Radiation damage to DNA can sometimes be repaired - but its not always repairable. There are a lot of factors, but ultimately if the damage is not repairable, the damage will often escalate into some form of cancer.
Radiation around Chernobyl still damages DNA & causes cancer in all mammals - not just humans.
Animals thrive in Chernobyl because there aren't any humans there. They are still having their DNA damaged by ionizing radiation though - which will give them cancer if they live long enough.
Wild animals rarely get cancer simply because they don't live long enough. Other things kill them before they're old enough for cancer to be a concern for them; predators, disease, accidents etc.
Those issues are being solved - and the solutions are being tested and proven right now. We live in a very exciting time. Here are some examples;
- Bitcoin's lightning network is hoping to move the bulk of day-to-day transactions off of the blockchain with only final settlement happening on-chain
- Bitcoin cash has opted to use larger blocks so more transactions can be mined into a block at a time
- IOTA & Nano's DAG offers better sharding & scalability than a traditional single blockchain
- Pre-mined coins, like Ripple, can remove the need to spend CPU cycles creating new coins if they can solve (or ignore) decentralisation via other means
- Coins like Ethereum are looking to move away from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake for a bunch of reasons, including better scalability & throughput
There are loads of cryptocurrencies that use blockchain or some derivative of it to achieve safe transactions with immutable history - which is the key use case for cryptographically secure chains of data.
Many of the buzzword-bandwagoners who haphazardly throw words like 'blockchain' into their earnings calls often miss the point of what a blockchain is good for and often just think blockchains can solve everything.
You're missing the point. Using large amounts of energy cycling through calculations is a side-effect, not the purpose. The purpose is using proof of work as the core mechanism to bitcoin's decentralised trust model.
There are other mechanisms that could be used like proof of stake or even proof of importance - but those trade different pros and cons and aren't as proven as PoW at this point.
Using large amounts of energy isn't the problem. Using large amounts of fossil-fuel energy is. Many miners are setting up camp in Iceland where they can take advantage of geothermal energy and environmental cooling.
The solution here isn't "Use less energy because I didn't understand why you need to use so much". It's "use energy more responsibly".
'wasted energy' implies there is no benefit or use in bitcoin mining.
Different people have different ideas of what is beneficial or useful - needless to say, many people clearly find mining bitcoin beneficial and useful otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. As a get-rich-quick scheme or for ideological views of currency and traditional banking - either way, people are doing it for a reason.
But those tunnels shouldn't be the benchmark. They're small because they're old. Their small diameter prevents the tube getting higher-capacity double-decker trains (a la, Paris' RER). London's newest tunnels (crossrail) are using RER sizes nearer 20'.
I haven't done much research, but a quick google finds this article that says the current average fee is about 1 satoshi per hop (fractions of a cent) and "the costs of spinning up a node and routing payments via the lightning network are not that high".
Presumably those running nodes that take 1 satoshi aren't doing so at a loss - so I think banks would really struggle to undercut the super-cheap nodes. Maybe a bank can run at a loss for longer than everyone else - but after the banks have killed competition and hike up their fees - the competition will come right on back.
There is nothing stopping some big banks from essentially taking over lighting and making settlement feeds just about equivalent to CC rates now
Big banks are free to participant in the lightning network just as much as everyone else is. That is, free as in speech - not as in beer.
Big banks (or you and I) are also free to set whatever settlement fees they want. That is also still free as in speech.
But let me tell you why that won't be bad for consumers...
Big bank charges $1000 to settle a fee? I can undercut them at $900. Someone else undercuts me. Someone undercuts them etc. It's a race to $0 fees and is good for consumers.
Unlike the traditional banking model - the banks won't have exclusive control to set fees. Instead, they would have fair competition with anyone and everyone.
The only way that would change is if, someone up-ended lightning network and made it less free-as-in-speech. Eg, government regulation saying that only registered financial entities confirming to KYC/AML etc may use it. They'd have a hard time enforcing that, but they could just plain outlaw free competition and that is how you hurt consumers.
It's a gamble. However, from what I've read; this drop isn't a result of fatal or bad news. Nobody has outlawed cryptocurrencies - nobody has broken their technical implementations. Nothing particularly exciting has happened recently in cryptocurrency news.
So, given that nothing happened to kill cryptocurrencies - I'd say the price will rebound. I could only speculate what the timeframe for that might be though - it could be days, months, weeks or years. It may also go down more before it goes up.
