Or the more neutral - or should I say, opportunistic: It's a stock, the value bounces up and down and if you buy right and sell right you can make some money off of it, but you should never put in more than you can stand to lose.
I think that (like shares and commodities) its use as a something you can trade in speculatively, is secondary.
If you own a share in a business, you get dividends and sometimes a say in how its run. It's also something you can sell, perhaps at a profit. If you own a ton of bricks, or aluminium, or wheat you can use it to make something. It's also something you can sell, perhaps at a profit.
A Bitcoin's primary use is as *currency* - its utility is that you can cheaply and conveniently transfer wealth electronically. That you can also speculate with it, is a secondary property.
The people who see the least value in Bitcoin, are those who live in places where conventional banking makes transferring money easy and cheap (e.g. if you have a UK bank account, it's free to make a BACS transfer), and who seldom need to transfer money abroad. And people who are too lazy to look at how much PayPal etc. skim off.
You do pay. All those devices that play/create h.265, have a licence payment to the MPEG Group burned into their retail price.
To keep the price down, Raspberry Pi disables the MPEG-2 hardware decoder that happened to be present on their SOAC. You can buy a licence and enable it for £2.40. If they'd kept it enabled throughout, the base price for the Pi would have been that much more expensive.
£2.40 isn't much to you. But Firefox's purpose is to make Web content available to as many people worldwide as possible, including people for whom £2.40 is a big deal.
Presumably if you burned the product locally, you could recover almost all of the water and nutrients. Water is obviously necessary to provide the hydrogen in hydrocarbons, but you get water back when you burn it in oxygen. Solid macronutrients like potassium and phosphorous don't go anywhere; they're in the ash/residue/smoke.
The people on the left and the people on the right are really less different than we're lead to believe. This division is important to maintain to a certain group of people. There are people who pull the strings of the people at both the top of the Republican and Democrat parties and these are the same people pulling the strings of both parties. By keeping the left/right battle alive they ensure that both Republicans and Democrats win elections and that no true challenge to their power arises. Why do so many large corporations, banks, and people like Ben Bernanke contribute to both parties? Exactly.
Hint: the Republican and Democrat parties are both on the right.
Mmm, but neither should they be entities that pay employees handsome salaries, to produce a load of stuff that the employee themselves thereafter own and may independently resell "in the same of the mighty dollar".
If these professors were campaigning that their work should be made public domain, or have an open source license slapped on it, then fine.
But it appears they want the university to pay them while they write books, then to be able to sell those books to another party.
It sounds less if you call it £11/month, from every *household* with a TV.
Should it be the government's job to extract £145/year from everyone with a TV so that it can be given to an extremely unrepresentative group to make programmes of interest to minorities?
Yes, for the same reason that it's the government's job to fund libraries. Libraries lead to better educated citizens (on average) who tend to drag society up with them. Ditto "good" television.
Your final point -- that billions need to die -- has a certain (not particularly original) logic to it, and it's a scenario that most people find, um, unpalatable. The most palatable solution I can think of is for everyone, right now, to start breeding less. Replacing yourself should be the absolute maximum. However, that ain't going to happen.
Your characterisation of the environmental movement, however, is deeply flawed. Not surprisingly, since you call them "ecologists". An "ecologist" is someone who studies ecology; an academic pursuit, not a political position or a belief system.
"Environmentalism" covers a broad variety of positions too. There are people who call themselves environmentalists because they object to windfarms on the grounds that they spoil the view. There are people who call themselves environmentalists because they're concerned about the welfare of newts living on a site where a new road is planned. And there are people who call themselves environmentalists because they're concerned about CO2 levels throwing the global climate into chaos. Those people are not the same. Those concerned about CO2 levels generally couldn't give a toss about some wind turbines spoiling a view. Those concerned about wind turbines spoiling the view tend to be climate change deniers.
Me, I believe CO2 levels will continue to rise. Droughts, flooding, loss of coastal areas will result. It will result in migration, and where people can't agree on how to divvy up the remaining resources, conflict and strife. It will be unpleasant, and I would like to see solutions that make it less unpleasant.
