Are you considering the resources it takes to replace that working appliance? Some estimates place one smartphone to consume an average of 1 gigajoule of energy and 13 tons of water to manufacture.
I was not considering that. For reference, 33 terajoules is equivalent to 6 or 7 international airline flights and 430000 tons of water is one day of water usage by the US Steel plants in Detroit.
The number of iPhones discarded due to this problem, 33,000, works out to 3.1 cubic meters of waste (assuming they are all modern size).
There may be a fair bit of value there, with exotic elements and whatnot, but it's hardly an environmental disaster. It's way less waste volume than you would get from, say, demolishing a Blockbuster Video store and replacing it with a Mattress Firm.
For many users, Outlook and Excel are the reason. Granted, the Outlook web interface is pretty good, but it does not quite equal the native client. With Excel, the Linux alternatives are poorly known and a point of (often unjustified) concern. I'll add that the Excel interface is generally better than the open source alternatives as well, particularly with things like column fills and conditional formatting.
Finally, let's think about graphics and sound, which are still sketchy way too often on Linux after all these years. Just a month ago, I watched a skilled Linux sysadmin spend days trying to get a 3-monitor setup to work properly. He ultimately succeeded, but what a nightmare!
The Moon was formed from a big collision between the Earth and some other object. Generally speaking, the light stuff was flung further into space, and formed the Moon while the heavy stuff congealed into the Earth as we know it.
As a consequence, the Moon has density of 3.5 grams/cc while the Earth has 5.5 g/cc. All the heavy, expensive stuff is on the Earth. So mining operations on the Moon would not find a lot of iron and valuable heavier metals. Silicates and the like, sure.
Every few years, I end up talking to some poor schlub who has reinvented relational databases. Badly.
It's not their fault, some of the folks are pretty smart. They just don't know. Anyway, Google just enabled another menagerie of eldritch cross-referencing nightmares.
This a dangerous thing for Coinbase to wish for. Once mainstream financial firms are involved, the regulators will want Coinbase to act more like a real exchange, or at least a real crossing network. With lots of regulations. It's a tremendous burden that existing exchanges have already hurdled.
- Have low "friction" in transactions (in terms of ease, time, and transaction costs)
- Be near-universal in acceptance
- Provide a good store of value
- Be difficult to counterfeit
Bitcoin does very well on the last point and, in some senses, also does well on the first point due to the fact that it is a digital currency.
These properties are generally achieved by currencies through some form of artificial scarcity. Gold, for example, is valued well above its utility in industry.
Bitcoins version of artificial scarcity is poisonous, in the sense that its mechanism invites society to waste resources (electricity, silicon chips) on generating scarce integers no one else has. The world will be far better off once we are using digital currencies with different forms of artificial scarcity.
I think it's hard to argue Bitcoin is treated much as a currency even now, except perhaps by the ransomware authors. Generally it is being purchased as an "investment", which lately bears similarity to some historical crazes and bubbles.
In this case, the margin I have in mind is in kinetic energy terms. It won't end up infinitely far away because it is nowhere near galactic escape velocity.
Escape speed from 1 AU (Earth's orbital radius) is about 42 km/s. The speed of this object, stated as 156,400 km/h, is just over 43/km/h. Assuming the object is a bit more than 1 AU from the Sun right now, it will escape the solar system but not by a wide margin.
One thing we have seen is that it is a tremendously expensive undertaking. The Android example shows how difficult it is to handle the unruly mob of independent manufacturers, so I think we will see such an OS one day, but that it will follow the Apple model of integrated hardware and software.
The market demand in the US and Europe is not terribly high for such a beast, but I could easily see, say, China or Korea deciding that having a new platform was of strategic value. Samsung has even tried it already.
In China, for example, if it were announced today that Android and iOS were going to be forbidden starting in 2021, you would have a pretty complete alternative ecosystem by then.
If Mr. Lapinski (the blogger) thinks this will have any significant effect on governments' efforts and success to incorporate facial recognition in the approaching Orwellian utopia, then he is nuts.
On the other hand, I agree that a touch ID on the back would have been nicer. Mostly because I don't want to have to aim my phone in a certain direction for it to unlock.
While you are not explicitly suggesting precious metals, it's worth a look at how they behave as currency.
Aside from the obvious inconveniences, they are also need to be standardized. This makes them subject, in practice, to chaotic manipulation. This transcription of a very libertarian historian's lecture recounts the tale of manipulation and inflation in ancient Roman currencies.
