There's absolutely no reason for higher mod scores except to have a "popularity contest," and that's not what good moderation is about
Actually, being able to easily see the best comments in a 1000-comment thread would be useful. Other commenting platforms have this feature and it works really well. One thing it does is make the time and subthread of posting completely irrelevant. Currently, +5 posts at the bottom of a story are read far less often than those at the top, I believe.
The key point is the 'popularity contest' and 'best' part of it. If the moderation process is unable to provide accurate ratings, the final 'ranking' will be inaccurate and unusable. Otherwise, it makes sense to include a 'sort by highest rated (post/thread)' functionality.
People don't always have time for that or might not want to undo their moderations in the thread.
Although I'm not sure GPs proposal is the best implementation of it, there needs to be an outlet for the feeling of disagreement with the content of a post. Even 90% true and insightful posts evoke a negative reaction if they do not align with your own views. We're only humans, after all.
In a sense, agreement with the content of a post is a different dimension than the technical quality of it. Ideally, the moderation system should reflect that. It may prove to be too complex (although if anyone would embrace slightly increased complexity for greatly increased functionality, it would be Slashdotters), but one could imagine having to indicate agreement with the content for all moderations (+1 Insightful, Disagree slightly, for instance), making moderation a two step action.
The (Android) BlackBerry Priv gives us a glimmer of hope. It's not a proper landscape slider, but at least it's a hardware slider. Let\s hope it will be wildly successful.
It's not. The whole 'bullets flying' and 'limitless number of bad guys' bullshit came out of your keyboard, not mine. Don't pretend that didn't happen.
If you put your money in bitCoin, dogeCoin, dinfinityCoin, whateverCoin, and if it's ripped off, it's gone. That's pretty much what I started out saying.
Again, nobody is saying otherwise or has said otherwise in this thread. Stop repeating irrelevant truths. It's just noise in this thread.
The article is actually all about stealing from the bank's customers.
Yes, that is what electronic bank robberies always amount to, be they of Bitcoin or of traditional currency. Only counting people stealing assets from the corporations themselves at this point would be stupid, as there is no meaningful equivalent in Bitcoin-land. Electronic money is weird.
Also, the stats you provided don't show shit
Yes, they do, given the above. (1) gives a clear and quantified indication of how physical bank robberies are becoming less common. (2) gives exact, authoritative and up to date statistics on (attempts at) physical bank robberies. (3) gives exact statistics on (attempts at) electronic bank robberies.
Your big takeaway (hadn't you've been so obtuse) could have been that attempts at electronic bank robberies are a magnitude more common than physical bank robberies.
It becomes really hard to stick by this comment, given the stats: "I never said that they can only be robbed physically, even though it still is the most popular method." Unless you have stats to prove otherwise, I conclude that you were wrong in saying the above.
Note also that the quoted average amount of money stolen in a physical bank robbery is $4000. The money they lose due to electronic robberies is a much bigger problem than what is pretty much a rounding error for them.
Yes, real banks get robbed, but that takes some real time and effort and most of the time the robbers get caught. In contrast, the risk-to-reward ratio for virtual currency is so unbalanced that it's a natural target with minimal risks. No bullets flying around, no get-away cars, no bank guards, no logistics about hauling the cash away, no dye-packets to worry about. It's like a crime made in heaven.
Note how you the contrast you present completely focuses on the physical nature. Had you have said that banks have better digital security than some crappy Bitcoin-exchange there would have been no issue. To say that you didn't imply that the 'real time and effort' had to do with 'bullets flying around, get-away cars, bank guards, hauling the cash away, dye-packets' is simply disingenuous.
The difference is that regardless of how the bank is robbed, I'll still get my money back.
This is still irrelevant to this thread, as I pointed out before.
Virtual currencies do have some serious, unavoidable problems inherent
Nobody in this thread has said otherwise (although the 'unavoidable' part of it is debatable). You don't seem to be very good at discussing. You shouldn't just randomly insert new subtopics and pretend they are a reply to what the other party said.
That should be the main response to this idea. It hinges on this completely retarded statement: "The private document was likely shared among other conspirators [via or stored using sharing services of big (US-based) companies]"
Honestly, which serious bad guy would be stupid enough to share or store 'Instructions.for.Executing.Terror.Attack.docx' using Google fucking Drive? Additionally, the point of using email drafts is that they are never sent, which means that they only ever exist in a single account and which renders the proposal completely ineffective.
