I don't hate America, but I do tend to hate its leadership. The two are distinctly different. Same with China--I don't doubt most of those billion citizens are great people who, language barriers aside, I'd be happy to be friends with. Same, indeed, with most nations that we're not politically aligned with.
If only the politicians, corporate officers, media moguls, etc, were the people in the trenches when the wars come.
There are very few other occupations that prepare you to keep cool and operate controls under varying gee-forces.
Admittedly, most of spaceflight happens with the thrusters off, but if you get spooked by the idea of sudden acceleration, you are not going to operate well in a spacecraft. And you may not think that you'll be spooked, but there's a reason acceleration is measured is Gees--that is, multiples of Earth's gravity. You'll suddenly, and briefly, weigh several times as much as you ever have before.
Jet pilots in particular experience abnormal gee forces with pretty much every flight. Test pilots have to train to recover from all kinds of ghastly aerodynamic fuck-ups. The sort of conditions they can recover from, or can't bur prepare for, would leave you horrified.
It's also much easier to detect toxins in a lab, let alone track down the source.
If free-range animals suddenly start coming back as having say lead exposure, you have to look in the water, the wind, any plants they might have eaten, any fertilizers you may have used on any of those plants, any feed you gave them--and even once you find the source, you have to find a way around the problem, since farms aren't what you call mobile. Compared to that, looking at the tools you put in the lab to produce the product (also known as "quality control") isn't exactly going out of your way.
When I started learning programming in high school, I was exceptionally shy. I found that I understood it better than most, and would often help other people learn, which was a big thing for me. Part of the reason I latched onto programming since then is because I was able to be of value to the people around me. If I had understood it just as well, but had to sit there pretending to work together with imaginary people through bullshit code snippets, just so the teacher had an easier time grading my work, I probably would have chosen a different profession.
As long as there are filler teachers, there are filler classes. If the school district (or university staff) knows damn well you won't learn anything, they've wasted your time.
Relatedly, a lot of public school classes will teach to government-mandated tests, and a bad teacher there can kill your curiosity about a subject, which can be worse than ignorance. With the internet, ignorance and curiosity can foster more growth than minimum understanding and a crushed spirit.
I saw a UFO while staring at the sky one day several years ago. That is to say, I saw something, and I don't know what it was. Given apparent distance, size, and motion characteristics, I can't match it to any known technology, physical effect, or biological creature. In fact, its behavior was unreal enough to make me doubt it was anything mundane. That doesn't prove that it's otherwise, and any suspicions I have that it could have been something alien are just that, suspicions.
Skepticism can coexist with unknown phenomena. One data point doesn't convince me. Rumors of other data points doesn't convince me. However, in absence of an explanation of all such events, it would be naive to trust people who say "It CANNOT be alien, as Aliens don't exist." Those are the words of True Believers, not skeptics.
And anyway, there's less evidence that Congress is on the side of the people than that there's aliens, so I don't know what you're trying to say./snark
It's not even about bashing the company. I get that they make a majority of their money on business instead of consumer machines. I don't even really mind that they tend to focus on those clients. However, you would think them capable of using that money to make the end-result better; you know, using it the way MS Research does (the ones who do things like the giant multitouch table, and other projects that never really made it to production, but were hella impressive). Only, you know, doing that for their main product, the one that is their forward-facing business, the one on whole idea of computing sinks or swims.
I mean, imagine that everyone at Microsoft had the opportunity to, with no pressure, put together a huge communal project, which would re-factor, re-imagine, and re-build the kernel, windowing system, registry, and all else from scratch. No business pressure to get it done in a certain number of years; no backwards-compatibility-layer bullshit, because it's not an external project. Just a pristine, clean, perfect template, which may not be ever released, but which is just a grand experiment based on decades of experience and giant bags of cash with dollar signs on them. I wonder what would come out of it?
It's not just games, although games are where it comes out most. Windows doesn't understand what to do with monitors and full-screen applications, up to and including its own desktop.
