By attaching a lightweight, inexpensive device to the back of a smart phone
By "device", you mean... A fluorescence microscope? Camera works as camera??? Whoah, major breakthrough, dude!
Hey! What do you suppose would happen if, instead of using a $300 phone as a camera (with all its controls inconveniently under the device), we used a $20 USB webcam?
I'll disable tracking by default. And Google should take my "threat" as guaranteed. I am not alone I know.
This!
At first glance, "anonymous" tracking sounds like an ideal compromise. We get to support websites we visit, without giving up our privacy in the process... Right?
Now drop this dream-scenario into the real world. Google intends to provide a way to globally, uniquely identify "you", anonymously. That works juuust fine - Until you give someone's "partner" (like Amazon, NewEgg, Expedia, etc) one teensy bit of PII. Then... Game over, man, game over! The entire spamming cold-calling advertising world now "knows" more about you than you know about yourself.
Fuck that. You guys just don't get it, do you? We don't want to "play nice". We want you to either:
1) Effectively act as a charity, giving us content for free,
2) Find a viable revenue model that doesn't involve treating us as the product rather than the customers, or
3) FOAD.
FTA: "All eligible entrants who submit a qualified Entry will receive an AWS promotional credit (“Promotional Credit”) of $50 USD to be used toward Paid Services (does not include Amazon FPS, reserved instances or support services) by December 31, 2014 in accordance with the AWS Promotional Credit Terms & Conditions available at https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/ (the “Credit T&Cs”). Individual Promotional Credit codes valued at $50 USD will be emailed to such entrants following the announcement of the Grand Prize winner in November, 2013" (bolding mine).
Now hold on just a sec... So they intend to give participants a $50 AWS credit... But not up-front? So to enter, you need to pay up front for access so you can develop and deploy your app, and then after you lose they'll give you credit to continue using something you no longer have a reason to keep alive?
Wow. Best scam ever! I need to run one of these "contests" myself!
So, you're claiming that a government regulation that significantly raises the costs of doing business (to a point above its current break-even point) might actually result in that business demanding more money for its product? And that that event might itself be used as input to a feedback loop?
Erm... Yes? I think you've fairly described the intent of my final point.:)
The US has a longstanding policy of getting involved where it doesn't belong over some natural resources, why not others? We need hard drives and cell phones just as much as we need internal combustion cars... Right?
The US doesn't have a specific lack of these "conflict minerals" - We simply don't have much in the way of proven reserves because they cost too much to pull out of the ground at current prices while obeying both environmental and labor laws.
As soon as the price starts to shoot up because China or DRC or public opinion or whatever becomes a barrier to cheap importation from somewhere with exploited child workers and a complete disregard for pollution, you can bet the farm you'll see mines spring up all over the place (Idaho, New Mexico, and South Carolina in particular have large known-but-mostly-untapped rare earth deposits) to meet demand.
So, no need to bomb anyone! Best of all, thanks to fracking (which admittedly has its own problems), we may soon have no reason to piss around in the sandbox, either. I, for one, look forward to a few decades of care-free isolationism in our near future.
Are you actually arguing that being homeless is a sensible choice for a person?
For some people - Yes. Living in a house costs a hell of a lot. Financially, it would make a lot more sense (particularly outside urban areas, where you need a car) to simply live in your car.
That said... No, I don't naively believe the guy from TFA lacks a home for pragmatic reasons. Most likely, he lacks a home because he can't hold down a job because the demons (whether bottled or "real") won't let him. In a less cruel world, the wolves (real actual Canis lupus, not imaginary or metaphorical ones) would eat him and everyone would go their merry way. In our world, we will instead force him to endure his demons, making a living watching ads in the library, for the next 40-60 years. Woo-hoo, go Western civilization!
It will cost more to supervise someone who does not want to work than it will to automate the job or hire someone productive.
Cool, you've just filled two menial jobs in one go! You've got the right idea, friend! XD
You really need a "why" for this? Okay, purely on a practical basis, if you don't give people a motivation to put down the Cheetos and the remote, get off the couch, and do something - Most of them won't. I mean, I love what I do, but I sure as hell don't like that I need to whore myself out doing it so the corporate execs can get matching A8 W12s this year instead of those crappy ol' "base model" A8s. If I didn't need to work to live, I wouldn't.