Even if this is implemented (if it isn't already in some form) and (some of) the bad guys are not already operating in a way that circumvents it, it would be absolutely trivial to start circumventing it for them. Private torrents, Bittorrent sync and the like, private FTP servers, private email servers, OwnCloud, some random small webhoster in Bumblefuckland, etc. The list of 'ways to share files securely, privately and easily' is pretty much endless. Only if you think along the lines of "Wow, everybody is using cloud based file sharing nowadays, surely the bad guys will too. File sharing == Google Drive/iCloud sharing; there is no other way" does this harebrained idea make sense.
You do realize that the money in my account is backed by the institution, right? And you do realize that the institution or the FDIC or the government will replace my money if it's stolen?
Yes, I do, but it is irrelevant to the point I was making. You painted a very outdated picture of bank robberies with 'bullets flying around' and I corrected you (in a needlessly snarky way, admittedly). The idea that banks can only be 'robbed' physically is simply wrong.
Works exactly the same?
Yes. I was pointing out your flawed logic, not stating that normal currencies and bitcoin-like currencies work exactly the same. The notion that bitcoin-like currencies are different because the good guy (exchange) providers to bad guy hackers-ratio is low is nonsense. Again: exactly the same holds for normal currencies.
Virtual currencies do have inherent problems and to deny that is to deny reality
I said:
I'm not saying Bitcoin (etc) does not have inherent problems
But perhaps you weren't responding to what I said anymore. I don't know.
Anyway, when talking about inherent problems, you need to imagine a situation in which normal banks start providing Bitcoin exchanges and accounts, and governments approaching Bitcoin like a normal currency. In such a situation Bitcoin would still have inherent problems, but none of the issues you've mentioned.
No bullets flying around, no get-away cars, no bank guards, no logistics about hauling the cash away, no dye-packets to worry about. It's like a crime made in heaven.
I don't have the answers (if there really are any) but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the problems inherent in virtual currencies.
You do realize that normal banks also have websites, right? And that the money in your bank account isn't actually comprised of bills sitting in a locker? Bank 'robberies' nowadays happen in a very different way than they used to, but they still happen. The thing with normal banks is that they are enormous institutions with huge budgets for security (for obvious reasons).
"Look at it this way: there are maybe a half-dozen banks in your country, but there are essentially a limitless number of bad guys out there who, from the safety of their basements, can spend all the time in the world thinking up ways to crack your system."
Works exactly the same. I'm not saying Bitcoin (etc) does not have inherent problems, but the lack of dependable professional exchanges/centralized storage facilities is not an inherent one.
Additional info as to which encoders they used: "HEVC HM Reference Software Codebase, Version 12.1. [Online]. Available: http://hevc.hhi.fraunhofer.de/... " "AVC JM Reference Software Codebase, Version 18.5. [Online]. Available: http://iphome.hhi.de/suehring/... "
Also, my experience with x265 encodes have been that (dark) low detail areas tend to look terrible, whereas everything else looks extremely good given the bitrate (be it high or low). I remember reading that this was a known (and non-trivial) issue in the x265 implementation at the time.
I have the Priv and the phone is hardware-wise indeed very good, with the exception of the front-cam (and in some devices [maybe just the first batch due to production issues?] physical gaps due to sloppy margins)
Firmware-wise they have kept to their promise of monthly updates, which does feel secure. Pretty much all the (minor) firmware additions to Android are good and well executed (picture password is a great feature, as is operation with the flip case and double tap to wake). I don't care that much for the 'productivity edge', but I can see how it might be useful to many people.
Software-wise I'm not a fan (and never was, btw). The Blackberry Hub and their camera app seem to be of mediocre quality, which is not that surprising, considering that this is their first real venture into Android coding. The camera app applies way too much noise reduction, which leads many (daytime!) images found on the web taken with the Priv to look 'cartoony' in low detail areas, so I just use third party camera apps. The Blackberry Hub was a battery hog when I hadn't disabled it.
I do believe the software will get much better, especially considering this news of the focus on Android. Given that and how they're starting out on Android, I think Blackberry may actually turn out to produce the best vendor apps and firmwares of all the Android handset manufacturers out there.
So you don't believe that yellow stains can be just fat buildup (which TSP excels at removing)? Try looking at an old pillowcase. No sir, you are wrong and are letting a specific bit of knowledge close your mind to other possibilities. Everything I said in my previous post is still as true as it was when it actually happened.
Seconded. It also works wonders for laundry, which suffers from the same issues.
