sadfsa

>porting an old Python codebase to Node

Node is how.

Nobody knows that YOU have the Bitcoins. What they know is that "coin" Y is at Bitcoin address 19FD9iREicdxheyt654FD6fsgdsfh. There is only one way to connect Bitcoin address 19FD9iREicdxheyt654FD6fsgdsfh with Person B: By Person A opening his/her big fat mouth.

Otherwise, the only thing you know about the owner of 19FD9iREicdxheyt654FD6fsgdsfh is approximately what planet they live on.

It's already widespread enough to use for some forms of money laundering. If you want to secretly move money from the US to Europe, just buy BTC in the US, deposit them on Mt. Gox (whose domain is registered in Japan, so I assume the servers are also in Japan), and from there sell the BTC and deposit the resulting money in your Swiss bank account.

It's also widespread enough to use instead of a Swiss bank account to hide money. Just move the money into a Bitcoin wallet, encrypt the wallet, and store copies of it on as many computers, in as many countries as possible.

The Bitcoin protocol fixes the rate of inflation by adjusting the size of the hash that needs to be calculated. Big Bitcoin rigs don't cause inflation, they merely increase the odds that newly minted Bitcoins will accrue to them.

I'm never, ever getting an iPhone.

Ease of programming isn't the issue, at least not when it comes to writing libraries that must interface with C code (as a robot-interfacing library is likely to). Most Schemes and Lisps can interface to C by means of a few simple declarations, while Python requires the C code to accept and return Python's internal data structures (and convert them to a form that can be used by C code), and requires it to register those functions that are to be made visible to Python.

Scheme (PLT)

  (require scheme/foreign)
  (unsafe!)
  (define my-c-lib (ffi-lib "libmylib")) ;; loads libmylib.so
  (define my-c-func (get-ffi-obj 'my_c_func my-c-lib (_fun _long -> _long)))
  ;; The C code does not need to take Scheme into account--
  ;; Existing C libraries can be interfaced with Scheme
  ;; with a trivial amount of effort.

C (to be linked against Python code-- Python can load the resulting shared library as if it was written in Python). Notice that all this code does is interface Linux's htonl function to Python:

  #include <Python.h>
  #include <netinet/in.h>
    
  static PyObject *
  py_htonl(PyObject *self, PyObject *args) {
     long my_arg;
 
     if(!PyArgParseTuple(args, "l", &my_arg))
         return NULL;
     return PyBuildValue("l", htonl(my_arg));
  }
  
  static PyMethodDef methods[] = {
      {"htonl", py_htonl, METH_VARARGS,
       "Demonstrate Python's C interface\n"}
  };
  
  static char module_doc[] = "Demonstration";  
  
  PyMODINIT_FUNC
  initfunc(void) {
    PyInitModule3("mylib", methods, module_doc);
  }

I'll answer the questions in order:

1: If humans lost all technology today, the vast majority of them would die off within a month, because only modern, high-energy farming can get enough food out of the ground to feed them. However, this high-energy farming is only possible because of oil, which not only transports the food, but provides the pesticides without which insects would be eating instead of humans. (Another finite, nonrenewable natural resource with no possible substitute provides fertilizer, without which our food wouldn't even grow).

2: Because, like other species before them, humans are destined to exhaust the resources on which they depend.

3: Nothing has been created (IOW, entropy has not decreased, and matter and energy are still conserved)-- we're merely better at transforming matter and energy than we used to be.

4: Before our developed energy resources were built, they existed as undeveloped energy resources and raw materials. For example, oil drills are made of steel from the ground, not steel magicked into existence, and they are built to remove oil from the ground, not to create oil out of thoughts.

4a: Since the aforementioned resources are finite, they are most certainly running out. The only scientific theory on the timing was formulated by one M. King Hubbert in the 1950s.

4c: General entropy is irrelevant. We're still over a trillion years away from seeing the entire universe burn out. The entropy of this planet, WRT its ability to sustain an ever-increasing human population, is increasing rapidly, as evidenced by global warming, desertification, deforestation, and other very obvious symptoms.

