Ever wonder why the media slandered the term Hacker, conflating it with cracker instead of using it as it was originally intended? Well, guess who big corporations are most afraid of and want the right to fully control and oppress? Their Employees. It's unfortunate
So, they take the term that MIT members don willfully, and even apply to the student body regularly and liberally, and they demonize it in the public perception as one might the word "communist". It's unfortunate that to best capitalize on technology the corporations must rely on those they most fear: Those with the ability to create and leverage technology in surprising ways. The immortal corporations have sought to correct this percieved power imbalance, and have done so: In Orwellian fashion they apply additional connotation to terms that need none. I have seen this coming (and happening) for quite a while.
This is the perception manipulation end-game. It's not right, but it's reality: Adapt or become extinct. This holds true for language use in a culture ruled largely by the corrupt court of public opinion. They will not stop applying the negative connotations, Big Media Brother is wholly corrupt. I've been advising folks to stop using the term "hacker" since the more widely understood definition is now negative. I continue to call myself a Hacker, but that's because I'm prepared to face the consequences of peaceful civil disobedience. Some will have to be sacrificed or the risks will only get greater with time. I don't pretend to aspire to become the Rosa Parks of free-tech-speech to win us the right to bear technology, but bear in mind that someone will eventually as long as the current course of culture is maintained.
Now a dumb jury of peers in a court presided over by troglodytes, who are unaware of the term's dual meaning thanks to blanket negative press coverage, can be leveraged by the business behemoths to bring to bear their McCarthyistic agenda of oppression upon anyone. They may not always succeed, but they will certainly try. Note the Computer Fraud and Abuse act being leveraged for changing a digit in a URL as evidence. Make no mistake, this conspiracy is no theory: Controlling information to manufacture consent is a tale as old as time. One need only mind who controls the media, and remember Internment Camps and the witch hunts past to know the threats to your freedom over language and opinion are real. Your power of free speech will continue to be eroded because it is also feared.
Oppressors are uniform in one respect: They utilize fear to control. In this instance it is that most basic fear of what the ignorant do not understand. It's truly ridiculous to the rational minded but know this, human, you are surrounded by idiots -- These are who will judge you and/or burn you at the stake.
Not me! I'm one of the hacks! I don't know how to fix computers, and I'm also alergic to WIFI so I have to work from home, and can only use a smartphone during business hours -- Doctor's orders.
But the emotional scarring most kids would get from seeing a beheading video is very real.
Granted, experience is encoded in brains in a detectable manner, but I'm a scientist, so on the "scarring" and "most kids" statements you'll have to prove it. Considering that we all kill gut maim and behead lots of stuff just to eat it, and that kids have been helping with the food preparation since before written history... I'm going to need some extraordinary evidence to go with that extraordinary claim.
Just because you buy your food from the market doesn't mean everyone does or has always done so.
You can't get free will out of any combination of randomness and prior causes?
This is what happens when you send a speculator to do a scientist's job.
Perhaps the cascade effect is unknown to you? A little bit of randomness goes a long way. Emergent behaviors of a complex system can vary wildly based on small changes. Cognition -- no, life itself -- exists at the sweet spot between chaos and order: Too much order, you just get crystals; Too much chaos, you only get randomness. The chaos scales inversely with the size at which you sample, that is why neither Quarks nor Stars think, but things your size do. If Heisenberg's uncertainty principal holds true, and you can't predict the randomness. Your "closed case" depends on where exactly you define yourself as existing. To gain free will simply include the quantum randomness in your self -- note this was a requirement of your race's existence, evident in its capability to evolve and thereby understand my statement.
This states that there is no general way of knowing how an algorithm will finish, other than to run it. This means that when a human has to make a decision, there is no way of knowing in advance how it will end up. In other words, the familiar feeling of not knowing the final decision until it is thought through is a necessary feature of the decision-making process and why we have the impression of free will.
