It's worse because they claim to be a moral organization. Investors were told that environmental considerations come before profit, for example. Just not social considerations, apparently.
Believe it or not, the rich tend to care more about environmental issues than the poor. It might feel good to say you recycle to "save the planet", but when you can't see a single tree from your 3rd story apartment in downtown slumville, the whole idea amounts to a mere abstraction. When, however, you spend one of your three months of vacation cruising the Caribbean on your private yacht, you very directly and tangibly experience environmental changes caused by human activities.
Rich people don't, however, visit the slums when at all possible, so let the poor eat cake.
But what, a bunch of unarmed anti-gun hippies are going to attack the homes of people they know have guns and are serious enough to get a license to carry one at all times?
Nope. More like "Hey, criminals, can't buy a gun? This 80YO snowbird (age and secondary residence listed on the CCW form) probably has a few kicking around her summer home!"
This study basically says that people get pissy when you prove them wrong, making them dig in their heels even though they may grudgingly agree with you.
That bit of information reduces the problem to a much, much easier one to deal with than the previous hypothesis of willful ignorance - These people just need us to give them a way to save face.
Disclaimer - I write what I write next as someone who loathes government intervention. But just make vaccinations mandatory. Simple as that. No more BS opting out on religious grounds, no more opting out because Jenny said not to, no more trusting in herd immunity while actively undermining it. Get your kids vaccinated, period, end of story; don't like it, too bad.
That way, no one needs to "back down" - Parents can gleefully shrug their shoulders, swear at Uncle Sam while quietly breathing a sigh of relief, and we can all move on as though none of this ever happened.
Seriously, if you come here to talk about how this isn't a fundamental bitcoin problem, you deserve to have your noise smacked with newspaper like a dog.
[...] This what we've been telling your stupid dumb asses about, now shut the fuck up, its a shitty idea. [...]I'm sorry, its easy for someone to setup an exchange and let someone else steal the coins
from the 'hot wallet', whatever the fuck that is.
Assertion 1) You understand BitCoin enough to discuss its "fundamental" problems.
Assertion 2) You've known that from the beginning and warned people about it.
Assertion 3) You know the difficulty involved in setting up an exchange.
And yet, you have no clue what "hot wallet" means?
Wow. Sing it, brother! Tell me again how a sheep's bladder may be used in the prevention of earthquakes?
That doesn't change the fact that, on the whole, there's a salary gap. As the linked article points out, some big factors out of this are the fact that women tend to leave their jobs more early, to have more intermittent commitments to work. The article seems quite content to leave the implication that, basically, this means that it's all the fault of women for just not caring about their career enough.
"Fault"? No. Relevant to someone's experience level and corresponding pay? Absolutely.
If a woman puts in 20 years steady, constantly learning new up-to-date skills while keeping the core skills well-honed, why the hell shouldn't she make more than some guy who started his career at the same time she did but just came back from a five year leave to raise a kid? And if she will continue to put in a solid 40+ hours a week while he spends the next decade taking 2-hour lunches to pick up the kids and can get called away by some school problem at a moment's notice, why shouldn't she get that promotion while he remains lower on the totem pole?
You misunderstand... This has nothing to do with the special unconstitutional "buy the board new gold-plated helicopters and we'll looks the other way for 15 minutes while your techs play in our server room" spying on American citizens.
This involves the run-of-the-mill unconstitutional "We spy on you plebes, suck it" police spying that the telecoms have to support per some random BS rights-stripping law from a decade or so back.
Easy to mix them up, but do try to keep up with which TLA has fucked you today, it matters which organization has to throw your complaint away!
/ Well, at least someone in the government listens - If not necessarily quite how we want...
The point is that any city in a civilised country will have to do some kind regulation of its bus services, because otherwise all kind of shady bus companies will pop up.
You realize that you can charter a private bus, from dozens of different companies, just about anywhere in the US, right? That you or I could hire a bus right now, to haul our 40 closest friends halfway across the country and drop us off in a cornfield in Nebraska, no questions asked?
The only part of this making it at all an unusual situation, Silicon Valley has decided to offer them on a regular basis to tech workers as a job perk, thereby filling a glaring gap in SF's public transit system.
