contulluipeste's comments

contulluipeste | 12 years ago | on: Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim

The composability of vi/vim is not only its power, but its weakness. It's like a non-redundant language in which (almost) everything can be validly interpreted leaving no room for error detection. In vim nearly everything can be interpreted as a command and executed (sometimes even without strong visual feedback to be noticed) which means a lot of rope for mistakes. And mistakes human do. And for (such imperfect) humans editors are.

contulluipeste | 12 years ago | on: Bitcoin and Thoughts from Bill Gates

It's interested to disagree exactly with what you agree and otherwise:

- "What problem does it solve?" It gives you freedom, true freedom! You send to whomever you wish and freely receive from anyone anytime from everywhere! No red tape involved, no fiscal infrastructure needed, no political settings getting in your way, no many other bigger-than-you problems. Freedom!

-"What backs it other than speculation?" (I'm sorry that I have to sound redundant, but...) Freedom! Anyone wishing to use a free currency will opt for it or something similar.

- "Many bad actors in the market with little regulation." Well, I admit that the other side of the coin named "freedom" is anarchy. It scares you and you seek shelter from the wild west land of virtual currencies, but other see opportunities in there and are willing to take necessary risks.

-"Consumer unfriendly: the average «man on the street» can't secure his wallet file and even many technically sharp people have been ripped off." The friendliness is an engineering problem, and the perception is a psychological one. Both can be addressed just like so many other like it. The average Joe just doesn't think now that the inflation or other aspects of fiat-currency is ripping him off, because the work in this regard was done.

-"Extreme volatility and lack of liquidity make it a poor store of value or unit of record, two things that are extremely important in a currency." After the MtGox exit the market is actually unusually stable! And the depth of the market only gets deeper and with it - the stability of it's price relative to other currencies.

You say you see potential with micropayments, but in the current setting, the "dust" transactions are penalized with transfer fees. According to http://bitcoinfees.com/ if the amount is lower than 0.01 Bitcoin an amount of 0.0001 Bitcoin is perceived. At the current price (~630 USD/Bitcoin) the penalty limit is $6,3 and if Bitcoin's price will go up so will this limit. If the Bitcoin will rise 10 times, that 0.0001 Bitcoin fee will be 63 USD cents which means that even if a Bitcoin is fungible up to eight subunit decimals, it will count only for fine-division of large numbers, not micro-payments.

So you may be skeptical regarding the Bitcoin, but IMHO - for the wrong reasons.

contulluipeste | 12 years ago | on: Have Gravitational Waves Been Detected?

That's how the current estimation of the universe age was made (only it was about the background space temperature of about 4 Kelvin). This time, by measuring magnetic waves they seek to find a (even slight) difference in expanding directions.

/not-a-scientist-either

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