One of my recurring problems was yellow staining on the armpits of (white) shirts (which would also make the shirt smell bad when worn really really quickly). Turns out it was just oil buildup which wasn't being washed away by the crippled detergents we now have (and which provided a safe little feeding ground for bacteria). I soaked the affected shirts in a solution with a tablespoon of TSP and detergent pre wash and voila. Now I just add some TSP about every three washes to prevent buildup and I haven't seen (or smelled!) any stains since.
Added bonus is that my laundry now feels clean and crisp post wash.
Exactly. From the abstract: "Geek engagement is found to be associated with elevated grandiose narcissism, extraversion, openness to experience, depression, and subjective well-being across multiple samples."
They really went out of their way to find the most inflammatory 'interpretation' of the study they could come up with.
Therein lies your answer. The only missing part in your appreciation of the matter is how much more slowly.
Humans can be dipshits, but they're pretty predictable. After all, biologically, we're still pretty much slightly more advanced naked apes. Painful but true. Our (biological) mental capabilities as a species and as an individual are very stable and thus, even for the greatest villain, we can come up with a model of his/her mind and find some way to deal with him/her (if only by coming together and collectively working against said villain).
Sufficiently advanced AI would not be bound by a 7kg lump of processing power running on <50watt of electrical power. It would not have to evolve its hardware or software through painstakingly slow and archaic processes, but could do so in fractions of seconds in a massively parallel way. Given enough possibilities to branch out and incorporate resources an AI being could be at rat level when we go to sleep and be orders of magnitude more intelligent, powerful and advanced than any of us when we wake up.
In reality, we should not really be that afraid that AI will destroy us. We should be afraid that it will render us obsolete.
Don't change the subject. Man up and admit you were wrong.
I get that in your little world, analogies don't exist.
No, you don't. That is a (false) loaded statement. I'm very good with analogies. That is why I can spot a shitty one a mile away.
It's "different".
No. I said 'very different'. Learn to quote someone. The 'very' implies that the difference is too big to allow the analogy to work. Simple.
The lack of incentives to cut costs are still there. The tragedy of the commons is still there.
No, I have already provided reasoning and a counterexample which proves you wrong.
Good, put that in a post.
I did. Learn to read and stay on a subject instead of changing it all the time.
Quality of service is not in isolation a measure of efficiency.
It's not. That is why I never said it was. Strawman. Again.
show a case where this actually happened with a numerical metric for quality of service that isn't laughable.
Pretty much all telecom privatizations. Longer customer service waiting times, lower customer satisfaction, artificially inflated prices. It's harder to find a case where that didn't happen.
We also have a far larger scale of failure too.
Stop changing the fucking subject. I remind you at this point that your idea that businesses are efficient is unproven. Screw your (completely baseless) 'larger scale of failure' bullshit.
Amazing, you are still pulling this shit. Now, it's the "unreliable to some extent" bit which is set.
No. Again, you are the only one talking in binary. It is still a fallacy and it makes you look like an idiot. The point was and is that you can't say "government is unreliable" (or worse: "all governments are unreliable") because that reduces the appreciation of unreliability to a false dichotomy. The ultimate irony here is that in being contrarian you have lost your way so much that you actually subsequently continue with arguing against your own point and for my original point:
"Good, the next step is understanding that broadly stating that 'governments' are unreliable or incapable of spending money in the right way is just scapegoating and pointing in the wrong direction. The point here is that all institutions are unreliable to some extent."
"Second, unreliability and all these synonyms are a matter of degree. Just because two things are unreliable doesn't mean that they are equally unreliable. Here as in your other two posts which mention this matter, you ignore degree and continue to ignore degree."
But it is good to see that you finally agree with me. I take it you will use your newfound insight to stay away from saying meaningless things like "I am implying that all governments are unreliable" and will replace them with "I am implying all governments are unreliable to some extent. As are private entities. I do believe that private entities are more reliable than public entities, but this is based mostly on a gut feeling and not really on science, or any substantial evidence, really."
Well, they can't be any dumber than you.
There is at least a 99% chance that they are. But that is as much besides the point as your silly ad hominem.
So why do they think that taxation is theft and all that, when they're getting all this wonder stuff from Kansas? Maybe it's because either Kansas public sugar isn't that awesome or that what they do get has nothing to do with what they pay.
That has nothing to do with the article (which it's plain to see you haven't read). You're just randomly stringing words together.
