If I had stock in AOL, I'd be making the call to sell it all. Now. The reason is as old as humanity itself: True genius doesn't run around telling everyone "I'm a genius!" anymore than true sanity runs around saying "I'm the sanest one here!" If you're pointing out your virtues to others, you have none to speak of.
Or, to quote the Tao Te Ching, "The best leaders go unnoticed by the people. The next best are loved and praised by the people. Then there are those who are feared by the people. Lastly there are those who are despised."
Guess which one this guy is? He's a shit leader, to enamored with his own self-importance to be useful to an investor. Sell. Sell. Sell now. Sell.
The 802.11 protocol does not require cell phones to broadcast their MAC addresses. Phones do it so that they can discover nearby networks faster, but it is completely optional.
Except, of course, that it does. In order to associate to an access point, you have to send your MAC address. It's sortof how packet-switched networks operate: It needs a source and destination. What you're talking about is a Probe request, a special type of packet when a station needs to obtain information from another station. This other station is typically an AP, but not necessarily.
Any connection made over wifi needs to broadcast a probe frame, and these are by definition unencrypted. Any station on the same channel can see them. Thus the only way to prevent broadcasting your MAC address is to disable wifi entirely. It is in no way "optional" for connecting to another wifi network, and many cell phone users want this functionality because auto-connecting to unsecured wifi allows for data transmission without incurring fees from their provider. The iPhone, for example, can receive OTA updates via open wifi, as can Android.
They aren't doing it solely to "discover nearby networks faster"; It actually saves the user money.
If you're carrying a cell phone around, you might as well surrender any idea that your movements are not being tracked by 3rd parties without your knowledge or consent. Retailers like Target are installing ANPR systems in surveillance cameras, their wifi routers are already watching for probe attempts from cell phones as a way of monitoring where you are in the store (how long did you spend in the women's section? Where on the floor did you stop to look at advertising?) and modules are also installed to track cell phone transmissions and ESNs to uniquely identify customers at checkout (you use a credit card, and now your ESN is linked to your name)...
Trash cans are watching you. Buses are equipped with similar sensors. If you are carrying a cell phone, someone, somewhere, knows exactly where you are and is going to sell this information. You are not carrying a cell phone these days: You're carrying a tracking beacon with two-way communication capability.
Even UEFI can be turned off on nearly every motherboard out there, my mobo from my new build early this year has UEFI and I could turn it off if I want. Right there in the menu selections. Though most good consumer boards also support TPM as an option.
This is only half-true. I have disabled UEFI boot on my ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3, but when attaching a USB mass storage device, there is still a substantial delay if it is a mechanical drive while it searches for bootable partitions. This behavior shouldn't happen if UEFI is truly disabled -- and this behavior is unique to UEFI motherboards. If boot from USB is disabled on pre-UEFI motherboards, this does not happen.
As well, I cannot prevent UEFI firmware from being loaded from devices; I can only set a preference to use "legacy" firmware. However, if such "legacy" firmware isn't found, it will still load via UEFI. It will also boot from UEFI if there are not any non-UEFI boot options available; I tested this by plugging in a flash drive which was UEFI boot-compliant and physically disconnected all other devices. It booted, even though it was disabled in the BIOS.
As well, the TPM module in most motherboards cannot be disabled. You have the option of not using it; However, its functionality can be accessed at any time. This includes, amongst other things, key storage and access to a unique identifier. This functionality can be "disabled" by the OS, which under Windows means it will not use the TPM, but user-space applications can still execute TPM operations, including (for example) ActiveX controls embedded into web pages and video games.
The only way to disable the TPM is to physically remove it from the motherboard, however in current models this is typically integrated directly into the BIOS chip, thus it may not be possible to disable it without destroying the motherboard.
The only question is whether or not we exploit these resources or we let them evaporate into the atmosphere.
Or we could switch to nuclear power, and then pump the methane to the bottom of the ocean, where it will be compressed into liquid form, should it ever be determined this is a problem. And rising ocean levels aren't a big concern to me... if you look at where most of the assholes and rich people of the world are, you'll quickly agree: Coastal cities being wiped out would be a good thing.:D
Um... yes actually. Van Gogh actually only sold one painting in his entire life, and he considered himself somewhat of a failure as a painter. He did not become famous until after his death.
