Other TV series contemporary with this include "Electro Woman and DynaGirl" and "Jason of Star Command".
My brain hurts from you triggering that deep-buried memory. I'll be messed up all week with that stuff replaying through my head.
My young brain thought the space scenes in Galactica were awesome, and I totally bought all the mass destruction in the pilot. Cylons scared the shit out of me... like Berzerk come to life (with the same inevitable outcome). I was able to see past all the dumb stuff, particularly because Star Wars had left me so hungry for more like it and there was just nothing. But even back then I felt the show started to fizzle out after the Pegasus episodes.
Yes, Windows 10 is bringing the classic desktop back, but it seems that it is becoming a unelegant mishmash of Modern UI widgets and classic Windows widgets.
Anyone can try Windows 10 for themselves if they have a spare box or can run Virtual Box. So far, "unelegant mishmash" is about right. Modern Apps seem like an emulation mode that intrudes on the desktop from time to time, even after taking steps to avoid them. There's a lot of user feedback about improving the desktop over Modern-izing everything. All I want out of a new Windows is a better Windows 7, like performance improvements, bug fixes, a programming API that doesn't drive people insane, and more customizability (Windows 8, 8.1, and 10 are all less customizable than 7). But you get the feeling nobody at Microsoft wants to work on that old crufty Windows code and would rather plug on something all new - and bundling it with Windows is going to convince you to like it. At least the Preview Program gives you a chance to yell about it until it's released.
No, children, the trolls were not here first. Some of us remember that human beings inhabited the Internet before the Eternal September.
Thank you. Usenet, for example was a welcome, tolerant, even useful place. You could reasonably trust someone on misc.forsale to send you what you expected after receiving your check. I suppose in those days, if anyone ever posted something bad, their sysadmin would receive an e-mail and the would-be troller would have his account suspended... and that would be that. Internet was a privilege, and short of getting a job in computers or defense, graduation meant leaving it forever.
Fuck. The Eternal September was 21 years ago. Kids have grown up big enough to legally drink since then, never knowing a net that was free of Nigerian Prince scams or murder by Craig's List. Whose on my lawn? Get off my lawn!
Funny thing is, I always found the gaps between the keys problematic. If your fingers weren't right on the keys, you'd slip through or press two.
My favorite keyboard was the one that came with the IBM 6150 (aka, the IBM PC-RT). Soft keys but with great tactile feel, and completely programmable so you could easily swap the CTRL and CAPS LOCK keys. It was IBM's take on a silent keyboard but will all their (then) quality thrown in.
Got some serious WPM out of it, but I hold no hope for getting one working today:-\
Plausible. From my own experience, patience and restraint on the order of The Mahatma is required to get problems fixed over the phone with Comcast (and, as it turns out, an increasing number of other companies, too).
My advice is to get a friend (or paid representative) to call on your behalf, someone not emotionally involved and who won't blow his stack (and, consequently, say something stupid, like where you work) after being told many things that are obviously, frustratingly wrong.
Microsoft has never respected numbers much. Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, NT 3.1, NT 3.5, NT 3.51, Windows 95, NT 4, Windows 98, Win2000, Windows ME, WinXP, Windows 7, Windows 8.... you see? all over the place. What they DO tend to respect is focus groups, and they maybe determined that 10 is sexier than 9, perhaps to imply more distance from (pfft) 8 (or steal from spotlight from OS X)?
Simply because a data-recorder didn't show the Start menu was used very often (in win 8 testing, I presume) does not mean that people don't rely upon it when the need arises. Or maybe dropping it was just a bone-headed effort to force users to use the Metro start page.
I'm still using an old Core2Duo (2.53 running at 3.8). It *only* has 4GB, but I put in and SSD and an ATI 6770 a couple years ago. Does everything I need, the only things it has problems running are recent games, not a reason to upgrade in my case. Many components got upgraded from machines found in the trash.
