Except that these fluctuations are just that, fluctuations. And they get smaller as bitcoin use grows (and thus the possibility for a single person to disrupt the entire economy decreases).
The lowest value I'm seeing in the last year (for mtgoxUSD) is just over $4/bc, the highest value I'm seeing is the current price of approximately $14/bc.
Now, you could call that a fluctuation but honestly, ever since the "Great crash" (that one that caused all the bitcoin-haters to scream that bitcoin was now totally and completely worthless and useless forever and would never recover (price spiked to over $30/bc or so, dropped back down to under $20/bc and slowly dropped to around $4/bc over the following couple of months)) the value of bitcoins on the various exchanges has been somewhat steadily rising.
Generally speaking the problem isn't with bitcoin, most major fluctuations in the currency's value have been fairly early on when big exchanges and mining pools have been robbed (a fitting description). As the use of the currency grows so does the stability. At the time of the "Great crash" the market was much more easily gamed than it is now, just a year and a half later (mtgox is no longer The(tm) exchange used by everyone and the economy is larger).
My point was that in my experience a lot of women set the bar higher online, a lot higher. When they're actually meeting people face to face they can't afford to just walk away the moment a guy says something which isn't perfect (well, I suppose if they are willing to settle for only meeting people online they could).
Basically, the way online dating works messes with their perception of reality (well, offline dating still expects men to "prove" themselves to women, just to a much lesser degree and on that environment women tend to be aware of the fact that there are other women available to the man in question).
Yeah, I didn't have much exposure to the BBS scene but what little I saw definitely indicated to me that it was a lot more social than the internet is, on a local level.
IRC in the 90s though, in my area that was huge with lots of people, especially teens and the early 20s crowd. Every little town seemed to have its own channel on some network and every channel would have at least ten or so regulars who idled there all the time and by Thursday night you could easily find 30 people in the channel for my hometown, and not just "nerds" either, lots of regular 15-to-30-year-olds chatting about what would be happening on Friday or Saturday. Found quite a few parties and acquaintances that way. If there was no one there who knew about a party that seemed like fun you'd just/join a neighboring town's channel and check there.
Last time I checked my old hometown's channel was maybe five or six years ago, a couple of people still there but no one I recognized. All that was missing was tumbleweed blowing by. Facebook just isn't the same, there people mostly talk to people they already know, the common factor on those IRC channels was location, not who you already knew IRL.
I've actually found that it's much easier for me to approach women IRL than online.
Mainly this is because I've noticed that online a lot of women have insanely high standards, even an average (in terms of both looks and personality) woman gets used to being contacted by multiple men every day so they tend to not even reply to messages unless you're in the top n% (for small values of n) by their standards.
It can be quite annoying browsing women's profiles on sites like OkCupid, lots of them list qualities you must have and qualities you absolutely shouldn't have if you wish to get a reply.
It's been a while since Perl was The language used by sysadmins. It's still around, sure. But shell scripts never really went away and Python has been growing steadily as well.
How is Python "pedantic"? Because you can just dump out unreadable gibberish without bother to format your code in any sensible way? Because that seems to be the main complaint from those who dislike Python. This is also why I think it's a good language for beginners, better to have them learn right away how to use indentation and proper code formatting than have to deal with their unreadable code several years down the line (and boy have I seen some unreadable code by developers who, for some reason, never got around to learning when to indent. It should be so simple, instead they manage to just insert a random number of spaces and/or tabs at the beginning of each line).
While every standard has its issues I'm really hoping your hatred of XML/XHTML isn't the usual one. That is, that the "problem" with XHTML and XML is that parsers simply refuse to deal with broken XML/XHTML*, as far as I'm concerned that's a feature, not a bug.
* I've heard complaints about this many times, the core complaint seems to be "well, now I have to write markup that's actually standards-compliant and that's just too hard! I want HTML that will render even if it's horribly broken!"
I'm going to say I don't really need a 10 foot UI but it would be nice with something a bit more like it than ordinary desktop UIs. Slightly larger widgets, text that defaults to a slightly larger size, just enough to make it easy to use from the couch. It's not that I can't see what's on the screen, it's that when I'm on the couch and I leave XBMC to check out some website or whatever I don't want to have to be as precise with the mouse as I am when I'm at my desktop machine.
