If you count as "unique" every single time, it means you have avoided getting matched to a preexisting profile. A random user agent will have that effect.
If, however, you count as 1/x the first time, 2/x the second time, 3/x the third time, and so on, it means they can actually match you to a unique previous visitor - yourself. Not so good, in that case.
The trackers want you to look as unique as possible, but the same each time you visit. You, OTOH, want to look either as common as possible, or unique every time.
Having 3 big arse monitors connected to a giant, lint-filled box humming noisily under my desk will always be a part of my life.
Kudos, you've won the thread. No, really, you made the single most important point so far...
Screen real-estate.
The "computer" itself may (and realistically, will) get smaller and smaller and smaller, until we wear them like cheap costume jewelry. The display device will become something like Google Glasses, or a spiffy holographic projector, or perhaps even a direct neural interface in the long run. But your phone just doesn't make a good working environment (and I mean that in the "good" sense, not the office-drudgery sense). At some point, you will want to sit down, turn on your 3d immersive holographic desktop environment, and get things done.
So really, I suppose we have a convergence rather than an extinction... Desktop PCs will do just fine, because every phone will work as one. On the subway, it will give you a nice small privacy-protecting interface. At the office, it will fill a wall or entire cubicle with what you need to work on. And at home, it will project por... Er... Whatever form of entertainment you prefer to engage in.
Will that mean the PC has died? No. It will mean your phone now has the power - The display power (CPU power has already largely become a moot point for the vast majority of uses) - Of what you would have used as a desktop PC instead.
We'll use European cars that already get that sort of milage!
This. It pisses me off so much that I can't get a lightweight diesel-electric hybrid in the US. At all. They just don't exist here, and neither the manufacturers (in making them) nor the government (in approving European ones for import) seem the least bit interested in remedying that.
We could hit 54.5 MPG as a fleet average far, far sooner than 2025. As you point out, we just need lower powered and smaller hybrids, simple as that. You want over 120 horses or a curb weight over 3000lbs? Special license class. Done in one - Considering that most of my fellow Americans can't even perpendicular park for shit, any actual driving-skill based licensing requirement would instantly rule out a good 95% of the population.
/ Seriously? You need 160HP? I drive an 88HP hybrid and have no problem passing the slowpokes on my daily commute (even the "players" who speed up to try to block me from passing). No. You don't need 160HP. // You need a 5500lbs SUV that seats ten for your daily commute? No. No you don't. It would cost you less to rent a minivan once a month, than to feed that beast on your daily commute. And if you really do drag nine kids to soccer every day, you should need a damned chauffeur's license for that!
Do you buy movies that you plan to watch only once instead of renting them?
Depends on the price, honestly - If I can buy it for $2, sure, I'll buy it rather than rent it. Case in point, about three months ago Best Buy had a borderline-unbelievable sale on complete seasons of assorted "prime-time" cartoons (like Family Guy). Those have little repeat-watching value, but for $10 a season (and in a few cases, $10 for the entire run of 2-4 seasons), I picked up one of everything they had left in stock.
Normally, I'd just add them to my NetFlix queue (and before you ask, no, I have zero interest in streaming NetFlix), watch once, and delete. But for a low enough price, what the hell, might as well have a copy to keep.
Players supporting movies that use protection phone home to verify licenses to play movies.
I guess I've never encountered any "licensed" content (though let's not drift onto the topic of whether we "buy" or "license" physical media). If I can't use it in a DRM-free form on whatever player I want, I simply don't buy/rent/lease/license/watch it.
So far, that hasn't stopped me from watching anything I wanted, so I don't really know where it applies. But if/when I encounter it, I will certainly vote with my wallet and watch something else instead.
But how do you add music and movies to it? Doesn't the movie playing application have to phone home to download the movies or at least to validate your subscription to movies? If not, what am I missing?
Hmm? I think I missed your joke, there.
I either rip right to that machine, locally, from physical media; or I buy content from my "real" desktop machine and copy it over (stripping out any protection first, if necessary).
Not sure what you mean by the player phoning home, though... Do most of them do that? I primarily use VLC, MediaPlayer Classic, and Fubar2000, of which I think VLC has an option to check for updates, but doesn't force it on the user.
I don't have a problem with autoupdating (though I absolutely do think every piece of software should explicitly ask first).
I have a problem with non-manual updates that break things - Like Flash. Like older plugins. Like Fiddler. Like the size of my goddamned personal toolbar icons (lookin' at you, FF4!).
I have no problem whatsoever with semi-automatically repairing bugs, or even adding new features under the hood. I have a huge problem with breaking legacy support without my permission.
In a connected world things are never teh same as ysterday. [...snip...] There is a common misbelief that a computer is like a car or refrigerator. Just never upgrade because if it aint broke do not fix it right?
Another common (and erroneous) belief says that every computer everywhere must work online. Must fend off a never-ending onslaught of active attacks from outside. Must stay up-to-date at the expense of dropping legacy support, because who uses that old crap anymore?