I applaud you, sir. An evening of tech dumpster-diving with a friend of mine some time back was a real eye-opening experience, particularly where we found some office or government building chucking mass quantities of "older" equipment. Tons of working, capable silicon, heading for landfills, when a lot of it maybe a year ago would have been tempting on newegg. There was a time when the latest OS or application release would make your hardware seem terrible, prompting you to pine for an upgrade, but not any longer, with the narrow exception of cutting-edge games, or professional apps for which you should get your employer to pay for anyway.
What you miss out on with older hardware is size and power-consumption. If performance is not your goal, then with modern gear you have the opportunity to build a silent, fanless system and/or an entire PC that fits in a 5" square box. It surprises me that this remains a niche market for do-it-your-selfers or small shops online. It would be worth it to me to pay a few bucks for a noiseless rig that fits on my desk. But as long as my older rigs are running fine, no worries.
Copyright silliness may have led to him being caught, but Danks got his 33 months all by himself.
Danks was arrested only six days after he'd uploaded the video, and two days later he wrote on Facebook, "Seven billion people and I was the first. F*** you Universal Pictures."
Danks had also sold DVD copies of the movie for £1.50 each. He said his total profit from the scheme was about £1,000.
To who? Who buys these things? Why would anyone spend money and time to suffer through a cam-rip? how much of this was earned after he was arrested?
The prosecuting and defending attorneys both seemed to agree that Danks' motive for the piracy of Fast and Furious 6 was “Street Cred.” His defense attorney told the court, "He has no substantial assets of any sort, and his financial gain has been extremely limited, but he was obviously aware that it was a popular film that would be of interest."
The judge was particularly harsh on Danks because of his cavalier attitude."This was bold, arrogant, and cocksure offending,” he said to Danks, as Sky News reports.
Google, unlike Apple, doesn't actually force you to go through its "stupid "store"". And Microsoft doesn't force you either, at least on its non-RT, non-phone versions of its Windows OS.
Well, if you're going to bring up non-phone versions, then Apple doesn't force (Mac) users to go through its store either.
thermonuclear? you mean like the H-bomb, but it's a power plant? with... a turbine? you worked on that? then I will stay off your lawn, but maybe I could borrow your mower?
The Patent Office, in an effort to modernize and attract more talent (you know, accept less salary for your engineering/science degree by working for the government instead of the private sector) implemented a plan to permit people to work from home, and from there to work remotely from the city the Office itself is located at, any city you want (within the 48 contiguous states). This was a natural outgrowth of an earlier (and successful) effort to eliminate paper at the office and work entirely electronically.
The actual source material for the Post article appears to show growing pains that one can reasonably expect from permitting thousands of employees to do their work from home, hundreds or even thousands of miles from the Office (if they qualify). Whereas the Post article seems written intentionally to inflame the reader (for what... maybe to sell more advertising? build cred for the writer?), the source material shows no wide-spread fraud, just your typical employees finding that, with the freedom to work at home, it's real easy to put your work off until deadline and then cram, or not put in the hours you would if you had a supervisor looking into your cubicle each morning. Same shit the private sector has been dealing with for years.
From what I can tell from the source, the management of the PTO is on it, and has been on it at least since the report came out in 2012. The only difference is that, because this is government, it's public and everyone can arm-chair quarterback their asses (probably as they themselves goof off at their terminals at work or from inside their momma's basement), whereas if a private company were going through this, it would be an internal matter and none of your damned business.
The Patent Office performs a function that is crucial; not even the Koch brothers would deny that. Shitting on the whole lot of them because a couple of employees can't handle the freedom of telework is unfair and dishonest, particularly coming from people taking suspiciously long lunch hours to write comments on slashdot:-|
Just in case anyone is confused from the fact that this was modded "interesting" (as opposed to"funny" or "troll"), it is most assuredly bullshit. The AC is not "a reviewer for USPTO".
Key flaws: there is no such thing is a patent "reviewer" (they are called examiners, and a real patent examiner would never call him or herself otherwise).
AC also wrote about "approve approve approve reject approve". Patent examiners do not "approve" anything... they "allow" applications or pass applications to "allowance". Again, an actual examiner, after all the training they go through, would not make this mistake.