I have a two-screen setup. They're cheap, but let's not get picky. The one on the left is 1024x768, a trashy little thing I've had for years. The one on the right is 1360x768, a repurposed LCD TV. (Don't get me started on its problems.) Let's say I'm playing some old game, which wants to run at 4:3. Windows, naively, puts that on my 16:9, because it doesn't think about what it's doing, and it's not configurable. Does it make intelligent use of the remaining screen real-estate? No, apparently Windows thinks the graphics card would be overtaxed adding, say, a widget bar to the side of a mis-scaled app.
Let's say I want to switch contexts to the other monitor. I don't need to see the hidden desktop. Should be simple, right? No, as soon as the fullscreen app loses focus, Windows does the funky chicken. (I've seen at least one game that manages to display full-screen without this, so I assume it's bad or legacy programming, but let's be real--Windows could override this behavior if they'd thought about it.
There's no reason why you couldn't generalize an application container (Desktop, fullscreen app, desktop with widgets, widget sidebar, etc) and divide up your screens to accomodate as many as possible, with special keys to control it and low-level compositing to help you control your GUI. But Windows doesn't innovate, and they don't think. Multiple-monitor setups have existed for ages, but they're not a commercially viable target demographic, I guess.
I'm honestly sick of analogies like this. Google isn't writing it down. You wrote it down, and a Google-bot walked by, noticed it, and made a mental note of where to find it later, in case anyone asked.
Google is less of a shady private investigator and more of a shady information broker--only instead of hanging out in a creepy back alley and only dealing with scumbags, they hang out front and center in the middle of town and make it much easier for pretty much everyone to lead their lives.
It's not just the heat of the magma (although I think you're underestimating that); it's also pressure. As soon as you breach the mantle (if not before), violently hot molten rock is going to have a place it can go where it can relieve the pressure of miles of rock sitting on it.
Keep in mind the forces you're talking about. Volcanoes don't throw out tons of ash and molten rock because it wants to fly. Tons and tons of material are given upward momentum because of pressure from below.
1. What happens to the core when we start pumping large amounts of heat out of the core? How long until it cools enough for our magnetic field to collapse enough to be dangerous?
Here's a fascinating thought experiment that might interest you: What is cold weather?
It's so easy to say that cold weather is the movement of cold air, but that's wrong. "Cold" is not a force or some sort of negative energy that gets applied during winter. Cold is what happens when, if even for a moment, we stop getting enough sunlight to make up for the energy that's lost to space. Every single winter of every single year (and remember that summer on one hemisphere is winter on the other), huge swaths of the planet are losing energy to space. It's enough to bring the frost line of soil down several feet just in the northern US--I'd hate to think how deep it penetrates in Canada.
There is no comparison of the surface area affected by severe winters to the surface area of geothermal wells, and as such, there is no comparing the energy loss between the two.
And keep in mind, nobody's suggesting drilling into the mantle, let alone the core. That's known as a volcano. We don't really have materials to safely handle that sort of well. And the crust of the earth is so remarkably thin compared to the size of the mantle... well, I'm not sure we'll have to worry about it for millenia if not more.
Laptops, desktops, and iPads do not make up a majority of connections. Nearly half of that subset can (and does) access the 5GHz band, but even so, 94% of the total network load is on 2.4GHz
We need more reviews, and more experimentation. I've had an idea that's been tickling in the back of my mind; call it an aggressive experiment in education.
Take some number, N. Let's say 10 for each state in the nation. Put aside $1,000,000 for each N. Hopefully it won't be necessary to adjust for inflation, but put that idea aside for now.
Choose N social security numbers (or another unique ID), entirely at random, from the people born in the past year. Put them in a safe without looking at them. Announce the intent and details of this program (see below) to schools that could possibly be affected, if you like. If you don't, there's no reason you couldn't do the following now with people born in the past.
