In other news the Linux kernel doesn't fit on a floppy disk. I fail to get upset about 1.6MB of something doing something more intelligent than relying on 100s of customised scripts and dumping PID files somewhere.
It is incredibly common to see people who don't read the manual or refuse to to end up with issues around logging, daemons shutting down etc.
Systemd does a lot of things poorly but it's behaviour on starting / stopping daemons and logging is well documented and unfortunately also highly configurable. There are some definite bugs with mounting network filesystems during boot and the like, but whenever I hear about someone missing logs or having a daemon randomly disappear, that is entirely user / distribution maintainer error.
In my experience, the advice on Microsoft forums always boils down to the following anyway: Save all of your data an reinstall Windows from scratch.
MS never would say that. That would make sense, and fix the problem. MS's reps on the forums on the other hand will go out of their way to post long instructions to do something that is entirely nothing at all to do with your problem.
Sidenote: The one good thing MS did in Windows 10 is ensure the that nuclear option no longer deletes user data and can be doen with one click.
Yes and No, my experience has been mixed. Between my Surface Pro 3 and my wife's Surface Pro 4 and all the shitty hardware that comes with it, MS has been very good with support for the hardware on the devices. Both of our SPs have been replaced under warranty, we've gone through 4 pens and 3 keyboards between us too.
Software support from MS on the other hand is a miserable failure. Getting security patches is not support. It's base line minimum expectations. Their replies and presence in the forums are mostly windowdressing with MS's reps regularly offering suggestions that have absolutely zero to do with the questions users post.
Then there's software quality itself. For an entire generation I put up with problems on my SP3 being slow to wake when hitting the power button. This was entirely to do with the SP4 keyboard (initially listed as compatible with the SP3, and finally the only available accessory for the SP3) and it's shitty driver. Some users on reddit effectively reverse engineered the problem and had very detailed information about how and why the bug occurs. MS's response?... Well they fixed it when they released the SP5 and had to ship another driver to the SP3 users. They completely ignored users within support and within warranty for a simple driver fix for close to 18 months.
My reply to Microsoft no longer "helping" users on their forums,... thank god, users may get some proper advice now.
Possibly. But still the question is how much. Showing you're willing to ship something somewhere is quite different from actively doing business with that area.
As usual if the laws were black and white then the lawyers would be out of business.
Yes it does break that isolation. And it does so in a way that is almost impossible to exploit without someone having direct access to the computer already. Again if I were a cloud provider I would be pissed, general users, server administrators, and pretty much any scenario that doesn't involve handing your keyboard over to someone else while you leave them alone with your computer for a long time has nothing to worry about.
And even if they were more seriously exploitable, side channel attacks are still fundamentally different to the FDIV bug which was the processor not doing what it was supposed to.
Oh yeah Intel have a long history of management fuck-ups and their marketing is well and truly garbage directly contributing to killing some of their products.
But take off that tinfoil hat for a second and look at the history of it's processor bugs: - The FDIV bug: A processor doing a normal operation can return an incorrect result. This is a breaking bug unrelated to a design feature and a recall was issued. Business as usual. - The F00F bug: While the result of the processor, it only happens when it is fed a completely invalid instruction. It is not possible to test every possible combination of instructions against processors to see which will cause them to lockup, and why would it be expected that the processor receives such an instruction? The F00F bug is nothing compared to the many hundreds of errata that get published by ALL processor vendors detailing strange behaviour under certain conditions. If you don't use buggy software you won't hit this invalid instruction which has undocumented behaviour.
- Spectre: You write as if this was some nefarious bug that was introduced on purpose knowing the outcome. You write as if it actually affects people in meaningful ways. Take a deep breath, put the <b> tags down and let's see just what happened. A process used to speed up processors was put in place as part of the architecture long before side channel attacks were a thing demonstrated to work on CPUs. The bug affected multiple processors (SPARC, Powers and ARM's Cortex7 CPUs are affected by Spectre too). This is not a bug, it's a vulnerability exploiting a purposeful, documented and widely used feature. And who is affected? A few cloud providers. Whoop-de-do. If you get close enough to use Spectre on someone's computer then you already own them anyway.
