That's a valid reason to complain about energy required to perform transactions, but not mining.
For mining, you can be either for or against pissing away horrific amounts of energy to mine BTC, but its efficiency or inefficiency is an artificial design choice that the system must follow.
But it's a horrible design choice. Basically, by design, it stays secure only by making the cost of mining too expensive for someone to buy enough miners to game the system and the primary expense is electricity. If someone manages to get around this limitation by say heating a stadium with the excess heat, then either they can game the system or the amount of electricity used goes up as the cost to mine drops.
>If I could maintain my current lifestyle, while working a 20 hour week, I certainly would not get a second job.
That's the point... you can't maintain your lifestyle because OTHER people will gladly pick up a second job so they can have more stuff. Eventually that kind of choice puts downward pressure on wages until everyone has to work 40 hours again just to keep up.
A partial solution would be to make it illegal to work more than 20 hours per week and/or mandatory vacation. I say partial solution because if you could only legally work 20 hours a week, you would likely see a lot more people doing projects in their spare time like fixing up a car for extra income. I think this would still be a net win though as it would encourage entrepreneurship.
Reasons people turn to piracy: 1. Too many services. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are the big ones. But CBS has a service, HBO has a service, even WWE has a service. Even Disney and Stargate?!?!?! are soon to have a streaming service. At least Amazon throws other perks in with it.
Amazon also at least attempts to offer you everything. Sure, a lot of it is still over priced but at least it's available for a price. Netflix resisted a search box for the longest time because they knew people would discover that none of their favorite movies are actually there. My kids find it insulting when they type in a specific movie and Netflix offers an alternative title. My ideal service would offer everything less than a year old at $2/hour and everything more than 10 years old at 50cents per hour. IF someone offered a service like this and offered everything ever made, piracy would die tomorrow and it would still give a nice $4/movie for new release rentals and $1/movie for old release rentals which is about what the going rate is anyways. The problem is noone wants to hunt across 5 services and then find out that it's not available anyways.
I think a shipping container full of donations would make a good payload. You could charge people $100/pound to put something in the shipping container. Even if there was a 90% chance of failure, I think you could find plenty of people who would pay to have something on a real rocket launch.
On the flip side of that, every major phone brand, particularly Samsung, Google and Apple, all have photo/email/sms/cloud apps, but moving from one to the other is a pain in the a**, so most people pick a brand and just stick with it. In this case competition looks good on paper but in reality it's vendor lock-in.
Which is why the government should demand interoperability just like they did with instant messaging, email, etc.... If your friend list and your posts carried from service to service then people could use competing services without lock-in. At the very least they should allow some sort of aggregation service that sits on top of facebook and other social media services. Google doesn't really have the lockin, there is plenty of competition, it's easy enough to switch to bing, duckduckgo, etc... if people found them more useful. Amazon is probably the hardest to break up. It's lockin is economy of scale and convenience. It's really hard for someone to go head to head with amazon but I once thought that about ebay so anything's possible.
You do not have to use a cell phone, or have it turned on while doing criminal shit.
Your entire argument hinges on that fundamentally false statement.
You're carrying a GPS tracker that you contractually agreed to allow track you. End of the argument. Goodbye.
I never willingly contractually agreed to have anyone track me and I would gladly opt out of records of my GPS movement if allowed. The services I use on my phone don't require them to actually store my location anywhere to still be able to provide me the service. I think the correct solution is to make it illegal for cellular companies to store cellular tower or GPS locations about their customers.
As far as turning your phone off while breaking the law, I could easily see a future where an innocent person could become a suspect just because their phone happened to be off during multiple robberies.
Or tweak the algo to show the depressed the negative stuff other people post [there's is always negative stuff]. So, hopefully they'll realize that there are people as unhappy as they are. That should work if the problem is the perceived good life other people live.
This would be a VERY difficult thing to get right. Yes, if you're miserable and see everyone else is happy, this can possibly make you feel worse but so can seeing a bunch of depressing posts from everyone. Ideally what you would probably want to show is posts of people overcoming difficulties but it would likely be hard to find this thread consistently.
If you want that level of privacy there are plenty of end-to-end encrypted channels.