In 25 years (A complete public education plus, if they're lucky enough, a college education, and either some work towards a higher degree or some time in business), pull the numbers out of the safe, find those N people, and offer them the following deal:
Right now, before anything else happens, you make a documentary about their life--about all the people that influenced them and about their entire education, from pre-school to current day. When all that documentation and research is done, give them the $1 Million. Tell them to start a business, project, whatever with it--but don't force them. Instead, watch the money. See if they spend it on business, on hookers, on charity, on family. Reconvene and finish the documentary in a few years, or after the initial seed money runs out.
There are three fundamental, interesting things you can learn with this sort of experiment: * The state of the school system given a truly random sampling of students (even if it is very small) * The effect of the school system on the student's life, along with other environmental factors, and how it shaped their future (as indicated by how they spend the money) * If you announced the program, how that affected the way teachers viewed that particular year of students. For example, I can imagine that some teachers might refuse to give up on problem students, or work them harder, simply because they might be the lucky ones. Also, I can imagine school administrators forcing that sort of attitude, or punishing problem children more, or... who knows.
Cons: Well, it does cost $1M per child, plus the cost to do the documentary. It's also not well-controlled. But I think it would be fascinating. I want to see it happen, just to see the data, just to see someone's history right at this moment, and then watch them move on into the future with renewed purpose and a grand opportunity.
So why is the Bitcoin value so volatile? (Now we're in the realm of pure speculation on my part) Because there's no supply chain to keep prices stable. No supply chain of any sort; a restaurant that accepts bitcoins can not buy silverware, or food, or paper cups, or cash register tape, or POS systems, or pay rent in Bitcoins.
Also, there is no critically necessary good which can only be purchased by bitcoins. If it bought you protection from, say, hackers, in a way that no other currency could, it would have a standard amount of value.
Imagine in the ancient past, before currency was quite standardized, but feudal governments are willing to trade your loyalty for protection from wild animals, bandits, and the like. Part of "your loyalty", naturally, is taxes, which must be of standardized value. If you don't pay a given amount, you don't get let into the castle when an army sieges, and get to watch your family raped and murdered as you breathe your last breath. You could try to offer them cows and sheep in lieu of coins for tax, but cows and sheep have upkeep; unless they're going to be slaughtered for meat right away, they're as much a burden as a gift. They'd prefer you kept providing milk and wool, so they can tax you later. So you trade milk and wool for coins, and with coins buy protection; the tax coins then are used to buy and trade other goods.
Stepping out of the analogy, if there was a nasty protection racket where your ISP had to pay off foreign hackers to not be obliterated, and this payment had to be in bitcoins, it might become viable to pay your ISP for service with bitcoins. Then, when you the consumer can buy ISP service in bitcoins, you could use that as a value standard for trading bitcoins for other things.
Fortunately, when you clicked the 'I agree' button, you gave Facebook a commercial, transferable, sublicensable, license
Caution: IANAL
No, I didn't. Contract law, on behalf of the signatory, assigned them those rights. Because that contract was non-negotiable, I didn't "give them rights" (note active voice); the "rights were assigned" (passive voice) as per posted notices.
Now, do I have a terrible problem with this? No, but that fact depends on one critical conceit: that the party writing the non-negotiable agreement is not using heady legal language to allow them to commit crimes or other injurious behavior while staying within the letter of the law. This is the major problem; nobody, good or evil, writes negotiable user agreements for software or similar user services, and the good and evil contracts are sufficiently close in length and form that it takes a legal expert to tell the difference. This shifts the balance of power away from both signatories and towards the legal system, which is only a good idea if the legal system is both vigilant and trustworthy. Vigilant, because preventing the abuse of contract law requires an examination of the contract before it is signed (or before it is given legitimacy by the court or its agents), and trustworthy, because it is remarkably easy to sweep abuse of contract law under the rug, simply because the victim is a signatory and is therefore assumed to have fully understood it.
I don't trust the US legal system to be vigilant or trustworthy when it comes to abuses of contract law, and I have seen absolutely nothing that suggests this will change.
And he kind of burned out. He lives with his brother (my good friend) now and hasn't ever really had a real job. After he completed college, he decided to independently pursue his own interests and sort of realized that the whole educational path he had taken was really him just quickly absorbing other people's works. Striking out on new ground was far too uncomfortable for him. What was worse was that this totally destroyed his confidence.