I could give you a million and one counterexamples to that, but let me give you a common one many people likely use - A mostly-offline home media machine. I don't give a damn if it has 10 year old software riddled with security holes, I don't give a damn if it has up-to-date antivirus software, I don't give a damn if it has FireFox 3 and Flash 7 on it - It plays all my music, it plays all my movies, and I have it set up exactly the way I want to output correctly to my projector and sound system. It lives behind my firewall, and visits exactly two websites, IMDB and CDDB. It should remain functional, in its present state, until the actual hardware fails.
Oh, but look at that, Microsoft decided (yet again) to ignore my autoupdate preferences and reboot it last night; but never mind that I just lost my place in the movie I paused before bed, because today I get to waste two hours trying to convince it that yes, it still has S/PDIF out. Oh, and look at that, Firefox "forgot" (yet again) that I I don't want updates, and has blocked half my plugins. Woo-hoo!
Yes, the internet changes daily, and some software needs to reflect that. That doesn't mean we should ever, ever expect to just randomly lose functionality we had yesterday.
It should prompt to update every day, regardless of whether they visit a site with flash/PDF/etc. That way the update gets applied before they "want to view content NOW". Otherwise they'll click cancel.
You realize, of course, that not all of us need or want to stay at the bleeding edge of every product we use?
Most people just want the same thing they used yesterday to work today. Most people get really, really annoyed when what worked yesterday starts nagging them to upgrade today (or worse, "Adobe Flash (malware) has been blocked for your protection" - Fuck you, Moz!).
Keep it up, guys... Google can't thank you enough for pushing us to use Chrome. And yes, I know that Chrome updates itself, but it doesn't change (aka "break") anything each time.
and is becoming a quick way to short-circuit certain kinds of arguments
The real problem here comes from people using that as a "short cut" to an actual argument.
On the one hand, we've done a great job at getting them to grasp that correlation does not imply causation. Now, we need to get people to understand what does - Necessary and Sufficient.
Next time someone uses that as a catch-phrase to shoot down a correlation as meaningless, ask them:
Does B require A? Necessary.
Does A lead to B? Sufficient.
QED, A causes B (or vice-versa).
Of course, my choice of the word "meaningless" there carries its own problems - Using correlation vs causation as a rhetorical shortcut to actual logic glosses over the fact that (statistically significant) correlations can have meaning (just that they don't "mean" causation). FWIW, The vast majority of modern medicine involves dealing with correlations rather than causes - "depressed people have low serotonin, prozac increases available serotonin", "people with high cholesterol have more heart attacks; lipitor reduces cholesterol". You can often use a correlation, as long as the two sides actually do link via some unknown variables. When they don't, however - Well, pirates don't prevent global warming because adding more pirates to the world doesn't somehow put us back before the industrial revolution.
I never understood people who don't wear helmets when cycling.
Because, with literally thousand of hours biking as a (helmetless) kid growing up in the pre-nanny era, even riding about two miles to and from school every day (no, not an exaggerated memory, thanks to the magic of Google maps I can actually trace the route) - I took plenty of falls off my bike.
And a helmet wouldn't have done a hell of a lot to protect the one part of me that got injured over and over in those falls, my knees.
If I can reduce the chance of damage to literally the most valuable thing in my life by wearing a $25 helmet OF COURSE I'M GOING TO WEAR A HELMET DO YOU THINK I'M STUPID?
Yep, I kinda do - Because falls not related to a car hitting you won't affect your head, and if you do get hit by a car on a bike, that little eggshell won't do much to help you when the rest of your body gets smeared across the pavement like so much squirrel.
Free tip for all the Lance-wannabes out there - Quit "clipping in". When you can actually move your limbs to catch yourself falling, nothing short of getting run over should give you much worse than a bit of road-rash. Maybe a broken wrist if you go down hard.
While this sounds intriguing, I'd like to hear a good case for why BitCoin makes sense in this context.
I'll give you a positive and a negative.
Positive - This make sense because "futures" relate back to the (expected) scarcity and surplus of real-world material goods, the availability of which has no connection to the value of the Euro vs the Yuan. It would make more sense to hedge crude in terms of soybeans than in dollars, yet we only really have the option of doing it in dollars.
Negative - Bitcoin lacks even the connection to reality that Dollars have by virtue of the latter's use in trade for otherwise-real-world products and services.
Now, you could take that in two ways - Connecting Bitcoin to commodities may make it more "meaningful" than most government-issued currencies, because it can float against the rest of the world's currencies to maintain an accurate reflection of the reality underlying production, rather than some random economic policy put in place by a central bank. On the flip side of that, you currently can't actually take delivery of 50 tons of pork denominated in Bitcoins, so this looks like a "futures" market in the worst speculative sense, without the faintest connection to the underlying commodities.
If you've given people everything they could reasonably ask for, including profit share, and they still aren't performing, then chances are they're just lazy.
Not everyone can count as one of the stars. Yes, he should ditch the outright slackers; but the guys who just come in to do a fair day's work to get paid and go home? Sorry, but in any organization, they will form the vast majority of the workforce. Unless your entire organization can live with a "team" of one superstar, you just don't have the option of having all stars.
As for reaching for the stick to try make people into something they can never become, it will just hurt morale for no real gain. Don't go that route. I've seen it tried several times, and it always backfires.
Do your best to keep people happy, keep them wanting to come to work every day, and just stoically accept the fact that over half the team really doesn't give a shit outside "get the job done, get paid".