My personal gamble is; the price will probably go down a bit more, but by the end of the year, it will probably be up more than a traditional bank's savings account will be.
If you're looking to make a quick buck...it's very high risk. If you're looking to make a buck in the longer term, it's still high risk - but less so.
I'm not sure if it varies by country, but here at least, the uber app lets you tip. And the uber driver cannot see how much you tip until after they rate you.
That's fair enough, charge people who vomit more. But as someone who has gotten many ubers drunk, has never thrown up in or near an uber and generally doesn't cause a fuss...I don't want to be tarred with the same "all drunk people need to be charged more" brush.
Maybe they should have some sort of star rating. Like, if you're an asshole, or you throw up in ubers, the driver could rate you badly. Then later uber drivers can charge more to pick up someone with a low rating. That way, good-passengers don't get penalised because of the idiotic minority - and the driver has an indication whether a potential passenger is likely to cause them problems.
...maybe that already exists...and this story is either; a lazy PR stunt (this doesn't need AI, but AI gets press), or a genuine greedy attempt at ripping more cash from their customer's hands.
The issue here is people trusting someone else (the exchange) with their money (bitcoin). This isn't an inherent issue with bitcoin itself.
Fiat banks, for example, are essentially people trusting someone else (the bank) with their money. That would be just as stupid as the bitcoin exchange situation except; banks have insurance and government-backed assurances that mean if they screw up, customers don't lose their money.
The downside to the fiat model is; I have to use a bank because I cannot keep $350m of my own money safe without one. Keeping that much cash safe would be a horrible task that is prone to many risks. So my only real option is to use a bank to look after that money for me, and pay for the bank's insurance so my money is protected. Note that the insurance payment might be via your taxes (see government bailouts), account fees or whatever other mechanism the banks use to generate profit from you.
Bitcoin's different because I can keep 350m bitcoin safe myself. It's just a private key. The effort to keep 1 bitcoin safe is identical to the effort to keep 350m bitcoin safe. I don't need to pay to insure someone else anymore - I'm in total control of my own funds.
So given that bitcoin enables people to keep their own money safe without having to trust anyone else - why do people keep leaving their money on exchanges?
Answer 1: Because they're idiots. Or,
Answer 2: Because each individual only left a small amount of money on the exchange. Exchanges are the best way to get bitcoin right now - so, even in a transient capacity - people's bitcoins will be on the exchange and outside of their own control for a period of time. If people are smart, the quantity of bitcoin left on the exchange at any point in time will be balanced with the impact of losing it. Ie - transiting a small amount that you're not afraid to lose is fine.
I hope the majority of the lost $350m were from people who subscribe to answer #2 and no individual lost any money that means anything to them. Unfortunately, I suspect, there are a lot of misinformed/idiots who perhaps lost a significant amount of their own money through nothing but ignorance.
tl;dr
The lesson to be learnt here (and from every other exchange 'hack') is;
Don't give an unregulated and uninsured company a significant amount of your money to hold on to.
This isn't really a mess for Intel. This hack isn't for the faint hearted. Even the most seasoned PC-builders will not want to attempt to do this. They're not going to see their motherboard/chipset sales plummet because now all their customers are keeping their old motherboards.
I think a couple of things will happen at Intel in the wake of this;
The engineers at intel are probably just saying "huh, neat" or "I told you so"
The lawyers will be checking they're not liable for a 'planned obsolescence' kind of issue by forcing people upgrade to newer chipsets (hint, they're not, just because it can work with an old chipset on a specific ASRock board doesn't mean it works properly)
Current civilisation crumbles and by the time the roadster crashes down to earth, civilisation has rebuilt itself to the point of 1940s technology.
The car comes crashing down in a place coincidentally named Roswell, and top scientists harvest this strange extraterrestrial technology for the wonders of ICs, microcontrollers & Li-ion batteries.
Obviously the government don't want to cause panic that some alien craft crashed from space, so they subtly release technology based on this 'Tesla' civilisation's tech and take credit of these wonderful inventions themselves.
I downloaded and install it too to see what the fuss is all about and I agree with everything you said.
