I'm not really a linguist, but you might as well ask why we still use punctuation, or why we put spaces between words, or why we spell things in the ridiculous mess that is English-language spelling.
So close. You almost had it. The 'ridiculous mess' that is English-language spelling is also an optimization of cognitive load, just as capitalization and punctuation are. When humans read, we recognize the whole word, not individual letters. English spelling puts a greater cognitive load on the writer in order to significantly reduce the cognitive load on the reader. We could regularize the spelling of all homophones, simplifying writing—and sabotaging reading. Sabotaging it so badly that we would lose a lot of expressiveness.
Written English is considerably more expressive than spoken English, and a large part of the gain is because of spelling. Carat, caret, and carrot are trivial to distinguish in writing, regardless of context, but possible to parse verbally only in context. Admittedly people who aren't Bugs Bunny rarely talk about 24 carat carrots, but if we did, it would take a moment to parse the sentence when spoken, while it's completely clear when written. Professional speechwriters have lists of phrases never to use in a speech because they're impossible to understand without great context, and the misunderstanding could be significantly bad. Speechwriters have additional lists of phrases not to use in speeches that may be relatively easy to understand in context, but are also too easy to misunderstand or misconstrue. Writers have similar lists, but they're a lot shorter, and there's very little overlap with those of the speechwriters.
Human brains parse verbal language and written language very differently, so the evolved 'optimizations' of pronunciation and spelling are different because they serve very different purposes. Homophones are spelled differently because it makes written language much easier to read.
The consumers of these products would also balk at a "MADE IN CHINA" stamp on it. These aren't white label shampoos, they're pretty high end products for retail outlets that charge you way too much for them.
There's your answer. The retail price of the products you package is already ridiculously inflated. Either it can be slightly more ridiculously inflated or those assholes can accept a slightly lower profit. Either way, your company can increase your prices to pay your workers better. If you're as cheap and fast as you believe, you'll still be competitive. It's not like new production lines can be put together overnight, or even in a few years, especially considering the massive risk-aversion of capital today. No one is going to open a new bottle filling and capping plant in the Midwest and steal your business.
Most minimum wage jobs are part time or 'first job' positions.
Many are. Not most. As of 2014, the latest year for which BLS data is available, 57% of people making less than minimum wage (999,000 people) are over age 25. An additional 550,000 people over age 25 are making precisely minimum wage, 43% of that group. So 1.5 million people over age 25 are making at or below minimum wage, and that is a majority.
The BLS suffers from the same misapprehension you do, and doesn't collect more detailed age brackets. The economy has changed, substantially, and it happened years ago. There are so few jobs available that older workers are crowding out younger ones for what were once starter positions. The Millennials get a bad rap for being the least employed generation in US history, but it isn't entirely their fault. Jobs they should be working have been occupied by Boomers and GenXers, desperate for any income at all.
Nope, that's toys. They can watch a movie and you can't.
Nope, it's not toys. Who cares about movies? I renew my license plates using the Internet, and at the rate the state is going, that will be the only possible way to do it by 2020. They're closing DMV offices all over the state, and they never had a mail in option. I have two different bank accounts that are accessible solely over the Internet. There is no local branch whatsoever. There are no branches in my state or in the neighboring state.
These are not toys. These are necessities of living, and I'm not a rich person. The trend is more of the same, where interacting with government, financial systems, and health systems are all moving to Internet-only. It's inevitable, because it's cheapest. They're closing offices, shutting down call centers, and eliminating mail handling centers. I don't give a fuck about stagehands. I need to be able to pay my taxes.
The Internet does, in fact, behave like a water or gas pipeline; both data and electricity flow like water;
Wrong. No, it doesn't. The Internet does not behave like electricity or water or gas. The analogy especially fails for water and gas. Water and gas are physical things, being moved into your house. You will perform physical processes using them, and they behave in ways specific to physical things, which do not apply to data.
