Wow! That's awesome.

There is no information on where the numbers come from. They may be well researched for all I can tell, but they seem almost entirely arbitrary.

The bitcoin community is the first to start following what we're doing and I expect members of that community to be the first to "get" what we're doing.

One of the things Ripple does is it gives fiat currencies a lot of the behavior of bitcoins -- easily traded over long distances, no chargebacks, and so on. This removes a significant barrier from the use of Bitcoins -- that of having to adapt to fiat currencies that don't match it very well. Using Ripple to exchange Bitcoins for fiat currency is a key use case.

Ripple also gives a more uniform model for handling both Bitcoins and fiat. For example, you can set prices in dollars in our system and people can pay you with dollars, Bitcoins, Euros, or any other currency for which a path is available. So every company that adopts Ripple will be another company you can pay with Bitcoins and, we hope, with reduced exchange fees on either or both ends.

That's a decision people have to make ahead of time. We are failing to make that decision and it's one of things destroying our health care system. If you want hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to extend your life a month or two at the end, that's your choice. But I don't see why my health insurance should be unaffordable because of it. Our health and education systems are going down the tubes precisely because we don't conduct cost/benefit analyses and thus we don't focus our costs where they get us the greatest benefits and have to overpay for the benefits we really want.

Quite the reverse, it doesn't make sense not to.

It's even worse when you don't do that. You wind up driving costs through the roof and people can't afford the services they really do want. The protection against euthanasia and eugenics is individual rights.

I agree. But if you factor in the probability that the research will not pan out, I think these all flunk any sensible cost/benefit analysis. I don't think you can make a coherent case against a cost benefit analysis.

I'm tacitly assuming they're combined and that some link protocol (like PPPoA) is being used. The results are the same no matter what, but the details are different.

Unless you hacked the router, it wouldn't send any packets at all. It would never bring the IP link up because address negotiation had failed. Even if you did get it to accept packets, no packets bound for that address would ever get back to you.

On some ISPs, if you ask for an IP address that is in the set of IP addresses they could assign to you and that IP address isn't currently assigned to someone else, they will give you the IP address you ask for. Most likely your ISP is acting in this way.

Let me try to explain it one more time. Imagine the machine is in some particular state. Its components are in particular places, some are moving, and so on. Now imagine the machine with all its parts not moving and in a pile at the bottom. For each state of the machine, there's some minimum amount of energy it would take to assemble the machine from the pile of parts to that state -- you have to move the parts, accelerate moving parts, and so on. So you can assign every possible physical condition of the machine a number. No known laws of physics allow the machine to move from a state with a lower number to a state with a higher number unless energy is fed in from the outside. And outputting energy from the machine always lowers the state number.

Absolutely. The same is true of a book on a shelf. Almost no energy is required to keep the book on the shelf. But if you knock it off the shelf, you can extract that energy at any time. However, this lowers the book, changing the machine to a state with a lower energy.

Nobody said machines can't store a fixed amount of energy that you can then withdraw.

Correct. While we know of no practical way to build such a device, it doesn't really violate any known laws.

We permit the machine to operate at a fixed temperature, exchanging equal amounts of radiation (or any other kind of energy for that matter) with the environment provided it doesn't require or exploit any special organization of that energy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer
That's cheating.

By "perpetual motion machine", we mean an object of fixed size that can output more energy across its boundary that comes in across that boundary, and can continue to do so indefinitely. If you draw a box around the present location of everything that was present at the big bang, nothing would be leaving that box, and the box would eventually grow beyond all bounds. If the big bang is a perpetual motion, then everything is, even a single photon.

The argument I made explains precisely why these machines can't work. Whatever state they're in, whether resonant or not, can be assigned a number based on the minimum energy required to assemble the machine into that state. And no known law of motion, energy, inertia, or resonance allows a transition to a higher-numbered state or to a state with an equal number while withdrawing energy. It really is that simple.

It makes no difference what else is going on. All that matters is that the energy that comes out is from the water pushing up on the air and the energy that needs to go in for the ball to enter the water is an amount sufficient to raise any equal volume of water an equal distance. Since water is much denser than air, the energy that comes out of the machine must always be much less than the energy that goes into it unless the machine is slowing down, in which case it will soon stop.

Don't sell yourself short, I thought it was a brilliant retort.

There are conflicting theories, but so far as I know, none of them seriously suggests a violation of this principle. Some of the more "out there" theories claim the big bang drew energy from existing source that is limitless for practical purposes and then claim that they can build machines that can tap into this source. Machines that claim to tap into the energy stored in permanent magnets and try to find a technical escape clause by arguing their machines will last for decades or centuries, rather than forever, try this. Others claim their machines tap into a nuclear source.