Or looked at differently - When companies do this (and they do) to haul migrant workers from "stops" at every Home Depot in the area, to pick crops on a Georgia plantation, we applaud them for accommodating the needs of the poor. When Google does the same as a way to work around CalTrans' abysmal inter-city service, we give them hell. Pick a stance, folks - Accommodating and environmentally sound, or gentrifying and elitist?
I don't want my fridge online. I don't want my toaster online. I don't want my lights online. I don't want my toothbrush online. And dear Zeus but I sure as hell don't want my HVAC or oven or even my car online!
The "Internet of Things" doesn't even rate as a solution in need of a problem - More like a marketing gimmick in need of a thin excuse to get ever more personal data from us.
Dear Cisco - Go home, you've had too much to drink. Don't worry, your fridge says it has leftover mac&cheese for you to snack on.
But the community had to pay for a bit of yellow paint to mark the bus-stop and a Festivus pole to fix a sign with 'Bus-Stop' on it. That 'investment' needs to generate money!
This, so much this.
Seriously, San Francisco - What the fuck? I don't understand why this even counts as an issue - Would it really help your budget that much if you could force Google and company to take public transit to work? Or more likely, would it just massively increase congestion on your roads and make the average SF'er bitch about those damned geeks driving up the cost of parking spaces?
Like it or not, Silicon Valley didn't destroy SF, it made SF. You want to go back to the 1970s? Just move to Detroit today, and enjoy your cheap housing and everything that comes with it.
The Google buses amount to nothing more than carpools, an environmentally friendly way to move a few thousand people from home to work and back every day. Just admit it, this has nothing to do with public transit, and everything to do with gentrification - Not a bad word, BTW, it just means making the slums safe for human habitation again.
I too use radix sort, when I have a large number of unsorted items. I usually use a bidirectional bubble sort for smaller piles (ie, if I need to hold them all in my hand at once). And I've occasionally used a merge sort, which works great when you have to combine a handful of already-sorted piles.
Any of the more complex algorithms just don't work well in the real world - You either need too much (brain) stack space, or too much extra storage (desktop), to make it worth doing.
If it's as easy as a regular computer to switch, it's way more than 10% that use chrome or FF now a days (over 50 I think).
Probably more than 10%, yeah, but MSIE alone still has almost a 60% market share overall - And that includes the numbers from phones and tablets, where IE has a mere 1.5% penetration.
I'd love to say otherwise, but the vast majority of people just use what their PC comes with.
No, you don't. It may come with Bing as the default for everything, but what does that matter? Install Chrome, and bam, you have Google's tentacles in everything instead of Microsoft's. Well, both, actually - They don't so much "compete" at this point as protect each other from cries of abusing their monopoly.
Or looked at another way, Android devices come with a free OS complete with Google's spyware preinstalled on them. And I run FireFox on my Galaxy (and use webmail through FF, rather than the stock email client).
Does MS have a motive here other than charitably giving away their flagship product? Of course! That doesn't make the offer less legitimate. And more importantly, they know that 90% of people will just use the stock apps - You give us FOSS'ers too much credit in thinking MS cares in the least if 10% of us use Chrome or FF.
There is such a thing as bad PR. It is when the first impression is negative.
I really don't mean to sound like too much of a cheerleader here, but look at it this way:
If no one new decides to play with Bitcoin, its value should stabilize at a new, somewhat lower value than before (currently looking like we've stabilized at 2/3rds of the pre-Gox bust).
If even a tiny fraction of Joes get curious about "this newfangled BitCoin thing I keep hearing about"... Just 0.1% of the US public alone would literally double the number of active BitCoin users.
And of course, as the downside risk, if a significant fraction of the BTC population gets scared off, the value will drop proportionally to how many people sell and leave. In my opinion, however, I see that as having a very low likelihood - The early adopters of BitCoin want it to succeed, simple as that. Despite all the accusation of BitCoin as a Ponzi scheme, and all the speculation (yes, I won't deny the BTC economy has a lot more speculation than I consider healthy), most of the early adopters got on board for philosophical reasons; not in the hopes of someday scoring a "free" pizza for 10k near-worthless BTC.;)
You don't need to predict the future. You just need to look at the possible outcomes and their relative probability. And in this case, I see no reason to run screaming from the BTC economy.
