Eh, Google would still look good on the resume, and they can afford to relocate you while the vast array of smaller companies in Silly Valley can't. I recently went a different direction, for exactly the reasons you cite "something smells off", but if you don't already have a "big name" on your resume, any one of them is great for your career.
You have that backwards - and it the same mistake geeks made with Microsoft when/. was young. Buying up lots of small companies in a sector means there will be more such companies, not fewer, in 5 years. Startups do most of the innovation in tech, and mostly get funded on the hopes of being bought by a big player. When they do, many of the engineers move on to the next startup after a year. It doesn't matter if the big companies keep failing to market the products, because it's the engineers that are the industry.
Fair point, but the point remains that there are already several established decentralized alternatives, if you don't like a centrally-managed DNS. Systems like TOR, where you pretty much need to take down the server itself, or freenet's serverless approach.. While such things are slow, they'd work fine for a site that hosts trackers, not content.
DNS managed by a central authority serves the needs of large business well, and isn't going away. Want something else for stuff that large businesses don't like? Established alternatives exist, and inventing new approaches to DNS itself just muddy the waters.
Sure, sure, but people still see the movies. The studios are still focused on what sells tickets and discs, being still blind to making money through online distribution for the most part, and people will pay to see big budget special effects.
Hell, modern action films are just discordant short action clips that don't even explain what's happening in the scene, let alone tell a coherent story where you care if the heros win, and people still pay to see the effects. Or, rather, or more likely to pay to see the effects at the Cinema than they are to pay to see other things.
No, much of the right is for any sort of smaller government, no surprise there but they don't think stoners are cool and choose online identities that say "look at me, I'm a stoner, hahaha!". That's the part shocking for someone on the right "ganjadude".
Modern food has nothing to do with game meat. Meat is for protein, not for calories (it's thought that Scott's expedition to the Antarctic died because that wasn't well understood at the time, and they packed in lots of preserved meat and nowhere near enough calories).
Check out the nutritional information at a KFC sometime: the chicken fried in fat has less calories than the sides. A drumstick has ~120 (original recipe), a biscuit ~200. We seriously lard up our meals, a holdover from a time not that long ago when getting enough calories was still expensive (plus it tastes good), but lean meat is a poor source of calories.
Wolves circle and attack their prey, killing it by tearing it apart. They don't chase faster prey than the wolf by chasing until the prey dies from exhaustion. A man could do this with many animals, if he really wanted to, but it would be a terrible strategy to gain calories.
But there's a small yet vocal segment of the geek crowd that needs to believe that technological progress is infinitely exponential
Infinitely is a long time, but there's no apparent limit on technological growth that we've seen so far. Remember, "technology" isn't iPhones and rocket ships - those are toys enabled by technology - technology is efficiency at producing and delivering goods and services.
Efficiency transforms a cell phone from a brick with a car battery attached into the uninteresting bit of the computers most people carry. Efficiency transforms a GPS receiver from 50 pounds of gear with an attached generator, to another tiny bit of that same handheld device. Efficiency means the amount of America covered by forests has grow steadily for decades as it now take so little farmland to feed everyone. Efficiency means the much-reviled WalMart can undercut everyone else because they have the best logistics network ever invented.
Everywhere around you that you see inefficiency, that's more room for technological growth to continue, more evidence that it hasn't yet "peaked". Sure, there may be strict limits on what man can accomplish with chemical rockets, but there's value in doing those things more cheaply, more efficiently. And with sufficient time and technology, chemical rockets will become quaint, like steam engines.
Wonder why I took you for a hippie, ganjadude? Strange isn't it, ganjadude, that I would just assume you were a "legalize it" lefty stoner who only cared about one thing.
Prices everywhere reflect the Visa tax, and would be lower without it. Money well spent for the fraud protection, IMO, but it's still a real cost. There's really no difference between a fee/tax/whatever that most merchants pay, or the the customer pays directly - either way the price is higher.
It takes a remarkable amount of calories to run each mile. Lean meat has very few calories. You're quite unlikely to come out ahead with this strategy. Finding an already sick or injured animal (or a very young one) without much "run" left in it is a much better plan. Ambush and a short chase is a much better plan. There's a reason no actual predators use the "run until the prey dies of exhaustion" strategy.
Never be both a beater and a shooter, as the saying goes. Amusing, but true.
Hmm, what could ganjadude's politics be, I wonder? I'm guessing: outraged at government overreach in one hotbutton area, but actually OK with it everywhere else. But that's just a first impression.