If you want ANY level of privacy, then you shouldn't be using facebook in the first place. At least suicide prevention is a mostly non-evil use for their massive profiling. And if you are using the end-to-end encrypted channel to connect to facebook then it's pretty much like sanitizing a straw to drink out of a toilet.
Everyone has kids knows that the answer in how to have sex with kids is to call Grandma or a babysitter for the evening, to to a restaurant with your spouse and then go straight in a motel or if you feel fancy, search a quiet spot, park there and put newspapers on the car's windows.
Exactly. It doesn't surprise me that "how to have sex with kids" and "how to have sex kids" top the list especially during a holiday weekend. How the "your" got inserted is a slight mystery but it's possible that either people are typing it that way or google is somehow inserting the your for some reason.
Would you allow someone without a medical license to operate on you? I think the biohacker morons are likely the ones to face charges in this scenario, not the person injecting themselves.
You're assuming that it is two different people. If it's illegal and you have a terminal illness that you think it might help then you are likely going to do it yourself or find a close friend to help you. Just like medical marijuana and medical suicide, there is enough stuff on the web that someone can take care of it themselves with a little research.
Never really thought about the logistics of storing all those machines. Another negative with voting machines.
And unfortunately many of them are stored in highly unsecure locations.
Is there really any reason to keep the ballots after the election results have been certified? 6 weeks and it was all over, which was longer then usual but once over, why keep the ballots?
The main reason to keep them for at least a couple years is if questions come up about the legitimacy of the election. 6 weeks is before the new guy is even in office. Once the ballots are destroyed, it would be much easier for a bad actor to change the totals. With an election, you have to always assume the worst which is that the people doing the certifiying and/or making the voting machines are potential bad actors.
It's not inconceivable that scarcity could lead to more innovative approaches to the fresh water shortage we're destined to endure if the population growth continues unchecked.
A settlement for humans won't really solve the real problem. Fresh water for humans will never be a problem. We could survive on bottled water. Also, there is plenty of water in the ocean and we have plenty of technology for purifying, and piping the water to where it needs to be. Water is also dirt cheap. Even desalinated water is dirt cheap for human usage. Swimming pools and even lawns are not the problem. The problem is really agriculture. We cannot afford to desalinate water and use that water to water our millions of acres of corn and other crops. We could, but if we did then food would once again become a significant portion of a person's budget instead of the insignificant portion it has become today. Regardless, the fresh water shortage is not a problem. It's more a problem for the environment than for humans. For humans, it's easy enough to get fresh water to where it needs to be.
You know this is utter bullshit, right? As our population continues to grow we will eventually have to USE more of he land on Earth, but it doesnâ(TM)t mean cities are going to have to grow up in the desert or tundra. Look at the US, the vast majority of the central part of th country is minimally developed yet FAR easier to live in than the desert or tundra. People can cram into extremely dense communities the problem is food production and raw material sourcing.
That's not the point. The point is that it is still FAR FAR easier to live in the desert or the tundra than it is to live on mars. Yeah, Bill Gates could buy a bunch of great farmland but what's the point of that. Just like Bill Gates doesn't need any more money, he doesn't need an easy project. Buying dirt cheap land in the middle of a desert, with lots of free solar, a few minutes outside of a major city and he both gets the challenge of building something out of nothing and possibly even gets the change to increase the value of the land and open up the ability to increase the value of useless land elsewhere.
Around here, the polling places are usually school gyms or churches. Don't know if it would be practical to store the ballots permanently there.
With paper ballots there would be a lot less to store than all the machines that are currently stored. It would be easy enough to supply a safe to each school/church but most churches and schools likely already have a safe so putting the ballots in a tamper proof box in a third party safe would likely be even better as then the ability to get access to all the different safes would be even more difficult. I also would have no problem with the ballots being put in individual safety deposit boxes or even sent home and put in the safe of the local election official as long as it was in a tamper proof box and destroyed in public after the next election.
because being too tall is not nearly as inconvinient as being too short.