One more, "A major compounding factor is the fact that if you reject an application, it's likely to come back and be noticed, but if you approve an application, no one notices." Bullshit, the opposite is true. An application has to go through multiple reviews before it goes to patent, whereas rejecting an application only needs approval from a supervisor (if the Examiner does not him or herself have signature authority).
Just out to set the record straight for the/. community. If you thought AC's rant was funny/sarcastic (e.g., "Those vague descriptions and those wonky diagrams with little to no coherent explanation are intentional"), then chuckle chuckle; but if you read that stuff and bought it, you've been had by an Anonymous Coward.
Insightful response... would mod you up if I could. agree that only time will tell if Bitcoin will pay off for all the energy and the dedicated silicon being put to it (hopefully not headed for the landfill). I maintain that the effort would be far better spent on medical research, but humans will be humans, betting on maybe getting rich is more fun than betting on maybe curing a disease you might get in ten years. but rich or not, being sick sucks.
This a thousand times over. Run this equipment with World Community Grid or Folding@Home, might lead to curing cancer or AIDS. Fuck, just donate it to some medical research effort and maybe in 20 years a cure will come out and save your ass.
I'm sure specialized circuits that do SHA256 and only SHA256 will be incredibly useful when donated to medical research. Yep.
Seriously. The days of using general purpose hardware in bitcoin mining operations are long gone.
You can also think about this differently. The energy isn't wasted to make money out of nothing. Energy and highly specialized and efficient hardware are used to secure a distributed ledger and payment system against attacks from powerful adversaries by increasing up the cost of attacks. The money miners make is payment for this service they provide.
Wouldn't it suck for all the bitcoiners if a talented mathematician found a way to trivially circumvent the bitcoin exchange system or if someone came up with a new cryptocurrency that people just liked better (I think both are just a matter of time), leaving Bitcoiners with worthless data stored on hard drives.
Former might happen or not. Mathematical breakthroughs that lead to catastrophic failure of the system seem unlikely however. The current design is pretty resilient. If SHA256 is broken, there'll be a big mess, but the community may decide to switch to a different algorithm, fixing it with a hard fork. Even breaking ECDSA has limited impact, unless you can break keys in under 10 minutes. Even then, your attack will be probabilistic at best.
As for new cryptocurrencies, there are loads of them and one or two actually have some worthwhile new features. Guess who'll know about them before you do? Bitcoiners. Guess what they'll do with their Bitcoin holdings when they find new ones that look interesting? Go to an exchange and buy some using Bitcoin.
Good thing you're not solving real problems. What. A. Fucking. Waste.
This a thousand times over. Run this equipment with World Community Grid or Folding@Home, might lead to curing cancer or AIDS. Fuck, just donate it to some medical research effort and maybe in 20 years a cure will come out and save your ass.
Bitcoin? Megawattage flushed down the entropy hole. Wouldn't it suck for all the bitcoiners if a talented mathematician found a way to trivially circumvent the bitcoin exchange system or if someone came up with a new cryptocurrency that people just liked better (I think both are just a matter of time), leaving Bitcoiners with worthless data stored on hard drives. Maybe all that fine computing equipment won't end up in the landfill, but that's a lot of heat and fossil fuel gone for nothing.
Aren't they obliged to cancel your account if you ask, though? I mean, say you say "i want to close my account", they asked if you're sure, aware of the great deals etc. Say no, again, politely, then firmly "close my account now". What would happen if they continued trying to get you to stay and you stay silent?
You make me smile, my friend. But your cable company is not like the police who have to stop questioning you when you invoke your rights to remain silent and ask for a lawyer. Unless an ambitious attorney-general is riding up their ass over some consumer-protection clause, your cable company can keep on shilling until they (not you) become convinced they are wasting their time.
Tell them you're moving out of town (to a location that's not served by the company). Tell them you're broke and destitute with no job, and your wife left you and took the TV. Tell them your cable box overheated and burned your house down. Tell them you're appeals have run out and you're going to prison.
Every cable company office I've ever been in - every single one - all the employees are behind bullet proof glass that would make a bank teller envious.
My experience also. Would mod up if I had mod points. Everywhere I've lived, returning a cable box was like visiting a prison. Desolate white-washed cinderblock waiting rooms with strange-smelling air in a run-down part of town. The security glass makes you think you're looking out from a decompression chamber. The steel drawer you put your equipment in can take your arm clean off.