My sole point here is that you can't do this with the known laws of motion, gravity, magnetics, and electricity.

Since one ball is leaving at the top and one ball is entering at the bottom, you need to convert a space at the top of the water (left by the leaving ball) to a space at the bottom of the water (needed by the entering ball). How can you do that without lifting the water up?

The energy you get from the air rising comes from the water lowering as the air rises. Since water is denser than water, it takes more energy to lift the water up to make space for the entering ball than you get from the rising of that ball.

Imagine a tube with a fixed amount of water in it. Now imagine that same tube with the same amount of water but an air bubble in the bottom. The water level must be higher in the second tube. Thus it takes energy to place an air bubble in the bottom of a tube of water without removing water from it, since the existing water must be raised. This applies regardless of what's going on at the top of the tube.

For any such fixed-sized machine based solely on motion, gravity, magnetics, and electricity, and consuming no input fuel, you can assign a number to every state of the machine based on how much energy it would take to assemble the machine, charge its capacitors, place its magnets, accelerate any moving parts, and so on, starting with all the components at rest, neutrally charged, and infinitely far apart. (Or, alternatively, you can call the machine's initial state zero if you like and use the minimum energy needed to transition from the initial state to that state.) All known laws of physics only allow the machine to transition to states with an equal number, and any energy removed from the machine (including radiated and conducted heat) reduces that number. This is pretty much sufficient to show that any perpetual motion machine is provably impossible if it uses only the known properties of physics.

When the government does something, you see the thing the government did, and you reason (often correctly) that had the government not done it, it wouldn't have been done. However, what you don't see is what those resources could have produced had they not been taken by the government. And what you fail to factor in is the cost of all the research that doesn't produce useful results.

Yes, you need the government to take risks so bad that nobody's willing to take them with their own money. But it stands to reason that the vast majority of the time, the costs outweigh the probable benefits. We'd be better off without it.

Had the government not taxed the wealth that funded that research, those who produced that wealth would have used it for things they value more.

One thing you can do is accept an offer to exchange any kind of currency somebody is willing to sell for anything you already have. You can also place a standing offer that others can accept.

Since there's no mining, there isn't the early adopter mining advantage that Bitcoin had. Early adopters, however, will have the first crack at any opportunities the system does provide while later adopters will have missed at least some of them. This is, unfortunately, a dangerous area for me to comment on. (It's much the same reason Bitcoin folks can't say things like "Buy bitcoins as an investment, they're almost sure to go up".)

One possible early adopter advantage is that the system may have less liquidity in the beginning. Lower liquidity could mean larger spreads. For example, if nobody is offering to exchange a particular currency pair for a decent rate, you may find somebody who needs to exchange that currency pair to make a payment might accept an offer that's really not very good. You can easily place a number of "not very good" offers and if anyone gets desperate and liquidity is poor, that's a profit opportunity. However, there's no guarantee liquidity will be or stay poor. And you have to remember to cancel your offers if the exchange rates change. So this is purely speculative.

That's correct. So right now, it's just luck. If your ISP assigns your IP address to someone else, your connection will break.

Entering a static IP on your router does two things:

1) Your router will attempt to negotiate that IP address with the other end.

2) Your router will use that IP address no matter what the results of the negotiation.

Your ISP will likely give you the IP you asked for if it can. This prevents brief interruptions in connectivity from causing IP address changes. (Most modems/routers will first ask for whatever IP they had last, if they remember it. But they'll accept whatever the ISP offers after that.) However, if someone else has "your" IP address, they won't be able to give it to you and will offer you another IP address. You will reject that IP address, and the link negotiation will fail. Your router will retry the negotiation periodically.

Has Dwolla's policy changed? I was under the impression they specifically prohibited using Dwolla to buy and sell virtual currencies unless one party had special written permission from Dwolla to do so.

As you said, this process can only work if either Nefario or law enforcement is willing to participate in it. There's no evidence of either. And if law enforcement does get involved, the last thing an asset issuer will want to have done is paid out all the funds they hold to the wrong people.

I understand your frustration, but you are insisting other people do things that have huge risks to them and, frankly, don't make any sense. I would suggest pressuring GLBSE to agree to mediate a redemption process or, failing that, issue cryptographically verifiable asset holder lists so asset issuers can prove a particular person is or isn't on the list they got. You chose GLBSE to protect your ownership interest -- make them do what you paid them to do or hold them accountable.