Not totally true. Target wants me to buy my everyday products there, even if it doesn't mean upselling me and getting me out the door with a TV or housewares. Marketing that gets me in the door makes a store happy, even if it's not specifically to get me to buy things I don't need.
Bullshit. The entire "get them in the door" thing exists only because they expect you to buy other shit in addition to the shit that got you in the door. That way, they don't have to compete on that other shit. As long as the profit margin * odds of you buying it is high enough for them to cover any losses on deals that got you in the door, they win.
I think we can safely attribute the 33% increase in the chance of dying this year to:
1) The fact that the sample size is so low. Not very many 114 year olds to run data on, and many of them aren't actually 114. A lot of people that old don't have a reliable record of their birth.
LOL. So what you're saying is: "People accept government issued currencies because they believe they can also use it for goods and services.".
Like I said - just like every other currency. The fact that there's a government behind the USD doesn't make it fundamentally any different from BTC. Plenty of people didn't trust the USD when it was first issued. Hell, many people today don't. In fact, the people holding onto fiat currency are the poor and the morons, and the people holding onto property - be it real estate, gold, stock, whatever - are the ones at the top laughing at people like you.
Why do currencies of shitty governments stop being valuable? Because the government in question has printed so much of it to make it worthless, or redistributed it forcefully to the point that people don't want to hold onto it for fear of it being taken away.
Seems to me the flaw in this plan is that people are cheap -- you'd encourage a lot of them to sit out for the drop, drop, drop in prices in the last 12 hours. So you'd miss out on:
A) the logistical sanity of just having the plane mostly full well in advance.
B) A good chunk of the interest you make from holding on to several hundred dollars per passenger for what is often a few months.
plus, you'd probably end up with a lot of grumpy people who missed out during the last minute firesale. Sure, its their own fault, but people don't care -- you spill your fries, it's McDonald's fault, you show up late on Black Friday, it's Best Buy's fault that they only had 8 doorbuster sale HDTVs. People who missed out on a seat due to their own lack of planning would probably just rage at the airline.
The last minute price plummet already happens, though, and most people do NOT play that game - most people traveling have plans at the other end and need the flight to go there at a specific time.
Hell, the Simpsons did it 13 years ago:
Lisa: [counting money] I don't think there's enough here for a vacation. Marge: There is for a *mega savings* vacation. [looks at pamphlet] Chuck
Garabedian says you can fly mega-cheap if you don't care where you go. Chuck: [looks in through window] That's right! Just go to the airport and
wait for some no-shows, then you can buy their seats for a fraction of
the price! Marge: Are you going through our garbage? Chuck: That's right! You fat cats didn't finish your plankton; now it's mine!
[runs off with cans]
You can trace mined coins to specific IP addresses if you are careful with how you listen to the packets and try to find out which computer gave you the packet first. If you had several computers tracking this information, it would be possible to identify down to a small number of users who actually mined some Bitcoins, and from that if any Bitcoins were co-mingled with those mined coins to be able to further identify what other addresses might be used by that person who also is mining coins.
Still, attempting to do that is a real technical challenge and you would need the resources of something like the U.S. federal government to pull that off, plus a whole bunch of data mining and active participation in the Bitcoin network... and it still gives wiggle room for plausible deniability on the surface. If there was a particular set of transactions that such data mining was looking for, you can still be tracked.
On the other hand, if you were very paranoid about such things you could set up manual connections for routing Bitcoin data to only trusted nodes (by your own definition... not some random list in other words), and hopefully even they are being just as paranoid about random connections "to the outside world".
IF you control all nodes, AND you KNOW you control all the nodes, then you can track the transaction to the IP ADDRESS of the MINER or TRANSACTION INITIATOR. You cannot track the transaction to an individual person. An IP address is not a person. A Bitcoin address is not a person.
Furthermore, it's laughable to think that anyone can control all of the nodes to make this possible. And if that scenario ever did occur, you could just avoid routing directly to those nodes (as you mentioned).
If the government wanted to track a Bitcoin user down, they'd just shakedown ISPs as usual. The only "weakpoint" in Bitcoin's anonymity is the "bad guys control ALL the nodes" scenario. Beyond that, it's as anonymous as users want it to be. Most people mine in a shared pool, and thus associate their IP, a User ID, and 1 or more receiving addresses, and tell it to a 3rd party. People participating in currency exchanges do the same thing and worse, as shit then ends up tied to a bank account or similar.