Here, I assume something (government spending is awesome and you get payback for
I find it bizarre you would even resort to this in support of uninformed personal opinion. Science doesn't help you when you have no evidence. Nor does Wikipedia have useful information on someone's personal mental and emotional state. It's not even wrong.
You are a special snowflake, I get it. Your mind does not work like that of other humans.
Not interested.
Still failing basic arithmetic, eh? If I have 10 apples and I put 5 of those apples in a huge pile of apples, what part of my apples have I put in the pile? I didn't think it would have to come to this.
Certainly, by the time we get to a large country, we have plenty of people who will be assholes to someone they don't even know and will never meet.
Exactly. Your analogy was shit to the point of being completely unusable.
I think I read in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] that this is bullshit. It was, like, science.
I already explained to you why the Tragedy of the Commons does not apply.
The more considerable inefficiency of government
Unsaid, unproven and thus inadmissible. It is a fallacy, specifically: a loaded statement. (Technically, the opposite is starting to become apparent. In many places where privatization has been attempted costs have gone down, but simultaneously the quality of service has gone down faster, leading to a far worse ratio than when the 'inefficient' government ran that part of the sector)
Everything has the "not working properly" bit set.
No. You are the one making this black-and-white (the fallacy of the excluded middle / false dichotomy). I used logic that is much closer to reality and thus a better basis for reasoning, namely fuzzy logic: "all institutions are unreliable to some extent".
I remind you at this point that your idea that businesses are efficient is unproven. A specific example that very probably influences your view on the matter is that of IT-project fuckups. Businesses all across the world fuck up shittons of IT-projects, but the overwhelming majority of fuckups in that area you hear about is a government IT-project failing or going way over budget. Your human brain then, using the availability heuristic, concludes that businesses never fuck up IT-projects and governments do so all the time.
That is the wrong conclusion.
Food is important too.
Really? That is your defense for your analogy? Food is important too? Unbelievable.
As to an example of "costs pooled" and people making more costly decisions that shove cost on others? Tax avoidance is a big example.
That is not what I asked you. Read. "Hell, tons of managers in companies are insulated from the consequences of their own bad decisions and those decisions are puny compared to the ones taken on a national level. But I take it you have an alternative form of 'government' where 'cost is pooled' and everybody making decisions directly feels the effects of those decisions?"
If all this government spending is so awesome, everyone could be contributing more income. But they don't. And the huge reason why is that a dollar sent to your friendly, neighborhood government is not a dollar efficiently spent on the science or infrastructure that you want.
Wrong. This is what we call begging the question. (Some) People don't want to pay more taxes because they are shortsighted and have a skewed view of reality. It doesn't help when assholes start screaming bullshit like "tax is theft!" and "I'm working for the government for two days a week!" It's quite plain to see that countries with very low taxes are either tax havens for the very wealthy without a meaningful economy or straight up shit holes. Read this:
Respectively: no, no, and the (terrible) execution of it does not define socialism.
More importantly: You entered the term into the discussion. You chose to use the most dire depiction of it as the definition. Nothing in Jim Sadler's post implied that we should let people starve. If that is what socialism is to you, then obviously Jim Sadler was not talking about 'socialism'.
In simpler terms: you created and attacked a straw man. A classic and egregious fallacy in (your) reasoning.
I think that was a little bit more complicated than 'European peacemakers did nothing'. There were a lot of geopolitical things going on, in a large part driven by the people and their representatives not wanting to be the first or main player in yet another grueling war (which was very very fresh in everyone's mind and again, very grueling). It was (clearly) a shortsighted way of looking at matters, but to say that it was driven by a desire for 'peacemaking' is equally shortsighted.
It's obviously not entirely comparable, but a majority of American citizens supported pulling troops out of Iraq. You could construe it so that these 'peacemakers' are to blame for ISIS arising, but I'd say that that would be a flagrant misrepresentation of history.
Slashdot Mirror
There's absolutely no reason for higher mod scores except to have a "popularity contest," and that's not what good moderation is about
Actually, being able to easily see the best comments in a 1000-comment thread would be useful. Other commenting platforms have this feature and it works really well. One thing it does is make the time and subthread of posting completely irrelevant. Currently, +5 posts at the bottom of a story are read far less often than those at the top, I believe.
The key point is the 'popularity contest' and 'best' part of it. If the moderation process is unable to provide accurate ratings, the final 'ranking' will be inaccurate and unusable. Otherwise, it makes sense to include a 'sort by highest rated (post/thread)' functionality.
