LOL you know something like 95% of the country is urban or suburban.
80.7%, actually. As of 2016.
Rural doesn't equal yokel so close enough for government work.
You claimed 95% of the country is urban or suburban. The actual number is much lower. You didn't say anything about "yokels", which is good because that's not a well-defined category, just a condescending insult made by foolish people who have no idea who feeds them.
Are you suggesting that all of those '2nd Amendment activists who were all responsible gun owners' who surrounded him simply... froze, and didn't attempt to engage the killer... or call 911?
It's not clear to me whether anyone else was around. If there was, I'm sure they called 911 to get help for the victims, but assuming Routh dropped the guns and left immediately there would have been no legal justification for them to engage him. Citizens may use deadly force to stop an imminent threat of death or serious injury and for no other reason. Police have a little more latitude in the law (they can use deadly force to stop a fleeing felon) and a lot more in practice, but citizens who kill a fleeing, unarmed criminal can be prosecuted for murder.
a post on the Chromium Gerrit reveals that devices running Linux 3.14 or older will miss out.
So? Why would not you just download the source-code and compile it yourself?
You can. Put it in dev mode and go nuts. You'll lose all of the nice Chromebook security guarantees, of course, and your machine will be running a system that is custom, untested and therefore likely to be less reliable, but that's a perfectly acceptable tradeoff for many power users.
Stocks are an invesatment. That is what you explained.
You claimed that the stock markets work as investing "on the basis of someone dumber than me will buy it for more than I paid". Those were asackett's words about cryptocurrency investment, and you claimed that's how stock markets work. That claim is false.
The stockmarket is a place where you buy and sell anything.
No, it's a place where you buy and sell part ownership of publicly-traded companies.
And the target is to sell for a higher price than what you bought it for.
Not always. Sometimes the target is to buy a stock that will generate an ongoing dividend stream -- this is especially true of blue chips.
But even if we ignore that and assume that the goal is always to buy low and sell high, that still doesn't support your claim that you're buying on the basis of "someone dumber than me will buy it for more than I paid". Non-dividend stocks increase in value not because people get dumber, but because the value of the stock actually increases, because the company makes and sells stuff, generating revenue which is invested in growth (or buybacks). So if you buy a stock now and sell it ten years from now you expect to get more money from it because the company is actually worth more, so your share of the company has increased in value. Not because you expect people ten years from now to be dumber.
Please do not confuse the two. They are unrelated.
I'm sorry, it's not clear to me what two things you're referring to.
Many people are investing in blockchain, of which currency is but one piece. At least try to acknowledge the entire space when you start throwing out bullshit.
I said nothing about blockchain. I spoke only about current cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies aren't necessarily blockchain-based (see Chaum's eCash for an early non-blockchain example), and blockchains aren't usable only for cryptocurrencies. They're really not that closely related. Also, buying cryptocurrencies does nothing to invest in the general concept of blockchains... or even to invest in the general notion of cryptocurrencies. When you buy BTC, you're buying BTC. No more, no less.
You're a retard and have no idea what decentralized cryptocurrencies were created for, how they're used, valued, adopted into economies, etc.
I know exactly what they were created for, how they are (and are not) used in practice, how they are valued, how they have (and have not) been adopted into economies. Far better than you do, I (very strongly) suspect.
but investing in anything on the basis of "someone dumber than me will buy it for more than I paid" always leads to the greatest number of people learning the hard way that they're the dumber someones.
You are aware that is how the stockmarkets work, right?
No, it is not.
When you invest in stocks, you're buying a share of a (hopefully) productive company which is making and selling stuff, contributing to the economy and thereby generating profits for you. Some of those companies distribute your share of those profits in the form of dividends, others plow the profits into growth or stock repurchase plans, increasing the value of the shares you hold. Either way, you're buying a chunk of an enterprise you expect to be productive and therefore give you a positive return.
Sure, stock markets have ups and downs, sometimes running values above their realistic levels, and then correcting back downward, but over time and over a broad enough portfolio of stocks, you can absolutely expect positive returns on your investment. Not because you can sell to people dumber than you, but because you're buying pieces of real, productive enterprises that generate real value.