If you want to send x bitcoins to a person, you can exchange addresses however you wish, and then the network handles the rest. You could do both transactions from the same IP address so to anyone snooping it looks like someone was just moving money between their own wallets.
Sell tickets at time X for price Y*W, where Y is the minimum amount for flying a plane that holds at least as many passengers as booked, that yields Z profit per (passenger * classWeight), where classWeight is some cost factor based on how much first class, business, and coach cost the airlines. Z is somewhat fixed. W is some statistically-generated factor based on the expected price when the plane is full and some encouragement for people to book early.
People booking early pay a lower price due to W, and perhaps get a rate guarantee (if the price drops below Y*W more than a certain number of days before the flight, you get the lower rate), and get a more flexible cancellation policy.
As time goes on, tighten the cancellation policy (perhaps with a small fee), and firm up details (like what plane will be used, where people will sit). People booking later pay more.
1 week before the flight, no cancellations allowed, prices jump up to reach or exceed Z, and everyone knows which slot they'll be in in which sardine can.
If there are any open seats, sell them 12 hours before the flight. No cancellation policy, prices drop and drop until all the seats are filled.
Don't overbook (just don't do it) and let the late comers eat the cost of expected empty seats.
With all the time saved from not having to do the "We are now looking for volunteers to not get on the plane" dance, you could probably squeeze in an extra flight per gate a day.
2) Is any attempt made to control for extremely high risk or premature live births in areas with better neonatal capabilities?
The US has the best (lowest) infant mortality rate in the world. But people like unity100 like to trot out the "rankings" that are based on different measuring criteria.
In the US, anything that comes out of a women with any sign of life, and later dies, is chalked up as infant mortality. Other countries just write them off as still born.
The US infant mortality rate is the lowest in the world. Unless, of course, you don't use the same standard for "infant mortality" when measuring it in different countries.
The reason the US is placed lower on those lists is because in the US we call so much more shit "infant death" than other countries do. 12 weeks premature and dies in the US = infant death. Dies in another country = still born.
> That's the rub though- vaccines used to be for life threatening diseases like polio and smallpox but are now more and more prescribed for things that are merely a nuisance(chicken pox anyone?).
Wait till you get a bit older, your immune system a little weaker and then your chicken pox returns as shingles. That's more than a mere nuisance for a lot of people.
I got shingles at 25. I'm going to assume I won't make it to 40.
All Bitcoin exchanges are shit. They're for speculators. Bitcoin as a currency is fine, and it will be fine if every exchange dies off.
Without speculation, Bitcoin is worthless. The only reason anyone has ever accepted Bitcoin as payment for anything is because they believe they can redeem Bitcoin for some other currency later on
Wrong. People accept Bitcoin because they believe they can also use it for goods and services. Just like every other currency in existence.
I can send Bitcoins to people from a random address and all they will only know how much, when, and from what address.
You'd have to trace transactions backward to the originating address to find out where the money truly came from, and the ultimate originating source is always the miners.
For you to track anyone on Bitcoin you'd have to know their address. But anyone can generate a new address whenever they want. I myself had dozens back when I was mining Bitcoins.
You can trace all transactions to addresses (this is good, and is by design), but you absolutely cannot trace addresses to people without information from outside the network.
Tradehill was never a major Bitcoin exchange. MtGox is the only one anyone ever used. Tradehill was started by some guy who got mad that MtGox was raking in the cash. He started throwing out accusations about security holes, the owner (of MtGox) not actually having all of the BitCoins backing his market, etc. Then he threw up Tradehill and it was shit.
All Bitcoin exchanges are shit. They're for speculators. Bitcoin as a currency is fine, and it will be fine if every exchange dies off.
Massive amounts of water; massive amounts of fertilizer; massive amounts of herbicide; massive amounts of pesticide. The dirt is mainly there to keep the stalks upright....did I mention the massive amounts of subsidies and massive amounts of corporate ownership?
