Maybe. The thing is, a bit coin's intrinsic value is nothing. Not even the electricity used to mine it. So it could easily drop all the way to zero.
OTOH, it's useful to those who want to do unrecorded transactions. Until that shield is broken, it will retain some value. (Send me 8,000 bitcoins or all your files will remain encrypted!) It's not clear that the social value of bitcoin is positive. It's certainly expensive to generate new ones, and it's designed so that the cost of that can be expected to increase without limit if it continues to be used. Which means that over time, if it continues to be used, it will consume more electricity (or at least computations) than everything else that humanity does put together....unless P = NP, or there's a bug in the algorithm, or some other unlikely thing. (Is a bug *that* unlikely?)
Thus I think that bitcoin is likely to be a net social detriment. And this is without regard to whether some small group could take it over.
I'm sure it would be possible to implement a blockchain to do something, but you don't specify exactly what you're trying to do...and you've got to be extremely explicit or you end up with a garbage application. (You may anyway if your specs don't properly handle the problem you're trying to address, but if you explicit at least it has a chance of working.)
American teachers say "show your work" so they know you can do it. In high school algebra I was told not to show my work unless I felt like it, to discourage people copying from me. (Guess how popular I was. But that didn't really change anything.) At that point I could usually factor cubic equations in my head, but I never had any luck with quartic, except for a few special cases.
Watering ground with salt water is generally a bad idea. There are special cases where this isn't true, but you'd need to work quite hard to show that this is one of them.
It's not ridiculous. It's probably impractical, and there's a lots of places where it's very "hand-wavy", but it's not ridiculous.
OTOH, it going to require lots of untrusting countries to participate together for a long time. It's going to be quite expensive. It's not going to yield quick results. Etc.
There are lots of reasons why prior proposals to do the same thing haven't gotten off the ground. Outside of the ones mentioned above the one that bothers me is watering it area with salt water. Not many things of commercial value will grow in straight salt water. Someone else pointed out that this will also increase the humidity of the atmosphere, and water, itself, is a greenhouse gas. I'm not real convinced by that, as I doubt that it would rise high in the stratosphere before raining out...but it could feed various storms.
If that works at the edge of the desert, then it could (should?) be able to slowly decrease the size of the desert.
OTOH, it's my understanding that the desertification of the Sahara is not, older claims to the contrary, *caused* by overgrazing, but rather the overgrazing made the desertification cause by changing climate worse. If so, then while that kind of technique could improve things a lot, it wouldn't change the desert back into grassland.
I'm not sure what "salt tolerant plants" they were thinking of. The only one that comes to mind that seems at all appropriate is iceplant, and that doesn't put out anywhere near as much water as corn...which isn't salt tolerant, requires lots of fertilizers, etc. I think I've heard of "salt tolerant tomatoes", but I think they have a strong limit on how brackish the water can be. Mangroves would work, but that requires a *LOT* of water.
So the only plant I can think of that would work is iceplant. Pampas grass also seems to do well on ocean beaches. I can't think of anything that's profitable, and the ones I can think of are quite sparing in their use of water...except mangrove trees, which need LOTS of it.
OTOH, while that would cool the Sahara, I'm not at all sure just how much carbon it would impound. The salt tolerant plants I can think of tend to have shallow roots and small bodies. And you'd need to continually spend energy to pump the water in, unless you did something like using an H-bomb to dredge a below-sea-level lake. But project plowshare never did find much acceptance.
Also it would be interesting to know how they define "cleaner". I find it quite difficult to believe that they mean the engine runs without producing CO2.
I didn't say or indicate that I think it should be against the law for people under "about 23" to use marijuana, I said I thought it was a bad idea. There are at least several experiments that indicate the the neural pruning that is done to complete adolescence isn't complete until "about 23" (sometimes younger, sometimes older, but about then) and that marijuana interferes with that process in ways that appear to be detrimental. So people shouldn't do it.
If you want to say it has other effects that are sufficiently important that this is a relatively minor concern, then when that's true I'm fine with it. And it's also true that this research hasn't been replicated sufficiently to be regarded as certain. The current laws interfere with that process.