How do you figure? I don't see a major problem with being too short. We have a ton of short people called children so most companies and products have allowances made for this. Not so for someone who is tall. Someone who is extra tall doesn't have the option of shopping in the kids section for their furniture or clothes.
how about a nice comfy chair, a cup of coffee, an airconditioned office and a remote control and VR remote control. Look at it this was, that warehouse would no longer need to be conditioned, no temperature, lighting or even fresh air beyond the needs of the goods stored there, because the works are in a healthy safe human beneficial work environment operating the device by virtual reality remote control. How many jobs would be some much better with the simple inclusion of VR remote control, it is even conceivable that you do it from home.
Although I agree with you that a shorter work week would be good, I'm not convinced that it's any healthier to have workers sitting at a desk with a joystick all day. The human body requires movement and sitting is killing us. We really need to rethink work. Currently jobs are mostly either 100% manual labor which is terrible on your body or 100% desk job which might be even worse. Having some sort of exoskeleton might actually be an improvement. The worker still gets the movement that keeps them active without the physical strain that usually comes from manual labor.
I find it dubious that low-value heat would be more suitable for powering a watch than, say, a flexible solar cell in the watch strap.
Exactly. I would guess that an "invisible" solar panel behind the watch face or even a small disc a few millimeters wide could generate more energy from ambient light in an office than you could ever generate from waste body heat.
There are numerous ways the ticket brokers could cut out all the scalpers if they wanted. Raising prices, auction, non-transferable tickets, and many others. The ticket brokers like scalpers, and this is the only reason they exist.
Exactly this. They could follow the lead of the airline. You could have a cheap ticket which requires a picture id to match someone in your party. If you have a party of 10, you would only have to check one id. You could also sell a certain percentage at auction. Most of these concerts are also sellouts so even allowing someone to sell it back so that someone else can rebuy it wouldn't hurt the venue.
I think the main reason they keep the prices low is not because they want it affordable to fans but because they want the perceived artificial scarcity. They want it to sell out in minutes. If it doesn't sell out in minutes, it makes the artist look less popular.
To some extent. The problem is that a lot depends on how and where you keep your paper records. The more they are moved, aggregated and the longer they are stored, the more opportunity there is to tamper with them, and on a larger scale.
Paper records should never be moved or aggregated. Preferably, each polling station would have an individual safe where they are placed until the next election. The main advantages of paper ballots is the decentralization,the accountability and the ability to do a recount. You lose all that if they are aggregated. The polling stations should send their totals to the county where they become public record and those totals are sent to the state and then to the federal where again the aggregate totals are public. You can easily see that your polling station's 531 votes are recorded at the county and the total of all the polling stations equals the total sent on to the state. If there is any question, it is easy enough to recount at the specific polling station where there is a problem because you are only talking about a small number of ballots. It's also easy enough to count by hand because, again, you are talking about a small number of ballots. Even security becomes less of an issue because the ballots are physically located all across the county and altering or destroying them becomes a logistic nightmare.
No electronic system that you do not control everything, end to end, can be provably secure. I'm talking the level of control to know exactly what is inside that silicon, and that there is no direct or indirect way to meddle. You also need provable security on the software. Military systems can now cost much more than consumer systems to even attempt that level of traceability.
Yes, that's the first part, you need to control everything to prove it secure but there is a second part as well. You also need to have someone you can trust doing the controlling. For the most part, in the military, everyone is on the same side. In an election, by definition, there are two competing sides. So you need an uncorruptible neutral third party who has control of everything. Even if you find this mythical beast, you now have a single point of failure and a single attack vector. Every power hungry maniac will be trying to secretly get their guy into that position.
Decentralized paper ballots at the county level, on the other hand, are much harder to manipulate than even the mythical "perfect benevolent dictator". Unlike individual secret ballots, county totals are public record. Each county keeps track of their totals and makes sure that their total is the total reflected in the national election. So in order to change the results of a national election, you would have to have at least one agent physically present at every single county that you wanted to manipulate. We are likely talking thousands of agents across the country of which you have to make sure that none of them decide to expose your plot. Most local election volunteers I've seen are also pillars of the community where everyone knows everyone else. It's just not practical to coordinate an attack on the national election at the local level if we use paper ballots.
But noone really has a short-term incentive to change either of those.