You forgot to mention the massive amounts of nutrition and oh wait. Corn is theworst crop in existence. The only animal that can fully digest it is one that doesn't eat it - the termite.
So what do we do when faced with a shitty crop? We give it subsidies so people can continue to grow it. Then we pay other people to not grow it. Then we mandate that we put it in gasoline.
the production of 1 kg beef costs 15,500 L water the production of 1 kg broken rice costs 3,400 L water the production of 1 kg eggs costs 3,300 L water the production of 1 kg wheat costs 1,300 L water
You vegans are worse than the religious and atheist zealots.
Also, I seriously doubt that the net liquid cost of 1kg of cow is 15,500 L. Think about the water cycle carefully for 60 seconds (specifically, think about where cow urine and milk goes.)
It's vegan logic at it's finest. Same sort of crap that they use to tell people that if their piss is yellow, they're not drinking their necessary 2 gallons of water a day. These are the same morons wwho will measure their piss to find out that they're excreting 95%+ of the water they take in, and then reach the conclusion that they need to drink 3 gallons of water a day to prevent dehydration.
You get more radiation from being in a high altitude, unshielded aircraft (a LOT more, IIRC).
I don't see radiation as being a point of controversy.
You're a moron, and the TSA and the government love you for being one.
The scanners are operated by untrained monkeys. The scanners are not calibrated. The scanners are not tested. The scanners are not maintained.
And of course, the radiation you receive on the flight mostly passes through you. The radiation you receive from the scanner is all absorbed in a few milimeters of your skin. You get orders of magnitude more radiation expsure from a scanner than you do from a flight, even if you believe the scanners are outputting the "safe" amounts of radiation that they claim.
Keep dreaming about a-la-carte. Content creators won't allow it.
I dunno. Apple has $100 billion in the bank. They could use some of that to make content creators very friendly.
Content creators do not want another iTunes/App Store situation. They lose what, 30% of every sale due to the Apple tax?
It's better for them to roll their own store, control the content completely (DRM, where it shows up on the store, removing bad reviews, etc.), and take the entire pie.
10 bits per channel gets you 30 or 40 bits per pixel (with an alpha channel). 12 bits per channel gets you 36 or 48 bits per pixel. 16 bits per channel gets you 48 or 64 bits per pixel.
At 64 bits per pixel you can get 1 pixel in 1 word (or 2 words if you're still on a 32 bit processor). This is why we had 32 bit pixels in the first place.
Yes, movies have shitty color depth. Even if they have 10 or 12 bit per channel cameras, displays, and editing systems/software, everything gets crushed down to 24-bit color or even worse when they export to a shitty colorspace for broadcast/disc (see YUY2/YV12).
But games and photography would pretty much instantly benefit if people had access to more colors. No more faking contrast and making everything look like shit with HDR (of course idiots will still do it).
Yes, 16 bits is way more than we need. I'm not going to claim I can tell the difference between 10-bits and 12-bits of red. But going straight to a full 64-bit pixels just makes the most sense. Older system can easily and quickly map 64-bits to 32-bits. You could even store the 32-bit pixel in one half of the (64-bit) word, and then store the rest of the info in the other half - old systems would just ignore it. No need to figure out some vision-based scheme where you have 10 bits of green, 9 bits of red, 7 bits of blue and 6 bits of alpha where everything blue ultimately looks like shit despite the fact that they say it shouldn't be noticeable.
It's about time we get 4k televisions in production. Screw 3d, screw smart tv, just increase the resolution already. My monitor has higher resolution than my hdtv.
Don't forget about color dept. 1677216 just isn't enough. Absolutel no reason we shouldn't be at full on 16-bits per channel right now.
My 19", 4:3 monitor from 2002 had higher resolution than my HDTV does today. Oh, and better picture quality and response times, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Not totally true. Target wants me to buy my everyday products there, even if it doesn't mean upselling me and getting me out the door with a TV or housewares. Marketing that gets me in the door makes a store happy, even if it's not specifically to get me to buy things I don't need.
Bullshit.
The entire "get them in the door" thing exists only because they expect you to buy other shit in addition to the shit that got you in the door.
That way, they don't have to compete on that other shit. As long as the profit margin * odds of you buying it is high enough for them to cover any losses on deals that got you in the door, they win.
