The old start menu was just bloated and required searching for anything anyways.
Searching may work for you, but it does not work for me. You install a new software package. What do you search for? There are maybe fifty shortcuts in the menu to do various things. Not every product has only one executable.
I use Start menu all the time. Most of my important shortcuts are pinned (and automatic pinning disabled.) However now and then I need to go to the Start menu and go through the hierarchy to find what I need. If I search for Impact I get three results, from three different revisions of Xilinx Lab tools that I have installed here. How would I know which one is which in search results? There is no way to tell. But different revisions behave differently, and that is important.
Why? I could easily imagine having a media player running in Metro while I'm working on the desktop. Metro is good for stuff like that. I could have skype on there as well, etc.
Or you can have them minimized, in any Windows. Metro here is a solution in search of a problem.
A single key to switch state between "real work" and "stuff that needs occasional attention" seems like a useful thing to me
That's what tray icons do. Clock, network, removable devices, Skype, Bluetooth, etc.
Scroll lock on, enter Metro, wave fingers at screen to do something.
I'm sure changing the GUI concept on the fly has no overhead:-) I have my hands on keyboard/mouse already, why should I lift them and poke at the screen? BTW, I hate fingerprints on the screen. Metro cannot die fast enough for me.
Of the many systematic failures resulting in the USSR's inability to bring about a "workers' paradise" and eventual collapse, was "lack of eager participation in scientific fields" really so disastrous?
In one word, yes. In many words, a country doesn't have to have science. I haven't heard of many Kenyan or Mongolian scientists; but those countries exist and are viable enough. Science is needed to improve the world. A side effect of that is increased wealth of the population, and presige, and influx of students, and many other things. A country without science will be a mere consumer of goods that others invent and produce. Such a country is lucky if it has something (natural resources) to sell in exchange for other countries' math and drawings and ideas. Many countries have nothing to sell; sucks to be them.
Apparently, the Russian technocrats' estimates for "sufficient" pay to keep scientists happy can't have been too far off the mark --- after all, the USSR kept apace of the West in scientific development (and often in the lead)
Those had many causes. But good salary was rarely one of them. First, as you say, people were willing to make sacrifices. Secondly, at the top of the pack Academicians were paid well. Thirdly, some science was so important (nuclear, spaceflight) that no money was spared. Unfortunately, the downfall of all that began under Brezhnev, and by 1990's the process of decay had completed, with research facilities standing empty, and renting space out to newborn capitalists who used rooms where chemical labs used to be to simply mix electrolyte for car batteries. Did you notice the mass exodus of Russian scientists around that time, when the mechanism of exit visas was loosened and then removed? Did they escape their country because it was good? No, they escaped because they couldn't survive on scraps that the government threw them, and because they couldn't do any science because there was no money to buy equipment or visit conferences. All they could do is to sit in their old labs and drink alcohol. Some chose that path; those who were younger and who had future ahead of them, they found jobs abroad and left as fast as they could.
Note also the positive feedback loop here. As scientists and engineers run away, whole factories become unable to manufacture complex goods. Those factories close, and replacement goods are brought in from China. This results in disappearance of competent workers - and the resulting domino effect wipes out the whole industry. This can be seen in the USA as well - hard to assemble product A if all its parts B, C and D are not made locally. That's how nearly all computers are assembled in China (Taiwan.) Do you think there are workers left in the USA who can work a steel mill? Hardly anyone, outside of gray-haired old-timers, can work on a lathe or on a milling machine and produce accurate, high quality parts. I work with machinists, and I know who they are - a dying breed that lives on small orders from startups from Silicon Valley.
on the other hand, better than a society where tens of millions of workers live in conditions worse than you describe.
Conditions of life in USSR were markedly worse than conditions in the West. Salary of an experienced engineer was, say, 2400 roubles per year. A new car (if you can get one!) costs 6000 roubles. A condo costs about 10,000 roubles. Compare to US realities. An engineer would be getting, say, $50K/yr. and he can get a new car for $15K, and a condo for $40K - just by walking into the sales office and giving them the money. In reality, US people were very, very poor. You can compare them to americans on social security - they both get just enough to live in housing of minimal quality, and to buy food of minimum quality. While that may be fair to some workers, scientists and bright engineers do not want to be poor, and they know that they can do better. Why, in your opinion, Soviet people ran to the West at the first opportunity, but the opposite was hardly ever
"God"=="supernatural"=="not allowed by physical (natural) law."
