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User: FeelGood314

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  1. This is welcome on US Regulators To Back More Oversight of Virtual Currencies (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    I think most crypto currency creators would like some sort of regulation. The big question is what kind of regulation do you want and who are you going to regulate. It's not as if there is any central authority to most crypto currencies. So maybe the original creators of a currency might fill something out, or a currency like Tether might have a way of proving that they have assets backing their currency. But something like bitcoin? We don't even know who the creators were.

  2. Copy Right isn't a Right on Blizzard Issues DMCA Notice to a Fan-Run 'WoW' Legacy Server (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 1

    It's a privileged society chooses to grant in order to encourage people to make creations available to everyone. I think we have really lost track of the idea that copy right is something that is supposed to benefit society first. The game is abandoned the moment most people can't play it. Further there should be an requirement for copy right holders to make available to society their creation when the copy right expires. The BBC should not have the copy right for lost Dr. Who episodes, all those 8 bit games, if it wasn't ported to a new platform in a reasonable amount of time, the source code should have been made available.

    Further I can't see how a copy right longer than 10 years could possibly change a content creators motivation to create a game, song, movie or book.

  3. The Expanse - Hard Science fiction on Slashdot Asks: What Are Some Sci-Fi Books, Movies, and TV Shows You're Looking Forward To? · · Score: 1

    The thing I love about the expanse is, aside from the proto-molecule, everything is based on science we know. Also they work hard to get the physics right. Interstellar's science was beyond stupid and had the same mistakes as the pilot of The 100. Worst offence, when two objects in space separate, if one of them is not undergoing acceleration the two objects will continue moving together. Separating two space craft near a black hole doesn't cause the smaller one to fall away, throwing bodies out an orbiting space station air lock doesn't magically cause the bodies to suddenly fall to earth. The bodies will continue to orbit with you and just add to the space debris.

  4. Not all Virtue Signalling - better solution needed on GDC Rescinds Award For Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell After Criticisms of Sexually Inappropriate Behavior (polygon.com) · · Score: 1

    I will admit that a lot of this is virtue signalling and the GDC organizers really haven't handled it well. However, we have a problem in our society where some men have abused their power to manipulate women and those women have had no other recourse. If your only weapon to fight back with is public shaming and destroying someones career then it puts the victim in a tough position. I'm sure most of them don't think the public shaming is the appropriate outcome. We as a society need to come up with an alternative tool for the victims and we also need to figure out what to do with the perpetrators. In Canada, what percentage of our members of parliament will we kick out before we realize that we had a system were a high percentage of seemingly normal men, when put in a position of power, behaved deplorably?

  5. Smart Phone app on Fitness-Tracking App Reveals Locations of Secret Army Bases (theguardian.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you are in a sensitive area and you have a smart phone turned on then you aren't smart enough to be allowed in a sensitive area. If we are near people who potentially want to kill me and you turn your fucking position broadcasting device on beside me, I will turn it off after I take it off of your recently deceased body.

  6. Venus is a better canditate on Ask Slashdot: What Kind of Societies Will the First Mars Colonies Be? · · Score: 1

    Floating colonies in the Venusian atmosphere are actually more technically feasible for humans than the surface of Mars. At the right altitude the air pressure and temperature would be the same as Earth's, you can suck everything you need to make food, water, plastics and carbon fiber out of the atmosphere, no worries about cosmic rays, gravity is almost the same as earth and it's closer. The atmosphere wouldn't be pleasant on your skin but you don't really want to touch the Martian soil either.

  7. US Health care VS Canada - father of 5 on More Than 750 American Communities Have Built Their Own Internet Networks (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    Health care and the police are in many ways the last line of defense. They are both expensive and not very efficient. If you have to use them chances are you did some wrong elsewhere. Good exerciser, walk-able cities, good nutrition and not smoking or drinking are far more effective at increasing life expectancy and decreasing infant mortality than the last 40% of the money we spend on health care*. Likewise, good education, social support, job opportunities and safe neighbourhoods are far more effective at reducing crime than a militarized police force. So comparing healthcare efficiency to things like life expectancy is very flawed

    I have 5 kids, I've lived in the USA, I had Kaiser Permanente as my health care provider. Their spending per person in USD was about the same as Ontario, Canada spends per person in CAD. Their size and demographics were similar to Ontario not counting native Canadians. With Kaiser you get to see a doctor almost anytime, your wait to see a specialist is under an hour, tests are done right away and they tell you the results within hours. They covered most of prescriptions. There was no charge for parking, the parking lots weren't over flowing and doctors where not 2 hours late for your appointment. The doctors were on average more competent than my doctors in Canada, they appeared to be far better treated, had better tools and over half the ones I saw were born or educated in Canada.