No. I can "predict" that:
1) Existing BitCoin advocates won't suddenly say "oh, wow, guess I should delete my wallet now".
2) Joe Public now knows about BitCoin ("no such thing as bad PR" and all that); and
3) More interest in scarce resources drives their price up.
Interpret that however you want. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. This post contains forward-looking statements inherently susceptible to uncertainty and changes in circumstances. YMMV.
Sounds just like those stock pump-and-dump spam emails I get.
The part you, and most BTC haters don't get? The lack of a "dump" phase. I like BTC more for the philosophy behind it than for the practicality of using it - Much the same as FOSS. If it appreciates in value, hey, I've made a few bucks, not going to complain - Much the same as FOSS saving me from buying Windows/Office/Adobe/etc. And if it loses value because people like you can't stand seeing other people enjoy something new, well, no one can say I didn't do my part to help it along.
FWIW, I've taken my own advice here, so feel free to call me whatever you want - I can console myself with the 25-50% gains over the next three months. I don't use BTC primarily for that reason, but I sure as hell won't pass up the opportunity.
Half a billion dollars worth of bit coins just disappeared, well, was just publicly announced as disappeared.
No, they didn't. Every single Bitcoin in MtGox still exists, you can track them down in the block chain, and in this specific case, someone even still has access to them.
MtGox didn't lose BTC, they lost transactions (or rather, double-counted them in one direction) due to a flaw in their implementation. MtGox "lost" nothing more than an imaginary number on their balance sheet. Doesn't matter if they denominate that number in BTC or USD or Yen, still equally meaningless if they don't have controls in place to notice money walking out the door. Though stemming from a technical error, the failure of Gox has more to do with the failure of their accountants than with what services they provided or currencies they dealt in.
The fact that this happened AT ALL is a direct reflection on the very core design of BitCoin, and its not a bug, its intentional. Short sighted, but intentional.
Yes, actually, this does directly reflect the core design of BitCoin - And one niggling little detail that Gox failed to grasp. If you can't swim, son, don't jump in the deep end with the bigger boys. Though not really "short sighted", insofar as the protocol works just fine if you don't cut corners based on false assumptions about it.
Your currency is one for criminals.
Explain that to Patrick Byrne. Then learn about who and what you malign before opening your mouth again. Then go fuck yourself, on behalf of the vast majority of us who use BTC in entirely legitimate ways.
This is like the 4th or 5th exchange that has gone bust, right?
Actually more like 18, but MtGox counts as the first major exchange to fail. The rest of those amount to you or I throwing up an "exchange" as our CompSci101 project and then vanishing when they lost their shirts.
The loss of MtGox definitely counts as a blow to Bitcoin, but as others will no doubt point out, it had already started "failing" months ago (when you have a good 20% price spread vs the next highest exchange and you don't see arbitrage occurring on a massive scale, you know you have a problem). Any fools with either USD or BTC left in Gox since the beginning of the year (and even before that) pretty much stopped paying attention and deserve what they got.
And the effect on the BTC market since then bears that out - The price initially plummeted, but has already stabilized at 2/3rds its previous stable value. If anything, this counted (and still does, IMO) as a great opportunity to get in during a market correction and load up on deeply discounted BTC.
you still have no right what-so-ever to watch an X rated film that features a person still a minor under US law
You want to compare a crappy vitriolic C-movie to child porn. Okay, you've established the tone here, if not much else...
and yet used one in representing himself to the actors and in signing their contracts
Violating a condition of release doesn't invalidate an entirely unrelated contract, nor does using an alias - If you sign up for a credit card under your dog's name, it doesn't magically relieve you of the burden of paying for charges you make on that card.
ignoring that one side has been convicted of criminal acts, which makes your whole point moot
Prior criminal convictions don't invalidate an entirely unrelated contract. OJ can still sign a contract with a publisher to explain to the world how he "would have" done it (though as a tangential issue, he can't profit from it until he pays off the civil penalties against him).
and you don't have a right to have them put at further risk
Quite right - I don't. They did it to themselves by appearing in the movie in the first place. And now they get to face the consequences of spewing hate. Sorry, but they don't all magically get a "do-over" because of the even worse asshattery of the producer.