Cryptocurrencies are not the same. To the extent that cryptocurrencies are currencies, they're like "investing" in any other currency -- speculating on the relative strengths of different segments of the overall economy, which are wildly unpredictable and provide no engine of long-term predictable gains like that of healthy companies. Trading in "real" currencies takes two forms: arbitrage which attempts to profit from short-term changes and serves to provide liquidity for currency exchanges while smoothing out spurious differences, and hedging, which helps to limit the effects of currency swings on companies that trade in multiple currencies. No on "invests" in currencies by buying and holding (well, other than central banks, which do it for reasons other than generating profits), because there's no reason to believe that will work.
The reason people have "invested" in cryptocurrencies is because they have not been behaving like currencies. But there's also no real growth engine behind them beyond pure speculation: buying on the basis that "someone dumber than me will buy it for more than I paid". There was one reason to expect the continual increase in cryptocurrency values: the fact that most of them (especially BTC) have a hard upper limit on the number of coins that can be created. But the problem with that "hard upper limit" is that there is no limit on the number of cryptocurrencies that can be created. Not only that, but they don't actually work well as currencies, for numerous reasons.
Facebook is an opt-in service not mandated by anyone or anything. Don't want to use it, then don't. The only time you "need" Facebook is if you're dealing with public relations, and even then, you're not using Facebook for socialising but for promoting.
A Chinese citizen does not have the same freedoms. Facebook and China are not comparable in any way.
I think the idea that this is going to happen is laughable, but it's worth pointing out that if the Facebook trustworthiness score were to be used like the Chinese "Social Credit" score, it wouldn't be necessary to force people to use it. All that would be required is for various entities to begin relying on the score to make decisions about whether or not to trust someone. In such a world, someone who refuses to use Facebook would be distrusted by anyone who relies on the trust score. If you wanted to be trusted, you'd need to participate, much the way that if you want to be able to borrow money to buy a house you generally need to build a history of borrowing and repayment on smaller loans first.
One of the unfortunate effects of the switch from analog to digital TV in hilly/mountainous areas is that lots of areas that had analog coverage have no digital coverage. My home is in such an area. If coverage were improved, I'd put up an antenna. Perhaps this is happening in other places and driving antenna sales?
As for the "nicer experience", that's highly subjective. Some people might say the sound of a roaring V8 is a nicer experience. Is it worth an extra $50,000? Yes, but only to people like you who have money to burn.
Well, my Model S cost $42K, so there's no "extra $50K" here.
But FWIW, my perception is that even at full/new price, the Model S is worth what it costs. I like my LEAF; it's why I've owned two of them, but the Tesla is a much better car.
My LEAF was $35K (new) and my Tesla was $42K (used). So, not so much different there for me at least.
Well, I guess in practice I only spent about $20K for the LEAF, since I leased it and then bought it off the lease after it had depreciated much more than Nissan had expected. But the Tesla is easily three times the car the LEAF is, if not more.
I own one of each, and there is a world of difference between them.
Oh really? How much less time do you spend commuting now that you have the Model S?
I spend a lot less time worrying about when and where to charge, and whether I need to take a different car that day because the LEAF won't go far enough. But the difference is a lot more than just range. The Tesla is a much nicer experience... and that's saying something since the LEAF is more enjoyable to drive than most ICEVs I've had.
Or by "world of difference" you mean its ability to show off how rich you are?
That is actually the biggest negative with the Tesla. I'm not a flashy person and I don't care for all of the attention the Tesla gets. But it's by far the nicest-driving and most pleasant vehicle I've ever owned, so I'm willing to put up with that.
They are a company that makes money by pimping vast amounts of personal data about you and everyone you know to advertisers.
Google does not sell user data, nor even loan or rent it out (the implication one would take from "pimping"). Advertisers do not get any information about you or anyone you know from Google.
So did the people who worked at Enron so I'm not seeing much validity in your argument. Good people often work for bad organizations.
Enron was a case where a very small number of people -- just the financial types -- were the only ones who needed to know what was going on. What Google is accused of is very different. Vast numbers of Google engineers would have to be involved in most of what Google is often accused of.
