Firstly its a misconception that that VLS has anything to do with this. VLS has only really been mounted on ships from the 80s onwards. The first US ship with VLS was the Ticonderoga class cruiser launched first in 1980, however the VLS was only used for anti aircraft missiles and the Harpoon anti ship missiles were positioned in quad launchers at the rear of the ship. The Soviets did in fact deploy VLS earlier than NATO on the Azov class cruiser, but kept external anti ship / submarine missiles on many designs. Indeed throughout NATO it was common to mount anti ship weapons externally just as the Soviets did right up until the mid 80s. If you think about it, anti ship missiles want to go sideways rather than upwards so it makes sense to point them at where the enemy will be.
Given that the majority of anti ship missiles were external on both sides I suspect the difference in prominence and perception comes from two linked points.
1: The majority of NATO ships were not designed as surface combatants, rather as escorts for carriers
2: Soviet anti ship missiles tended to be bigger with higher speeds and larger warheads.
On the first point the main priority of the US navy is power projection. As such it is generally reliant on carriers to provide strike capability through sorties. This is suplemented by submarines for anti shipping capbilities. THe majority of NATO surface combatants are geared towards allowing those carriers to be deployed unimpeded, as such they have a lot of anti air and anti missile capbility which by nature fires upwards.
The Soviet navy was more focused on area denial as they did not develop a significant carrier force. As strike capbility was not provided by naval aircraft (at least to the same extent) a greater emphasis was put on sinking enemny combatants. As such their ships were designed for surface to surface roles to contest the baltic and black sea. This required them to be able to sink NATO carrier groups themselves which in turn required more powerful missiles with higher speeds and bigger warheads. These therefore which appear far more prominently on their ships. I'd also note that the Soviets tended to put large missiles on smaller ships such as corvettes which made them appear even more prominent.
Russian missile systems were during the cold war (and perhaps still are) superior in many ways to NATO counterparts. The USSR had no problem devloping reliable rocket motors and had some pretty fearsome weapons. I think the idea that they put their missiles on the side to prevent self damage is a little far fetched.
Completely agree with all of this. When you're looking at firing missiles like the P270 and P-700 AShMs that have a mass close to a small fighter aircraft, there's nothing to be gained by vertical launch here.
Small correction, Colossus was designed to break the Lorenz cypher (which was considerably more complex than Enigma). The machine itself was designed by Tommy Flowers (not Turing), who was a post office worker who had previously worked with vacuum tubes and thought it would be possible to build a programmable computer with them. After the war Flowers applied for funding to build a similar machine (Colossus being top secret) and was denied on account of the idea being impractical.
The machine Turing is famous for his work on was Bombe, which was designed to crack Enigma.
NASA would define life as "A self-sustaining series of chemical reactions capable of extracting energy from its environment and capable of Darwinian evolution.
Self-sustaining?
Nope.
Chemical reactions?
Definitely not.
Capable of extracting energy from its environment?
Unless you count people plugging in GPUs as the Blockchain's doing, no.
People are reacting to the clickbait title, not the use of metaphor. As the submitter, you should be able to change the title of the submission. If you no longer can, contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer so they can update it on your behalf.
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I'd think one is more qualified to address local challenges than global ones. Certainly all those people made their money focusing on the US market, not only because it's big and governed by relatively uniform regulations but because they understand it better than any other. For the same reasons, it's IMO far easier to be effective as a philanthropist closer to home. (This is not to say there aren't exceptions to this, just that there's a certain tendency for it to be true. Of course there's the somewhat-Rawlsian argument that you should focus on those worst off first; without addressing this argument in itself, I think you should also focus on those whom you can make better off most effectively and who in turn will likely do the most philanthropic work once their own situation improves, and at least for a US billionaire, US citizens sound like a great target demographic on both counts.)
Actually helping people in a significant way in large wealthy countries is harder/more expensive because the bar is already higher. A disadvantaged person in a first world country is still much better off then a disadvantaged person in a third world country.
Not saying that working in a country with no regulatory or physical infrastructure is easy, but buying a bunch of mosquito nets is much cheaper with very few unintended consequences compared to doing something like OP suggested. For instance, wouldn't a revived/subsidized CC put a lot of current companies/workers out of business? How would that opportunity effect a high schoolers decision making? Is this something that goes on forever, it sounds like we would be training more people to do a job then would be needed if this program stopped. etc, etc, etc.