If you disagree, respond and explain why.
People don't always have time for that or might not want to undo their moderations in the thread.
Although I'm not sure GPs proposal is the best implementation of it, there needs to be an outlet for the feeling of disagreement with the content of a post. Even 90% true and insightful posts evoke a negative reaction if they do not align with your own views. We're only humans, after all.
In a sense, agreement with the content of a post is a different dimension than the technical quality of it. Ideally, the moderation system should reflect that. It may prove to be too complex (although if anyone would embrace slightly increased complexity for greatly increased functionality, it would be Slashdotters), but one could imagine having to indicate agreement with the content for all moderations (+1 Insightful, Disagree slightly, for instance), making moderation a two step action.
The (Android) BlackBerry Priv gives us a glimmer of hope.
It's not a proper landscape slider, but at least it's a hardware slider. Let\s hope it will be wildly successful.
Also, an actual summary instead of a teaser would have been nice.
Thank you. Fallacious reasoning getting a +4 Insightful on Slashdot is a crime.
You lack the ability to stay on topic and the fortitude to admit when you are wrong. Good day.
that's what this whole thread is about
It's not. The whole 'bullets flying' and 'limitless number of bad guys' bullshit came out of your keyboard, not mine. Don't pretend that didn't happen.
If you put your money in bitCoin, dogeCoin, dinfinityCoin, whateverCoin, and if it's ripped off, it's gone. That's pretty much what I started out saying.
Again, nobody is saying otherwise or has said otherwise in this thread. Stop repeating irrelevant truths. It's just noise in this thread.
The article is actually all about stealing from the bank's customers.
Yes, that is what electronic bank robberies always amount to, be they of Bitcoin or of traditional currency. Only counting people stealing assets from the corporations themselves at this point would be stupid, as there is no meaningful equivalent in Bitcoin-land.
Electronic money is weird.
Also, the stats you provided don't show shit
Yes, they do, given the above.
(1) gives a clear and quantified indication of how physical bank robberies are becoming less common.
(2) gives exact, authoritative and up to date statistics on (attempts at) physical bank robberies.
(3) gives exact statistics on (attempts at) electronic bank robberies.
Your big takeaway (hadn't you've been so obtuse) could have been that attempts at electronic bank robberies are a magnitude more common than physical bank robberies.
It becomes really hard to stick by this comment, given the stats:
"I never said that they can only be robbed physically, even though it still is the most popular method."
Unless you have stats to prove otherwise, I conclude that you were wrong in saying the above.
Note also that the quoted average amount of money stolen in a physical bank robbery is $4000. The money they lose due to electronic robberies is a much bigger problem than what is pretty much a rounding error for them.
I never said that they can only be robbed physically, even though it still is the most popular method.
It is not:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business...
https://www.fbi.gov/stats-serv...
http://www.informationweek.com...? (note that the stats are from 2006)
. Also, you said this:
Yes, real banks get robbed, but that takes some real time and effort and most of the time the robbers get caught. In contrast, the risk-to-reward ratio for virtual currency is so unbalanced that it's a natural target with minimal risks. No bullets flying around, no get-away cars, no bank guards, no logistics about hauling the cash away, no dye-packets to worry about. It's like a crime made in heaven.
Note how you the contrast you present completely focuses on the physical nature. Had you have said that banks have better digital security than some crappy Bitcoin-exchange there would have been no issue. To say that you didn't imply that the 'real time and effort' had to do with 'bullets flying around, get-away cars, bank guards, hauling the cash away, dye-packets' is simply disingenuous.
The difference is that regardless of how the bank is robbed, I'll still get my money back.
This is still irrelevant to this thread, as I pointed out before.
Virtual currencies do have some serious, unavoidable problems inherent
Nobody in this thread has said otherwise (although the 'unavoidable' part of it is debatable). You don't seem to be very good at discussing. You shouldn't just randomly insert new subtopics and pretend they are a reply to what the other party said.
That should be the main response to this idea. It hinges on this completely retarded statement: "The private document was likely shared among other conspirators [via or stored using sharing services of big (US-based) companies]"
Honestly, which serious bad guy would be stupid enough to share or store 'Instructions.for.Executing.Terror.Attack.docx' using Google fucking Drive?
Additionally, the point of using email drafts is that they are never sent, which means that they only ever exist in a single account and which renders the proposal completely ineffective.