He considered himself a failure commercially... Because he was. He never stopped painting. That's fairly compelling evidence he knew he didn't suck... and that it was the world that was wrong, not him.
Just because you're bad at business doesn't mean you're bad at what you do. I know, I know... it's hard for people these days to understand that, but 'tis true.
We creative people are the good ones...those others...gosh, they're capable of violence.
I don't see how the two are mutually exclusive. Oh, the creative ways I murder people in my fantasies!
After all, what kind of creative would call himself fearful of people who can't create so much as a scrapbook unless they're following an example from youtube posted by...a creative.
Depends. Are they armed with just a scrapbook and a laptop, or something more substantial?
The fact is, there are way too many non-creatives and they are screwing up the planet. Just imagine how much better the world would be if every member of the Tea Party suddenly disappeared overnight. Oh, we can dream....
A true creative doesn't want people dropping dead or disappearing... they want them doing something useful and productive so they don't have time to "screw up the planet."
The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you're doing,' explains Victor.
Yeah. I bet Vincent Van Gogh thought he was total shit at painting, didn't know anything about paint mixing, brushes, or any of that. Look, I know what you're trying to say, Victor, but what you actually said made my brain hurt.
However, exploring new things and remembering old things are two different things. You can be good at what you do and yet still have a spark of curiousity to you and want to expand what you know. These aren't mutually exclusive. To suggest people murder their own egos in order to call themselves creative is really, really, fucking stupid.
You can, in fact, take pride in what you do, and yet be humble enough to want to learn more. It happens all the time.. at least until you're promoted to management.
[snark level=99] I think it's more like an interstellar dick-measuring contest. The United States, confident of it's military supremacy over Earth, now greedily eyes Mars. Who knows... while they were looking for water, maybe they discovered oil and just haven't said anything yet. [/snark]
People in positions of power generally don't have a clue how things work... since they never, you know, work. I'm sure if we hopped in the TARDIS and went back to when the Egyptians were building the pyramids, the foreman in charge of positioning the bricks was constantly complaining about the idiot Pharaoh putting down the wrong dimensions in the foundation, and telling them to use unwoven rope because he read in Pharaoh Times (the premier Pharaoh trade stone tablet!) that it would improve efficiency. He probably also randomly decided to outsource 30% of his slaves because "leading experts" said it was universally a great idea.
*cough* People at the top not having a clue is a problem as old as humanity.
One problem though with hybrid drives is they aren't necessarily faster than intelligent software caching to SSD's or of using a hardware controller
Actually, they're considerably dumber than that. They can't talk to the operating system so the only thing they can use to make mode decisions about what to cache is frequency of use and access patterns. Anyone who's studied CPU pipelining architecture knows that you need to be content-aware to optimize your cache... otherwise you're only optimizing for the best case scenario. The average and worst-case scenarios suffer by quite a bit.
For an "average" computer user that just browses the internet and maybe plays minecraft and checks their e-mail, 'dumb' caching will be fine. For someone like me though that is routinely editing large video and graphic files, screwing around in VMs, and doing transcoding... while playing the obligatory video games waiting for it to compile, transcode, compress, or whatever... hybrid drives will yield very little benefit. The access patterns appear so random that the cache maybe only manages a 25% hit rate.
* Footnote: The average meal at mcdonald's costs around $6. The ratio is accurate: This is like going to McDonald's to order a happy meal and winding up spending more than you do on rent for it. Whups.
So, you can't think of a solution, so it must be impossible.
Yeah, the laws of physics oppress me too. Specifically, E*sqrt(K) =.5(mv^2). When you consider how much energy you lose by pumping some several hundred amps into wire the thickness of a human hair, let's just say inductive reactance is going to fuck you long and hard... to even manage to push out a paltry 130J of muzzle velocity, you're going to need to convert about a car battery's worth of energy instantly into electromotive force. Now, assuming you manage to successfully do this... the coils are going to explosively vaporize from pumping a few mega-joules into them.
You will not get "a few shots" off at the energy level a.22 puts out. You will get a shot off. One. And then your gun will be a smouldering ozone-smelling pile of metal ooze from inductive heating.
Fires at ~90 MPH. Unlikely to outrun. Also unlikely to be lethal, but c'est la vie. Just a prototype.