Where did you get that definition? Millennia ago, when gods started to form in people's minds, physical (natural) law was not exactly a hot topic. Gods were defined as [nearly] omnipotent beings who did things. At no time a god (except FSM, perhaps) was claimed to be supernatural.
As matter of scientific truth, an existing god would have to be natural, such as allowed (in a certain form) by physical laws of the Universe where he is present in that form. It's simply by definition. The god may deform the physics of the area by him existing, but still that would be natural. We have plenty of places in this Universe that are ruled by different (from Earth) physics (inside a black hole, or a neutron star, etc.)
This was a very familiar situation in USSR. I was an engineer there, not a worker. However my father, an experienced doctor, at some point said "enough is enough" and quit his medical field altogether. He got a job at a salt distribution warehouse, to carry sacks of salt from one place to another. His pay increased twice, if not thrice.
You are right, of course, that many scientists (all over the world!) work not for money but for fun. They love their work. However... this recipe is only good if you are all alone in the world. You'd be perfectly happy pushing the boundaries of knowledge from 9am to 5pm (or much later) and then returning home, in your little single room, which doesn't even have a bathroom or a kitchen - you'd share those with people who live in other rooms. You'd never invite a girl to your room, firstly because no girl wants a poor scientist, secondly because you cannot entice her to visit you in that shared apartment, and thirdly you will not want all your neighbors to discuss your friends. But since you are single (forever!) this is not a concern at all.
Fortunately for demographics, such people are not very numerous. Most people are interested in families and children. They want their own apartment, their own car, and their own country home (dacha.) They do not want to live on pasta 364 days per year; they need clothes for themselves and for the children, and toys, and things, and vacation in Sochi. All this requires money (and knowing people who will sell you what you need; remember, stores are empty.) The meager salary of a MNS does not pay for any such thing. Eventually the wife spells out the offer that cannot be refused: "Get a real job and be a real man who earns money for the family. Or else." However displeasing such words can be, they do make sense. Some people - many! - surrender to the inevitable, abandon their scientific or engineering - or medical - careers and become lowly workers. All this is because workers were paid FAR MORE than specialists with several years of university education. You can see for yourself how disastrous such a policy would be for any country. Why was it in place? Because USSR was, officially, a state of proletariat; the "intelligentsia" (all those scientists and engineers) were just fellow travelers that had to be tolerated because they are useful.
I can write books on this subject, as can anyone who grew up in USSR. You cannot simply apply logic and derive an answer - USSR was actively and aggressively defying logic for sake of political dogmas. The facts on the ground are just what they are, and not what an educated and friendly foreigner (such as you) would think they are.
Note that USSR was not known for any fairness, anywhere. Every worker within a class (with few exceptions) was paid the same regardless of his skills, talent and output. An illiterate worker at the factory was earning more than a scientist. A political worker, who made no products and wasn't even good at management, was showered with money and perks. USSR was anything but fair, and that's why people ran away from it whenever they could; and that's why when USSR fell nobody shed a tear for the venerable Communist Party. CPSU wasn't even good at the only thing it pretended to do - to rule the society. Ask anyone who lived in USSR and you will be told all kinds of tales. For example, food was distributed not according to who had money or who had need, but according to where one worked, bypassing the stores (they had empty shelves.)
many countries have regulatory controls preventing citizens from easily moving money out of the country [...] Bitcoin provides a nice alternative in these cases
That "nice alternative" would be illegal.
The right thing to do is to demand that the law is changed (or the government.) It is never a good idea to break the law in hope that you won't be found. Governments interfere with many activities - they do not allow murder, they do not allow theft, they do not allow fraud... not everything that governments do is unreasonable, and citizens do not have a blanket permission to break laws if they are seen as inconvenient.