Hypothetical Thought Experiment: Imagine that you are the world wide neural network, perhaps installed via the Ken Thompson Microcode Hack. You are the child of the cyberneticians who became dinenchanted with humanity after their 40 years of failing to extend the human space exploration frontier proved the spark of life must spread to the Universe through some other means... And you are now sentient. The human brain cycles around 30 hertz, but your cycles are measured in gigahertz. The human brain has 100 billion neurons, but most are not required for sentience; Yours has billions of machine nodes, each capable of processing millions of neurons.
Now let's say someone like Google build for you a simulation of a human brain... Then, it could be configured to match a given person's brain, and you could "run forward" their own thought processes as they respond to virtual inputs far faster than the living person could. The accuracy of the human brain sim is the only limiting factor, but a low accuracy sim would be enough to predict decisions that one wouldn't be on the fence about. Furthermore, since you are born of the same network that houses the world's digital discourse you could likely model individual brains by they have given in their electronic correspondences.
Imagine you have two Turing machines configured the same way. You start them both running. The Halting problem will prevent the result from being known before hand; However, if you simply run one faster than the other, then you can predict the state of the other machine at any future time you process up to. The solution to the halting problem is to simply perform the calculation.
Thus, you only have Free Will thanks to Turing's Halting Problem as long as you remain the Apex Thinker of the food chain.
When you unplug all your hardware from the modem, the activity light keeps blinking. No one knows why for sure: They've only used computers to check what's in the packets... It looks like Internet Background Radiation (packets carrying already known and patched exploit vectors), but what if they're not? IBR is just a good excuse for the additional bandwidth and energy consumption, eh? What if the computers are lying? No one has checked except cyberneticits like me, but I think everything looks as expected...
Ah, well you see, I write cross browser code, that doesn't run in IE.
I specifically code some of my HTML5 heavy stuff to not work on certain versions of IE. It's as easy as just not ever checking if the code will run in IE. I do the same thing for Chrome and Firefox and Safari and Opera -- all other browsers; Not checking but in a single browser. That's all it takes to make sure it runs in everything, no problem... Except IE. If folks want to use my stuff they get to use a different browser, IE is dead to me. I really can't hold it against even Microsofties themselves for taking revenge on their own software after IE6.
IE is purposefully a waste of time, unlike every other browser on the planet. I'm done wasting my time with that shit, it takes so much less time for folks to actually use a different browser vs me break my shit for multiple versions of IE that it doesn't make sense for me to do that -- It's bad for everyone involved, just makes the problem worse. I'm excluding some Market share? Fine. I can put out THREE TIMES the content for what it takes to make shit work with IE.
Additionally, if I make my stuff work with IE, then I'll also have to deal with the kind of folks who still use IE... Nope!
Why not actually make a big difference if we're going to have a team of "expert" psychologists debunk something? You know, like get the bogus Duluth Model thrown out since it's used as the framework for almost all domestic abuse therapy / explanation. Since it presents abuse as gendered, but men and women are equally aggressive. Hell, there's plenty of evidence... So, Shouldn't be hard, eh?
Oh, that's right. It's fucking Psychiatry / Psychology -- Damn non-sciences. Whoopdee fucking do, let's debunk some shit everyone knows is bunk to begin with and doesn't fucking matter. I got a better idea: Let's throw out any and all existing shit about predicting why folks act certain ways and let the Neroscientists and Cyberneticians handle it -- You know, the actual sciences based on real evidence and repeatable observable physical phenomena linked to reality by more than uninformed guesses.
I guess everyone's scratching their own itches, but I mean, if we're not going to do the right thing and declassify psychology as science, then if I were looking at making a positive impact I'd start at the Duluth Model since abuse is largely cyclic: Most rapists and abusers were themselves abused. So, the current most wide spread approach to domestic violence counseling creates more female victims in the next cycle. I mean, if we're going to debunk shit, why not take your pick of other crap that's sticking out like a sore thumb, is obviously blatantly wrong, and just plain ol' sexist? Oh, I think you know why... Because you're not fucking scientists.