I think you are misusing the word 'right', what you should be using is permission or privilege.
No. No, he did not misuse the word.
We have a first amendment right protecting us from the government saying what we can and can't say. You may find IoM horribly offensive, but the systematic attempts to censor it since release amount to nothing less than a violation of that right.
This BS line about the director "tricking" the actors amounts to little more than prison camp guards crying about just following orders. "Oh shit, that jokey inflammatory C-movie we made actually got someone's attention? Quick, deny, deny!"
It makes a difference when the path to the field, and the field itself, is hostile to non-straight, white, men.
The funny part about that, you won't find a much more pure meritocracy than IT in the entire history of Humanity.
If group-X has a problem with the attitudes in IT, that says more about group-X than it does about IT. We may not, as a whole, tend to kowtow to BS politically correct social norms; but we'll accept a black Muslim woman programmer just as readily as any run-of-the-mill pasty white middle class basement dweller.
That said, yes, other departments put up with us more for what we bring to the table than for our manners. But again... That still says more about them than about us. We earn our keep. And theirs. Suck it up or go back to paper ledgers, physical pricebooks, board games, and typewriters.
The gender bias in professional sports *is* a huge problem.
And with that one line, you destroyed your own credibility. Women have every opportunity to compete in pro sports. Just find one who can beat LeBron or Kobe - Or hell, even a John Lucas or Jason Thompson.
Some professions don't appeal to women, some they don't do well at. But if you really want to rant, perhaps you should encourage more men to become K-6 teachers or nurses or therapists, to even out the gender gap there. Sorry? I can't hear you over the crickets. Can you speak up?
However general legislation against using digital devices can be done right. The issue we start to run into is things like do touch screens built into the dashboard count or windscreen HUDs like what BMW has in the works.
No, "general legislation" cannot work. Even our DUI/OUI laws, which most people would agree count as a generally good idea, all too often function as a complete mockery of their intended purpose (when people get arrested for sleeping it off in the back seat with the keys in the ignition, Houston, we have a problem!).
Laws that try to control proxy metrics for undesirable behavior have the same problem as any other proxy metric - They lead to both sides "gaming" the system. The cops imprison people in far, far better shape than your average bluehair or Xanax-mommy for blowing a.081, while hardcore alcoholics endangering everyone on the road have learned the "safest" routes home at 2am while driving with one eye open.
You want to control for specific behaviors, make those behaviors illegal. Leave the bullshit "let's ban scary looking guns" issues alone, and instead, how about we focus our efforts on finding and addressing root causes? Why do people text while driving? Because driving sucks. Why does driving suck? Because we have to sit in one spot and do nothing except swear at the slowpokes/speed-demons around us. Why do we have to sit in one spot and do nothing else? Because we have to drive the car. Why do we have to drive the car? Because the US has effectively no public transportation serving areas outside your local urban hubs.
Okay, only four "Why?"s, but it gets to a functionally useful root cause nicely - A cost-effective, functional public transit system would get rid of the vast majority of driving-related vices we have in the US. Drunk driving? No point risking it if a cab didn't cost $50, and loss of license wouldn't amount to having the government sentence you to a life of poverty if you could still get to work. Texting while driving? I hate to break it to you, but modern teens actively don't want to drive, and do it only as a last resort.
Now, getting back to the fifth "Why?", the US has one more underlying cause to our road problems: We have too damned much land. You want to make our highways safer? Declare 2/3rds of the country a national park, make property taxes inversely proportional to population density (with exemptions for actual production activities that legitimately require land, like farming), and watch the US turn into a modern Western European socialist state almost overnight.
And I say this as someone who lives in the middle of nowhere and likes it - Yet on the flip side of that, I spend literally $10k in gasoline a year and waste two hours of my life every day just trying to make a living.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worse because they claim to be a moral organization. Investors were told that environmental considerations come before profit, for example. Just not social considerations, apparently.
Believe it or not, the rich tend to care more about environmental issues than the poor. It might feel good to say you recycle to "save the planet", but when you can't see a single tree from your 3rd story apartment in downtown slumville, the whole idea amounts to a mere abstraction. When, however, you spend one of your three months of vacation cruising the Caribbean on your private yacht, you very directly and tangibly experience environmental changes caused by human activities.
