Dowry/gold payments sound more like your pet issue/outrage de jour.
Like.. wow. Ok, so the people handing out dowry payments overlaps with the industrialized, mechanized mining operations that you're referencing how exactly?
Realistically, the gold being PRODUCED today is more likely to wind up in some kind of electronic device than anything else. whereas the stuff being traded for daughters was probably dug out of the ground hundreds or thousands of years ago.
prediction: the amount of gold used in the hardware to produce bitcoins would outstrip the amound gold exchanged as dowry.
I don't think that's true actually. while it is a federal offense to tamper with mail while it's in custody of the mailman (IE, stealing from his bag) once it's been delivered though, it's merely theft.
So if you erroneously receive someone else's mail, legally you're in the clear if you open it -- but you'd still be classified as a scumbag.
For a gentleman in his 70's, the ability to very simply buy books and videos on amazon would likely be a benefit, not to mention the ability to have amazon's tech support fix whatever issue you're having or show you how to do something would likely be a benefit to the OP.
the lock-in and/or ethical considerations behind the kindle aren't really an issue for the non-geek crowd. if you want a nice tablet that lets you consume media easily, the kindle is a pretty good bet.
The snowden leaks almost seem like a false flag type situation. the scary NSA/CIA/FBI are snooping on you, queue the outrage! Meanwhile every single fucking corporation in the USA is doing the same, with far less oversight, and far spookier goals. (Sure a government agency should be expected to come along and strong-arm entities such as google and facebook (though who am I kidding? they're basically partners.) so either way they get the data..). How is it not commented on, that short of a few very specific use cases, 'big data' is basically the solution to personal privacy?
GIve it 10 years and you'll have your health and life insurance companies discussing your shopping habits with your grocery store, your car insurance company with it's lojack device in your car (or failing that, your smartphones GPS data), and 100% of your web-usage habits tracked and correlated to YOU. It's 12:30 am and maybe it's the wine, but as melodramatic as this sounds, we're a society marching into our own yokes -- all for the sake of convenience and saving 10 cents on a pack of toilet paper.
Basically the score is this: the security/privacy/sanity focused crowd is up in arms over the NSA, which represents about 1% of the population, half of whom bleat about privacy while still using the services that enable the NSA/FBI/Whoever. 99.5% of the population is either not using these services, or is indifferent (in actions, though perhaps not in words.).
can those hollow tooth destroying Easter monstrosities even be called "chocolate"? If i'm not mistaken for something to be labeled as 'chocolate' it has to have X% of cocoa butter, and those as near as i can tell are churned out in a chinese woodshop and varnished with something vaguely resembling chocolate.
It's amazing how the outrage of the day really riles people up into frothy frenzy. It seems that the root problem is the lack of respect and attention people pay towards driving. Texting is a convenient target, but I'm willing to wager that the same people who think it's 'okay' to text whilst driving are the same who wouldn't think twice about eating, applying mascara, checking a map, scolding their children, restraining a dog, driving while tired, changing the radio station, looking for a CD, singing along to a song, or any of the fuckmillion other ways people can distract themselves while operating a car. Guess what... distracted people kill other people. you can't legislate common sense. stop fucking trying.
Until there are 0 murders, robberies, arsons, rapes, financial crimes,dog thefts,sugared soda sales, or $crime in the city, cracking down on drivers while texting should be pretty much of 0 importance.
Yes because intrusive, onerous policies are never enacted in baby steps. Or.. yeah -- if an insurance company can make some arbitrary amount of profit with this scheme in the current toothless implementation, are you dumb enough to believe they won't ramp it up and go for more at some point? Or it becomes an industry standard, and forced by either legislation or price increases?
Yet another example of "hey do tihs, it's good for you!" is a laughably transparent rendition of "Hey, do this! it's good for us".
This is only good for you if you're an angelic driver (and only until you make a single mistake, regardless of tickets or accidents.). The more accurately these insurance companies can measure risk, the more apt they are to stick it to anyone who doesn't fit their models.
the whole premise of insurance is to spread unknown risk over a population of people paying into the system, as that risk becomes better 'known', the more likely adverse selection is to occur . And the benefits of that better measurement are not accrued to the insured. So while the perfect driver can save a few bucks here and there, a service that realistically everyone over the age of 21 is legally mandated to have (mass transit/pedestrian folk, ok cool -- but at some point in the past year i'm willing to bet you've relied on someone else's car/insurance) will necessarily become more expensive to everyone else.