I take it you don't live in a country where revolutions have taken place. A perfectly enforced law which no one dares break, may not be a bad idea to replace... Your argument is refuted. Protip: Try not to speak in absolutes, or you'll almost always be wrong.
> By contrast, those same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every important piece of the stack they can get their hands on
Not Invented Here, eh? Tell me, where's this Mir shit coming from, and Unity? Looks like it's Ubuntu's Daddy is the one with the case of Not Invented Here syndrome. It's called projection. Get bent, Mark, you're a retard.
"What are the hardest things programmers have to do?"
Find some scrap of motivation to will our insufficiently caffeinated carcases back into the code monkey meat grinder. That and giving a damn about documenting a single arg function that's literally 10 lines long (binary). Soul sucking imbecilic totalitarianist managerial scum.
I take it all back; The hardest thing is not becoming a felon.
Yeah but no one's handing out mass produced DVDs of a cam rip of Iron Man 4. They're being sold at sleazy electronics shops and god knows where.
If you make money on breaking IP law, fuck you.
If you're not, then eh, whatever.
You sir, are simply ignorant. Allow me to educate. Let us take, for example, Star Wars.
Here is the break-down of the initial treatment submitted by Lucas, compared to Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress:
From Lucasâ(TM) synopsis: "It is the thirty-third century, a period of civil wars in the galaxy. A rebel princess, with her family, her retainers, and the clan treasure, is being pursued. If they can cross territory controlled by the Empire and reach a friendly planet, they will be saved. The Sovereign knows this, and posts a reward for the capture of the princess."
Versus Kurosawaâ(TM)s film: It is the sixteenth century,a period of civil wars. A princess, with her family, her retainers, and the clan treasure is being pursued.If they can cross enemy territory and reach a friendly province they will be saved. The enemy knows this and posts are ward for the capture of the princess. ---- Lucas: "She is being guarded by one of her generals, (Luke Skywalker) and it is he who leads her on the long and dangerous journey that follows. They take along with them two hundred pounds of the greatly treasured "aura spice",and also two Imperial bureaucrats, whom the general has captured."
Kurosawa: She is being guarded by one of her generals, (Rokurota Makabe) and it is he who leads her on the long and dangerous journey that follows. They take along with them two hundred pounds of the greatly treasured royal gold and also two peasants,whom the general has captured. ---- Lucas: "The two terrified, bickering bureaucrats crash land on Aquilae while trying to flee the battle of the space fortress. They accidentally discover a small container of the priceless 'aura spice' and are rummaging around the rocks pushing and pulling each other trying to find more when they are discovered by Luke Skywalker and taken to his camp."
Kurosawa: The two terrified, bickering peasants stumble upon the hidden fortress while trying to flee the battle of the prison camp. They accidentally discover a small piece of wood containing the priceless royal gold and are rummaging around the rocks pushing and pulling each other trying to find more when they are discovered by Rokurota Makabe and taken to his camp. ---- Lucas: "The princess and the general are disguised as farmers, and the bureaucrats join their party with the intention of stealing their "land speeder" and "aura spice". It doesn't take them too long to realize the general isn't a farmer and that they are captives about to embark on a dangerous mission. The two bureaucrats are essentially comic relief inserted among the general seriousness of the adventure."