As someone in a similar situation (You don't have to consider me a prodigy; I don't. But I got through school and college with minimal studying, by listening and learning), with similar problems (low confidence, burned out, etc), let me offer this for consideration: I have a lot of projects in the back of my mind--many, from tabletop games to video games to other software to computer hardware, fountains, architecture, writing, animation, and probably others I can't immediately think of. However, I don't know how to get anywhere, and critically, nobody is interested in helping me get where I want to go.
Education is a path to becoming an academic. The school system is NOT set up to help you with any particular project you may have in mind; it is set up to give you a solid foundation. For a great, great many people, education replaces inspiration, which is to say that you don't need to say, "You know what I want to learn? Arithmetic. That would help me solve this problem!" You don't have to go out of your way to learn math like a farm boy of the first century, who quite reasonably may never have needed it. You don't have to gain these skills by grit and willpower. However, when these skills are no longer an accomplishment, you DO need grit and willpower to take the next step.
More importantly, what you need to take the next step are people who know what you're capable of, know what you'd like to do, and are willing to help. Imagine if someone took one of my projects and said, "You know what? Let's run with this. I bet if you took classes to learn this, and I went over here to talk to these people, and I know some people over here that can help... maybe within a couple years we might have something to show to investors, and we can make a business out of it." That sort of confidence can't come from me. I'll work, I'll offer inspiration, I'll do all sorts of things, but everything I want to do is a project, and all of those projects are going to NEED other people. Before I can even ask for their help, I have to believe others will want the end result; I can't just look at them and say, "Yup. They'll want this. Come on everyone, trust me, we'll do it." That seems sleazy to me, or corrupt, or... I don't even know what.
How do you educate a prodigy? Find out where their sights are set, and help them along that road. If they have their sights on many things, help with that. Don't ever, ever tell them that when they reach maturity (ie leave college) and are on their own, their job is done. That's a stalling point, and I would imagine that a lot of people get stuck there.
I disagree slightly. The simplicity is there, but it's not everything.
In my opinion, the thing the iPad had, which no other tablet until the Kindle Fire did, was an existing use case. If you buy an iPad, you are almost guaranteed to understand that you can buy and watch movies, music, and TV on it. This seems like a little thing, until you realize that for the non-techie consumer, that's the ONLY value to it at the beginning. Understanding what an app is, or how you would play a game on a touchscreen, is something you experiment with; if you don't like to experiment, you don't spend $500 on it.
Not only is the Fire not a $500 investment in experimentation, it starts with an existing use case, so you can justify buying it. I think it'll do better than most.
The various media industries, when they're being selfish, say "Piracy" to mean "You made a copy when we asked you not to." Generally, the courts force this to only be a crime if you then share it with others. The existence of ROMs at all, even ones you dump yourself, are nevertheless piracy in that definition.
Now look at the logistics of it. At this point, they're not manufacturing these products anymore. Unless they remade games for a new device, there is no product you can buy from them anymore--you can only buy secondhand games and secondhand systems. You say you don't want to pirate, which for games that are currently being sold is marvelous. But when they aren't selling products to you, they aren't losing money if you pirate instead of buying secondhand. Understand, if they ever decided to release ROMs, they would release them along with first-party, copy-protected emulators, and that's an investment of time, manpower, and money in and of itself. (It does happen; the PSP for example emulates PlayStation games, which you can get from their store, if you can stomach going there after the security breach nonsense.)
If you want to support game developers or the industry, buy new products, whether it's games or licensed T-shirts. There's precious little to be found in emulation that could possibly help their bottom line.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't hate America, but I do tend to hate its leadership. The two are distinctly different. Same with China--I don't doubt most of those billion citizens are great people who, language barriers aside, I'd be happy to be friends with. Same, indeed, with most nations that we're not politically aligned with.
If only the politicians, corporate officers, media moguls, etc, were the people in the trenches when the wars come.