You know, I have a theory about phone companies (cox voice in this case) I think they sell or find a way to 'share' personal data about subscribers with telemarketing partners.
Wife and I made the mistake of getting Cox Voice because it was cheap, and being able to send/receive a fax is nice (google voice has too much jitter to really be reliable for faxing). Within 5 minutes of having the handset connected, the telemarketing calls started flooding in. Some of which knew our names and address. (this was an 'unlisted' number.) In a given day, we still get around 15-20 telemarketing calls.
All this despite being at the current address for less than 6 months, and moving from out of state.
How long would you wager the particulate matter from a wood burning stove stays in the atmosphere... what's the geographical spread of smoke from a 20 foot tall chimney?
I grew up in eastern OR -- We had a wood burning stove, our neighbors had one, their neighbors had one, basically half the town had one.
Every winter, the scent of wood stoves was in the air.. and it was awesome. Even now, when i smell a wood stove, i get homesick. However, I can't imagine a large city with that same frequency of wood burning use. Which I'd imagine is the scenario that most slashdotters are familiar with, and the authors of this regulation would be familiar with.
This is well meaning regulation, but it really needs to be localized. As other posters have said, if you live in a remote/rural location, your options are going to be truck in propane, chop wood, or use pellet stoves.
It's absolutely a density issue. if you have a few hundred people using wood stoves spread out over a wide area (think small/rural town) it's probably fine. But in a city, with multiple city blocks, each of which using a wood stove -- totally different story.
I think you're misunderstanding the long term outcome here. You said it yourself: your teenage kids wouldn't stop dreaming about the iphone. In a few years when those teenagers get a job, and start earning actual money, those desires for the "finer things" (in this case, a dubious distinction -- but I'm referring to an iphone or other apple product) are still present. and what will they decided to splurge on?
Economies of scale don't have much to do with it, at least not in the TV > PC realm. The panels which go into TVs are very different than those that go into monitors. Combine that with the incredible size difference between the standard TV and the standard monitor and there's not much they share in common.
Stupid fucking "HD" marketing is what caused PC monitor resolutions to stagnate.
I'm not talking about the complete unit. (bezel, housing, whatever) Rather, just the TN/IPS panel itself.
Are you saying that TV uses an entirely different LCD panel than a equivalent sized monitor? If so, heh -- learn something new every day:)
Well that's kind of in-line with my point. Samsung (or insert panel manufacturer here) can have a production run of 1920x1200 panels destined just for monitors. OR they can have a larger run of 1920x1080 destined for both TV's and monitors. Guess which will be cheaper?
1080p TV drove the adoption of 1920x1080 as the standard for PC monitors more than marketing.
I always thought that one of the reasons that 1920x1080 monitors took off the way they did is because the same panel that goes in a 1080p tv, goes in a 1920x1080 monitor. Without that economy of scale (IE producing one panel for both the PC monitors and TV's), the prices would be even more bonkers expensive for early adopters.
in other words, if the 4k TV market doesn't explode, then don't count on PC monitors at that resolution being mainstream.
So whenever you hear / read a press release from a corporation/industry body saying they're doing something for the best interest of the customer, just replace "customer" with "ourselves".
The fact that our regulatory bodies have allowed ISP's to purchase media companies shows how broken / toothless they are. The fact that Michael Powell went from the FCC to lobbying for the very god damn companies his former office was supposed to regulate is baffling.
As someone who grew up on the Oregon/Washington border (Milton-Freewater, yay!) -- I can tell you, only a dummy would drive to Washington to get gas.. those barbarians make you pump it yourself!
In all seriousness though, this is a bad idea. The only thing (any) government likes to give up less than tax dollars is authority/control/tracking. If they are allowed to track your car for one purpose, they'll very very very quickly roll that out into other domains. And usually it'll be under the auspices of something that no one can really argue against (say, using vehicle data to augment amber alert type scenarios) But the net result is that we gradually cede our privacy and personal liberties to defend against some bogeyman or another.
OK, that's a bunch of nonsense. Look, copyright infringement for media has always been a case of mismatched perceptions of value.
