Pardon my retail ignorance, but the manufacturers can't just put Windows 7 on the machines?
I haven't bothered following the story, but if the past is any guide then MS won't let them. MS has a strong interest in selling their new shit instead of their old crap.[*]
[*] Although I admit that Windows 7 is almost usable. I wouldn't use it for my day-to-day work, but it's nowhere near as annoying as all the previous versions of Windows I've used. I'm guessing that that's why they made sure Windows 8 was a landmark new annoyance... got to get back to the basics, kind of thing.
I suspect smart phones and the like are doing more than anything else to kill the market for PCs. You don't need a PC to be a dog on the internet anymore.
Okay, fine, but show me another currency that has such wild yo-yo conversion rates and a financial advisor that suggests investing in it in the first place.
I always see what Cramer recommends, then do the opposite.
I know this sounds like trolling, but I am legitimately curious: is the value of a bitcoin somehow tied to the waste of processor cycles/energy that was put in to 'mining' it? Or is that energy expenditure accounted for anywhere in the bitcoin system? Because the whole system seems, to me, like an elaborate way of demonstrating the second law of thermodynamics by using up energy to essentially use entropy as currency.
Yes, yes, this is the foundation of the new field of thermodynomics. Starting from the basic reaction:
nothing --> entropy + bitcoin
it follows immediately, as you have observed, that there is a unit of monetary value equal to a unit of entropy, albeit with the opposite sign.
More importantly, it explains why the entropy of the universe is constantly increasing: the only way to get rid of entropy is to cancel it out with money, and no species intelligent enough to have money is willing to spend it that way, so as time goes the universe accumulates more and more entropy+money, or entroney as the thermodynomicists call it.
And since any intelligent species can be expected to accelerate the natural process, SETI is now converting their equipment to quit looking for radio signals and start looking for systems that have mostly been converted to entroney. (Those are the systems that we will want to visit first anyway, because we will be able to just harvest the accumulated money directly, rather than going through the whole bothersome colonial exploitation thing.)
I have applied for a patent on a device that burns paper money that you put into it, thereby producing even more money at the output.[1] My prototype just uses a CPU fan, but with cooling towers you should be able to do it on industrial scale. Though some of my colleagues have expressed concern that it will accelerate global warming if everyone starts doing it.
[1] You would think that by eliminating the money you would reduce entropy, but my key insight was that you can use low-value inflated money, which has more value as negentropy than its face value. The thermodynomic processes that allow that to come about are a very promising area of new research.
We really need a corollary for Godwin's Law adapted specifically to Bitcoin discussions: as soon as you say, "The US dollar doesn't have any intrinsic value either!", you lose.
Godwin's Law isn't actually about losing an argument; it simply predicts that the longer an Internet discussion goes on, the higher the probability that someone will bring up Hitler.
And in this case, it took exactly three steps to get from "Bitcoin" to "Hitler".
I find it particularly interesting when commenters will trot out their pet cause on completely unrelated topics. Take a deep breath. Calm down. Take a walk outside. You'll feel better without all this stress.
So objecting to crooked politicians is a "pet cause"?
Seriously, I'm getting fucking tired of companies slagging off at each other, with either aggressive or passive aggressive comments made between various CEOs or VPs or whoever thinks they're important enough to get the spotlight for a few minutes.
What do you expect them to do? Innovate, and sell us stuff that's actually useful?
The game isn't up, but their heyday seems to be past.
I heard a speaker a while back who had a view of waves in the digital industry. There was IBM. Then there was DEC. Then there was Microsoft. Then there was Amazon. Then there was Face book. Next there will be...?
Many of the "old" ones are still around, and still huge businesses. They just aren't viewed as the hot item / trendsetter anymore.
There is a relatively recent scam of announcing fake conferences, sometimes with the name of a real one, gathering the registration fees, and disappearing. Sometimes they steal the real conference's entire web site to make it look real.
One long-running conference shut down within the last year or so because the fake clones were having such a big impact that they couldn't get enough paper submissions or registrations anymore.
Medicine and medical research suffers from two problems:
1. Inherent difficulty, both technical (huge diversity and complexity of human physiology) and ethical (can't round up people to experiment on - at least not "in principle").
