We were also allowed to borrow and re-shrinkwrap games at the Game store I worked in, in the UK, in 2000. Seemed like official company policy to give us better product knowledge!
In the UK the tax incentives for Electric cars may be skewing demand towards new Vs secondhand EVs.
I can lease a new EV via my employer's salary sacrifice scheme. I can pay my lease payments from my pre-tax income. There is an additional tax due on cars leased this way in the UK called Benefit-in-Kind tax (BIK). The rate of this tax is fairly high for petrol/diesel cars but for EVs is currently near zero (based on 2% of the car's value).
The problem is that most of the major lease firms that operate these programs for employers only offer new vehicles. Ideally I would like a nearly-new EV. I have escalated and apparently our lease provider (Tusker) are looking at rolling this out in the first half of this year. I currently know of only one other lease firm that offers this option. I suspect is in the interest of lease firms to prop up the value of the used EV market, but this depends also on their margins on new vehicles. I wonder if it would make sense for the tax incentives for used Vs new EVs to be rejigged to avoid incentivising unnecessary new car production?
Relatively fast onset gastro symptoms. Used to be fine with any beer but at about 21 started noticing the problem with a lot of largers. Asahi, Tsing Tao, seemed less of a issue. Not formula diagnosed.
I appear to have a yeast intolerance that stops me drinking some (but not all) beers. I can drink Guinness though! I didn't realise it used a distinct strain of brewers yeast. If only breweries listed the yeast they used in the ingredients, I could narrow down which one(s) are problematic...
That's funny. I went for an open day in the UK Computer Science dept in 1999. It was an exciting department but one of the things that put me off was the internet was so slow in the lab it was almost unusable. Perhaps they were having a bad day...
I've often wondered this. Would be interesting to see how useful that 3dfx IP ended up being? When I was a teenager I tried to get my parents to open a brokerage account so I could buy some 3dfx stock as I was so excited by what they were doing.
I was too young to read the Rudiments of Wisdom comics. My mum cut them out and saved them in a scrap book for me. She finally gave me it about 10 years later, in the mid 90's, to read. What a treat!
Out of curiosity, has anyone here ever used Autonomy's product? Given it was such a high profile company, I have
always been surprised that I had never seen it action or met anyone who had used it?
I suppose that might be true, but we can imagine a situation where there is no choice in the matter:
If network security cannot be maintained without sufficient inflation, then it surely it doesn't matter how philosophically wedded some users are to the 21m cap. It would lead to a hard fork, with two resulting coins:
1. An unchanged 'Capped-supply Bitcoin'
2. A new 'Permanent-subsidy Bitcoin'
Given a total breakdown in network security of the 'Capped-supply Bitcoin' (and its associated collapse in value), we would expect users to deem the, still secure and therefore higher value, 'Permanent-subsidy Bitcoin' to be the 'true' Bitcoin going forward, no?
Well, if the network proves not to work without a sizable block subsidy, it could be hard forked, with the forked version of the source code not capping issuance at 21m coins. It's certainly one possible outcome...
Network difficulty adjustment is there to ensure we get a new block mined, on average, every 10 minutes. It does not impact the cost of a 51% attack, just the block mining rate.
As emissions drop, less money is spent on mining and a 51% attack becomes cheaper.
When China turned off mining, mining temporarily became more profitable as it took some time for miner spend to get back to a equilibrium state (where miners, in aggregate, spend nearly the entire block reward on mining costs).
It did temporarily get 'cheaper' to conduct a 51% attack (although it was still so expensive as to not be viable - due to the currently high block reward). This wasn't because of the difficulty adjustment though - that just maintained the average time to mine a block at 10 minutes.