There are very few other occupations that prepare you to keep cool and operate controls under varying gee-forces.
Admittedly, most of spaceflight happens with the thrusters off, but if you get spooked by the idea of sudden acceleration, you are not going to operate well in a spacecraft. And you may not think that you'll be spooked, but there's a reason acceleration is measured is Gees--that is, multiples of Earth's gravity. You'll suddenly, and briefly, weigh several times as much as you ever have before.
Jet pilots in particular experience abnormal gee forces with pretty much every flight. Test pilots have to train to recover from all kinds of ghastly aerodynamic fuck-ups. The sort of conditions they can recover from, or can't bur prepare for, would leave you horrified.
deceased badgers.
So you're thinking it's a time travel experiment?
It's also much easier to detect toxins in a lab, let alone track down the source.
If free-range animals suddenly start coming back as having say lead exposure, you have to look in the water, the wind, any plants they might have eaten, any fertilizers you may have used on any of those plants, any feed you gave them--and even once you find the source, you have to find a way around the problem, since farms aren't what you call mobile. Compared to that, looking at the tools you put in the lab to produce the product (also known as "quality control") isn't exactly going out of your way.
When I started learning programming in high school, I was exceptionally shy. I found that I understood it better than most, and would often help other people learn, which was a big thing for me. Part of the reason I latched onto programming since then is because I was able to be of value to the people around me. If I had understood it just as well, but had to sit there pretending to work together with imaginary people through bullshit code snippets, just so the teacher had an easier time grading my work, I probably would have chosen a different profession.
As long as there are filler teachers, there are filler classes. If the school district (or university staff) knows damn well you won't learn anything, they've wasted your time.
Relatedly, a lot of public school classes will teach to government-mandated tests, and a bad teacher there can kill your curiosity about a subject, which can be worse than ignorance. With the internet, ignorance and curiosity can foster more growth than minimum understanding and a crushed spirit.
I saw a UFO while staring at the sky one day several years ago. That is to say, I saw something, and I don't know what it was. Given apparent distance, size, and motion characteristics, I can't match it to any known technology, physical effect, or biological creature. In fact, its behavior was unreal enough to make me doubt it was anything mundane. That doesn't prove that it's otherwise, and any suspicions I have that it could have been something alien are just that, suspicions.
Skepticism can coexist with unknown phenomena. One data point doesn't convince me. Rumors of other data points doesn't convince me. However, in absence of an explanation of all such events, it would be naive to trust people who say "It CANNOT be alien, as Aliens don't exist." Those are the words of True Believers, not skeptics.
And anyway, there's less evidence that Congress is on the side of the people than that there's aliens, so I don't know what you're trying to say. /snark
It's not even about bashing the company. I get that they make a majority of their money on business instead of consumer machines. I don't even really mind that they tend to focus on those clients. However, you would think them capable of using that money to make the end-result better; you know, using it the way MS Research does (the ones who do things like the giant multitouch table, and other projects that never really made it to production, but were hella impressive). Only, you know, doing that for their main product, the one that is their forward-facing business, the one on whole idea of computing sinks or swims.
I mean, imagine that everyone at Microsoft had the opportunity to, with no pressure, put together a huge communal project, which would re-factor, re-imagine, and re-build the kernel, windowing system, registry, and all else from scratch. No business pressure to get it done in a certain number of years; no backwards-compatibility-layer bullshit, because it's not an external project. Just a pristine, clean, perfect template, which may not be ever released, but which is just a grand experiment based on decades of experience and giant bags of cash with dollar signs on them. I wonder what would come out of it?
It's not just games, although games are where it comes out most. Windows doesn't understand what to do with monitors and full-screen applications, up to and including its own desktop.
I have a two-screen setup. They're cheap, but let's not get picky. The one on the left is 1024x768, a trashy little thing I've had for years. The one on the right is 1360x768, a repurposed LCD TV. (Don't get me started on its problems.) Let's say I'm playing some old game, which wants to run at 4:3. Windows, naively, puts that on my 16:9, because it doesn't think about what it's doing, and it's not configurable. Does it make intelligent use of the remaining screen real-estate? No, apparently Windows thinks the graphics card would be overtaxed adding, say, a widget bar to the side of a mis-scaled app.