2. The medical-industrial complex that is the tangled mess of big pharma, academia, and regulators with huge amount of money slushing around.
The combination makes medicine and medical research particularly toxic to conducting good science. You tell me another field that comes even close.
I remember reading a few years ago that one of the top medical journals (New England, IIRC) started letting doctors publish review articles for drugs without mentioning that they were paid by the company that sells them.
Also, most drug testing in the USA is done by the company that wants to market it, which introduces the desire to suppress results that show that a drug is dangerous and/or ineffective. Kind of like the tobacco industry back in the day...
Infinite density = zero size and something with zero size no longer exists. If something has a presence in spacetime it will have some form of dimension. You can't have "something" that isn't actually there.
Not everyone thinks the mathematical singularity exists as a reality.
I'm guessing that some quantum effect limits how far it can collapse. Or maybe some kind of time dilation keeps it from ever completing.
How can you die from your own perspective? You can be about to die, surely going to die,... but your perspective doesn't get to make the actual transition.
TOS was terrible. I know I'm going to get hate for saying that, but it's truly unbearable crap. No-wonder that whole age bracket has an aversion to science.
Yeah, it should have been sophisticated, like today's television shows.
Slashdot Mirror
Pardon my retail ignorance, but the manufacturers can't just put Windows 7 on the machines?
I haven't bothered following the story, but if the past is any guide then MS won't let them. MS has a strong interest in selling their new shit instead of their old crap.[*]
[*] Although I admit that Windows 7 is almost usable. I wouldn't use it for my day-to-day work, but it's nowhere near as annoying as all the previous versions of Windows I've used. I'm guessing that that's why they made sure Windows 8 was a landmark new annoyance... got to get back to the basics, kind of thing.
I suspect smart phones and the like are doing more than anything else to kill the market for PCs. You don't need a PC to be a dog on the internet anymore.
a loss of almost half in real value.
Thus proving (like any currency, ultimately) that they have no value.
If it lost half of its real value, was that its "real" value to start with?
Okay, fine, but show me another currency that has such wild yo-yo conversion rates and a financial advisor that suggests investing in it in the first place.
I always see what Cramer recommends, then do the opposite.
I know this sounds like trolling, but I am legitimately curious: is the value of a bitcoin somehow tied to the waste of processor cycles/energy that was put in to 'mining' it? Or is that energy expenditure accounted for anywhere in the bitcoin system? Because the whole system seems, to me, like an elaborate way of demonstrating the second law of thermodynamics by using up energy to essentially use entropy as currency.
Yes, yes, this is the foundation of the new field of thermodynomics. Starting from the basic reaction:
nothing --> entropy + bitcoin
it follows immediately, as you have observed, that there is a unit of monetary value equal to a unit of entropy, albeit with the opposite sign.
More importantly, it explains why the entropy of the universe is constantly increasing: the only way to get rid of entropy is to cancel it out with money, and no species intelligent enough to have money is willing to spend it that way, so as time goes the universe accumulates more and more entropy+money, or entroney as the thermodynomicists call it.
And since any intelligent species can be expected to accelerate the natural process, SETI is now converting their equipment to quit looking for radio signals and start looking for systems that have mostly been converted to entroney. (Those are the systems that we will want to visit first anyway, because we will be able to just harvest the accumulated money directly, rather than going through the whole bothersome colonial exploitation thing.)
I have applied for a patent on a device that burns paper money that you put into it, thereby producing even more money at the output.[1] My prototype just uses a CPU fan, but with cooling towers you should be able to do it on industrial scale. Though some of my colleagues have expressed concern that it will accelerate global warming if everyone starts doing it.
[1] You would think that by eliminating the money you would reduce entropy, but my key insight was that you can use low-value inflated money, which has more value as negentropy than its face value. The thermodynomic processes that allow that to come about are a very promising area of new research.
We really need a corollary for Godwin's Law adapted specifically to Bitcoin discussions: as soon as you say, "The US dollar doesn't have any intrinsic value either!", you lose.
Godwin's Law isn't actually about losing an argument; it simply predicts that the longer an Internet discussion goes on, the higher the probability that someone will bring up Hitler.