Even if this is implemented (if it isn't already in some form) and (some of) the bad guys are not already operating in a way that circumvents it, it would be absolutely trivial to start circumventing it for them. Private torrents, Bittorrent sync and the like, private FTP servers, private email servers, OwnCloud, some random small webhoster in Bumblefuckland, etc. The list of 'ways to share files securely, privately and easily' is pretty much endless. Only if you think along the lines of "Wow, everybody is using cloud based file sharing nowadays, surely the bad guys will too. File sharing == Google Drive/iCloud sharing; there is no other way" does this harebrained idea make sense.
You do realize that the money in my account is backed by the institution, right? And you do realize that the institution or the FDIC or the government will replace my money if it's stolen?
Yes, I do, but it is irrelevant to the point I was making. You painted a very outdated picture of bank robberies with 'bullets flying around' and I corrected you (in a needlessly snarky way, admittedly). The idea that banks can only be 'robbed' physically is simply wrong.
Works exactly the same?
Yes. I was pointing out your flawed logic, not stating that normal currencies and bitcoin-like currencies work exactly the same.
The notion that bitcoin-like currencies are different because the good guy (exchange) providers to bad guy hackers-ratio is low is nonsense. Again: exactly the same holds for normal currencies.
Virtual currencies do have inherent problems and to deny that is to deny reality
I said:
I'm not saying Bitcoin (etc) does not have inherent problems
But perhaps you weren't responding to what I said anymore. I don't know.
Anyway, when talking about inherent problems, you need to imagine a situation in which normal banks start providing Bitcoin exchanges and accounts, and governments approaching Bitcoin like a normal currency. In such a situation Bitcoin would still have inherent problems, but none of the issues you've mentioned.
No bullets flying around, no get-away cars, no bank guards, no logistics about hauling the cash away, no dye-packets to worry about. It's like a crime made in heaven.
I don't have the answers (if there really are any) but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the problems inherent in virtual currencies.
You do realize that normal banks also have websites, right? And that the money in your bank account isn't actually comprised of bills sitting in a locker?
Bank 'robberies' nowadays happen in a very different way than they used to, but they still happen. The thing with normal banks is that they are enormous institutions with huge budgets for security (for obvious reasons).
"Look at it this way: there are maybe a half-dozen banks in your country, but there are essentially a limitless number of bad guys out there who, from the safety of their basements, can spend all the time in the world thinking up ways to crack your system."
Works exactly the same. I'm not saying Bitcoin (etc) does not have inherent problems, but the lack of dependable professional exchanges/centralized storage facilities is not an inherent one.
Additional info as to which encoders they used:
"HEVC HM Reference Software Codebase, Version 12.1. [Online]. Available: http://hevc.hhi.fraunhofer.de/... "
"AVC JM Reference Software Codebase, Version 18.5. [Online]. Available: http://iphome.hhi.de/suehring/... "
Also, my experience with x265 encodes have been that (dark) low detail areas tend to look terrible, whereas everything else looks extremely good given the bitrate (be it high or low). I remember reading that this was a known (and non-trivial) issue in the x265 implementation at the time.
I have the Priv and the phone is hardware-wise indeed very good, with the exception of the front-cam (and in some devices [maybe just the first batch due to production issues?] physical gaps due to sloppy margins)
Firmware-wise they have kept to their promise of monthly updates, which does feel secure. Pretty much all the (minor) firmware additions to Android are good and well executed (picture password is a great feature, as is operation with the flip case and double tap to wake). I don't care that much for the 'productivity edge', but I can see how it might be useful to many people.
Software-wise I'm not a fan (and never was, btw). The Blackberry Hub and their camera app seem to be of mediocre quality, which is not that surprising, considering that this is their first real venture into Android coding. The camera app applies way too much noise reduction, which leads many (daytime!) images found on the web taken with the Priv to look 'cartoony' in low detail areas, so I just use third party camera apps. The Blackberry Hub was a battery hog when I hadn't disabled it.
I do believe the software will get much better, especially considering this news of the focus on Android. Given that and how they're starting out on Android, I think Blackberry may actually turn out to produce the best vendor apps and firmwares of all the Android handset manufacturers out there.
Man up and admit that you made a false claim based on incomplete knowledge.
So you don't believe that yellow stains can be just fat buildup (which TSP excels at removing)? Try looking at an old pillowcase.
No sir, you are wrong and are letting a specific bit of knowledge close your mind to other possibilities. Everything I said in my previous post is still as true as it was when it actually happened.
Seconded. It also works wonders for laundry, which suffers from the same issues.
