True but that doesn't explain why it is the first proper e -cash. The answer is that , because the blockchain is opaque, monero is fungible in contrast to bitcoin where all interactions on the blockchain are readable by all parties. XMR transactions are actually unlinkable and untraceable unless a private key is provided for purposes of auditability. Therefore, unlike Bitcoin, your funds cannot be blacklisted if they are Politically Incorrect.

There is a megawatt ecat in North Carolina, and it is happily operating day after day, making you look sillier and sillier.

I doubt that. But I am certain that you are a slanderer.

> cold fusion - it worked like claimed, would be damn easy to verify to actually happen.

Firstly, it is increasingly easy to verify low-energy nuclear reactions, as the exponentially expanding body of verifications attests.

Secondly, observations of low-energy nuclear reactions are not dependent upon theoretical explanations.

Thirdly, there are a wide variety of hypothesized mechanisms whereby nucleon-nucleus interactions may occur at low energies. Your comment was quite vague, and its coherence depends upon the structure of a particular hypothesis, which one is left unspecified. This makes the premise irrefutable, and hence meaningless, and therefore the inference is meaningless.

Fourthly, peer review and traditional scientific process is not skipped by all researchers in the field. Yes, there are a number of notable amateur or commercial researchers who are not particularly interested in playing the game we call science. Their success or failure will be measured in practical devices being applied in industry or infrastructure. not by the progress of mainstream science. That's perfectly alright. Science will catch up, if they manage to leap ahead.

Fifthly, there is nothing pseudo-scientific about observing phenomena with careful instrumentation, submitting processes to peer review, hypothesizing physical mechanisms which may underlie the observed phenomena, and formulating experimental procedures to test those hypotheses. This is occuring in LENR, but for the most part it is occurring in minor journals and specialist conferences, whereas in the absence of an irrational aversion to the topic, it would benefit from wider scrutiny and the attention of a larger proportion of the professional scientific community. Given the quality and level of the results observed to date, this would be much to the benefit of society at large, as it can be foreseeably expected to result in technological advance and diffusion at a higher rate than observed so far.

It must be comforting to live in such a simple world, but I suspect you will do a lot of damage before the model discrepancies force an update.

No one sane would consider me conservative, in any regard. I consider AGW a very poor explanation for the established facts (which include dramatic ongoing climate change).

I consider low-energy nuclear reactions to be extremely well-established, and doubt that the physics community will persist in resisting the tide of evidence, now that Robert Park is well-dead and buried.

Other planets are heating as well, indicating a non-anthropic cause.

The dominant greenhouse gas is water vapor. In comparison, everything else is a rounding error.

It doesn't matter though, we will get draconian regulation of fossil fuels. That horse has left the barn. Time to invest in renewables and, yes, low-energy nuclear.

Agreed, Bitcoin's transparent blockchain means all of your activities are published to the world, and tracked actively by dozens of corps and goverment TLAs.

For that reason, I prefer to transact using XMR, which offers cryptographic guarantees of privacy, using an opaque blockchain protected by iterated ring signatures. I can still send BTC to bitcoin wallets by using xmr.to or shapeshift.io, making it no less liquid and usable than bitcoin, and I know that none of my activities can be traced back to me unless I intentionally publish an audit key.

If you transact on the bitcoin blockchain, you are giving up all hope of effective privacy. This IRS guy started out by picking off SilkRoad users by tracing blockchain transactions. Ulbricht was a lucky strike, due to Ross's opsec failures, and did not depend on transaction history, but the little fish he picked off were all victims of the public transparent blockchain.

That's why I think the future of free enterprise lies in opaque blockchains with cryptographic privacy guarantees built-in by default. Anything else leaves you open to blackmail, extortion, or, at the optimistic best, tracking in the manner of facebook/google/et-filia.

I transact in Monero whenever possible for this reason. Particularly if the value of my XMR holdings were to rise dramatically, I would not want my identity tracable through linking to exchange transactions. Whenever I want to spend bitcoin, I do so through xmr.to or shapeshift.io, spending XMR at market XMR/BTC exchange rates.

Plus, most of these sprays contain benzalkonium chloride as a preservative, and that stuff can cause its own problems.

What do you expect from a country run by Tata consultants?

I've been running Fedora on mine for a few months. I had some early problems with wireless, but on my most recent trip (a few kernel updates later) it was fine. The touchpad seems to be working better too. My only real gripe at this point is that the battery doesn't quite last all day like my 13" MBA can, but then the Zenbook's considerably cheaper than most in the under-three-pound category so I guess sacrifices had to be made somewhere.

Yes, there is such a law. 40 CFR 86.1809-10 - Prohibition of defeat devices. So much for the "if it's legal it's wonderful" pseudo-argument.

It's because they throw out a lot of POSIX features/requirements - e.g. nested directories, rename, links, durability/consistency guarantees. In other areas, such as permissions, they have their own POSIX-incompatible alternatives. These shortcuts do make implementation easier, allowing a stronger focus on pure scalability. The theory is that the combined complexity of POSIX semantics and dealing with high scale (including issues such as performance and fault handling) is just too much, and it becomes an either/or situation. As a member of the GlusterFS team, I strongly disagree. My colleagues, including those on the Ceph team, probably do as well. The semantics of object stores like S3 have been designed to make their own developers' lives easier, and to hell with the users.

Not all POSIX features are necessary. Some are outdated, poorly specified, or truly too cumbersome to live. On the other hand, the object-store feature set is *too* small. I've seen too many users start with an object store, then slowly reimplement much of what's missing themselves. The result is a horde of slow, buggy, incompatible implementations of functionality that should be natively provided by the underlying storage. That's a pretty lousy situation even before we start to talk about being able to share files/objects with any kind of sane semantics. You want to write a file on one machine, send a message to another machine, and be sure they'll read what you just wrote? Yeah, you can do that, but the techniques you'll have to use are the same ones that are already inside your distributed object store. Even if both their implementation and yours are done well, the duplication will be disastrous for both performance and fault handling. It would be *far* better to enhance object stores than to keep making those mistakes . . . or you could just deploy a distributed file system and use the appropriate subset of the functionality that's already built in.

A semantically-rich object store like Ceph's RADOS can be a wonderful thing, but the dumbed-down kind is a disgrace.

That is very untrue. I'm on the GlusterFS team, and we've had users providing "POSIX style FS access in a cloud-like environment" for years. Amazon recently started doing the same with EFS, and there are others. It's sure not easy, I wouldn't say any of the alternatives have all of the isolation or ease of use that they should, but it's certainly possible.

that would explain why you came so close yet utterly failed to detect the effect, thereby losing your nobel