Lurker > Energy Surge

A soft g, similar to the way gymnasium or giraffe is pronounced.

Also, the acronym was created to be a play on the peanut butter. So I believe it should be pronounced like the peanut butter.

To those of you defending your pronunciation because in the acronym the G stands for graphics, a word with a hard g, how do you pronounce CERN? The C stands for Conseil, so I imagine to be logically consistent you would say KERN?

In any case, I don't care about your logical consistency. Pronounce it however you like as long as a sizeable portion of the population pronounces it that way.


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The only reason lightning never strikes in the same place twice, is that the same place isn't there the second time.

I bought Hollow Knight for $14.99. And after putting over 100 hours into it, I feel like I robbed someone.


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The only reason lightning never strikes in the same place twice, is that the same place isn't there the second time.

A few more points.

What happens if there are two blocks mined at the same time. Well the new miners have to choose one of those blocks to point their next block at. When the next block is mined it can only point at one block so the other block will be discarded by the network in favor of the longer chain of blocks. The longer chain takes more work (more hashing) to create so it is the more valid block. This is why you wait till your transaction is several blocks back in the chain to ensure it actually cleared and was posted in the ledger.

The protocol wants to maintain a block every ten minutes. But if more and more people are mining, and especially if they combine their mining power (by using the same set of transactions and the same wallet for the mining rewards and splitting up nonce values between each other) they can create blocks at quicker rates.

So the protocol routinely checks (every 2016 blocks) how much time is passing between block generation. If blocks are being created more often than every ten minutes, the difficulty is increased by decreasing the target hash value. If blocks are being generated less often than every ten minutes, the difficulty is decreased by increasing the target number. So despite there being hundreds of miners working together in coalitions to mine these blocks, the difficulty is maintained at ten minutes per block

I think bitcoin is intriguing, but I see this increased mining effort as a wasteful use of electricity and computer hardware. Graphics card prices are rising as a result, and graphics cards that have been run non-stop for a couple years hashing blocks are then being resold to recoup the hardware investment to reinvest in faster hardware. These worn out cards potentially have little life left in them after being put through the wear and tear of perpetual mining.


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The only reason lightning never strikes in the same place twice, is that the same place isn't there the second time.

Muffinz0rz posted...

I literally can't fathom how a computer creates or does whatever to virtual data to then be turned around and sold for real, tangible dollars.

The way Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies work is by creating and maintaining a distributed ledger. Instead of a single organization holding the values of multiple bank accounts in their private database, the entire world can freely look at a ledger describing transactions of all the accounts in the ledger.

Each account is a public key, and the account owner has the private key. They sign the transaction using their private key and anyone can verify the signature is valid in no time at all, but forging the signature would require an unfeasible amount of time.

The problem is how do you prevent double spending? I can sign a transaction giving you the 1 BTC in my account and everyone can see it is valid. But I can also publish a transaction giving that 1 BTC to my other account and it will also have a valid signature. How do we determine where the money actually went?

This is where the ledger comes in. The ledger is a block chain. Each block contains several transactions and a hash of the previous block's header. This way, we have an ordered list of blocks of transactions to compute the current balance in each account. When a transaction is posted, we check to make sure it had that much money in the account to make the transaction valid. The network will not accept a transaction that spend more coins than an account possesses. So if I post two contradictory transactions only one of them can be accepted into a block.

If you are receiving money, you just wait to see if the transaction sending to your account appears in the block chain and then wait for more blocks appended after it cementing the transaction in the chain. Then you will know you received the funds. (You don't actually have to monitor the block chain, your wallet software will check to see if a transaction sent your wallet money and will display the balance once the transaction has reached an acceptable threshold of age in the chain.)

So how do these blocks get created? Well there are miners, they are functioning as the network validators. They are constantly recording valid transactions and adding them to the next block. They hash the previous block's header and include that as the pointer to the previous block and they include their own account where newly created coins and transaction fees will be deposited. Finally they have a custom field in the block called a nonce. They can put any value they want in this field, it normally starts at 0. Then they take this whole block of information and hash it. The resulting hash must be smaller than a predetermined target. If it isn't, the only data they can change is that arbitrary nonce. Then they hash the block again and again until they get below the target.

When they get below the target, they publish the block to the network. Everyone can quickly verify its contents, they can see it was made after the previous block as it has that block's hash included. They can see the transactions are all validly signed and come from accounts with the requisite funds. And they can see the entire block hashes to the target value. Everyone should accept it and use its header for the next block and begin hashing a new block of transactions to follow it.

The miner receives any transaction fees and also newly minted bitcoins added by the block. Bitcoins are generated and distributed to the network by block generation. Back in 2009, blocks created 50 BTC. Around four years later this halved to 25 BTC generated each block. And around 2017 it halved again to 12.5 BTC per block. Eventually no new Bitcoins will be generated and the network will only operate on transaction fees. Right now though the newly generated coins are why people are willing to invest in hardware and electricity to mine blocks.
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The only reason lightning never strikes in the same place twice, is that the same place isn't there the second time.

The House of Representatives has to elect the President from the top three candidates. However, each representative doesn't cast a vote. Instead they vote en bloc, all the reps from one state cast one vote for that candidate. A candidate must receive a majority, the votes of 26 states' representatives, to be elected president.

