I recently visited a retirement home, for a community event which was held there. Nobody knew me there, and I didn't talk to or identify myself to anyone, I just listened. Shortly afterwards, I started seeing ads for the retirement home in my Android phone browser. I can only conclude that Google is sharing my GPS location with advertisers...
Possible. A few other possibilities: (1) Google is sharing NON-gps location (as derived from wifi network access, or inferred from emails), or (2) your carrier is sharing your cell-tower-derived location with advertisers.
Your post is a breath of fresh air. Not that I necessarily follow it all, but I can tell from the writing that you share my belief that there is a lot more intelligence to be had around analyzing and using crypto-currencies than either "I'm going to get rich on it" or "Because the gonna-get-rich fools are losing their shirts now, it's dead." Jeebus, where's my aspirin?
Honestly, the whole article's got it backwards. I'll believe crypto-currencies are dead when people have stopped using them; and, emphatically, the speculators don't matter to me. And then this quote:
Blockchain is fundamentally changing the way industries do business, from traditional banking to supply chain management
it IS? I've been paying some attention, and have yet to see a single interesting use case where -- aside from crypto-currency for which it's well suited -- blockchain does anything better than the centralized, backed up data repo of whatever corporation or conglomerate is working with data. If someone can point me to something interesting being done, please do tell.
Anyway... thanks again for writing with structure, I dug it.
OPM basically handed China the entire database of every cleared U.S. military or civilian person.
Clarification: this quote is easily mis-read to mean "every cleared military person or civilian person", whereas it actually means "every military or civilian person who had a clearance", as wikipedia says the number of people affected was 21 million (a very significant number, just not nearly as massive as the population of the US).
They'll still be hit with transaction costs that vary creating instability in revenue
Transaction costs are known up front, and I'm sure they'll simply have the payer cover those.
and they still have the potential for loss from second to second with an automated transaction... there'll still need to be a transaction that takes some time and bitcoin value changes constantly. There only really exists a potential for them to lose
You're right that fluctuations may cause transactions to go through with slightly different values than those intended, but you're wrong to say they can only lose. Fluctuations are in general random, and on average will result in neither loss nor gain. And if things are on a long downward slope like they are right now (coming off the "speculation" nuttiness), they can simply add a small additional fee for the payer for that too.
There's really nothing hard about making this work.
I'd think they wouldn't even have a human monitoring it; they'll just cash in btc for dollars the instant they're paid. I agree that I don't see a notable functional value add to their doing this in the context of paying taxes, but they're doing it for the symbolic value, sending the message that they're tech savvy, or at least not luddites. I happen to appreciate the sentiment behind that message, and I hope it works for them; but I understand that not everybody will choose to see things that way.
cannot comprehend how mind-bogglingly stupid [some/most] politicians can be
Can you spell out what you mean? I'm assuming you mean your comment to somehow apply in the context of crypto currency, but past that I'm not clear what point you're making.
(I'm not GP, but wanted to comment.) I agree with GP that crypto-coins should be thought of as transaction facilitators, not investment mediums. Any given crypto-coin could disappear, but individual coin stoppages are circumstantial and beside the larger point that -- economically speaking -- SOME crypto coins will always exist (unless outright prohibited by law at some future time), because they enable transactions that can't be micro-managed; e.g. if a government dislikes a particular foreign political candidate for whatever reason, people can still donate to that candidate using crypto-coins... which means (as GP points out) that there will be demand for crypto-coins, which means that people will be willing to pay non-zero amounts for them.
As to what price gets set for a given crypto-coin, it's really just demand. BTC demand went way up in the past few years because a bunch of people thought it was an investment medium, which lead to demand, which lead to the price going up. It was a foregone conclusion that the price would flatten somewhere (if for no other reason than the total amount of wealth available in the world with which to buy it, but of course it didn't even get that far), and once it flattened people realized there was no way to argue it was worth a particular amount and investors fled, and viola the price is coming back down. In the long term it will even out to whatever sustainable level feeds its ecosystemic usage for facilitating transactions... but between here and there, watch for other narratives being overlaid on it by people looking to mass manipulate demand again.
In my view, there are two kinds of people "investing" in crypto-coins: naive people and con-men. Other people (non-investors) are, generally speaking, in and out of a given amount of bitcoin as individual transactions require.