Water and data are in no way analogous. Water requires acquisition, treatment, and the ability to move vast quantities of something very heavy. Water pressure and data throughput are in no way analogous. Water velocity is a physical thing, which can be very expensive to achieve. Data velocity is an electrical thing that costs nothing beyond powering the routers and switches. Specifically, moving no data at all costs exactly the same as moving maximum data (since the majority of installed routers and switches today do not have sleepy ports). Similarly for gas, though the power required to move gas is much less than it is for water, since it is much lighter. It's still far higher than that required to move data, and still changes substantially based on demand, because it is a physical process.
Electricity and data are not analogous either. Electricity must be generated, and that generation requires vast physical plant with, in the case of coal and fission power, extremely heavy inputs. How much you and your neighbors are using changes how much must be generated from moment to moment, which requires changing a very large physical process. Sending or not sending data changes nothing at all. Send, don't send, the same (minuscule) amount of power is required either way.
Congestion does not behave the same way either. If too many people try to draw on the capacity of a physical system, physical processes simply stop working. If the gas pressure is too low, your gas water heater will not ignite correctly, and will in fact extinguish itself if it's an older model driven by a pilot light. If the water pressure is too low, your shower won't work. If a network connection is congested, many things keep working. Only latency-sensitive things suffer, at first, and even that can be alleviated by QOS routers. There is no analogous process in water or gas systems. You can not simply throttle your faucet and make your shower work when water pressure is too low.
Data access is no longer a luxury, and while it's not magical, it's definitely special. Attempting to reason about it as if it were a physical thing fails in numerous ways, some of which I have described here. Other people do it a bit better, but I think I hit the high points.
It's okay for rich people to have toys the rest of us couldn't afford anyway *even if we took those toys away*.
Sure, fine. Except we're not talking about toys. We're talking about data, WHICH DOES NOT BEHAVE LIKE ANYTHING ELSE!!1111elebenty-one. Goddamnit, you'd think Slashdot, of all places, would have figured this out by now. Nearly every analogy fails. As far as I know, every analogy fails. Data does not act like water. Data does not act like electricity. Data does not act like toys. Data does not act like cars.
Data does not act like anything else, and every attempt to try to reason about it by analogy runs afoul of this problem.
If your business can be done better by someone else, then someone else WILL do it better.
No they won't. If there's only one other someone else, they will function in a tacit cartel with you. If there's only two other someone elses, they will still function in a tacit cartel with you. It takes a minimum of 4 competitors before actual competitive behavior emerges, barring collusion into an explicit cartel. There is no market anywhere in the US with 4 competitive ISPs. (And no, a market with a cell provider, a WISP, a hardline phone company, and a cable company does not have 4 competitors. They are not substitutable services. Unfortunately the FCC believes the lie that they are.)
Yeah, but if Enron, Comcast, SCO, Oracle, and Microsoft mess things up they go out of business. The government extracts money under the thread of violence.
According to just the past week of Slashdot stories, Comcast, SCO, Oracle and Microsoft all extract money under threat of violence too. Oracle wants $9.3 billion under threat of violence.
Your talking point is not as powerful as you think it is.
Unlike the surfaces over which they are typically erected (such as sand or light-colored roofs), which bounce a lot of the sun's input back into space through the "visible-light window" of atmospheric transmission, solar panels absorb pretty much all the light that strikes them.
That's very much a regional thing. Clay tiles are still the most popular roofing material in China, but not all clay is light-colored. Elsewhere, 70% of all roofs in the US are covered in asphalt shingles, most of which are black. It would be even higher if not for the southwest. Europe is similar. In other words, in places where per capita electricity usage is highest, solar panels are a wash as far as albedo is concerned.
This is, of course, absurd, but it's little more absurd than anything else said about her. There's no particular evidence that she's a "corrupt, serially lying manipulator" other than the intensive media campaign saying so being put forth by the Republican machine.