DNS was decentralized at first as well (at one point Microsoft was getting blackholed so often that had a $50k bounty for the contact info of anyone running a DNS server, not exactly public knowledge). At some point the US government decided DNS was actually important, and the DHS got involved and so on.
There are already a few encrypted networks out there where anyone can set up a server, and the government has to do a bit more work to take it down. The problem is enough making people aware of any of them to have the network effect take over, and making new ones just makes that problem worse.
No one is going to take seriously anything you write using the word "womyn". At first I just assumed you were trolling, but you seem to be in earnest - no troll would blend ridiculous notions from the left with ridiculous notions from the right into the same post, that's just poor trollmanship.
Actually, as CLIs go, search-based CLIs aren't a bad idea. A CLI is notoriously non-discoverable, but the ability to type a few letters that should be in the command somewhere can help a lot (assuming it's not a Unix CLI where all command names are encrypted). The idea needs to evolve more IMO, but it's not a bad direction to be moving.
This is the upside of new technologies being marketed first to the wealthy. Low-end products don't do fixes or recalls unless the lawsuits are expected to exceed the cost of the fix, which makes progress slow. High-end products must care more about reputation than that, so things get improved even when the company's not at fault, because sales are so tied to "good overall experience". That makes progress fast.
If Tesla does start selling a 30-40k car, it will benefit from all these "lessons learned", which might well have been ignored for years if they had started with a low-end product.
For a power user, everything moved in Win7 - every system setting, everything I knew how to find in the control panel, and so on.
That was briefly annoying, but really wasn't a big deal because everything was discoverable. The problem with Win8 isn't that everything moved again - we're all used to that for Windows - it's that nothing is discoverable in Metro. Blegh.
Dammit, I had the same problem with my XBone. I had to read the freaking manual to figure out how to use a freaking video game console, because metro is so not-discoverable.
Context menus, guys! Context menus are everything.
Why would you believe that? The NSA has the IP addresses associated with every bitcoin transaction ever process (well, maybe they were ignoring it early on), and certainly knows the billing address associated with every IP address at any given moment, or can demand that information at a whim.
Sure, you could just use someone else's WiFi or whatever, just like stolen credit cards are often used for illicit goods, but in that sense a bitcoin transaction is no more anonymous to the government than a CC transaction.
The actual bitcoins themselves will still be limited.
Sure, but that entirely misses the point. The amount of physical currency in circulation isn't the interesting part of the money supply.
The question then is, at what point people will realize that a bitcoin is worth more than a promise by somebody to give you a bitcoin.
Dollars work exactly the same way, at least to anyone who understands how money works. Everything must be discounted for risk. That doesn't stop inflation. And for "safe" investments, the risk that the promise won't be kept is significantly smaller than inflation.
The risk that a "eurodollar" savings account won't return your money is non-zero, unlike government-insured accounts. It even be really high as such things go, like 1% or 2%. But they were still popular when they paid 10% and a US savings account paid 5.25% (and inflation was 12% or whatever - it was the Carter years).
You can still have bitcoin inflation, and the amount by which "a promise to return a bitcoin" by a bank is worth less than one in hand will generally be less than inflation. It's only if the banking system collapses will bitcoins-in-hand be special (of course, governments will start seizing them at that point, but that's a different discussion).
How is bitcoin not a fiat currency? Its supply is determined by algorithm instead of by a central bank, but that's not what "fiat" is about. For that matter, its supply is only controlled until it becomes mainstream - if BTC-denominated savings accounts ("eurobitcoins"), BTC futures, and BTC-denominated insurance policies come into play, the supply will be quite uncontrolled.
What privacy to you think bitcoin provides? The government knows the physical address associated with the IP address associated with every bitcoin transaction. OK, sure it may be easier to use a stolen WiFi than a stolen credit card, but that's a pretty slim advantage.
Effectively France is just policing fraud as they see it. If Google isn't honestly disclosing what they do with your information, then it's legitimate to think of this under the umbrella of "fraud prevention".
I'm all for free markets with minimal regulation, but fraud prevention is absolutely a legitimate place for the government to be sticking its nose in. Just like contract enforcement, and standardization of weights and measures, you can't have a free market without a government fulfilling this role.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, Google would still look good on the resume, and they can afford to relocate you while the vast array of smaller companies in Silly Valley can't. I recently went a different direction, for exactly the reasons you cite "something smells off", but if you don't already have a "big name" on your resume, any one of them is great for your career.