With both teams, we have guns who are great and really engaged in looking after the customers, but some of the team struggle. Sometimes it is easy to say that there isn't too much work on and goof off and read Slashdot all day. This puts more pressure on some of the team.
This reads somewhat confusingly - You mean that sometimes one team has work and others don't? Or just that on both teams you have some stars and some slackers?
If the former - Simply break down your "team" boundaries! Most coders can handle admin/netops tasks; and although not everyone can code, everyone can help test, which (I say as a coder) often counts as half the work in getting any any large project.
If the latter - Trickier, because real life just works like that. You can of course fire the real slackers. The ones who do their job but have no desire to do more than it takes to get paid, however... Well, you can't really change that no matter what you offer them. At best, you can make sure they have "enough" to do to keep them busy. You might try matching management styles to each group - The superstars just need to hear someone say "go!", and they'll get it done; The 9-to-5'ers likely need more hands-on management (not micromanagement, but someone to semi-actively keep them engaged throughout the day and notice when they've had a bit too much downtime).
As for what motivates geeks in general - "Play" (by which I don't necessarily mean "competition"). Simple as that. Sometimes that means letting people find a cool new way to solve a mundane common task even though it might take a bit longer than necessary; sometimes it means letting them read Slashdot; and sometimes it literally means taking 15 minutes and having a Nerf finger-rocket war across the entire office.
And what are you using those domains for eh? MFA sites maybe and your trying to hide ownership from the big G
This spring, I registered an "ego" domain - My own name dot net, on a whim.
I paid for it with a credit card in my name. I gave a fake phone number, and a PO box for my address. I used a real email address (albeit one made specifically to catch the junk I expected by registering.
And three days later, GoDaddy locked my domain and reversed the charges, refusing to do business with me until I sent them a scan of my driver's license. WTF?
So, I told GoDaddy to go fuck themselves, and registered with a no-name, for less, with automatic free privacy protection (the WhoIs contacts go to them, rather than to me) and that doesn't give the least damn if I want to register as George Bush.
The real problem here involves laziness on the part of law enforcement, pure and simple - IP addresses don't mean LEOs can't track you down, it just means they actually need to come up with enough evidence to convince a judge to demand the ISP turn over the owner's info. It makes doing their job an actual job, rather than a five second query against WhoIs.
Stop expecting to rest of the world to do your work for you, guys. If you need to track me down, do so. But don't expect me to put up with nonstop telemarketers, not to mention the risk of some crazy actually showing up at my door because he doesn't like what I said about Rush Limbaugh, just to save you from having to do some legwork if someday I break the law.
Innocent until proven guilty. Read up on it sometime, eh?
Since you feel so strongly about it, why don't you kill yourself.
1) I have not chosen to do so - Yet. If (when) I get a terminal disease or crippling disability, I have no qualms about ending it all rather than suffering pointlessly. This putz did choose to do so, making a fairly rational choice to die rather than enjoy a prolonged stay with the notoriously rapey US penal system.
2) I currently contribute to society by virtue of belonging to the 53% who do pay taxes. As opposed to our corpse-of-the-day, who had just gotten busted for carjacking - And keep in mind an armed carjacker, meaning he counts as "only" a carjacker and not a murderer by the pure luck of not having met the wrong guy in the car he jacked.
3) If I "feel strongly about it", I do so only out of annoyance, to see so many hypocrites railing against the "news" (for lack of a better word to describe what Fox broadcasts) showing this guy dying. Yet we actively go to other countries to kill brown people and we pay to see far more gory scenes in movies as pure entertainment; FFS, this only made the news because Fox knows their audience wanted to see something "exciting" happen. So many people suddenly "care" about this worthless POS, yet if Fox hadn't broadcast it, 99% of them would never even have heard about it - Just as they didn't notice the other 2700 suicides that day.
My guess: you
have a big ego that says your life is more important than anybody else.
I can think of tons of people far more important than me. I act as little more than a cog - A productive member of society, but no one special. So... Bzzzt. Better luck with your next baseless assumption.
Which gets me back to the smug sense of superiority.
Gets you back to it? You didn't mention it before that random aside. Anyway, call me crazy but yeah, I do kinda consider myself a bit better than a carjacker. And if that bothers you, ask yourself which you'd rather run into in a dark parking lot - A callous bastard, or a murderous thug.
So tired of the "Darwin" meme. It expresses a sense of smug superiority that is entirely undeserved.
Get over it - The rest of us have gotten tired of modern society depriving Darwin of his due. We have too many goddamned people on the planet. The more that remove themselves from it, the better.
In this case, we get a double win, because the taxpayers would have ended up having to pay for food, housing, medical care, and basic cable for this waste of flesh for the next few years. This could only get any better if we see a wave of copycats trying to make the news - Bring 'em on, boys! I'll gladly give you my attention for your 15 seconds of fame as payment.
a block is essentially a transaction in a ledger (the blockchain) which updates which accounts (addresses) hold what balances. [...] You can't say "this bitcoin came from those found in block X".
Sorry, but with the exception of your point about parallel branches, you have that factually incorrect in every meaningful way.