Paintball gun: Fires at 200 MPH. Tickles if you get hit while wearing a hoodie. Definately non-lethal, but c'est la vie. Not a prototype, over twice the speed, runs on canned air.
Result 1: Disinfection of Spacecraft Potable Water Systems... which is inside the spacecraft, not the spacecraft itself. And it's a PDF.
Result 2: Microbial Monitoring and Disinfection aboard NASA Spacecraft... sounds promising, but it's paywalled. For $17.50 though I might be able to get access to a dense academic tomb. Thanks, Google!
Result 3: Corrosion control and disinfection studies in spacecraft water systems... ah, another example of water system disinfection, not spacecraft decontamination.
In fact, the first several pages of google results are completely useless at answering the question of how do you disinfect the entire spacecraft?
*sigh* A few years ago I'd have said "you should read your links before you post them."
That's why DRM created more copyright infringements than anything else.
Not exactly. People are ditching cable TV in record numbers because it's exactly like regular TV. Originally, cable TV promised no advertisements for a small fee, and better selection. But over time, advertising crept in. Now, over 1/3rd of programming is advertising. When you include video overlays into programming content, it's closer to 50%. Piracy, on the other hand, has no advertising. It has cut away all the bullshit and serves you just what you want to see, and only that. No mandatory trailers. No unskippable advertisements. No FBI warnings. Just the content, nothing more, nothing else, nothing less.
See, pirated material is currently the only way to get HD material without advertising. Even Netflix doesn't offer true HD streaming, nor does it allow play-later downloading that is HD. There isn't a single service in the United States or almost anywhere that allows real-time, on demand programming without advertisements. Considering we've had the technology to do this since the mid-80s, that says a lot about the mentality of content providers.
There is a huge disconnect between them, and the consumers. And the consumers are increasingly finding ways to cut the middlemen out of the equation and get content directly. I'm waiting for the collapse of the distribution industry; in the future, TV shows will be bid on like kickstarter projects, and things like having the first few shows (or even season!) available for free will become commonplace, and places like Amazon and Netflix will allow you to purchase and download the complete series for only a few dollars, and episodes for pennies. And the thing is... it'll be more profitable to the producers, and cheaper for the consumers. It's a win-win scenario for everyone...
As we've discovered, life is pretty resiliant. It can survive in a vaccum, it can survive radiation, it can feed on all kinds of chemicals and environments... and every year we discover life has found a new way to exist in a previously-thought inhospitable environment. We even have self-replicating proteins (prions) that are so resistant that medical tools used on someone infected with mad cow have to be thrown away after, because they can't be adequately disinfected.
I'd be very interested in knowing how NASA plans on disinfecting its spacecraft prior to launch so it doesn't wind up detecting now, or years or centuries down the line, what we brought with us.
Even so, a sharp projectile hitting your at 23MPH still isn't something to laugh at as the grandparent attempts to do.
Grandma here. When I was your age, I used to go putzing around through farm fields stealing corn, riding motorcycles, and other acts of rural mischief... because well, it's the country, and what else are you going to do? Naturally, the farmers, who themselves have done these sorts of things, loaded up the shotgun with bird shot or salt, and blasted away at us.
Yes, I've been shot at with a shotgun. Many times. I've dug the bird shot out of my clothes. Once or twice, squeezed out a few pieces that had managed to get embedded like little splinters in my backside. But let me be the first to tell you... muzzle energy does mean something.
It means that 3% of the kick of a.22 at anything beyond point blank range is unlikely to penetrate even bare skin. A t-shirt is sufficient to keep it from doing anything more than leaving a bruise.
So yeah, it is something to laugh at because I actually know a thing or two about guns, unlike you. Anyone who tried to shoot me with this thing, assuming I wasn't able to kill them where they stood trying to pick up and aim this monstrosity at me, I would be sufficiently protected by simply wearing a thick hoodie... because that's what I wear when going to play paintball with my friends... and those hit at around 200 MPH.
So again. Ha. Ha. Ha. This gun is less dangerous than a tennis ball.
Why is this marked 0 redundant? Mods, this is clearly a reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. All such references deserve 5 funny.
That was the old slashdot. The new slashdot has been overrun by hordes of hipsters and their ipads and skinny jeans and insist they're geeky because they downloaded and installed linux on one of their old computers.. played with it for a few hours, and then called it quits.