Those hard caps, for example, are intended to prevent export of capital out of the country while not interfering with small time business - travel or purchases. Why would that be desirable? Because if one Elbonian billionaire exports his capital, it won't be invested locally, and what then should 10 million Elbonians do? From the POV of the billionaire, it's certainly easier to just buy stock at one of the exchanges in NYC and be done, instead of buying factories and laying down the railways and modern roads. But the latter benefits Elbonia. The former benefits foreigners.
there are still many other improvements under the hood over windows 7 that shouldn't be thrown out because of one bad feature.
Will you buy a car with a 1,000 hp engine, powerful brakes, super good radio, but without the steering wheel?
Besides, the improvements in Win8 are minor, and largely invisible to the user. However omissions are huge. First, Aero is gone. Instead Win8 has tabletized, flat color decorations (of some awful color!) that can be rendered on an ARM processor. Second, the Start menu - the main method of discovering Windows - is gone. It is replaced with miles of unmanageable tiles. Can you select one tile out of a couple thousand? Third, discoverable controls are replaced with magic gestures that you must learn and remember. Fourth, these gestures are not ideal for mouse operation, and touching a desktop monitor is not such a hot idea.
Win8 is hard to use, and that's why it is not so appealing to a common user. Sure, it starts fast and runs faster, but it does you no good if you cannot start and run what you need. Ballmer left for a very good reason - to avoid the shame of being fired. Perhaps sanity will be restored soon at MS, and Win9 will be a Win7 with Win8 kernel and with Metro that runs as an isolated, windowed subsystem. Touch should be easy to disable, and it should not be required on a PC.
Most, if not all, US cellular networks (AT&T and Verizon, at least) do not allow that. This is exactly why I am staying with my dumbphone. I would have bought a smartphone and never used the data plan; but AT&T mandates that once you connect a smartphone to the network you must pay for data. I do not like paying for services that I will never use.
I can fix a bad OS. But my parents cannot. Geeks do not represent a significant portion of the market. Even though geeks are influencers, they are not all too excited about personally fixing every Win8 box and then downloading and installing updates to ClassicShell every two weeks or so. Furthermore, Win8 split control panel functions into standard Control Panel and the new Metro Control Panel. I do not even remember what got moved where. The thing is a mess. I personally can work it, but a common man operates on muscle memory, and if the icon that he was clicking all the time to get the Interwebz is not there anymore, he will call his ISP and complain that Internet has crashed and they should fix it.
I have one Win8 laptop, and it will be probably downgraded to Win7. When others ask my advice, I tell them to get Win7. Some people are still in XP land, and they are happy there. Why not, if XP runs their software as it was designed to do? I have here some software that does not work even on Vista; and some other software runs on Win7 but not on Win8. Who needs this PITA?
Well, some starry-eyed BTC tinkerers still remain; however the big dogs have moved in - it's them who run ASIC farms in Iceland, not a geek in his parents' basement. BTC mining is an industry now, with their own capitalists. Even among geeks the initial desire to have a "free as in speech" currency quickly morphed into a speculative addiction. How many people here proudly declared that they made money on buying and selling BTC? On the other hand, there isn't much other use of BTC. It became the tulip bulbs of 21st century, except that you can't plant it and enjoy the flowers:-)
The role of that basement-dwelling geek is now only to supply his lunch money into the BTC system, so that miners can sell him their BTC, and the "finance industry" operators, like exchanges, can do him a small haircut on each transaction. If you dislike the current banking system, there is nothing attractive for you in the BTC system of exchanges and transfers for a fee. You want hard, cold cash in hand. Both are poor stores of value; stock of essential companies, valued fairly, is probably the best for that (outside of traditional choices of such precious metals as lead and brass.)
I tend to default to the understanding that I'm not entirely qualified to go jabbering on the internet that they've probably just got it wrong
That's not what GP was saying. He was asking WHY they thought those two neutrons to be one. He did not call them idiots who cannot count, for example:-) The GP's question is valid and insightful, that's why it got moderated as such.
I'd like to hear a simple explanation myself. Unfortunately, none is provided above. Appeal to authority is not good enough.
True, the US government will never listen to 99.99% of the country's population. However the remaining 0.01% install and remove Presidents with a single phone call. They will be listened to, and very carefully.
Last bitcoin transaction I made, I actually double checked the fee.... it worked out to about 50 cents on $100. Seemed quite worth it to me given that paypal would have taken more.