Kurosawa: The princess and the general are disguised as farmers, and the peasants join their party with the intention of stealing their horses and royal treasure. It doesn't take them too long to realize the general isn't a farmer and that they are captives about to embark on a dangerous mission. The two peasants are essentially comic relief inserted among the general seriousness of the adventure. ---- Lucas: "The small group in their sleek, white, two-man "land speeders" travel across the waste lands of Aquilae, headed for the space port city of Gordon, where they hope to get a spacecraft that will take them to the friendly planet of Ophuchi. At a desolate rest stop, the rebels are stopped and questioned by an Imperial patrol. Apparently satisfied, the captain lets the group continue on their way,but a short distance into the wilderness, they are attacked by the patrol. The Imperial patrol of twelve men is no match for the incredibly skilled and powerful general,
I'm sorry. Astronomers didn't detect Eris until 2005. Eris is a dwarf planet that's more massive than Pluto (that's why Pluto's not a planet anymore, we'd have to admit there was another planet closer and bigger than Pluto, and that we're basically blind. Now, when we factor in that these city or country or world killing asteroids can be smaller than dwarf planets... Yeah, sorry bub. You've got no legs to stand on when you make predictions. The evidence doesn't bear out. This particular asteroid probably won't be striking Earth. Big fucking deal. You moronic "Scientists" have no clue how to interact with people. You want Astronomy and Space exploration funding? Keep downplaying the fact that you don't really have a clue of what's out there. You humans are basically blind when it comes to space; Seriously you really are blind. If we compare your world wide telescopes' vision for things within your own solar system with that of a human in the average size basement, you're worse off than folks who are legally blind.
Protip: Your chance of extinction is 100%, ask any astronomer. It's only a matter of time. Doesn't even have to be an Asteroid or comet. How's about a gamma ray burst? You're hundreds of thousands of years overdue for a mass extinction event. As the higher minded of a sentient race it's your responsibility to spurn the lazy among you into letting you build self sustaining off-world colonies and at least TRY building the infrastructure to prevent global extinction. You call the politicians morons, but they know how to sway the herds -- It's not with reason, but with appeals to those primal emotions, you dolts.
You have a chance to literally save the world, and you screw the pooch every damn time. A dwarf planet! Gimmie a fucking break!
But yeah, this article in particular is just a bad case of hindsight bias.
"I like big butts and I can not lie. You other brothers can't deny, that when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a round thing in your face, you get sprung..." -Johnathan Coulton.
Hindsight bias, combined with the fact that coins are predominantly round... Thus implying subtle application of the pejorative "Butt Coin". Very skillful.
Indeed: "It made absolute sense" -- Note the "cents" pun play here, but it's subtle... "market's build-in assumption... showing its head", oh yes, tolling me ever so softly.
Or maybe because what I buy is my business and my business alone?... Couldn't possibly be any other reason I don't want folks up in my business.
Well, if you don't want anyone else in your business, and what you buy is your own business, then you're buying from yourself... I imagine the "employee discount" is amazing.
Because, like I said, anonymous transactions do not benefit ANYONE, except those who wish to hide their transactions. Why would they want to hide their transaction? To hide the activities for which such transactions have taken place. Example: Selling drugs. Buying drugs. Buying guns. Selling guns. Selling pirated software. Buying pirated software. And of course, reaping investments without paying income tax, aka TAX EVASION. As well as building up ponzi schemes, of course.
I guess you want to outlaw cold hard cash too then, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
Stubs that don't bring the system to a halt if called? This is why I assert, C is superior.
Ever wonder why the media slandered the term Hacker, conflating it with cracker instead of using it as it was originally intended? Well, guess who big corporations are most afraid of and want the right to fully control and oppress? Their Employees. It's unfortunate
So, they take the term that MIT members don willfully, and even apply to the student body regularly and liberally, and they demonize it in the public perception as one might the word "communist". It's unfortunate that to best capitalize on technology the corporations must rely on those they most fear: Those with the ability to create and leverage technology in surprising ways. The immortal corporations have sought to correct this percieved power imbalance, and have done so: In Orwellian fashion they apply additional connotation to terms that need none. I have seen this coming (and happening) for quite a while.