They haven't read the classics. They don't know about THGTTG... they haven't read the LOTR books and realized that whole business about Helm's Deep never happened... they probably didn't grow up hoping to be snatched away by The Doctor, or to live with the Beast because of his enormous library... and fuck the castle.
Face it.... the slashdot you knew is dead. It's just posers now.:(
âoeGovernment's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.â -- Ronald Reagan
All of this depends on the government's ability to find the bitcoins, and then provide some kind of evidence that it was exchanged for something. If I transfer funds from my checking to savings accounts, that isn't taxed because no goods or services were exchanged.
The government can try to regulate it, but it'll be as successful as the IRS demanding people pay taxes on their purchases of marijuana. Now yes, they'll pass a law anyway, and yes they'll spend an exorbinant amount of money to prove they can enforce it and then make an example out of a few people in highly-publicized cases, but they won't change things substantially.
This will rapidly evolve into another "war on _________", with innocent people being caught in dragnets while the guilty ones rapidly develop the skills to evade it. It's like big banks -- they were too big to fail, and so they were also too big to jail. The government doesn't take down large organizations, criminal or legal... it goes after the people who are isolated. It goes after the low hanging fruit... and it hopes that scares enough people off to keep them in line.
But business will go on as well as ever... already, people using the Silk Road website within Tor have started switching over to virtual machines that do not store any persistent state information... in the next few weeks, I expect many, if not most, will be. Criminals adapt in a matter of hours or days... law enforcement adapts in a matter of months or years. It's not hard to see who has the upper hand here.
Eh, small point of reference. A coil gun and a gauss gun are two different things. A coil gun works by pulling the slug magnetically down the barrel. A gauss gun works by putting the slug on rails and running a charge across it. But neither are going to be particularly dangerous with the amount of electricity available to your average home owner. -_-
Slashdot Mirror
I hope he is treated similarly
If I had stock in AOL, I'd be making the call to sell it all. Now. The reason is as old as humanity itself: True genius doesn't run around telling everyone "I'm a genius!" anymore than true sanity runs around saying "I'm the sanest one here!" If you're pointing out your virtues to others, you have none to speak of.
Or, to quote the Tao Te Ching, "The best leaders go unnoticed by the people. The next best are loved and praised by the people. Then there are those who are feared by the people.
Lastly there are those who are despised."
Guess which one this guy is? He's a shit leader, to enamored with his own self-importance to be useful to an investor. Sell. Sell. Sell now. Sell.
"I'd buy that for a dollar".
Sure, only one problem: GPS doesn't work well indoors and sucks battery like it's going out of style.
The 802.11 protocol does not require cell phones to broadcast their MAC addresses. Phones do it so that they can discover nearby networks faster, but it is completely optional.
Except, of course, that it does. In order to associate to an access point, you have to send your MAC address. It's sortof how packet-switched networks operate: It needs a source and destination. What you're talking about is a Probe request, a special type of packet when a station needs to obtain information from another station. This other station is typically an AP, but not necessarily.
Any connection made over wifi needs to broadcast a probe frame, and these are by definition unencrypted. Any station on the same channel can see them. Thus the only way to prevent broadcasting your MAC address is to disable wifi entirely. It is in no way "optional" for connecting to another wifi network, and many cell phone users want this functionality because auto-connecting to unsecured wifi allows for data transmission without incurring fees from their provider. The iPhone, for example, can receive OTA updates via open wifi, as can Android.
They aren't doing it solely to "discover nearby networks faster"; It actually saves the user money.
If you're carrying a cell phone around, you might as well surrender any idea that your movements are not being tracked by 3rd parties without your knowledge or consent. Retailers like Target are installing ANPR systems in surveillance cameras, their wifi routers are already watching for probe attempts from cell phones as a way of monitoring where you are in the store (how long did you spend in the women's section? Where on the floor did you stop to look at advertising?) and modules are also installed to track cell phone transmissions and ESNs to uniquely identify customers at checkout (you use a credit card, and now your ESN is linked to your name)...
Trash cans are watching you. Buses are equipped with similar sensors. If you are carrying a cell phone, someone, somewhere, knows exactly where you are and is going to sell this information. You are not carrying a cell phone these days: You're carrying a tracking beacon with two-way communication capability.
Even UEFI can be turned off on nearly every motherboard out there, my mobo from my new build early this year has UEFI and I could turn it off if I want. Right there in the menu selections. Though most good consumer boards also support TPM as an option.