A transaction fee of 0.5% is insanely high. All the money will be lost - paid to owners of the BTC network - after only 200 transactions.
Maybe two super-massive black holes passed close to each other and spun these off?
Perhaps. But now instead of explaining why one common star is moving somewhere fast you need to explain why two uncommon black holes are moving somewhere fast, and on top of that why they nearly hit each other and some common star...
Except you fail to take into account all the extra fees required for having a bank account in the first place!
It costs nothing to open a bank account. Why would a bank object to taking money from you? The bank will happily run SQL INSERT with your name on it. The clerks are on salary, so there is no downside.
Some services of the bank may be free or not free, depending on what level of banking you want and how much money you operate with. This is not a concern, unless your cash flow is so bad that you have to drain the account every other day. This is not what happens when you trade internationally; it happens only when you have no job and a large family - hardly a good test case for BTC.
The way to deal with that is to trade in common currency (USD for oil, for example.) You are proposing that this common currency should be BTC; but it doesn't really change the equation - you still have conversion fees. I worked at a company that sold equipment abroad, and all payments for it were in USD. The trading partner had USD accounts; I have no interest to know how those accounts related to their national currency accounts.
Besides, if "someone in Europe" does not want USD, chances are that he does not want BTC either. USD is convertible and liquid, you can exchange nearly any amount of it instantly, anywhere in the world. You can exchange USD for goods, for services, for other currency, for stock, for contracts, or for whatever else you can imagine. If there is something for sale on this planet, a USD will buy it. The same cannot be said about many other currencies; BTC is just as popular as some African money, at best - and I don't mean Krugerrand:-) Thinking about that, there are more people in any given Central African country that use their national currency than BTC users all over the world.
But let's see what today's exchange rate is, per oanda.com:
Selling 1.00000 USD you get 0.73508 EUR
Buying 1.00000 USD you pay 0.73515 EUR
The difference is 0.00007 Euro, or 0.095%. This is an infinitely better deal than 0.6% that BTC exchanges ask for. Why? Because the Forex market is huge, and competition in it is also huge. On top of that, you pay this fee only once, from your currency to "their." In case of BTC as an intermediary you have to convert twice, so you actually compare (flat wire fee + 0.095% exchange fee) to (zero wire fee + 1.2% exchange fee.) There are very few cases (small sums) when BTC wins - even if your time is worth nothing, and if you don't mind risking it all with BTC exchanges and their arbitrary payment schedules.
Yes. Many businesses do that daily. Many private investors do that all the time. People gather up money for houses or expensive cars. (How did you pay for your house, with cash? I used a wire transfer, IIRC.) Nothing stops you from transferring money. The transactions will be reported, but as long as the money is sufficiently traced you will never hear a peep from anyone.
I got caught in those moving savings between banks
Sorry to hear. But in my experience it's smooth sailing. Banks are not in business of interfering with your money. The government might be, but the banks do their best to keep the government out of your pants. People with money are subtle and quick to anger.
If the BTC merchant in question has banking capabilities in both countries involved, then why would you need BTC for this transfer? As they say in fantasy books, "You deposit your money in any Gnome bank in the country, and you can take it out from the same or any other Gnome bank." The modern world embraced this principle and extended it, so any Visa card owner can withdraw his money from any Visa ATM anywhere in the world (with a small fee if the machine belongs to another bank.)
but if you can make a good deal of your purchases with BTC, too, then you don't need to convert it to a national currency.
Sure, if only you can make a good deal on purchase with BTC. However the moneychangers at BTC exchanges want their pound of flesh, so the prices in BTC are not that likely to be better than under other combinations of payment instruments. Your best bet, probably, is to pay with USD because USD is accepted nearly everywhere without conversion to RMB or whatever local currency the seller may have. It is standard practice for Canadian banks to offer USD accounts to anyone who walks in, just to facilitate cross-border trade.
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The old start menu was just bloated and required searching for anything anyways.
Searching may work for you, but it does not work for me. You install a new software package. What do you search for? There are maybe fifty shortcuts in the menu to do various things. Not every product has only one executable.
I use Start menu all the time. Most of my important shortcuts are pinned (and automatic pinning disabled.) However now and then I need to go to the Start menu and go through the hierarchy to find what I need. If I search for Impact I get three results, from three different revisions of Xilinx Lab tools that I have installed here. How would I know which one is which in search results? There is no way to tell. But different revisions behave differently, and that is important.
