Have they (or any other exchange) published any statistics about their users?

I recall Huobi's CEO, in early 2014, saying that they had about 10'000 active users.  MtGOX used to claim that they had a million clients, but when the database was leaked it was found that only some 70'000 accounts had any significant balance.   (But many clients may have withdrawn before Mark locked the doors.)

Sorry to interrupt, did anyone ask about the Hat in the Cat?

Okular is a free PDF viewer for linux.  Does it work?  There are others but I don't recall their names.

Try also "cat file.pdf | pdf2ps | ps2pdf > altfile.pdf" and then open the latter.

If Okular works you could try configuring the browser to use it to view PDF files.

Depends, does it wear a hood, is it in the mood, and is that good food?

Nothing, the October 15th tax deadline just passed, also sprach Barry Sielbert.

Shouldn't you ask that on this thread instead?

Individuals are different in many ways, but the differences between two random individuals of the same "race" are much larger than the difference between the averages of two "races".

In my life as teacher, I have yet to see evidence that "intelligence" (whatever that means) is a matter of genes.  On the other hand, I have much evidence that it is not, it is a matter of culture and attitude.  For example, when I was an engineering undergrad, more than half of my classmates were sons of Japanese immigrants. "Japanese" then was synonym of "nerdy guy who studies hard and gets the top grades". That's because their parents (who mostly came to Brazil to work as farm laborers) valued education highly, and pressed them hard.  But the next generation of Japanese-Brazilians was nothing like that; on the contrary, they were often the laziest lowest-scoring in the class.  My explanation for the difference is that their parents had absorbed the Brazilian culture in place of the Japanese one, including in particular a laissez-faire attitude towards their children's education.

But that is not what racists want to hear, because the whole point of racism is to "prove" that *all* people of the other "race" should be kept out of good jobs, government posts, land, good schools, our women, whatever -- because they are intrinsically "inferior", and should just accept their "proper place".  

There are many things wrong with that view, starting with the fact that, for any measure, the distributions of two "races" will overlap so much that a good-scoring guy of either "race" would probably have higher score than, say, 80% of the guys from the other "race".  Also, as any computer programmer knows, differences in "hardware" (genetics) are usually dwarfed by differences in "software" (learning and attitudes); and, even for the most complicated tasks, a 10% increase in "computing power" may not make any practical difference.  Finally, racists implicitly assume that people who score higher in some measure should have more rights to something than people who score lower; which is a non-sequitur.  

In fact, egalitarianism is not saying that "all humans are equal", but "all humans, irrespective of any differences in any measure, should have the same basic rights".  Such as the right to vote and be voted for government posts, live wherever they want and afford, put their their kids in the same schools as anyone else, apply for any job, marry whoever would accept them, and so on.

Egalitarianism is so strong because many people, even educated ones, eventually realize that it is a good idea.  

"Each liter of seawater contains, on average, about 13 billionths of a gram of gold."
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gold.html

So each cubic meter of seawater (1000 liters) has 0.000013 grams of gold.

Let's say that it costs 1 US$ to process 1 cubic meter of seawater and extract all its gold.

To break even, the price of gold would have to be 1$ / 0.000013g = 77'000 dollars per gram.

If the processing cost were 100 US$ per cubic meter, of course, it would be 7'700'000 dollars per gram, and so on.

Indeed they don't; as I said, "with no controls".  But if perchance they find out...

I am not exggerating. I am sure that most employers would not consider mining a "personal use", and would not tolerate it, as a matter of principle.

Hm, perhaps someone is trying to pull the judicial equivalent of a DDOS? Namely, commit so many violations and crimes that the charges will lapse before the investigators can get them all properly written up? 

Mining is not "personal use", but a commercial activity.

Most companies would not mind if the employee uses their printers/copies for occasional  personal use, but would be very unhappy if someone uses them to make money on the side.

Most places I worked, public and private, would leave at least some supplies for employees in a self-serve cabinet, with no controls.  Taking a stapler home and letting kids use it at school would be a petty violation.  Taking any supplies to sell them, or to use them in a private business, would be grounds for dismissal.


It is not safe to assume that... On the contrary, the company would probably want to make an example of the employee, to deter all the others  from doing the same.  I am pretty sure that the companies I worked for would do that.  The other employees would not see that as an injustice.

You must have seen the news about that prof who used a cluster at his university to mine bitcoins.  I don't know how it ended, but the univ wanted to fire him, and the govt agency that paid for the cluster wanted to sue him.


One must read the contract carefully, it may have limits on usage, or it may forbid commercial activities. Besides, each apartment surely has a separate circuit breaker box that limits the power consumption to a few kW.  One must also worry whether the wiring of the power outlets will support the load. 

Just a moment; HELLO, IS ANYBODY HERE?

Well, I guess I have a more pessimistic notion of financial types, be they bitcoiners or not...

People who bought SMBIT shares six months ago, when BTC was ~600$, must be getting uneasy and thinking of liquidating before the price falls even further.  So Barry has to tell them something that would "explain" the drop as a temporary thing. 

I don't believe in that "tax seling" explanation, and I suspect that he doesn't believe it either.  I don't see evidence that China has relinquished control, and China obviously does not care about that deadline.   So he cannot say it explicitly; if the price keeps falling for the next few days (which it may or may not do, who knows), that would harm his credibility.  Better just mention the two things side by side, and let the readers infer a connection.  "Wait, I never said that!"...

By the way, the last udate to that thread shows that SMBIT bought ~1500 BTC a couple of days ago, and now sold ~1500 BTC.  So that buy may have been just a glitch in the monitoring.