Additionally, I will add that plexamp bears no resemblance to winamp. winamp's strengths were;
- Simple to use. Plexamp requires sign-in to a plex server, the volume cannot be controlled independently of the system (so good luck balancing music while playing a video game), there doesn't seem to be a way to manage playlists, browsing the library has been replaced with a search
- Small footprint. Plexamp is using 121.8MB of RAM on my Mac and that seems to be creeping up, around 16% CPU & it's 'energy impact' is around 21 (whatever that means). I don't know if that's good or bad in relation to winamp - but it is in addition to the plex server I've got running on my network - so I wouldn't say the overall plex ecosystem has a small footprint at all.
- Plays everything. In fairness, plex has always been ok with every format in my library - so maybe they nailed this one
Summary: It's ok but really nothing special and I feel like if you're paying homage to something like winamp, you need to do a very good job. It's like when you see someone redoing Led Zep - they have to do a really good job to be 'allowed' to do that.
I saw one yesterday that was where 2 roads merge before splitting again and everyone does the lane dance in the shared section of road. The speed limit was 20, which is frankly too slow for the size of the road & they put a speed camera right at the point the lanes merge. So while you're paying attention to all the crazy lane swapping happening around you, you also need to fix your eyes on your speedo to make sure you don't accidentally creep over an unnaturally slow speed limit at the same time.
It's already known that amazon have dynamic pricing - it's not a stretch to assume that mechanism could be used for shady reasons.
At risk of sounding like a cheesy advertisement: That's why I use camel camel camel!
For those who don't know; it tells you the price history of any product on amazon - so you can see if they've hiked the prices before putting it on sale or just in general if the price is lower or higher than normal.
So much this. I came here to post the same comment
I was recently involved in a project that did not use AI, despite other similar projects by other companies using AI. Anyway, it was all very exciting, and innovative and the company roped in its press contacts to shout our new product from the rooftops and we, the project team & the company, were VERY clear with the press when we were asked about our use of AI. We explicitly said "This system doesn't use any form of AI". Many times. I seriously cannot emphasise enough how much we told them we didn't use AI because we did not want them to be spreading misinformation about our product and the first assumption for our system was "it must be using AI".
So, next morning the papers & websites etc were all filled with "$company launches exciting new project that uses AI" with "related" articles that attempt to go into some depth about AI in general and whether skynet's going to kill us all.
Journalism isn't just inaccurate or misinformed. It is outright deception to increase readership numbers. Journalism is literal fiction. I'm sure some places are worse than others - but it is very difficult to gauge.
I read recently about a psychological effect - which I suspect it's one of those eponymous laws - whereby if you read an article in the newspaper about an area you are highly knowledgeable - you laugh at the inaccuracies of the article. You then turn the page and read something that you are not an expert in and accept it as fact.
For some reason of human nature, despite most people having personal experience of reading something in the paper that they know is untrue, people will generally forgive those inaccuracies and assume they're rare occurrences. My recent experience with the press and our not-AI project has made me much more sceptical of anything I read.
If the alternative is relying on flash or silverlight or some arbitrary other player to watch video - then yes, EMEA does offer a better user experience.
This isn't a question of whether DRM is good or bad - it's a question of, we're already stuck with DRM so can we make it a bit less painful by providing native browser support.
I've only really just started learning about stocks & that whole side of things I'd previously not paid attention to - so I'm likely off the mark and would welcome any pointers.
My understanding is that P/E ratio is a key measure of how successful a business is at making more money than it's spending. Twitter does not have a P/E because it's negative (ie, they're losing money). And they've been that way for a very long time (I think, actually, forever).
So, the only way anyone ever made money out of twitter was doing stock-market trickery of buying a bag of crap stock, convincing (ie, sales, lies, hype, whatever you want to call it) someone it's worth more than you paid for it and selling it to them.
That entire mechanism of making money is separate from the actual business of twitter. It's got nothing to do with tweets or users, or ads. Twitter's actual business makes no money.
Now, that someone might get lucky and twitter might actually start selling more ads and making some money; Facebook, for example, IIRC, had a long period of losing money but turned it around. But whether FB can keep that momentum remains to be seen; their P/E has been slowly declining over last few years.
Slashdot Mirror
Radiation damage to DNA can sometimes be repaired - but its not always repairable. There are a lot of factors, but ultimately if the damage is not repairable, the damage will often escalate into some form of cancer.
Radiation around Chernobyl still damages DNA & causes cancer in all mammals - not just humans.
Animals thrive in Chernobyl because there aren't any humans there. They are still having their DNA damaged by ionizing radiation though - which will give them cancer if they live long enough.