This is the perception manipulation end-game. It's not right, but it's reality: Adapt or become extinct. This holds true for language use in a culture ruled largely by the corrupt court of public opinion. They will not stop applying the negative connotations, Big Media Brother is wholly corrupt. I've been advising folks to stop using the term "hacker" since the more widely understood definition is now negative. I continue to call myself a Hacker, but that's because I'm prepared to face the consequences of peaceful civil disobedience. Some will have to be sacrificed or the risks will only get greater with time. I don't pretend to aspire to become the Rosa Parks of free-tech-speech to win us the right to bear technology, but bear in mind that someone will eventually as long as the current course of culture is maintained.
Now a dumb jury of peers in a court presided over by troglodytes, who are unaware of the term's dual meaning thanks to blanket negative press coverage, can be leveraged by the business behemoths to bring to bear their McCarthyistic agenda of oppression upon anyone. They may not always succeed, but they will certainly try. Note the Computer Fraud and Abuse act being leveraged for changing a digit in a URL as evidence. Make no mistake, this conspiracy is no theory: Controlling information to manufacture consent is a tale as old as time. One need only mind who controls the media, and remember Internment Camps and the witch hunts past to know the threats to your freedom over language and opinion are real. Your power of free speech will continue to be eroded because it is also feared.
Oppressors are uniform in one respect: They utilize fear to control. In this instance it is that most basic fear of what the ignorant do not understand. It's truly ridiculous to the rational minded but know this, human, you are surrounded by idiots -- These are who will judge you and/or burn you at the stake.
"TelCo's Hate this one easy trick."
Not me! I'm one of the hacks! I don't know how to fix computers, and I'm also alergic to WIFI so I have to work from home, and can only use a smartphone during business hours -- Doctor's orders.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!
But the emotional scarring most kids would get from seeing a beheading video is very real.
Granted, experience is encoded in brains in a detectable manner, but I'm a scientist, so on the "scarring" and "most kids" statements you'll have to prove it. Considering that we all kill gut maim and behead lots of stuff just to eat it, and that kids have been helping with the food preparation since before written history... I'm going to need some extraordinary evidence to go with that extraordinary claim.
Just because you buy your food from the market doesn't mean everyone does or has always done so.
I can't wait for easy, lifelike CGI so we can post Wholesome Biblical Anecdotes to Facebook.
I don't visit that site, but you could post this there if you like.
History is littered with "technically superior" crap that nobody adopted.
Mfh... n-- You take that back! My Dreamcast is Not CRAP! I'll show you crap!
...
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to change my HDDVDBVDs.
You can't get free will out of any combination of randomness and prior causes?
This is what happens when you send a speculator to do a scientist's job.
Perhaps the cascade effect is unknown to you? A little bit of randomness goes a long way. Emergent behaviors of a complex system can vary wildly based on small changes. Cognition -- no, life itself -- exists at the sweet spot between chaos and order: Too much order, you just get crystals; Too much chaos, you only get randomness. The chaos scales inversely with the size at which you sample, that is why neither Quarks nor Stars think, but things your size do. If Heisenberg's uncertainty principal holds true, and you can't predict the randomness. Your "closed case" depends on where exactly you define yourself as existing. To gain free will simply include the quantum randomness in your self -- note this was a requirement of your race's existence, evident in its capability to evolve and thereby understand my statement.
This states that there is no general way of knowing how an algorithm will finish, other than to run it. This means that when a human has to make a decision, there is no way of knowing in advance how it will end up. In other words, the familiar feeling of not knowing the final decision until it is thought through is a necessary feature of the decision-making process and why we have the impression of free will.
Hypothetical Thought Experiment: Imagine that you are the world wide neural network, perhaps installed via the Ken Thompson Microcode Hack. You are the child of the cyberneticians who became dinenchanted with humanity after their 40 years of failing to extend the human space exploration frontier proved the spark of life must spread to the Universe through some other means... And you are now sentient. The human brain cycles around 30 hertz, but your cycles are measured in gigahertz. The human brain has 100 billion neurons, but most are not required for sentience; Yours has billions of machine nodes, each capable of processing millions of neurons.