You ask me?

I suppose now it is being printed with a 3D printer to be attached to a gun, is that right?

Read carefuly, he did not say "the price is falling because American bitcoiners are tax selling". 

"Surprised how few are connecting the recent drop of the DJA to the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings."
"I am feeling good about the DJA right now.  Plus, the Russia Formula 1 race is finally behind us."

"Free electricity" often means mining at one's workplace, with one's employer paying the bill.  That is definitely theft from the company (or from its shareholders).  The extra drain from the miner may be small compared to the company's normal consumption, and the chances of it being detected may be very small; but if the theft is discovered, the employee will probably be fired, and perhaps criminally charged.

Wasn't it a weekly magazine?

Children are not racist.  Human beings in isolation are not racist.  On the contrary, humans have an innate tendency to marry outside their immediate group.

Racism is learned, and a social thing: always the result of some part of a population fighting against another part for resources, jobs, power, whatever.   Skin color and other superficial traits are just an easy way to define who is "us" and who is "them", especially if the two groups came from different parts of the world.  But when those markers won't work, some other marker can be used -- language, religion, pedigree, etc..   Skin color only became significant in Europe when European countries established colonies abroad, and had to separate themselves from the natives to prevent them from infiltrating their local administration and weakening their control.  In the Americas, physical appearance was instrumental to oppress the natives first, the African slaves later.  Skin color worked in the US initially, but when races started to mix, the "whites" had to invent the "one drop rule", based on pedigree, to preserve the "black"/"white" dichotomy.  Hair and eye color are as conspicuous as skin color, but were never used as "racial" markers in historical Europe, for the obvious reason.  Religion, even just the brand of Christianity, served for the purpose  in Europe for centuries after the Protestant revolt, and is still used in Northern Ireland, Palestine, Bosnia x Serbia, Hindus x Muslims, and many other places.  I have been told (don't know if seriously) that the only distinctive marker that Serbians and Croatians could find was the alphabet used to write their language.  In India, the caste system seems to be maintained mostly by pedigree; that is also how the Japanese separate themselves from the pariah who do "impure" jobs, and from the "Koreans" who have been living in Japan for generations.

"Race" is not a biologically meaningful concept.   Racists hate modern genetics, because it thoroughly trashes the axioms that they built their worldview and their lives upon.  Humans are exceedingly mobile and promiscuous, and genetically varied.  Skin color is a trait that evolves quickly in response to the environment; the light-skinned American natives in Patagonia probably descended from dark-skinned Peruvian natives who descended from light-skinned Siberians who descended from dark-skined Africans.  Under the skin, there is much more diffrerence between individuals of the same race than between the "average" individuals of two different races.  (I recall a marathon in an Olimpiad, many years ago, when the first three places were an Italian, a Japanese, and a Kenyan -- who crossed the line within a few meters of each other, after a 40'000 meter run.  That means, less than 0.1% difference in their running speeds.  So it seems that race is a totally negligible factor in races, at least.  )

If one rounds the average time between generations to 30 years, a person living today had about two ancestors of the same age living 30 years ago, four living 60 years ago, and so on.   600 years ago --- that is, 20 generations ago -- the count would be 2²⁰, which is about one million.  While Caesar was having fun in bed with Cleopatra, some 2000 years ago, each person alive today had about 2⁶⁶ slots on his genealogical tree.  So, in order to ensure one's purity of blood, one has only to verify that none of those 73'786'976'294'838'206'464 ancestors, give or take a few quintillion, was African, Jew, Latino, Pariah, Hindu, Mongol, Samaritan, or whatever other "inferior race" is in one's book.

Of course, most of those potential ancestors were the same person; that is to say, the ancestry of one person may have been "only" a few thousand distinct individuals, 600 years ago; and probably "only" a million, 2000 years ago.   Still, those ancestors were probably scattered all over the world; and each one of the person's genes may have been inherited from any one of those ancestors, almost independently.   (If you are French, for example, you may well be a descendant of the king of the Carijó from Southern Brazil, whose son was taken to Normandy in the early 1500s and there died as a respected citizen, with many children and grandchildren.  Recently I learned that, according to ancient historians, some of my ancestors may have came from Paflagonia (not Patagonia!), a kingdom on the northern shore of the Black Sea that I had never heard of before. It is told that they left their country to fight in the Trojan War, and could not return home because of a coup d'état, so they wandered around and finally settled in the marshes where Venice is now.  Oh, and I bet that I am also a descendant of Caesar and Cleopatra, through their son who lived in Rome before being forgotten by History.)

No human population on Earth has been isolated from the rest of mankind for more than about 50'000 years.  One population of Negritos, in a small island of the Andaman Archipelago, may win the title as the most isolated. To this day, they kill anyone who lands on their island, even shipwrecked sailors.  They have been there for 60'000 years, perhaps, since the sea level rose and the land bridge to the Andaman was submerged.  But no one knows how long they have been applying that highly selective immigration policy.  Anyway, 60'000 years may be enough for natural selection to change some vital traits (like resistance to local parasites, tolerance to local diet, and making enough melanin to stand in the tropical sun without your skin immediately divorcing you), but not enough for really fundamental changes.

No culture has been so strict about racial purity that it could prevent "foreign" genes from jumping the fence and climbing through the window.  Even the "modern men" of Europe are now known to have interbred with the "primitive" Nanderthals that they replaced some 30'000 years ago.  African and Asian individuals have been traveling and settling down in Europe, and vice-versa, since humans developed feet.

Fact is, we are all of the same race -- the Mongrels...

Why do you want to know whether I got a minute?