Rich people don't, however, visit the slums when at all possible, so let the poor eat cake.
But what, a bunch of unarmed anti-gun hippies are going to attack the homes of people they know have guns and are serious enough to get a license to carry one at all times?
Nope. More like "Hey, criminals, can't buy a gun? This 80YO snowbird (age and secondary residence listed on the CCW form) probably has a few kicking around her summer home!"
This study basically says that people get pissy when you prove them wrong, making them dig in their heels even though they may grudgingly agree with you.
That bit of information reduces the problem to a much, much easier one to deal with than the previous hypothesis of willful ignorance - These people just need us to give them a way to save face.
Disclaimer - I write what I write next as someone who loathes government intervention. But just make vaccinations mandatory. Simple as that. No more BS opting out on religious grounds, no more opting out because Jenny said not to, no more trusting in herd immunity while actively undermining it. Get your kids vaccinated, period, end of story; don't like it, too bad.
That way, no one needs to "back down" - Parents can gleefully shrug their shoulders, swear at Uncle Sam while quietly breathing a sigh of relief, and we can all move on as though none of this ever happened.
Seriously, if you come here to talk about how this isn't a fundamental bitcoin problem, you deserve to have your noise smacked with newspaper like a dog.
[...] This what we've been telling your stupid dumb asses about, now shut the fuck up, its a shitty idea.
[...]I'm sorry, its easy for someone to setup an exchange and let someone else steal the coins
from the 'hot wallet', whatever the fuck that is.
Assertion 1) You understand BitCoin enough to discuss its "fundamental" problems.
Assertion 2) You've known that from the beginning and warned people about it.
Assertion 3) You know the difficulty involved in setting up an exchange.
And yet, you have no clue what "hot wallet" means?
Wow. Sing it, brother! Tell me again how a sheep's bladder may be used in the prevention of earthquakes?
That doesn't change the fact that, on the whole, there's a salary gap. As the linked article points out, some big factors out of this are the fact that women tend to leave their jobs more early, to have more intermittent commitments to work. The article seems quite content to leave the implication that, basically, this means that it's all the fault of women for just not caring about their career enough.
"Fault"? No. Relevant to someone's experience level and corresponding pay? Absolutely.
If a woman puts in 20 years steady, constantly learning new up-to-date skills while keeping the core skills well-honed, why the hell shouldn't she make more than some guy who started his career at the same time she did but just came back from a five year leave to raise a kid? And if she will continue to put in a solid 40+ hours a week while he spends the next decade taking 2-hour lunches to pick up the kids and can get called away by some school problem at a moment's notice, why shouldn't she get that promotion while he remains lower on the totem pole?
Oh, gee, did I mix up my genders there? Huh.
Any claim that it's an acronym comes after the fact, and is incorrect.
Would you like to tell me my favorite pizza toppings, next?
You misunderstand... This has nothing to do with the special unconstitutional "buy the board new gold-plated helicopters and we'll looks the other way for 15 minutes while your techs play in our server room" spying on American citizens.
This involves the run-of-the-mill unconstitutional "We spy on you plebes, suck it" police spying that the telecoms have to support per some random BS rights-stripping law from a decade or so back.
Easy to mix them up, but do try to keep up with which TLA has fucked you today, it matters which organization has to throw your complaint away!
/ Well, at least someone in the government listens - If not necessarily quite how we want...
Tea is not an acronym.
As used, incorrect.
It stands for "Taxed Enough Already".
The point is that any city in a civilised country will have to do some kind regulation of its bus services, because otherwise all kind of shady bus companies will pop up.
You realize that you can charter a private bus, from dozens of different companies, just about anywhere in the US, right? That you or I could hire a bus right now, to haul our 40 closest friends halfway across the country and drop us off in a cornfield in Nebraska, no questions asked?
The only part of this making it at all an unusual situation, Silicon Valley has decided to offer them on a regular basis to tech workers as a job perk, thereby filling a glaring gap in SF's public transit system.