Zuckerberg came under fire after he and other executives removed their Facebook messages from several recipients' inboxes. The move led many to question whether the company would give other users the option to unsend messages.
Framing this as user envy (of the ability to delete messages) is a red herring. Zuck deleting messages was wrong because it's a coverup. Even if every user had had the ability to delete messages, executive communications should be held to a higher standard; in the world of governance, silent unannounced redactions are for weasles and crooks.
10 minutes doesn't give you too much time to correct yourself. But it's a lot better than having your mistakes preserved eternally.
Bad phrasing. Your mistakes are still preserved eternally, just after a 10 minute delay. This mea culpa from Facebook is a weak token gesture, which still doesn't give users the same powers the execs exercised, while attempting to make people think that the original execs act is now whitewashed.
Thanks for the info. Now that I think about it, it may be that what I see is different than most, I'm a LineageOS user... not sure if their display is different or not...
Battery management: it's nigh impossible to understand what exactly is draining your memory
(I'm assuming you meant battery instead of memory.) I just go to the "Battery" thing in settings, and it gives a detailed breakdown of exactly how much power each app or process has been using. Am I missing something?
I get that you're saying I left something important out. I believe you. But not knowing what that important thing was, you didn't help me understand at all. Just letting you know, in case your intent was somehow to actually help.
So charging at 10W means 10W of heat in the charger.
The way energy conservation laws go, charging at a 10W rate means that the generated heat will be at the level of (H - 10W), where H is the total wattage sent to the charger. So for example if 12W are being sent to the charger and 10W of that is being used to charge, the heat will be 2W worth.
... to make it impossible to remove or hide transactions? It would seem that this would outlaw the use of blockchain in China.
This doesn't per se outlaw blockchain in China. True, China could not remove things from blockchains, BUT if China knows who put any given thing on a blockchain and is willing to torture/disappear them, blockchains don't have to be illegal to be acceptable to the Chinese authorities.
I believe that exercise is very good BUT I want to point out that my (quick) skim of the study indicates that this is not a controlled study, in the sense of "participant A was told to exercise and participant B was told not to". So unless I missed the part where they did that, this is a correlation... and it's entirely easy to construct a theory where people who are going to die find it harder to get motivated to exercise... effectively reversing the cause/effect relationship that would otherwise be really useful.
Just what I want: A closed platform with microphones, cameras, and Facebook spying on me 24/7.
It's really not that bad, Facebook has provided a way to disable data collection. In the web interface, just go to "Settings", then "IO Config", nav your way down to the middle of the page to "Data Collection Settings", in that dialog find the "Other Settings" button, and in the middle menu choose "Permissions", then "Facebook Permissions", then hover over the icon shaped like a vaccuum (but don't hover too long or you have to restart this whole process!), then choose one of the options they have, either "Never uncollect data" or "Always on" or "Only if friends 10 hops away have enabled".
And you're set!
(oh, sometimes the settings don't start until a month after you've done them, and they don't last through power outages nor through loud noises.)
Completely irrelevant. If I pretend to be you, that's impersonation. If I assume a completely fake identity, that is not impersonation.
Do you really think that when Patrick Stewart plays Jean Luc Picard, he's breaking the law?
Your argument is (implicitly) premised on the idea that if Patrick Stewart portrays a real person in a movie, he WOULD be breaking the law. Since that's not true, this particular arg is invalid.
Just writing to clarify a fine point: we have in fact evolved, despite there not needing to be any magic around to make that happen. Natural selection happened in a big way in the 1918 pandemic, and past that we've had a couple of generations to incorporate mutations. I'm not quantifying how much more immune to diseases in general we are because of that, and so in that sense am not disagreeing what one interpretation of your statement, but I don't want people to casually think either that evolution is magic, or that it doesn't happen to us (and all living things) all the time, or that it isn't in some cases (not necessarily this one) significant even on small time scales.
Put another way: yes, we have evolved, and whether that's magical or not is really more a poetic debate than anything else. I wouldn't be surprised if we happen to be approximately as susceptible to disease as we were 100 years ago, but from an evolutionary standpoint that happens to be unaddressed by the flavor of your statement.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently visited a retirement home, for a community event which was held there. Nobody knew me there, and I didn't talk to or identify myself to anyone, I just listened. Shortly afterwards, I started seeing ads for the retirement home in my Android phone browser. I can only conclude that Google is sharing my GPS location with advertisers...