This is only half-true. I have disabled UEFI boot on my ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3, but when attaching a USB mass storage device, there is still a substantial delay if it is a mechanical drive while it searches for bootable partitions. This behavior shouldn't happen if UEFI is truly disabled -- and this behavior is unique to UEFI motherboards. If boot from USB is disabled on pre-UEFI motherboards, this does not happen.
As well, I cannot prevent UEFI firmware from being loaded from devices; I can only set a preference to use "legacy" firmware. However, if such "legacy" firmware isn't found, it will still load via UEFI. It will also boot from UEFI if there are not any non-UEFI boot options available; I tested this by plugging in a flash drive which was UEFI boot-compliant and physically disconnected all other devices. It booted, even though it was disabled in the BIOS.
As well, the TPM module in most motherboards cannot be disabled. You have the option of not using it; However, its functionality can be accessed at any time. This includes, amongst other things, key storage and access to a unique identifier. This functionality can be "disabled" by the OS, which under Windows means it will not use the TPM, but user-space applications can still execute TPM operations, including (for example) ActiveX controls embedded into web pages and video games.
The only way to disable the TPM is to physically remove it from the motherboard, however in current models this is typically integrated directly into the BIOS chip, thus it may not be possible to disable it without destroying the motherboard.
The only question is whether or not we exploit these resources or we let them evaporate into the atmosphere.
Or we could switch to nuclear power, and then pump the methane to the bottom of the ocean, where it will be compressed into liquid form, should it ever be determined this is a problem. And rising ocean levels aren't a big concern to me... if you look at where most of the assholes and rich people of the world are, you'll quickly agree: Coastal cities being wiped out would be a good thing. :D
Um... yes actually. Van Gogh actually only sold one painting in his entire life, and he considered himself somewhat of a failure as a painter. He did not become famous until after his death.
He considered himself a failure commercially... Because he was. He never stopped painting. That's fairly compelling evidence he knew he didn't suck... and that it was the world that was wrong, not him.
Just because you're bad at business doesn't mean you're bad at what you do. I know, I know... it's hard for people these days to understand that, but 'tis true.
We creative people are the good ones...those others...gosh, they're capable of violence.
I don't see how the two are mutually exclusive. Oh, the creative ways I murder people in my fantasies!
After all, what kind of creative would call himself fearful of people who can't create so much as a scrapbook unless they're following an example from youtube posted by...a creative.
Depends. Are they armed with just a scrapbook and a laptop, or something more substantial?
The fact is, there are way too many non-creatives and they are screwing up the planet. Just imagine how much better the world would be if every member of the Tea Party suddenly disappeared overnight. Oh, we can dream....
A true creative doesn't want people dropping dead or disappearing... they want them doing something useful and productive so they don't have time to "screw up the planet."
The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you're doing,' explains Victor.
Yeah. I bet Vincent Van Gogh thought he was total shit at painting, didn't know anything about paint mixing, brushes, or any of that. Look, I know what you're trying to say, Victor, but what you actually said made my brain hurt.
However, exploring new things and remembering old things are two different things. You can be good at what you do and yet still have a spark of curiousity to you and want to expand what you know. These aren't mutually exclusive. To suggest people murder their own egos in order to call themselves creative is really, really, fucking stupid.
You can, in fact, take pride in what you do, and yet be humble enough to want to learn more. It happens all the time.. at least until you're promoted to management.
Are we asking to be invaded?
[snark level=99]
I think it's more like an interstellar dick-measuring contest. The United States, confident of it's military supremacy over Earth, now greedily eyes Mars. Who knows... while they were looking for water, maybe they discovered oil and just haven't said anything yet.
[/snark]
People in positions of power generally don't have a clue how things work... since they never, you know, work. I'm sure if we hopped in the TARDIS and went back to when the Egyptians were building the pyramids, the foreman in charge of positioning the bricks was constantly complaining about the idiot Pharaoh putting down the wrong dimensions in the foundation, and telling them to use unwoven rope because he read in Pharaoh Times (the premier Pharaoh trade stone tablet!) that it would improve efficiency. He probably also randomly decided to outsource 30% of his slaves because "leading experts" said it was universally a great idea.
*cough* People at the top not having a clue is a problem as old as humanity.