I reckon so, yes. If by some miracle we ended up with a population of 4 billion, none starving, but with a significantly lower average intelligence than today... that would be better than a population of 12 billion geniuses, fighting over too few resources.
You're absolutely right about that. But the position (I'm not sure whether it's *my* position) is that we're going to have to move NYC (and London, and Rio, etc.) eventually, whatever happens. So why not stop throwing money at preventing the problem, and start throwing money at mitigating it instead?
James Lovelock is convinced that CO2 has passed the tipping point, the damage can't be undone. He's suggested abandoning all efforts to stop/slow it, and go all out in building flood defences, inland settlements, developing crops that work in the new conditions, etc.
right now we have very talented (and intelligent) women not giving birth due to not wanting to deal with the problems of being pregnant.
Good. Fewer people is fewer people. Don't worry, we've a long way to go before there are so many people refraining from breeding that we can't find "talented (and intelligent)" offspring anywhere.
because it has a world-wide reputation for accurate, relatively unbiased, and high quality reporting.
A reputation that is has long-since lost the justification for. Maybe it's unbiased compared to Fox News, but that only shows how utterly pathetic mainstream US media is.
What TV news broadcaster do you feel is less biased than the BBC? I can't think of one.
BBC news has repeatedly been shown to be biased. [...] The quality of other programmes is generally very poor.
In both cases, compared to what other broadcaster?
I don't see a commercial broadcaster in the UK, waiting in the wings, that's more balanced than the BBC. All newspapers have a bias (which their readership likes), and so would any commercial news broadcaster that popped up to fill the void left by the BBC.
The BBC is usually accused of bias by right-wingers who would like it to be more sympathetic to right-wing views. As a left-winger, I find it often too sympathetic towards right-wing views. That's a sign of balance.
As for quality of other programmes, well, some of them are pretty poor. But not as poor as what's on the other channel!
As it happens (as it 'appens) although I strongly support the BBC, I think Top of the Pops, an echo chamber for music that was already popular, is exactly the kind of thing that should be on a commercial station.
But do you imagine for one moment that if, in the 1970s, a commercial broadcaster had handled Top of the Pops, and the country's main pop music radio station, that Savile and the others would have had less access to young girls, or taken any less advantage of them? No. That unfortunate culture was nothing to do with the BBC's funding model.
Since when do "state run" and "quality" belong together?
BBC.
In the UK, switching from BBC1 (main state-funded TV channel) to ITV1 (main commercial broadcaster) is like going from a Michelin-starred restaurant to McDonald's.
State-funded is different from state-run. Allegedly this Greek broadcaster is the former, but I don't know how far it swung in which direction.
I love the BBC; I love its funding model. But I love it least when it's doing programming for minorities, and least when it's trying to compete with commercial broadcasters.
A commercial broadcaster could bankroll Strictly Come Dancing, or even Doctor Who so the BBC should step aside and let that happen.
A commercial broadcaster is unlikely to produce something like Precision: the Measure of all Things. I would rather have a state mandated licence fee, and have that kind of thing made, than not.
Without the BBC there would be no source of quality British content. You could argue that in the absence of the BBC, someone else would fill that demand -- but I'd be pretty pessimistic about that happening.
Slashdot Mirror
Or the more neutral - or should I say, opportunistic: It's a stock, the value bounces up and down and if you buy right and sell right you can make some money off of it, but you should never put in more than you can stand to lose.
I think that (like shares and commodities) its use as a something you can trade in speculatively, is secondary.
If you own a share in a business, you get dividends and sometimes a say in how its run. It's also something you can sell, perhaps at a profit.
If you own a ton of bricks, or aluminium, or wheat you can use it to make something. It's also something you can sell, perhaps at a profit.
A Bitcoin's primary use is as *currency* - its utility is that you can cheaply and conveniently transfer wealth electronically. That you can also speculate with it, is a secondary property.