You have to keep in mind that Tolkien's world during the third age is still very much one filled with magic, both still-active and lost relics. The magic has begun to fade and the age of men is approaching but it's still all around. And it's not like the swords are somehow one-of-a-kind super-special ones.
My overall point is that whenever there's a story about anyone using any kind of force against a woman there are tons of comments from people who are outraged that the police/a robbery victim/whatever would use violence against a woman(!!!11one) no matter how justified (woman had an AK-47 and some guy managed to knock her out before she fired it into a crowd? You can bet there are people online bashing the guy for using violence against a woman).
Seeing as I'm on the other end of the spectrum, male, tall and not always so innocent-looking (that is, it's pretty easy for me to look like I'm up to no good) it tends to irk me (especially since I'm hardly a violent individual, it just seems a lot of people assume I'm more dangerous than I really am).
So a small, middle aged woman managed to resist arrest for several minutes? Wow. Those cops should be ashamed of themselves. Really, how did cops survive 10 years ago? Did they all get sound ass kickings from tiny middle aged women?
Seriously, if you can't arrest someone like that without a taser, then you're so badly trained that you should not be allowed out on the street.
Well, the same rules should apply regardless of who they're arresting. As a 6'4" guy who works out regularly I fully expect that if the police ever decide to arrest me for anything I'm likely to get maced and beaten simply because I'm a big guy, the same should be done to short skinny women as well, maybe then people will care.
The next step would be for bouncers at bars and clubs to apply the same standards to both men and women (here in Sweden I have myself experienced being told that I needed to "calm down" and that I'd had too much to drink after my first beer of the night because, well I'm not sure, but minutes later several very drunk young women were dancing on chairs and rather than getting threats of violence from the bouncer while he held his hand on his baton he simply calmly asked them not to dance on the chairs)...
Strict - Fairly straightforward, unlikely to see anything that might offend overly nervous parents or people with invisible sky-friends.
Moderate - The default, might let some slightly "naughty" things through but overall a lot closer to Strict than Off.
Off - No filtering, if the best result for your search was a naked a woman or some guy fucking a watermelon, that's what you got. For good and bad
What has some of us upset is that Google removed the "Off" setting. Instead they're saying "yeah well if you want porn just add 'anal rape tentacle gangbang' to your search string". Which would make sense if the only/ reason for setting SafeSearch to Off was to browse porn. However, in practice I've found that outside of the workplace it often makes sense to set SafeSearch to Off in order to get more accurate results, quite often fairly innocent images would not show up with SafeSearch set to Strict or Moderate.
Well, the problem is, as stated further up in the thread. What if you want, for example, to find pictures of something which by American moral standards is considered slightly dirty? Search for just what you're looking for and you get the neutered results, add "porn" or some other explicit term and suddenly you're getting hardcore porn instead. One major advantage of being able to just leave the filter off is that you can get "raw" results (yeah, I've written some basic code for searching through data, splitting data into N-grams, assigning relations to words based on their TF-IDF and all that junk, I know the results aren't "raw" in the same sense as looking for documents where your exact term pops up the most times, but at least you could turn off that damn SafeSearch filter in the past).
So? In the past you had to disable SafeSearch to see them, now you have to go out of your way to find them by repeatedly tweaking your search terms to figure out how to trick Google into showing those results.
As others have pointed out, the biggest problem isn't if you're looking for hardcore porn, if you search for "violent anal gangbang" chances are you'll get what you're looking for, the problem is the gray areas, those searches that aren't for that kind of material but which aren't for "fluffy happy bunny captions" either...
Yeah, sadly this is one of those things that work much better on Windows than OS X or any Linux setup I've tried (Sure, if you want to get picky about it you could write your own patches to deal with this, perhaps even introducing a new abstraction layer, but for an average user this is hardly an option).
Wow, here in Sweden SMS is finally and very slowly starting to die out in favor of various online methods of messaging (Apple's Messenger thing seems to be growing and lots of people just use Facebook's chat function with push alerts on their cellphones).