And I make pretty good money at a cushy desk job, at that. People killing themselves for minimum wage at McDonalds? Who do you seriously expect would put up with that for similar pay to doing absolutely nothing?
So, how do you motivate the majority of able-bodied people to actually contribute to society rather than leech off it? "You can take a thankless but dignity-preserving job to make your living, or you can scrape gum off public sidewalks - your choice". Simple as that. Until we can automate every menial job on the planet, we need to have people who would rather do them than put up with some unpleasant alternative. When you make the alternative not all that unpleasant, goodbye food service, goodbye discount retail, goodbye agricultural workers.
Of course, as an alternative, we could pay McSlaves significantly more, so they want to work there... Except, in doing so, you've just tripled the price of a Big Mac, meaning that it now costs more to live, so that base-level government paycheck intended to let everyone survive now doesn't qualify as enough to get by.
2) Retype Bitcoin address from screen to laptop when receiving money for "microwork tasks" like spamming YouTube
I think you meant "point the phone's camera at the QR code on the task completion page". Type it in? How... archaic!:)
So yeah, managing to use BTC doesn't really take a rocket scientist. That said, while the sort of tasks underlying these crappy online less-than-minimum-wage bounties don't actually take much skill, successfully satisfying the payout terms often does. I did a few of those through Amazon's Turk a few years back just for the hell of it, and they had the most absurd terms - Things like "check the following websites to look for pictures containing more than one species of baby animals", with the fine print disclaiming that getting paid required you to log your start and end time for the task, it couldn't take less than 85 seconds or longer than 95 seconds, and any pictures of iguanas invalidated all other results.
I made 18 cents total before I got bored with it. Took me about three hours. I could probably have made more "mining" Bitcoin block hashes by hand.
Why is this thing priced like a modern board when it has all out of date components on it? Wake me up when they do the Bay Trail version or slash $100 off of the asking price.
Intel seems to have totally missed the mark on this one. People don't buy the Raspberry Pi because they want a desktop PC in an awkward form factor. They buy the RPi because they want a tiny general purpose computing device that sips power and costs so little as to consider it disposable.
The Minnow completely fails on all but one of those criteria - It costs 8x as much, has a 60% larger footprint (almost the size of a NanoITX board!), the CPU alone draws up to 4W (not even counting everything else on the board) vs the Pi's 2.5W total...
If anything, I would have to suspect Intel means to target this as a semi-embedded Epia/Jetway/ECS killer - Though even there, it costs more, still has a larger footprint than readily-available Pico-ITX boards, and lacks the standardized mechanical aspects (ie, mounting holes) you get with the ITX family.
DOA. Simple as that. You can already get more computer for less money, and less computer for a LOT less money.
In order for the mystery to deepen, we would first need to have a mystery, even a shallow(?) one. But what do we have here? A complete lack of a mystery.
Yes, life can produce methane. Yes, some geological processes can produce methane. Mars has neither... So?
I have a complete lack of Siberian tigers in my basement. That doesn't count as a mystery, deep or otherwise.
Sorry? I completely fail to see any humor in the fact that the banks of the world explicitly and openly collude to fuck us as hard as they can - And with the outright support of government, at that.
the first one of them that get a performance electric car, that isn't fugly as all the current "green" cars....sporty looking (like the Tesla Roadster was) for the price range of a low end Vette...gets all my money.
Seriously? The Tesla S has almost the same profile as a Lamborghini Gallardo. Slightly less absurd front scoop, a bit less "sharp" in a few places, but otherwise, very similar.
I do have to agree about the price, though - If GM can do it at under $30k, awesome. $65k and up, not so cool.
The worst criminals have always had the law on their side - From the landed nobles of Old Europe, to the "robber barons" of the late 19th / early 20th centuries, to patent trolls and the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA today.
Doesn't make it right. They all belong(ed) up against the wall.
A multiplayer FPS... Without PvP? Wow. Just... Wow.