Will Intel be allowed to profit? Why not? Do you punish car makers for producing vehicles that can be driven faster than the max speed limit leading to safety issues? There is absolutely no reason not to let Intel profit from this. To go after them at this point would be to basically say no one who programs for a living should ever turn a profit given the number of basic bugs that creep into most software. And while you try and strip Intel of profits, first prove to us how you were negatively impacted to the point where your purchasing decision would have been different given the advanced knowledge.
By that measure, so is burning gasoline. Carbon isn't created or destroyed, it's merely attached/detached from various other elements.
No it's not. The definition of being carbon neutral is cycling through the atmosphere. Gasoline is digging up sequestered carbon. That wouldn't otherwise cycle back in through the atmosphere. Breathing on the other hand puts CO2 in the atmosphere which gets taken out through the plants we eat.
Don't cherry pick. I just gave examples of things that could be considered defence against the legislation. Just because your website is in Spanish doesn't mean it's targeting EU people, but if your website is only in English its part of the argument against.
From outside. But if the element for country in the shipping destination and billing address forms contains elements referencing member states, that might count as "the mentioning of customers or users who are in the Union" per recital 23.
It's very rare to see any company do anything other than list all possible postal codes, including those belonging to countries where the USA has sanctions. Now if you specifically mention just EU countries, then you have a case for targetting.
Does having a processor process customers' payment count as "doing something"?
See above, does the processor cater to your customers? Or are you customers required to jump through hoops to use said processor, such as having their currency converted to another currency? Just because you use Paypal (or for the sake of the EU argument Adyen) doesn't mean you're catering to customers of every country where someone can log into said payment processor.
avoid making yourself a test case
I'm still trying to figure out how you, with such little presence inside the EU that you need representation (the original thing we're talking about here) can become a test case. You have as much chance at becoming a test case in this scenario than I do getting fined by the council of Seattle for smoking a joint in public on the streets of Amsterdam.
So on average, unless you are an athlete, every 2 years, you exhale a ton of CO2.
Which also means on average you consume a ton of CO2 sequested by whatever it is you ate. Now if only the production of what you ate didn't involve belching carbon to the air you would be CO2 neutral. But it's easier to get companies to stop wasting energy during food production than it is to get people to stop breathing.
It will be fun to see them tax that...
Taxes are a handle on the economy to enact policy. Did you elect a politician that promised they will stop people from breathing? More likely you enacted a mouthbreather.
Breathing is carbon neutral. While I pay a carbon tax on the gasoline I burn, I don't pay a carbon tax on the firewood I burn for heat., nor for the store bought charcoal I use for barbecuing.
Actually it's not. But depending on your food source the entire lifecycle may be carbon neutral. Breathing generates CO2 by inhaling O2, and your body then reacts O2 with glucose generating CO2 as a result, it doesn't just strip the other gasses out of the air. This is actually why if you hold your breath you feel the need to breath > buildup of CO2 in your blood (your body doesn't think it needs oxygen, it thinks it needs to expel CO2). We breath in 400ppm and breath out several percent CO2, the same percentage as we lost to O2 (20.9% in, around 19% out). Nitrogen and Argon stay pretty much the same on the way in and out.
However that CO2 you generated takes energy which your cells get from the glucose that was reacted, you get that glucose from food, and some of your food (especially greens) absorb that CO2 you exhale during photosynthesis while growing. Eating your greens is carbon neutral. Eating your steak, well you've moved the reaction down to another living animal, but the cow got its glucose from somewhere too.
The pot tax is one of the highest, the alcohol tax is crazy high, the gas tax is stupidly high, and when we get tabs affordable, switch to pay per mile and tax on car value.
It's almost like the taxes are levied specifically to get you to change certain practices.
Sorry, I don't know how much longer I can stay in this state
Then go smoke pot, and drown yourself in alcohol in another state. But please don't keep buying petrol, the environment is fucked enough as it is.
