In order to avoid confusion, I feel it necessary to point out that it is "Joe Gratz, a San Francisco-based patent lawyer who is representing Twitter in a patent dispute" who said the above quote and not the President of the United States.
While I'm sure that every member of HackerNews would read the article first, clarification may help our visitors who decide to skim the comments =)
>From what I can tell, one of the settings used to deal with division by 0 is the so-called Riemann sphere, which is where we take a space shuttle and use it to fly over and drop a cow on top of a biodome, and then have the cow indiscriminately fire laser beams at the grass inside and around the biodome. That's my intuitive understanding of it anyway.
also:
>Our cow isn't staring into infinity. It's looking down at infinity, observing infinity with detached understanding. If our cow were not so enlightened, and also had the facial muscles, it might betray the subtlest of smiles at infinity's infinity face, for infinity's turbid fractal whirlpools and vast lethargic swamps are but swathes of data like any other to this cow.
What may not be obvious without (or, actually, even with) reading the actual article is that that stuff about cows on biodomes actually is a (rather facetious) way of describing what the Riemann sphere is.
> You might be wondering why we don't just ask a biologist about these mysteries. The reason is because you're inside a car right now, I'm driving, we're lost, both of us are tourists, and I'm one of those people that would sooner burn hours of gasoline/diesel than ask for directions. You also suspect I might be some kind of criminal, so you're afraid of bringing up the issue. All around it's pretty awkward in here.
One of the coolest parts of the article is at the very end when he algorithmically constructs music with the sierpinski triangle. http://www.oftenpaper.net/img/sierzrp1.mp3
The Zimbabwean dollar analogy is appropriate. Throughout its wild swings and hyperinflation, it was backed by a government. Bitcoin is backed by nothing at all.
How do you establish a new currency? Well it is easy, you take control over some area of land, by military force or by treaty with the present occupiers of it, then you declare that the people living there need to pay you taxes, then you decide what to accept those taxes in. And that's what it means for a government to "back" a currency.
Considering all of the uproar caused by the Newsweek article, if people knowing you have bitcoins puts you in danger, then I'd say it's not a currency I want anything to do with.
Yeah, if everyone knew I had £1,000,000,000.00 hidden under my mattress (and some mattress that would be), then I imagine my life might be under a little more threat than otherwise too.
Err, it is widely known, google "world's richest people". The difference is, as your sibling post pointed out, those people don't have it hidden under a mattress.
Fiat is only "backed by government" in the sense that you're forced to obtain it to pay debts and taxes. Other than that, the Fed can print more to prevent deflation and the Government can act politically to try and stem inflation. There are limits to that control.
Even if Gox didn't lose the money, or at least not as much as we're hearing, who's going to 'bank' with them now? Who would leave their money with someone who will, at any time, cut off access and actively refuse to provide information?
Their value has been totally demolished in the eyes of their current customers and in the eyes of all potential customers. It's so bad that it has set back Bitcoin's adoption by months, if not years. The freaking Wall Street Journal published articles about it!
If this is not a case of fraud, then it is one of the worst and most poorly managed acquisitions in history.
This article was an interesting read. It highlights a lot of the positives of American culture. Sometimes it's good to hear such things. Thank you, I needed that.
Sony also just recently had it featured as a free download for Playstation Plus members.
/Sidenote
On the PS3, it wasn't worth the bandwidth it took to download. The shoddy textures they used for the console version made it look half a step removed from a late gen PS 2 game. The gameplay and the recycled story didn't help either. It felt like they just took extra character models and levels from the previous BioShock games development, reskinned them and sold it to us it back to us with a plot that consisted of cross out the names of characters and places and writing in new ones.
I hope they do better in the future, but playing that game has dispositioned me to thinking it may not be a bad time to shut down and start over: they need some new ideas.
It's been too much of a risk for several years now. If security is truly a deep concern of your, you wouldn't still be running XP.