5: Yes, humans are running out of general resources (because they are finite) to transform into security-enhancing resources. No, humans are not running out of chaos, they are creating plenty of it: Polluted drinking water, fishless oceans, coalless coal mines, a toxic atmosphere, and dry oil fields (among other things) are all perfectly useless to our security. Eventually, there isn't going to be anything left but rocks and mud, and then the situation I described in (1) above will exist.

5a: 100,000 years is not a long time compared to the length of the history of life on Earth. There have been other species that lasted longer, but are gone today.

Asking a philosophical question like "what does X really mean" is akin to asking "what data structure would best represent X in a program?" They could even be considered to be the same question. So philosophy is as central to programming as mathematics.

We don't really create-- we merely transform physical resources from one form to another, increasing total entropy in the process. Because entropy can only increase and never decrease, our creative activities are outweighed by the destruction that is a direct consequence of it.

In other words, the only ways we can be "creative of resources" are to create energy from nothing, create matter from nothing, or to reduce entropy without increasing it elsewhere. All three of these are known to be impossible.

This is the second post I've seen from wozad.com where clicking on the headline simply leads to their top-level site (where they try to sell you their service). Smells like spam to me.

Rule of law is a myth. A leaky abstraction. Laws can't rule people because laws don't have minds. People, on the other hand, do have minds, and they use them to create deceptive abstractions like Rule of Law.

If you look behind the abstraction, all Rule of Law means is that those who have the most authority tell you what to do by writing laws, instead of by shouting at you. It then becomes obvious that Rule of Law can't stop slavery, because the rulers can simply tell some people to be slaves by passing a law (which has actually happened before).

I don't know what dictionary you're using, but here are a few definitions from mine:

scalable - How well a hardware or software system can adapt to increased demands.

scalable - the ability of a product or network to accommodate growth

The ability to scale hardware and software to support larger or smaller volumes of data and more or less users.

the ability of a computer system to shrink or grow as requirements change

I disabled Flash when I discovered that if a Web page has multiple Flash objects, then each one gets its own thread. Where one Flash object consumes 20% of an average CPU, 20 of them can render a computer unresponsive.

I also noticed that even if you disable a Flash object with Adblock, it continues to consume CPU cycles.

Flash is Trash.

Loops would probably be easier to teach if they taught "goto" first. "Goto" is easy for beginners to grasp, and loops can be taught in terms of it.

Recursion is easy if you're used to it. A recursive procedure just looks like a loop to me.

I remember checking out a first-year CS textbook from a library, back when I was in HS. It described one-bit adders and other hardware and then prescribed a lab assignment that required stuff I couldn't buy at a computer store.

Later, I signed up for a CS course at a college, and their textbook was just a glorified Visual Basic tutorial, because at the time, all the companies were looking for Visual Basic programmers.

Now, companies are looking for Java programmers, so the schools have switched over to that. Never mind that programming languages have a long history of turning out to be short-term fads (COBOL and Pascal before Java), and the real skill is in understanding the logic underneath the language.

These statements (especially the one about "meaning") show how religion affects a person's view of science. For it to <i>mean</i> something to be human, there has to be someone who intends for it to mean something. Once you accept that God is imaginary, the problem of "meaningless humanity" disappears.

The only problem with your 10-hour workweek is that, as living expenses go down and people try to stop working, wages drop also (because workers won't complain as much if the cuts won't put them out on the street), so you'll still have to work two full-time jobs to keep your cheap house surrounded by endless farmland.

This social factor includes murders and other petty crimes, as well as holocausts, wars, and things of that sort, all of which have a tendency to reduce lifespan, and none of which would stop just because we live 2500 years.

Because, unlike Julian Simon, some people know that the planet is made of matter, and they know about the Law of Matter/Energy Conservation, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and other physical properties of the Universe, any of which by itself would make it impossible for natural resources to be infinite.

Some people have also heard the story of Rapa Nui, whose inhabitants discovered that natural resources are NOT infinite, shortly before their deaths.

Right now, there is a Web site (pogo.com) where people actually pay money to play pointless, boring games (such as Solitaire, Mahjong, etc), all of which are written in Java.

A similar Web site, using Native Client, could roll out higher quality games (like Quake) and charge higher prices for access.