Wild animals rarely get cancer simply because they don't live long enough. Other things kill them before they're old enough for cancer to be a concern for them; predators, disease, accidents etc.
Those issues are being solved - and the solutions are being tested and proven right now. We live in a very exciting time. Here are some examples;
- Bitcoin's lightning network is hoping to move the bulk of day-to-day transactions off of the blockchain with only final settlement happening on-chain
- Bitcoin cash has opted to use larger blocks so more transactions can be mined into a block at a time
- IOTA & Nano's DAG offers better sharding & scalability than a traditional single blockchain
- Pre-mined coins, like Ripple, can remove the need to spend CPU cycles creating new coins if they can solve (or ignore) decentralisation via other means
- Coins like Ethereum are looking to move away from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake for a bunch of reasons, including better scalability & throughput
There are loads of cryptocurrencies that use blockchain or some derivative of it to achieve safe transactions with immutable history - which is the key use case for cryptographically secure chains of data.
Many of the buzzword-bandwagoners who haphazardly throw words like 'blockchain' into their earnings calls often miss the point of what a blockchain is good for and often just think blockchains can solve everything.
You're missing the point. Using large amounts of energy cycling through calculations is a side-effect, not the purpose. The purpose is using proof of work as the core mechanism to bitcoin's decentralised trust model.
There are other mechanisms that could be used like proof of stake or even proof of importance - but those trade different pros and cons and aren't as proven as PoW at this point.
Using large amounts of energy isn't the problem. Using large amounts of fossil-fuel energy is. Many miners are setting up camp in Iceland where they can take advantage of geothermal energy and environmental cooling.
The solution here isn't "Use less energy because I didn't understand why you need to use so much". It's "use energy more responsibly".
Nothing wrong with facts. Nothing wrong with opinions. But opinions presented as facts is another thing entirely.
'wasted energy' implies there is no benefit or use in bitcoin mining.
Different people have different ideas of what is beneficial or useful - needless to say, many people clearly find mining bitcoin beneficial and useful otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. As a get-rich-quick scheme or for ideological views of currency and traditional banking - either way, people are doing it for a reason.
So who are you to say they are wasting energy?
Some london underground lines are 11'8
But those tunnels shouldn't be the benchmark. They're small because they're old. Their small diameter prevents the tube getting higher-capacity double-decker trains (a la, Paris' RER). London's newest tunnels (crossrail) are using RER sizes nearer 20'.
> accidentally created the strongest controllable magnetic field
Was it accidental or controllable? I feel like you can't have it both ways
I haven't done much research, but a quick google finds this article that says the current average fee is about 1 satoshi per hop (fractions of a cent) and "the costs of spinning up a node and routing payments via the lightning network are not that high".
Presumably those running nodes that take 1 satoshi aren't doing so at a loss - so I think banks would really struggle to undercut the super-cheap nodes. Maybe a bank can run at a loss for longer than everyone else - but after the banks have killed competition and hike up their fees - the competition will come right on back.
There is nothing stopping some big banks from essentially taking over lighting and making settlement feeds just about equivalent to CC rates now
Big banks are free to participant in the lightning network just as much as everyone else is. That is, free as in speech - not as in beer.
Big banks (or you and I) are also free to set whatever settlement fees they want. That is also still free as in speech.
But let me tell you why that won't be bad for consumers...
Big bank charges $1000 to settle a fee? I can undercut them at $900. Someone else undercuts me. Someone undercuts them etc. It's a race to $0 fees and is good for consumers.
Unlike the traditional banking model - the banks won't have exclusive control to set fees. Instead, they would have fair competition with anyone and everyone.
The only way that would change is if, someone up-ended lightning network and made it less free-as-in-speech. Eg, government regulation saying that only registered financial entities confirming to KYC/AML etc may use it. They'd have a hard time enforcing that, but they could just plain outlaw free competition and that is how you hurt consumers.
It's a gamble. However, from what I've read; this drop isn't a result of fatal or bad news. Nobody has outlawed cryptocurrencies - nobody has broken their technical implementations. Nothing particularly exciting has happened recently in cryptocurrency news.
So, given that nothing happened to kill cryptocurrencies - I'd say the price will rebound. I could only speculate what the timeframe for that might be though - it could be days, months, weeks or years. It may also go down more before it goes up.
My personal gamble is; the price will probably go down a bit more, but by the end of the year, it will probably be up more than a traditional bank's savings account will be.
