I recall installing Office from ~35 floppy discs, and finding that one of the discs in the 20s was unreadable after what felt like an eternity. The installation still completed after I skipped it though, so presumably it only contained some optional feature I never ended up using.
A friend of mine had his first job installing Oracle from floppies. I'm not sure what the actual count was, but we would joke about him installing disk 1 of 99...
The holy grail is a cryptocurrency that can scale to billions of users while maintaining sufficient decentralization and security to be immune to state-level attack and corruption. BTC in combination with the higher level protocols such as Lightning (and others not yet conceived) is the only system that I believe can achieve this.
That creates opprotunities for other Level 1 chains. Solana for example charges $0.00025 per transaction (however this is still denominated in the SOL currency so it will fluctuate). Hedera network is $0.0001 per transaction and is fixed in USD.
They have other problems. Solana's entire supply is said to be 5% of the current world population. I'll let you do the math on the rich/poor inequality this entails.
Each problem that's dismissed out of hand by crypto proponents is compounded by the endless streams of bigger and worse problems.
I'm very confused by both of your points. The supply of a cryptocurrency is equal to a person? A crypto token is not a person so I'm guessing you missed a few words there?
How is building a competing chain to more efficiently solve a problem (high transaction fees) in a competitive market in any way "dismissing" that problem? That seems the exact opposite of dismissing a problem.
Do those new solutions come with new problems? Sure, that's true of any technology. Dynamo-based databases solved high availability and network partitionability of data but come with several trade-offs. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use Cassandra for anything.
That said, Solana is not the hill I'm willing to die on and it's hot garbage. Hedera seems good though.
Same. Lightning gets around them by bunching a bunch of transactions into one bitcoin transaction. Which is exactly what people have been doing with card processing for ages now.
And of course there other payment systems around the world that don't rely on card transactions.
And don't forget that the entire lightning thing is dependent on banks aka nodes with large sums of money to provide liquidity in the system.
Also, when comparing the deep field images I don't think it can be stressed enough the difference in exposure time between HST and JWST images (Hubble had a 10x longer exposure time). Many many more distant galaxies would become visible in the JWST image with the much longer exposure time. I look forward to seeing some long-exposure deep field images from JWST!
This is underappreciated. Much lamentation has been made of the fact that JWST's current mission length is only ten years (maybe twenty or thirty at best, but hard-limited by on-board coolant), but with the speed of its observations that ten years will be as productive as a century of Hubble time.
Perhaps if the laser light were put through adjustable optics to set the focal point at the target. That way, anything sufficiently closer or further than the target along the laser's path will see non-dangerous intensity. Still don't want the thing accidentally targeting eye balls though.
Clearly, the ML algorithm had been given the goal of optimizing the happiness of the user. It had ascertained that the user was quite active on social media and had tied a significant amount of their self-worth to the number of likes received from posts and photos. It had correctly calculated that the user would extract more enjoyment from the photo by way of likes if their friend's face were replaced with an arrangement of foliage. The user clearly did not like that friend very much anyway due to the lack of engagement with their posts. Truly impressive technology.