The lecture was intended as a cautionary tale about economic government management, but one important aspect of it is that, despite a currency based on precious metal coinage and an exchange economy based on that coinage and bulk precious metals, Rome still had essentially all the same problems people worry about with fiat currencies.
Playing with percentages can get easily confused which is what I suspect happened to you because your math is way off.
Wrong.
Percentages are handy for comparison, but can be easily confused or used to conflate facts.
Agreed.
... a white man is several times more likely to be shot by a black man, than the other way around
Thus, 1/1,046,032 whites was an interracial murderer. A black person statistically has to meet over 1M whites to run into an interracial murderer (whitey is pretty safe these days, apparently)....1/92,176 blacks was an interracial murderer. A white person has to meet 92K random blacks to statistically meet an interracial murderer.... 1/32,608 black men was an interracial murderer. Thus, any random young black man is 240% more likely to murder a white than any random white person is to murder another white person and any random young black man is 20,900% more likely to murder a black person than any random white person is to murder a black person.
You are simply reading the GPs text differently. It hinges on the meaning of the phrase "likely to be shot by a black man", where one can read that as either "likely, in the course of daily life, to be shot by a black man" (my interpretation) or "likely, upon seeing a young black man, to be shot by him" (your interpretation, and possibly the GPs).
By the way, a white man is several times more likely to be shot by a black man, than the other way around. It's not some 20-30% difference. It's several hundred percent more likely.
This is getting really off-topic, but that statement is ridiculously far off. Murder is quite well traced by the FBI, so let's take it as a proxy for shootings. The FBI has this nice table of 2013 statistics (other years would be broadly similar).
From the table we can see that there were 409 murders of whites by blacks. With a white population of roughly 200 million, that makes about 2 parts per million. We also see 189 murders of blacks by whites. With a black population of about 40 million, that makes just under 5 parts per million.
From this we see that a black person is about 2.5x more likely to be murdered by a white person than the other way around. That's the opposite of what you said.
Now, it is true that if you restrict to the cohort of actual crime victims, things look different. For example, given that a white person is one of the 3,000 murder victims , chances are about 14% that the murderer was black. In comparison, given that a black person was one of the 2,500 victims, chances are about 7.5% that the murderer was white.
Even viewing the statistics this way, we do not reach "several hundred percent", but rather 80%.
There's a book titled (roughly) "Think Samsung" that was published in 2010 (link). It's said to give a disturbing picture of Samsung's corruption, and was even reviewed in The New York Times. It was written by Samsung's former chief legal counsel.
In his book, Mr. Kim depicts Mr. Lee and “vassal” executives at Samsung as bribing thieves who “lord over” the country, its government and media. He portrays prosecutors as opportunists who are ruthless to those they regard as “dead” powers, like a former president, but subservient to and afraid of Samsung, which he calls the “power that never dies.”
As the others have said, Wikileaks isn't out of play at all.
You're right, they are not necessarily out of play on this. The out-of-play scenario I have in mind (with zero evidence for it, mind you) is that the organization with all this data has been sending it to Assange (or making it available online) encrypted with his public key.
With Assange unable to handle things, they would have to find another part of Wikileaks they trust to share their publication goals. Perhaps that's not so easy.
With WikiLeaks (likely) out of play, whoever has been sending WikiLeaks the Democrats' data will either have to find another channel for release, or stop releasing. In the former case, that may give intelligence agencies a better idea of their target.
I wonder if there was a back-channel conversation with Ecuador -- something like "Whoever is behind this, Ecuador is effectively acting as an accessory to some outside party attempting to alter the US presidential election. Is that *really* how you want us to treat this?"
Except that in the case of platforms, you may have a lot of money tied into either the "App Store" or "Google Play" for apps/music/video/etc
In addition, there's the pain of migrating calendars and the like. There are export options and tools to assist in that, but it could still get painful I fear. For music, Spotify customers would be fine but I am not sure about Play or iTunes, even where it is just a matter of playlists.
It's hard to tell of course how many people this matters for. In effect the article is telling us fewer than 50% of Note 7 owners are both clueful and worry about migration problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you considering the resources it takes to replace that working appliance? Some estimates place one smartphone to consume an average of 1 gigajoule of energy and 13 tons of water to manufacture.
I was not considering that. For reference, 33 terajoules is equivalent to 6 or 7 international airline flights and 430000 tons of water is one day of water usage by the US Steel plants in Detroit.
The number of iPhones discarded due to this problem, 33,000, works out to 3.1 cubic meters of waste (assuming they are all modern size).
There may be a fair bit of value there, with exotic elements and whatnot, but it's hardly an environmental disaster. It's way less waste volume than you would get from, say, demolishing a Blockbuster Video store and replacing it with a Mattress Firm.