I would've paid for this bundle if Company of Heroes had been available for OS X and Linux. I already have a copy for Windows that I've tried to get running under Wine (with poor results).
I thought Emacs was the leading virtual LISP machine. It's got a bunch of neat software that will run on it. Sadly the default text editor is a bit clunky.
In my experience it tends to be less a failing of the design and infrastructure of the Internet as a whole and more a failing of whoever is hosting the content (bogged-down server(s) or lack of bandwidth on their end).
There are always exceptions, of course, I know a few people who insist on using "wireless broadband" even when they have access to FTTH/FTTP services simply because they chose the wireless service a year or two ago and they keep telling themselves it's "good enough" (while waiting 30-90 seconds for Youtube videos to buffer enough to start playing) much in the same way that they feel their TV reception is "good enough" when the signal doesn't drop out too often on days with good weather (and it's pretty much unwatchable on rainy or snowy days). These people are the exception though, they're the ones who just won't admit that their setup is broken for whatever reason (a lot of times the Swedish word "dumsnålhet" would seem to be fitting, it translates to something like "cheap/stingy to the point of stupidity", it's when you've got a $1500 gaming PC and you won't spend another $3 per month on broadband because it's "too much money" or you've got a $2000 3D TV and you can't be bothered replacing the antenna cable because a new one costs $10).
I thought it was God(TM) who put them there to test our faith. Or is that just one of Satan's lies? Does that mean the christians who claim this are actually heretics?
I keep hearing this "with unions everyone will get the same salary" thing from Americans and I've been getting the impression that there's a lot of irrational hatred of unions based on this misconception.
This is not some fundamental consequence of unions, it's simply a side-effect of some of the American unions. Here in Sweden, where we have a lot of strong unions in all sorts of industries, most just demand that there's a reasonable minimum salary, that you can't be forced to work as a "temporary" employee for years on end, that when layoffs happen they do so in a fair way, that local labor laws regarding overtime pay and things like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that these fluctuations are just that, fluctuations. And they get smaller as bitcoin use grows (and thus the possibility for a single person to disrupt the entire economy decreases).
The lowest value I'm seeing in the last year (for mtgoxUSD) is just over $4/bc, the highest value I'm seeing is the current price of approximately $14/bc.
Now, you could call that a fluctuation but honestly, ever since the "Great crash" (that one that caused all the bitcoin-haters to scream that bitcoin was now totally and completely worthless and useless forever and would never recover (price spiked to over $30/bc or so, dropped back down to under $20/bc and slowly dropped to around $4/bc over the following couple of months)) the value of bitcoins on the various exchanges has been somewhat steadily rising.
Generally speaking the problem isn't with bitcoin, most major fluctuations in the currency's value have been fairly early on when big exchanges and mining pools have been robbed (a fitting description). As the use of the currency grows so does the stability. At the time of the "Great crash" the market was much more easily gamed than it is now, just a year and a half later (mtgox is no longer The(tm) exchange used by everyone and the economy is larger).
My point was that in my experience a lot of women set the bar higher online, a lot higher. When they're actually meeting people face to face they can't afford to just walk away the moment a guy says something which isn't perfect (well, I suppose if they are willing to settle for only meeting people online they could).
Basically, the way online dating works messes with their perception of reality (well, offline dating still expects men to "prove" themselves to women, just to a much lesser degree and on that environment women tend to be aware of the fact that there are other women available to the man in question).
Yeah, I didn't have much exposure to the BBS scene but what little I saw definitely indicated to me that it was a lot more social than the internet is, on a local level.
IRC in the 90s though, in my area that was huge with lots of people, especially teens and the early 20s crowd. Every little town seemed to have its own channel on some network and every channel would have at least ten or so regulars who idled there all the time and by Thursday night you could easily find 30 people in the channel for my hometown, and not just "nerds" either, lots of regular 15-to-30-year-olds chatting about what would be happening on Friday or Saturday. Found quite a few parties and acquaintances that way. If there was no one there who knew about a party that seemed like fun you'd just /join a neighboring town's channel and check there.