I'm in Europe. I have a credit card which when I go to use it I often take multiple guesses at the pin. My point exactly, you with your half a dozend credit cards fetishize borrowed capital. Much of the rest of the world use electronic transactions that clear on the spot even when we pay with our mobile phones.
In those places you're also most likely to find credit systems that don't store and forward transactions but rather process them instantly. In Australia credit card transactions would show up instantly on my account in a different colour as (pending), but none the less the transaction already affected the account balance.
It could also be a North American thing. I have a Citibank Visa card from America (corporate card) and I noticed that Citi often take a day or two for transactions to show up. That genuinely confused me the first couple of times I used it.
The power does not flow the other way, it flows the same way.
Consuming 2kW vs generating 2kW is not power flowing the same way. Re-read what I said.
Germany has the biggest solar installations per capita of the world.
Indeed. Germany has the biggest installed solar capacity per capita in the world. What it also has is that installed capacity in a very different way than most other countries with large reliance on industrial generation, e.g. solar farms, and large scale commercial installations. In actual number of installed solar systems Germany is on par with the likes of Australia, a country with 1/5th of the number of households.
Germany many generate the most solar, but you're far from the country with the most roof-top solar systems and end point generation systems. The very thing we are talking about. Heck when you concentrate production the way Germany does you specifically avoid the very issues we're talking about.
Article 3(2)(a) [gdpr-info.eu] states that "offering of goods and services [...] to such data subjects in the Union" is enough to make the GDPR apply.
Indeed it does. But just because you can buy something and get it shipped doesn't mean it's on offer to an EU customer. One legal analysis said that you actually need to put effort into targeting said customer. E.g. If you sell me something on ebay or from your other American store doesn't automatically put you in the line of fire for the GDPR. For that to apply you need to at least put some effort into your customers:
a) Do you collect taxes and report it to the EU state? If your customer is likely to have their shipment held up at customs for taxation then GDPR does not apply to you. b) Do you accept payment in Euros or is the customer required to have their bank convert it back to your home currency? c) Is your website in German? Or are you relying on customers to have proficiency in English? d) Are you shipping within the EU or from outside?
The the most obvious get out of jail card:
e) Do you actually have a subsidiary or presence in the EU. If not, then how is a law from another jurisdiction supposed to apply to you?
I've seen several analysis that basically summed up the GDPR as a senseless kneejerk reaction by a world not realising that just because you have a website, doesn't mean you are actually offering "to data subjects in the Union".
Remember you actually need to do something within a jurisdiction for that jurisdiction to apply or you need to fall afoul of laws on both sides of the legal border to create extradition. Which brings me to:
But when you wrote your comment, were you mostly referring to multibillion-dollar companies or to small businesses with annual turnover less than $10 million?
If you're a multi-billion dollar organisation you've got funds to not worry. If you're a small business with a turnover of less than $10million and you don't even have an office in the EU, relax. If you can't relax then get some different legal advice because the current one you're getting is making you afraid of being sued by your own shadow.
No they don't.. What happens to a payment when if the network is down?
Typically I don't part with money in that case. You can't store non-credit transactions for later which is why places that rely on that requirement don't accept debit cards. I would say that kind of transaction would happen maybe once ever few months for me usually when I'm travelling and need to hire a car or book a hotel. Around about that time I typically realise I forgot the pin number on my credit card.
As a matter of interest are you talking to yourself or is there actually another person still using ICQ? I'm struggling to remember my number, or even the email address I had back when it was popular.
I cannot speak to all blockchains, but the basic theory makes assumptions that hardware is a sticky and expensive thing, so the weight of many servers already dedicated to a blockchain will be too high a barrier to scale.
What hardware and where? Do you want to gain over 51% of power over Bitcoin? If it were available you could rent that kind of hasing power for $700k for one hour. And one hour is all you'll need to make off with more money than that.
Fortunately Bitcoin is too big to make that kind of computational power available for rent. Most companies with ASICs massively parallel processors don't offer those kinds of resources.