And it's also true that if people are ok with fucking up their own head and they decide to do so, I don't object. But they should be informed that the current evidence, such as it is, seems to indicate that it's generally a bad idea because it interferes with normal brain development.
You're acting like it's hard and expensive to set up an ISP. That's not true, it's just been uneconomic, because the big players have taken all the business. But it's actually rather cheap and easy...as long as you use the lines that someone else has installed. And even local installation isn't THAT hard as long as you can obtain right of way. (And if the Telco agencies get into a fight with the state, they may have a hard time obtaining right of way, and need to use the state's lines. So they won't.)
The interstate commerce clause, if it applies (see arguments about the FCCs authority above) wouldn't give them right of way. Or their wires could be excessively taxed. Or lots of other options. They don't want to get into this fight. What they want is consistent business rules across the entire country, and the FCC just shat on that. Whether they were being prodded by the telcos or not I wouldn't care to guess. Perhaps the were just being idiots and thought they were doing the telcos a favor.
Personally, I think sale should be an infraction (local option), and advertising it should be a misdemeanor, except that I'm fine with advertising it on electronic media being a felony...and no other penalties. I also think the tax should be slightly lower than that on tobacco.
I don't want marijuana to be some sort of legal power group, but I also disapprove of it being an illegal power group. Just design the laws to split things up into small growers and vendors, and to discourage large businesses from getting involved.
That said, it does seem as if it's a poor idea for people under the age of around 23 to use it, as it fucks up their brain development. (And it's got to be "around 23" as the exact age is a, probably genetic, variable. Which makes it a really piss-poor thing to write a law about. Still, we have 21 as a legal drinking age...I think that's still what it is, I haven't paid much attention since I turned 21.)
I wouldn't say that it's older than America, but it's clearly older than the United States, as it was one of the principles of the Articles of Confederation. It's also embedded into the US Constitution, though the government in power always ignores that. I believe it's the 10th amendment. Which, in any rational system, would take precedence over things like the Interstate Commerce Clause, as it was an amendment to the main document. Unfortunately, enforcement is left up to those who benefit by ignoring it.
I think it varies a lot between people. I don't get much benefit from it either, OTOH I get *NO* benefit from acetaminophen, and alway use either aspirin or ibuprofen instead. Or sometimes alcohol, even though it doesn't reduce inflammation.
I don't know about you, but I don't read those dictionaries. I'll admit that I'm nearly illiterate WRT emoji. To me they seem to degrade communication as (or more) often than they assist it. And I feel it is quite reasonable that I have only a vague idea what most of them are intended to represent.
P.S.: There may be dictionaries, but they don't constitute a general agreement. Anyone can put together a dictionary, and if a single word were a decent replacement for an emoji, then there'd be no justification for their existence.
The judge felt that the the text, if interpreted seriously, was defamatory, however the emoji was indication that it was not to be interpreted seriously. It wasn't the emoji that was felt to be defamatory.
I'm only assuming, of course, that we're talking about the same case. The linked article listed several cases.
I can't really speak to that, because due to their EULA I stopped using Apple products. But one guess was that Apple is a big company, and Jobs didn't pay lots of attention to every product. (I've got to admit this is the first I've ever heard of MobileMe.)
*Parts* of the government were anti-Nazi, or at least pro-Britain before Pearl Harbor. But only parts. There was significant official disagreement, and also lots of public disagreement.
I'm not at all sure I'm for it anyway. Is it really practical? But the physical layer of the network *is* a natural monopoly, and should therefore be run by *some* part of the government. I'd prefer a utility commission...and I'd prefer that all members of the commission and executives be forbidden from accepting any remuneration from anyone even remotely connected with the industry they are regulating not only while they are serving on the commission, but for the rest of their lives. This might mean the need for a substantial retirement package, but that would be cheap to prevent regulatory capture.
The prior assertion was a bit stronger than that. It was an assertion that he contradicts not his staff, but himself. I've seen several second hand (third hand) reports of such, but I've never been interested enough to verify them.