I think he's case sensitive.
No, you just have to stand in front of a RAID 1 mirror and say:
hosts file apk.
hosts file apk.
HOSTS FILE APK!
Wikipedia copied it from somewhere else that either practices or believes that vegan logic.
Short, intense bursts with light effort in between?
20 minutes a day?
Twice a week?
BRB interval training/taking a shit.
Because men generally work more than women and get violently killed more than women and receive less health attention/spending than women.
2/3 / 1/2 = 4/3 = 1/3 increase.
I think we can safely attribute the 33% increase in the chance of dying this year to:
1) The fact that the sample size is so low. Not very many 114 year olds to run data on, and many of them aren't actually 114. A lot of people that old don't have a reliable record of their birth.
2) The fact that they're 114 fucking years old.
LOL.
So what you're saying is: "People accept government issued currencies because they believe they can also use it for goods and services.".
Like I said - just like every other currency. The fact that there's a government behind the USD doesn't make it fundamentally any different from BTC. Plenty of people didn't trust the USD when it was first issued. Hell, many people today don't. In fact, the people holding onto fiat currency are the poor and the morons, and the people holding onto property - be it real estate, gold, stock, whatever - are the ones at the top laughing at people like you.
Why do currencies of shitty governments stop being valuable? Because the government in question has printed so much of it to make it worthless, or redistributed it forcefully to the point that people don't want to hold onto it for fear of it being taken away.
Both are impossible with Bitcoins, by the way.
Seems to me the flaw in this plan is that people are cheap -- you'd encourage a lot of them to sit out for the drop, drop, drop in prices in the last 12 hours. So you'd miss out on:
A) the logistical sanity of just having the plane mostly full well in advance.
B) A good chunk of the interest you make from holding on to several hundred dollars per passenger for what is often a few months.
plus, you'd probably end up with a lot of grumpy people who missed out during the last minute firesale. Sure, its their own fault, but people don't care -- you spill your fries, it's McDonald's fault, you show up late on Black Friday, it's Best Buy's fault that they only had 8 doorbuster sale HDTVs. People who missed out on a seat due to their own lack of planning would probably just rage at the airline.
The last minute price plummet already happens, though, and most people do NOT play that game - most people traveling have plans at the other end and need the flight to go there at a specific time.
Hell, the Simpsons did it 13 years ago:
Lisa: [counting money] I don't think there's enough here for a vacation.
Marge: There is for a *mega savings* vacation. [looks at pamphlet] Chuck
Garabedian says you can fly mega-cheap if you don't care where you go.
Chuck: [looks in through window] That's right! Just go to the airport and
wait for some no-shows, then you can buy their seats for a fraction of
the price!
Marge: Are you going through our garbage?
Chuck: That's right! You fat cats didn't finish your plankton; now it's mine!
[runs off with cans]
You can trace mined coins to specific IP addresses if you are careful with how you listen to the packets and try to find out which computer gave you the packet first. If you had several computers tracking this information, it would be possible to identify down to a small number of users who actually mined some Bitcoins, and from that if any Bitcoins were co-mingled with those mined coins to be able to further identify what other addresses might be used by that person who also is mining coins.
Still, attempting to do that is a real technical challenge and you would need the resources of something like the U.S. federal government to pull that off, plus a whole bunch of data mining and active participation in the Bitcoin network... and it still gives wiggle room for plausible deniability on the surface. If there was a particular set of transactions that such data mining was looking for, you can still be tracked.
On the other hand, if you were very paranoid about such things you could set up manual connections for routing Bitcoin data to only trusted nodes (by your own definition... not some random list in other words), and hopefully even they are being just as paranoid about random connections "to the outside world".
IF you control all nodes, AND you KNOW you control all the nodes, then you can track the transaction to the IP ADDRESS of the MINER or TRANSACTION INITIATOR.
You cannot track the transaction to an individual person. An IP address is not a person. A Bitcoin address is not a person.
Furthermore, it's laughable to think that anyone can control all of the nodes to make this possible.
And if that scenario ever did occur, you could just avoid routing directly to those nodes (as you mentioned).
If the government wanted to track a Bitcoin user down, they'd just shakedown ISPs as usual.
