Thursday Next

Ok... so early on we used to operate on a needsies and wantsies basis, "I'll swap my Shearer for your Fowler." known as bartering. Then we found something that everyone valued relatively equally. E.g. Gold, Silver, known as "Commodity Trading". That is, the item being traded is valuable in and of itself. Gold was pressed into coins so that people knew how much gold they were getting, a flat square may look the same-ish size as a cirle, but the circle has greater volume, and so is more gold. "Coins" just meant everyone had a reference point without needing cumbersome scales and such. Now we use "Fiat Money" which is the trade of rusty piece of crap Italian cars items (coins, notes, etc) that have no intrinsic value other than that value conferred on them by government statute. Basically, there is a law that says "£1 is worth this much." In the past the government used to state that it would personally redeem currency for gold at that rate, that then changed to being guaranteed by tax revenue. At the moment (most) currencies are valued against the US Dollar, which is itself valued against gold. That said, the "value" of a pound is entirely relative. £1 may officially equal €1, but if all you've got is €20, the taxi driver tells you the fare is £15 sterling and a passer by offers you £15 for your €20, then €20 could suddenly become very worth £15.

Infamous and Dead Nation for my PS3, ModNation and Pursuit Force on the PSP. Plus my 60 day Plus subscription. Oh, and the ID theft cover... that seems to have gone a bit quiet.

I guess, I just don't get it. Who creates it? Who verifies it? How do we know how much currency there is? There has to be some sort of central infrastructure to decide all this because the bitcoin has no intrinsic value, it's not a goat or a lump of gold, it has no use beyond its symbolic value and is not a finite or tangible resource.

[quote name=「Advent Chaos」 @Thursday Next You have some interesting friends and family there, I knew CoD was popular, but I never thought it would generate that kind of fan-dism (?) I've seen quite a few examples of such "fanaticism" on Sony's Facebook and PlayStation Blog site. As much as everyone here derides the CoD fanbase (with good reason - my cousin, much as I love the guy, is a stereotypical CoD fan. Doesn't really know his games that well, plays pretty much exclusively racers and shooters, is a bit of a chav...) they are rabidly loyal.

I'd guess the same system that tells my computer that I have part 0042 of latest EA game, and someone in brazil is missing part 00042 of same game, and so sends that chunk from my PC to the brazil PC? Also it uses a hash, which would make duplicates pretty unlikely. (as in unlikely as someone in the world being born with the same DNA as you) It was some Googlers side project so I assume out of any part of the idea, the tech side is down to pat. It's the economical stuff where it's wobbly. Like where the value comes from. People make unauthorised duplicates of EA's games all the time... I think there's a thread on it somewhere called... um... "Piracy"? What's to stop someone making a pirate copy of a bitcoin?

Bwahahahahaha! I think that might be a touch on the sensational side. Just a hunch. As you say, the mining sounds dodgy. The lack of a central, regulated, independent institution is also troubling, without that I don't get how you can't just make loads of duplicate bitcoins, I mean if I give two different people bitcoin number 00000002, how will they know that I've spent the same coin twice? And what's to stop me claiming that I also own bitcoin 00000012?

Great episode, really can't wait for the next. Matt Smith is turning out be a wicked Doctor, he just keeps getting better.

I think playing online was (rightly) the priority. A couple of my PS3 owning friends and family were considering trading in so that they could play CoD online (I know, I know). Think Sony might just have pulled it out of the fire timing-wise.

Possible that Ethan didn't sign into his main/original PS3? Weirdly, my PS3 YLOD'd a while back, tried logging in on my Slim (just to see if it worked) and it did. Odd no? I thought I was gonna have to wait on an email. Still, yay! BFBC2 tonight. Doubt I'll be able to hit the broad side of a barn though.

I don't, to be honest. I've heard reasons, but none of them make any sense to me. To me the GTA games were always about a rags to (ill gotten) riches tale. Vice City was pretty much Scarface with a happy ending, San Andreas too charted the rise to greatness of a nobody from the hood. GTAIV had none of that, it felt dull, grey and bland as a result. ^In my opinion.^

I'd quite like to meet the individual who coined the word "preboot". I already hate that word and I've only read it in two places (including my use just then).

The ending isn't all bubblegum, rainbows and sunshine, but it is positive (imho). He gets over his slutty ex. He manages to keep his job. His family doesn't get evicted. His mum kicks out her loser boyfriend. Plus he beats his rivals where it matters. If he gets jumped and takes a shoeing, his bruises will heal, he still has the moral victory, his main rival is a laughing stock. That coupled with the fact that he managed to get over his writers block is all positive. Sure, he doesn't sign up to a major label and become a rap-star, but then if he did people would moan about it not being realistic. I suppose it depends on your "conditions for victory". As Rabbit himself said "Hey Sol, do you ever wonder at what point you just got to say fuck it man? Like when you gotta stop living up here, and start living down here?". It's not necessarily a defeatist statement, it's also one of acceptance. He still has his dreams and ambitions, he just accepts where he is now and learns not to hate his life. Like I said, not sunshine and rainbows, but who wants yet another bullshit story about someone who lives "The American Dream"?

I was expecting something like that Jessica Alba series about cat people, I'm pleased to say it was nothing like that. I'll put the rest in spoilers, not giving away an plot points but if you want to go to the film knowing as little as possible, who am I to stand in your way?

Saw Hanna last night. A-fucking-mazing film. Go see it. Everything from the cinematography to the chemical brothers soundtrack kicked arse. The acting was spot on, in fact, Blanchett was probably the weakest of the cast, which is saying something as I think she's generally a pretty good actor. So glad I skipped on Priest to see it, Pirates next week. Yargh!

Beautiful. "I'll never get my comeuppance, do you hear me? No comeuppance!" - Homer Simpson

This just in: Thursday Next is secretly a teenage girl! That's exactly the result I got in my copy of Bliss! How odd.

Sounds like a novel way of dealing with a nuisance. I'd like to see this rule applied to all the wankers on public transport who think I'd like to hear the shitty hip hop crackling out of the pathetic tinny speaker on their knobby iPhone.

Hey, I like FFXIII, I'm on my second playthrough and really enjoying it (now that I'm back on Pulse).

It's just a bit of fun isn't it? I certainly didn't sit there for half an hour pondering each answer, I just went with what sounded most like me on the first reading. Same as I do with those "Which [noun] are you?" tests in celeb magazines and such. I'm certainly not about to start looking at my never ending quest for power in a new light having done this test any more than I'd head to the make-up counter of Boots if my "Which comic book villain are you?" test came back with the answer "The Joker".

Completely disagree with you Dean. If a book is written in Chinese, or braille and is read out to you in English, does that make it not art? Does the requirement for an interpretive medium prevent it being art? Code is a language that most of us don't understand, so we use machines to interpret the code into a form we do understand. If we learned computer code as we did our native language then we would be like Cypher. "All I see now is Blonde, Brunette, Redhead..."

Milk!? Philistine.

ITT "Hugh Jackman is attractive to women" awareness group.

You get a sense of achievement. I did get them all and was thoroughly unimpressed.

Would you like to earn 1000xp for making a cup of tea?