    In Ontario you may not even have a doctor. We have a huge shortage, likely because the good doctors say f*#k it and move to California. You have to pay for your prescriptions, hospitals are dirty bacteria infested shit holes (I worked in one) with expensive, crowded parking. MRI or a non life threatening procedure? 6 to 9 months. Test results - we will tell you in 2 weeks if it is positive, if it's negative or we screw up don't expect anything. Don't bother requesting to see a specialist for allergies, sports injuries, or skin conditions.

    *Ontario spends 40% of it's health budget on the last 18 months of a persons life, so this spending does very little to increase live expectancy(the best you could argue is it extends it by 18 months, but it doesn't, and likely makes the last 18 months miserable). They spend another 40% on 5% of the patients - mostly premature babies, chronic ailments, mentally ill or mentally less responsible. I suspect politically it is impossible for a government not to spend money this way.

  8. How did Toronto make the list? on Amazon Picks 20 Finalists For 'HQ2' Second Headquarters Location (nbcnews.com) · · Score: 1

    They can't really offer tax breaks, Trump would go ballistic if Amazon chose a city outside of the USA and the income taxes are higher. Health care costs would be a lot lower and corporate tax is slightly lower that doesn't make up for the lack of other breaks and the higher income tax on employees. Plus it would be pretty brave of Amazon to choose a city outside of the USA and a real slap at Trump.

  9. As a father of 5 on Ask Slashdot: How Would You Explain Einstein's Theories To a Nine-Year-Old? · · Score: 1

    I've had my kids watch the TV shows Eureka https://www.youtube.com/watch?... before they were 9. So my kids already new what force, energy and mass were. It makes having these discussions much easier.

    E=mc^2 makes sense if they know what energy is and they understand the units

    relativity needs a lot of math to explain properly but I think I did a better job with my youngest son. The speed of light is actually the speed of causality. Every observer sees this speed the same even if they are moving relative to each other. I then give the example of a rocket trying to travel to the nearest star. The star is 4 light years away. The first ship takes 6 years to get there. We build a second ship that goes twice as fast. To the observer on earth the ship takes just over 4 years to get there. The person in the ship though gets there in 3 years according to his watch. However the person in the ship has a meter stick and he measures the distance and discovers it wasn't 4 light years, it was a little less than 3 light years. So his measured speed was still less than the speed of light because relative to him the distance decreased.

  10. climate scientists vs slashdot anonymous coward on Global Warming Predictions May Now Be a Lot Less Uncertain (wired.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Let see we have the really simple model. Add energy to a system at a constant rate, slow the rate at which energy leaves the system, the system heats up. Now smart people will make the system a lot more complicated and then add positive feed backs that slow the rate at which energy leaves the system and they will add estimates to when those positive feed backs occur. Everyone agrees with the simple model, adding CO2 to the atmosphere slows the rate at which infra red light radiates back into space. Almost every climate scientist agrees there are positive feed backs that will be triggered as the temperature rises. The only question is at what temperature do those feed backs exceed what human action is doing and when that temperature is reached. If we don't do something we know it will happen we just don't know when.

    Bad things will happen at just a couple of degrees warmer. Rain patterns will change, pests like mosquitoes will move, coastal cities will flood. No one talks about the bad things at 6C because they don't want to sound like crazy alarmists.

  11. Responsible disclosure on Intel Says Newer Chips Also Hit by Unwanted Reboots After Patch (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    This was a complicated bug. I can definitely see how the engineers made the design decisions that lead to it. Intel isn't handling this well but if we just consider the patches they are rushed. A few more months would definitely have been helpful. These bugs aren't that bad for home users that don't enable javascript by default. The bad guy still has to get you to run the malicious code. The defects are however devastating for cloud computing where the vendors are running someone else's code.

  12. Poor Programming on The World's Top-Selling Video Game Has a Cheating Problem (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    Some cheats can't be avoided but others like seeing through walls? The server should be able to figure out what my client can see and not tell me of the positions of players not in my field of view.