The only "weakpoint" in Bitcoin's anonymity is the "bad guys control ALL the nodes" scenario.
Beyond that, it's as anonymous as users want it to be. Most people mine in a shared pool, and thus associate their IP, a User ID, and 1 or more receiving addresses, and tell it to a 3rd party. People participating in currency exchanges do the same thing and worse, as shit then ends up tied to a bank account or similar.
If you want to send x bitcoins to a person, you can exchange addresses however you wish, and then the network handles the rest. You could do both transactions from the same IP address so to anyone snooping it looks like someone was just moving money between their own wallets.
Why not:
Sell tickets at time X for price Y*W, where Y is the minimum amount for flying a plane that holds at least as many passengers as booked, that yields Z profit per (passenger * classWeight), where classWeight is some cost factor based on how much first class, business, and coach cost the airlines. Z is somewhat fixed. W is some statistically-generated factor based on the expected price when the plane is full and some encouragement for people to book early.
People booking early pay a lower price due to W, and perhaps get a rate guarantee (if the price drops below Y*W more than a certain number of days before the flight, you get the lower rate), and get a more flexible cancellation policy.
As time goes on, tighten the cancellation policy (perhaps with a small fee), and firm up details (like what plane will be used, where people will sit). People booking later pay more.
1 week before the flight, no cancellations allowed, prices jump up to reach or exceed Z, and everyone knows which slot they'll be in in which sardine can.
If there are any open seats, sell them 12 hours before the flight. No cancellation policy, prices drop and drop until all the seats are filled.
Don't overbook (just don't do it) and let the late comers eat the cost of expected empty seats.
With all the time saved from not having to do the "We are now looking for volunteers to not get on the plane" dance, you could probably squeeze in an extra flight per gate a day.
2) Is any attempt made to control for extremely high risk or premature live births in areas with better neonatal capabilities?
The US has the best (lowest) infant mortality rate in the world.
But people like unity100 like to trot out the "rankings" that are based on different measuring criteria.
In the US, anything that comes out of a women with any sign of life, and later dies, is chalked up as infant mortality.
Other countries just write them off as still born.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ix=seb&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=infant%20mortality%20rates%20higher%20in%20countries%20with%20vaccine&pbx=1&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&fp=12915d1a2a85fa97&ix=seb&ion=1&ix=seb&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=d12e3d4071aa9682&biw=1273&bih=965&ix=seb&ion=1
Man, you're such a fucking troll.
That link is a joke, just like you.
The US infant mortality rate is the lowest in the world.
Unless, of course, you don't use the same standard for "infant mortality" when measuring it in different countries.
The reason the US is placed lower on those lists is because in the US we call so much more shit "infant death" than other countries do. 12 weeks premature and dies in the US = infant death. Dies in another country = still born.
> That's the rub though- vaccines used to be for life threatening diseases like polio and smallpox but are now more and more prescribed for things that are merely a nuisance(chicken pox anyone?).
Wait till you get a bit older, your immune system a little weaker and then your chicken pox returns as shingles. That's more than a mere nuisance for a lot of people.
I got shingles at 25.
I'm going to assume I won't make it to 40.
All Bitcoin exchanges are shit. They're for speculators. Bitcoin as a currency is fine, and it will be fine if every exchange dies off.
Without speculation, Bitcoin is worthless. The only reason anyone has ever accepted Bitcoin as payment for anything is because they believe they can redeem Bitcoin for some other currency later on
Wrong. People accept Bitcoin because they believe they can also use it for goods and services.
Just like every other currency in existence.
I can send Bitcoins to people from a random address and all they will only know how much, when, and from what address.
You'd have to trace transactions backward to the originating address to find out where the money truly came from, and the ultimate originating source is always the miners.
For you to track anyone on Bitcoin you'd have to know their address. But anyone can generate a new address whenever they want.
I myself had dozens back when I was mining Bitcoins.
You can trace all transactions to addresses (this is good, and is by design), but you absolutely cannot trace addresses to people without information from outside the network.
Bitcoin is perfectly anonymous.
Bitcoin exchanges like Tradehill and MtGox are not anyonymous.
Tradehill was never a major Bitcoin exchange.