One of my recurring problems was yellow staining on the armpits of (white) shirts (which would also make the shirt smell bad when worn really really quickly). Turns out it was just oil buildup which wasn't being washed away by the crippled detergents we now have (and which provided a safe little feeding ground for bacteria). I soaked the affected shirts in a solution with a tablespoon of TSP and detergent pre wash and voila. Now I just add some TSP about every three washes to prevent buildup and I haven't seen (or smelled!) any stains since.
Added bonus is that my laundry now feels clean and crisp post wash.
Exactly. From the abstract:
"Geek engagement is found to be associated with elevated grandiose narcissism, extraversion, openness to experience, depression, and subjective well-being across multiple samples."
They really went out of their way to find the most inflammatory 'interpretation' of the study they could come up with.
Seconded. Foobar2000 is an amazing player. Very powerful, fast and versatile.
It is especially great if you like customizing your interface in a functional fashion (versus a visual one).
The scope for Swift is enormous: use it for everything from operating systems to scripting
As opposed to other programming languages. There is no other language that can do that.
Stop drinking the Kool-Aid, man. Swift is going to be slightly better than Objective C. That's it.
albeit perhaps only more slowly
Therein lies your answer. The only missing part in your appreciation of the matter is how much more slowly.
Humans can be dipshits, but they're pretty predictable. After all, biologically, we're still pretty much slightly more advanced naked apes. Painful but true.
Our (biological) mental capabilities as a species and as an individual are very stable and thus, even for the greatest villain, we can come up with a model of his/her mind and find some way to deal with him/her (if only by coming together and collectively working against said villain).
Sufficiently advanced AI would not be bound by a 7kg lump of processing power running on <50watt of electrical power. It would not have to evolve its hardware or software through painstakingly slow and archaic processes, but could do so in fractions of seconds in a massively parallel way. Given enough possibilities to branch out and incorporate resources an AI being could be at rat level when we go to sleep and be orders of magnitude more intelligent, powerful and advanced than any of us when we wake up.
In reality, we should not really be that afraid that AI will destroy us. We should be afraid that it will render us obsolete.
Why not put in ten apples then
Don't change the subject. Man up and admit you were wrong.
I get that in your little world, analogies don't exist.
No, you don't. That is a (false) loaded statement. I'm very good with analogies. That is why I can spot a shitty one a mile away.
It's "different".
No. I said 'very different'. Learn to quote someone. The 'very' implies that the difference is too big to allow the analogy to work. Simple.
The lack of incentives to cut costs are still there. The tragedy of the commons is still there.
No, I have already provided reasoning and a counterexample which proves you wrong.
Good, put that in a post.
I did. Learn to read and stay on a subject instead of changing it all the time.
Quality of service is not in isolation a measure of efficiency.
It's not. That is why I never said it was. Strawman. Again.
show a case where this actually happened with a numerical metric for quality of service that isn't laughable.
Pretty much all telecom privatizations. Longer customer service waiting times, lower customer satisfaction, artificially inflated prices. It's harder to find a case where that didn't happen.
We also have a far larger scale of failure too.
Stop changing the fucking subject. I remind you at this point that your idea that businesses are efficient is unproven. Screw your (completely baseless) 'larger scale of failure' bullshit.
Amazing, you are still pulling this shit. Now, it's the "unreliable to some extent" bit which is set.
No. Again, you are the only one talking in binary. It is still a fallacy and it makes you look like an idiot. The point was and is that you can't say "government is unreliable" (or worse: "all governments are unreliable") because that reduces the appreciation of unreliability to a false dichotomy. The ultimate irony here is that in being contrarian you have lost your way so much that you actually subsequently continue with arguing against your own point and for my original point:
"Good, the next step is understanding that broadly stating that 'governments' are unreliable or incapable of spending money in the right way is just scapegoating and pointing in the wrong direction. The point here is that all institutions are unreliable to some extent."
"Second, unreliability and all these synonyms are a matter of degree. Just because two things are unreliable doesn't mean that they are equally unreliable. Here as in your other two posts which mention this matter, you ignore degree and continue to ignore degree."
But it is good to see that you finally agree with me. I take it you will use your newfound insight to stay away from saying meaningless things like "I am implying that all governments are unreliable" and will replace them with "I am implying all governments are unreliable to some extent. As are private entities. I do believe that private entities are more reliable than public entities, but this is based mostly on a gut feeling and not really on science, or any substantial evidence, really."