The producers are thinking the rights to watch that DVD at-will should be worth about $19.99, to the 'pirate' that same privilege is worth about $.99. We saw this with the music industry around 1999. If those 'scumbag' 'pirates' (calling downloading a movie/song without permission piracy or theft is absurd, and frames the entire debate around those loaded terms) were simply freeloaders, iTunes would not have succeeded the way it has. Netflix would have flopped, and Redbox would not exist. People want to pay for entertainment, the failure is on the content makers to judge their market.
Further, "piracy" usually leads to a superior product, less hassle, more freedom of use. Case in point, i love Office Space. I own the "special collector's edition" watching the DVD requires me sit through about 7 minutes of anti-piracy propaganda, FBI Warnings, previews etc. The DVD rip i can download for free in 20 seconds? none of that useless garbage. I'm all for supporting the makers of entertainment, but they need to bring something to the table in terms of value. They do not get to make an inferior product (compared to "piracy"), charge 20x what their customers are willing to pay, and then complain about 'pirates'. (or worse/worst use the legal system as a cudgel to try to prop up their severe lack of business acumen).
The worst logic though is assuming that if someone downloads something, that's automatically lost revenue. The wife and I were having awful movie night, and "Simon Sez" was the chosen movie (Dennis Rodman is a noted thespian). Does downloading this movie constitute any lost revenue for the studio? I'm not depriving them of selling it to someone else, I definitely wasn't going to buy it -- so they aren't losing any revenue, and bitorrent handled the distribution... show me the victim? (other than myself for sitting through it.)
The Newton failed, therefore tablet PC's are a non-starter -- makes about as much sense as your comment:)
How well is a touch based controller truly going to work when paired with a console designed around a 4 way D pad? (This is barring all the short comings it had with sensitivity to x/y movement, as well as pressure sensitivity.)
Yes, but during our horrible, soul-killing abominable summers (6 months out of the year) AC usage 24/7 is pretty well required. How many nights a year does the overnight low not dip below 100?
(I moved to phoenix from oregon, i might be.. exaggerating, but shit summers be hot here.)
PRE-scandaled? that's brilliant, a politician going into an election in such a state removes the element of surprise -- or "the devil you know.." i like it.
Heh, maybe not the best example. Sea salt has no iodine in it -- and a lack of iodine in the diet can lead to birth and mental defects. Politicizing salt production has lead to some interesting and unintended consequences... namely a lack of iodine in the diet for some, and mandating the addition of iodine brings back memories of the colonial days..
Slashdot Mirror
Like.. wow. Ok, so the people handing out dowry payments overlaps with the industrialized, mechanized mining operations that you're referencing how exactly?
Realistically, the gold being PRODUCED today is more likely to wind up in some kind of electronic device than anything else. whereas the stuff being traded for daughters was probably dug out of the ground hundreds or thousands of years ago.
prediction: the amount of gold used in the hardware to produce bitcoins would outstrip the amound gold exchanged as dowry.
So if you erroneously receive someone else's mail, legally you're in the clear if you open it -- but you'd still be classified as a scumbag.
Oblig: IANAL, but i'm pretty sure that's the law.
the lock-in and/or ethical considerations behind the kindle aren't really an issue for the non-geek crowd. if you want a nice tablet that lets you consume media easily, the kindle is a pretty good bet.
i see what you did there, sneakypants.
The snowden leaks almost seem like a false flag type situation. the scary NSA/CIA/FBI are snooping on you, queue the outrage! Meanwhile every single fucking corporation in the USA is doing the same, with far less oversight, and far spookier goals. (Sure a government agency should be expected to come along and strong-arm entities such as google and facebook (though who am I kidding? they're basically partners.) so either way they get the data..). How is it not commented on, that short of a few very specific use cases, 'big data' is basically the solution to personal privacy?
GIve it 10 years and you'll have your health and life insurance companies discussing your shopping habits with your grocery store, your car insurance company with it's lojack device in your car (or failing that, your smartphones GPS data), and 100% of your web-usage habits tracked and correlated to YOU. It's 12:30 am and maybe it's the wine, but as melodramatic as this sounds, we're a society marching into our own yokes -- all for the sake of convenience and saving 10 cents on a pack of toilet paper.