On the other hand Zencash was recently 51%ed and the attackers made off with $550000. If they used rented equipment for an hour the attack cost them less than $6000. Bitcoin gold suffered a 51% that magically generated $18m worth of the currency. That attack would currently theoretically cost $4000/h. Litecoin has been attacked in the past too (though with their current hash rate that would now be quite difficult). It seems that the typical targets of attacks are currencies with the equihash algorithm (does it sound like someone has some specific hardware somewhere they aren't using?) And coins that have a market cap >$100m
There's a lot to the equation. For instance you wouldn't attack Smartcoin despite you being able to rent the capacity to the tune of $1/h because it has such a pathetically small market cap that it is impossible to make off with any money. Remember this may be an attack against a currency, but in reality to make money you need to commit fraud against an exchange, otherwise how do you get good old American Dollars in the end.
The entirety of the Netherlands is growing tulips instead of food.
Flevoland is growing tulips. Actually not true. Noordoostpolder is growing tulips. That's a couple of hundred of sq km worth. The rest of the country on the other hand is not only growing enough food for itself but is also providing food for a fair chunk of the EU as one of the biggest food exporters in the world.
I hate cryptocurrencies as much as the next guy, but it helps your argument if you don't start the first sentence with senseless hyperbole.
but most publications at the time were at Intel's pocket and were trying to pass off that absolute turd Netburst architecture as gold
Dark black coloured glasses much? I remember building a computer back in that time. The publications most definitely didn't pull any punches when talking about how inferior Netburst was to the Athlon 64 and most of the talk was about how the Athlon 64 would change the world. And it did. About the only negative thing anyone said about AMD at the time was related to TPD, and that was a generation behind. The good old Athlon may have spanked the P3, but it screamed with the delight of a Dyson in need of a bearing change as it did.
Slashdot Mirror
It just worked before.
Someone put a fuckton of effort into making sure what little the system was capable of worked in your case. This was not a glowing review of sysvinit.
In other news the Linux kernel doesn't fit on a floppy disk. I fail to get upset about 1.6MB of something doing something more intelligent than relying on 100s of customised scripts and dumping PID files somewhere.
It is incredibly common to see people who don't read the manual or refuse to to end up with issues around logging, daemons shutting down etc.
Systemd does a lot of things poorly but it's behaviour on starting / stopping daemons and logging is well documented and unfortunately also highly configurable. There are some definite bugs with mounting network filesystems during boot and the like, but whenever I hear about someone missing logs or having a daemon randomly disappear, that is entirely user / distribution maintainer error.
In my experience, the advice on Microsoft forums always boils down to the following anyway: Save all of your data an reinstall Windows from scratch.
MS never would say that. That would make sense, and fix the problem. MS's reps on the forums on the other hand will go out of their way to post long instructions to do something that is entirely nothing at all to do with your problem.
Sidenote: The one good thing MS did in Windows 10 is ensure the that nuclear option no longer deletes user data and can be doen with one click.
Yes and No, my experience has been mixed. Between my Surface Pro 3 and my wife's Surface Pro 4 and all the shitty hardware that comes with it, MS has been very good with support for the hardware on the devices. Both of our SPs have been replaced under warranty, we've gone through 4 pens and 3 keyboards between us too.
Software support from MS on the other hand is a miserable failure. Getting security patches is not support. It's base line minimum expectations. Their replies and presence in the forums are mostly windowdressing with MS's reps regularly offering suggestions that have absolutely zero to do with the questions users post.
Then there's software quality itself. For an entire generation I put up with problems on my SP3 being slow to wake when hitting the power button. This was entirely to do with the SP4 keyboard (initially listed as compatible with the SP3, and finally the only available accessory for the SP3) and it's shitty driver. Some users on reddit effectively reverse engineered the problem and had very detailed information about how and why the bug occurs. MS's response? ... Well they fixed it when they released the SP5 and had to ship another driver to the SP3 users. They completely ignored users within support and within warranty for a simple driver fix for close to 18 months.
My reply to Microsoft no longer "helping" users on their forums, ... thank god, users may get some proper advice now.
