Your points are valid. IMO the key tradeoff b/w gold (analog) and bitcoin (digital) is extra resiliency vs usability.

If there were a systemic collapse breaking governments, knocking off power and telecom networks etc, gold would be immediately most valuable. But more quickly than fiat, bitcoin would be useful.

Power and telecom systems are more resilient to systemic collapse (& have more bouncebackability) than a functioning government and its currency. Some semblance of critical systems would come online whether put up by government, armies, warlords, cooperatives etc (See Somalia as an example). When those systems are online, bitcoin can be sent and received.

In short: in terms of usability: Fiat > Bitcoin > Gold in terms of resilience: Gold > Bitcoin > Fiat

Am I missing anything here?

Paper currency is often used after the government backing it collapses.

Not only that, people will use anything as currency in the absence of fiat. Cigarettes, tea bags, polished rocks, etc.

Are miners still going to be operating in this post-collapse environment?

Whoever operates is going to become rich. So someone will step up to satisfy the need.

You need a hash rate at least vaguely close to the pre-collapse hash rate, or else the network will grind to a halt. Will they be physically capable of that?

This assumes a sudden collapse event happening within the 10 minutes that it takes to reset the hash rate. I'm struggling to think of global scenarios where that can happen so quickly.

What are the chances that collapse is a sudden event vs a cascading deterioration event?

It takes two weeks to reset the hash rate, if the hash rate stays constant. If it starts dropping, the time goes up.

can you explain this further?

Sure! The difficulty is supposed to adjust approximately every two weeks, and it readjusts based on how quickly blocks were found after the previous readjustment. The target is for blocks to take an average of 10 minutes.

The trick is that the difficulty adjustment time is not actually measured in weeks (or seconds), but in blocks. Since blocks are supposed to take 10 minutes, the difficulty readjusts every 2016 blocks. It looks at the time needed to complete the last 2016 blocks, and readjusts so that the next 2016 blocks will take two weeks at that rate.

If the hash rate is steady, then that readjustment will happen close to the two-week mark, and of course it will do very little because the rate is steady.

If the hash rate is increasing, then the period becomes smaller. As a simplified example, consider what happens if the hash rate is constant for the first week of an adjustment period, and then doubles. The first 1008 blocks took a week. The next 1008 blocks will take about 3.5 days. The next readjustment will therefore happen after about 10.5 days, not 14 days. The real Bitcoin network looks a little bit like this: over its lifetime, the actual difficulty readjustment period has averaged 13.17 days, not 14 days, because of the steadily increasing hash rate.

Now consider the opposite case, where the hash rate is cut in half after a week. The second batch of 1008 blocks will take two weeks, for a total of three weeks.

Worse, consider a case where the hash rate is cut in half every week. You'll (probably) never reach the next difficulty readjustment, and blocks will take longer and longer to mine until they're taking days or weeks instead of just 10 minutes. You could get into a spiral where a single event that significantly cuts the hash rate results in the network becoming much slower and less useful, so people use it less, so miners earn less, so they drop out and the hash rate drops further, etc.

It's hard to say just how the real-world hash rate would change in response to a catastrophe, of course. Maybe that sort of shock wouldn't happen. But this is the general idea of why Bitcoin could run into trouble due to a quick but not quite immediately apocalyptic decrease in the hash rate.

It could be that the rise of 'enlightenment' word occurences in the 1960s refers to the enlightenment as the Buddhists and Zen practitioners speak of it instead of the European context of the word. The rise would map with the counterculture movement of those times which we're still living in.

I thought this might be the case too, but the n-grams for "enlightenment", "Enlightenment", "the Enlightenment", and "The Enlightenment", etc. are all quite different. Lowercase "enlightenment" doesn't show the same pattern as capital-E or with the definite article.

Is there a link between being 'anatomically modern' (as you describe it) and the propensity to develop tools/culture?

The link, I believe, seems weaker than once imagined. Here's a handful more papers/discussion adding to the complexity: http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/07/can-we-retire-60000-yea...

Simple answer is I don't think there's any consensus, but a radically novel view is beginning to emerge, being aided hugely by our newfound ability to genetically sequence ancient fossils.

This is a very interesting idea. Perhaps taping a sample session with some extraordinarily easeful people and showing it to participants can help model the openness involved. I'd be game.

I am not sure that one can learn to have that kind of openness without practicing it oneself. An equally esoteric practice that might help to foster this is the Bohm Dialogue.[1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_Dialogue

I agree that media trading is quite hand-wavy - similar to trading stocks.

That said, it's quite possible that the article mistook 'hit rate' for 'conversion rate'. That would explain why snooping for imps "near bank branches" would make sense. Those customers may be primed for the ad/can convert sooner.

Agreed. Do you think this boom will happen in developed or developing markets?

I would say developed. Innovation demands people having some time, some money and some ambition to create new things.

Hard to know, but i think the next big thing always come from USA, Europe or Japan. The only exception is China that create their own big things.

I think this is a great idea. I'd add that the idea of the mandatory hours in the open plan be sold rather than enforced.

A second point. There is a design challenge here too. How much open is too open? How many cubicles is too closed?

I've known Tony now for 6 years. He's smart and extremely resilient - two great qualities of an entrepreneur.

I know little about GPU compilers though. What are the key factors to make this successful?

I can't thank you enough!

There are a number of factors that will make this product successful:

1. The compiler needs to work well. 2. We need to teach average developers that they can build new applications/algorithms that were previously unfeasible. 3. We need to reduce Hadoop costs for large corporations.

Simple enough, right? :) Also worth noting that ParallelX will be an Heroku add-on as well (with a freemium plan!)

Does anyone know how to remove the reminder to turn on notifications?

Details: - Using latest iOS

- All notifications are off in iPhone's settings

- Every time I switch to the app, a full page message reminds me to turn on notifications (even just swiping to Control Center reproduces the full page message. Aggressive!)

- In the Facebook messenger settings, there are only 2 options: to "Turn off until 8:00am" or "Turn off for 1h".

If this is intentional (or rather if it persists past today), Facebook just lost the last stronghold they had on me. I use them for nothing but messaging. And the one caveat I have for using them is that I only check in when the thought occurs to me not as I'm pinged.

If intentional (speculation coming), I bet they've run the engagement #s to show it makes sense. But this is a bad principle that is pretty restrictive for a company at their scale. They've pretty much increased the cost of cognitive cost of using their app.

The facebook messenger user in me is hoping this is a feature that times out after the first day of installs. Otherwise goodbye Zuck.

I like this idea and was thinking just the same. The real advantage is customizability at scale.