Why? I could easily imagine having a media player running in Metro while I'm working on the desktop. Metro is good for stuff like that. I could have skype on there as well, etc.
Or you can have them minimized, in any Windows. Metro here is a solution in search of a problem.
A single key to switch state between "real work" and "stuff that needs occasional attention" seems like a useful thing to me
That's what tray icons do. Clock, network, removable devices, Skype, Bluetooth, etc.
Scroll lock on, enter Metro, wave fingers at screen to do something.
I'm sure changing the GUI concept on the fly has no overhead :-) I have my hands on keyboard/mouse already, why should I lift them and poke at the screen? BTW, I hate fingerprints on the screen. Metro cannot die fast enough for me.
Of the many systematic failures resulting in the USSR's inability to bring about a "workers' paradise" and eventual collapse, was "lack of eager participation in scientific fields" really so disastrous?
In one word, yes. In many words, a country doesn't have to have science. I haven't heard of many Kenyan or Mongolian scientists; but those countries exist and are viable enough. Science is needed to improve the world. A side effect of that is increased wealth of the population, and presige, and influx of students, and many other things. A country without science will be a mere consumer of goods that others invent and produce. Such a country is lucky if it has something (natural resources) to sell in exchange for other countries' math and drawings and ideas. Many countries have nothing to sell; sucks to be them.
Apparently, the Russian technocrats' estimates for "sufficient" pay to keep scientists happy can't have been too far off the mark --- after all, the USSR kept apace of the West in scientific development (and often in the lead)
Those had many causes. But good salary was rarely one of them. First, as you say, people were willing to make sacrifices. Secondly, at the top of the pack Academicians were paid well. Thirdly, some science was so important (nuclear, spaceflight) that no money was spared. Unfortunately, the downfall of all that began under Brezhnev, and by 1990's the process of decay had completed, with research facilities standing empty, and renting space out to newborn capitalists who used rooms where chemical labs used to be to simply mix electrolyte for car batteries. Did you notice the mass exodus of Russian scientists around that time, when the mechanism of exit visas was loosened and then removed? Did they escape their country because it was good? No, they escaped because they couldn't survive on scraps that the government threw them, and because they couldn't do any science because there was no money to buy equipment or visit conferences. All they could do is to sit in their old labs and drink alcohol. Some chose that path; those who were younger and who had future ahead of them, they found jobs abroad and left as fast as they could.
Note also the positive feedback loop here. As scientists and engineers run away, whole factories become unable to manufacture complex goods. Those factories close, and replacement goods are brought in from China. This results in disappearance of competent workers - and the resulting domino effect wipes out the whole industry. This can be seen in the USA as well - hard to assemble product A if all its parts B, C and D are not made locally. That's how nearly all computers are assembled in China (Taiwan.) Do you think there are workers left in the USA who can work a steel mill? Hardly anyone, outside of gray-haired old-timers, can work on a lathe or on a milling machine and produce accurate, high quality parts. I work with machinists, and I know who they are - a dying breed that lives on small orders from startups from Silicon Valley.
on the other hand, better than a society where tens of millions of workers live in conditions worse than you describe.
Conditions of life in USSR were markedly worse than conditions in the West. Salary of an experienced engineer was, say, 2400 roubles per year. A new car (if you can get one!) costs 6000 roubles. A condo costs about 10,000 roubles. Compare to US realities. An engineer would be getting, say, $50K/yr. and he can get a new car for $15K, and a condo for $40K - just by walking into the sales office and giving them the money. In reality, US people were very, very poor. You can compare them to americans on social security - they both get just enough to live in housing of minimal quality, and to buy food of minimum quality. While that may be fair to some workers, scientists and bright engineers do not want to be poor, and they know that they can do better. Why, in your opinion, Soviet people ran to the West at the first opportunity, but the opposite was hardly ever
"God"=="supernatural"=="not allowed by physical (natural) law."
Where did you get that definition? Millennia ago, when gods started to form in people's minds, physical (natural) law was not exactly a hot topic. Gods were defined as [nearly] omnipotent beings who did things. At no time a god (except FSM, perhaps) was claimed to be supernatural.
