That's a very strange argument you're putting forward there. You're saying that you are okay with allowing security holes in your computer because you trust one government less than another one.
Fine, but what about the fact that you are allowing known security holes to remain active on your computer? Are you really so confident that (a) the Russians will never use them to e.g. drain your bank/credit card accounts, and (b) no other parties will ever exploit them to do the same, with or without the Russians' blessing?
To me it sounds like you have allowed your political axe-grinding to override your common sense.
Ah, it's Saturday, so it's "the government never makes a mistake" today. Presumably tomorrow we'll go back to "the government can never do anything right".
But if you want to go with a "it was a secret test" conspiracy theory, consider that the government doing the secret testing may not have been the American government.
Don't they have the ability to send an "all clear" over the same channel they sent the "LOOK OUT YOU'RE ABOUT TO DIE!!!" message?
No, apparently they do not:
"[Emergency alerts] aren't like text messages, where a sender can dash off a quick 'sorry my bad' if they mistype. IPAWS notices have a specific format, which must be composed formally and in advance. Audio files for broadcast notices must be recorded or generated and uploaded. Often, this has to be done by special software on special equipment."
Lenders know about inflation, so they will increase the interest on the loan to compensate for it.
Of course they can't do that on a fixed-rate loan (at least not until end of the loan's fixed rate period if it's an ARM). They try to account for that risk by making the interest rates higher on fixed-rate loans than on variable-rate loans, of course, but they have to try to thread the needle there -- if they guess too low, they could lose money in the event of unexpected inflation, or if they guess too high, their loans won't be competitive and and they'll lose business to the competition.
TLDR; it is possible for inflation to benefit the payer of a mortgage, but only in the (hopefully rare) case where inflation spikes up significantly higher than the lender thought likely when drawing up the terms of the loan. And if that happens, people usually have other problems to worry about.
f they advertised a certain performance and their design flaw makes that performance not possible, it's legally breach of contract and/or false advertising.
Except that their traditional level of performance is still perfectly possible -- just don't install the anti-Meltdown patches, and you'll have a system that runs at full efficiency. It will be insecure against Meltdown attacks, of course, but no more insecure than it was 5, 10, or 15 years ago... and AFAIK Intel never promised anyone perfect security anyway.
The phrase "largest prime number discovered" refers to the largest prime that has been discovered. I know English is a hard language, but it's not that hard.
The problem is that the phrase is ambiguous.
It could mean:
The (largest prime number) has been discovered. -- i.e. there is a largest prime number and we just found it.
or it could mean:
The largest prime number [that we have so far] discovered [is two-to-the-whatever-minus-one].
Presumably the headline writer mean to communicate the latter, but ended up mostly communicating the former. It's true that people familiar with the properties of prime number can probably infer what the headline writer intended, but a good headline avoids ambiguity (unless it's clickbait, in which case ambiguity is considered desirable).
An alternate prediction: both sexes will continue indefinitely, but the differences between them will be significantly attenuated over time. With most of the traditionally sex-linked tasks (brute manual labor, combat, conception, carrying fetuses to term, etc) readily outsourced to machines, a person's sex will become a minor detail, similar in importance to, say, hair-color or eye-color. i.e. mostly a matter of aesthetics, and modifiable without too much difficulty or controversy, if what you were born with is not to your liking.
So, what do you suggest? Should we outlaw automation and go back to manual labor as much as possible? Or just freeze technology as it is today, on the assumption that any further developments will inevitably harm more people than they help?
If you agree that those options aren't practical, then the only alternative is to find a way for people to continue to enjoy a reasonable quality of life despite the existence of technologies that render their skills economically irrelevant. Perhaps that means Universal Basic Income, or New Deal style government-jobs programs, or better education, or some other mechanism, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure that calling people who accurately describe the problem 'myopic and heartless', doesn't help solve anything.
NN is about not allowing the ISP to sell* access to you to those providing online services.
It goes the other way too -- NN is (was?) also about preventing the ISPs from extorting money from the online services.
Comcast to Netflix: Nice video-streaming service you got there. It would be a shame if all of our customers suddenly couldn't use it anymore due to constant buffering issues, and had to switch to Comcast Video Service (TM) instead. Netflix: Please don't shut off our oxygen! Comcast: Okay, just pay us $500,000 a month and we'll allow the bits to keep flowing Netflix: Okay, but in order to cover that cost we'll have to raise Netflix subscription fees by 40% Comcast: Fine by us!
The US military budget is $597 billion a year (that's billion, with a 'b').
$22 million spent looking for UFOs means that over the program's lifetime they spent.003% of one year's budget on the program.