  13. Careful with the alt coins - survivor bias on Bitcoin Watchers Running Out of Explanations Blame Slump on Moon (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    They often look really good when you look at the charts but remember the coins in positions 150 - 200 likely were not there 3 months ago. You are looking at the top performers from positions 150 - 400 from 3 months ago, so of coarse they look great. (Well except for the coins that were in the top 150 that fell.)

  14. 1 Million USD per hour in investment + sell wall on Bitcoin Watchers Running Out of Explanations Blame Slump on Moon (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    100 thousand in electricity and 900 thousand in new hardware, USD per hour. That is the current investment in all crypto mining. That required 1 million more in people to invest every hour. The total market cap for crypto currencies wasn't very high, about half a trillion which in financial terms is nothing. Assume crypto is mostly invested in by only wealthy, male geeks between 25 and 55 who have maybe 20K to play with then the total investment pool would be maybe 10 million people, world wide. That's 200 Billion to waste on electricity and mining hardware or 20 years at the current rational stupidity*. Trouble is the 1 million an hour is very erratic. So we will see large swings.

    There is currently a huge sell wall. That is a huge amount of people who want to sell at 5 to 10% higher than the current trading prices. This effectively means the price can't rise very much in the near future (next 12 to 24 hours). So given the huge sell wall no one wants to buy and at the same time we have the miners who still need their 1M every hour.

    *rational stupidity - the current mining method is extremely wasteful, the transaction costs are so high and transaction times so long that Bitcoin is useless. However bitcoin is controlled by the miners not the people who own the coins. The miners are actually being rational. They have to pay for their mining equipment in the next 6 months. High transaction fees are good for them. They know the long term viability of the current situation is zero but they aren't in it for the long term.

    My prediction - one of the proof of stake currencies will become dominant in the next 18 months and the proof of work currencies will either die or their block rewards will be closer to $1000/hr. I doubt the market will sink more than another 20%. No one remaining has to sell anymore.

  15. L2 is dark on The James Webb Space Telescope Has Emerged From the Freezer (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    L2 is in the earth's shadow. It will orbit around L2 in such a way that it is never in the earth's shadow but also so that it's sun shield will block light from the earth, the moon and the sun. It will also be about 6 times further from the earth than the moon.

  16. Routing and Distance on Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    Big planes could get more people out of an airport and fly further. Before computerized routing every airline had to mostly operated as a hub and spoke with big planes moving people between hubs. In the 80s the routing problem was solved. It still took 15 years for the airlines to perfect it but it should have been obvious that they would. Next was the distance problem. You used to need a big 747 to get you across the Atlantic or Pacific. Not anymore. The big planes still have an advantage on some long routes that are busy enough to fill them but with the big planes no longer needed between hubs we have a surplus of big planes for the next 5 years. Reply to This Share

  17. Routing and distance on Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    Big planes could get more people out of an airport and fly further. Before computerized routing every airline had to mostly operated as a hub and spoke with big planes moving people between hubs. In the 80s the routing problem was solved. It still took 15 years for the airlines to perfect it but it should have been obvious that they would. Next was the distance problem. You used to need a big 747 to get you across the Atlantic or Pacific. Not anymore. The big planes still have an advantage on some long routes that are busy enough to fill them but with the big planes no longer needed between hubs we have a surplus of big planes for the next 5 years.

  18. Democracy is how you remove a government on Ask Slashdot: How Would You Use Computers To Make Elections Better? · · Score: 2

    The electorate are always going to be emotional, easily fooled and right stupid. Look at the average person and then realize half the people are dumber than him. The best you can hope for is to have a way to remove an incompetent government after 4 or 5 years. The best democracies are ones where people successfully remove a bad party and don't have it return unless it seriously changes it's way. These are countries where new parties can be created and eventually form the government. Poor democracies are ones where the government doesn't change, switches back and forth between two parties with no hope of a third party forming, or countries with endless coalitions where the same people stay in government forever.

  19. completely unworkable on US Supreme Court Will Revisit Ruling On Collecting Internet Sales Tax (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Charge an extra $0.10 cents for a particular counties sales tax and then spend $20 in administrative time trying to mail that $0.10 to them? A small business that might sell under $20 a year to all of North Dakota would likely just say, fuck it, we don't ship there, get a postal box in Manitoba, Canada.

    Further the tax rules are a mess in most places. Shoes, taxable, children's shoes no tax. Food under x dollars one rate, over another rate....