As matter of scientific truth, an existing god would have to be natural, such as allowed (in a certain form) by physical laws of the Universe where he is present in that form. It's simply by definition. The god may deform the physics of the area by him existing, but still that would be natural. We have plenty of places in this Universe that are ruled by different (from Earth) physics (inside a black hole, or a neutron star, etc.)
This was a very familiar situation in USSR. I was an engineer there, not a worker. However my father, an experienced doctor, at some point said "enough is enough" and quit his medical field altogether. He got a job at a salt distribution warehouse, to carry sacks of salt from one place to another. His pay increased twice, if not thrice.
You are right, of course, that many scientists (all over the world!) work not for money but for fun. They love their work. However... this recipe is only good if you are all alone in the world. You'd be perfectly happy pushing the boundaries of knowledge from 9am to 5pm (or much later) and then returning home, in your little single room, which doesn't even have a bathroom or a kitchen - you'd share those with people who live in other rooms. You'd never invite a girl to your room, firstly because no girl wants a poor scientist, secondly because you cannot entice her to visit you in that shared apartment, and thirdly you will not want all your neighbors to discuss your friends. But since you are single (forever!) this is not a concern at all.
Fortunately for demographics, such people are not very numerous. Most people are interested in families and children. They want their own apartment, their own car, and their own country home (dacha.) They do not want to live on pasta 364 days per year; they need clothes for themselves and for the children, and toys, and things, and vacation in Sochi. All this requires money (and knowing people who will sell you what you need; remember, stores are empty.) The meager salary of a MNS does not pay for any such thing. Eventually the wife spells out the offer that cannot be refused: "Get a real job and be a real man who earns money for the family. Or else." However displeasing such words can be, they do make sense. Some people - many! - surrender to the inevitable, abandon their scientific or engineering - or medical - careers and become lowly workers. All this is because workers were paid FAR MORE than specialists with several years of university education. You can see for yourself how disastrous such a policy would be for any country. Why was it in place? Because USSR was, officially, a state of proletariat; the "intelligentsia" (all those scientists and engineers) were just fellow travelers that had to be tolerated because they are useful.
I can write books on this subject, as can anyone who grew up in USSR. You cannot simply apply logic and derive an answer - USSR was actively and aggressively defying logic for sake of political dogmas. The facts on the ground are just what they are, and not what an educated and friendly foreigner (such as you) would think they are.
Note that USSR was not known for any fairness, anywhere. Every worker within a class (with few exceptions) was paid the same regardless of his skills, talent and output. An illiterate worker at the factory was earning more than a scientist. A political worker, who made no products and wasn't even good at management, was showered with money and perks. USSR was anything but fair, and that's why people ran away from it whenever they could; and that's why when USSR fell nobody shed a tear for the venerable Communist Party. CPSU wasn't even good at the only thing it pretended to do - to rule the society. Ask anyone who lived in USSR and you will be told all kinds of tales. For example, food was distributed not according to who had money or who had need, but according to where one worked, bypassing the stores (they had empty shelves.)
Being a successful professional, a great husband and father, making inroads to becoming a moderately successful author [...]
Those are side effects of LDS, not of LSD.
many countries have regulatory controls preventing citizens from easily moving money out of the country [...] Bitcoin provides a nice alternative in these cases
That "nice alternative" would be illegal.
The right thing to do is to demand that the law is changed (or the government.) It is never a good idea to break the law in hope that you won't be found. Governments interfere with many activities - they do not allow murder, they do not allow theft, they do not allow fraud... not everything that governments do is unreasonable, and citizens do not have a blanket permission to break laws if they are seen as inconvenient.
Those hard caps, for example, are intended to prevent export of capital out of the country while not interfering with small time business - travel or purchases. Why would that be desirable? Because if one Elbonian billionaire exports his capital, it won't be invested locally, and what then should 10 million Elbonians do? From the POV of the billionaire, it's certainly easier to just buy stock at one of the exchanges in NYC and be done, instead of buying factories and laying down the railways and modern roads. But the latter benefits Elbonia. The former benefits foreigners.
there are still many other improvements under the hood over windows 7 that shouldn't be thrown out because of one bad feature.