Now you can argue that that was money wasted, and maybe its was, but if you're going to complain about the US military wasting money, this program is way down the list. And if it actually found something (and who is to say it hasn't? oooooh), then it would have been very well worth the investment for the military to know that aliens are among us -- knowing whether your country is being surveilled or infiltrated (and by whom) is considered very important to know in defense circles.
I'm pretty sure unless someone's path to the presidency was being a telecom attorney, no president will have explicit understanding of Net Neutrality rules.
Re-read the sentence you quoted. It says "with an explicit understanding that the Net Neutrality rules...", not "an explicit understanding of the Net Neutrality rules".
You're right that Trump doesn't understand Net Neutrality, any more than he understands any other area of US policy. All Trump knows (and all he wants to know) is that if a policy was enacted under Obama, he's against it and will try to get rid of it.
The internets are a big consumer of electricity and pr0n is a big consumer of the internets. We wouldn't need so much internet if it weren't for internet porn, so it would use less power. QED, etc.
If we assume that everyone who stopped watching Internet porn without adopting some other sexual outlet, that would be valid reasoning.
If, OTOH, many of them went back to buying printed pornography (as they did pre-Internet), then we'd have to account for the additional energy spent manufacturing, delivering, and procuring billions of additional paper magazines. I don't think there would be a net energy savings realized.
Most humans aren't very good at assessing risk, since they tend to rely on emotion and anecdote.
Insurance companies, OTOH, live or die by the accuracy of their risk assessment, and as such they do a proper statistical analysis and go by the actuarial tables -- or they go out of business.
Therefore I'm inclined to weigh the insurance companies' ideas about what improves safety more heavily than shouts of "OMG look what happened that one time though" on Slashdot.
I suppose you price it at $39.95, and do an on-the-fly conversion to whatever the equivalent is in Bitcoin at the moment the user clicks the "buy game" button.
What that says about Bitcoin's utility as an exchange currency is left as an exercise for the reader:)
No there isn't. Businesses mostly use payment gateways that sell the BTC immediately. There's no risk of price fluctuation to the business.
Presumably it's the owners of the payment gateway that are taking the risk, and charging their users whatever fee they think is necessary to cover the potential costs of the risk?
If so, the client businesses can still suffer if the gateways' risks (and therefore their fees) get too high.
Oh, I remember that. That was that thing for idiots who were convinced it was easier to carry around a 6 ounce, $1000 phone than a free 10 gram debit card because "tapping" was somehow infinitely less physically exhausting than "swiping".
It is a bit easier to to "tap" using the cell phone that's already in your hand (because of course it is) than to dig out your wallet, then dig the credit card out of the wallet, then swipe, then (sometimes) sign your name on the little slip of paper, then put it all away again.
But that's not the real advantage of Apple Pay over a credit card -- the real advantage is that it's less vulnerable to replay attacks. WIth swiping a debit/credit card, anytime you make a purchase, you've given the seller all the information necessary to make more purchases on your account, whenever he/she wants to.
As for carrying around a 6 ounce, $1000 phone -- you're doing that anyway (except maybe for the $1000 part), so why not take advantage of it?
Funny, I can hand a dude paper cash, or incur a ~2% hidden credit card fee with current archaic cash dollars. Why is Bitcoin better again?
Have you calculated the hidden cash fee involved in reliably getting your paper cash to the dude when he isn't standing there next to you? Depending on your use case, Bitcoin might be cheaper than e.g. flying to China with an envelope full of bills.
Sorry, but you're the naive one: the comments are not a popular vote. They did not produce any outcome.
Of course they did; everything has an outcome. They didn't produce a decision, for the reasons you mentioned, but the outcome they produced was to give the anti-net neutrality people the illusion of having popular support for their plans.
If cell phone makers instead of giving me a pointlessly thinner phone, just gave me a larger battery I could use it for a whole day without needing a charge.
So buy whatever cell phone you like, buy a combination phone-case/external-battery for it, and you'll have pretty much the functionality you want. Problem solved.
Unless you're running your battery down to near-zero every day, you're not doing full discharge/recharge cycles, so your battery should last longer than 500 charges.
As for what to do when the battery life is no longer long enough -- swap it out for a new battery. (Sorry, iPhone users, you'll have to hire a college kid to do it for you)
More likely someone will notice when they see his car on fire -- I don't think most bitcoin-mining rigs were ever engineered to operate inside an enclosed vehicle, under glass, on a hot, sunny day:)
Slashdot Mirror
That's a very strange argument you're putting forward there. You're saying that you are okay with allowing security holes in your computer because you trust one government less than another one.