If you're looking to make a quick buck...it's very high risk. If you're looking to make a buck in the longer term, it's still high risk - but less so.
I'm not sure if it varies by country, but here at least, the uber app lets you tip. And the uber driver cannot see how much you tip until after they rate you.
That's fair enough, charge people who vomit more. But as someone who has gotten many ubers drunk, has never thrown up in or near an uber and generally doesn't cause a fuss...I don't want to be tarred with the same "all drunk people need to be charged more" brush.
...maybe that already exists...and this story is either; a lazy PR stunt (this doesn't need AI, but AI gets press), or a genuine greedy attempt at ripping more cash from their customer's hands.
Maybe they should have some sort of star rating. Like, if you're an asshole, or you throw up in ubers, the driver could rate you badly. Then later uber drivers can charge more to pick up someone with a low rating. That way, good-passengers don't get penalised because of the idiotic minority - and the driver has an indication whether a potential passenger is likely to cause them problems.
The issue here is people trusting someone else (the exchange) with their money (bitcoin). This isn't an inherent issue with bitcoin itself.
Fiat banks, for example, are essentially people trusting someone else (the bank) with their money. That would be just as stupid as the bitcoin exchange situation except; banks have insurance and government-backed assurances that mean if they screw up, customers don't lose their money.
The downside to the fiat model is; I have to use a bank because I cannot keep $350m of my own money safe without one. Keeping that much cash safe would be a horrible task that is prone to many risks. So my only real option is to use a bank to look after that money for me, and pay for the bank's insurance so my money is protected. Note that the insurance payment might be via your taxes (see government bailouts), account fees or whatever other mechanism the banks use to generate profit from you.
Bitcoin's different because I can keep 350m bitcoin safe myself. It's just a private key. The effort to keep 1 bitcoin safe is identical to the effort to keep 350m bitcoin safe. I don't need to pay to insure someone else anymore - I'm in total control of my own funds.
So given that bitcoin enables people to keep their own money safe without having to trust anyone else - why do people keep leaving their money on exchanges?
Answer 1: Because they're idiots. Or,
Answer 2: Because each individual only left a small amount of money on the exchange. Exchanges are the best way to get bitcoin right now - so, even in a transient capacity - people's bitcoins will be on the exchange and outside of their own control for a period of time. If people are smart, the quantity of bitcoin left on the exchange at any point in time will be balanced with the impact of losing it. Ie - transiting a small amount that you're not afraid to lose is fine.
I hope the majority of the lost $350m were from people who subscribe to answer #2 and no individual lost any money that means anything to them. Unfortunately, I suspect, there are a lot of misinformed/idiots who perhaps lost a significant amount of their own money through nothing but ignorance.
tl;dr
The lesson to be learnt here (and from every other exchange 'hack') is;
Don't give an unregulated and uninsured company a significant amount of your money to hold on to.
This isn't really a mess for Intel. This hack isn't for the faint hearted. Even the most seasoned PC-builders will not want to attempt to do this. They're not going to see their motherboard/chipset sales plummet because now all their customers are keeping their old motherboards.
I think a couple of things will happen at Intel in the wake of this;
The engineers at intel are probably just saying "huh, neat" or "I told you so"
The lawyers will be checking they're not liable for a 'planned obsolescence' kind of issue by forcing people upgrade to newer chipsets (hint, they're not, just because it can work with an old chipset on a specific ASRock board doesn't mean it works properly)
Current civilisation crumbles and by the time the roadster crashes down to earth, civilisation has rebuilt itself to the point of 1940s technology.
...maybe this has happened before...
The car comes crashing down in a place coincidentally named Roswell, and top scientists harvest this strange extraterrestrial technology for the wonders of ICs, microcontrollers & Li-ion batteries.
Obviously the government don't want to cause panic that some alien craft crashed from space, so they subtly release technology based on this 'Tesla' civilisation's tech and take credit of these wonderful inventions themselves.
I downloaded and install it too to see what the fuss is all about and I agree with everything you said.
Additionally, I will add that plexamp bears no resemblance to winamp. winamp's strengths were;
- Simple to use. Plexamp requires sign-in to a plex server, the volume cannot be controlled independently of the system (so good luck balancing music while playing a video game), there doesn't seem to be a way to manage playlists, browsing the library has been replaced with a search
- Small footprint. Plexamp is using 121.8MB of RAM on my Mac and that seems to be creeping up, around 16% CPU & it's 'energy impact' is around 21 (whatever that means). I don't know if that's good or bad in relation to winamp - but it is in addition to the plex server I've got running on my network - so I wouldn't say the overall plex ecosystem has a small footprint at all.