What could have happened in these places to inspire this much security? I wanna know!
I'm sure that'll work out well, like the current corse is.
Agreed. The article is MBA-speak, with no vision, ideas, or anticipation. You hear this kind of shit, irrelevance is coming.
I'm sad to see it come to this, but the rumors have been persistent that MS had become more and more of an un-fun drudgery politics look-over-your-shoulder shit-hole to work at, and that can only lead to brain-drain, loss of morale, and a black-hole sucking away product ideas that might make the company worthwhile again, leaving only the suits and bean-counters steering the ship.
Plus good luck getting elected if you are honest about being an atheist. It's basically considered political suicide in most of the country.
Pffft. Who's requiring you to be honest? It's politics. Fuck being honest about that shit. It ain't nobody's business. (besides, if religious nuts would just keep it as their business, instead of always making it everyone else's business, religion wouldn't be such a fucking problem)
Have you seen the caliber of psychopathic nimrods that run for office? That's beneath me./jk
Yep. And that's how shit keeps happening, the circle jerk goes round and round. But just imagine if a bunch of non-nimrods stepped up, put cooler heads together, start chipping away at the nimrods. Might go slow at first, but man, how cool would it be if our legislatures were nimrod-free.
Ending prohibition didn't kill the mob. They just switched from bootlegging to trafficking narcotics, and they reached the height of their power in the 50s and 60s, long after the prohibition ended.
Well... by this thinking, the mob continued because prohibition didn't end. They moved from one prohibited product to another, but always a product the people wanted, but couldn't get because of a prohibition, and the mob was in a particularly good position (with their organization and international reach) to supply.
In the same way, while legalizing marijuana might reduce crime here in the US, cartels in Mexico are Too Big to Fail. They won't pack up their things and head home quietly if marijuana is legalized; they'll just start peddling something new.
What might happen if the cartels' market dried up is, at best, speculation. Could be risky, change is scary. But doing nothing and maintaining the status quo is worse. The cartels continue to get better and better at smuggling (they got submarines for fuck sake) and much, much richer while turning Central and South American countries into murderous hell-holes from which children flee to the U.S. on foot, and that ain't no shit.
I don't see how decriminalizing them good possibly be a good idea. The addiction rate for these drugs is 2.5 to 3 times that of alcohol.
I'm also nervous about cocaine and meth easily getting around (like, more than it already is). But the fact is, drug addiction and mental illness is just gonna have to be something that this country has to shut up, knuckle-down and deal with. It's not going away, and prohibition doesn't help. Prohibition only has power to do one thing... throw people in jail. It doesn't cure addiction (drugs make their way into prisons all the time), and distracts everyone from the larger issue of mental illness. It's like taking out the garbage: nobody wants to do it, nobody gets credit for doing it, but it's gotta be done or shit just piles up and gets worse.
Companies should not be permitted to profit from the sale of addictive substances for recreational purposes.
like tobacco in cigarettes?
or the 200 other ingredients in there to get you addicted?
The poster is saying what's typically said. You would think that selling a highly addictive substances for recreational purposes would make you rich and invincible, entire nations hopelessly enslaved by your product. Addict-zombie attack. But you'd be wrong.
Sometimes, the answer isn't the easy one. The lesson painfully learned from prohibition is that prohibition raises demand, not lowers it.
On the other hand, education and regulation, not out-and-out bans, really work. Tobacco smoking in the U.S. used to be around 50% in the Don Draper years. Now it's under 20 and still dropping. Tobacco companies are having to merge to maintain market share.
The difference is between people politely, but firmly, told to take their habit outside or into a (dirty) designated area or else you'll get a fine, and police breaking down doors and throwing flash-bombs that kill your grandma with a heart attack (because the Informant lied, and the Chief gave the green-light because the Politician wanted to go on the news that evening with pictures of drugs on the table.
Slashdot Mirror
Other TV series contemporary with this include "Electro Woman and DynaGirl" and "Jason of Star Command".