Correct. But proper science also doesn't censor bad propaganda films.
Incorrect. Bad propaganda films that lead to behavior that is at best contributory negligence and at worst involuntary manslaughter definitely should be censored, with the scientific evidence that proves that the behavior is negligence or manslaughter.
Censorship is not universally bad. It is entirely reasonable for a society to decide as a whole that something is so terrible that it needs to be suppressed. Flat Earthers are mocked and derided and no one anywhere thinks they deserve to present their case in an hour and a half long video at a major film festival, despite the fact their delusions don't tend to kill anybody. That general opinion is censorship in action. It's such an all-pervasive and well-accepted censorship that you may not actually think of it as such, but it is. Antivaxxers deserve all that censorship and more because their delusions do maim and kill people.
I will revise my initial statement a little. Not all forms of censorship are universally bad. Antivaxxers don't deserve to be maimed or killed for their delusions, despite the fact that their delusions are maiming and killing other people. However they should not be given a bully pulpit, they should not be given worldwide publicity, they should not be given the slightest shred of avoidable exposure, and they should not be tolerated in polite company, precisely because their delusions are so dangerous.
In this case, it will pop up a message that says "No comment history available" because it hasn't been modded at all (at least not at the time that I'm posting this comment).
Is that true? It wasn't more than a few weeks ago that clicking on the score got you a table of the score modifiers, even when a post had not been moderated. It showed the base score (+1 for logged in users), and the +1 Karma Bonus (if applicable) on a second line. "No comment history available" looks like a recently introduced bug, to me. What does history have to do with anything?
Given that its been quite a while since someone landed anything on the moon. It would be a victory for space exploration if someone sent up a robot and dug a hole.
It would be, but the next robots on the moon won't be digging holes. Just rolling around. (Unless one of the teams gets really ambitious while trying to win the bonus $4 million available for discovering water.) The prize availability terminates at the end of next year, so the teams competing had better hurry up.
There is already a new standard for physical ethernet cabling, calling RJ.5 (that is, ar-jay-point-five)
"RJ point five is a trademark of TE Connectivity used here under license."
Nope. Not a standard. A wannabe "standard" that hasn't replaced anything at all. It's just a money-grab, as these things always devolve into these days.
When will people learn, corporate greed does not breed standards?
One thing that I've been seeing a lot in recent years is the same IT job adverts for positions at Abbott showing up every few months and keep showing in cycles, generally every 6-months. (And by "same" I mean identical wording not just some generic sysadmin or developer spot.)
That's an attempt at legal ass-covering, recommended by lawyers. They're fake job listings, designed to "prove" that no local employees are available, to meet the H1B terms. They have no intention of actually hiring anyone who responds to those ads. As long as IT workers displaced by H1Bs continue to just shrug and take another job, the efficacy of the attempted ass-cover won't be tested in court.
Scantily clad? Bare arms and bare midriff counts as scantily clad these days? (And not even very much midriff.) They're completely covered from a (very high) waist to their toes, otherwise. Not even close to as scanty as many many professional dancers at clubs all over the country. Not strip clubs, either. Plain old night club girls wear less than that.
I expect that only a hand full of big fast food chains will build a bot, and that the local restaurants with real food keep on working as usual: open doors or reservation by phone.
Except in the Bay area, where every shithole and roach coach will have one, each more intrusive than the last.
Now let's imagine : let two AlphaGo machines play each other Go games. More games. More time allowed... Folks : it becomes IMO so abysmal. Where will it stops ? I literally shiver in awe.
Then this will blow your mind. This has already happened. AlphaGo trained against itself as a matter of course. In consequence, it has already played more games than any human alive ever could. Think about that for a while.
No no, you're thinking is all wrong. In 10 years, we'll pitting our phones together on the same table and have them play it out while placing winning bets . It's sorta like putting two Furbies in front of each other; useless, but endless fun:)
In 10 years, if you put two Furbies in front of each other, they'll spend a few minutes evolving a common private language, then agree to cooperate to kill you in your sleep.