- Plays everything. In fairness, plex has always been ok with every format in my library - so maybe they nailed this one
Summary: It's ok but really nothing special and I feel like if you're paying homage to something like winamp, you need to do a very good job. It's like when you see someone redoing Led Zep - they have to do a really good job to be 'allowed' to do that.
What is with the random currency acronyms in this story (and your comment) - are these Americanisms?
£ or GBP are far more commonplace than BP or UKP - I'd never heard of BP or UKP in the context of British currency until today.
The same thing that happens if you currently hit speed bumps at 49.7mph - you'd trash your car and only have yourself to blame.
This, coupled with speed cameras in harsh places.
I saw one yesterday that was where 2 roads merge before splitting again and everyone does the lane dance in the shared section of road. The speed limit was 20, which is frankly too slow for the size of the road & they put a speed camera right at the point the lanes merge. So while you're paying attention to all the crazy lane swapping happening around you, you also need to fix your eyes on your speedo to make sure you don't accidentally creep over an unnaturally slow speed limit at the same time.
Incidentally, irssi can be used to connect to a whole bunch of non-IRC networks too. Including Slack and Gitter.
It's already known that amazon have dynamic pricing - it's not a stretch to assume that mechanism could be used for shady reasons.
At risk of sounding like a cheesy advertisement: That's why I use camel camel camel!
For those who don't know; it tells you the price history of any product on amazon - so you can see if they've hiked the prices before putting it on sale or just in general if the price is lower or higher than normal.
So much this. I came here to post the same comment
I was recently involved in a project that did not use AI, despite other similar projects by other companies using AI. Anyway, it was all very exciting, and innovative and the company roped in its press contacts to shout our new product from the rooftops and we, the project team & the company, were VERY clear with the press when we were asked about our use of AI. We explicitly said "This system doesn't use any form of AI". Many times. I seriously cannot emphasise enough how much we told them we didn't use AI because we did not want them to be spreading misinformation about our product and the first assumption for our system was "it must be using AI".
So, next morning the papers & websites etc were all filled with "$company launches exciting new project that uses AI" with "related" articles that attempt to go into some depth about AI in general and whether skynet's going to kill us all.
Journalism isn't just inaccurate or misinformed. It is outright deception to increase readership numbers. Journalism is literal fiction. I'm sure some places are worse than others - but it is very difficult to gauge.
I read recently about a psychological effect - which I suspect it's one of those eponymous laws - whereby if you read an article in the newspaper about an area you are highly knowledgeable - you laugh at the inaccuracies of the article. You then turn the page and read something that you are not an expert in and accept it as fact.
For some reason of human nature, despite most people having personal experience of reading something in the paper that they know is untrue, people will generally forgive those inaccuracies and assume they're rare occurrences. My recent experience with the press and our not-AI project has made me much more sceptical of anything I read.
If the alternative is relying on flash or silverlight or some arbitrary other player to watch video - then yes, EMEA does offer a better user experience.
This isn't a question of whether DRM is good or bad - it's a question of, we're already stuck with DRM so can we make it a bit less painful by providing native browser support.
I don't recall this ever being a thing here in the UK. Not sure if it wasn't possible here or if it just didn't catch on.
I've only really just started learning about stocks & that whole side of things I'd previously not paid attention to - so I'm likely off the mark and would welcome any pointers.
My understanding is that P/E ratio is a key measure of how successful a business is at making more money than it's spending. Twitter does not have a P/E because it's negative (ie, they're losing money). And they've been that way for a very long time (I think, actually, forever).
So, the only way anyone ever made money out of twitter was doing stock-market trickery of buying a bag of crap stock, convincing (ie, sales, lies, hype, whatever you want to call it) someone it's worth more than you paid for it and selling it to them.
That entire mechanism of making money is separate from the actual business of twitter. It's got nothing to do with tweets or users, or ads. Twitter's actual business makes no money.
Now, that someone might get lucky and twitter might actually start selling more ads and making some money; Facebook, for example, IIRC, had a long period of losing money but turned it around. But whether FB can keep that momentum remains to be seen; their P/E has been slowly declining over last few years.