"Accounts" do nothing more than sign blocks. They don't exist in any meaningful way in the system except as keys to sign blocks.
And yes, you most certainly can trace any Bitcoin (or fraction thereof) back to its origin block. You can even trace their ancestry all the way back to THE origin block, though once you pass the one it came from, not much point in going futher.
If you sincerely consider yourself correct and don't just post this as yet another Bitcoin hater, I recommend you take a look at BlockExplorer. Take the time to trace through just a few transaction, and you'll quickly understand exactly what really happens when you "spend" a Bitcoin.
Tell me, was Henry Ford a parasite? How about Sam Walton?
Henry Ford's biggest fans describe him as "obsessive, dictatorial, abusive and utterly without conscience". He built an empire on the backs (and not infrequently, the blood) of his workers.
And Sam Walton? Seriously, you want to use a guy who built such a great empire that towns go to frickin' court to keep it out, as a role model of what businessmen can do for us?
You're a fucking moron.
...Says the guy who made my own point far, far more poignantly than did I. So in that regard, I guess you did one-up me. Thanks,dude!:D
Why NO, I don't think it's the LEAST bit suspicious that this is the 23rd week in a row that this exact sequence of transactions has occurred between these exact same participants.
Though funny, you of course see the flaw in this part of your reasoning?
In case you don't - Each of those transactions would come from, and go to, an entirely different address. You wouldn't even see them as distinct 160BTC transfers; rather, you would just see a scattered collection adding up to 160BTC that "someone" (presumably the previous owner, but not guaranteed due to the existence of "physical" wallets) signed as belonging to the new owner.
Or to put that another way - Even if you bust the seller, and get his entire history of addresses to trace through the blockchain... You still have no way to tell that buyer-A equals buyer-B. That gets a bit less certain for the reverse (since the seller could stupidly have kept using the same address over and over, instead of making a throwaway one each time), but assuming him as not a complete idiot, the same flaw applies - Despite knowing every account to which the buyer has ever sent Bitcoins, you can't tell they all belong to the same seller.
The whole issue of anonymity as it relates to Bitcoin confuses most people. As a good way to look at it, coins have an identity and complete history, but their owners do not, existing solely as a single address at a single point in time (or allowing for a few sloppy assumptions, exist for two points in time).
There are no discrete "coins". There are only addresses and balances.
You have that almost entirely backward. Bitcoin has no "balances" as they relate to an address; it has blocks (groups of 50BTC) that you can trace through a transaction history to determine the current owners of various subdivisions of that block.
You can think of it almost as if, to figure out how much money you have in the bank, you needed to check every dollar bill in circulation to see if you own a portion of it (though more accurately, you would only need to look at any new dollars printed to see if they mention a change in one you used to, or now, own).
Now, more charitably, you may have meant that no discrete "coins" exist in the sense that 1BTC doesn't actually refer to anything except in the context of "1/50th of block X". Don't, however, mistake that for meaning the 1.47BTC you receive today doesn't come complete with a full transaction history tracing it back through every owner it ever had, all the way back to the single address of the miner who "won" that block.
The whole point of being a brilliant business person is to see an opportunity and to be able to take it in order to make profit from having other people do something that the market wants.
FTFY.
Workers don't produce out of nowhere, they have to be hired and told what to do.
Absolute unabashed bullshit. People have "produced" since before we came down from the trees. The businessman may well get credit for encouraging us as a species to produce more than we individually need (though whether you call that "kudos" or "blame" depends on your take on the current state of the world); but his actual direct role amounts to nothing more than that of a parasite.
Throw a bunch of 'workers' together without any purpose, capital, tools and management and see how far that takes you in terms of productivity.
We made it to all seven continents, to the top of the food chain, and discovered beer before "business" started taking a cut. Far enough for ya?
Let's make sure we ignore and apologize for everyone that does it to the candidates we don't like and cry foul only when it's done to the candidate we lionize.
Sadly, no one even bothers insulting the third party candidates.
That will surely help our electoral process.
Only two things will "help our electoral process" - Finding a way to ban private funding of campaigns, and switching to something like IRV that makes it possible to vote for third parties without throwing away your vote completely.
Whether or not one (even popular) geek calls a candidate a poopy-head amounts to worrying about a drop of piss in a pond of raw sewage.
It's odd that everyone is obsessed with the profanity and cares nothing about the ad hominem that it delivered.
I feel quite a lot more concerned that the potential next president of the US believes in magic underwear (not a joke, look it up!), than I do about whether or not a typical antisocial geek not running for any public office managed to say something a little too bluntly.
But hey, look at the alternative... Four more years of - Hmm... Well... What has Barry done, other than get a crippled version of Romneycare applied nationwide? Wow. Way to stick it to your opponent, the creator of your greatest accomplishment to date.
/ "If everyone wasted their vote on [Johnson] [he] would be the next president"
Slashdot Mirror
Short conclusion: I'm screwed.
That depends...
If you count as "unique" every single time, it means you have avoided getting matched to a preexisting profile. A random user agent will have that effect.
If, however, you count as 1/x the first time, 2/x the second time, 3/x the third time, and so on, it means they can actually match you to a unique previous visitor - yourself. Not so good, in that case.
