ckastner

94 ms·

961.
by ckastner 9y ago
The point was that popularity can be a misleading metric. Twitter might be ubiquitous (a household name, as you said), but just like Iron Man, its popularity is not proportional to its financial success.
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by ckastner 9y ago
As a metric, popularity can be misleading. Take Hollywood, for example: few things nowadays are as ever-present as motion pictures, but the total box office revenue for 2016 was around $11bn [1]. That's about 19 days worth of revenue f
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by ckastner 9y ago
After glancing over the whitepaper, I get the motivation, but I just don't see how this scheme is viable, financially. Participants with little storage to give, have little to earn, but must remain connected to the network. Why bother
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by ckastner 9y ago
> It's mysterious to me how literally every action a feminist takes is somehow directly responsibile for all problems that befall them, with every action that might possibly hurt a man being somehow a catastrophe in the making. As I
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by ckastner 9y ago
AFAICT, the source you cited (dated 2013) quantifies the investors merely as 'many Spaniards', and from the grandparent's source, we know that the Bitcoin market cap around that time was around $1bn, which is not even roundin
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by ckastner 9y ago
Your conclusion is wrong. A profit is a realized financial gain. In a given period, income surpassed expenses. A business failure is a business that has failed, it has ended. A lack of profit can lead to failure, but in no way implies it.
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by ckastner 9y ago
By that logic, any company not yet bankrupt could be called profitable. Profit is a reflection of past performance, not future potential.
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by ckastner 9y ago
The grandparent's argument wasn't against fans, it was against cults.
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by ckastner 9y ago
> but by then Tesla will have over 50% of the world's battery production I'm not sure whether you are referring to control or consumption, but in case it's the former: the cells Tesla uses are produced by Panasonic, so tec
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by ckastner 9y ago
> Having sounded the alarm bells, a group of benevolent white-hat hackers from the Ethereum community rapidly organized. They analyzed the attack and realized that there was no way to reverse the thefts, yet many more wallets were vulne
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by ckastner 9y ago
Thank you -- that's exactly how I feel about the Braun reference. The "program" here being one of the simplest imaginable, with literally thousands of years of prior art.
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by ckastner 9y ago
No. My argument was that a bottle was a vessel with a cap, and evoking Braun's “less but better” approach, while interesting (iconic, even) in itself, is unnecessary. To me, it merely sounds like pointless name-dropping.
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by ckastner 9y ago
I do believe they are trying to do something, but it has more to do with marketing and product placement than with design. Lastly, we did our best to follow the “less but better” teachings of 1960’s Braun designs. These enduring designs ar
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by ckastner 9y ago
My thoughts exactly. The movie depicts a future in which nourishment has become purely functional -- not by choice, but because food resources are so scarce. (And to top it off, the function is served by the worst "waste" imaginab
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by ckastner 9y ago
Soylent takes its name from a 1960s sci-fi thriller starring Charlton Heston (the website maintains they actually got the idea from the book on which the film is based. Sure, guys. Sure.) In the movie, there’s a massive food shortage, and
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by ckastner 9y ago
> 2) Because a permission-less censorship-resistant decentralized financial system has the potential to truly improve society, hence worth spending energy on it. The other side of the coin: a permission-less censorship-resistant decentra
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by ckastner 9y ago
Or rather from Panasonic. That's where Tesla get's its batteries from. (Tesla financed the Gigafactory, but it is operated by Panasonic, and they previously bought their lithium-battery cells from Panasonic. This is according to T
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by ckastner 9y ago
According to one theory, people can generally be classified either in people who are satisfied when something is good enough (satisficiers), or people who are driven to maximize every result (maximizers). https://en.wikipedia.org
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by ckastner 9y ago
Interesting, I would have thought it to be too dangerous. How do you get the necessary traction in eg: a braking scenario on snow? Are there special tires for that? Yes, cars in the winter can be horrible. Anytime Vienna gets a few centimet
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by ckastner 9y ago
I'm curious what results one could see if this experiment were repeated in any of the winter months.
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by ckastner 9y ago
Just to be clear: I wasn't making an argument in favor of states, merely in favor of a regulating body. Some industries already self-regulate precisely to preempt regulation by a government agency, as in: "we're well-behaved
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by ckastner 9y ago
> But when you have two funding systems, where one is completely open, and the other requires certain guarantees (identity, legal responsibility), the first is always going to be full of scammers. Exactly. It always cracks me up when peo
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by ckastner 9y ago
> The allure for people starting a company is that you can raise millions and give 0% of your company away. Some people will scam, it's true maybe a lot will, but some will undoubtedly start something big and will want to do more th
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by ckastner 9y ago
Agreed. The fact that the site only supports Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ether makes me even suspect that it's only purpose is to fan the flames.
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by ckastner 9y ago
The title is a bit ambiguous to me, so to be clear: the $400 are to activate the service, without which a placeholder image will be displayed instead. It's not "oh, you hotlinked one of our images, now pay $400". (I'm no
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by ckastner 9y ago
I don't think that the advertisement itself is the issue, but rather the medium chosen for it. Speaking for myself, I expect /etc/motd to contain information deemed relevant to me by the responsible sysadmin. I feel like this
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by ckastner 9y ago
> The online ESTA form does not "approve" someone to enter the US I did not claim that it did. I was speaking only of the ESTA application itself.
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by ckastner 9y ago
The point is that if his name was on some blacklist or no-fly-list, then this should have had its effect during the (automated) ESTA application process.
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by ckastner 9y ago
What puzzles me is that the ESTA application was approved in the first place. If they were going to deny him entry, why approve it? Could there be a more benign explanation for this issue? For example: his ESTA approval expired (it's v
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by ckastner 9y ago
> but as a trade-off, it says in the terms that they can deny it for any reason with no questions Notably, the Customs and Border Patrol officer at your point of entry can do this [1], on the spot. [1] https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov

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