Could not disagree more and I don't think your argument is a reasonable one at all. If censorship is bad you don't eliminate it by facilitating censorship. So by censoring they are reducing censorship? That circular reasoning right there.
Only if you don't think it through. It makes sense if Google can offer a service that is less censored than the existing homegrown search engines. Google is staffed primarily by people who oppose censorship and wish to decrease it. Do you think the same is true of Baidu?
If they're concerned about moral and ethical issues why the hell do they work for Google?
Because Google is a rather moral and ethical company. You obviously disagree but you might want to consider that Google employees have much better visibility into company actions than you do. I'll bet that if you listed all of the immoral and unethical things you think Google does or has done, many of them would simply be untrue (there's a lot of misinformation floating around), and the rest would be things that reasonable people can disagree on.
Actually, I think this question about censorship in China is one that reasonable people can disagree on. I appreciate and agree with the goals of the protesters, but I think they're making perfect the enemy of good. It's better to provide a censored search engine in China than to provide no search engine in China, from an ethical perspective. It allows Google to understand the precise parameters of Chinese censorship, and to carefully push the boundaries in ways that local Chinese companies might not. It allows Google to become a force for reducing censorship in China. Oh, and also to make money, which is the primary goal of any business, of course. Which isn't to say that it should be allowed to override other goals, like ethical behavior, but most of the time there is no ethical or moral conflict with making money, because the best way to do it is by selling people something they want at a price they want to pay for it.
I am proud to say that Debian has been my distro of choice for 20 of those 25 years.
Happy, happy birthday, Debian! Here's to 25 more!
Hear, hear!
I haven't been using Debian as long as you (only ~20 years), but I'm happy to say it's still my OS of choice... and the one I'm using to type this post.
That's right. This kind of rule, in effect, would force everyone to grossly overstate the value of everything and pay ludicrous taxes to avoid unnecessary risk of a sudden forced move.
Taxes wouldn't be any more ludicrous than they are now (you can decide if they're ludicrous now). When imposing this system, you'd just need to lower the property tax rate. This is a normal thing that happens all the time; assessors adjust the property tax mill rate based on the total value of all of the assessed property, specifically so that when they do broad revisions to property values, people don't get hit with big bills.
So you'd just need to ask everyone to revise their property value, then adjust the mill rate to produce the expected total property tax revenue. It would be the case that people would pay more or less taxes based on their willingness to relocate, but I don't think the differences would be huge and that doesn't seem inherently unfair... in fact it seems to better serve the fundamental reason for having property taxes in the first place.
You do realize that socialism is mainstream in Europe, right? I'm looking around and I don't see any gulags here.
And capitalism is also mainstream in Europe. Markets are somewhat regulated, but the bulk of decisionmaking about where to invest resources is left to the owners of capital.
For that matter, the US also has quite a lot of socialism. Less than most European countries, but more than many nations in the world.
Really, this is a false dichotomy. Capitalism vs communism, now there's a real conflict, since the ownership of the means of production is completely different. But capitalism and socialism can and do coexist relatively nicely; capitalistic organization of the means of production and relatively uncontrolled markets ensure that lots of wealth is generated and there's plenty of room for upward mobility, while socialistic redistribution ensures that those who don't own the capital and don't fight their way into the upper classes don't starve.
Honestly, the whole industrialized world, including the US, has settled on capitalism with a socialist safety net as the best economic structure. We only debate about the scope, scale and structure of the safety net.
Slashdot Mirror
For those who are wondering, here's how it works:
For those who are really wondering how it works, I believe this paper is the relevant one: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/7...
1Password encrypts everything at rest, and you have to put in your master password to access your database.
The same is true of Chrome's password database, though it doesn't auto-lock.
If a Chromebook servers the author's needs, then all the power to him. I just can't wait to see him melt down when his internet connection goes down.
Many Chrome apps work fine offline.
Do Chromebooks have vi, emacs, and bash?
Yes, as mentioned in the summary.
Wrong. These cars all have drivers in them. These are not self-driving cars.
So you're saying it's Waymo's drivers who struggle with left turns and merging?
He's saying they still have a human babysitter behind the wheel.