The trackers want you to look as unique as possible, but the same each time you visit. You, OTOH, want to look either as common as possible, or unique every time.
Who cares? Adblock; Ghostery; RandomUserAgent; and always, always, ALWAYS lie when asked for things like your DOB or zip code.
Have fun fulling your DB with useless crap trying to "track" me, Marketers.
Depends on the brand of beer. I am not sure I would bid anything over Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Pffft, that would only appeal to hipsters - And everyone knows they all still use MySpace for the irony-cred.
Wow, you only left out "buy a gun", and we'd have a dead ringer for the Unibomber! ;)
(That said, I agree with you on all but #3, which you'd understand why if you'd actually followed #4)
Having 3 big arse monitors connected to a giant, lint-filled box humming noisily under my desk will always be a part of my life.
Kudos, you've won the thread. No, really, you made the single most important point so far...
Screen real-estate.
The "computer" itself may (and realistically, will) get smaller and smaller and smaller, until we wear them like cheap costume jewelry. The display device will become something like Google Glasses, or a spiffy holographic projector, or perhaps even a direct neural interface in the long run. But your phone just doesn't make a good working environment (and I mean that in the "good" sense, not the office-drudgery sense). At some point, you will want to sit down, turn on your 3d immersive holographic desktop environment, and get things done.
So really, I suppose we have a convergence rather than an extinction... Desktop PCs will do just fine, because every phone will work as one. On the subway, it will give you a nice small privacy-protecting interface. At the office, it will fill a wall or entire cubicle with what you need to work on. And at home, it will project por... Er... Whatever form of entertainment you prefer to engage in.
Will that mean the PC has died? No. It will mean your phone now has the power - The display power (CPU power has already largely become a moot point for the vast majority of uses) - Of what you would have used as a desktop PC instead.
We'll use European cars that already get that sort of milage!
// You need a 5500lbs SUV that seats ten for your daily commute? No. No you don't. It would cost you less to rent a minivan once a month, than to feed that beast on your daily commute. And if you really do drag nine kids to soccer every day, you should need a damned chauffeur's license for that!
This. It pisses me off so much that I can't get a lightweight diesel-electric hybrid in the US. At all. They just don't exist here, and neither the manufacturers (in making them) nor the government (in approving European ones for import) seem the least bit interested in remedying that.
We could hit 54.5 MPG as a fleet average far, far sooner than 2025. As you point out, we just need lower powered and smaller hybrids, simple as that. You want over 120 horses or a curb weight over 3000lbs? Special license class. Done in one - Considering that most of my fellow Americans can't even perpendicular park for shit, any actual driving-skill based licensing requirement would instantly rule out a good 95% of the population.
/ Seriously? You need 160HP? I drive an 88HP hybrid and have no problem passing the slowpokes on my daily commute (even the "players" who speed up to try to block me from passing). No. You don't need 160HP.
Do you buy movies that you plan to watch only once instead of renting them?
Depends on the price, honestly - If I can buy it for $2, sure, I'll buy it rather than rent it. Case in point, about three months ago Best Buy had a borderline-unbelievable sale on complete seasons of assorted "prime-time" cartoons (like Family Guy). Those have little repeat-watching value, but for $10 a season (and in a few cases, $10 for the entire run of 2-4 seasons), I picked up one of everything they had left in stock.
Normally, I'd just add them to my NetFlix queue (and before you ask, no, I have zero interest in streaming NetFlix), watch once, and delete. But for a low enough price, what the hell, might as well have a copy to keep.
Players supporting movies that use protection phone home to verify licenses to play movies.
I guess I've never encountered any "licensed" content (though let's not drift onto the topic of whether we "buy" or "license" physical media). If I can't use it in a DRM-free form on whatever player I want, I simply don't buy/rent/lease/license/watch it.
So far, that hasn't stopped me from watching anything I wanted, so I don't really know where it applies. But if/when I encounter it, I will certainly vote with my wallet and watch something else instead.
But how do you add music and movies to it? Doesn't the movie playing application have to phone home to download the movies or at least to validate your subscription to movies? If not, what am I missing?
Hmm? I think I missed your joke, there.
I either rip right to that machine, locally, from physical media; or I buy content from my "real" desktop machine and copy it over (stripping out any protection first, if necessary).
Not sure what you mean by the player phoning home, though... Do most of them do that? I primarily use VLC, MediaPlayer Classic, and Fubar2000, of which I think VLC has an option to check for updates, but doesn't force it on the user.
Yes Mozilla needs to do this.
I don't have a problem with autoupdating (though I absolutely do think every piece of software should explicitly ask first).
I have a problem with non-manual updates that break things - Like Flash. Like older plugins. Like Fiddler. Like the size of my goddamned personal toolbar icons (lookin' at you, FF4!).
I have no problem whatsoever with semi-automatically repairing bugs, or even adding new features under the hood. I have a huge problem with breaking legacy support without my permission.
In a connected world things are never teh same as ysterday. [...snip...] There is a common misbelief that a computer is like a car or refrigerator. Just never upgrade because if it aint broke do not fix it right?