One problem though with hybrid drives is they aren't necessarily faster than intelligent software caching to SSD's or of using a hardware controller
Actually, they're considerably dumber than that. They can't talk to the operating system so the only thing they can use to make mode decisions about what to cache is frequency of use and access patterns. Anyone who's studied CPU pipelining architecture knows that you need to be content-aware to optimize your cache... otherwise you're only optimizing for the best case scenario. The average and worst-case scenarios suffer by quite a bit.
For an "average" computer user that just browses the internet and maybe plays minecraft and checks their e-mail, 'dumb' caching will be fine. For someone like me though that is routinely editing large video and graphic files, screwing around in VMs, and doing transcoding... while playing the obligatory video games waiting for it to compile, transcode, compress, or whatever... hybrid drives will yield very little benefit. The access patterns appear so random that the cache maybe only manages a 25% hit rate.
* Footnote: The average meal at mcdonald's costs around $6. The ratio is accurate: This is like going to McDonald's to order a happy meal and winding up spending more than you do on rent for it. Whups.
So, you can't think of a solution, so it must be impossible.
Yeah, the laws of physics oppress me too. Specifically, E*sqrt(K) = .5(mv^2). When you consider how much energy you lose by pumping some several hundred amps into wire the thickness of a human hair, let's just say inductive reactance is going to fuck you long and hard... to even manage to push out a paltry 130J of muzzle velocity, you're going to need to convert about a car battery's worth of energy instantly into electromotive force. Now, assuming you manage to successfully do this... the coils are going to explosively vaporize from pumping a few mega-joules into them.
You will not get "a few shots" off at the energy level a .22 puts out. You will get a shot off. One. And then your gun will be a smouldering ozone-smelling pile of metal ooze from inductive heating.
Physics: Because fuck you.
"Hey honey, I'm going to McDonald's to grab a bite to eat, be back in 10!"
(A few hours later)
"... Umm, honey, how did you manage to spend $710 dollars at McDonalds?"
Fires at ~90 MPH. Unlikely to outrun. Also unlikely to be lethal, but c'est la vie. Just a prototype.
Paintball gun: Fires at 200 MPH. Tickles if you get hit while wearing a hoodie. Definately non-lethal, but c'est la vie. Not a prototype, over twice the speed, runs on canned air.
Threat level: Minimal.
Imagine what would have happened had the puny Earthlings' communication network rejected HAL's message due to a triggered lameness filter.
It would have looked like Daleks arguing with Cybermen
.
Google can be helpful. So can wikipedia.
(clicks link) Except when it isn't.
Result 1: Disinfection of Spacecraft Potable Water Systems... which is inside the spacecraft, not the spacecraft itself. And it's a PDF.
Result 2: Microbial Monitoring and Disinfection aboard NASA Spacecraft... sounds promising, but it's paywalled. For $17.50 though I might be able to get access to a dense academic tomb. Thanks, Google!
Result 3: Corrosion control and disinfection studies in spacecraft water systems... ah, another example of water system disinfection, not spacecraft decontamination.
In fact, the first several pages of google results are completely useless at answering the question of how do you disinfect the entire spacecraft?
*sigh* A few years ago I'd have said "you should read your links before you post them."
That's why DRM created more copyright infringements than anything else.
Not exactly. People are ditching cable TV in record numbers because it's exactly like regular TV. Originally, cable TV promised no advertisements for a small fee, and better selection. But over time, advertising crept in. Now, over 1/3rd of programming is advertising. When you include video overlays into programming content, it's closer to 50%. Piracy, on the other hand, has no advertising. It has cut away all the bullshit and serves you just what you want to see, and only that. No mandatory trailers. No unskippable advertisements. No FBI warnings. Just the content, nothing more, nothing else, nothing less.
See, pirated material is currently the only way to get HD material without advertising. Even Netflix doesn't offer true HD streaming, nor does it allow play-later downloading that is HD. There isn't a single service in the United States or almost anywhere that allows real-time, on demand programming without advertisements. Considering we've had the technology to do this since the mid-80s, that says a lot about the mentality of content providers.