More importantly, they have a major incentive to continue to exploit it. For instance, the top 10% of drinkers drink more than 10 drinks per day (over 70 drinks a week). Most people will admit that these people have a problem. The problem is that this group of problem drinkers buy over 50% of the alcohol. Think about that, if Budweiser cut them off, they would lose over 50% of their sales. If instead of cutting them off, they limited them to only 5 drinks per day (35 drinks a week), they would still lose over 25% of their sales. A substantial portion of Budweiser's sales (and everyone else's) are people with addictions. Likely most if not all of their best customers are people with addictions. This likely holds for facebook, casinos, and possibly even department stores. Try telling a business that they need to cut off their best customers.
Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, but rather maintains its value by the utility it offers and the number of people who hold Bitcoin. This makes it very similar to any fiat currency, actually. At least investing in metals gives you something with intrinsic value.
As bitcoin does offer a service, I think the main threat to bitcoin is competing cryptocurrencies. Not surprisingly, this is the same threat to other fiat currencies which is why most countries outlaw competing currencies and many even outlaw or restrict precious metals for the same reason. On the other hand, there are no laws preventing someone from creating hundred or even thousands of competing cryptocurrencies but cryptocurrencies do benefit from having a sufficiently large mining pool so it seems like bitcoin and all the cryptocurrencies should eventually stabilize at the price needed to maintain a sufficiently large mining pool to keep it secure. I have no idea what this price point would be but it might be interesting to try to calculate.
The reason that it's hard to find a non-smart TV is there is no value in it for the manufacturer. Noone is willing to pay extra for a missing feature. If the average consumer sees a smart TV and a non-smart TV for the same price, they are going to choose the smart TV every time so it's worth it for the manufacturer to slap together a crappy "smart tv" feature and add it to the TV. Smart TV features also let TV manufacturers differentiate themselves. It also allows them to have "planned obsolescence". It also gives them the ability to strike deals with netflix, amazon, etc... A non-smart TV has none of these financial advantages for the manufacturer and still costs the same amount to manufacture and ship.
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That's a valid reason to complain about energy required to perform transactions, but not mining.
For mining, you can be either for or against pissing away horrific amounts of energy to mine BTC, but its efficiency or inefficiency is an artificial design choice that the system must follow.
But it's a horrible design choice. Basically, by design, it stays secure only by making the cost of mining too expensive for someone to buy enough miners to game the system and the primary expense is electricity. If someone manages to get around this limitation by say heating a stadium with the excess heat, then either they can game the system or the amount of electricity used goes up as the cost to mine drops.
>If I could maintain my current lifestyle, while working a 20 hour week, I certainly would not get a second job.
That's the point... you can't maintain your lifestyle because OTHER people will gladly pick up a second job so they can have more stuff. Eventually that kind of choice puts downward pressure on wages until everyone has to work 40 hours again just to keep up.
A partial solution would be to make it illegal to work more than 20 hours per week and/or mandatory vacation. I say partial solution because if you could only legally work 20 hours a week, you would likely see a lot more people doing projects in their spare time like fixing up a car for extra income. I think this would still be a net win though as it would encourage entrepreneurship.
Reasons people turn to piracy:
1. Too many services. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are the big ones. But CBS has a service, HBO has a service, even WWE has a service. Even Disney and Stargate?!?!?! are soon to have a streaming service. At least Amazon throws other perks in with it.
Amazon also at least attempts to offer you everything. Sure, a lot of it is still over priced but at least it's available for a price. Netflix resisted a search box for the longest time because they knew people would discover that none of their favorite movies are actually there. My kids find it insulting when they type in a specific movie and Netflix offers an alternative title. My ideal service would offer everything less than a year old at $2/hour and everything more than 10 years old at 50cents per hour. IF someone offered a service like this and offered everything ever made, piracy would die tomorrow and it would still give a nice $4/movie for new release rentals and $1/movie for old release rentals which is about what the going rate is anyways. The problem is noone wants to hunt across 5 services and then find out that it's not available anyways.
A 3 year old requires 3 years of training. This system can learn in hours.
So give the computer 3 years of training on the fastest supercomputer available. A 3 year old would still be able to outperform it.
I think a shipping container full of donations would make a good payload. You could charge people $100/pound to put something in the shipping container. Even if there was a 90% chance of failure, I think you could find plenty of people who would pay to have something on a real rocket launch.