What value is there in this article?
Same value as reading the Daily Mail, it is important to understand how stupid people think as you may inadvertently end up working for one.
Possibly. But still the question is how much. Showing you're willing to ship something somewhere is quite different from actively doing business with that area.
As usual if the laws were black and white then the lawyers would be out of business.
Yes it does break that isolation. And it does so in a way that is almost impossible to exploit without someone having direct access to the computer already. Again if I were a cloud provider I would be pissed, general users, server administrators, and pretty much any scenario that doesn't involve handing your keyboard over to someone else while you leave them alone with your computer for a long time has nothing to worry about.
And even if they were more seriously exploitable, side channel attacks are still fundamentally different to the FDIV bug which was the processor not doing what it was supposed to.
Oh yeah Intel have a long history of management fuck-ups and their marketing is well and truly garbage directly contributing to killing some of their products.
But take off that tinfoil hat for a second and look at the history of it's processor bugs:
- The FDIV bug: A processor doing a normal operation can return an incorrect result. This is a breaking bug unrelated to a design feature and a recall was issued. Business as usual.
- The F00F bug: While the result of the processor, it only happens when it is fed a completely invalid instruction. It is not possible to test every possible combination of instructions against processors to see which will cause them to lockup, and why would it be expected that the processor receives such an instruction? The F00F bug is nothing compared to the many hundreds of errata that get published by ALL processor vendors detailing strange behaviour under certain conditions. If you don't use buggy software you won't hit this invalid instruction which has undocumented behaviour.
- Spectre: You write as if this was some nefarious bug that was introduced on purpose knowing the outcome. You write as if it actually affects people in meaningful ways. Take a deep breath, put the <b> tags down and let's see just what happened. A process used to speed up processors was put in place as part of the architecture long before side channel attacks were a thing demonstrated to work on CPUs. The bug affected multiple processors (SPARC, Powers and ARM's Cortex7 CPUs are affected by Spectre too). This is not a bug, it's a vulnerability exploiting a purposeful, documented and widely used feature. And who is affected? A few cloud providers. Whoop-de-do. If you get close enough to use Spectre on someone's computer then you already own them anyway.
Will Intel be allowed to profit? Why not? Do you punish car makers for producing vehicles that can be driven faster than the max speed limit leading to safety issues? There is absolutely no reason not to let Intel profit from this. To go after them at this point would be to basically say no one who programs for a living should ever turn a profit given the number of basic bugs that creep into most software. And while you try and strip Intel of profits, first prove to us how you were negatively impacted to the point where your purchasing decision would have been different given the advanced knowledge.
Won't someone think of the coal miners!
By that measure, so is burning gasoline. Carbon isn't created or destroyed, it's merely attached/detached from various other elements.
No it's not. The definition of being carbon neutral is cycling through the atmosphere. Gasoline is digging up sequestered carbon. That wouldn't otherwise cycle back in through the atmosphere. Breathing on the other hand puts CO2 in the atmosphere which gets taken out through the plants we eat.
Don't cherry pick. I just gave examples of things that could be considered defence against the legislation. Just because your website is in Spanish doesn't mean it's targeting EU people, but if your website is only in English its part of the argument against.
From outside. But if the element for country in the shipping destination and billing address forms contains elements referencing member states, that might count as "the mentioning of customers or users who are in the Union" per recital 23.
It's very rare to see any company do anything other than list all possible postal codes, including those belonging to countries where the USA has sanctions. Now if you specifically mention just EU countries, then you have a case for targetting.
Does having a processor process customers' payment count as "doing something"?
See above, does the processor cater to your customers? Or are you customers required to jump through hoops to use said processor, such as having their currency converted to another currency? Just because you use Paypal (or for the sake of the EU argument Adyen) doesn't mean you're catering to customers of every country where someone can log into said payment processor.
avoid making yourself a test case
I'm still trying to figure out how you, with such little presence inside the EU that you need representation (the original thing we're talking about here) can become a test case. You have as much chance at becoming a test case in this scenario than I do getting fined by the council of Seattle for smoking a joint in public on the streets of Amsterdam.