My brain hurts from you triggering that deep-buried memory. I'll be messed up all week with that stuff replaying through my head.
My young brain thought the space scenes in Galactica were awesome, and I totally bought all the mass destruction in the pilot. Cylons scared the shit out of me... like Berzerk come to life (with the same inevitable outcome). I was able to see past all the dumb stuff, particularly because Star Wars had left me so hungry for more like it and there was just nothing. But even back then I felt the show started to fizzle out after the Pegasus episodes.
Yes, Windows 10 is bringing the classic desktop back, but it seems that it is becoming a unelegant mishmash of Modern UI widgets and classic Windows widgets.
Anyone can try Windows 10 for themselves if they have a spare box or can run Virtual Box. So far, "unelegant mishmash" is about right. Modern Apps seem like an emulation mode that intrudes on the desktop from time to time, even after taking steps to avoid them.
There's a lot of user feedback about improving the desktop over Modern-izing everything. All I want out of a new Windows is a better Windows 7, like performance improvements, bug fixes, a programming API that doesn't drive people insane, and more customizability (Windows 8, 8.1, and 10 are all less customizable than 7). But you get the feeling nobody at Microsoft wants to work on that old crufty Windows code and would rather plug on something all new - and bundling it with Windows is going to convince you to like it. At least the Preview Program gives you a chance to yell about it until it's released.
No, children, the trolls were not here first. Some of us remember that human beings inhabited the Internet before the Eternal September.
Thank you. Usenet, for example was a welcome, tolerant, even useful place. You could reasonably trust someone on misc.forsale to send you what you expected after receiving your check. I suppose in those days, if anyone ever posted something bad, their sysadmin would receive an e-mail and the would-be troller would have his account suspended... and that would be that. Internet was a privilege, and short of getting a job in computers or defense, graduation meant leaving it forever.
Fuck. The Eternal September was 21 years ago. Kids have grown up big enough to legally drink since then, never knowing a net that was free of Nigerian Prince scams or murder by Craig's List. Whose on my lawn? Get off my lawn!
Funny thing is, I always found the gaps between the keys problematic. If your fingers weren't right on the keys, you'd slip through or press two.
My favorite keyboard was the one that came with the IBM 6150 (aka, the IBM PC-RT). Soft keys but with great tactile feel, and completely programmable so you could easily swap the CTRL and CAPS LOCK keys. It was IBM's take on a silent keyboard but will all their (then) quality thrown in.
Got some serious WPM out of it, but I hold no hope for getting one working today :-\
Plausible. From my own experience, patience and restraint on the order of The Mahatma is required to get problems fixed over the phone with Comcast (and, as it turns out, an increasing number of other companies, too).
My advice is to get a friend (or paid representative) to call on your behalf, someone not emotionally involved and who won't blow his stack (and, consequently, say something stupid, like where you work) after being told many things that are obviously, frustratingly wrong.
Microsoft has never respected numbers much.
Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, NT 3.1, NT 3.5, NT 3.51, Windows 95, NT 4, Windows 98, Win2000, Windows ME, WinXP, Windows 7, Windows 8.... you see? all over the place.
What they DO tend to respect is focus groups, and they maybe determined that 10 is sexier than 9, perhaps to imply more distance from (pfft) 8
(or steal from spotlight from OS X)?
Simply because a data-recorder didn't show the Start menu was used very often (in win 8 testing, I presume) does not mean that people don't rely upon it when the need arises.
Or maybe dropping it was just a bone-headed effort to force users to use the Metro start page.
I'm still using an old Core2Duo (2.53 running at 3.8). It *only* has 4GB, but I put in and SSD and an ATI 6770 a couple years ago. Does everything I need, the only things it has problems running are recent games, not a reason to upgrade in my case. Many components got upgraded from machines found in the trash.
I applaud you, sir. An evening of tech dumpster-diving with a friend of mine some time back was a real eye-opening experience, particularly where we found some office or government building chucking mass quantities of "older" equipment. Tons of working, capable silicon, heading for landfills, when a lot of it maybe a year ago would have been tempting on newegg. There was a time when the latest OS or application release would make your hardware seem terrible, prompting you to pine for an upgrade, but not any longer, with the narrow exception of cutting-edge games, or professional apps for which you should get your employer to pay for anyway.