Google could destroy the US robotics industry.
You have that backwards - and it the same mistake geeks made with Microsoft when /. was young. Buying up lots of small companies in a sector means there will be more such companies, not fewer, in 5 years. Startups do most of the innovation in tech, and mostly get funded on the hopes of being bought by a big player. When they do, many of the engineers move on to the next startup after a year. It doesn't matter if the big companies keep failing to market the products, because it's the engineers that are the industry.
We fans know the first one is really "Star Trek: The Tone Poem".
Fair point, but the point remains that there are already several established decentralized alternatives, if you don't like a centrally-managed DNS. Systems like TOR, where you pretty much need to take down the server itself, or freenet's serverless approach.. While such things are slow, they'd work fine for a site that hosts trackers, not content.
DNS managed by a central authority serves the needs of large business well, and isn't going away. Want something else for stuff that large businesses don't like? Established alternatives exist, and inventing new approaches to DNS itself just muddy the waters.
Sure, sure, but people still see the movies. The studios are still focused on what sells tickets and discs, being still blind to making money through online distribution for the most part, and people will pay to see big budget special effects.
Hell, modern action films are just discordant short action clips that don't even explain what's happening in the scene, let alone tell a coherent story where you care if the heros win, and people still pay to see the effects. Or, rather, or more likely to pay to see the effects at the Cinema than they are to pay to see other things.
No, much of the right is for any sort of smaller government, no surprise there but they don't think stoners are cool and choose online identities that say "look at me, I'm a stoner, hahaha!". That's the part shocking for someone on the right "ganjadude".
Modern food has nothing to do with game meat. Meat is for protein, not for calories (it's thought that Scott's expedition to the Antarctic died because that wasn't well understood at the time, and they packed in lots of preserved meat and nowhere near enough calories).
Check out the nutritional information at a KFC sometime: the chicken fried in fat has less calories than the sides. A drumstick has ~120 (original recipe), a biscuit ~200. We seriously lard up our meals, a holdover from a time not that long ago when getting enough calories was still expensive (plus it tastes good), but lean meat is a poor source of calories.
Wolves circle and attack their prey, killing it by tearing it apart. They don't chase faster prey than the wolf by chasing until the prey dies from exhaustion. A man could do this with many animals, if he really wanted to, but it would be a terrible strategy to gain calories.
But there's a small yet vocal segment of the geek crowd that needs to believe that technological progress is infinitely exponential
Infinitely is a long time, but there's no apparent limit on technological growth that we've seen so far. Remember, "technology" isn't iPhones and rocket ships - those are toys enabled by technology - technology is efficiency at producing and delivering goods and services.
Efficiency transforms a cell phone from a brick with a car battery attached into the uninteresting bit of the computers most people carry. Efficiency transforms a GPS receiver from 50 pounds of gear with an attached generator, to another tiny bit of that same handheld device. Efficiency means the amount of America covered by forests has grow steadily for decades as it now take so little farmland to feed everyone. Efficiency means the much-reviled WalMart can undercut everyone else because they have the best logistics network ever invented.
Everywhere around you that you see inefficiency, that's more room for technological growth to continue, more evidence that it hasn't yet "peaked". Sure, there may be strict limits on what man can accomplish with chemical rockets, but there's value in doing those things more cheaply, more efficiently. And with sufficient time and technology, chemical rockets will become quaint, like steam engines.
Wonder why I took you for a hippie, ganjadude? Strange isn't it, ganjadude, that I would just assume you were a "legalize it" lefty stoner who only cared about one thing.
Prices everywhere reflect the Visa tax, and would be lower without it. Money well spent for the fraud protection, IMO, but it's still a real cost. There's really no difference between a fee/tax/whatever that most merchants pay, or the the customer pays directly - either way the price is higher.
It takes a remarkable amount of calories to run each mile. Lean meat has very few calories. You're quite unlikely to come out ahead with this strategy. Finding an already sick or injured animal (or a very young one) without much "run" left in it is a much better plan. Ambush and a short chase is a much better plan. There's a reason no actual predators use the "run until the prey dies of exhaustion" strategy.
Never be both a beater and a shooter, as the saying goes. Amusing, but true.
Hmm, what could ganjadude's politics be, I wonder? I'm guessing: outraged at government overreach in one hotbutton area, but actually OK with it everywhere else. But that's just a first impression.