Fine, but what about the fact that you are allowing known security holes to remain active on your computer? Are you really so confident that (a) the Russians will never use them to e.g. drain your bank/credit card accounts, and (b) no other parties will ever exploit them to do the same, with or without the Russians' blessing?
To me it sounds like you have allowed your political axe-grinding to override your common sense.
Ah, it's Saturday, so it's "the government never makes a mistake" today. Presumably tomorrow we'll go back to "the government can never do anything right".
But if you want to go with a "it was a secret test" conspiracy theory, consider that the government doing the secret testing may not have been the American government.
Don't they have the ability to send an "all clear" over the same channel they sent the "LOOK OUT YOU'RE ABOUT TO DIE!!!" message?
No, apparently they do not:
"[Emergency alerts] aren't like text messages, where a sender can dash off a quick 'sorry my bad' if they mistype. IPAWS notices have a specific format, which must be composed formally and in advance. Audio files for broadcast notices must be recorded or generated and uploaded. Often, this has to be done by special software on special equipment."
https://www.theatlantic.com/te...
If you glue enough of them over the license numbers/letters, definitely.
Lenders know about inflation, so they will increase the interest on the loan to compensate for it.
Of course they can't do that on a fixed-rate loan (at least not until end of the loan's fixed rate period if it's an ARM). They try to account for that risk by making the interest rates higher on fixed-rate loans than on variable-rate loans, of course, but they have to try to thread the needle there -- if they guess too low, they could lose money in the event of unexpected inflation, or if they guess too high, their loans won't be competitive and and they'll lose business to the competition.
TLDR; it is possible for inflation to benefit the payer of a mortgage, but only in the (hopefully rare) case where inflation spikes up significantly higher than the lender thought likely when drawing up the terms of the loan. And if that happens, people usually have other problems to worry about.
f they advertised a certain performance and their design flaw makes that performance not possible, it's legally breach of contract and/or false advertising.
Except that their traditional level of performance is still perfectly possible -- just don't install the anti-Meltdown patches, and you'll have a system that runs at full efficiency. It will be insecure against Meltdown attacks, of course, but no more insecure than it was 5, 10, or 15 years ago... and AFAIK Intel never promised anyone perfect security anyway.
The phrase "largest prime number discovered" refers to the largest prime that has been discovered. I know English is a hard language, but it's not that hard.
The problem is that the phrase is ambiguous.
It could mean:
The (largest prime number) has been discovered. -- i.e. there is a largest prime number and we just found it.
or it could mean:
The largest prime number [that we have so far] discovered [is two-to-the-whatever-minus-one].
Presumably the headline writer mean to communicate the latter, but ended up mostly communicating the former. It's true that people familiar with the properties of prime number can probably infer what the headline writer intended, but a good headline avoids ambiguity (unless it's clickbait, in which case ambiguity is considered desirable).
An alternate prediction: both sexes will continue indefinitely, but the differences between them will be significantly attenuated over time. With most of the traditionally sex-linked tasks (brute manual labor, combat, conception, carrying fetuses to term, etc) readily outsourced to machines, a person's sex will become a minor detail, similar in importance to, say, hair-color or eye-color. i.e. mostly a matter of aesthetics, and modifiable without too much difficulty or controversy, if what you were born with is not to your liking.
Of all the things humanity doesn't have a shortage of, spermatozoa have got to be right up near the top of the list :)
I'm pretty sure the "weak minds" quote was making an implicit argument for strong typing, not against it.
"The economy is growing!" Not for them it's not.
So, what do you suggest? Should we outlaw automation and go back to manual labor as much as possible? Or just freeze technology as it is today, on the assumption that any further developments will inevitably harm more people than they help?
If you agree that those options aren't practical, then the only alternative is to find a way for people to continue to enjoy a reasonable quality of life despite the existence of technologies that render their skills economically irrelevant. Perhaps that means Universal Basic Income, or New Deal style government-jobs programs, or better education, or some other mechanism, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure that calling people who accurately describe the problem 'myopic and heartless', doesn't help solve anything.
NN is about not allowing the ISP to sell* access to you to those providing online services.
It goes the other way too -- NN is (was?) also about preventing the ISPs from extorting money from the online services.
Comcast to Netflix: Nice video-streaming service you got there. It would be a shame if all of our customers suddenly couldn't use it anymore due to constant buffering issues, and had to switch to Comcast Video Service (TM) instead.
Netflix: Please don't shut off our oxygen!
Comcast: Okay, just pay us $500,000 a month and we'll allow the bits to keep flowing
Netflix: Okay, but in order to cover that cost we'll have to raise Netflix subscription fees by 40%
Comcast: Fine by us!
The US military budget is $597 billion a year (that's billion, with a 'b').