Bitcoin is finite and one would expect the supply to become smaller over time thanks to keys being lost or owners dying and their accounts being inaccessible. In the long term guessing keys may be the only way to obtain new coins.
This is a common irrational argument (meaning it requires more work to determine truth) regarding the exhaustion of "supply". A "coin" is simply a numeric value in a wallet of a whole amount. Fractional amounts can, and will, continue to be "created" using subdivision of existing coin. There is, with future code changes, no limit to the precision of the values stored there, so even a sub fraction of a bitcoin will still do to serve the entire network, if the network is still operating, of course.
The deflation issue is what is really addressed here, where no new coins will be introduced at a given point. Whether new coin arrives or not, is really not an issue. An analogy would be the use of pennies if all the paper money went missing.
Guessing keys should never be an option, otherwise Bitcoin needs to upgrade its cryptographic functions.
The supply will be shrinking in the sense of the asset/currency becoming deflationary at some point, as soon as 'lost Bitcoins > mining reward'.
The limit of 21 million is arbitrary. Actually the current maximum in terms of units is 2,100 trillion, as you can divide every Bitcoin in 10^8 units.
As a hard fork can update this denomination, there is nothing that limits Bitcoin to be adopted by a large audience.
Not true. Mining at later stages will provide miners with transaction fees which will be significantly high enough for them to focus on keeping the network secure rather trying to find colliding keys
Unless you have a hidden advantage, the cost of mining and the reward for collecting transaction fees will converge. The capital required to become a miner is very small, and the amount that a user can offer for fees is easy to change, allowing the market to be very efficient.
This would basically make Bitcoin Keynesian, since coin stored in wallets would now decay with a given probability. So you would have to invest it at least a little to beat the decay (shrinkage) rate.
You're mixing up Keynesianism with money supply increases due to changes to the reserve ratio, discount rate, and printed currency. These happen to central bank controlled fiat money regardless of whether the people controlling the money supply are Keynesian.
Then you conflated losing some percentage of your cash assets due to inflation, which can happen even if the money supply does not change, to losing all of your cash assets with some probability. The former encourages investment, while the latter encourages not holding cash at all.
Once the primary way of gaining bitcoins is hacking wallets, the longer a bitcoin is behind the same private key, the longer that given wallet is a target.
IMO, the most vulnerable wallets are going to be the ones actively in use and stored insecurely, for example, on Windows machines subject to the recent NSA bug.
Firstly its a misconception that that VLS has anything to do with this. VLS has only really been mounted on ships from the 80s onwards. The first US ship with VLS was the Ticonderoga class cruiser launched first in 1980, however the VLS was only used for anti aircraft missiles and the Harpoon anti ship missiles were positioned in quad launchers at the rear of the ship. The Soviets did in fact deploy VLS earlier than NATO on the Azov class cruiser, but kept external anti ship / submarine missiles on many designs. Indeed throughout NATO it was common to mount anti ship weapons externally just as the Soviets did right up until the mid 80s. If you think about it, anti ship missiles want to go sideways rather than upwards so it makes sense to point them at where the enemy will be.
Given that the majority of anti ship missiles were external on both sides I suspect the difference in prominence and perception comes from two linked points.
1: The majority of NATO ships were not designed as surface combatants, rather as escorts for carriers
2: Soviet anti ship missiles tended to be bigger with higher speeds and larger warheads.
On the first point the main priority of the US navy is power projection. As such it is generally reliant on carriers to provide strike capability through sorties. This is suplemented by submarines for anti shipping capbilities. THe majority of NATO surface combatants are geared towards allowing those carriers to be deployed unimpeded, as such they have a lot of anti air and anti missile capbility which by nature fires upwards.
The Soviet navy was more focused on area denial as they did not develop a significant carrier force. As strike capbility was not provided by naval aircraft (at least to the same extent) a greater emphasis was put on sinking enemny combatants. As such their ships were designed for surface to surface roles to contest the baltic and black sea. This required them to be able to sink NATO carrier groups themselves which in turn required more powerful missiles with higher speeds and bigger warheads. These therefore which appear far more prominently on their ships. I'd also note that the Soviets tended to put large missiles on smaller ships such as corvettes which made them appear even more prominent.
Russian missile systems were during the cold war (and perhaps still are) superior in many ways to NATO counterparts. The USSR had no problem devloping reliable rocket motors and had some pretty fearsome weapons. I think the idea that they put their missiles on the side to prevent self damage is a little far fetched.