Elon Musk and Steven Hawking agree with me, so I know I'm right.
... you do realize actual people fail this test? There's no faster way to get banned from a counterstrike server than to be better than everyone. They will immediately accuse you of aimbotting.
What does that have to do with the price of fish? At CounterStrike's age, it should have had an automated ELO server implemented years ago, with all instance servers connected to it and enforcing an ELO range for joining players. Either a range selected and hardcoded by the owner of the server or a dynamic range assigned by the server based on the ranks of joining players. The client would need to be able to display and filter by ELO range, including an automated match feature.
Tie the rank to a Steam account and the majority of the possible exploits could be contained. CounterStrike might enjoy a renaissance if such a system were implemented. People like a game with a high probability of fun.
That part about everyone having a Swiss bank account sounds wonderful to me. I think every person deserves a little tax haven of their own. (IIRC Switzerland is no longer useful as a tax haven, but that's besides the point.)
Of course the plebes can't be allowed to have a Swiss bank account of their very own. Only the elites are allowed to have that.
You recall slightly incorrectly. The Swiss banks gave up the names associated with some numbered accounts. Basically all accounts created after a certain date. If your account was older than that (old money), they didn't give it up. They gave up Bill Gates and Larry Page, but the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers still have their privacy.
The fanboy with stars in his eyes is completely ignoring the fact that Intel has shown first 3D XPoint products that are just twice as fast as flash-based SSDs. The 1000x density and speed factors he's slobbering over are projected ceilings, which will take years to achieve in actual hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not really a linguist, but you might as well ask why we still use punctuation, or why we put spaces between words, or why we spell things in the ridiculous mess that is English-language spelling.
So close. You almost had it. The 'ridiculous mess' that is English-language spelling is also an optimization of cognitive load, just as capitalization and punctuation are. When humans read, we recognize the whole word, not individual letters. English spelling puts a greater cognitive load on the writer in order to significantly reduce the cognitive load on the reader. We could regularize the spelling of all homophones, simplifying writing—and sabotaging reading. Sabotaging it so badly that we would lose a lot of expressiveness.
Written English is considerably more expressive than spoken English, and a large part of the gain is because of spelling. Carat, caret, and carrot are trivial to distinguish in writing, regardless of context, but possible to parse verbally only in context. Admittedly people who aren't Bugs Bunny rarely talk about 24 carat carrots, but if we did, it would take a moment to parse the sentence when spoken, while it's completely clear when written. Professional speechwriters have lists of phrases never to use in a speech because they're impossible to understand without great context, and the misunderstanding could be significantly bad. Speechwriters have additional lists of phrases not to use in speeches that may be relatively easy to understand in context, but are also too easy to misunderstand or misconstrue. Writers have similar lists, but they're a lot shorter, and there's very little overlap with those of the speechwriters.
Human brains parse verbal language and written language very differently, so the evolved 'optimizations' of pronunciation and spelling are different because they serve very different purposes. Homophones are spelled differently because it makes written language much easier to read.
The consumers of these products would also balk at a "MADE IN CHINA" stamp on it. These aren't white label shampoos, they're pretty high end products for retail outlets that charge you way too much for them.
There's your answer. The retail price of the products you package is already ridiculously inflated. Either it can be slightly more ridiculously inflated or those assholes can accept a slightly lower profit. Either way, your company can increase your prices to pay your workers better. If you're as cheap and fast as you believe, you'll still be competitive. It's not like new production lines can be put together overnight, or even in a few years, especially considering the massive risk-aversion of capital today. No one is going to open a new bottle filling and capping plant in the Midwest and steal your business.
Most minimum wage jobs are part time or 'first job' positions.
