Still have yet to find a block myself since the ASIC revolution, and I'm hashing 5 THash. Back when I was hashing 3 or so GHash on GPUs, I wound up discovering 11 blocks as part of a pool. It is luck and risk really. I look back and do the math thinking I could have earned 550 BTC at that time, but reality due to pool mining is I earned half that. I miss the days of pulling in 10 BTC a week...

PM sent. For the record, I am the largest single shareholder in this fund that I'm aware of. Not happy with the situation, but I well understand that too many factors were involved that didn't go our way, going back to BFL delays, the sudden spike in the value of BTC after hardware purchases, and rampant network growth.

You can look at it on a country by country basis, which actually doesn't bode well for the UK statistically. As a matter of fact, in 2013, gun crimes increased 34%, but overall violent crime rates are nearly 10x higher in the UK.

The problem with looking at violent crime stats is that the types of crime and reporting vary country to country. For instance, Stats Canada has different crimes and crime reporting than the US, so there may be a higher number of violent crimes listed by StatCan than the FBI uniform violent crime statistics. Actually, it is a higher number in Canada, nearly 2x, however a study showed that when trying to normalize the data between countries, which is actually somewhat difficult and introduces a little bit of subjectivity to the stats, Canada should technically have a slightly lower violent crime rate if compared apples to apples to the US.

Another problem with comparing stats between countries, it takes a relatively large population group and lumps them all together, so in particular with the US, you will find that by looking at things more locally, about 95% or so of the counties across the country have levels of violent crime in line with, or better than some of the most peaceful European nations. The problem is in the larger urban centers, like Washington DC, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, etc. They have a tendency to really skew the crime stats in the US as a whole because of an abnormally high rate of violence.

If you look closer at the US, you have to look at who is killing who. Mass shootings are an anomaly, though since Newtown, I know of at least 2 instances of attempted mass shootings in schools that were cut short by armed personnel on site, one of which was in Colorado. The rate of mass shootings in the US is relatively steady and it is difficult to find signal in the noise as to what the trends are.

Typical homicides in the US are generally gang related or drug related. Nearly half the homicides (firearm related or otherwise) are perpetuated by a demographic that only comprises of 5% of the US population (black people). Of that half of the homicides, about 75% to 80% (maybe more, I'd have to check the stats again) are black on black crime, many of which have past criminal behavior (this is actually relevant regardless of race).

Suicide wise, in Canada, you can see laws of substitution in effect. Many try to enact laws like "safe storage" laws to make it difficult for someone to use firearms as a means of suicide. From a lot of the research I've found, suicide by firearm is only about 3 to 5% more effective than suicide by hanging (the second most effective method). In Canada when we introduced safe storage laws, firearm related suicides were down, but suicides were not down. When you broke the numbers down, most of the suicides moved to hanging rather than firearms.

"They" in this context tends to mean either some form of government or their law enforcement arms.

I am in Alberta, however, since firearms are federally regulated, the laws regarding what kinds of firearms you can own are equal across all provinces. The main exception to this is the long gun registry, where Quebec seems to be quite keen on keeping the registry intact (and is still fighting with the Supreme Court of Canada on it).

TECHNICALLY, in Canada, all firearms are illegal to own, unless you carry a card that says you are allowed to acquire and possess firearms (due to the way the Firearms Act is worded). Handguns and some rifles are classified as restricted, while most rifles are classified as non-restricted. Anyone with a Possession and Acquisition License (PAL) can purchase non-restricted firearms. People who have the "Restricted" designation on their PAL can own restricted firearms. I have a restricted designation on my PAL, therefore it is legal for me to own restricted firearms.

The restricted category of firearms have their own stipulation to them. You aren't really allowed to use them anywhere other than a shooting range, and some provincial CFO's (Chief Firearms Officers) won't even allow registration to be transferred from a retailer or another gun seller to you unless you can prove you are a member of a range (even though many ranges allow guests). Mainly to "prove" your purpose for owning a restricted firearm is for target shooting. Given that some high caliber handguns and rifles happen to be listed as restricted, many (including myself) actually question the real intention of the restricted category (It's because my gun is black isn't it).