Another common (and erroneous) belief says that every computer everywhere must work online. Must fend off a never-ending onslaught of active attacks from outside. Must stay up-to-date at the expense of dropping legacy support, because who uses that old crap anymore?
I could give you a million and one counterexamples to that, but let me give you a common one many people likely use - A mostly-offline home media machine. I don't give a damn if it has 10 year old software riddled with security holes, I don't give a damn if it has up-to-date antivirus software, I don't give a damn if it has FireFox 3 and Flash 7 on it - It plays all my music, it plays all my movies, and I have it set up exactly the way I want to output correctly to my projector and sound system. It lives behind my firewall, and visits exactly two websites, IMDB and CDDB. It should remain functional, in its present state, until the actual hardware fails.
Oh, but look at that, Microsoft decided (yet again) to ignore my autoupdate preferences and reboot it last night; but never mind that I just lost my place in the movie I paused before bed, because today I get to waste two hours trying to convince it that yes, it still has S/PDIF out. Oh, and look at that, Firefox "forgot" (yet again) that I I don't want updates, and has blocked half my plugins. Woo-hoo!
Yes, the internet changes daily, and some software needs to reflect that. That doesn't mean we should ever, ever expect to just randomly lose functionality we had yesterday.
It should prompt to update every day, regardless of whether they visit a site with flash/PDF/etc. That way the update gets applied before they "want to view content NOW". Otherwise they'll click cancel.
You realize, of course, that not all of us need or want to stay at the bleeding edge of every product we use?
Most people just want the same thing they used yesterday to work today. Most people get really, really annoyed when what worked yesterday starts nagging them to upgrade today (or worse, "Adobe Flash (malware) has been blocked for your protection" - Fuck you, Moz!).
Keep it up, guys... Google can't thank you enough for pushing us to use Chrome. And yes, I know that Chrome updates itself, but it doesn't change (aka "break") anything each time.
and is becoming a quick way to short-circuit certain kinds of arguments
The real problem here comes from people using that as a "short cut" to an actual argument.
On the one hand, we've done a great job at getting them to grasp that correlation does not imply causation. Now, we need to get people to understand what does - Necessary and Sufficient.
Next time someone uses that as a catch-phrase to shoot down a correlation as meaningless, ask them:
Does B require A? Necessary.
Does A lead to B? Sufficient.
QED, A causes B (or vice-versa).
Of course, my choice of the word "meaningless" there carries its own problems - Using correlation vs causation as a rhetorical shortcut to actual logic glosses over the fact that (statistically significant) correlations can have meaning (just that they don't "mean" causation). FWIW, The vast majority of modern medicine involves dealing with correlations rather than causes - "depressed people have low serotonin, prozac increases available serotonin", "people with high cholesterol have more heart attacks; lipitor reduces cholesterol". You can often use a correlation, as long as the two sides actually do link via some unknown variables. When they don't, however - Well, pirates don't prevent global warming because adding more pirates to the world doesn't somehow put us back before the industrial revolution.
I never understood people who don't wear helmets when cycling.
Because, with literally thousand of hours biking as a (helmetless) kid growing up in the pre-nanny era, even riding about two miles to and from school every day (no, not an exaggerated memory, thanks to the magic of Google maps I can actually trace the route) - I took plenty of falls off my bike.
And a helmet wouldn't have done a hell of a lot to protect the one part of me that got injured over and over in those falls, my knees.
If I can reduce the chance of damage to literally the most valuable thing in my life by wearing a $25 helmet OF COURSE I'M GOING TO WEAR A HELMET DO YOU THINK I'M STUPID?
Yep, I kinda do - Because falls not related to a car hitting you won't affect your head, and if you do get hit by a car on a bike, that little eggshell won't do much to help you when the rest of your body gets smeared across the pavement like so much squirrel.
Free tip for all the Lance-wannabes out there - Quit "clipping in". When you can actually move your limbs to catch yourself falling, nothing short of getting run over should give you much worse than a bit of road-rash. Maybe a broken wrist if you go down hard.
While this sounds intriguing, I'd like to hear a good case for why BitCoin makes sense in this context.
I'll give you a positive and a negative.
Positive - This make sense because "futures" relate back to the (expected) scarcity and surplus of real-world material goods, the availability of which has no connection to the value of the Euro vs the Yuan. It would make more sense to hedge crude in terms of soybeans than in dollars, yet we only really have the option of doing it in dollars.
Negative - Bitcoin lacks even the connection to reality that Dollars have by virtue of the latter's use in trade for otherwise-real-world products and services.
Now, you could take that in two ways - Connecting Bitcoin to commodities may make it more "meaningful" than most government-issued currencies, because it can float against the rest of the world's currencies to maintain an accurate reflection of the reality underlying production, rather than some random economic policy put in place by a central bank. On the flip side of that, you currently can't actually take delivery of 50 tons of pork denominated in Bitcoins, so this looks like a "futures" market in the worst speculative sense, without the faintest connection to the underlying commodities.
If you've given people everything they could reasonably ask for, including profit share, and they still aren't performing, then chances are they're just lazy.
Not everyone can count as one of the stars. Yes, he should ditch the outright slackers; but the guys who just come in to do a fair day's work to get paid and go home? Sorry, but in any organization, they will form the vast majority of the workforce. Unless your entire organization can live with a "team" of one superstar, you just don't have the option of having all stars.