Let's say I want to switch contexts to the other monitor. I don't need to see the hidden desktop. Should be simple, right? No, as soon as the fullscreen app loses focus, Windows does the funky chicken. (I've seen at least one game that manages to display full-screen without this, so I assume it's bad or legacy programming, but let's be real--Windows could override this behavior if they'd thought about it.
There's no reason why you couldn't generalize an application container (Desktop, fullscreen app, desktop with widgets, widget sidebar, etc) and divide up your screens to accomodate as many as possible, with special keys to control it and low-level compositing to help you control your GUI. But Windows doesn't innovate, and they don't think. Multiple-monitor setups have existed for ages, but they're not a commercially viable target demographic, I guess.
I'm honestly sick of analogies like this. Google isn't writing it down. You wrote it down, and a Google-bot walked by, noticed it, and made a mental note of where to find it later, in case anyone asked.
Google is less of a shady private investigator and more of a shady information broker--only instead of hanging out in a creepy back alley and only dealing with scumbags, they hang out front and center in the middle of town and make it much easier for pretty much everyone to lead their lives.
In other words, the Court system will happily allow itself to be used to commit a crime, as long as you pretend the issue is sexual.
Thanks Puritanism, you've done wonders for the nation.
It's not just the heat of the magma (although I think you're underestimating that); it's also pressure. As soon as you breach the mantle (if not before), violently hot molten rock is going to have a place it can go where it can relieve the pressure of miles of rock sitting on it.
Keep in mind the forces you're talking about. Volcanoes don't throw out tons of ash and molten rock because it wants to fly. Tons and tons of material are given upward momentum because of pressure from below.
(IANAGeologist)
1. What happens to the core when we start pumping large amounts of heat out of the core? How long until it cools enough for our magnetic field to collapse enough to be dangerous?
Here's a fascinating thought experiment that might interest you: What is cold weather?
It's so easy to say that cold weather is the movement of cold air, but that's wrong. "Cold" is not a force or some sort of negative energy that gets applied during winter. Cold is what happens when, if even for a moment, we stop getting enough sunlight to make up for the energy that's lost to space. Every single winter of every single year (and remember that summer on one hemisphere is winter on the other), huge swaths of the planet are losing energy to space. It's enough to bring the frost line of soil down several feet just in the northern US--I'd hate to think how deep it penetrates in Canada.
There is no comparison of the surface area affected by severe winters to the surface area of geothermal wells, and as such, there is no comparing the energy loss between the two.
And keep in mind, nobody's suggesting drilling into the mantle, let alone the core. That's known as a volcano. We don't really have materials to safely handle that sort of well. And the crust of the earth is so remarkably thin compared to the size of the mantle... well, I'm not sure we'll have to worry about it for millenia if not more.
Laptops, desktops, and iPads do not make up a majority of connections. Nearly half of that subset can (and does) access the 5GHz band, but even so, 94% of the total network load is on 2.4GHz
We need more reviews, and more experimentation. I've had an idea that's been tickling in the back of my mind; call it an aggressive experiment in education.
Take some number, N. Let's say 10 for each state in the nation. Put aside $1,000,000 for each N. Hopefully it won't be necessary to adjust for inflation, but put that idea aside for now.
Choose N social security numbers (or another unique ID), entirely at random, from the people born in the past year. Put them in a safe without looking at them. Announce the intent and details of this program (see below) to schools that could possibly be affected, if you like. If you don't, there's no reason you couldn't do the following now with people born in the past.