For many users, Outlook and Excel are the reason. Granted, the Outlook web interface is pretty good, but it does not quite equal the native client. With Excel, the Linux alternatives are poorly known and a point of (often unjustified) concern. I'll add that the Excel interface is generally better than the open source alternatives as well, particularly with things like column fills and conditional formatting.
Finally, let's think about graphics and sound, which are still sketchy way too often on Linux after all these years. Just a month ago, I watched a skilled Linux sysadmin spend days trying to get a 3-monitor setup to work properly. He ultimately succeeded, but what a nightmare!
BBEdit was great for its era, but I use other editors now. VSCode, for this formerly anti-Microsoft nerd, has been excellent.
The Moon was formed from a big collision between the Earth and some other object. Generally speaking, the light stuff was flung further into space, and formed the Moon while the heavy stuff congealed into the Earth as we know it.
As a consequence, the Moon has density of 3.5 grams/cc while the Earth has 5.5 g/cc. All the heavy, expensive stuff is on the Earth. So mining operations on the Moon would not find a lot of iron and valuable heavier metals. Silicates and the like, sure.
Every few years, I end up talking to some poor schlub who has reinvented relational databases. Badly.
It's not their fault, some of the folks are pretty smart. They just don't know. Anyway, Google just enabled another menagerie of eldritch cross-referencing nightmares.
The daily volume is considerably more than you cite, at $600 million/day and that is just in USD terms. Overall volume is about triple that.
I actually agree with you about it being vulnerable, but we should base our arguments on solid numbers.
This a dangerous thing for Coinbase to wish for. Once mainstream financial firms are involved, the regulators will want Coinbase to act more like a real exchange, or at least a real crossing network. With lots of regulations. It's a tremendous burden that existing exchanges have already hurdled.
A good currency should do a few things:
- Have low "friction" in transactions (in terms of ease, time, and transaction costs)
- Be near-universal in acceptance
- Provide a good store of value
- Be difficult to counterfeit
Bitcoin does very well on the last point and, in some senses, also does well on the first point due to the fact that it is a digital currency.
These properties are generally achieved by currencies through some form of artificial scarcity. Gold, for example, is valued well above its utility in industry.
Bitcoins version of artificial scarcity is poisonous, in the sense that its mechanism invites society to waste resources (electricity, silicon chips) on generating scarce integers no one else has. The world will be far better off once we are using digital currencies with different forms of artificial scarcity.
I think it's hard to argue Bitcoin is treated much as a currency even now, except perhaps by the ransomware authors. Generally it is being purchased as an "investment", which lately bears similarity to some historical crazes and bubbles.
Nice links, thank you!
In this case, the margin I have in mind is in kinetic energy terms. It won't end up infinitely far away because it is nowhere near galactic escape velocity.
Escape speed from 1 AU (Earth's orbital radius) is about 42 km/s. The speed of this object, stated as 156,400 km/h, is just over 43/km/h. Assuming the object is a bit more than 1 AU from the Sun right now, it will escape the solar system but not by a wide margin.
One thing we have seen is that it is a tremendously expensive undertaking. The Android example shows how difficult it is to handle the unruly mob of independent manufacturers, so I think we will see such an OS one day, but that it will follow the Apple model of integrated hardware and software.
The market demand in the US and Europe is not terribly high for such a beast, but I could easily see, say, China or Korea deciding that having a new platform was of strategic value. Samsung has even tried it already.
In China, for example, if it were announced today that Android and iOS were going to be forbidden starting in 2021, you would have a pretty complete alternative ecosystem by then.
If Mr. Lapinski (the blogger) thinks this will have any significant effect on governments' efforts and success to incorporate facial recognition in the approaching Orwellian utopia, then he is nuts.
On the other hand, I agree that a touch ID on the back would have been nicer. Mostly because I don't want to have to aim my phone in a certain direction for it to unlock.
While you are not explicitly suggesting precious metals, it's worth a look at how they behave as currency.
Aside from the obvious inconveniences, they are also need to be standardized. This makes them subject, in practice, to chaotic manipulation. This transcription of a very libertarian historian's lecture recounts the tale of manipulation and inflation in ancient Roman currencies.
The lecture was intended as a cautionary tale about economic government management, but one important aspect of it is that, despite a currency based on precious metal coinage and an exchange economy based on that coinage and bulk precious metals, Rome still had essentially all the same problems people worry about with fiat currencies.