The people who see the least value in Bitcoin, are those who live in places where conventional banking makes transferring money easy and cheap (e.g. if you have a UK bank account, it's free to make a BACS transfer), and who seldom need to transfer money abroad. And people who are too lazy to look at how much PayPal etc. skim off.
You do pay. All those devices that play/create h.265, have a licence payment to the MPEG Group burned into their retail price.
To keep the price down, Raspberry Pi disables the MPEG-2 hardware decoder that happened to be present on their SOAC. You can buy a licence and enable it for £2.40. If they'd kept it enabled throughout, the base price for the Pi would have been that much more expensive.
£2.40 isn't much to you. But Firefox's purpose is to make Web content available to as many people worldwide as possible, including people for whom £2.40 is a big deal.
Who said it was mysterious or magical? Everyone knows wood is a biofuel.
How does that devalue biofuels, or take away from the achievement of creating more useful and efficient burnable crops?
Presumably if you burned the product locally, you could recover almost all of the water and nutrients. Water is obviously necessary to provide the hydrogen in hydrocarbons, but you get water back when you burn it in oxygen. Solid macronutrients like potassium and phosphorous don't go anywhere; they're in the ash/residue/smoke.
Shorthand for "she showed interest in basic science at school".... and now she has made an original discovery of her own.
You went to one bad library, and therefore all of them suck?
I went to my local library at 9:30am the other week, to kill time before a dentist's appointment (usually if I go to the library it's on a weekend).
The study area was fully occupied with people studying in silence.
So by virtue of the university being "not an Ayn Rand entity", the relationship between a professor and a university is:
- we give you a salary
- you do whatever it is you fancy
- you sell the outcome of that effort to a third party
I don't see who gains from that - except the professor.
The people on the left and the people on the right are really less different than we're lead to believe. This division is important to maintain to a certain group of people. There are people who pull the strings of the people at both the top of the Republican and Democrat parties and these are the same people pulling the strings of both parties. By keeping the left/right battle alive they ensure that both Republicans and Democrats win elections and that no true challenge to their power arises. Why do so many large corporations, banks, and people like Ben Bernanke contribute to both parties? Exactly.
Hint: the Republican and Democrat parties are both on the right.
Mmm, but neither should they be entities that pay employees handsome salaries, to produce a load of stuff that the employee themselves thereafter own and may independently resell "in the same of the mighty dollar".
If these professors were campaigning that their work should be made public domain, or have an open source license slapped on it, then fine.
But it appears they want the university to pay them while they write books, then to be able to sell those books to another party.
You can be arrogant and correct at the same time.
Er, this is about material created by professors -- that is, people being paid by the university.
My employer owns the copyright on work I produce on their time. What's different about universities.
Contracts, I suppose. So these professors should check their contracts before signing them.
Thanks for reading past my typo.
It sounds less if you call it £11/month, from every *household* with a TV.
Should it be the government's job to extract £145/year from everyone with a TV so that it can be given to an extremely unrepresentative group to make programmes of interest to minorities?
Yes, for the same reason that it's the government's job to fund libraries. Libraries lead to better educated citizens (on average) who tend to drag society up with them. Ditto "good" television.
Unfortunately for the rich, "hosed" poor people can get a bit uppity and make life uncomfortable for them.
Eh? I couldn't manage without three mouse buttons in Windows, today. The scroll wheel, of course, doubles as a button.
Middle-click is "paste" in an Xterm.
Your final point -- that billions need to die -- has a certain (not particularly original) logic to it, and it's a scenario that most people find, um, unpalatable. The most palatable solution I can think of is for everyone, right now, to start breeding less. Replacing yourself should be the absolute maximum. However, that ain't going to happen.
Your characterisation of the environmental movement, however, is deeply flawed. Not surprisingly, since you call them "ecologists". An "ecologist" is someone who studies ecology; an academic pursuit, not a political position or a belief system.
