enko

Not to nitpick, but wombats can actually run pretty fast when they want to - up to 40kph. And I reckon kangaroos, while fast, aren't very manoeuvrable; if they're on a line they tend to stay on that line, right into the path of the vehicle.

Koalas, though, geeze - they're slow, drunk usually, and don't give a damn. I almost hit one once, slamming on the brakes and almost going off the road, and the damn thing didn't react at all, just kept unconcernedly strolling across. Doubt anything can stop them except fences combined with safe crossings (tunnels, wildlife bridges).

> during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami when broken hazardous waste containers eventually found their way onto Somali shores leaving a large majority of the population suffering from various illnesses, such as radiation sickness

This sounds extremely doubtful. Tsunami-borne hazardous waste containers breaking up in Somalia en masse? Radioactive waste!? And a "large majority" of Somalians were poisoned by this?

I don't usually like to play the wiki-pedant but a very big [citation needed] on that.

Sorry. Pretty late night where I am, and a couple too many bottles of, uh, "rose water".

Anyway my point was - the lack of a real fight doesn't have much to do with the rule change, since it was present last year as well. And anyway, the season's just beginning - let's see what happens.

I have to admit I love the sound of a good engine - and aeroplanes, and boats, trains, everything. It's the sound of power. Watching cars race without that sound is a far less emotive experience. One of the commentators on tonight's Bahrain race said that the safety car sounded much better than the race cars, and I wistfully agreed.

That said, I do think some people overdo it a bit and I actually like that FIA is willing to force innovation, even if it's (initially?) unpopular.

The article title might have given it away ...

> there are no fights to watch at the top

Were we watching the same race? The last 11 laps were an epic battle between Rosberg and Hamilton, and the mob contending for points was no less thrilling. I thought it was a great race, at least at the end.

And have you already forgotten 2013? Red Bull won every single race in the second half of the season. Yeah, Mercedes is on top, for now, it's not like a constructor has never been dominant before.

My opinion is irrelevant. And if your point had any validity, it would transfer right across.

You're changing the topic - you know I'm right. Take it to heart, please. These things are important.

> There's nothing in the comment you replied to that indicates any cavalierness about "gay rights"

You missed the point. The GP's comment, by dismissing gay right's relevance to mozilla, implicitly treated the matter in a "cavalier" manner.

Let's do a little find/replace to prove the point. Eich donated $1000 to the KKK. The GP notes that lynching niggers has nothing to do with the day to day operations of Mozilla, so what's the big deal. The parent is dismayed by how trivial black person's rights are considered by HN. What's your comment, tptacek?

After using the toilet, do you wash your hands, or just wipe them?

You've just demonstrated why washing toilets are superior. I cannot understand our misplaced, hollow pride in not adopting something which simply works better. I've even heard some especially crazy people try to say the japanese toilets are "perverted" - the hold tradition has on some people is just insane.

Japanese toilets are simply better. For some bizarre reason we've resisted adopting them here. It boggles the mind.

> an ongoing conversation Patrick and I had been having with Colin, not all of which HN is aware of

The knowledge that there's missing context, which was provided in some sort of back room inside-baseball hn-elites secret discussion to which I was not a party and will never be granted access, kind of makes me wish the article had never been posted in the first place.

"Here's my article - which you'll never understand, because you weren't there, because you're not cool enough". Great.

I understand and agree with, to some extent, the argument against centralisation. However, I don't see how this fork solves it - it's switching from one form of centralisation (ASICs) to another (huge clusters of mining rigs).

GPUs may be ubiquitous but it's not viable to run a mining rig with just one, which means that all those GPU miners are basically running "specialised hardware" too. Joe schmoe does not just happen to have an 8-GPU tower computer lying around.

As much as $2000 GPU mining boxes have? To go with their 50c+/kwh electricity prices? Yes, yes they have.

> Nothing is gained.

Well, where's the gain from mandating GPUs?

> increased efficiency does not add value anywhere

Back to CPUs, then?

I've seen some mining rooms which disprove your notion that GPU-only mining will stop the capitalised players having an advantage. They always will.

And yes, it's always a balancing act. The network adjusts the difficulty based on total hashrate, not on power efficiency, which is just an overhead. More and more people will pile in until the difficulty is high enough to render mining unviable. However, ASICs at least will shift the balance more towards hardware costs vs the raw power cost that it is now, and reduce the number of useless components that need to be manufactured, etc.

If we're going to do that, why not get rid of GPUs, too. ASICs are merely an efficiency increase, just like GPUs were.

I somehow suspect, however, the proponents of this change are not "regular joes", who might have an intel HD2000 in their laptop. And if we're going to play the "democratising" card, with GPU mining it's a lottery of where you happen to live - electricity prices vary wildly around the globe. ASICs help to take that out of the equation, so if anything they're more "democratic"!