And in this case, it took exactly three steps to get from "Bitcoin" to "Hitler".
Isn't there an ongoing debate whether bitcoin is a "commodity" or a "currency" or both?
Neither. It's just a bloody waste of CPU time.
I thought it was a scam to drive up Slashdot page hits.
US money also technically has a real value of 1/20 of a cent per bill, that doesn't stop us.
If people will trade real goods and services for currency, that is what it is worth.
Everything is worth exactly what someone else will give you for it.
There's an xkcd for that.
I find it particularly interesting when commenters will trot out their pet cause on completely unrelated topics.
Take a deep breath. Calm down. Take a walk outside. You'll feel better without all this stress.
So objecting to crooked politicians is a "pet cause"?
Ok, compared to whatever Facebook Home is, I'm willing to stipulate that Windows Phone is the real thing.
The question that immediately comes to mind is, the real what?
The real attempt to be the latest gimmick that everyone thinks they have to have.
Seriously, I'm getting fucking tired of companies slagging off at each other, with either aggressive or passive aggressive comments made between various CEOs or VPs or whoever thinks they're important enough to get the spotlight for a few minutes.
What do you expect them to do? Innovate, and sell us stuff that's actually useful?
Nah, that's too much trouble.
I think the game is up for Microsoft.
The game isn't up, but their heyday seems to be past.
I heard a speaker a while back who had a view of waves in the digital industry. There was IBM. Then there was DEC. Then there was Microsoft. Then there was Amazon. Then there was Face book. Next there will be...?
Many of the "old" ones are still around, and still huge businesses. They just aren't viewed as the hot item / trendsetter anymore.
Who in the software / social networking / consumer electronics industry is any different?
Sounds like bad LoTR fanfic poetry.
Or a copy of a real turd. Tough call.
But when you figure out which one is the original, make sure you give Microsoft the credit for it.
There is a relatively recent scam of announcing fake conferences, sometimes with the name of a real one, gathering the registration fees, and disappearing. Sometimes they steal the real conference's entire web site to make it look real.
One long-running conference shut down within the last year or so because the fake clones were having such a big impact that they couldn't get enough paper submissions or registrations anymore.
Medicine and medical research suffers from two problems:
1. Inherent difficulty, both technical (huge diversity and complexity of human physiology) and ethical (can't round up people to experiment on - at least not "in principle").
2. The medical-industrial complex that is the tangled mess of big pharma, academia, and regulators with huge amount of money slushing around.
The combination makes medicine and medical research particularly toxic to conducting good science. You tell me another field that comes even close.
I remember reading a few years ago that one of the top medical journals (New England, IIRC) started letting doctors publish review articles for drugs without mentioning that they were paid by the company that sells them.
Also, most drug testing in the USA is done by the company that wants to market it, which introduces the desire to suppress results that show that a drug is dangerous and/or ineffective. Kind of like the tobacco industry back in the day...
I read that as "hatebook".
Where you 'enemy' people instead of 'friend' them...
I'm also curious how the gravity gets *out*.
Infinite density = zero size and something with zero size no longer exists. If something has a presence in spacetime it will have some form of dimension. You can't have "something" that isn't actually there.
Not everyone thinks the mathematical singularity exists as a reality.
I'm guessing that some quantum effect limits how far it can collapse. Or maybe some kind of time dilation keeps it from ever completing.
Shock at being in a black hole in the first place.
Shock at the radiation that blasted away her face plate.
Shock that we were able to afford to get her that far from Earth, when we're shutting down airports right now.
And then her body would be torn asunder.
Shock at the amount of poop accumulating in your spacesuit.
Only from his own perspective.
How can you die from your own perspective? You can be about to die, surely going to die, ... but your perspective doesn't get to make the actual transition.
An intelligent person comes to recognize that having a LITERATURE DEGREE isn't a route to financial security.
Wow. That's some insight.
The only interesting thing about the article is that the writer didn't figure it out *before* investing 10 years in her education.
It would be different if it was a field where the bottom fell out of the market just before you graduated.
TOS was terrible. I know I'm going to get hate for saying that, but it's truly unbearable crap. No-wonder that whole age bracket has an aversion to science.
Yeah, it should have been sophisticated, like today's television shows.