What you miss out on with older hardware is size and power-consumption. If performance is not your goal, then with modern gear you have the opportunity to build a silent, fanless system and/or an entire PC that fits in a 5" square box. It surprises me that this remains a niche market for do-it-your-selfers or small shops online. It would be worth it to me to pay a few bucks for a noiseless rig that fits on my desk. But as long as my older rigs are running fine, no worries.
Ars Technica has more on the story, and links to actual news sites covering the mess. And as many insightful Slashdot commentators have surmised, there's more to the story than a lousy cam-rip of a lousy movie.
Copyright silliness may have led to him being caught, but Danks got his 33 months all by himself.
Danks was arrested only six days after he'd uploaded the video, and two days later he wrote on Facebook, "Seven billion people and I was the first. F*** you Universal Pictures."
Danks had also sold DVD copies of the movie for £1.50 each. He said his total profit from the scheme was about £1,000.
To who? Who buys these things? Why would anyone spend money and time to suffer through a cam-rip?
how much of this was earned after he was arrested?
The prosecuting and defending attorneys both seemed to agree that Danks' motive for the piracy of Fast and Furious 6 was “Street Cred.” His defense attorney told the court, "He has no substantial assets of any sort, and his financial gain has been extremely limited, but he was obviously aware that it was a popular film that would be of interest."
The judge was particularly harsh on Danks because of his cavalier attitude."This was bold, arrogant, and cocksure offending,” he said to Danks, as Sky News reports.
I believe you, but do you have a cite? Does some literary authority make these numbers gospel?
Google, unlike Apple, doesn't actually force you to go through its "stupid "store"". And Microsoft doesn't force you either, at least on its non-RT, non-phone versions of its Windows OS.
Well, if you're going to bring up non-phone versions, then Apple doesn't force (Mac) users to go through its store either.
Been watching old movies lately?
thermonuclear power plant turbine
thermonuclear? you mean like the H-bomb, but it's a power plant? with... a turbine? you worked on that?
then I will stay off your lawn, but maybe I could borrow your mower?
The Patent Office, in an effort to modernize and attract more talent (you know, accept less salary for your engineering/science degree by working for the government instead of the private sector) implemented a plan to permit people to work from home, and from there to work remotely from the city the Office itself is located at, any city you want (within the 48 contiguous states). This was a natural outgrowth of an earlier (and successful) effort to eliminate paper at the office and work entirely electronically.
The actual source material for the Post article appears to show growing pains that one can reasonably expect from permitting thousands of employees to do their work from home, hundreds or even thousands of miles from the Office (if they qualify). Whereas the Post article seems written intentionally to inflame the reader (for what... maybe to sell more advertising? build cred for the writer?), the source material shows no wide-spread fraud, just your typical employees finding that, with the freedom to work at home, it's real easy to put your work off until deadline and then cram, or not put in the hours you would if you had a supervisor looking into your cubicle each morning. Same shit the private sector has been dealing with for years.
From what I can tell from the source, the management of the PTO is on it, and has been on it at least since the report came out in 2012. The only difference is that, because this is government, it's public and everyone can arm-chair quarterback their asses (probably as they themselves goof off at their terminals at work or from inside their momma's basement), whereas if a private company were going through this, it would be an internal matter and none of your damned business.
The Patent Office performs a function that is crucial; not even the Koch brothers would deny that. Shitting on the whole lot of them because a couple of employees can't handle the freedom of telework is unfair and dishonest, particularly coming from people taking suspiciously long lunch hours to write comments on slashdot :-|
As a reviewer for USPTO, I can tell you...
Just in case anyone is confused from the fact that this was modded "interesting" (as opposed to"funny" or "troll"), it is most assuredly bullshit. The AC is not "a reviewer for USPTO".
Key flaws: there is no such thing is a patent "reviewer" (they are called examiners, and a real patent examiner would never call him or herself otherwise).