The thing is, the transmission layer of the network, even a wireless network, is a natural monopoly. In such a case it does make sense to have the government running it...you aren't going to get much competition anyway. *Somebody's* going to be controlling it.
Compare the current situation with the original situation, where the phone company supplied the wires and the connection, and any group that wanted to could start up an ISP. Then there was real competition between the ISPs. Now? But competition at the physical level is impractical. So the physical layer should be handled by a "public utility". The problem is, I'd really like it to be isolated from government control.
I think you're wrong, but he wouldn't be satisfied until the Apple version was the best, for some acceptable-to-him definition of best. I don't get the feeling that Apple has that "strive for excellence" push behind it anymore. I sure didn't always agree with the Jobs definition of excellence (a one button mouse!), but he had *some* version of excellence, and he pushed people towards it.
Enemy is perhaps too strong a term, though adversary is definitely appropriate.
I think a more appropriate punishment would be preferring other suppliers over Intel in all government contracts, and perhaps canceling some contracts that have already been awarded.
That the Russians were as brutal and a you claim, and they were expansionist appears true. That's not the same at claiming they had equal part in starting WW2, and I find that second claim at best dubious. You might more fairly blame Britain, as they set up Poland to be conquered by the Nazis. Many in the British government considered the Nazis to be better than the Communists, and wanted to use them as a weapon against the Communists. Or consider the affairs around Czechoslovakia, and it's amalgamation with Germany. I've never understood Chamberlain's actions, but they certainly played a large part in causing WW2. Then there's the US, which waffled between supporting the Nazis and being against them, sometimes swinging one way and sometimes the other. The US didn't really decide against the Nazis until Pearl Harbor.
One never knows how history would have worked out had things been different, but if Chamberlain had stood up the Hitler over Czechoslovakia, then it seems plausible that Mussolini would have sided with the allies, and WW2 would have been a "damp squib". I don't think Stalin and Hitler could ever have trusted each other, despite the "pact of steel".
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Maybe. The thing is, a bit coin's intrinsic value is nothing. Not even the electricity used to mine it. So it could easily drop all the way to zero.
OTOH, it's useful to those who want to do unrecorded transactions. Until that shield is broken, it will retain some value. (Send me 8,000 bitcoins or all your files will remain encrypted!) It's not clear that the social value of bitcoin is positive. It's certainly expensive to generate new ones, and it's designed so that the cost of that can be expected to increase without limit if it continues to be used. Which means that over time, if it continues to be used, it will consume more electricity (or at least computations) than everything else that humanity does put together....unless P = NP, or there's a bug in the algorithm, or some other unlikely thing. (Is a bug *that* unlikely?)
Thus I think that bitcoin is likely to be a net social detriment. And this is without regard to whether some small group could take it over.
Insufficient information.
I'm sure it would be possible to implement a blockchain to do something, but you don't specify exactly what you're trying to do...and you've got to be extremely explicit or you end up with a garbage application. (You may anyway if your specs don't properly handle the problem you're trying to address, but if you explicit at least it has a chance of working.)
American teachers say "show your work" so they know you can do it. In high school algebra I was told not to show my work unless I felt like it, to discourage people copying from me. (Guess how popular I was. But that didn't really change anything.) At that point I could usually factor cubic equations in my head, but I never had any luck with quartic, except for a few special cases.
Watering ground with salt water is generally a bad idea. There are special cases where this isn't true, but you'd need to work quite hard to show that this is one of them.
It's not ridiculous. It's probably impractical, and there's a lots of places where it's very "hand-wavy", but it's not ridiculous.
OTOH, it going to require lots of untrusting countries to participate together for a long time. It's going to be quite expensive. It's not going to yield quick results. Etc.
There are lots of reasons why prior proposals to do the same thing haven't gotten off the ground. Outside of the ones mentioned above the one that bothers me is watering it area with salt water. Not many things of commercial value will grow in straight salt water. Someone else pointed out that this will also increase the humidity of the atmosphere, and water, itself, is a greenhouse gas. I'm not real convinced by that, as I doubt that it would rise high in the stratosphere before raining out...but it could feed various storms.