Basically the score is this: the security/privacy/sanity focused crowd is up in arms over the NSA, which represents about 1% of the population, half of whom bleat about privacy while still using the services that enable the NSA/FBI/Whoever. 99.5% of the population is either not using these services, or is indifferent (in actions, though perhaps not in words.).
can those hollow tooth destroying Easter monstrosities even be called "chocolate"? If i'm not mistaken for something to be labeled as 'chocolate' it has to have X% of cocoa butter, and those as near as i can tell are churned out in a chinese woodshop and varnished with something vaguely resembling chocolate.
It's amazing how the outrage of the day really riles people up into frothy frenzy. It seems that the root problem is the lack of respect and attention people pay towards driving. Texting is a convenient target, but I'm willing to wager that the same people who think it's 'okay' to text whilst driving are the same who wouldn't think twice about eating, applying mascara, checking a map, scolding their children, restraining a dog, driving while tired, changing the radio station, looking for a CD, singing along to a song, or any of the fuckmillion other ways people can distract themselves while operating a car. Guess what... distracted people kill other people. you can't legislate common sense. stop fucking trying.
Until there are 0 murders, robberies, arsons, rapes, financial crimes,dog thefts,sugared soda sales, or $crime in the city, cracking down on drivers while texting should be pretty much of 0 importance.
Yes because intrusive, onerous policies are never enacted in baby steps. Or.. yeah -- if an insurance company can make some arbitrary amount of profit with this scheme in the current toothless implementation, are you dumb enough to believe they won't ramp it up and go for more at some point? Or it becomes an industry standard, and forced by either legislation or price increases?
Yet another example of "hey do tihs, it's good for you!" is a laughably transparent rendition of "Hey, do this! it's good for us".
This is only good for you if you're an angelic driver (and only until you make a single mistake, regardless of tickets or accidents.). The more accurately these insurance companies can measure risk, the more apt they are to stick it to anyone who doesn't fit their models.
the whole premise of insurance is to spread unknown risk over a population of people paying into the system, as that risk becomes better 'known', the more likely adverse selection is to occur . And the benefits of that better measurement are not accrued to the insured. So while the perfect driver can save a few bucks here and there, a service that realistically everyone over the age of 21 is legally mandated to have (mass transit/pedestrian folk, ok cool -- but at some point in the past year i'm willing to bet you've relied on someone else's car/insurance) will necessarily become more expensive to everyone else.
Oh, and NSA/FBI/data privacy, yadda yadda.
speak for yourself ace.
Wife and I made the mistake of getting Cox Voice because it was cheap, and being able to send/receive a fax is nice (google voice has too much jitter to really be reliable for faxing). Within 5 minutes of having the handset connected, the telemarketing calls started flooding in. Some of which knew our names and address. (this was an 'unlisted' number.) In a given day, we still get around 15-20 telemarketing calls.
All this despite being at the current address for less than 6 months, and moving from out of state.
How long would you wager the particulate matter from a wood burning stove stays in the atmosphere... what's the geographical spread of smoke from a 20 foot tall chimney?
I grew up in eastern OR -- We had a wood burning stove, our neighbors had one, their neighbors had one, basically half the town had one. Every winter, the scent of wood stoves was in the air.. and it was awesome. Even now, when i smell a wood stove, i get homesick. However, I can't imagine a large city with that same frequency of wood burning use. Which I'd imagine is the scenario that most slashdotters are familiar with, and the authors of this regulation would be familiar with.
This is well meaning regulation, but it really needs to be localized. As other posters have said, if you live in a remote/rural location, your options are going to be truck in propane, chop wood, or use pellet stoves.
It's absolutely a density issue. if you have a few hundred people using wood stoves spread out over a wide area (think small/rural town) it's probably fine. But in a city, with multiple city blocks, each of which using a wood stove -- totally different story.
I think you're misunderstanding the long term outcome here. You said it yourself: your teenage kids wouldn't stop dreaming about the iphone. In a few years when those teenagers get a job, and start earning actual money, those desires for the "finer things" (in this case, a dubious distinction -- but I'm referring to an iphone or other apple product) are still present. and what will they decided to splurge on?
Economies of scale don't have much to do with it, at least not in the TV > PC realm. The panels which go into TVs are very different than those that go into monitors. Combine that with the incredible size difference between the standard TV and the standard monitor and there's not much they share in common.