On the flip side of that, every major phone brand, particularly Samsung, Google and Apple, all have photo/email/sms/cloud apps, but moving from one to the other is a pain in the a**, so most people pick a brand and just stick with it. In this case competition looks good on paper but in reality it's vendor lock-in.
Which is why the government should demand interoperability just like they did with instant messaging, email, etc.... If your friend list and your posts carried from service to service then people could use competing services without lock-in. At the very least they should allow some sort of aggregation service that sits on top of facebook and other social media services. Google doesn't really have the lockin, there is plenty of competition, it's easy enough to switch to bing, duckduckgo, etc... if people found them more useful. Amazon is probably the hardest to break up. It's lockin is economy of scale and convenience. It's really hard for someone to go head to head with amazon but I once thought that about ebay so anything's possible.
You do not have to use a cell phone, or have it turned on while doing criminal shit.
Your entire argument hinges on that fundamentally false statement.
You're carrying a GPS tracker that you contractually agreed to allow track you. End of the argument. Goodbye.
I never willingly contractually agreed to have anyone track me and I would gladly opt out of records of my GPS movement if allowed.
The services I use on my phone don't require them to actually store my location anywhere to still be able to provide me the service.
I think the correct solution is to make it illegal for cellular companies to store cellular tower or GPS locations about their customers.
As far as turning your phone off while breaking the law, I could easily see a future where an innocent person could become a
suspect just because their phone happened to be off during multiple robberies.
Or tweak the algo to show the depressed the negative stuff other people post [there's is always negative stuff]. So, hopefully they'll realize that there are people as unhappy as they are. That should work if the problem is the perceived good life other people live.
This would be a VERY difficult thing to get right. Yes, if you're miserable and see everyone else is happy, this can possibly make you feel worse but so can seeing a bunch of depressing posts from everyone. Ideally what you would probably want to show is posts of people overcoming difficulties but it would likely be hard to find this thread consistently.
If you want that level of privacy there are plenty of end-to-end encrypted channels.
If you want ANY level of privacy, then you shouldn't be using facebook in the first place.
At least suicide prevention is a mostly non-evil use for their massive profiling.
And if you are using the end-to-end encrypted channel to connect to facebook then it's pretty much like sanitizing a straw to drink out of a toilet.
Everyone has kids knows that the answer in how to have sex with kids is to call Grandma or a babysitter for the evening, to to a restaurant with your spouse and then go straight in a motel or if you feel fancy, search a quiet spot, park there and put newspapers on the car's windows.
Exactly. It doesn't surprise me that "how to have sex with kids" and "how to have sex kids" top the list especially during a holiday weekend. How the "your" got inserted is a slight mystery but it's possible that either people are typing it that way or google is somehow inserting the your for some reason.
Would you allow someone without a medical license to operate on you? I think the biohacker morons are likely the ones to face charges in this scenario, not the person injecting themselves.
You're assuming that it is two different people. If it's illegal and you have a terminal illness that you think it might help then you are likely going to do it yourself or find a close friend to help you. Just like medical marijuana and medical suicide, there is enough stuff on the web that someone can take care of it themselves with a little research.
Never really thought about the logistics of storing all those machines. Another negative with voting machines.
And unfortunately many of them are stored in highly unsecure locations.
Is there really any reason to keep the ballots after the election results have been certified? 6 weeks and it was all over, which was longer then usual but once over, why keep the ballots?
The main reason to keep them for at least a couple years is if questions come up about the legitimacy of the election. 6 weeks is before the new guy is even in office. Once the ballots are destroyed, it would be much easier for a bad actor to change the totals. With an election, you have to always assume the worst which is that the people doing the certifiying and/or making the voting machines are potential bad actors.
It's not inconceivable that scarcity could lead to more innovative approaches to the fresh water shortage we're destined to endure if the population growth continues unchecked.