Many are. Not most. As of 2014, the latest year for which BLS data is available, 57% of people making less than minimum wage (999,000 people) are over age 25. An additional 550,000 people over age 25 are making precisely minimum wage, 43% of that group. So 1.5 million people over age 25 are making at or below minimum wage, and that is a majority.
The BLS suffers from the same misapprehension you do, and doesn't collect more detailed age brackets. The economy has changed, substantially, and it happened years ago. There are so few jobs available that older workers are crowding out younger ones for what were once starter positions. The Millennials get a bad rap for being the least employed generation in US history, but it isn't entirely their fault. Jobs they should be working have been occupied by Boomers and GenXers, desperate for any income at all.
What makes you think IBM lawyers are able to touch garlic and wooden stakes?
The Nazgul are allowed to touch anything they like, except possibly the One Ring.
Nope, that's toys. They can watch a movie and you can't.
Nope, it's not toys. Who cares about movies? I renew my license plates using the Internet, and at the rate the state is going, that will be the only possible way to do it by 2020. They're closing DMV offices all over the state, and they never had a mail in option. I have two different bank accounts that are accessible solely over the Internet. There is no local branch whatsoever. There are no branches in my state or in the neighboring state.
These are not toys. These are necessities of living, and I'm not a rich person. The trend is more of the same, where interacting with government, financial systems, and health systems are all moving to Internet-only. It's inevitable, because it's cheapest. They're closing offices, shutting down call centers, and eliminating mail handling centers. I don't give a fuck about stagehands. I need to be able to pay my taxes.
The Internet does, in fact, behave like a water or gas pipeline; both data and electricity flow like water;
Wrong. No, it doesn't. The Internet does not behave like electricity or water or gas. The analogy especially fails for water and gas. Water and gas are physical things, being moved into your house. You will perform physical processes using them, and they behave in ways specific to physical things, which do not apply to data.
Water and data are in no way analogous. Water requires acquisition, treatment, and the ability to move vast quantities of something very heavy. Water pressure and data throughput are in no way analogous. Water velocity is a physical thing, which can be very expensive to achieve. Data velocity is an electrical thing that costs nothing beyond powering the routers and switches. Specifically, moving no data at all costs exactly the same as moving maximum data (since the majority of installed routers and switches today do not have sleepy ports). Similarly for gas, though the power required to move gas is much less than it is for water, since it is much lighter. It's still far higher than that required to move data, and still changes substantially based on demand, because it is a physical process.
Electricity and data are not analogous either. Electricity must be generated, and that generation requires vast physical plant with, in the case of coal and fission power, extremely heavy inputs. How much you and your neighbors are using changes how much must be generated from moment to moment, which requires changing a very large physical process. Sending or not sending data changes nothing at all. Send, don't send, the same (minuscule) amount of power is required either way.
Congestion does not behave the same way either. If too many people try to draw on the capacity of a physical system, physical processes simply stop working. If the gas pressure is too low, your gas water heater will not ignite correctly, and will in fact extinguish itself if it's an older model driven by a pilot light. If the water pressure is too low, your shower won't work. If a network connection is congested, many things keep working. Only latency-sensitive things suffer, at first, and even that can be alleviated by QOS routers. There is no analogous process in water or gas systems. You can not simply throttle your faucet and make your shower work when water pressure is too low.
Data access is no longer a luxury, and while it's not magical, it's definitely special. Attempting to reason about it as if it were a physical thing fails in numerous ways, some of which I have described here. Other people do it a bit better, but I think I hit the high points.
It's okay for rich people to have toys the rest of us couldn't afford anyway *even if we took those toys away*.
Sure, fine. Except we're not talking about toys. We're talking about data, WHICH DOES NOT BEHAVE LIKE ANYTHING ELSE!!1111elebenty-one. Goddamnit, you'd think Slashdot, of all places, would have figured this out by now. Nearly every analogy fails. As far as I know, every analogy fails. Data does not act like water. Data does not act like electricity. Data does not act like toys. Data does not act like cars.