And how does he know that?
Wrong. These cars all have drivers in them. These are not self-driving cars.
So you're saying it's Waymo's drivers who struggle with left turns and merging?
LOL you know something like 95% of the country is urban or suburban.
80.7%, actually. As of 2016.
Rural doesn't equal yokel so close enough for government work.
You claimed 95% of the country is urban or suburban. The actual number is much lower. You didn't say anything about "yokels", which is good because that's not a well-defined category, just a condescending insult made by foolish people who have no idea who feeds them.
LOL you know something like 95% of the country is urban or suburban.
80.7%, actually. As of 2016.
Are you suggesting that all of those '2nd Amendment activists who were all responsible gun owners' who surrounded him simply... froze, and didn't attempt to engage the killer... or call 911?
It's not clear to me whether anyone else was around. If there was, I'm sure they called 911 to get help for the victims, but assuming Routh dropped the guns and left immediately there would have been no legal justification for them to engage him. Citizens may use deadly force to stop an imminent threat of death or serious injury and for no other reason. Police have a little more latitude in the law (they can use deadly force to stop a fleeing felon) and a lot more in practice, but citizens who kill a fleeing, unarmed criminal can be prosecuted for murder.
So? Why would not you just download the source-code and compile it yourself?
You can. Put it in dev mode and go nuts. You'll lose all of the nice Chromebook security guarantees, of course, and your machine will be running a system that is custom, untested and therefore likely to be less reliable, but that's a perfectly acceptable tradeoff for many power users.
Stocks are an invesatment. That is what you explained.
You claimed that the stock markets work as investing "on the basis of someone dumber than me will buy it for more than I paid". Those were asackett's words about cryptocurrency investment, and you claimed that's how stock markets work. That claim is false.
The stockmarket is a place where you buy and sell anything.
No, it's a place where you buy and sell part ownership of publicly-traded companies.
And the target is to sell for a higher price than what you bought it for.
Not always. Sometimes the target is to buy a stock that will generate an ongoing dividend stream -- this is especially true of blue chips.
But even if we ignore that and assume that the goal is always to buy low and sell high, that still doesn't support your claim that you're buying on the basis of "someone dumber than me will buy it for more than I paid". Non-dividend stocks increase in value not because people get dumber, but because the value of the stock actually increases, because the company makes and sells stuff, generating revenue which is invested in growth (or buybacks). So if you buy a stock now and sell it ten years from now you expect to get more money from it because the company is actually worth more, so your share of the company has increased in value. Not because you expect people ten years from now to be dumber.
Please do not confuse the two. They are unrelated.
I'm sorry, it's not clear to me what two things you're referring to.
Many people are investing in blockchain, of which currency is but one piece. At least try to acknowledge the entire space when you start throwing out bullshit.
I said nothing about blockchain. I spoke only about current cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies aren't necessarily blockchain-based (see Chaum's eCash for an early non-blockchain example), and blockchains aren't usable only for cryptocurrencies. They're really not that closely related. Also, buying cryptocurrencies does nothing to invest in the general concept of blockchains... or even to invest in the general notion of cryptocurrencies. When you buy BTC, you're buying BTC. No more, no less.
You're a retard and have no idea what decentralized cryptocurrencies were created for, how they're used, valued, adopted into economies, etc.
I know exactly what they were created for, how they are (and are not) used in practice, how they are valued, how they have (and have not) been adopted into economies. Far better than you do, I (very strongly) suspect.
Crypto is like investing in a stock with an infinity price to earnings ratio.
You mean "Cryptocurrency is like..."
"Crypto" is short for "cryptography" and has been for decades. Please help fight the redefinition.
but investing in anything on the basis of "someone dumber than me will buy it for more than I paid" always leads to the greatest number of people learning the hard way that they're the dumber someones.
You are aware that is how the stockmarkets work, right?
No, it is not.
When you invest in stocks, you're buying a share of a (hopefully) productive company which is making and selling stuff, contributing to the economy and thereby generating profits for you. Some of those companies distribute your share of those profits in the form of dividends, others plow the profits into growth or stock repurchase plans, increasing the value of the shares you hold. Either way, you're buying a chunk of an enterprise you expect to be productive and therefore give you a positive return.