Or looked at differently - When companies do this (and they do) to haul migrant workers from "stops" at every Home Depot in the area, to pick crops on a Georgia plantation, we applaud them for accommodating the needs of the poor. When Google does the same as a way to work around CalTrans' abysmal inter-city service, we give them hell. Pick a stance, folks - Accommodating and environmentally sound, or gentrifying and elitist?
This.
I don't want my fridge online. I don't want my toaster online. I don't want my lights online. I don't want my toothbrush online. And dear Zeus but I sure as hell don't want my HVAC or oven or even my car online!
The "Internet of Things" doesn't even rate as a solution in need of a problem - More like a marketing gimmick in need of a thin excuse to get ever more personal data from us.
Dear Cisco - Go home, you've had too much to drink. Don't worry, your fridge says it has leftover mac&cheese for you to snack on.
But the community had to pay for a bit of yellow paint to mark the bus-stop and a Festivus pole to fix a sign with 'Bus-Stop' on it. That 'investment' needs to generate money!
This, so much this.
Seriously, San Francisco - What the fuck? I don't understand why this even counts as an issue - Would it really help your budget that much if you could force Google and company to take public transit to work? Or more likely, would it just massively increase congestion on your roads and make the average SF'er bitch about those damned geeks driving up the cost of parking spaces?
Like it or not, Silicon Valley didn't destroy SF, it made SF. You want to go back to the 1970s? Just move to Detroit today, and enjoy your cheap housing and everything that comes with it.
The Google buses amount to nothing more than carpools, an environmentally friendly way to move a few thousand people from home to work and back every day. Just admit it, this has nothing to do with public transit, and everything to do with gentrification - Not a bad word, BTW, it just means making the slums safe for human habitation again.
Heh, a bit closer, yeah.
:)
All goes well with me, other than having too little free time. Probably a good problem to have, as someone who gets bored easily.
I too use radix sort, when I have a large number of unsorted items. I usually use a bidirectional bubble sort for smaller piles (ie, if I need to hold them all in my hand at once). And I've occasionally used a merge sort, which works great when you have to combine a handful of already-sorted piles.
Any of the more complex algorithms just don't work well in the real world - You either need too much (brain) stack space, or too much extra storage (desktop), to make it worth doing.
If it's as easy as a regular computer to switch, it's way more than 10% that use chrome or FF now a days (over 50 I think).
Probably more than 10%, yeah, but MSIE alone still has almost a 60% market share overall - And that includes the numbers from phones and tablets, where IE has a mere 1.5% penetration.
I'd love to say otherwise, but the vast majority of people just use what their PC comes with.
It's not gratis - you have to use Bing.
No, you don't. It may come with Bing as the default for everything, but what does that matter? Install Chrome, and bam, you have Google's tentacles in everything instead of Microsoft's. Well, both, actually - They don't so much "compete" at this point as protect each other from cries of abusing their monopoly.
Or looked at another way, Android devices come with a free OS complete with Google's spyware preinstalled on them. And I run FireFox on my Galaxy (and use webmail through FF, rather than the stock email client).
Does MS have a motive here other than charitably giving away their flagship product? Of course! That doesn't make the offer less legitimate. And more importantly, they know that 90% of people will just use the stock apps - You give us FOSS'ers too much credit in thinking MS cares in the least if 10% of us use Chrome or FF.
There is such a thing as bad PR. It is when the first impression is negative.
;)
I really don't mean to sound like too much of a cheerleader here, but look at it this way:
If no one new decides to play with Bitcoin, its value should stabilize at a new, somewhat lower value than before (currently looking like we've stabilized at 2/3rds of the pre-Gox bust).
If even a tiny fraction of Joes get curious about "this newfangled BitCoin thing I keep hearing about"... Just 0.1% of the US public alone would literally double the number of active BitCoin users.
And of course, as the downside risk, if a significant fraction of the BTC population gets scared off, the value will drop proportionally to how many people sell and leave. In my opinion, however, I see that as having a very low likelihood - The early adopters of BitCoin want it to succeed, simple as that. Despite all the accusation of BitCoin as a Ponzi scheme, and all the speculation (yes, I won't deny the BTC economy has a lot more speculation than I consider healthy), most of the early adopters got on board for philosophical reasons; not in the hopes of someday scoring a "free" pizza for 10k near-worthless BTC.