Last time I checked my old hometown's channel was maybe five or six years ago, a couple of people still there but no one I recognized. All that was missing was tumbleweed blowing by. Facebook just isn't the same, there people mostly talk to people they already know, the common factor on those IRC channels was location, not who you already knew IRL.
I've actually found that it's much easier for me to approach women IRL than online.
Mainly this is because I've noticed that online a lot of women have insanely high standards, even an average (in terms of both looks and personality) woman gets used to being contacted by multiple men every day so they tend to not even reply to messages unless you're in the top n% (for small values of n) by their standards.
It can be quite annoying browsing women's profiles on sites like OkCupid, lots of them list qualities you must have and qualities you absolutely shouldn't have if you wish to get a reply.
They still have forums, they just don't link to them from anywhere on the site for some reason.
It's been a while since Perl was The language used by sysadmins. It's still around, sure. But shell scripts never really went away and Python has been growing steadily as well.
How is Python "pedantic"? Because you can just dump out unreadable gibberish without bother to format your code in any sensible way? Because that seems to be the main complaint from those who dislike Python. This is also why I think it's a good language for beginners, better to have them learn right away how to use indentation and proper code formatting than have to deal with their unreadable code several years down the line (and boy have I seen some unreadable code by developers who, for some reason, never got around to learning when to indent. It should be so simple, instead they manage to just insert a random number of spaces and/or tabs at the beginning of each line).
While every standard has its issues I'm really hoping your hatred of XML/XHTML isn't the usual one. That is, that the "problem" with XHTML and XML is that parsers simply refuse to deal with broken XML/XHTML*, as far as I'm concerned that's a feature, not a bug.
* I've heard complaints about this many times, the core complaint seems to be "well, now I have to write markup that's actually standards-compliant and that's just too hard! I want HTML that will render even if it's horribly broken!"
I'm going to say I don't really need a 10 foot UI but it would be nice with something a bit more like it than ordinary desktop UIs. Slightly larger widgets, text that defaults to a slightly larger size, just enough to make it easy to use from the couch. It's not that I can't see what's on the screen, it's that when I'm on the couch and I leave XBMC to check out some website or whatever I don't want to have to be as precise with the mouse as I am when I'm at my desktop machine.
You have to keep in mind that Tolkien's world during the third age is still very much one filled with magic, both still-active and lost relics. The magic has begun to fade and the age of men is approaching but it's still all around. And it's not like the swords are somehow one-of-a-kind super-special ones.
My overall point is that whenever there's a story about anyone using any kind of force against a woman there are tons of comments from people who are outraged that the police/a robbery victim/whatever would use violence against a woman(!!!11one) no matter how justified (woman had an AK-47 and some guy managed to knock her out before she fired it into a crowd? You can bet there are people online bashing the guy for using violence against a woman).
Seeing as I'm on the other end of the spectrum, male, tall and not always so innocent-looking (that is, it's pretty easy for me to look like I'm up to no good) it tends to irk me (especially since I'm hardly a violent individual, it just seems a lot of people assume I'm more dangerous than I really am).
She clearly resisted arrest for several minutes,
So a small, middle aged woman managed to resist arrest for several minutes? Wow. Those cops should be ashamed of themselves. Really, how did cops survive 10 years ago? Did they all get sound ass kickings from tiny middle aged women?
Seriously, if you can't arrest someone like that without a taser, then you're so badly trained that you should not be allowed out on the street.
Well, the same rules should apply regardless of who they're arresting. As a 6'4" guy who works out regularly I fully expect that if the police ever decide to arrest me for anything I'm likely to get maced and beaten simply because I'm a big guy, the same should be done to short skinny women as well, maybe then people will care.
The next step would be for bouncers at bars and clubs to apply the same standards to both men and women (here in Sweden I have myself experienced being told that I needed to "calm down" and that I'd had too much to drink after my first beer of the night because, well I'm not sure, but minutes later several very drunk young women were dancing on chairs and rather than getting threats of violence from the bouncer while he held his hand on his baton he simply calmly asked them not to dance on the chairs)...