MtGox is the only one anyone ever used. Tradehill was started by some guy who got mad that MtGox was raking in the cash. He started throwing out accusations about security holes, the owner (of MtGox) not actually having all of the BitCoins backing his market, etc. Then he threw up Tradehill and it was shit.
All Bitcoin exchanges are shit. They're for speculators. Bitcoin as a currency is fine, and it will be fine if every exchange dies off.
Massive amounts of water; massive amounts of fertilizer; massive amounts of herbicide; massive amounts of pesticide. The dirt is mainly there to keep the stalks upright. ...did I mention the massive amounts of subsidies and massive amounts of corporate ownership?
You forgot to mention the massive amounts of nutrition and oh wait.
Corn is theworst crop in existence. The only animal that can fully digest it is one that doesn't eat it - the termite.
So what do we do when faced with a shitty crop? We give it subsidies so people can continue to grow it. Then we pay other people to not grow it. Then we mandate that we put it in gasoline.
You vegans are worse than the religious and atheist zealots.
Also, I seriously doubt that the net liquid cost of 1kg of cow is 15,500 L. Think about the water cycle carefully for 60 seconds (specifically, think about where cow urine and milk goes.)
It's vegan logic at it's finest. Same sort of crap that they use to tell people that if their piss is yellow, they're not drinking their necessary 2 gallons of water a day. These are the same morons wwho will measure their piss to find out that they're excreting 95%+ of the water they take in, and then reach the conclusion that they need to drink 3 gallons of water a day to prevent dehydration.
You get more radiation from being in a high altitude, unshielded aircraft (a LOT more, IIRC).
I don't see radiation as being a point of controversy.
You're a moron, and the TSA and the government love you for being one.
The scanners are operated by untrained monkeys.
The scanners are not calibrated.
The scanners are not tested.
The scanners are not maintained.
And of course, the radiation you receive on the flight mostly passes through you. The radiation you receive from the scanner is all absorbed in a few milimeters of your skin. You get orders of magnitude more radiation expsure from a scanner than you do from a flight, even if you believe the scanners are outputting the "safe" amounts of radiation that they claim.
Keep dreaming about a-la-carte. Content creators won't allow it.
I dunno. Apple has $100 billion in the bank. They could use some of that to make content creators very friendly.
Content creators do not want another iTunes/App Store situation.
They lose what, 30% of every sale due to the Apple tax?
It's better for them to roll their own store, control the content completely (DRM, where it shows up on the store, removing bad reviews, etc.), and take the entire pie.
10 bits per channel gets you 30 or 40 bits per pixel (with an alpha channel).
12 bits per channel gets you 36 or 48 bits per pixel.
16 bits per channel gets you 48 or 64 bits per pixel.
At 64 bits per pixel you can get 1 pixel in 1 word (or 2 words if you're still on a 32 bit processor).
This is why we had 32 bit pixels in the first place.
Yes, movies have shitty color depth. Even if they have 10 or 12 bit per channel cameras, displays, and editing systems/software, everything gets crushed down to 24-bit color or even worse when they export to a shitty colorspace for broadcast/disc (see YUY2/YV12).
But games and photography would pretty much instantly benefit if people had access to more colors. No more faking contrast and making everything look like shit with HDR (of course idiots will still do it).
Yes, 16 bits is way more than we need. I'm not going to claim I can tell the difference between 10-bits and 12-bits of red. But going straight to a full 64-bit pixels just makes the most sense. Older system can easily and quickly map 64-bits to 32-bits. You could even store the 32-bit pixel in one half of the (64-bit) word, and then store the rest of the info in the other half - old systems would just ignore it. No need to figure out some vision-based scheme where you have 10 bits of green, 9 bits of red, 7 bits of blue and 6 bits of alpha where everything blue ultimately looks like shit despite the fact that they say it shouldn't be noticeable.
airborne distribution?
That's called a money shot.
It's about time we get 4k televisions in production. Screw 3d, screw smart tv, just increase the resolution already. My monitor has higher resolution than my hdtv.
Don't forget about color dept. 1677216 just isn't enough.
Absolutel no reason we shouldn't be at full on 16-bits per channel right now.
My 19", 4:3 monitor from 2002 had higher resolution than my HDTV does today.
Oh, and better picture quality and response times, too.