If no vice-president candidate receives 270 electoral votes, the Senate has to select from the top two candidates. The senators vote individually and the vice-president must receive a majority, at least 51 votes, to be elected. The wording of the twelfth amendment makes it seem like only sitting senators may vote, precluding the the sitting vice-president from breaking a 50-50 tie vote. But some believe the sitting vice-president would be permitted to break the tie.

If the House can't elect someone following the above terms, the vice president selected by the senate becomes acting president until they do. If the senate also can't elect a candidate by the above rules, the succession rules make the Speaker of the House the acting president until one of the branches of Congress select a candidate.


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The only reason lightning never strikes in the same place twice, is that the same place isn't there the second time.

When most people say they want "net neutrality" what they're referring to is the idea of a free and open Internet. When most people say the government is getting rid of "net neutrality" they're referring to regulations that were passed in 2015 by the FCC. Regulations meant to control the Internet. So basically the opposite of free and open. The plan was to use the archaic Title II regulations, meant to regulate telephone companies of the 1930s, to regulate Internet service providers today.

This was a bad idea from the start. Telephone companies have stagnated under Title II. The latest innovations offered for telephones, such as caller ID, voicemail, and call-waiting were all developed and brought to market by the end of the 80s. The telephone service has languished under Title II. Meanwhile, the Internet has flourished. Unrestricted by onerous regulations (thanks Clinton administration) the Internet has innovated and grown astoundingly fast. Why do we want to change that to work like the telephone company?

When everyone screams that we're losing "Net Neutrality" we're not actually changing how the Internet works. The Title II regulations hadn't even gone into affect so this revocation of Title II won't change anything. The Internet you know and love didn't change and now the plan to change it has been stopped. Stop complaining, the Internet you've enjoyed for years is being saved!

The reason people are complaining is they are worried about a boogeyman that hasn't happened yet. Comcast didn't throttle Netflix, it was actually a much more nuanced problem. Large Internet companies have peering relationships where they agree it is mutually beneficial to interconnect with each other so neither party pays the other. End users pay residential ISPs for access to their network. Data centers (and their customers) pay large ISPs for access to their network. Then these large networks connect to each other at no charge to form the entire Internet.

But as Netflix started sending more and more traffic these connections started getting overloaded. So everything started slowing down. Not just Netflix, any site that reached Comcast users through the same networks that Netflix used saw decreased latency and longer load times. However video streaming is more sensitive to slowdown than website browsing so these customers complained the loudest.

The solution is for Comcast to connect directly with Netflix, giving them better access to their customers and preventing other sties from suffering by having to share the bandwidth with Netflix streaming video. But who should pay for this? Comcast or Netflix? If Comcast pays for it then, they will probably increase Internet costs to cover the expense. But then all their customers will be paying for the Netflix usage, even if they don't use Netflix. It makes more sense that Netflix pay for it. Then either they eat the costs themselves or they raise their prices making only Netflix users pay for Netflix service.

Netflix wanted to blame someone else instead of paying more for a service they overused. Netflix doesn't want to increase costs, because that means less revenue or they have to raise prices. They know their customers don't want to pay much more. So they blamed Comcast and hoped that all the Comcast customers would indirectly pay for the costs and their service could remain attractive at its current price point.

The general public latched onto this story and framed it as Comcast slowing down a competitor when it had nothing at all to do with that. They were worried Comcast was going to start checking what services their users used and charging them different rates based on what they use. That's not at all what happened. They were actually protecting their customers from being forced to subsidize Netflix.

Stop complaining about Title II being removed! It was a horrible solution to a misrepresented problem.


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The only reason lightning never strikes in the same place twice, is that the same place isn't there the second time.

Rockies posted...

Wait a sec

How did you put three line breaks in there, when I quote it they are just normal breaks, but when I try to put in multiple breaks it automatically makes them one

Line 1

<b></b>

Line 5

Line 1



Line 5

You just have to make use of empty markup. When you quote however, the empty markup has already been removed from the post before being stored in the database. So anytime you edit or quote a post that used empty markup to alter the formatting, you have to add it back in to maintain the formatting. If you quote my message, the visible bold tags will be parsed as markup and removed. If you want them to stay visible you have to put empty markup inside each opening and closing tag.


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The only reason lightning never strikes in the same place twice, is that the same place isn't there the second time.

While the Tooks (and the Oldbucks before them) were the hereditary line of Thains, they only commanded an armed force in emergencies to protect the Shire from invasion.

The Shire did have a police force known as the Shirriffs or the Watch. And Hobbits specifically working the border were known as Bounders. But their numbers were inadequate to thwart a determined invasion force.

The real reason the Shire was mostly undisturbed is because the Rangers guarded the borders outside the Shire.


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The only reason lightning never strikes in the same place twice, is that the same place isn't there the second time.

Well at least Tree Style Tabs still works. Now if I can only find a way to remove the tabs at the top when I have its sidebar activated...

Looking for alternatives in the legacy add-ons gives this for NoScript:
https://hackademix.net/2017/11/14/double-noscript/
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The only reason lightning never strikes in the same place twice, is that the same place isn't there the second time.