You don't need to predict the future. You just need to look at the possible outcomes and their relative probability. And in this case, I see no reason to run screaming from the BTC economy.
so you can predict performance then?
No. I can "predict" that:
1) Existing BitCoin advocates won't suddenly say "oh, wow, guess I should delete my wallet now".
2) Joe Public now knows about BitCoin ("no such thing as bad PR" and all that); and
3) More interest in scarce resources drives their price up.
Interpret that however you want. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. This post contains forward-looking statements inherently susceptible to uncertainty and changes in circumstances. YMMV.
Sounds just like those stock pump-and-dump spam emails I get.
The part you, and most BTC haters don't get? The lack of a "dump" phase. I like BTC more for the philosophy behind it than for the practicality of using it - Much the same as FOSS. If it appreciates in value, hey, I've made a few bucks, not going to complain - Much the same as FOSS saving me from buying Windows/Office/Adobe/etc. And if it loses value because people like you can't stand seeing other people enjoy something new, well, no one can say I didn't do my part to help it along.
FWIW, I've taken my own advice here, so feel free to call me whatever you want - I can console myself with the 25-50% gains over the next three months. I don't use BTC primarily for that reason, but I sure as hell won't pass up the opportunity.
Half a billion dollars worth of bit coins just disappeared, well, was just publicly announced as disappeared.
.
No, they didn't. Every single Bitcoin in MtGox still exists, you can track them down in the block chain, and in this specific case, someone even still has access to them
MtGox didn't lose BTC, they lost transactions (or rather, double-counted them in one direction) due to a flaw in their implementation. MtGox "lost" nothing more than an imaginary number on their balance sheet. Doesn't matter if they denominate that number in BTC or USD or Yen, still equally meaningless if they don't have controls in place to notice money walking out the door. Though stemming from a technical error, the failure of Gox has more to do with the failure of their accountants than with what services they provided or currencies they dealt in.
The fact that this happened AT ALL is a direct reflection on the very core design of BitCoin, and its not a bug, its intentional. Short sighted, but intentional.
Yes, actually, this does directly reflect the core design of BitCoin - And one niggling little detail that Gox failed to grasp. If you can't swim, son, don't jump in the deep end with the bigger boys. Though not really "short sighted", insofar as the protocol works just fine if you don't cut corners based on false assumptions about it.
Your currency is one for criminals.
Explain that to Patrick Byrne. Then learn about who and what you malign before opening your mouth again. Then go fuck yourself, on behalf of the vast majority of us who use BTC in entirely legitimate ways.
"Seriously dude, open your eyes."
This is like the 4th or 5th exchange that has gone bust, right?
Actually more like 18, but MtGox counts as the first major exchange to fail. The rest of those amount to you or I throwing up an "exchange" as our CompSci101 project and then vanishing when they lost their shirts.
The loss of MtGox definitely counts as a blow to Bitcoin, but as others will no doubt point out, it had already started "failing" months ago (when you have a good 20% price spread vs the next highest exchange and you don't see arbitrage occurring on a massive scale, you know you have a problem). Any fools with either USD or BTC left in Gox since the beginning of the year (and even before that) pretty much stopped paying attention and deserve what they got.
And the effect on the BTC market since then bears that out - The price initially plummeted, but has already stabilized at 2/3rds its previous stable value. If anything, this counted (and still does, IMO) as a great opportunity to get in during a market correction and load up on deeply discounted BTC.
Wow, where to start...
you still have no right what-so-ever to watch an X rated film that features a person still a minor under US law
You want to compare a crappy vitriolic C-movie to child porn. Okay, you've established the tone here, if not much else...
and yet used one in representing himself to the actors and in signing their contracts
Violating a condition of release doesn't invalidate an entirely unrelated contract, nor does using an alias - If you sign up for a credit card under your dog's name, it doesn't magically relieve you of the burden of paying for charges you make on that card.
ignoring that one side has been convicted of criminal acts, which makes your whole point moot
Prior criminal convictions don't invalidate an entirely unrelated contract. OJ can still sign a contract with a publisher to explain to the world how he "would have" done it (though as a tangential issue, he can't profit from it until he pays off the civil penalties against him).
and you don't have a right to have them put at further risk
Quite right - I don't. They did it to themselves by appearing in the movie in the first place. And now they get to face the consequences of spewing hate. Sorry, but they don't all magically get a "do-over" because of the even worse asshattery of the producer.