$22 million spent looking for UFOs means that over the program's lifetime they spent .003% of one year's budget on the program.
Now you can argue that that was money wasted, and maybe its was, but if you're going to complain about the US military wasting money, this program is way down the list. And if it actually found something (and who is to say it hasn't? oooooh), then it would have been very well worth the investment for the military to know that aliens are among us -- knowing whether your country is being surveilled or infiltrated (and by whom) is considered very important to know in defense circles.
I'm pretty sure unless someone's path to the presidency was being a telecom attorney, no president will have explicit understanding of Net Neutrality rules.
Re-read the sentence you quoted. It says "with an explicit understanding that the Net Neutrality rules...", not "an explicit understanding of the Net Neutrality rules".
You're right that Trump doesn't understand Net Neutrality, any more than he understands any other area of US policy. All Trump knows (and all he wants to know) is that if a policy was enacted under Obama, he's against it and will try to get rid of it.
The internets are a big consumer of electricity and pr0n is a big consumer of the internets. We wouldn't need so much internet if it weren't for internet porn, so it would use less power. QED, etc.
If we assume that everyone who stopped watching Internet porn without adopting some other sexual outlet, that would be valid reasoning.
If, OTOH, many of them went back to buying printed pornography (as they did pre-Internet), then we'd have to account for the additional energy spent manufacturing, delivering, and procuring billions of additional paper magazines. I don't think there would be a net energy savings realized.
Most humans aren't very good at assessing risk, since they tend to rely on emotion and anecdote.
Insurance companies, OTOH, live or die by the accuracy of their risk assessment, and as such they do a proper statistical analysis and go by the actuarial tables -- or they go out of business.
Therefore I'm inclined to weigh the insurance companies' ideas about what improves safety more heavily than shouts of "OMG look what happened that one time though" on Slashdot.
I suppose you price it at $39.95, and do an on-the-fly conversion to whatever the equivalent is in Bitcoin at the moment the user clicks the "buy game" button.
What that says about Bitcoin's utility as an exchange currency is left as an exercise for the reader :)
No there isn't. Businesses mostly use payment gateways that sell the BTC immediately. There's no risk of price fluctuation to the business.
Presumably it's the owners of the payment gateway that are taking the risk, and charging their users whatever fee they think is necessary to cover the potential costs of the risk?
If so, the client businesses can still suffer if the gateways' risks (and therefore their fees) get too high.
Oh, I remember that. That was that thing for idiots who were convinced it was easier to carry around a 6 ounce, $1000 phone than a free 10 gram debit card because "tapping" was somehow infinitely less physically exhausting than "swiping".
It is a bit easier to to "tap" using the cell phone that's already in your hand (because of course it is) than to dig out your wallet, then dig the credit card out of the wallet, then swipe, then (sometimes) sign your name on the little slip of paper, then put it all away again.
But that's not the real advantage of Apple Pay over a credit card -- the real advantage is that it's less vulnerable to replay attacks. WIth swiping a debit/credit card, anytime you make a purchase, you've given the seller all the information necessary to make more purchases on your account, whenever he/she wants to.
As for carrying around a 6 ounce, $1000 phone -- you're doing that anyway (except maybe for the $1000 part), so why not take advantage of it?
Funny, I can hand a dude paper cash, or incur a ~2% hidden credit card fee with current archaic cash dollars. Why is Bitcoin better again?
Have you calculated the hidden cash fee involved in reliably getting your paper cash to the dude when he isn't standing there next to you? Depending on your use case, Bitcoin might be cheaper than e.g. flying to China with an envelope full of bills.
With any luck, it will win the crown for "longest distance on a single charge" as well.
Sorry, but you're the naive one: the comments are not a popular vote. They did not produce any outcome.
Of course they did; everything has an outcome. They didn't produce a decision, for the reasons you mentioned, but the outcome they produced was to give the anti-net neutrality people the illusion of having popular support for their plans.
If cell phone makers instead of giving me a pointlessly thinner phone, just gave me a larger battery I could use it for a whole day without needing a charge.
So buy whatever cell phone you like, buy a combination phone-case/external-battery for it, and you'll have pretty much the functionality you want. Problem solved.
Unless you're running your battery down to near-zero every day, you're not doing full discharge/recharge cycles, so your battery should last longer than 500 charges.
As for what to do when the battery life is no longer long enough -- swap it out for a new battery. (Sorry, iPhone users, you'll have to hire a college kid to do it for you)
More likely someone will notice when they see his car on fire -- I don't think most bitcoin-mining rigs were ever engineered to operate inside an enclosed vehicle, under glass, on a hot, sunny day :)