> So I mean for today, You could have, some bitcoin business have a tab, so you pay them and you work your tab there and presumably you can cash your tab out if you don't use it. If you have repeat custom... or maybe the shops in the local area could make a shared tab or something in anticipation of... you know somebody in the local area ... technology expert could make a local bitcoin tab that's interoperable between the shops and some sort of app to do it.
There are a couple the deal with choice and happiness that I found very enlightening. Matthieu Ricard's may be one of them, and was already mentioned. There is at least one other and maybe more on that general subject though.
I actually had an argument with my statistics professor about this...
The question she gave was basically this: 'The king has one sibling, what is the probability that it is a boy?'
I actually took an opposing view to her initially and then came back the next day saying that it is ambiguous and depends on what we assume about the king, but she wouldn't even agree with me on that.
George Carlin is a clear thinker and very funny, definitely one of my favorite comedians. I like heady comedy. He simplifies things though, and this is a good example. Humanity is causing geological-scale effects on the planet and we need to address that.
It's not as if the planet were being damaged already and we just came along and tried to stop it, we're the ones causing the damage. He's correct to say that '90%' of species that have existed have already gone extinct(actually, I believe it's much, much higher than that, I think 99.9%). However, if Bill Bryson is to be believed, the rate of extinction has risen dramatically due to humanity, I believe Bryson said that it is 5 times greater than what it would be sans-humanity. There are times in the earth's past where there has been a much higher rate of extinction for a short time, the most recent event like this took out the dinosaurs. I believe the first one occurred when the atmosphere was 'poisoned' with oxygen from the first plant-like bacteria. As thinking entities, it's our responsibility to not allow our effects on the planet to have such a catastrophic outcome.
The article answers that question, if you had bothered to read it. Current hardware RNGs rely on Newtonian physics and generate numbers which -- if you had sufficient knowledge of starting conditions -- you could predict. The method described in the article uses quantum entanglement to produce completely unpredictable numbers.
Wow, you're both douchy and wrong. The article doesn't say anything about the techonology which I linked to. Did YOU "bother to read it"?
The article says that Newtonian physics does not allow any randomness, which is fairly obvious and has nothing to do with the hardware I'm asking about.
The article also discusses 'pseudo-random number generators', which, I'm assuming since this is HN, you know are purely software-based.
The Wikipedia page which I linked to, claims that currently used hardware uses 'thermal noise' and 'other quantum phenomena', which you might have realized "if you had bothered to read it".
If you don't mind now, I was really hoping to learn something about a technology which I am sincerely interested in.