Well, they can't be any dumber than you.
There is at least a 99% chance that they are. But that is as much besides the point as your silly ad hominem.
So why do they think that taxation is theft and all that, when they're getting all this wonder stuff from Kansas? Maybe it's because either Kansas public sugar isn't that awesome or that what they do get has nothing to do with what they pay.
That has nothing to do with the article (which it's plain to see you haven't read). You're just randomly stringing words together.
Here, I assume something (government spending is awesome and you get payback for
I find it bizarre you would even resort to this in support of uninformed personal opinion. Science doesn't help you when you have no evidence. Nor does Wikipedia have useful information on someone's personal mental and emotional state. It's not even wrong.
You are a special snowflake, I get it. Your mind does not work like that of other humans.
Not interested.
Still failing basic arithmetic, eh?
If I have 10 apples and I put 5 of those apples in a huge pile of apples, what part of my apples have I put in the pile?
I didn't think it would have to come to this.
Certainly, by the time we get to a large country, we have plenty of people who will be assholes to someone they don't even know and will never meet.
Exactly. Your analogy was shit to the point of being completely unusable.
I think I read in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] that this is bullshit. It was, like, science.
I already explained to you why the Tragedy of the Commons does not apply.
The more considerable inefficiency of government
Unsaid, unproven and thus inadmissible. It is a fallacy, specifically: a loaded statement.
(Technically, the opposite is starting to become apparent. In many places where privatization has been attempted costs have gone down, but simultaneously the quality of service has gone down faster, leading to a far worse ratio than when the 'inefficient' government ran that part of the sector)
Everything has the "not working properly" bit set.
No. You are the one making this black-and-white (the fallacy of the excluded middle / false dichotomy). I used logic that is much closer to reality and thus a better basis for reasoning, namely fuzzy logic: "all institutions are unreliable to some extent".
I remind you at this point that your idea that businesses are efficient is unproven. A specific example that very probably influences your view on the matter is that of IT-project fuckups. Businesses all across the world fuck up shittons of IT-projects, but the overwhelming majority of fuckups in that area you hear about is a government IT-project failing or going way over budget. Your human brain then, using the availability heuristic, concludes that businesses never fuck up IT-projects and governments do so all the time.
That is the wrong conclusion.
Food is important too.
Really? That is your defense for your analogy? Food is important too?
Unbelievable.
As to an example of "costs pooled" and people making more costly decisions that shove cost on others? Tax avoidance is a big example.
That is not what I asked you. Read.
"Hell, tons of managers in companies are insulated from the consequences of their own bad decisions and those decisions are puny compared to the ones taken on a national level. But I take it you have an alternative form of 'government' where 'cost is pooled' and everybody making decisions directly feels the effects of those decisions?"
If all this government spending is so awesome, everyone could be contributing more income. But they don't. And the huge reason why is that a dollar sent to your friendly, neighborhood government is not a dollar efficiently spent on the science or infrastructure that you want.
Wrong. This is what we call begging the question.
(Some) People don't want to pay more taxes because they are shortsighted and have a skewed view of reality. It doesn't help when assholes start screaming bullshit like "tax is theft!" and "I'm working for the government for two days a week!"
It's quite plain to see that countries with very low taxes are either tax havens for the very wealthy without a meaningful economy or straight up shit holes.
Read this:
Respectively: no, no, and the (terrible) execution of it does not define socialism.
More importantly: You entered the term into the discussion. You chose to use the most dire depiction of it as the definition. Nothing in Jim Sadler's post implied that we should let people starve. If that is what socialism is to you, then obviously Jim Sadler was not talking about 'socialism'.
In simpler terms: you created and attacked a straw man. A classic and egregious fallacy in (your) reasoning.
Dude, I mined an entire BitCoin this year with my home computing cluster.
That's right, I'm a pretty big player in the BC-scene, man.
I think that was a little bit more complicated than 'European peacemakers did nothing'. There were a lot of geopolitical things going on, in a large part driven by the people and their representatives not wanting to be the first or main player in yet another grueling war (which was very very fresh in everyone's mind and again, very grueling). It was (clearly) a shortsighted way of looking at matters, but to say that it was driven by a desire for 'peacemaking' is equally shortsighted.
It's obviously not entirely comparable, but a majority of American citizens supported pulling troops out of Iraq. You could construe it so that these 'peacemakers' are to blame for ISIS arising, but I'd say that that would be a flagrant misrepresentation of history.