The instruction set has nothing to do with clock speed.
well IBM power8 has 5GHz chip, what's Intel's problem
It's not Intel. It's those pesky customers who don't want a 190W TPD chip in their computers.
So on average, unless you are an athlete, every 2 years, you exhale a ton of CO2.
Which also means on average you consume a ton of CO2 sequested by whatever it is you ate. Now if only the production of what you ate didn't involve belching carbon to the air you would be CO2 neutral. But it's easier to get companies to stop wasting energy during food production than it is to get people to stop breathing.
It will be fun to see them tax that...
Taxes are a handle on the economy to enact policy. Did you elect a politician that promised they will stop people from breathing? More likely you enacted a mouthbreather.
Breathing is carbon neutral. While I pay a carbon tax on the gasoline I burn, I don't pay a carbon tax on the firewood I burn for heat., nor for the store bought charcoal I use for barbecuing.
Actually it's not. But depending on your food source the entire lifecycle may be carbon neutral. Breathing generates CO2 by inhaling O2, and your body then reacts O2 with glucose generating CO2 as a result, it doesn't just strip the other gasses out of the air. This is actually why if you hold your breath you feel the need to breath > buildup of CO2 in your blood (your body doesn't think it needs oxygen, it thinks it needs to expel CO2). We breath in 400ppm and breath out several percent CO2, the same percentage as we lost to O2 (20.9% in, around 19% out). Nitrogen and Argon stay pretty much the same on the way in and out.
However that CO2 you generated takes energy which your cells get from the glucose that was reacted, you get that glucose from food, and some of your food (especially greens) absorb that CO2 you exhale during photosynthesis while growing. Eating your greens is carbon neutral. Eating your steak, well you've moved the reaction down to another living animal, but the cow got its glucose from somewhere too.
The pot tax is one of the highest, the alcohol tax is crazy high, the gas tax is stupidly high, and when we get tabs affordable, switch to pay per mile and tax on car value.
It's almost like the taxes are levied specifically to get you to change certain practices.
Sorry, I don't know how much longer I can stay in this state
Then go smoke pot, and drown yourself in alcohol in another state. But please don't keep buying petrol, the environment is fucked enough as it is.
I'm in Canada with half a dozen credit cards
I'm in Europe. I have a credit card which when I go to use it I often take multiple guesses at the pin.
My point exactly, you with your half a dozend credit cards fetishize borrowed capital. Much of the rest of the world use electronic transactions that clear on the spot even when we pay with our mobile phones.
In those places you're also most likely to find credit systems that don't store and forward transactions but rather process them instantly. In Australia credit card transactions would show up instantly on my account in a different colour as (pending), but none the less the transaction already affected the account balance.
It could also be a North American thing. I have a Citibank Visa card from America (corporate card) and I noticed that Citi often take a day or two for transactions to show up. That genuinely confused me the first couple of times I used it.
The power does not flow the other way, it flows the same way.
Consuming 2kW vs generating 2kW is not power flowing the same way. Re-read what I said.
Germany has the biggest solar installations per capita of the world.
Indeed. Germany has the biggest installed solar capacity per capita in the world. What it also has is that installed capacity in a very different way than most other countries with large reliance on industrial generation, e.g. solar farms, and large scale commercial installations. In actual number of installed solar systems Germany is on par with the likes of Australia, a country with 1/5th of the number of households.
Germany many generate the most solar, but you're far from the country with the most roof-top solar systems and end point generation systems. The very thing we are talking about. Heck when you concentrate production the way Germany does you specifically avoid the very issues we're talking about.
Article 3(2)(a) [gdpr-info.eu] states that "offering of goods and services [...] to such data subjects in the Union" is enough to make the GDPR apply.