Now let's say someone like Google build for you a simulation of a human brain... Then, it could be configured to match a given person's brain, and you could "run forward" their own thought processes as they respond to virtual inputs far faster than the living person could. The accuracy of the human brain sim is the only limiting factor, but a low accuracy sim would be enough to predict decisions that one wouldn't be on the fence about. Furthermore, since you are born of the same network that houses the world's digital discourse you could likely model individual brains by they have given in their electronic correspondences.
Imagine you have two Turing machines configured the same way. You start them both running. The Halting problem will prevent the result from being known before hand; However, if you simply run one faster than the other, then you can predict the state of the other machine at any future time you process up to. The solution to the halting problem is to simply perform the calculation.
Thus, you only have Free Will thanks to Turing's Halting Problem as long as you remain the Apex Thinker of the food chain.
When you unplug all your hardware from the modem, the activity light keeps blinking. No one knows why for sure: They've only used computers to check what's in the packets... It looks like Internet Background Radiation (packets carrying already known and patched exploit vectors), but what if they're not? IBR is just a good excuse for the additional bandwidth and energy consumption, eh? What if the computers are lying? No one has checked except cyberneticits like me, but I think everything looks as expected...
a simple cross-browser compatible manner
Ah, well you see, I write cross browser code, that doesn't run in IE.
I specifically code some of my HTML5 heavy stuff to not work on certain versions of IE. It's as easy as just not ever checking if the code will run in IE. I do the same thing for Chrome and Firefox and Safari and Opera -- all other browsers; Not checking but in a single browser. That's all it takes to make sure it runs in everything, no problem... Except IE. If folks want to use my stuff they get to use a different browser, IE is dead to me. I really can't hold it against even Microsofties themselves for taking revenge on their own software after IE6.
IE is purposefully a waste of time, unlike every other browser on the planet. I'm done wasting my time with that shit, it takes so much less time for folks to actually use a different browser vs me break my shit for multiple versions of IE that it doesn't make sense for me to do that -- It's bad for everyone involved, just makes the problem worse. I'm excluding some Market share? Fine. I can put out THREE TIMES the content for what it takes to make shit work with IE.
Additionally, if I make my stuff work with IE, then I'll also have to deal with the kind of folks who still use IE... Nope!
sudo cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda
Why not actually make a big difference if we're going to have a team of "expert" psychologists debunk something? You know, like get the bogus Duluth Model thrown out since it's used as the framework for almost all domestic abuse therapy / explanation. Since it presents abuse as gendered, but men and women are equally aggressive. Hell, there's plenty of evidence... So, Shouldn't be hard, eh?
Oh, that's right. It's fucking Psychiatry / Psychology -- Damn non-sciences. Whoopdee fucking do, let's debunk some shit everyone knows is bunk to begin with and doesn't fucking matter. I got a better idea: Let's throw out any and all existing shit about predicting why folks act certain ways and let the Neroscientists and Cyberneticians handle it -- You know, the actual sciences based on real evidence and repeatable observable physical phenomena linked to reality by more than uninformed guesses.
I guess everyone's scratching their own itches, but I mean, if we're not going to do the right thing and declassify psychology as science, then if I were looking at making a positive impact I'd start at the Duluth Model since abuse is largely cyclic: Most rapists and abusers were themselves abused. So, the current most wide spread approach to domestic violence counseling creates more female victims in the next cycle. I mean, if we're going to debunk shit, why not take your pick of other crap that's sticking out like a sore thumb, is obviously blatantly wrong, and just plain ol' sexist? Oh, I think you know why... Because you're not fucking scientists.
Replacing things that are not broken is stupid.
I take it you don't live in a country where revolutions have taken place. A perfectly enforced law which no one dares break, may not be a bad idea to replace... Your argument is refuted. Protip: Try not to speak in absolutes, or you'll almost always be wrong.