I mean, I admittedly hate involuntary PvP in most online games. But I can't really imagine how they plan to attract people to an FPS without PvP as a core game mechanic - "Come play a UT clone against AI opponents, oh and don't forget your freemium upgrades if you want to have any chance at lasting 30 seconds"?
And if that kid ending up shooting the other one, and it turned out the police knew of this incident and didn't even investigate, that'd fine, right?
Do you see just a bit of grey area between "ignore" and "arrest"? Hmm?
A parent complained. Fine. The police have a five minute chat with the kid, and maybe, if he sounds completely screwed up, ask for a psych evaluation. End of story.
As presented, he did nothing wrong. This complete bullshit about "terroristic threats" needs to stop now - And "interference of the operation of a school"? Wouldn't that require, I dunno, actually interfering in the operation of a school or something along those lines? Taking a video with your cell phone, crosshairs or not, doesn't do that. Posting that video to YouTube doesn't do that.
Now, in fairness, yes, sometimes we do complain when the authorities look the other way. When James Holmes actually did go to a shrink (several, in fact) prior to his attack, one of whom declared him a threat to the public who outright said he wanted to kill people, and began stockpiling weapons in the six months leading up to Aurora - Not quite the same ballpark as a 15YO playing a game with reality as the background decoration.
They did -- they predicted it would generate $161 million in revenue.
On what basis? They can't even figure out who owes the tax after the fact, how did they come up with that magic number before passing it?
If you ask me my opinion about something, I'll give it. Time may prove me wrong or right, but if wrong, you can bet the farm that I can at least explain my reasoning to you in a rational, even compelling manner.
I'm actually quite impressed that the Massachusetts politicians have reversed course on this idiotic tax so quickly
...In other news, MA politicians haven't had access to their email in over a week, and mysteriously can't seem to find anyone willing to help them. In a completely unrelated turn of events, they started talking about H1Bs as a possible solution immediately before they lost all access to the internet. And now, merely half an hour later, they've come to their senses.
I only see people discussing the first-level implications to privacy and security of the NSA having chosen parameters that lead to a somehow-weak curve. Except - That doesn't take any special NSA magic, they just cheated up front.
Such discussion completely overlooks the much bigger problem here, however - The NSA chose parameters that give a weaker curve. Parameters generated as the output of hashing them with SHA1.
The ability to choose parameters strongly suggests that the NSA has a way to produce input texts that yield a desired SHA1 hash. That takes special NSA magic, and should really count as the FP story here, not the far less impressive trick of stacking the deck in their favor.
"The Aeroscraft airship can compress a certain amount of its lifting gas and put it into fabric tanks, under pressure. The density of the compressed gas is higher so that it is no longer lighter than air, and therefore this airship, unlike any of its predecessors, can change its buoyancy."
Uhh... That works with submarines because they actually do change their mass-inside-the-hull (and therefore their density) by taking in or dumping out water from the environment around them. With a rigid frame containing just helium, it doesn't matter whether you store the helium in a tank or in the balloon, you have the same total mass inside the footprint of the hull, and therefore the same overall density (for reference, a balloon "containing" a vacuum would have more buoyancy than even one using Hydrogen).
Not to say they couldn't have found a solution to that particular problem, but the explanation given... Doesn't solve that problem.
A device with no moving parts counts as basically indestructible (under normal circumstances) as long as the screen doesn't crack. Cracking the screen takes a hell of a lot more force than crashing a HDD head into the platter whirring just a few microns below it.
And as another perk, strong magnetic fields largely don't affect flash, until you start getting into strengths that pose a health risk to the human using the tablet. The standard method of wiping a HDD uses a relatively weak (on the "causes human damage" scale of things) 60hz magnetic field.
WTF? On my last preview, I didn't have that entire block quote at the top. New "feature" for those of us who would prefer to manually quote what we want to respond to, or just a glitch?
This should be blocked by the government until Bitcoin is considered a legitimate currency, and therefore held to the same standards and regulations as an actual bank.