In 25 years (A complete public education plus, if they're lucky enough, a college education, and either some work towards a higher degree or some time in business), pull the numbers out of the safe, find those N people, and offer them the following deal:
Right now, before anything else happens, you make a documentary about their life--about all the people that influenced them and about their entire education, from pre-school to current day. When all that documentation and research is done, give them the $1 Million. Tell them to start a business, project, whatever with it--but don't force them. Instead, watch the money. See if they spend it on business, on hookers, on charity, on family. Reconvene and finish the documentary in a few years, or after the initial seed money runs out.
There are three fundamental, interesting things you can learn with this sort of experiment:
* The state of the school system given a truly random sampling of students (even if it is very small)
* The effect of the school system on the student's life, along with other environmental factors, and how it shaped their future (as indicated by how they spend the money)
* If you announced the program, how that affected the way teachers viewed that particular year of students. For example, I can imagine that some teachers might refuse to give up on problem students, or work them harder, simply because they might be the lucky ones. Also, I can imagine school administrators forcing that sort of attitude, or punishing problem children more, or... who knows.
Cons: Well, it does cost $1M per child, plus the cost to do the documentary. It's also not well-controlled. But I think it would be fascinating. I want to see it happen, just to see the data, just to see someone's history right at this moment, and then watch them move on into the future with renewed purpose and a grand opportunity.
A quick search for "Clippy Fanfic" proves that yes, the internet has already stooped that low.
So why is the Bitcoin value so volatile? (Now we're in the realm of pure speculation on my part) Because there's no supply chain to keep prices stable. No supply chain of any sort; a restaurant that accepts bitcoins can not buy silverware, or food, or paper cups, or cash register tape, or POS systems, or pay rent in Bitcoins.
Also, there is no critically necessary good which can only be purchased by bitcoins. If it bought you protection from, say, hackers, in a way that no other currency could, it would have a standard amount of value.
Imagine in the ancient past, before currency was quite standardized, but feudal governments are willing to trade your loyalty for protection from wild animals, bandits, and the like. Part of "your loyalty", naturally, is taxes, which must be of standardized value. If you don't pay a given amount, you don't get let into the castle when an army sieges, and get to watch your family raped and murdered as you breathe your last breath. You could try to offer them cows and sheep in lieu of coins for tax, but cows and sheep have upkeep; unless they're going to be slaughtered for meat right away, they're as much a burden as a gift. They'd prefer you kept providing milk and wool, so they can tax you later. So you trade milk and wool for coins, and with coins buy protection; the tax coins then are used to buy and trade other goods.
Stepping out of the analogy, if there was a nasty protection racket where your ISP had to pay off foreign hackers to not be obliterated, and this payment had to be in bitcoins, it might become viable to pay your ISP for service with bitcoins. Then, when you the consumer can buy ISP service in bitcoins, you could use that as a value standard for trading bitcoins for other things.
It's not Bob I'm worried about, it's Clippy.
Shooting? Just hook it up to a bomb.
Fortunately, when you clicked the 'I agree' button, you gave Facebook a commercial, transferable, sublicensable, license
Caution: IANAL
No, I didn't. Contract law, on behalf of the signatory, assigned them those rights. Because that contract was non-negotiable, I didn't "give them rights" (note active voice); the "rights were assigned" (passive voice) as per posted notices.
Now, do I have a terrible problem with this? No, but that fact depends on one critical conceit: that the party writing the non-negotiable agreement is not using heady legal language to allow them to commit crimes or other injurious behavior while staying within the letter of the law. This is the major problem; nobody, good or evil, writes negotiable user agreements for software or similar user services, and the good and evil contracts are sufficiently close in length and form that it takes a legal expert to tell the difference. This shifts the balance of power away from both signatories and towards the legal system, which is only a good idea if the legal system is both vigilant and trustworthy. Vigilant, because preventing the abuse of contract law requires an examination of the contract before it is signed (or before it is given legitimacy by the court or its agents), and trustworthy, because it is remarkably easy to sweep abuse of contract law under the rug, simply because the victim is a signatory and is therefore assumed to have fully understood it.
I don't trust the US legal system to be vigilant or trustworthy when it comes to abuses of contract law, and I have seen absolutely nothing that suggests this will change.