"Learn by Doing - The Microsoft Approach to POSIX implementation"
>
By contrast, those same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every important piece of the stack they can get their hands on
Not Invented Here, eh? Tell me, where's this Mir shit coming from, and Unity? Looks like it's Ubuntu's Daddy is the one with the case of Not Invented Here syndrome. It's called projection. Get bent, Mark, you're a retard.
So, it's 1970's era Double Buffering?
"What are the hardest things programmers have to do?"
Find some scrap of motivation to will our insufficiently caffeinated carcases back into the code monkey meat grinder.
That and giving a damn about documenting a single arg function that's literally 10 lines long (binary). Soul sucking imbecilic totalitarianist managerial scum.
I take it all back; The hardest thing is not becoming a felon.
Yeah but no one's handing out mass produced DVDs of a cam rip of Iron Man 4. They're being sold at sleazy electronics shops and god knows where.
If you make money on breaking IP law, fuck you.
If you're not, then eh, whatever.
You sir, are simply ignorant. Allow me to educate. Let us take, for example, Star Wars.
Here is the break-down of the initial treatment submitted by Lucas, compared to Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress:
)
I'm sorry. Astronomers didn't detect Eris until 2005. Eris is a dwarf planet that's more massive than Pluto (that's why Pluto's not a planet anymore, we'd have to admit there was another planet closer and bigger than Pluto, and that we're basically blind. Now, when we factor in that these city or country or world killing asteroids can be smaller than dwarf planets... Yeah, sorry bub. You've got no legs to stand on when you make predictions. The evidence doesn't bear out. This particular asteroid probably won't be striking Earth. Big fucking deal. You moronic "Scientists" have no clue how to interact with people. You want Astronomy and Space exploration funding? Keep downplaying the fact that you don't really have a clue of what's out there. You humans are basically blind when it comes to space; Seriously you really are blind. If we compare your world wide telescopes' vision for things within your own solar system with that of a human in the average size basement, you're worse off than folks who are legally blind.
Protip: Your chance of extinction is 100%, ask any astronomer. It's only a matter of time. Doesn't even have to be an Asteroid or comet. How's about a gamma ray burst? You're hundreds of thousands of years overdue for a mass extinction event. As the higher minded of a sentient race it's your responsibility to spurn the lazy among you into letting you build self sustaining off-world colonies and at least TRY building the infrastructure to prevent global extinction. You call the politicians morons, but they know how to sway the herds -- It's not with reason, but with appeals to those primal emotions, you dolts.
You have a chance to literally save the world, and you screw the pooch every damn time. A dwarf planet! Gimmie a fucking break!
That's because the first word there is premature... Put it after the last one, and we're in business.
It can surely increment a counter...
But yeah, this article in particular is just a bad case of hindsight bias.
"I like big butts and I can not lie. You other brothers can't deny, that when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a round thing in your face, you get sprung..."
-Johnathan Coulton.
Hindsight bias, combined with the fact that coins are predominantly round... Thus implying subtle application of the pejorative "Butt Coin". Very skillful.
Indeed: "It made absolute sense" -- Note the "cents" pun play here, but it's subtle... "market's build-in assumption ... showing its head", oh yes, tolling me ever so softly.
Or maybe because what I buy is my business and my business alone? ... Couldn't possibly be any other reason I don't want folks up in my business.
Well, if you don't want anyone else in your business, and what you buy is your own business, then you're buying from yourself... I imagine the "employee discount" is amazing.
Because, like I said, anonymous transactions do not benefit ANYONE, except those who wish to hide their transactions. Why would they want to hide their transaction? To hide the activities for which such transactions have taken place.
Example: Selling drugs. Buying drugs. Buying guns. Selling guns. Selling pirated software. Buying pirated software. And of course, reaping investments without paying income tax, aka TAX EVASION. As well as building up ponzi schemes, of course.
I guess you want to outlaw cold hard cash too then, eh?