Stupid fucking "HD" marketing is what caused PC monitor resolutions to stagnate.
I'm not talking about the complete unit. (bezel, housing, whatever) Rather, just the TN/IPS panel itself. Are you saying that TV uses an entirely different LCD panel than a equivalent sized monitor? If so, heh -- learn something new every day :)
Well that's kind of in-line with my point. Samsung (or insert panel manufacturer here) can have a production run of 1920x1200 panels destined just for monitors. OR they can have a larger run of 1920x1080 destined for both TV's and monitors. Guess which will be cheaper?
1080p TV drove the adoption of 1920x1080 as the standard for PC monitors more than marketing.
in other words, if the 4k TV market doesn't explode, then don't count on PC monitors at that resolution being mainstream.
So whenever you hear / read a press release from a corporation/industry body saying they're doing something for the best interest of the customer, just replace "customer" with "ourselves". The fact that our regulatory bodies have allowed ISP's to purchase media companies shows how broken / toothless they are. The fact that Michael Powell went from the FCC to lobbying for the very god damn companies his former office was supposed to regulate is baffling.
As someone who grew up on the Oregon/Washington border (Milton-Freewater, yay!) -- I can tell you, only a dummy would drive to Washington to get gas.. those barbarians make you pump it yourself!
In all seriousness though, this is a bad idea. The only thing (any) government likes to give up less than tax dollars is authority/control/tracking. If they are allowed to track your car for one purpose, they'll very very very quickly roll that out into other domains. And usually it'll be under the auspices of something that no one can really argue against (say, using vehicle data to augment amber alert type scenarios) But the net result is that we gradually cede our privacy and personal liberties to defend against some bogeyman or another.
Milo Minderbinder, is that you?
OK, that's a bunch of nonsense. Look, copyright infringement for media has always been a case of mismatched perceptions of value.
The producers are thinking the rights to watch that DVD at-will should be worth about $19.99, to the 'pirate' that same privilege is worth about $.99. We saw this with the music industry around 1999. If those 'scumbag' 'pirates' (calling downloading a movie/song without permission piracy or theft is absurd, and frames the entire debate around those loaded terms) were simply freeloaders, iTunes would not have succeeded the way it has. Netflix would have flopped, and Redbox would not exist. People want to pay for entertainment, the failure is on the content makers to judge their market.
Further, "piracy" usually leads to a superior product, less hassle, more freedom of use. Case in point, i love Office Space. I own the "special collector's edition" watching the DVD requires me sit through about 7 minutes of anti-piracy propaganda, FBI Warnings, previews etc. The DVD rip i can download for free in 20 seconds? none of that useless garbage. I'm all for supporting the makers of entertainment, but they need to bring something to the table in terms of value. They do not get to make an inferior product (compared to "piracy"), charge 20x what their customers are willing to pay, and then complain about 'pirates'. (or worse/worst use the legal system as a cudgel to try to prop up their severe lack of business acumen).
The worst logic though is assuming that if someone downloads something, that's automatically lost revenue. The wife and I were having awful movie night, and "Simon Sez" was the chosen movie (Dennis Rodman is a noted thespian). Does downloading this movie constitute any lost revenue for the studio? I'm not depriving them of selling it to someone else, I definitely wasn't going to buy it -- so they aren't losing any revenue, and bitorrent handled the distribution... show me the victim? (other than myself for sitting through it.)
The Newton failed, therefore tablet PC's are a non-starter -- makes about as much sense as your comment :)
How well is a touch based controller truly going to work when paired with a console designed around a 4 way D pad? (This is barring all the short comings it had with sensitivity to x/y movement, as well as pressure sensitivity.)
Yes, but during our horrible, soul-killing abominable summers (6 months out of the year) AC usage 24/7 is pretty well required. How many nights a year does the overnight low not dip below 100? (I moved to phoenix from oregon, i might be .. exaggerating, but shit summers be hot here.)
PRE-scandaled? that's brilliant, a politician going into an election in such a state removes the element of surprise -- or "the devil you know.." i like it.
Heh, maybe not the best example. Sea salt has no iodine in it -- and a lack of iodine in the diet can lead to birth and mental defects. Politicizing salt production has lead to some interesting and unintended consequences... namely a lack of iodine in the diet for some, and mandating the addition of iodine brings back memories of the colonial days..