Firearms that are classified as prohibited are just that... prohibited. Not allowed to own them... unless you fall under certain categories under the Firearms Act that allow grandfather status. These are known as the 12.(x) rules. If you look under section 12 of the Firearms Act, you can see various subsections like 12.1, 12.2, etc. These correspond to the certain conditions for owning prohibited firearms. That law will be used on the PAL just like the "Restricted" designation, only it will say something like "12.6 Prohibited", which essentially means you are allowed to possess and acquire firearms that are prohibited due to section 12.6 of the Firearms Act.

Firearms like the AK47 and their variants (including Saiga shotguns), any other full auto firearm, and any firearm that can be easily converted to full auto are prohibited in Canada. If you want an AK47 like firearm, then you might look at the CZ858 or VZ58 which both have non-restricted variants.

It would pass off as amusing to some in the US as well. I'm in Canada and own a small collection of rifles and handguns. I also reload my own ammunition, so I'm frequently buying reloading supplies like primers, gunpowder and projectiles. My next purchase will probably be in a couple weeks. I plan on getting a Trijicon TR24G for one of my bullpup rifles, which is intended for 3Gun and short/medium range hunting.

I'd say that my collection of firearms and ammunition would be considered respectable, even by US standards, and I have friends that are in the same boat.

I have tossed the idea of accepting Bitcoin out to a few guys on the Canadian Gun Nutz forum but got no biters. I just keep a wallet address in my sig line in case anyone wishes to graciously donate bitcoin to help me buy more lead to keep my casting/reloading costs low for some of my high caliber fun...

Thanks for the update.

I've worked with the guys over at Cool IT Systems. They are a good group of people and engineers and I've used their solutions in my personal computer for low acoustic CPU cooling. When I was working with them, we had put together a PICMG 1.3 backplane and SHB into a desktop chassis running 6 GPUs. We had run a custom cooling and manifold system from 3 radiators on the chassis to cool the 2 Xeon CPUs and 6 GeForce GPUs. All this we managed to put together in a week with some help doing custom fabrication on the chassis. This would have been back in 2007/2008.

At that time, they were doing an early prototype cooling system for rackmount computing. They had essentially done the redneck setup by mounting a radiator from a Honda Accord onto the rear panel of the cabinet with a couple large fans. Was cool to see. Actually looked pretty neat too.

There may be some different staff there now as one of the guys I know has moved on, but in general, I have found them to be a very good group of people to work with and they know their stuff. They have done a lot of OEM work for other PC companies, and I believe they currently license their pre-plumbed CPU coolers under the Corsair brand.

13 seconds shy of 16 hours.

What is your sense on the ability of Cointerra to be able to deliver in January?

I feel lucky that I've managed to sell a number of my units when I did at the prices I did (about 25% of my holdings). Even then, I'm still sure that I probably am your largest note holder (if not, close to it). Having said that, I do wish to see a fair and equitable way to see revenues distributed, but I did probably take the biggest risk of most by investing most of my BTC in your fund day 1 as well as investing some of my own money in the BFL debacle (at least I'll see miners come in the next week probably).

I am guessing that based on what I'm reading, I would be hard pressed to see a break even based on my remaining notes?

It will ask the moment you log in. A popup window will appear. The order status at this point is something along the lines of "Waiting for acceptance"... or something like that. Once you agree, it will go back to "Processing".

There... now make me some dividends...

I managed to confirm my order. I had to refresh pages sometimes because Cloudflare would kick in. It took a bit, but I did manage to accept and confirm the order is now "Processing".

No effin kidding. Though I did offer to take my 180 ghash worth of singles in jallys. Not sure if they'll bite though. Getting anxious now that they have actually started putting units out the door.

You have multiple factors to consider. Electrical service coming in, which can be 60 amp, 100 amp, 200 amp, etc., and then the individual circuits. Most of the time, individual circuits are only 15 amp. Best thing to consider is either separating loads on individual circuits, or running a high amp (like a 30 amp) and run it into a sub panel with some 15 amp circuits, Then run a strip on each circuit.

My miners have kicked on as well. The stratum proxy on a couple of my BAMT miners had automatically started working away as well. All good to go, just hoping the pool will start getting some block rewards now.

I guess it's one way to try and keep the network difficulty at bay for the next round...

I haven't been able to connect to stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333 for about 15 minutes now.