(For those unfamiliar with it, Mises is a libertarian think tank, and largely horseshit, but I rather like that lecture. Example of silliness: Road signs and lights that regulate driver behavior at intersections are an abominable menace to society")
Mod parent up, please. This person knows what they are talking about.
Sleep is the new status symbol
My teenagers have unbelievably high status, then.
Playing with percentages can get easily confused which is what I suspect happened to you because your math is way off.
Wrong.
Percentages are handy for comparison, but can be easily confused or used to conflate facts.
Agreed.
... a white man is several times more likely to be shot by a black man, than the other way around
Thus, 1/1,046,032 whites was an interracial murderer. A black person statistically has to meet over 1M whites to run into an interracial murderer (whitey is pretty safe these days, apparently). ...1/92,176 blacks was an interracial murderer. A white person has to meet 92K random blacks to statistically meet an interracial murderer. ... 1/32,608 black men was an interracial murderer. Thus, any random young black man is 240% more likely to murder a white than any random white person is to murder another white person and any random young black man is 20,900% more likely to murder a black person than any random white person is to murder a black person.
You are simply reading the GPs text differently. It hinges on the meaning of the phrase "likely to be shot by a black man", where one can read that as either "likely, in the course of daily life, to be shot by a black man" (my interpretation) or "likely, upon seeing a young black man, to be shot by him" (your interpretation, and possibly the GPs).
By the way, a white man is several times more likely to be shot by a black man, than the other way around. It's not some 20-30% difference. It's several hundred percent more likely.
This is getting really off-topic, but that statement is ridiculously far off. Murder is quite well traced by the FBI, so let's take it as a proxy for shootings. The FBI has this nice table of 2013 statistics (other years would be broadly similar).
From the table we can see that there were 409 murders of whites by blacks. With a white population of roughly 200 million, that makes about 2 parts per million. We also see 189 murders of blacks by whites. With a black population of about 40 million, that makes just under 5 parts per million.
From this we see that a black person is about 2.5x more likely to be murdered by a white person than the other way around. That's the opposite of what you said.
Now, it is true that if you restrict to the cohort of actual crime victims, things look different. For example, given that a white person is one of the 3,000 murder victims , chances are about 14% that the murderer was black. In comparison, given that a black person was one of the 2,500 victims, chances are about 7.5% that the murderer was white.
Even viewing the statistics this way, we do not reach "several hundred percent", but rather 80%.
There's a book titled (roughly) "Think Samsung" that was published in 2010 (link). It's said to give a disturbing picture of Samsung's corruption, and was even reviewed in The New York Times. It was written by Samsung's former chief legal counsel.
In his book, Mr. Kim depicts Mr. Lee and “vassal” executives at Samsung as bribing thieves who “lord over” the country, its government and media. He portrays prosecutors as opportunists who are ruthless to those they regard as “dead” powers, like a former president, but subservient to and afraid of Samsung, which he calls the “power that never dies.”
Even representing some of those shades rely on computer's using gamuts that contain imaginary colours.
Whenever I want imaginary colors, I just multiply my existing colors by i
Don't forget the $50 Billion in job losses to offset the $25 B in gains. We tried this crap with NAFTA etc and it only benefits the rich.
People who actually have studied this and know something about it disagree with you.
I don't blame you, it is an easy mistake to make because benefits are diffuse while costs are concentrated and easy to identify, especially due to the inadequacy (in the USA) of the trade-adjustment assistance program.
As the others have said, Wikileaks isn't out of play at all.
You're right, they are not necessarily out of play on this. The out-of-play scenario I have in mind (with zero evidence for it, mind you) is that the organization with all this data has been sending it to Assange (or making it available online) encrypted with his public key.
With Assange unable to handle things, they would have to find another part of Wikileaks they trust to share their publication goals. Perhaps that's not so easy.
With WikiLeaks (likely) out of play, whoever has been sending WikiLeaks the Democrats' data will either have to find another channel for release, or stop releasing. In the former case, that may give intelligence agencies a better idea of their target.
I wonder if there was a back-channel conversation with Ecuador -- something like "Whoever is behind this, Ecuador is effectively acting as an accessory to some outside party attempting to alter the US presidential election. Is that *really* how you want us to treat this?"
Except that in the case of platforms, you may have a lot of money tied into either the "App Store" or "Google Play" for apps/music/video/etc
In addition, there's the pain of migrating calendars and the like. There are export options and tools to assist in that, but it could still get painful I fear. For music, Spotify customers would be fine but I am not sure about Play or iTunes, even where it is just a matter of playlists.
It's hard to tell of course how many people this matters for. In effect the article is telling us fewer than 50% of Note 7 owners are both clueful and worry about migration problems.