Possible. A few other possibilities: (1) Google is sharing NON-gps location (as derived from wifi network access, or inferred from emails), or (2) your carrier is sharing your cell-tower-derived location with advertisers.
Honestly, the whole article's got it backwards. I'll believe crypto-currencies are dead when people have stopped using them; and, emphatically, the speculators don't matter to me. And then this quote:
Blockchain is fundamentally changing the way industries do business, from traditional banking to supply chain management
it IS? I've been paying some attention, and have yet to see a single interesting use case where -- aside from crypto-currency for which it's well suited -- blockchain does anything better than the centralized, backed up data repo of whatever corporation or conglomerate is working with data. If someone can point me to something interesting being done, please do tell.
Anyway... thanks again for writing with structure, I dug it.
OPM basically handed China the entire database of every cleared U.S. military or civilian person.
Clarification: this quote is easily mis-read to mean "every cleared military person or civilian person", whereas it actually means "every military or civilian person who had a clearance", as wikipedia says the number of people affected was 21 million (a very significant number, just not nearly as massive as the population of the US).
I'd agree that squinted at from the right light, it may rise in some's opinion to "objectionable". But "unbelievably stupid" seems overboard.
They'll still be hit with transaction costs that vary creating instability in revenue
Transaction costs are known up front, and I'm sure they'll simply have the payer cover those.
and they still have the potential for loss from second to second with an automated transaction... there'll still need to be a transaction that takes some time and bitcoin value changes constantly. There only really exists a potential for them to lose
You're right that fluctuations may cause transactions to go through with slightly different values than those intended, but you're wrong to say they can only lose. Fluctuations are in general random, and on average will result in neither loss nor gain. And if things are on a long downward slope like they are right now (coming off the "speculation" nuttiness), they can simply add a small additional fee for the payer for that too.
There's really nothing hard about making this work.
I'd think they wouldn't even have a human monitoring it; they'll just cash in btc for dollars the instant they're paid. I agree that I don't see a notable functional value add to their doing this in the context of paying taxes, but they're doing it for the symbolic value, sending the message that they're tech savvy, or at least not luddites. I happen to appreciate the sentiment behind that message, and I hope it works for them; but I understand that not everybody will choose to see things that way.
cannot comprehend how mind-bogglingly stupid [some/most] politicians can be
Can you spell out what you mean? I'm assuming you mean your comment to somehow apply in the context of crypto currency, but past that I'm not clear what point you're making.
as they would need to be to avoid such a volatile currency blowing up in their faces.
Blowing up how? If you're worried that it'll devalue while they hold it, don't; they'll cash it right away. What else you worried about?
As to what price gets set for a given crypto-coin, it's really just demand. BTC demand went way up in the past few years because a bunch of people thought it was an investment medium, which lead to demand, which lead to the price going up. It was a foregone conclusion that the price would flatten somewhere (if for no other reason than the total amount of wealth available in the world with which to buy it, but of course it didn't even get that far), and once it flattened people realized there was no way to argue it was worth a particular amount and investors fled, and viola the price is coming back down. In the long term it will even out to whatever sustainable level feeds its ecosystemic usage for facilitating transactions... but between here and there, watch for other narratives being overlaid on it by people looking to mass manipulate demand again.
In my view, there are two kinds of people "investing" in crypto-coins: naive people and con-men. Other people (non-investors) are, generally speaking, in and out of a given amount of bitcoin as individual transactions require.
You're not replying to another message, and your own message is confusing. Are you asking a question, being sarcastic, or pointing something out?
Zuckerberg came under fire after he and other executives removed their Facebook messages from several recipients' inboxes. The move led many to question whether the company would give other users the option to unsend messages.
Framing this as user envy (of the ability to delete messages) is a red herring. Zuck deleting messages was wrong because it's a coverup. Even if every user had had the ability to delete messages, executive communications should be held to a higher standard; in the world of governance, silent unannounced redactions are for weasles and crooks.
10 minutes doesn't give you too much time to correct yourself. But it's a lot better than having your mistakes preserved eternally.