These guys should be charged with fraud for this crap. These are not "ATM" machines. What they give out is not an officially recognized currency. What they give out is not even a stable currency (I've seen Bitcoin halve, then double, then halve in value over the span of a few days), and there is NO INSURANCE through the government if the entire thing goes belly up (don't tell me that it won't- that's not the point, I'm insured through the Canadian Government who will cover a small amount of money if something happens to my bank).
The more I think about it, the more I think this is some seriously shady crap. You're basically trying to trick the public into buying into your currency and making them believe it's actually valuable for day-to-day use (it's not for 99% of the consumers). I mean, these machines sure as shit aren't going to have warning labels on the side that say "Hey, the market you're buying into could halve overnight, making your money worth half as much!". How many people actually using these machines are really going to know what they're getting into?
This should be blocked by the government until Bitcoin is considered a legitimate currency, and therefore held to the same standards and regulations as an actual bank.
You have mixed levels here. The "dollar" (Canadian or otherwise) does not count as a bank, and has no standards and regulations imposed directly on the currency itself.
Now, if you want to demand that money-handlers/lenders/changers/etc dealing in BTC live up to similar regulations to those dealing in "real" money, hey, I would agree with you in spirit - Aside from the fact that those dealing in BTC will have a great deal of difficulty complying with AML regulations by design.
But you should at least strive to make a coherent argument, rather than something as absurd as "all cows must get SafeServ certified".
Few people know they can do so. For the vast majority, there's no option but the default.
While I agree with you in principle, and 100% oppose attempts to censor the net by anyone, for any reason... I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people who would use a VPN in the first place know all about "Hadrian's Firewall" and that they can opt out of it (for now).
That said - Seriously Cameron, WTF? Yes, the internet makes porn easier to get to than ever before; don't act all stuffy about the idea of kids seeing it, however, when we old-timers made due juuust fine with our dads' stash of Playboys, and turned out well enough.
/ Started "reading it for the articles" sometime around age 7. // Gainfully employed, debt-free, and in a happy, stable, long-term relationship.
Slashdot Mirror
By attaching a lightweight, inexpensive device to the back of a smart phone
By "device", you mean... A fluorescence microscope? Camera works as camera??? Whoah, major breakthrough, dude!
Hey! What do you suppose would happen if, instead of using a $300 phone as a camera (with all its controls inconveniently under the device), we used a $20 USB webcam?
Pinky, bring me the yak!
Okay, I'll admit this appeals to my interests, but seriously? This belongs on Fark, not Slashdot.
WTF, editors?
I'll disable tracking by default. And Google should take my "threat" as guaranteed. I am not alone I know.
This!
At first glance, "anonymous" tracking sounds like an ideal compromise. We get to support websites we visit, without giving up our privacy in the process... Right?
Now drop this dream-scenario into the real world. Google intends to provide a way to globally, uniquely identify "you", anonymously. That works juuust fine - Until you give someone's "partner" (like Amazon, NewEgg, Expedia, etc) one teensy bit of PII. Then... Game over, man, game over! The entire spamming cold-calling advertising world now "knows" more about you than you know about yourself.
Fuck that. You guys just don't get it, do you? We don't want to "play nice". We want you to either:
1) Effectively act as a charity, giving us content for free,
2) Find a viable revenue model that doesn't involve treating us as the product rather than the customers, or
3) FOAD.
Simple as that - Yes, really.
FTA: "All eligible entrants who submit a qualified Entry will receive an AWS promotional credit (“Promotional Credit”) of $50 USD to be used toward Paid Services (does not include Amazon FPS, reserved instances or support services) by December 31, 2014 in accordance with the AWS Promotional Credit Terms & Conditions available at https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/ (the “Credit T&Cs”). Individual Promotional Credit codes valued at $50 USD will be emailed to such entrants following the announcement of the Grand Prize winner in November, 2013 " (bolding mine).
Now hold on just a sec... So they intend to give participants a $50 AWS credit... But not up-front? So to enter, you need to pay up front for access so you can develop and deploy your app, and then after you lose they'll give you credit to continue using something you no longer have a reason to keep alive?
Wow. Best scam ever! I need to run one of these "contests" myself!