Will you buy a car with a 1,000 hp engine, powerful brakes, super good radio, but without the steering wheel?
Besides, the improvements in Win8 are minor, and largely invisible to the user. However omissions are huge. First, Aero is gone. Instead Win8 has tabletized, flat color decorations (of some awful color!) that can be rendered on an ARM processor. Second, the Start menu - the main method of discovering Windows - is gone. It is replaced with miles of unmanageable tiles. Can you select one tile out of a couple thousand? Third, discoverable controls are replaced with magic gestures that you must learn and remember. Fourth, these gestures are not ideal for mouse operation, and touching a desktop monitor is not such a hot idea.
Win8 is hard to use, and that's why it is not so appealing to a common user. Sure, it starts fast and runs faster, but it does you no good if you cannot start and run what you need. Ballmer left for a very good reason - to avoid the shame of being fired. Perhaps sanity will be restored soon at MS, and Win9 will be a Win7 with Win8 kernel and with Metro that runs as an isolated, windowed subsystem. Touch should be easy to disable, and it should not be required on a PC.
I have the same plan I had with the dumbphone.
Most, if not all, US cellular networks (AT&T and Verizon, at least) do not allow that. This is exactly why I am staying with my dumbphone. I would have bought a smartphone and never used the data plan; but AT&T mandates that once you connect a smartphone to the network you must pay for data. I do not like paying for services that I will never use.
I can fix a bad OS. But my parents cannot. Geeks do not represent a significant portion of the market. Even though geeks are influencers, they are not all too excited about personally fixing every Win8 box and then downloading and installing updates to ClassicShell every two weeks or so. Furthermore, Win8 split control panel functions into standard Control Panel and the new Metro Control Panel. I do not even remember what got moved where. The thing is a mess. I personally can work it, but a common man operates on muscle memory, and if the icon that he was clicking all the time to get the Interwebz is not there anymore, he will call his ISP and complain that Internet has crashed and they should fix it.
I have one Win8 laptop, and it will be probably downgraded to Win7. When others ask my advice, I tell them to get Win7. Some people are still in XP land, and they are happy there. Why not, if XP runs their software as it was designed to do? I have here some software that does not work even on Vista; and some other software runs on Win7 but not on Win8. Who needs this PITA?
Well, some starry-eyed BTC tinkerers still remain; however the big dogs have moved in - it's them who run ASIC farms in Iceland, not a geek in his parents' basement. BTC mining is an industry now, with their own capitalists. Even among geeks the initial desire to have a "free as in speech" currency quickly morphed into a speculative addiction. How many people here proudly declared that they made money on buying and selling BTC? On the other hand, there isn't much other use of BTC. It became the tulip bulbs of 21st century, except that you can't plant it and enjoy the flowers :-)
The role of that basement-dwelling geek is now only to supply his lunch money into the BTC system, so that miners can sell him their BTC, and the "finance industry" operators, like exchanges, can do him a small haircut on each transaction. If you dislike the current banking system, there is nothing attractive for you in the BTC system of exchanges and transfers for a fee. You want hard, cold cash in hand. Both are poor stores of value; stock of essential companies, valued fairly, is probably the best for that (outside of traditional choices of such precious metals as lead and brass.)
You pay for both; and, IMO, Facebook is more expensive in the long term. A BTC fee is not going to haunt you ten years down the road.
I tend to default to the understanding that I'm not entirely qualified to go jabbering on the internet that they've probably just got it wrong
That's not what GP was saying. He was asking WHY they thought those two neutrons to be one. He did not call them idiots who cannot count, for example :-) The GP's question is valid and insightful, that's why it got moderated as such.
I'd like to hear a simple explanation myself. Unfortunately, none is provided above. Appeal to authority is not good enough.
No, firing incompetent people in charge of a massive project is the right thing to do.
Good luck to you in firing Obama.
$20 says that there will be source code not passed along, requiring reverse engineering or rewrites.
It could be much worse. The new team can be given all the old code and asked to "fix" it ...
Indeed, a free currency needs more fees. Want to pay? Pay for the paying. Don't forget a fee for the pay for the pay...