Data does not act like anything else, and every attempt to try to reason about it by analogy runs afoul of this problem.
Corporations have competition.
ISPs do not.
If your business can be done better by someone else, then someone else WILL do it better.
No they won't. If there's only one other someone else, they will function in a tacit cartel with you. If there's only two other someone elses, they will still function in a tacit cartel with you. It takes a minimum of 4 competitors before actual competitive behavior emerges, barring collusion into an explicit cartel. There is no market anywhere in the US with 4 competitive ISPs. (And no, a market with a cell provider, a WISP, a hardline phone company, and a cable company does not have 4 competitors. They are not substitutable services. Unfortunately the FCC believes the lie that they are.)
Yeah, but if Enron, Comcast, SCO, Oracle, and Microsoft mess things up they go out of business. The government extracts money under the thread of violence.
According to just the past week of Slashdot stories, Comcast, SCO, Oracle and Microsoft all extract money under threat of violence too. Oracle wants $9.3 billion under threat of violence.
Your talking point is not as powerful as you think it is.
Unlike the surfaces over which they are typically erected (such as sand or light-colored roofs), which bounce a lot of the sun's input back into space through the "visible-light window" of atmospheric transmission, solar panels absorb pretty much all the light that strikes them.
That's very much a regional thing. Clay tiles are still the most popular roofing material in China, but not all clay is light-colored. Elsewhere, 70% of all roofs in the US are covered in asphalt shingles, most of which are black. It would be even higher if not for the southwest. Europe is similar. In other words, in places where per capita electricity usage is highest, solar panels are a wash as far as albedo is concerned.
...not to mention some extreme SCOTUS sophist malfuckery.
I have mod points, but you're already at +5. The rhetoric is at its finest when the word "malfuckery" gets used. And I mean that sincerely. Bravo.
This is, of course, absurd, but it's little more absurd than anything else said about her. There's no particular evidence that she's a "corrupt, serially lying manipulator" other than the intensive media campaign saying so being put forth by the Republican machine.
She did marry Bill. I'm just sayin'...
Correct. But proper science also doesn't censor bad propaganda films.
Incorrect. Bad propaganda films that lead to behavior that is at best contributory negligence and at worst involuntary manslaughter definitely should be censored, with the scientific evidence that proves that the behavior is negligence or manslaughter.
Censorship is not universally bad. It is entirely reasonable for a society to decide as a whole that something is so terrible that it needs to be suppressed. Flat Earthers are mocked and derided and no one anywhere thinks they deserve to present their case in an hour and a half long video at a major film festival, despite the fact their delusions don't tend to kill anybody. That general opinion is censorship in action. It's such an all-pervasive and well-accepted censorship that you may not actually think of it as such, but it is. Antivaxxers deserve all that censorship and more because their delusions do maim and kill people.
I will revise my initial statement a little. Not all forms of censorship are universally bad. Antivaxxers don't deserve to be maimed or killed for their delusions, despite the fact that their delusions are maiming and killing other people. However they should not be given a bully pulpit, they should not be given worldwide publicity, they should not be given the slightest shred of avoidable exposure, and they should not be tolerated in polite company, precisely because their delusions are so dangerous.
In this case, it will pop up a message that says "No comment history available" because it hasn't been modded at all (at least not at the time that I'm posting this comment).
Is that true? It wasn't more than a few weeks ago that clicking on the score got you a table of the score modifiers, even when a post had not been moderated. It showed the base score (+1 for logged in users), and the +1 Karma Bonus (if applicable) on a second line. "No comment history available" looks like a recently introduced bug, to me. What does history have to do with anything?
Given that its been quite a while since someone landed anything on the moon. It would be a victory for space exploration if someone sent up a robot and dug a hole.
It would be, but the next robots on the moon won't be digging holes. Just rolling around. (Unless one of the teams gets really ambitious while trying to win the bonus $4 million available for discovering water.) The prize availability terminates at the end of next year, so the teams competing had better hurry up.