So, you're claiming that a government regulation that significantly raises the costs of doing business (to a point above its current break-even point) might actually result in that business demanding more money for its product? And that that event might itself be used as input to a feedback loop?
:)
Erm... Yes? I think you've fairly described the intent of my final point.
The US has a longstanding policy of getting involved where it doesn't belong over some natural resources, why not others? We need hard drives and cell phones just as much as we need internal combustion cars... Right?
The US doesn't have a specific lack of these "conflict minerals" - We simply don't have much in the way of proven reserves because they cost too much to pull out of the ground at current prices while obeying both environmental and labor laws.
As soon as the price starts to shoot up because China or DRC or public opinion or whatever becomes a barrier to cheap importation from somewhere with exploited child workers and a complete disregard for pollution, you can bet the farm you'll see mines spring up all over the place (Idaho, New Mexico, and South Carolina in particular have large known-but-mostly-untapped rare earth deposits) to meet demand.
So, no need to bomb anyone! Best of all, thanks to fracking (which admittedly has its own problems), we may soon have no reason to piss around in the sandbox, either. I, for one, look forward to a few decades of care-free isolationism in our near future.
Are you actually arguing that being homeless is a sensible choice for a person?
For some people - Yes. Living in a house costs a hell of a lot. Financially, it would make a lot more sense (particularly outside urban areas, where you need a car) to simply live in your car.
That said... No, I don't naively believe the guy from TFA lacks a home for pragmatic reasons. Most likely, he lacks a home because he can't hold down a job because the demons (whether bottled or "real") won't let him. In a less cruel world, the wolves (real actual Canis lupus, not imaginary or metaphorical ones) would eat him and everyone would go their merry way. In our world, we will instead force him to endure his demons, making a living watching ads in the library, for the next 40-60 years. Woo-hoo, go Western civilization!
It will cost more to supervise someone who does not want to work than it will to automate the job or hire someone productive.
Cool, you've just filled two menial jobs in one go! You've got the right idea, friend! XD
You really need a "why" for this? Okay, purely on a practical basis, if you don't give people a motivation to put down the Cheetos and the remote, get off the couch, and do something - Most of them won't. I mean, I love what I do, but I sure as hell don't like that I need to whore myself out doing it so the corporate execs can get matching A8 W12s this year instead of those crappy ol' "base model" A8s. If I didn't need to work to live, I wouldn't.
And I make pretty good money at a cushy desk job, at that. People killing themselves for minimum wage at McDonalds? Who do you seriously expect would put up with that for similar pay to doing absolutely nothing?
So, how do you motivate the majority of able-bodied people to actually contribute to society rather than leech off it? "You can take a thankless but dignity-preserving job to make your living, or you can scrape gum off public sidewalks - your choice". Simple as that. Until we can automate every menial job on the planet, we need to have people who would rather do them than put up with some unpleasant alternative. When you make the alternative not all that unpleasant, goodbye food service, goodbye discount retail, goodbye agricultural workers.
Of course, as an alternative, we could pay McSlaves significantly more, so they want to work there... Except, in doing so, you've just tripled the price of a Big Mac, meaning that it now costs more to live, so that base-level government paycheck intended to let everyone survive now doesn't qualify as enough to get by.
He's homeless, I'd be hard pressed to call that a living.
He hasn't died yet. I'd be hard pressed to call that not a living.
2) Retype Bitcoin address from screen to laptop when receiving money for "microwork tasks" like spamming YouTube
:)
I think you meant "point the phone's camera at the QR code on the task completion page". Type it in? How... archaic!
So yeah, managing to use BTC doesn't really take a rocket scientist. That said, while the sort of tasks underlying these crappy online less-than-minimum-wage bounties don't actually take much skill, successfully satisfying the payout terms often does. I did a few of those through Amazon's Turk a few years back just for the hell of it, and they had the most absurd terms - Things like "check the following websites to look for pictures containing more than one species of baby animals", with the fine print disclaiming that getting paid required you to log your start and end time for the task, it couldn't take less than 85 seconds or longer than 95 seconds, and any pictures of iguanas invalidated all other results.
