten off-topic.

Back to mining... -part of the issue, too, might just be that there are these self-identifying miners who don't want to give up the lifestyle, where maybe they have the knowledge to do something more complicated but would otherwise be limited to jobs they're uninterested in. Mining allows almost anyone with some computer-savvy to be their own boss, or at least be a kind of franchise owner. Maybe they think the issue's just that they need more energy-efficient hardware, or need to look into co-locating, perhaps even rent out a building near cheap hydro-power hundreds of miles out. --And this isn't that far-fetched, I think. When I was still insisting to myself that I wanted to mine, I was actually looking into old VFW, Elk, etc buildings where the members are all dying out and they're renting spaces of their often-quite-large premises at low rates so long as their activities aren't disrupted, and maybe I could negotiate a deal where I'd pay for electricity for the warmer 6 months, and they'd cover it in Winter (after all, I'd set up a couple box fans in the doorway dividing our parts of the building so they wouldn't need to turn on the heat to be comfortably warm, and keeping old people warm is always nice). -And I was looking into USB watchdogs, self-resetting circuit breakers, how I could use ZigBee to communicate to "slaves" without needing all the PCs directly connected to the Internet, and how I could configure CGRemote & CGWatcher to be able to have this productive lease contract hundreds of miles away without ever contributing any foot traffic so I could negotiate a better lease rate.

TL;DR - Price was previously in a bubble and mining was good. Mining is bad, now, but increased cost-efficiency and energy-efficiency are still going to create strong pressure for difficulty to increase. Bitmain and the other manufacturers don't give half a shit about price because a) they sold that risk to miners (worst-case scenario, everyone takes a 6-month vacation with full pay from the massive stash of money they've accumulated), and b) people are still going to insist on being miners, and they have increased incentive to buy new, cost-efficient ASICs now that their margins are negative or at least more slim. It's well-known that anyone banking on BTC price increasing would be far better served by just buying BTC and not fucking around trying to generate it through digital wizardry, but miners gonna mine, and I'm not sure there's anything wrong with wanting to be a digital wizard, anyway (digital wizard is a large step up from "computer whiz," at least). All that said, this doesn't mean price doesn't impact difficulty, and it's obvious by the slow-down in increase - but mining isn't dead by any stretch of the imagination.

Newspaper doesn't know how to telephone. Maybe they tried to Internet by emailing Steve Huffman, "why did govermint keep drug money?"

Pinktooth is coming, likely Q3 2015. Zuckerberg is launching it along with a slight modification to FB: "Accept friends with benefits request."

Subway will also be able to remotely stimulate your prostate each time they have a $5/12" deal. Welcome to the future.

#BanBear #ChillingEffect

I've been watching @Midnight for about a year and seem to've learned how to use Twitter without having to use it.