Ever stop to think that could be because script and story are just as good on the torrented copy, but special effects look better on the big screen?
DNS was decentralized at first as well (at one point Microsoft was getting blackholed so often that had a $50k bounty for the contact info of anyone running a DNS server, not exactly public knowledge). At some point the US government decided DNS was actually important, and the DHS got involved and so on.
There are already a few encrypted networks out there where anyone can set up a server, and the government has to do a bit more work to take it down. The problem is enough making people aware of any of them to have the network effect take over, and making new ones just makes that problem worse.
No one is going to take seriously anything you write using the word "womyn". At first I just assumed you were trolling, but you seem to be in earnest - no troll would blend ridiculous notions from the left with ridiculous notions from the right into the same post, that's just poor trollmanship.
Actually, as CLIs go, search-based CLIs aren't a bad idea. A CLI is notoriously non-discoverable, but the ability to type a few letters that should be in the command somewhere can help a lot (assuming it's not a Unix CLI where all command names are encrypted). The idea needs to evolve more IMO, but it's not a bad direction to be moving.
This is the upside of new technologies being marketed first to the wealthy. Low-end products don't do fixes or recalls unless the lawsuits are expected to exceed the cost of the fix, which makes progress slow. High-end products must care more about reputation than that, so things get improved even when the company's not at fault, because sales are so tied to "good overall experience". That makes progress fast.
If Tesla does start selling a 30-40k car, it will benefit from all these "lessons learned", which might well have been ignored for years if they had started with a low-end product.
For a power user, everything moved in Win7 - every system setting, everything I knew how to find in the control panel, and so on.
That was briefly annoying, but really wasn't a big deal because everything was discoverable. The problem with Win8 isn't that everything moved again - we're all used to that for Windows - it's that nothing is discoverable in Metro. Blegh.
Dammit, I had the same problem with my XBone. I had to read the freaking manual to figure out how to use a freaking video game console, because metro is so not-discoverable.
Context menus, guys! Context menus are everything.
Why would you believe that? The NSA has the IP addresses associated with every bitcoin transaction ever process (well, maybe they were ignoring it early on), and certainly knows the billing address associated with every IP address at any given moment, or can demand that information at a whim.
Sure, you could just use someone else's WiFi or whatever, just like stolen credit cards are often used for illicit goods, but in that sense a bitcoin transaction is no more anonymous to the government than a CC transaction.
The actual bitcoins themselves will still be limited.
Sure, but that entirely misses the point. The amount of physical currency in circulation isn't the interesting part of the money supply.
The question then is, at what point people will realize that a bitcoin is worth more than a promise by somebody to give you a bitcoin.
Dollars work exactly the same way, at least to anyone who understands how money works. Everything must be discounted for risk. That doesn't stop inflation. And for "safe" investments, the risk that the promise won't be kept is significantly smaller than inflation.
The risk that a "eurodollar" savings account won't return your money is non-zero, unlike government-insured accounts. It even be really high as such things go, like 1% or 2%. But they were still popular when they paid 10% and a US savings account paid 5.25% (and inflation was 12% or whatever - it was the Carter years).
You can still have bitcoin inflation, and the amount by which "a promise to return a bitcoin" by a bank is worth less than one in hand will generally be less than inflation. It's only if the banking system collapses will bitcoins-in-hand be special (of course, governments will start seizing them at that point, but that's a different discussion).
The same way you move a file across filesystems: copy and delete.
How is bitcoin not a fiat currency? Its supply is determined by algorithm instead of by a central bank, but that's not what "fiat" is about. For that matter, its supply is only controlled until it becomes mainstream - if BTC-denominated savings accounts ("eurobitcoins"), BTC futures, and BTC-denominated insurance policies come into play, the supply will be quite uncontrolled.
What privacy to you think bitcoin provides? The government knows the physical address associated with the IP address associated with every bitcoin transaction. OK, sure it may be easier to use a stolen WiFi than a stolen credit card, but that's a pretty slim advantage.
Effectively France is just policing fraud as they see it. If Google isn't honestly disclosing what they do with your information, then it's legitimate to think of this under the umbrella of "fraud prevention".
I'm all for free markets with minimal regulation, but fraud prevention is absolutely a legitimate place for the government to be sticking its nose in. Just like contract enforcement, and standardization of weights and measures, you can't have a free market without a government fulfilling this role.