Indeed it does. But just because you can buy something and get it shipped doesn't mean it's on offer to an EU customer. One legal analysis said that you actually need to put effort into targeting said customer. E.g. If you sell me something on ebay or from your other American store doesn't automatically put you in the line of fire for the GDPR. For that to apply you need to at least put some effort into your customers:
a) Do you collect taxes and report it to the EU state? If your customer is likely to have their shipment held up at customs for taxation then GDPR does not apply to you.
b) Do you accept payment in Euros or is the customer required to have their bank convert it back to your home currency?
c) Is your website in German? Or are you relying on customers to have proficiency in English?
d) Are you shipping within the EU or from outside?
The the most obvious get out of jail card:
e) Do you actually have a subsidiary or presence in the EU. If not, then how is a law from another jurisdiction supposed to apply to you?
I've seen several analysis that basically summed up the GDPR as a senseless kneejerk reaction by a world not realising that just because you have a website, doesn't mean you are actually offering "to data subjects in the Union".
Remember you actually need to do something within a jurisdiction for that jurisdiction to apply or you need to fall afoul of laws on both sides of the legal border to create extradition. Which brings me to:
But when you wrote your comment, were you mostly referring to multibillion-dollar companies or to small businesses with annual turnover less than $10 million?
If you're a multi-billion dollar organisation you've got funds to not worry.
If you're a small business with a turnover of less than $10million and you don't even have an office in the EU, relax. If you can't relax then get some different legal advice because the current one you're getting is making you afraid of being sued by your own shadow.
No they don't.. What happens to a payment when if the network is down?
Typically I don't part with money in that case. You can't store non-credit transactions for later which is why places that rely on that requirement don't accept debit cards. I would say that kind of transaction would happen maybe once ever few months for me usually when I'm travelling and need to hire a car or book a hotel. Around about that time I typically realise I forgot the pin number on my credit card.
As a matter of interest are you talking to yourself or is there actually another person still using ICQ? I'm struggling to remember my number, or even the email address I had back when it was popular.
I cannot speak to all blockchains, but the basic theory makes assumptions that hardware is a sticky and expensive thing, so the weight of many servers already dedicated to a blockchain will be too high a barrier to scale.
What hardware and where? Do you want to gain over 51% of power over Bitcoin? If it were available you could rent that kind of hasing power for $700k for one hour. And one hour is all you'll need to make off with more money than that.
Fortunately Bitcoin is too big to make that kind of computational power available for rent. Most companies with ASICs massively parallel processors don't offer those kinds of resources.
On the other hand Zencash was recently 51%ed and the attackers made off with $550000. If they used rented equipment for an hour the attack cost them less than $6000. Bitcoin gold suffered a 51% that magically generated $18m worth of the currency. That attack would currently theoretically cost $4000/h. Litecoin has been attacked in the past too (though with their current hash rate that would now be quite difficult). It seems that the typical targets of attacks are currencies with the equihash algorithm (does it sound like someone has some specific hardware somewhere they aren't using?) And coins that have a market cap >$100m
There's a lot to the equation. For instance you wouldn't attack Smartcoin despite you being able to rent the capacity to the tune of $1/h because it has such a pathetically small market cap that it is impossible to make off with any money. Remember this may be an attack against a currency, but in reality to make money you need to commit fraud against an exchange, otherwise how do you get good old American Dollars in the end.
The entirety of the Netherlands is growing tulips instead of food.
Flevoland is growing tulips. Actually not true. Noordoostpolder is growing tulips. That's a couple of hundred of sq km worth. The rest of the country on the other hand is not only growing enough food for itself but is also providing food for a fair chunk of the EU as one of the biggest food exporters in the world.
I hate cryptocurrencies as much as the next guy, but it helps your argument if you don't start the first sentence with senseless hyperbole.
but most publications at the time were at Intel's pocket and were trying to pass off that absolute turd Netburst architecture as gold
Dark black coloured glasses much? I remember building a computer back in that time. The publications most definitely didn't pull any punches when talking about how inferior Netburst was to the Athlon 64 and most of the talk was about how the Athlon 64 would change the world. And it did. About the only negative thing anyone said about AMD at the time was related to TPD, and that was a generation behind. The good old Athlon may have spanked the P3, but it screamed with the delight of a Dyson in need of a bearing change as it did.