I made 18 cents total before I got bored with it. Took me about three hours. I could probably have made more "mining" Bitcoin block hashes by hand.
Why is this thing priced like a modern board when it has all out of date components on it? Wake me up when they do the Bay Trail version or slash $100 off of the asking price.
Intel seems to have totally missed the mark on this one. People don't buy the Raspberry Pi because they want a desktop PC in an awkward form factor. They buy the RPi because they want a tiny general purpose computing device that sips power and costs so little as to consider it disposable.
The Minnow completely fails on all but one of those criteria - It costs 8x as much, has a 60% larger footprint (almost the size of a NanoITX board!), the CPU alone draws up to 4W (not even counting everything else on the board) vs the Pi's 2.5W total...
If anything, I would have to suspect Intel means to target this as a semi-embedded Epia/Jetway/ECS killer - Though even there, it costs more, still has a larger footprint than readily-available Pico-ITX boards, and lacks the standardized mechanical aspects (ie, mounting holes) you get with the ITX family.
DOA. Simple as that. You can already get more computer for less money, and less computer for a LOT less money.
In order for the mystery to deepen, we would first need to have a mystery, even a shallow(?) one. But what do we have here? A complete lack of a mystery.
Yes, life can produce methane. Yes, some geological processes can produce methane. Mars has neither... So?
I have a complete lack of Siberian tigers in my basement. That doesn't count as a mystery, deep or otherwise.
AHAHAHAHA Stop it! Yer killing me!
Sorry? I completely fail to see any humor in the fact that the banks of the world explicitly and openly collude to fuck us as hard as they can - And with the outright support of government, at that.
the first one of them that get a performance electric car, that isn't fugly as all the current "green" cars....sporty looking (like the Tesla Roadster was) for the price range of a low end Vette...gets all my money.
Seriously? The Tesla S has almost the same profile as a Lamborghini Gallardo. Slightly less absurd front scoop, a bit less "sharp" in a few places, but otherwise, very similar.
I do have to agree about the price, though - If GM can do it at under $30k, awesome. $65k and up, not so cool.
Except patent trolls aren't actually committing crimes, and therefore aren't criminal.
The worst criminals have always had the law on their side - From the landed nobles of Old Europe, to the "robber barons" of the late 19th / early 20th centuries, to patent trolls and the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA today.
Doesn't make it right. They all belong(ed) up against the wall.
they've basically suspended all PvP in the game.
A multiplayer FPS... Without PvP? Wow. Just... Wow.
I mean, I admittedly hate involuntary PvP in most online games. But I can't really imagine how they plan to attract people to an FPS without PvP as a core game mechanic - "Come play a UT clone against AI opponents, oh and don't forget your freemium upgrades if you want to have any chance at lasting 30 seconds"?
And if that kid ending up shooting the other one, and it turned out the police knew of this incident and didn't even investigate, that'd fine, right?
Do you see just a bit of grey area between "ignore" and "arrest"? Hmm?
A parent complained. Fine. The police have a five minute chat with the kid, and maybe, if he sounds completely screwed up, ask for a psych evaluation. End of story.
As presented, he did nothing wrong. This complete bullshit about "terroristic threats" needs to stop now - And "interference of the operation of a school"? Wouldn't that require, I dunno, actually interfering in the operation of a school or something along those lines? Taking a video with your cell phone, crosshairs or not, doesn't do that. Posting that video to YouTube doesn't do that.
Now, in fairness, yes, sometimes we do complain when the authorities look the other way. When James Holmes actually did go to a shrink (several, in fact) prior to his attack, one of whom declared him a threat to the public who outright said he wanted to kill people, and began stockpiling weapons in the six months leading up to Aurora - Not quite the same ballpark as a 15YO playing a game with reality as the background decoration.
They did -- they predicted it would generate $161 million in revenue.
On what basis? They can't even figure out who owes the tax after the fact, how did they come up with that magic number before passing it?
If you ask me my opinion about something, I'll give it. Time may prove me wrong or right, but if wrong, you can bet the farm that I can at least explain my reasoning to you in a rational, even compelling manner.
I'm actually quite impressed that the Massachusetts politicians have reversed course on this idiotic tax so quickly
Will wonders never cease.