SafeSearch used to have three settings:
What has some of us upset is that Google removed the "Off" setting. Instead they're saying "yeah well if you want porn just add 'anal rape tentacle gangbang' to your search string". Which would make sense if the only/ reason for setting SafeSearch to Off was to browse porn. However, in practice I've found that outside of the workplace it often makes sense to set SafeSearch to Off in order to get more accurate results, quite often fairly innocent images would not show up with SafeSearch set to Strict or Moderate.
Well, the problem is, as stated further up in the thread. What if you want, for example, to find pictures of something which by American moral standards is considered slightly dirty? Search for just what you're looking for and you get the neutered results, add "porn" or some other explicit term and suddenly you're getting hardcore porn instead. One major advantage of being able to just leave the filter off is that you can get "raw" results (yeah, I've written some basic code for searching through data, splitting data into N-grams, assigning relations to words based on their TF-IDF and all that junk, I know the results aren't "raw" in the same sense as looking for documents where your exact term pops up the most times, but at least you could turn off that damn SafeSearch filter in the past).
So? In the past you had to disable SafeSearch to see them, now you have to go out of your way to find them by repeatedly tweaking your search terms to figure out how to trick Google into showing those results.
As others have pointed out, the biggest problem isn't if you're looking for hardcore porn, if you search for "violent anal gangbang" chances are you'll get what you're looking for, the problem is the gray areas, those searches that aren't for that kind of material but which aren't for "fluffy happy bunny captions" either...
I tried this mode on the OS X client recently and it was extremely clunky and was mostly a pain in the ass to work with.
It's a great first try at a ten foot interface but they've definitely got some work to do.
Yeah, sadly this is one of those things that work much better on Windows than OS X or any Linux setup I've tried (Sure, if you want to get picky about it you could write your own patches to deal with this, perhaps even introducing a new abstraction layer, but for an average user this is hardly an option).
Wow, here in Sweden SMS is finally and very slowly starting to die out in favor of various online methods of messaging (Apple's Messenger thing seems to be growing and lots of people just use Facebook's chat function with push alerts on their cellphones).
I would've paid for this bundle if Company of Heroes had been available for OS X and Linux. I already have a copy for Windows that I've tried to get running under Wine (with poor results).
No interest in Windows-only games for me though.
I thought Emacs was the leading virtual LISP machine. It's got a bunch of neat software that will run on it. Sadly the default text editor is a bit clunky.
If 40 is the new 60 does that mean I can retire at 45? That'd be neat.
In my experience it tends to be less a failing of the design and infrastructure of the Internet as a whole and more a failing of whoever is hosting the content (bogged-down server(s) or lack of bandwidth on their end).
There are always exceptions, of course, I know a few people who insist on using "wireless broadband" even when they have access to FTTH/FTTP services simply because they chose the wireless service a year or two ago and they keep telling themselves it's "good enough" (while waiting 30-90 seconds for Youtube videos to buffer enough to start playing) much in the same way that they feel their TV reception is "good enough" when the signal doesn't drop out too often on days with good weather (and it's pretty much unwatchable on rainy or snowy days). These people are the exception though, they're the ones who just won't admit that their setup is broken for whatever reason (a lot of times the Swedish word "dumsnålhet" would seem to be fitting, it translates to something like "cheap/stingy to the point of stupidity", it's when you've got a $1500 gaming PC and you won't spend another $3 per month on broadband because it's "too much money" or you've got a $2000 3D TV and you can't be bothered replacing the antenna cable because a new one costs $10).
I thought it was God(TM) who put them there to test our faith. Or is that just one of Satan's lies? Does that mean the christians who claim this are actually heretics?
I keep hearing this "with unions everyone will get the same salary" thing from Americans and I've been getting the impression that there's a lot of irrational hatred of unions based on this misconception.
This is not some fundamental consequence of unions, it's simply a side-effect of some of the American unions. Here in Sweden, where we have a lot of strong unions in all sorts of industries, most just demand that there's a reasonable minimum salary, that you can't be forced to work as a "temporary" employee for years on end, that when layoffs happen they do so in a fair way, that local labor laws regarding overtime pay and things like that.