As for reaching for the stick to try make people into something they can never become, it will just hurt morale for no real gain. Don't go that route. I've seen it tried several times, and it always backfires.
Do your best to keep people happy, keep them wanting to come to work every day, and just stoically accept the fact that over half the team really doesn't give a shit outside "get the job done, get paid".
With both teams, we have guns who are great and really engaged in looking after the customers, but some of the team struggle. Sometimes it is easy to say that there isn't too much work on and goof off and read Slashdot all day. This puts more pressure on some of the team.
This reads somewhat confusingly - You mean that sometimes one team has work and others don't? Or just that on both teams you have some stars and some slackers?
If the former - Simply break down your "team" boundaries! Most coders can handle admin/netops tasks; and although not everyone can code, everyone can help test, which (I say as a coder) often counts as half the work in getting any any large project.
If the latter - Trickier, because real life just works like that. You can of course fire the real slackers. The ones who do their job but have no desire to do more than it takes to get paid, however... Well, you can't really change that no matter what you offer them. At best, you can make sure they have "enough" to do to keep them busy. You might try matching management styles to each group - The superstars just need to hear someone say "go!", and they'll get it done; The 9-to-5'ers likely need more hands-on management (not micromanagement, but someone to semi-actively keep them engaged throughout the day and notice when they've had a bit too much downtime).
As for what motivates geeks in general - "Play" (by which I don't necessarily mean "competition"). Simple as that. Sometimes that means letting people find a cool new way to solve a mundane common task even though it might take a bit longer than necessary; sometimes it means letting them read Slashdot; and sometimes it literally means taking 15 minutes and having a Nerf finger-rocket war across the entire office.
And what are you using those domains for eh? MFA sites maybe and your trying to hide ownership from the big G
This spring, I registered an "ego" domain - My own name dot net, on a whim.
I paid for it with a credit card in my name. I gave a fake phone number, and a PO box for my address. I used a real email address (albeit one made specifically to catch the junk I expected by registering.
And three days later, GoDaddy locked my domain and reversed the charges, refusing to do business with me until I sent them a scan of my driver's license. WTF?
So, I told GoDaddy to go fuck themselves, and registered with a no-name, for less, with automatic free privacy protection (the WhoIs contacts go to them, rather than to me) and that doesn't give the least damn if I want to register as George Bush.
The real problem here involves laziness on the part of law enforcement, pure and simple - IP addresses don't mean LEOs can't track you down, it just means they actually need to come up with enough evidence to convince a judge to demand the ISP turn over the owner's info. It makes doing their job an actual job, rather than a five second query against WhoIs.
Stop expecting to rest of the world to do your work for you, guys. If you need to track me down, do so. But don't expect me to put up with nonstop telemarketers, not to mention the risk of some crazy actually showing up at my door because he doesn't like what I said about Rush Limbaugh, just to save you from having to do some legwork if someday I break the law.
Innocent until proven guilty. Read up on it sometime, eh?
Since you feel so strongly about it, why don't you kill yourself.
1) I have not chosen to do so - Yet. If (when) I get a terminal disease or crippling disability, I have no qualms about ending it all rather than suffering pointlessly. This putz did choose to do so, making a fairly rational choice to die rather than enjoy a prolonged stay with the notoriously rapey US penal system.
2) I currently contribute to society by virtue of belonging to the 53% who do pay taxes. As opposed to our corpse-of-the-day, who had just gotten busted for carjacking - And keep in mind an armed carjacker, meaning he counts as "only" a carjacker and not a murderer by the pure luck of not having met the wrong guy in the car he jacked.
3) If I "feel strongly about it", I do so only out of annoyance, to see so many hypocrites railing against the "news" (for lack of a better word to describe what Fox broadcasts) showing this guy dying. Yet we actively go to other countries to kill brown people and we pay to see far more gory scenes in movies as pure entertainment; FFS, this only made the news because Fox knows their audience wanted to see something "exciting" happen. So many people suddenly "care" about this worthless POS, yet if Fox hadn't broadcast it, 99% of them would never even have heard about it - Just as they didn't notice the other 2700 suicides that day.
My guess: you have a big ego that says your life is more important than anybody else.
I can think of tons of people far more important than me. I act as little more than a cog - A productive member of society, but no one special. So... Bzzzt. Better luck with your next baseless assumption.
Which gets me back to the smug sense of superiority.
Gets you back to it? You didn't mention it before that random aside. Anyway, call me crazy but yeah, I do kinda consider myself a bit better than a carjacker. And if that bothers you, ask yourself which you'd rather run into in a dark parking lot - A callous bastard, or a murderous thug.
So tired of the "Darwin" meme. It expresses a sense of smug superiority that is entirely undeserved.
Get over it - The rest of us have gotten tired of modern society depriving Darwin of his due. We have too many goddamned people on the planet. The more that remove themselves from it, the better.
In this case, we get a double win, because the taxpayers would have ended up having to pay for food, housing, medical care, and basic cable for this waste of flesh for the next few years. This could only get any better if we see a wave of copycats trying to make the news - Bring 'em on, boys! I'll gladly give you my attention for your 15 seconds of fame as payment.