There is a huge disconnect between them, and the consumers. And the consumers are increasingly finding ways to cut the middlemen out of the equation and get content directly. I'm waiting for the collapse of the distribution industry; in the future, TV shows will be bid on like kickstarter projects, and things like having the first few shows (or even season!) available for free will become commonplace, and places like Amazon and Netflix will allow you to purchase and download the complete series for only a few dollars, and episodes for pennies. And the thing is... it'll be more profitable to the producers, and cheaper for the consumers. It's a win-win scenario for everyone...
Except the middlemen.
As we've discovered, life is pretty resiliant. It can survive in a vaccum, it can survive radiation, it can feed on all kinds of chemicals and environments... and every year we discover life has found a new way to exist in a previously-thought inhospitable environment. We even have self-replicating proteins (prions) that are so resistant that medical tools used on someone infected with mad cow have to be thrown away after, because they can't be adequately disinfected.
I'd be very interested in knowing how NASA plans on disinfecting its spacecraft prior to launch so it doesn't wind up detecting now, or years or centuries down the line, what we brought with us.
Even so, a sharp projectile hitting your at 23MPH still isn't something to laugh at as the grandparent attempts to do.
Grandma here. When I was your age, I used to go putzing around through farm fields stealing corn, riding motorcycles, and other acts of rural mischief... because well, it's the country, and what else are you going to do? Naturally, the farmers, who themselves have done these sorts of things, loaded up the shotgun with bird shot or salt, and blasted away at us.
Yes, I've been shot at with a shotgun. Many times. I've dug the bird shot out of my clothes. Once or twice, squeezed out a few pieces that had managed to get embedded like little splinters in my backside. But let me be the first to tell you... muzzle energy does mean something.
It means that 3% of the kick of a .22 at anything beyond point blank range is unlikely to penetrate even bare skin. A t-shirt is sufficient to keep it from doing anything more than leaving a bruise.
So yeah, it is something to laugh at because I actually know a thing or two about guns, unlike you. Anyone who tried to shoot me with this thing, assuming I wasn't able to kill them where they stood trying to pick up and aim this monstrosity at me, I would be sufficiently protected by simply wearing a thick hoodie... because that's what I wear when going to play paintball with my friends... and those hit at around 200 MPH.
So again. Ha. Ha. Ha. This gun is less dangerous than a tennis ball.
Why is this marked 0 redundant? Mods, this is clearly a reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. All such references deserve 5 funny.
That was the old slashdot. The new slashdot has been overrun by hordes of hipsters and their ipads and skinny jeans and insist they're geeky because they downloaded and installed linux on one of their old computers.. played with it for a few hours, and then called it quits.
They haven't read the classics. They don't know about THGTTG... they haven't read the LOTR books and realized that whole business about Helm's Deep never happened... they probably didn't grow up hoping to be snatched away by The Doctor, or to live with the Beast because of his enormous library... and fuck the castle.
Face it.... the slashdot you knew is dead. It's just posers now. :(
âoeGovernment's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.â -- Ronald Reagan
All of this depends on the government's ability to find the bitcoins, and then provide some kind of evidence that it was exchanged for something. If I transfer funds from my checking to savings accounts, that isn't taxed because no goods or services were exchanged.
The government can try to regulate it, but it'll be as successful as the IRS demanding people pay taxes on their purchases of marijuana. Now yes, they'll pass a law anyway, and yes they'll spend an exorbinant amount of money to prove they can enforce it and then make an example out of a few people in highly-publicized cases, but they won't change things substantially.
This will rapidly evolve into another "war on _________", with innocent people being caught in dragnets while the guilty ones rapidly develop the skills to evade it. It's like big banks -- they were too big to fail, and so they were also too big to jail. The government doesn't take down large organizations, criminal or legal... it goes after the people who are isolated. It goes after the low hanging fruit... and it hopes that scares enough people off to keep them in line.
But business will go on as well as ever... already, people using the Silk Road website within Tor have started switching over to virtual machines that do not store any persistent state information... in the next few weeks, I expect many, if not most, will be. Criminals adapt in a matter of hours or days... law enforcement adapts in a matter of months or years. It's not hard to see who has the upper hand here.
Eh.... my bad. I haven't had my morning coffee yet... whrrrggrrrble.
Eh, small point of reference. A coil gun and a gauss gun are two different things. A coil gun works by pulling the slug magnetically down the barrel. A gauss gun works by putting the slug on rails and running a charge across it. But neither are going to be particularly dangerous with the amount of electricity available to your average home owner. -_-