Sure, stock markets have ups and downs, sometimes running values above their realistic levels, and then correcting back downward, but over time and over a broad enough portfolio of stocks, you can absolutely expect positive returns on your investment. Not because you can sell to people dumber than you, but because you're buying pieces of real, productive enterprises that generate real value.
Cryptocurrencies are not the same. To the extent that cryptocurrencies are currencies, they're like "investing" in any other currency -- speculating on the relative strengths of different segments of the overall economy, which are wildly unpredictable and provide no engine of long-term predictable gains like that of healthy companies. Trading in "real" currencies takes two forms: arbitrage which attempts to profit from short-term changes and serves to provide liquidity for currency exchanges while smoothing out spurious differences, and hedging, which helps to limit the effects of currency swings on companies that trade in multiple currencies. No on "invests" in currencies by buying and holding (well, other than central banks, which do it for reasons other than generating profits), because there's no reason to believe that will work.
The reason people have "invested" in cryptocurrencies is because they have not been behaving like currencies. But there's also no real growth engine behind them beyond pure speculation: buying on the basis that "someone dumber than me will buy it for more than I paid". There was one reason to expect the continual increase in cryptocurrency values: the fact that most of them (especially BTC) have a hard upper limit on the number of coins that can be created. But the problem with that "hard upper limit" is that there is no limit on the number of cryptocurrencies that can be created. Not only that, but they don't actually work well as currencies, for numerous reasons.
Facebook is an opt-in service not mandated by anyone or anything. Don't want to use it, then don't. The only time you "need" Facebook is if you're dealing with public relations, and even then, you're not using Facebook for socialising but for promoting.
A Chinese citizen does not have the same freedoms. Facebook and China are not comparable in any way.
I think the idea that this is going to happen is laughable, but it's worth pointing out that if the Facebook trustworthiness score were to be used like the Chinese "Social Credit" score, it wouldn't be necessary to force people to use it. All that would be required is for various entities to begin relying on the score to make decisions about whether or not to trust someone. In such a world, someone who refuses to use Facebook would be distrusted by anyone who relies on the trust score. If you wanted to be trusted, you'd need to participate, much the way that if you want to be able to borrow money to buy a house you generally need to build a history of borrowing and repayment on smaller loans first.
One of the unfortunate effects of the switch from analog to digital TV in hilly/mountainous areas is that lots of areas that had analog coverage have no digital coverage. My home is in such an area. If coverage were improved, I'd put up an antenna. Perhaps this is happening in other places and driving antenna sales?
The 2018 Leaf has a 150 mi range
My LEAF is a 2012.
As for the "nicer experience", that's highly subjective. Some people might say the sound of a roaring V8 is a nicer experience. Is it worth an extra $50,000? Yes, but only to people like you who have money to burn.
Well, my Model S cost $42K, so there's no "extra $50K" here.
But FWIW, my perception is that even at full/new price, the Model S is worth what it costs. I like my LEAF; it's why I've owned two of them, but the Tesla is a much better car.
Nissan is nowhere close to Tesla.
Especially in terms of price.
My LEAF was $35K (new) and my Tesla was $42K (used). So, not so much different there for me at least.
Well, I guess in practice I only spent about $20K for the LEAF, since I leased it and then bought it off the lease after it had depreciated much more than Nissan had expected. But the Tesla is easily three times the car the LEAF is, if not more.
I own one of each, and there is a world of difference between them.
Oh really? How much less time do you spend commuting now that you have the Model S?
I spend a lot less time worrying about when and where to charge, and whether I need to take a different car that day because the LEAF won't go far enough. But the difference is a lot more than just range. The Tesla is a much nicer experience... and that's saying something since the LEAF is more enjoyable to drive than most ICEVs I've had.
Or by "world of difference" you mean its ability to show off how rich you are?
That is actually the biggest negative with the Tesla. I'm not a flashy person and I don't care for all of the attention the Tesla gets. But it's by far the nicest-driving and most pleasant vehicle I've ever owned, so I'm willing to put up with that.