A settlement for humans won't really solve the real problem. Fresh water for humans will never be a problem. We could survive on bottled water. Also, there is plenty of water in the ocean and we have plenty of technology for purifying, and piping the water to where it needs to be. Water is also dirt cheap. Even desalinated water is dirt cheap for human usage. Swimming pools and even lawns are not the problem. The problem is really agriculture. We cannot afford to desalinate water and use that water to water our millions of acres of corn and other crops. We could, but if we did then food would once again become a significant portion of a person's budget instead of the insignificant portion it has become today. Regardless, the fresh water shortage is not a problem. It's more a problem for the environment than for humans. For humans, it's easy enough to get fresh water to where it needs to be.
You know this is utter bullshit, right? As our population continues to grow we will eventually have to USE more of he land on Earth, but it doesnâ(TM)t mean cities are going to have to grow up in the desert or tundra. Look at the US, the vast majority of the central part of th country is minimally developed yet FAR easier to live in than the desert or tundra. People can cram into extremely dense communities the problem is food production and raw material sourcing.
That's not the point. The point is that it is still FAR FAR easier to live in the desert or the tundra than it is to live on mars. Yeah, Bill Gates could buy a bunch of great farmland but what's the point of that. Just like Bill Gates doesn't need any more money, he doesn't need an easy project. Buying dirt cheap land in the middle of a desert, with lots of free solar, a few minutes outside of a major city and he both gets the challenge of building something out of nothing and possibly even gets the change to increase the value of the land and open up the ability to increase the value of useless land elsewhere.
Around here, the polling places are usually school gyms or churches. Don't know if it would be practical to store the ballots permanently there.
With paper ballots there would be a lot less to store than all the machines that are currently stored. It would be easy enough to supply a safe to each school/church but most churches and schools likely already have a safe so putting the ballots in a tamper proof box in a third party safe would likely be even better as then the ability to get access to all the different safes would be even more difficult. I also would have no problem with the ballots being put in individual safety deposit boxes or even sent home and put in the safe of the local election official as long as it was in a tamper proof box and destroyed in public after the next election.
because being too tall is not nearly as inconvinient as being too short.
How do you figure? I don't see a major problem with being too short. We have a ton of short people called children so most companies and products have allowances made for this. Not so for someone who is tall. Someone who is extra tall doesn't have the option of shopping in the kids section for their furniture or clothes.
how about a nice comfy chair, a cup of coffee, an airconditioned office and a remote control and VR remote control. Look at it this was, that warehouse would no longer need to be conditioned, no temperature, lighting or even fresh air beyond the needs of the goods stored there, because the works are in a healthy safe human beneficial work environment operating the device by virtual reality remote control. How many jobs would be some much better with the simple inclusion of VR remote control, it is even conceivable that you do it from home.
Although I agree with you that a shorter work week would be good, I'm not convinced that it's any healthier to have workers sitting at a desk with a joystick all day. The human body requires movement and sitting is killing us. We really need to rethink work. Currently jobs are mostly either 100% manual labor which is terrible on your body or 100% desk job which might be even worse. Having some sort of exoskeleton might actually be an improvement. The worker still gets the movement that keeps them active without the physical strain that usually comes from manual labor.
I find it dubious that low-value heat would be more suitable for powering a watch than, say, a flexible solar cell in the watch strap.
Exactly. I would guess that an "invisible" solar panel behind the watch face or even a small disc a few millimeters wide could generate more energy from ambient light in an office than you could ever generate from waste body heat.
There are numerous ways the ticket brokers could cut out all the scalpers if they wanted. Raising prices, auction, non-transferable tickets, and many others. The ticket brokers like scalpers, and this is the only reason they exist.
Exactly this. They could follow the lead of the airline. You could have a cheap ticket which requires a picture id to match someone in your party. If you have a party of 10, you would only have to check one id. You could also sell a certain percentage at auction. Most of these concerts are also sellouts so even allowing someone to sell it back so that someone else can rebuy it wouldn't hurt the venue.
I think the main reason they keep the prices low is not because they want it affordable to fans but because they want the perceived artificial scarcity. They want it to sell out in minutes. If it doesn't sell out in minutes, it makes the artist look less popular.
To some extent. The problem is that a lot depends on how and where you keep your paper records. The more they are moved, aggregated and the longer they are stored, the more opportunity there is to tamper with them, and on a larger scale.