"Environmentalism" covers a broad variety of positions too. There are people who call themselves environmentalists because they object to windfarms on the grounds that they spoil the view. There are people who call themselves environmentalists because they're concerned about the welfare of newts living on a site where a new road is planned. And there are people who call themselves environmentalists because they're concerned about CO2 levels throwing the global climate into chaos. Those people are not the same. Those concerned about CO2 levels generally couldn't give a toss about some wind turbines spoiling a view. Those concerned about wind turbines spoiling the view tend to be climate change deniers.
Me, I believe CO2 levels will continue to rise. Droughts, flooding, loss of coastal areas will result. It will result in migration, and where people can't agree on how to divvy up the remaining resources, conflict and strife. It will be unpleasant, and I would like to see solutions that make it less unpleasant.
I reckon so, yes. If by some miracle we ended up with a population of 4 billion, none starving, but with a significantly lower average intelligence than today... that would be better than a population of 12 billion geniuses, fighting over too few resources.
... and isn't biofuel effectively solar power (burning biomass produced by photosynthesis). So *that*'s nuclear power?
And isn't oil just biofuel, concentrated by geological processes? So that's nuclear power too?
Aaargh!
You're absolutely right about that. But the position (I'm not sure whether it's *my* position) is that we're going to have to move NYC (and London, and Rio, etc.) eventually, whatever happens. So why not stop throwing money at preventing the problem, and start throwing money at mitigating it instead?
James Lovelock is convinced that CO2 has passed the tipping point, the damage can't be undone. He's suggested abandoning all efforts to stop/slow it, and go all out in building flood defences, inland settlements, developing crops that work in the new conditions, etc.
right now we have very talented (and intelligent) women not giving birth due to not wanting to deal with the problems of being pregnant.
Good. Fewer people is fewer people. Don't worry, we've a long way to go before there are so many people refraining from breeding that we can't find "talented (and intelligent)" offspring anywhere.
because it has a world-wide reputation for accurate, relatively unbiased, and high quality reporting.
A reputation that is has long-since lost the justification for. Maybe it's unbiased compared to Fox News, but that only shows how utterly pathetic mainstream US media is.
What TV news broadcaster do you feel is less biased than the BBC? I can't think of one.
BBC news has repeatedly been shown to be biased.
[...]
The quality of other programmes is generally very poor.
In both cases, compared to what other broadcaster?
I don't see a commercial broadcaster in the UK, waiting in the wings, that's more balanced than the BBC. All newspapers have a bias (which their readership likes), and so would any commercial news broadcaster that popped up to fill the void left by the BBC.
The BBC is usually accused of bias by right-wingers who would like it to be more sympathetic to right-wing views. As a left-winger, I find it often too sympathetic towards right-wing views. That's a sign of balance.
As for quality of other programmes, well, some of them are pretty poor. But not as poor as what's on the other channel!
As it happens (as it 'appens) although I strongly support the BBC, I think Top of the Pops, an echo chamber for music that was already popular, is exactly the kind of thing that should be on a commercial station.
But do you imagine for one moment that if, in the 1970s, a commercial broadcaster had handled Top of the Pops, and the country's main pop music radio station, that Savile and the others would have had less access to young girls, or taken any less advantage of them? No. That unfortunate culture was nothing to do with the BBC's funding model.
Since when do "state run" and "quality" belong together?
BBC.
In the UK, switching from BBC1 (main state-funded TV channel) to ITV1 (main commercial broadcaster) is like going from a Michelin-starred restaurant to McDonald's.
State-funded is different from state-run. Allegedly this Greek broadcaster is the former, but I don't know how far it swung in which direction.
I love the BBC; I love its funding model. But I love it least when it's doing programming for minorities, and least when it's trying to compete with commercial broadcasters.
A commercial broadcaster could bankroll Strictly Come Dancing, or even Doctor Who so the BBC should step aside and let that happen.
A commercial broadcaster is unlikely to produce something like Precision: the Measure of all Things. I would rather have a state mandated licence fee, and have that kind of thing made, than not.
Without the BBC there would be no source of quality British content. You could argue that in the absence of the BBC, someone else would fill that demand -- but I'd be pretty pessimistic about that happening.