I only see people discussing the first-level implications to privacy and security of the NSA having chosen parameters that lead to a somehow-weak curve. Except - That doesn't take any special NSA magic, they just cheated up front.
Such discussion completely overlooks the much bigger problem here, however - The NSA chose parameters that give a weaker curve. Parameters generated as the output of hashing them with SHA1.
The ability to choose parameters strongly suggests that the NSA has a way to produce input texts that yield a desired SHA1 hash. That takes special NSA magic, and should really count as the FP story here, not the far less impressive trick of stacking the deck in their favor.
"The Aeroscraft airship can compress a certain amount of its lifting gas and put it into fabric tanks, under pressure. The density of the compressed gas is higher so that it is no longer lighter than air, and therefore this airship, unlike any of its predecessors, can change its buoyancy."
Uhh... That works with submarines because they actually do change their mass-inside-the-hull (and therefore their density) by taking in or dumping out water from the environment around them. With a rigid frame containing just helium, it doesn't matter whether you store the helium in a tank or in the balloon, you have the same total mass inside the footprint of the hull, and therefore the same overall density (for reference, a balloon "containing" a vacuum would have more buoyancy than even one using Hydrogen).
Not to say they couldn't have found a solution to that particular problem, but the explanation given... Doesn't solve that problem.
A device with no moving parts counts as basically indestructible (under normal circumstances) as long as the screen doesn't crack. Cracking the screen takes a hell of a lot more force than crashing a HDD head into the platter whirring just a few microns below it.
And as another perk, strong magnetic fields largely don't affect flash, until you start getting into strengths that pose a health risk to the human using the tablet. The standard method of wiping a HDD uses a relatively weak (on the "causes human damage" scale of things) 60hz magnetic field.
WTF? On my last preview, I didn't have that entire block quote at the top. New "feature" for those of us who would prefer to manually quote what we want to respond to, or just a glitch?
Weird.
This should be blocked by the government until Bitcoin is considered a legitimate currency, and therefore held to the same standards and regulations as an actual bank.
These guys should be charged with fraud for this crap. These are not "ATM" machines. What they give out is not an officially recognized currency. What they give out is not even a stable currency (I've seen Bitcoin halve, then double, then halve in value over the span of a few days), and there is NO INSURANCE through the government if the entire thing goes belly up (don't tell me that it won't- that's not the point, I'm insured through the Canadian Government who will cover a small amount of money if something happens to my bank).
The more I think about it, the more I think this is some seriously shady crap. You're basically trying to trick the public into buying into your currency and making them believe it's actually valuable for day-to-day use (it's not for 99% of the consumers). I mean, these machines sure as shit aren't going to have warning labels on the side that say "Hey, the market you're buying into could halve overnight, making your money worth half as much!". How many people actually using these machines are really going to know what they're getting into?
This should be blocked by the government until Bitcoin is considered a legitimate currency, and therefore held to the same standards and regulations as an actual bank.
You have mixed levels here. The "dollar" (Canadian or otherwise) does not count as a bank, and has no standards and regulations imposed directly on the currency itself.
Now, if you want to demand that money-handlers/lenders/changers/etc dealing in BTC live up to similar regulations to those dealing in "real" money, hey, I would agree with you in spirit - Aside from the fact that those dealing in BTC will have a great deal of difficulty complying with AML regulations by design.
But you should at least strive to make a coherent argument, rather than something as absurd as "all cows must get SafeServ certified".
Few people know they can do so. For the vast majority, there's no option but the default.
// Gainfully employed, debt-free, and in a happy, stable, long-term relationship.
While I agree with you in principle, and 100% oppose attempts to censor the net by anyone, for any reason... I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people who would use a VPN in the first place know all about "Hadrian's Firewall" and that they can opt out of it (for now).
That said - Seriously Cameron, WTF? Yes, the internet makes porn easier to get to than ever before; don't act all stuffy about the idea of kids seeing it, however, when we old-timers made due juuust fine with our dads' stash of Playboys, and turned out well enough.
/ Started "reading it for the articles" sometime around age 7.