There is already a new standard for physical ethernet cabling, calling RJ.5 (that is, ar-jay-point-five)
"RJ point five is a trademark of TE Connectivity used here under license."
Nope. Not a standard. A wannabe "standard" that hasn't replaced anything at all. It's just a money-grab, as these things always devolve into these days.
When will people learn, corporate greed does not breed standards?
One thing that I've been seeing a lot in recent years is the same IT job adverts for positions at Abbott showing up every few months and keep showing in cycles, generally every 6-months. (And by "same" I mean identical wording not just some generic sysadmin or developer spot.)
That's an attempt at legal ass-covering, recommended by lawyers. They're fake job listings, designed to "prove" that no local employees are available, to meet the H1B terms. They have no intention of actually hiring anyone who responds to those ads. As long as IT workers displaced by H1Bs continue to just shrug and take another job, the efficacy of the attempted ass-cover won't be tested in court.
Scantily clad? Bare arms and bare midriff counts as scantily clad these days? (And not even very much midriff.) They're completely covered from a (very high) waist to their toes, otherwise. Not even close to as scanty as many many professional dancers at clubs all over the country. Not strip clubs, either. Plain old night club girls wear less than that.
Kids these days...
Damn those Chinese capacitors! Damn you to hell!
I expect that only a hand full of big fast food chains will build a bot, and that the local restaurants with real food keep on working as usual: open doors or reservation by phone.
Except in the Bay area, where every shithole and roach coach will have one, each more intrusive than the last.
Now let's imagine : let two AlphaGo machines play each other Go games. More games. More time allowed... Folks : it becomes IMO so abysmal. Where will it stops ? I literally shiver in awe.
Then this will blow your mind. This has already happened. AlphaGo trained against itself as a matter of course. In consequence, it has already played more games than any human alive ever could. Think about that for a while.
No no, you're thinking is all wrong. In 10 years, we'll pitting our phones together on the same table and have them play it out while placing winning bets . It's sorta like putting two Furbies in front of each other; useless, but endless fun :)
In 10 years, if you put two Furbies in front of each other, they'll spend a few minutes evolving a common private language, then agree to cooperate to kill you in your sleep.
Elon Musk and Steven Hawking agree with me, so I know I'm right.
... you do realize actual people fail this test? There's no faster way to get banned from a counterstrike server than to be better than everyone. They will immediately accuse you of aimbotting.
What does that have to do with the price of fish? At CounterStrike's age, it should have had an automated ELO server implemented years ago, with all instance servers connected to it and enforcing an ELO range for joining players. Either a range selected and hardcoded by the owner of the server or a dynamic range assigned by the server based on the ranks of joining players. The client would need to be able to display and filter by ELO range, including an automated match feature.
Tie the rank to a Steam account and the majority of the possible exploits could be contained. CounterStrike might enjoy a renaissance if such a system were implemented. People like a game with a high probability of fun.
That part about everyone having a Swiss bank account sounds wonderful to me. I think every person deserves a little tax haven of their own. (IIRC Switzerland is no longer useful as a tax haven, but that's besides the point.)
Of course the plebes can't be allowed to have a Swiss bank account of their very own. Only the elites are allowed to have that.
You recall slightly incorrectly. The Swiss banks gave up the names associated with some numbered accounts. Basically all accounts created after a certain date. If your account was older than that (old money), they didn't give it up. They gave up Bill Gates and Larry Page, but the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers still have their privacy.
The fanboy with stars in his eyes is completely ignoring the fact that Intel has shown first 3D XPoint products that are just twice as fast as flash-based SSDs. The 1000x density and speed factors he's slobbering over are projected ceilings, which will take years to achieve in actual hardware.
SJW
DRINK!
Are you trying to kill off the Slashdot readership? That drinking game is a one way trip to alcohol poisoning.