If that works at the edge of the desert, then it could (should?) be able to slowly decrease the size of the desert.
OTOH, it's my understanding that the desertification of the Sahara is not, older claims to the contrary, *caused* by overgrazing, but rather the overgrazing made the desertification cause by changing climate worse. If so, then while that kind of technique could improve things a lot, it wouldn't change the desert back into grassland.
I'm not sure what "salt tolerant plants" they were thinking of. The only one that comes to mind that seems at all appropriate is iceplant, and that doesn't put out anywhere near as much water as corn...which isn't salt tolerant, requires lots of fertilizers, etc. I think I've heard of "salt tolerant tomatoes", but I think they have a strong limit on how brackish the water can be. Mangroves would work, but that requires a *LOT* of water.
So the only plant I can think of that would work is iceplant. Pampas grass also seems to do well on ocean beaches. I can't think of anything that's profitable, and the ones I can think of are quite sparing in their use of water...except mangrove trees, which need LOTS of it.
OTOH, while that would cool the Sahara, I'm not at all sure just how much carbon it would impound. The salt tolerant plants I can think of tend to have shallow roots and small bodies. And you'd need to continually spend energy to pump the water in, unless you did something like using an H-bomb to dredge a below-sea-level lake. But project plowshare never did find much acceptance.
Also it would be interesting to know how they define "cleaner". I find it quite difficult to believe that they mean the engine runs without producing CO2.
I didn't say or indicate that I think it should be against the law for people under "about 23" to use marijuana, I said I thought it was a bad idea. There are at least several experiments that indicate the the neural pruning that is done to complete adolescence isn't complete until "about 23" (sometimes younger, sometimes older, but about then) and that marijuana interferes with that process in ways that appear to be detrimental. So people shouldn't do it.
If you want to say it has other effects that are sufficiently important that this is a relatively minor concern, then when that's true I'm fine with it. And it's also true that this research hasn't been replicated sufficiently to be regarded as certain. The current laws interfere with that process.
And it's also true that if people are ok with fucking up their own head and they decide to do so, I don't object. But they should be informed that the current evidence, such as it is, seems to indicate that it's generally a bad idea because it interferes with normal brain development.
You're acting like it's hard and expensive to set up an ISP. That's not true, it's just been uneconomic, because the big players have taken all the business. But it's actually rather cheap and easy...as long as you use the lines that someone else has installed. And even local installation isn't THAT hard as long as you can obtain right of way. (And if the Telco agencies get into a fight with the state, they may have a hard time obtaining right of way, and need to use the state's lines. So they won't.)
The interstate commerce clause, if it applies (see arguments about the FCCs authority above) wouldn't give them right of way. Or their wires could be excessively taxed. Or lots of other options. They don't want to get into this fight. What they want is consistent business rules across the entire country, and the FCC just shat on that. Whether they were being prodded by the telcos or not I wouldn't care to guess. Perhaps the were just being idiots and thought they were doing the telcos a favor.
Personally, I think sale should be an infraction (local option), and advertising it should be a misdemeanor, except that I'm fine with advertising it on electronic media being a felony...and no other penalties. I also think the tax should be slightly lower than that on tobacco.
I don't want marijuana to be some sort of legal power group, but I also disapprove of it being an illegal power group. Just design the laws to split things up into small growers and vendors, and to discourage large businesses from getting involved.
That said, it does seem as if it's a poor idea for people under the age of around 23 to use it, as it fucks up their brain development. (And it's got to be "around 23" as the exact age is a, probably genetic, variable. Which makes it a really piss-poor thing to write a law about. Still, we have 21 as a legal drinking age...I think that's still what it is, I haven't paid much attention since I turned 21.)
I wouldn't say that it's older than America, but it's clearly older than the United States, as it was one of the principles of the Articles of Confederation. It's also embedded into the US Constitution, though the government in power always ignores that. I believe it's the 10th amendment. Which, in any rational system, would take precedence over things like the Interstate Commerce Clause, as it was an amendment to the main document. Unfortunately, enforcement is left up to those who benefit by ignoring it.