Bad phrasing. Your mistakes are still preserved eternally, just after a 10 minute delay. This mea culpa from Facebook is a weak token gesture, which still doesn't give users the same powers the execs exercised, while attempting to make people think that the original execs act is now whitewashed.
Thanks for the info. Now that I think about it, it may be that what I see is different than most, I'm a LineageOS user... not sure if their display is different or not...
Battery management: it's nigh impossible to understand what exactly is draining your memory
(I'm assuming you meant battery instead of memory.) I just go to the "Battery" thing in settings, and it gives a detailed breakdown of exactly how much power each app or process has been using. Am I missing something?
Reporter Posed as Cambridge Analytica To Run Political Ads on Facebook. Facebook, To No One's Surprise, Failed To Catch That They Were Frauds.
This on the heels of previous slashdot article Reporters Posed as 100 Senators To Run Ads on Facebook. Facebook Approved All of Them. Tiny bit of irony there.
Prediction: Won't happen, ever.
I get that you're saying I left something important out. I believe you. But not knowing what that important thing was, you didn't help me understand at all. Just letting you know, in case your intent was somehow to actually help.
Aha. Thank you.
Facebook Fined Maximum Legal Amount For Cambridge Analytica Scandal
Facebook has been fined $645,000
Facebook could have been served a maximum fine of 17 million British pounds
Huh?
So charging at 10W means 10W of heat in the charger.
The way energy conservation laws go, charging at a 10W rate means that the generated heat will be at the level of (H - 10W), where H is the total wattage sent to the charger. So for example if 12W are being sent to the charger and 10W of that is being used to charge, the heat will be 2W worth.
... to make it impossible to remove or hide transactions? It would seem that this would outlaw the use of blockchain in China.
This doesn't per se outlaw blockchain in China. True, China could not remove things from blockchains, BUT if China knows who put any given thing on a blockchain and is willing to torture/disappear them, blockchains don't have to be illegal to be acceptable to the Chinese authorities.
I believe that exercise is very good BUT I want to point out that my (quick) skim of the study indicates that this is not a controlled study, in the sense of "participant A was told to exercise and participant B was told not to". So unless I missed the part where they did that, this is a correlation... and it's entirely easy to construct a theory where people who are going to die find it harder to get motivated to exercise... effectively reversing the cause/effect relationship that would otherwise be really useful.
Just what I want: A closed platform with microphones, cameras, and Facebook spying on me 24/7.
It's really not that bad, Facebook has provided a way to disable data collection. In the web interface, just go to "Settings", then "IO Config", nav your way down to the middle of the page to "Data Collection Settings", in that dialog find the "Other Settings" button, and in the middle menu choose "Permissions", then "Facebook Permissions", then hover over the icon shaped like a vaccuum (but don't hover too long or you have to restart this whole process!), then choose one of the options they have, either "Never uncollect data" or "Always on" or "Only if friends 10 hops away have enabled".
And you're set!
(oh, sometimes the settings don't start until a month after you've done them, and they don't last through power outages nor through loud noises.)
Completely irrelevant. If I pretend to be you, that's impersonation. If I assume a completely fake identity, that is not impersonation. Do you really think that when Patrick Stewart plays Jean Luc Picard, he's breaking the law?
Your argument is (implicitly) premised on the idea that if Patrick Stewart portrays a real person in a movie, he WOULD be breaking the law. Since that's not true, this particular arg is invalid.
Maybe its time I just swallowed my pride and built myself a Linux/Windows dual-booter.
I've been on Linux Mint for three years now, no Windows involved. Come on in, the water's fine.
We haven't magically evolved somehow
Just writing to clarify a fine point: we have in fact evolved, despite there not needing to be any magic around to make that happen. Natural selection happened in a big way in the 1918 pandemic, and past that we've had a couple of generations to incorporate mutations. I'm not quantifying how much more immune to diseases in general we are because of that, and so in that sense am not disagreeing what one interpretation of your statement, but I don't want people to casually think either that evolution is magic, or that it doesn't happen to us (and all living things) all the time, or that it isn't in some cases (not necessarily this one) significant even on small time scales.
Put another way: yes, we have evolved, and whether that's magical or not is really more a poetic debate than anything else. I wouldn't be surprised if we happen to be approximately as susceptible to disease as we were 100 years ago, but from an evolutionary standpoint that happens to be unaddressed by the flavor of your statement.