jbb555

Presumably this flaw explains why zip files are so obscure and difficult to use. (Yeah it's no great but clearly it's not been an issue)

I'm not a fan of BAD change.

Who does that?

Ultimately a clear majority of the UK population is in favor of leave. This has increased since the vote as the lies of the remain campaign proved not to be true.

Much of the remain support is concentrated in a handful of London consistences meaning that almost all english MPs have a significant majority of leave supporters.

They have to vote for that or they won't be selected in a future election.

In any case. If the government doesn't follow the will of the people, then the 18 million people who votes leave will ensure that we have a new government one way or another.

What exactly are people using the linux shell for? It's fun, but given that you can't easily access windows files and you can't use it to run things like the visual C++ compiler you can't easily use it to script windows programs.

What do people actually use it for?

Bitcoin seems to be going through an issue at the moment where many transactions are taking hours to complete due to a large backlog. This might be transient but when I ask any questions about so what happens if volume doubles, I just get attacked for asking such questions.

It seems bitcoin just doesn't scale very well.

So my question is does ZCash? How will it cope with current bitcoin volumes? Or 10 times? Or 1000?

People STILL confuse the construction of software with the construction of buildings. We can estimate fairly accurately how long it will take to build a building once we have reasonable plans for it. I can pretty accurately say that it will take about 4 minutes to build the software once I have the plans to build it. The compiler pretty much automates the whole job.

Writing software is NOT construction. Much of it isn't even design. Most of it is gathering detailed requirements and writing them down in unambiguous form (code).

My asking how long it's going to take to write a software it's like saying to a building contractor how long will it take to design every single detail of a city block including gathering all the requirements.

Also the requirements for software are much more detailed than building. 100000 lines of code represents 100000 decisions. I bet not many buildings have 100000 decisions. And 10000 is tiny for a software project.

Yeah sure. But it's not a good solution really. First of all I don't really want to pay any more. Secondly, if everyone has to do this in order to get their transactions processed in a reasonable time, then nobody is any better off..

As others have said "mining" is really not a good name for what is happening. What the miners are really doing is the work that is necessary to confirm and secure the transactions.

When they do that, if they are the first miner to come up with the values required to confirm the transaction they are allowed to add a transaction of their own which "transfers" some bitcoins from "nowhere" to them, thus getting rewarded for their work. it is this that incentivizes people to "mine" but it's not the purpose.

I've had transactions waiting for 8 hours now for a confimation. And some more new ones this morning for 3 hours now without a single confirmation.

All of these contains the default fees added by the clients and which were sufficient last month.

I was trying to demonstrate bitcoin to some friends last night. They made wallets and I tried to transfer some coin to them. After an hour they were saying it would have been quicker to drive to the ATM and get cash. I doubt they'll look at bitcoin again now.

This needs fixing and this needs fixing quickly. Waiting half an hour for a few confirmations used to be a problem that needed fixing. Waiting hours will quickly kill bitcoin.

This looks good to me. It looks like it is not just another bitcoin clone, it has genuine, and well thought out improvements. I'll probably try it out unlike all the others.

A whole article about why space elevators would be better than rockets with only the slight problem that we don't know of any way to build one with any materials we have.

If we are allowed to do that, I think we should use star trek transporters. They would be even cheaper and even better. We don't know how to build those either...

If you have windows "Pro".... Which most people won't have.

I think we should define a low level learning virtual machine. Basically something like a C64 but updated to be a bit more modern. Have a virtual 4 core CPU that runs a fake machine code, have memory mapped IO so that you can put a pixel on a screen by writing a byte to memory, you can read a mouse position from a fixed memory address etc.

You could make it more advanced by using the IO. We could define things like a 3d graphics interface by defining virtual registers that take commands. Pretend hardware instead of an API.

Basically a fake blank computer for learning fun stuff on that's a bit more modern than an old spectrum of C64 but still (emulated) basic hardware and no layers or libraries...

Perhaps if it became popular people might create the actual hardware... Hmm, I might make one :P

> It did one thing and did it better than anything else of the same era

I would argue that it still does. It's not a great language, but to just get something working I still can't think of anything better that doesn't require lots of planning or infrastructure