True, the US government will never listen to 99.99% of the country's population. However the remaining 0.01% install and remove Presidents with a single phone call. They will be listened to, and very carefully.
Last bitcoin transaction I made, I actually double checked the fee.... it worked out to about 50 cents on $100. Seemed quite worth it to me given that paypal would have taken more.
A transaction fee of 0.5% is insanely high. All the money will be lost - paid to owners of the BTC network - after only 200 transactions.
I presume Mt. Gox pays good interest on the money that is locked up in their system?
Maybe two super-massive black holes passed close to each other and spun these off?
Perhaps. But now instead of explaining why one common star is moving somewhere fast you need to explain why two uncommon black holes are moving somewhere fast, and on top of that why they nearly hit each other and some common star...
Except you fail to take into account all the extra fees required for having a bank account in the first place!
It costs nothing to open a bank account. Why would a bank object to taking money from you? The bank will happily run SQL INSERT with your name on it. The clerks are on salary, so there is no downside.
Some services of the bank may be free or not free, depending on what level of banking you want and how much money you operate with. This is not a concern, unless your cash flow is so bad that you have to drain the account every other day. This is not what happens when you trade internationally; it happens only when you have no job and a large family - hardly a good test case for BTC.
The way to deal with that is to trade in common currency (USD for oil, for example.) You are proposing that this common currency should be BTC; but it doesn't really change the equation - you still have conversion fees. I worked at a company that sold equipment abroad, and all payments for it were in USD. The trading partner had USD accounts; I have no interest to know how those accounts related to their national currency accounts.
Besides, if "someone in Europe" does not want USD, chances are that he does not want BTC either. USD is convertible and liquid, you can exchange nearly any amount of it instantly, anywhere in the world. You can exchange USD for goods, for services, for other currency, for stock, for contracts, or for whatever else you can imagine. If there is something for sale on this planet, a USD will buy it. The same cannot be said about many other currencies; BTC is just as popular as some African money, at best - and I don't mean Krugerrand :-) Thinking about that, there are more people in any given Central African country that use their national currency than BTC users all over the world.
But let's see what today's exchange rate is, per oanda.com:
Selling 1.00000 USD you get 0.73508 EUR
Buying 1.00000 USD you pay 0.73515 EUR
The difference is 0.00007 Euro, or 0.095%. This is an infinitely better deal than 0.6% that BTC exchanges ask for. Why? Because the Forex market is huge, and competition in it is also huge. On top of that, you pay this fee only once, from your currency to "their." In case of BTC as an intermediary you have to convert twice, so you actually compare (flat wire fee + 0.095% exchange fee) to (zero wire fee + 1.2% exchange fee.) There are very few cases (small sums) when BTC wins - even if your time is worth nothing, and if you don't mind risking it all with BTC exchanges and their arbitrary payment schedules.
have you ever tried to transfer 100k USD?
Yes. Many businesses do that daily. Many private investors do that all the time. People gather up money for houses or expensive cars. (How did you pay for your house, with cash? I used a wire transfer, IIRC.) Nothing stops you from transferring money. The transactions will be reported, but as long as the money is sufficiently traced you will never hear a peep from anyone.
I got caught in those moving savings between banks
Sorry to hear. But in my experience it's smooth sailing. Banks are not in business of interfering with your money. The government might be, but the banks do their best to keep the government out of your pants. People with money are subtle and quick to anger.
If the BTC merchant in question has banking capabilities in both countries involved, then why would you need BTC for this transfer? As they say in fantasy books, "You deposit your money in any Gnome bank in the country, and you can take it out from the same or any other Gnome bank." The modern world embraced this principle and extended it, so any Visa card owner can withdraw his money from any Visa ATM anywhere in the world (with a small fee if the machine belongs to another bank.)
but if you can make a good deal of your purchases with BTC, too, then you don't need to convert it to a national currency.
Sure, if only you can make a good deal on purchase with BTC. However the moneychangers at BTC exchanges want their pound of flesh, so the prices in BTC are not that likely to be better than under other combinations of payment instruments. Your best bet, probably, is to pay with USD because USD is accepted nearly everywhere without conversion to RMB or whatever local currency the seller may have. It is standard practice for Canadian banks to offer USD accounts to anyone who walks in, just to facilitate cross-border trade.