Paper records should never be moved or aggregated. Preferably, each polling station would have an individual safe where they are placed until the next election. The main advantages of paper ballots is the decentralization,the accountability and the ability to do a recount. You lose all that if they are aggregated. The polling stations should send their totals to the county where they become public record and those totals are sent to the state and then to the federal where again the aggregate totals are public. You can easily see that your polling station's 531 votes are recorded at the county and the total of all the polling stations equals the total sent on to the state. If there is any question, it is easy enough to recount at the specific polling station where there is a problem because you are only talking about a small number of ballots. It's also easy enough to count by hand because, again, you are talking about a small number of ballots. Even security becomes less of an issue because the ballots are physically located all across the county and altering or destroying them becomes a logistic nightmare.
No electronic system that you do not control everything, end to end, can be provably secure. I'm talking the level of control to know exactly what is inside that silicon, and that there is no direct or indirect way to meddle. You also need provable security on the software. Military systems can now cost much more than consumer systems to even attempt that level of traceability.
Yes, that's the first part, you need to control everything to prove it secure but there is a second part as well. You also need to have someone you can trust doing the controlling. For the most part, in the military, everyone is on the same side. In an election, by definition, there are two competing sides. So you need an uncorruptible neutral third party who has control of everything. Even if you find this mythical beast, you now have a single point of failure and a single attack vector. Every power hungry maniac will be trying to secretly get their guy into that position.
Decentralized paper ballots at the county level, on the other hand, are much harder to manipulate than even the mythical "perfect benevolent dictator". Unlike individual secret ballots, county totals are public record. Each county keeps track of their totals and makes sure that their total is the total reflected in the national election. So in order to change the results of a national election, you would have to have at least one agent physically present at every single county that you wanted to manipulate. We are likely talking thousands of agents across the country of which you have to make sure that none of them decide to expose your plot. Most local election volunteers I've seen are also pillars of the community where everyone knows everyone else. It's just not practical to coordinate an attack on the national election at the local level if we use paper ballots.
But noone really has a short-term incentive to change either of those.
More importantly, they have a major incentive to continue to exploit it. For instance, the top 10% of drinkers drink more than 10 drinks per day (over 70 drinks a week). Most people will admit that these people have a problem. The problem is that this group of problem drinkers buy over 50% of the alcohol. Think about that, if Budweiser cut them off, they would lose over 50% of their sales. If instead of cutting them off, they limited them to only 5 drinks per day (35 drinks a week), they would still lose over 25% of their sales. A substantial portion of Budweiser's sales (and everyone else's) are people with addictions. Likely most if not all of their best customers are people with addictions. This likely holds for facebook, casinos, and possibly even department stores. Try telling a business that they need to cut off their best customers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, but rather maintains its value by the utility it offers and the number of people who hold Bitcoin. This makes it very similar to any fiat currency, actually. At least investing in metals gives you something with intrinsic value.
As bitcoin does offer a service, I think the main threat to bitcoin is competing cryptocurrencies. Not surprisingly, this is the same threat to other fiat currencies which is why most countries outlaw competing currencies and many even outlaw or restrict precious metals for the same reason. On the other hand, there are no laws preventing someone from creating hundred or even thousands of competing cryptocurrencies but cryptocurrencies do benefit from having a sufficiently large mining pool so it seems like bitcoin and all the cryptocurrencies should eventually stabilize at the price needed to maintain a sufficiently large mining pool to keep it secure. I have no idea what this price point would be but it might be interesting to try to calculate.
The problem in fact is with the site AssFaceBook. Also RedFaceBook, PronFaceBook, and DoYouKissYourMotherWithThatFaceBook!
None of which to my knowledge facebook has any control over so they can have the best blocker in the world on facebook and it won't do any good.
The reason that it's hard to find a non-smart TV is there is no value in it for the manufacturer. Noone is willing to pay extra for a missing feature. If the average consumer sees a smart TV and a non-smart TV for the same price, they are going to choose the smart TV every time so it's worth it for the manufacturer to slap together a crappy "smart tv" feature and add it to the TV. Smart TV features also let TV manufacturers differentiate themselves. It also allows them to have "planned obsolescence". It also gives them the ability to strike deals with netflix, amazon, etc... A non-smart TV has none of these financial advantages for the manufacturer and still costs the same amount to manufacture and ship.