I think you are misusing the word 'right', what you should be using is permission or privilege.
No. No, he did not misuse the word.
We have a first amendment right protecting us from the government saying what we can and can't say. You may find IoM horribly offensive, but the systematic attempts to censor it since release amount to nothing less than a violation of that right.
This BS line about the director "tricking" the actors amounts to little more than prison camp guards crying about just following orders. "Oh shit, that jokey inflammatory C-movie we made actually got someone's attention? Quick, deny, deny!"
It makes a difference when the path to the field, and the field itself, is hostile to non-straight, white, men.
The funny part about that, you won't find a much more pure meritocracy than IT in the entire history of Humanity.
If group-X has a problem with the attitudes in IT, that says more about group-X than it does about IT. We may not, as a whole, tend to kowtow to BS politically correct social norms; but we'll accept a black Muslim woman programmer just as readily as any run-of-the-mill pasty white middle class basement dweller.
That said, yes, other departments put up with us more for what we bring to the table than for our manners. But again... That still says more about them than about us. We earn our keep. And theirs. Suck it up or go back to paper ledgers, physical pricebooks, board games, and typewriters.
The gender bias in professional sports *is* a huge problem.
And with that one line, you destroyed your own credibility. Women have every opportunity to compete in pro sports. Just find one who can beat LeBron or Kobe - Or hell, even a John Lucas or Jason Thompson.
Some professions don't appeal to women, some they don't do well at. But if you really want to rant, perhaps you should encourage more men to become K-6 teachers or nurses or therapists, to even out the gender gap there. Sorry? I can't hear you over the crickets. Can you speak up?
With the current wording GEMA looks like the bad guy
So "truth" doesn't count as a defense against defamation in Germany?
However general legislation against using digital devices can be done right. The issue we start to run into is things like do touch screens built into the dashboard count or windscreen HUDs like what BMW has in the works.
.081, while hardcore alcoholics endangering everyone on the road have learned the "safest" routes home at 2am while driving with one eye open.
No, "general legislation" cannot work. Even our DUI/OUI laws, which most people would agree count as a generally good idea, all too often function as a complete mockery of their intended purpose (when people get arrested for sleeping it off in the back seat with the keys in the ignition, Houston, we have a problem!).
Laws that try to control proxy metrics for undesirable behavior have the same problem as any other proxy metric - They lead to both sides "gaming" the system. The cops imprison people in far, far better shape than your average bluehair or Xanax-mommy for blowing a
You want to control for specific behaviors, make those behaviors illegal. Leave the bullshit "let's ban scary looking guns" issues alone, and instead, how about we focus our efforts on finding and addressing root causes? Why do people text while driving? Because driving sucks. Why does driving suck? Because we have to sit in one spot and do nothing except swear at the slowpokes/speed-demons around us. Why do we have to sit in one spot and do nothing else? Because we have to drive the car. Why do we have to drive the car? Because the US has effectively no public transportation serving areas outside your local urban hubs.
Okay, only four "Why?"s, but it gets to a functionally useful root cause nicely - A cost-effective, functional public transit system would get rid of the vast majority of driving-related vices we have in the US. Drunk driving? No point risking it if a cab didn't cost $50, and loss of license wouldn't amount to having the government sentence you to a life of poverty if you could still get to work. Texting while driving? I hate to break it to you, but modern teens actively don't want to drive, and do it only as a last resort.
Now, getting back to the fifth "Why?", the US has one more underlying cause to our road problems: We have too damned much land. You want to make our highways safer? Declare 2/3rds of the country a national park, make property taxes inversely proportional to population density (with exemptions for actual production activities that legitimately require land, like farming), and watch the US turn into a modern Western European socialist state almost overnight.
And I say this as someone who lives in the middle of nowhere and likes it - Yet on the flip side of that, I spend literally $10k in gasoline a year and waste two hours of my life every day just trying to make a living.
So...what's your gripe then?
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
That about do it for ya?