  20. Few offended - many faked outrage on When It Comes to Gorillas, Google Photos Remains Blind (wired.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You do not have the right not to be offended. Generally I shouldn't go out of my way to do something just to offend you but that's not even close to the case here. I seriously doubt many people were offended. I do however think a certain group of people used this as an opportunity to criticize google. This group of people care less about difficulties black people face than they do care about being seen about caring about black issues. There is a reason SJW is a derogatory term.

    There are so many actual issues that black or native North Americans face where the solutions are actually hindered by SJWs. It is quite frustrating.

  21. Mining pools and difficulty on China Plans To Kill Most of the World's Bitcoin Mining Operations (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The mining pools are run out of China. The physical location of the devices doing the hashing is wherever the electricity is cheapest. For example, people heat their homes in Quebec with electricity so some are mining there now and heating with the waste heat.
    The mining equipment won't vanish. If you have sunk the cost of buying the equipment, you won't turn it off because electricity got more expensive. Right now $1 worth of electricity gets you about $10 worth of crypto currency. If the price of electricity goes up 9x it still will make sense to mine. It just won't make sense to buy new equipment.

    Transaction times won't be affected. The total hashing power won't decrease. It's rate of increase might slow. BUT, even if the total hashing power fell, the currencies have what is called a difficulty level. That will decrease and a currency like bitcoin will continue to create a new block every 10 minutes.

  22. No incremental gain on Can We Replace Intel x86 With an Open Source Chip? (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Linux was incremental. You had the kernel, a command line and things were slowly added to it but even early on you had something people could play with. It's easy to transfer software, it's easy to work on small parts. Hardware is a bit different. Your first open source CPU is going to suck. It will have absolutely no advantage over the existing processors and won't for many years. How are you going to keep a community going with very little tangible to show.

  23. Why all the hate against Bill? on Bill Gates Is First Guest Editor In Time Magazine's 94-Year History (geekwire.com) · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Seriously, it seems like a bunch of virtue signalling to me. Bill post Microsoft, has been probably the greatest and smartest philanthropist of our time. So I'm guessing the hate has to be directed at Microsoft and his time there. Now if Microsoft is anywhere close to the top of your list of evil organizations then you have a serious lack of world knoledge. If you look at the details of Microsoft's abuses most of them are just being very competitive and a couple I would attribute to luck more than planning (e.g. Novell printer support).

    The world likes standards. If you make software for home users you ideally only want to make it for one platform and you want it to be so simple your grandmother can use it without making a support call. Microsoft gave the world that and they also made it easy for developers. Ask anyone who ever created anything for a Mac in the early 90s how easy it was just to make a window appear. Microsoft also did everything possible to make your old programs run on new versions of their OS. So that accounting software that ran on DOS 5.1 still works under Windows 10. Microsoft gained their OS dominance through being smart and working hard.
    Did they abuse their dominant position in the OS to gain an advantage else where? Yeah
    Did they overreact and crush netscape when they felt threatened? Yeah
    Did they give us an OS that most of us still use everyday at work, does it work pretty darn well and get stuff done for us? Yes
    Of the platforms - Linux, iOS, Windows and the Android on you AT&T phone, windows doesn't even seem that locked down.

    So competitive and occasionally evil but in the greater scheme of things Microsoft at it's worst was a better behaved company than 90% of the worlds large companies.

  24. Cute - you think you live in a democracy on What Happens When States Have Their Own Net Neutrality Rules? (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    I'm going to define democracy as a means of people peacefully removing a group from power. In the USA you have only two groups and you have absolutely no way of removing both of them. New parties can't form and take power. Most of your house seats safe. Senate and presidential campaigns require an insane amount of money, organization and legal work and that's just to get a name on every ballot. The Dems and the Republicans have a complete strangle hold on probably 85% of the elected positions in the entire USA

    When was the last time a new party formed in the USA that was able to come in second in a national election?
    How equal are people's voices? Does a minimum wage worker have 1/100 the voice of Mark Zuckerberg or 1/10,000?
    Is gerrymandering legal?
    Can a politician vote on a bill that affects a friend or major donor?
    Does the USA support countries where the government changes by democratic processes more often than it opposes them for electing the "wrong" leaders?

    *Since the end of Reconstruction, there have been a total of 30 U.S. Senators, 111 U.S. Representatives, and 28 Governors that weren't affiliated with either major party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  25. Re:I'll fine one right now on Largest Prime Number Discovered – With More Than 23m Digits (mersenne.org) · · Score: 1

    2^98,435,672 - 1 is equal to (2^49217836 + 1)(2^49217836 - 1); it's a difference of squares.