AC also wrote about "approve approve approve reject approve". Patent examiners do not "approve" anything... they "allow" applications or pass applications to "allowance". Again, an actual examiner, after all the training they go through, would not make this mistake.
One more, "A major compounding factor is the fact that if you reject an application, it's likely to come back and be noticed, but if you approve an application, no one notices." Bullshit, the opposite is true. An application has to go through multiple reviews before it goes to patent, whereas rejecting an application only needs approval from a supervisor (if the Examiner does not him or herself have signature authority).
Just out to set the record straight for the /. community. If you thought AC's rant was funny/sarcastic (e.g., "Those vague descriptions and those wonky diagrams with little to no coherent explanation are intentional"), then chuckle chuckle; but if you read that stuff and bought it, you've been had by an Anonymous Coward.
Insightful response... would mod you up if I could.
agree that only time will tell if Bitcoin will pay off for all the energy and the dedicated silicon being put to it (hopefully not headed for the landfill). I maintain that the effort would be far better spent on medical research, but humans will be humans, betting on maybe getting rich is more fun than betting on maybe curing a disease you might get in ten years. but rich or not, being sick sucks.
I'm sure specialized circuits that do SHA256 and only SHA256 will be incredibly useful when donated to medical research. Yep.
Seriously. The days of using general purpose hardware in bitcoin mining operations are long gone.
You can also think about this differently. The energy isn't wasted to make money out of nothing. Energy and highly specialized and efficient hardware are used to secure a distributed ledger and payment system against attacks from powerful adversaries by increasing up the cost of attacks. The money miners make is payment for this service they provide.
Former might happen or not. Mathematical breakthroughs that lead to catastrophic failure of the system seem unlikely however. The current design is pretty resilient. If SHA256 is broken, there'll be a big mess, but the community may decide to switch to a different algorithm, fixing it with a hard fork. Even breaking ECDSA has limited impact, unless you can break keys in under 10 minutes. Even then, your attack will be probabilistic at best.
As for new cryptocurrencies, there are loads of them and one or two actually have some worthwhile new features. Guess who'll know about them before you do? Bitcoiners. Guess what they'll do with their Bitcoin holdings when they find new ones that look interesting? Go to an exchange and buy some using Bitcoin.
Good thing you're not solving real problems. What. A. Fucking. Waste.
This a thousand times over. Run this equipment with World Community Grid or Folding@Home, might lead to curing cancer or AIDS. Fuck, just donate it to some medical research effort and maybe in 20 years a cure will come out and save your ass.
Bitcoin? Megawattage flushed down the entropy hole. Wouldn't it suck for all the bitcoiners if a talented mathematician found a way to trivially circumvent the bitcoin exchange system or if someone came up with a new cryptocurrency that people just liked better (I think both are just a matter of time), leaving Bitcoiners with worthless data stored on hard drives. Maybe all that fine computing equipment won't end up in the landfill, but that's a lot of heat and fossil fuel gone for nothing.
Aren't they obliged to cancel your account if you ask, though? I mean, say you say "i want to close my account", they asked if you're sure, aware of the great deals etc. Say no, again, politely, then firmly "close my account now". What would happen if they continued trying to get you to stay and you stay silent?
You make me smile, my friend. But your cable company is not like the police who have to stop questioning you when you invoke your rights to remain silent and ask for a lawyer. Unless an ambitious attorney-general is riding up their ass over some consumer-protection clause, your cable company can keep on shilling until they (not you) become convinced they are wasting their time.
Tell them you're moving out of town (to a location that's not served by the company). Tell them you're broke and destitute with no job, and your wife left you and took the TV. Tell them your cable box overheated and burned your house down. Tell them you're appeals have run out and you're going to prison.
Then they might give up.
Every cable company office I've ever been in - every single one - all the employees are behind bullet proof glass that would make a bank teller envious.
My experience also. Would mod up if I had mod points. Everywhere I've lived, returning a cable box was like visiting a prison. Desolate white-washed cinderblock waiting rooms with strange-smelling air in a run-down part of town. The security glass makes you think you're looking out from a decompression chamber. The steel drawer you put your equipment in can take your arm clean off.
What could have happened in these places to inspire this much security? I wanna know!
staying the corse with fewer people.