I think it varies a lot between people. I don't get much benefit from it either, OTOH I get *NO* benefit from acetaminophen, and alway use either aspirin or ibuprofen instead. Or sometimes alcohol, even though it doesn't reduce inflammation.
Which font are you looking at the emoji in? It makes a difference.
Emoji are ambiguous. This is largely intentional by the designers, and often by the users.
I don't know about you, but I don't read those dictionaries. I'll admit that I'm nearly illiterate WRT emoji. To me they seem to degrade communication as (or more) often than they assist it. And I feel it is quite reasonable that I have only a vague idea what most of them are intended to represent.
P.S.: There may be dictionaries, but they don't constitute a general agreement. Anyone can put together a dictionary, and if a single word were a decent replacement for an emoji, then there'd be no justification for their existence.
The judge felt that the the text, if interpreted seriously, was defamatory, however the emoji was indication that it was not to be interpreted seriously. It wasn't the emoji that was felt to be defamatory.
I'm only assuming, of course, that we're talking about the same case. The linked article listed several cases.
I can't really speak to that, because due to their EULA I stopped using Apple products. But one guess was that Apple is a big company, and Jobs didn't pay lots of attention to every product. (I've got to admit this is the first I've ever heard of MobileMe.)
*Parts* of the government were anti-Nazi, or at least pro-Britain before Pearl Harbor. But only parts. There was significant official disagreement, and also lots of public disagreement.
I'm not at all sure I'm for it anyway. Is it really practical? But the physical layer of the network *is* a natural monopoly, and should therefore be run by *some* part of the government. I'd prefer a utility commission...and I'd prefer that all members of the commission and executives be forbidden from accepting any remuneration from anyone even remotely connected with the industry they are regulating not only while they are serving on the commission, but for the rest of their lives. This might mean the need for a substantial retirement package, but that would be cheap to prevent regulatory capture.
The prior assertion was a bit stronger than that. It was an assertion that he contradicts not his staff, but himself. I've seen several second hand (third hand) reports of such, but I've never been interested enough to verify them.
The thing is, the transmission layer of the network, even a wireless network, is a natural monopoly. In such a case it does make sense to have the government running it...you aren't going to get much competition anyway. *Somebody's* going to be controlling it.
Compare the current situation with the original situation, where the phone company supplied the wires and the connection, and any group that wanted to could start up an ISP. Then there was real competition between the ISPs. Now? But competition at the physical level is impractical. So the physical layer should be handled by a "public utility". The problem is, I'd really like it to be isolated from government control.
Were I to switch to BSD, I'd prefer Mate to KDE. I use lots of KDE tools and libraries, but their screen has gotten too noisy.
I think you're wrong, but he wouldn't be satisfied until the Apple version was the best, for some acceptable-to-him definition of best. I don't get the feeling that Apple has that "strive for excellence" push behind it anymore. I sure didn't always agree with the Jobs definition of excellence (a one button mouse!), but he had *some* version of excellence, and he pushed people towards it.
Enemy is perhaps too strong a term, though adversary is definitely appropriate.
I think a more appropriate punishment would be preferring other suppliers over Intel in all government contracts, and perhaps canceling some contracts that have already been awarded.
That the Russians were as brutal and a you claim, and they were expansionist appears true. That's not the same at claiming they had equal part in starting WW2, and I find that second claim at best dubious. You might more fairly blame Britain, as they set up Poland to be conquered by the Nazis. Many in the British government considered the Nazis to be better than the Communists, and wanted to use them as a weapon against the Communists. Or consider the affairs around Czechoslovakia, and it's amalgamation with Germany. I've never understood Chamberlain's actions, but they certainly played a large part in causing WW2. Then there's the US, which waffled between supporting the Nazis and being against them, sometimes swinging one way and sometimes the other. The US didn't really decide against the Nazis until Pearl Harbor.
One never knows how history would have worked out had things been different, but if Chamberlain had stood up the Hitler over Czechoslovakia, then it seems plausible that Mussolini would have sided with the allies, and WW2 would have been a "damp squib". I don't think Stalin and Hitler could ever have trusted each other, despite the "pact of steel".