And he kind of burned out. He lives with his brother (my good friend) now and hasn't ever really had a real job. After he completed college, he decided to independently pursue his own interests and sort of realized that the whole educational path he had taken was really him just quickly absorbing other people's works. Striking out on new ground was far too uncomfortable for him. What was worse was that this totally destroyed his confidence.
As someone in a similar situation (You don't have to consider me a prodigy; I don't. But I got through school and college with minimal studying, by listening and learning), with similar problems (low confidence, burned out, etc), let me offer this for consideration: I have a lot of projects in the back of my mind--many, from tabletop games to video games to other software to computer hardware, fountains, architecture, writing, animation, and probably others I can't immediately think of. However, I don't know how to get anywhere, and critically, nobody is interested in helping me get where I want to go.
Education is a path to becoming an academic. The school system is NOT set up to help you with any particular project you may have in mind; it is set up to give you a solid foundation. For a great, great many people, education replaces inspiration, which is to say that you don't need to say, "You know what I want to learn? Arithmetic. That would help me solve this problem!" You don't have to go out of your way to learn math like a farm boy of the first century, who quite reasonably may never have needed it. You don't have to gain these skills by grit and willpower. However, when these skills are no longer an accomplishment, you DO need grit and willpower to take the next step.
More importantly, what you need to take the next step are people who know what you're capable of, know what you'd like to do, and are willing to help. Imagine if someone took one of my projects and said, "You know what? Let's run with this. I bet if you took classes to learn this, and I went over here to talk to these people, and I know some people over here that can help... maybe within a couple years we might have something to show to investors, and we can make a business out of it." That sort of confidence can't come from me. I'll work, I'll offer inspiration, I'll do all sorts of things, but everything I want to do is a project, and all of those projects are going to NEED other people. Before I can even ask for their help, I have to believe others will want the end result; I can't just look at them and say, "Yup. They'll want this. Come on everyone, trust me, we'll do it." That seems sleazy to me, or corrupt, or... I don't even know what.
How do you educate a prodigy? Find out where their sights are set, and help them along that road. If they have their sights on many things, help with that. Don't ever, ever tell them that when they reach maturity (ie leave college) and are on their own, their job is done. That's a stalling point, and I would imagine that a lot of people get stuck there.
The better question is, if it's publicly available, is he really disclosing it?
I disagree slightly. The simplicity is there, but it's not everything.
In my opinion, the thing the iPad had, which no other tablet until the Kindle Fire did, was an existing use case. If you buy an iPad, you are almost guaranteed to understand that you can buy and watch movies, music, and TV on it. This seems like a little thing, until you realize that for the non-techie consumer, that's the ONLY value to it at the beginning. Understanding what an app is, or how you would play a game on a touchscreen, is something you experiment with; if you don't like to experiment, you don't spend $500 on it.
Not only is the Fire not a $500 investment in experimentation, it starts with an existing use case, so you can justify buying it. I think it'll do better than most.
It makes perfect sense.
Let's say you were given a year to kill Hewlett-Packard.
The various media industries, when they're being selfish, say "Piracy" to mean "You made a copy when we asked you not to." Generally, the courts force this to only be a crime if you then share it with others. The existence of ROMs at all, even ones you dump yourself, are nevertheless piracy in that definition.
Now look at the logistics of it. At this point, they're not manufacturing these products anymore. Unless they remade games for a new device, there is no product you can buy from them anymore--you can only buy secondhand games and secondhand systems. You say you don't want to pirate, which for games that are currently being sold is marvelous. But when they aren't selling products to you, they aren't losing money if you pirate instead of buying secondhand. Understand, if they ever decided to release ROMs, they would release them along with first-party, copy-protected emulators, and that's an investment of time, manpower, and money in and of itself. (It does happen; the PSP for example emulates PlayStation games, which you can get from their store, if you can stomach going there after the security breach nonsense.)
If you want to support game developers or the industry, buy new products, whether it's games or licensed T-shirts. There's precious little to be found in emulation that could possibly help their bottom line.