Good riddance.
a block is essentially a transaction in a ledger (the blockchain) which updates which accounts (addresses) hold what balances. [...] You can't say "this bitcoin came from those found in block X".
Sorry, but with the exception of your point about parallel branches, you have that factually incorrect in every meaningful way.
"Accounts" do nothing more than sign blocks. They don't exist in any meaningful way in the system except as keys to sign blocks.
And yes, you most certainly can trace any Bitcoin (or fraction thereof) back to its origin block. You can even trace their ancestry all the way back to THE origin block, though once you pass the one it came from, not much point in going futher.
If you sincerely consider yourself correct and don't just post this as yet another Bitcoin hater, I recommend you take a look at BlockExplorer. Take the time to trace through just a few transaction, and you'll quickly understand exactly what really happens when you "spend" a Bitcoin.
Tell me, was Henry Ford a parasite? How about Sam Walton?
...Says the guy who made my own point far, far more poignantly than did I. So in that regard, I guess you did one-up me. Thanks ,dude! :D
Henry Ford's biggest fans describe him as "obsessive, dictatorial, abusive and utterly without conscience". He built an empire on the backs (and not infrequently, the blood) of his workers.
And Sam Walton? Seriously, you want to use a guy who built such a great empire that towns go to frickin' court to keep it out, as a role model of what businessmen can do for us?
You're a fucking moron.
Why NO, I don't think it's the LEAST bit suspicious that this is the 23rd week in a row that this exact sequence of transactions has occurred between these exact same participants.
Though funny, you of course see the flaw in this part of your reasoning?
In case you don't - Each of those transactions would come from, and go to, an entirely different address. You wouldn't even see them as distinct 160BTC transfers; rather, you would just see a scattered collection adding up to 160BTC that "someone" (presumably the previous owner, but not guaranteed due to the existence of "physical" wallets) signed as belonging to the new owner.
Or to put that another way - Even if you bust the seller, and get his entire history of addresses to trace through the blockchain... You still have no way to tell that buyer-A equals buyer-B. That gets a bit less certain for the reverse (since the seller could stupidly have kept using the same address over and over, instead of making a throwaway one each time), but assuming him as not a complete idiot, the same flaw applies - Despite knowing every account to which the buyer has ever sent Bitcoins, you can't tell they all belong to the same seller.
The whole issue of anonymity as it relates to Bitcoin confuses most people. As a good way to look at it, coins have an identity and complete history, but their owners do not, existing solely as a single address at a single point in time (or allowing for a few sloppy assumptions, exist for two points in time).
There are no discrete "coins". There are only addresses and balances.
You have that almost entirely backward. Bitcoin has no "balances" as they relate to an address; it has blocks (groups of 50BTC) that you can trace through a transaction history to determine the current owners of various subdivisions of that block.
You can think of it almost as if, to figure out how much money you have in the bank, you needed to check every dollar bill in circulation to see if you own a portion of it (though more accurately, you would only need to look at any new dollars printed to see if they mention a change in one you used to, or now, own).
Now, more charitably, you may have meant that no discrete "coins" exist in the sense that 1BTC doesn't actually refer to anything except in the context of "1/50th of block X". Don't, however, mistake that for meaning the 1.47BTC you receive today doesn't come complete with a full transaction history tracing it back through every owner it ever had, all the way back to the single address of the miner who "won" that block.
The whole point of being a brilliant business person is to see an opportunity and to be able to take it in order to make profit from having other people do something that the market wants.
FTFY.
Workers don't produce out of nowhere, they have to be hired and told what to do.
Absolute unabashed bullshit. People have "produced" since before we came down from the trees. The businessman may well get credit for encouraging us as a species to produce more than we individually need (though whether you call that "kudos" or "blame" depends on your take on the current state of the world); but his actual direct role amounts to nothing more than that of a parasite.
Throw a bunch of 'workers' together without any purpose, capital, tools and management and see how far that takes you in terms of productivity.
We made it to all seven continents, to the top of the food chain, and discovered beer before "business" started taking a cut. Far enough for ya?
Let's make sure we ignore and apologize for everyone that does it to the candidates we don't like and cry foul only when it's done to the candidate we lionize.
Sadly, no one even bothers insulting the third party candidates.
That will surely help our electoral process.
Only two things will "help our electoral process" - Finding a way to ban private funding of campaigns, and switching to something like IRV that makes it possible to vote for third parties without throwing away your vote completely.
Whether or not one (even popular) geek calls a candidate a poopy-head amounts to worrying about a drop of piss in a pond of raw sewage.
It's odd that everyone is obsessed with the profanity and cares nothing about the ad hominem that it delivered.
I feel quite a lot more concerned that the potential next president of the US believes in magic underwear (not a joke, look it up!), than I do about whether or not a typical antisocial geek not running for any public office managed to say something a little too bluntly.
But hey, look at the alternative... Four more years of - Hmm... Well... What has Barry done, other than get a crippled version of Romneycare applied nationwide? Wow. Way to stick it to your opponent, the creator of your greatest accomplishment to date.
/ "If everyone wasted their vote on [Johnson] [he] would be the next president"