Have you driven a Nissan LEAF? Have you driven a Tesla Model S?
I own one of each, and there is a world of difference between them. Nissan is nowhere close to Tesla.
They are a company that makes money by pimping vast amounts of personal data about you and everyone you know to advertisers.
Google does not sell user data, nor even loan or rent it out (the implication one would take from "pimping"). Advertisers do not get any information about you or anyone you know from Google.
So did the people who worked at Enron so I'm not seeing much validity in your argument. Good people often work for bad organizations.
Enron was a case where a very small number of people -- just the financial types -- were the only ones who needed to know what was going on. What Google is accused of is very different. Vast numbers of Google engineers would have to be involved in most of what Google is often accused of.
Could not disagree more and I don't think your argument is a reasonable one at all. If censorship is bad you don't eliminate it by facilitating censorship. So by censoring they are reducing censorship? That circular reasoning right there.
Only if you don't think it through. It makes sense if Google can offer a service that is less censored than the existing homegrown search engines. Google is staffed primarily by people who oppose censorship and wish to decrease it. Do you think the same is true of Baidu?
If they're concerned about moral and ethical issues why the hell do they work for Google?
Because Google is a rather moral and ethical company. You obviously disagree but you might want to consider that Google employees have much better visibility into company actions than you do. I'll bet that if you listed all of the immoral and unethical things you think Google does or has done, many of them would simply be untrue (there's a lot of misinformation floating around), and the rest would be things that reasonable people can disagree on.
Actually, I think this question about censorship in China is one that reasonable people can disagree on. I appreciate and agree with the goals of the protesters, but I think they're making perfect the enemy of good. It's better to provide a censored search engine in China than to provide no search engine in China, from an ethical perspective. It allows Google to understand the precise parameters of Chinese censorship, and to carefully push the boundaries in ways that local Chinese companies might not. It allows Google to become a force for reducing censorship in China. Oh, and also to make money, which is the primary goal of any business, of course. Which isn't to say that it should be allowed to override other goals, like ethical behavior, but most of the time there is no ethical or moral conflict with making money, because the best way to do it is by selling people something they want at a price they want to pay for it.
I am proud to say that Debian has been my distro of choice for 20 of those 25 years.
Happy, happy birthday, Debian! Here's to 25 more!
Hear, hear!
I haven't been using Debian as long as you (only ~20 years), but I'm happy to say it's still my OS of choice... and the one I'm using to type this post.
That's right. This kind of rule, in effect, would force everyone to grossly overstate the value of everything and pay ludicrous taxes to avoid unnecessary risk of a sudden forced move.
Taxes wouldn't be any more ludicrous than they are now (you can decide if they're ludicrous now). When imposing this system, you'd just need to lower the property tax rate. This is a normal thing that happens all the time; assessors adjust the property tax mill rate based on the total value of all of the assessed property, specifically so that when they do broad revisions to property values, people don't get hit with big bills.
So you'd just need to ask everyone to revise their property value, then adjust the mill rate to produce the expected total property tax revenue. It would be the case that people would pay more or less taxes based on their willingness to relocate, but I don't think the differences would be huge and that doesn't seem inherently unfair... in fact it seems to better serve the fundamental reason for having property taxes in the first place.
You do realize that socialism is mainstream in Europe, right? I'm looking around and I don't see any gulags here.
And capitalism is also mainstream in Europe. Markets are somewhat regulated, but the bulk of decisionmaking about where to invest resources is left to the owners of capital.
For that matter, the US also has quite a lot of socialism. Less than most European countries, but more than many nations in the world.
Really, this is a false dichotomy. Capitalism vs communism, now there's a real conflict, since the ownership of the means of production is completely different. But capitalism and socialism can and do coexist relatively nicely; capitalistic organization of the means of production and relatively uncontrolled markets ensure that lots of wealth is generated and there's plenty of room for upward mobility, while socialistic redistribution ensures that those who don't own the capital and don't fight their way into the upper classes don't starve.
Honestly, the whole industrialized world, including the US, has settled on capitalism with a socialist safety net as the best economic structure. We only debate about the scope, scale and structure of the safety net.