I'm sure that'll work out well, like the current corse is.
Agreed. The article is MBA-speak, with no vision, ideas, or anticipation. You hear this kind of shit, irrelevance is coming.
I'm sad to see it come to this, but the rumors have been persistent that MS had become more and more of an un-fun drudgery politics look-over-your-shoulder shit-hole to work at, and that can only lead to brain-drain, loss of morale, and a black-hole sucking away product ideas that might make the company worthwhile again, leaving only the suits and bean-counters steering the ship.
Plus good luck getting elected if you are honest about being an atheist. It's basically considered political suicide in most of the country.
Pffft. Who's requiring you to be honest? It's politics. Fuck being honest about that shit. It ain't nobody's business.
(besides, if religious nuts would just keep it as their business, instead of always making it everyone else's business, religion wouldn't be such a fucking problem)
Then run for office yourself.
EEEEEWWWWWW
Have you seen the caliber of psychopathic nimrods that run for office? /jk
That's beneath me.
Yep. And that's how shit keeps happening, the circle jerk goes round and round.
But just imagine if a bunch of non-nimrods stepped up, put cooler heads together, start chipping away at the nimrods.
Might go slow at first, but man, how cool would it be if our legislatures were nimrod-free.
Nimrod-free
(how nice it would be)
As for the "pull down mirror", that isn't even remotely new technology. Other vehicles have had those for a decade or more.
Yeah, like limos. So where's the feature that lets the kids raise the privacy partition to cut their parent off?
Ending prohibition didn't kill the mob. They just switched from bootlegging to trafficking narcotics, and they reached the height of their power in the 50s and 60s, long after the prohibition ended.
Well... by this thinking, the mob continued because prohibition didn't end. They moved from one prohibited product to another, but always a product the people wanted, but couldn't get because of a prohibition, and the mob was in a particularly good position (with their organization and international reach) to supply.
In the same way, while legalizing marijuana might reduce crime here in the US, cartels in Mexico are Too Big to Fail. They won't pack up their things and head home quietly if marijuana is legalized; they'll just start peddling something new.
What might happen if the cartels' market dried up is, at best, speculation. Could be risky, change is scary. But doing nothing and maintaining the status quo is worse. The cartels continue to get better and better at smuggling (they got submarines for fuck sake) and much, much richer while turning Central and South American countries into murderous hell-holes from which children flee to the U.S. on foot, and that ain't no shit.
I don't see how decriminalizing them good possibly be a good idea. The addiction rate for these drugs is 2.5 to 3 times that of alcohol.
I'm also nervous about cocaine and meth easily getting around (like, more than it already is). But the fact is, drug addiction and mental illness is just gonna have to be something that this country has to shut up, knuckle-down and deal with. It's not going away, and prohibition doesn't help. Prohibition only has power to do one thing... throw people in jail. It doesn't cure addiction (drugs make their way into prisons all the time), and distracts everyone from the larger issue of mental illness. It's like taking out the garbage: nobody wants to do it, nobody gets credit for doing it, but it's gotta be done or shit just piles up and gets worse.
Companies should not be permitted to profit from the sale of addictive substances for recreational purposes.
like tobacco in cigarettes?
or the 200 other ingredients in there to get you addicted?
The poster is saying what's typically said. You would think that selling a highly addictive substances for recreational purposes would make you rich and invincible, entire nations hopelessly enslaved by your product. Addict-zombie attack. But you'd be wrong.
Sometimes, the answer isn't the easy one. The lesson painfully learned from prohibition is that prohibition raises demand, not lowers it.
On the other hand, education and regulation, not out-and-out bans, really work. Tobacco smoking in the U.S. used to be around 50% in the Don Draper years. Now it's under 20 and still dropping. Tobacco companies are having to merge to maintain market share.
The difference is between people politely, but firmly, told to take their habit outside or into a (dirty) designated area or else you'll get a fine, and police breaking down doors and throwing flash-bombs that kill your grandma with a heart attack (because the Informant lied, and the Chief gave the green-light because the Politician wanted to go on the news that evening with pictures of drugs on the table.