I don't think it's about the accuracy of their information. It's about your own "qualifications" to make a diagnosis based on a web page.
Reading a web page doesn't make you an MD. And if you spend your time reading descriptions of medical symptoms, sooner or later you'll find something you think applies to you. It happens to med students.
And then you go into your doctor screeching about how you have Snarfelitis and desperately need the medication you saw on TV to treat it which Astrazenica is hawking for you to go ask your doctor about.
When people get their medical information from the internet and TV commercials... they're bound to end up clueless people who think they have some catastrophic disease.
Because the most mundane of symptoms can be blown out of proportion once you get paranoid about them.
A small amount of knowledge with insufficient context and education can be dangerous.
People have been using the interwebs to fuel hypochondria for at least a decade. Starting with WebMD and moving on.
I was once told by someone that pretty much a huge chunk of med students develop it for a period... because you suddenly start to know what every symptom might suggest and you start looking for it.
That's far from the one and only problem with Sony.
They're assholes. They're anti-consumer. They're constantly trying to achieve vendor lock in. They treat the security of their consumers data as an afterthought.
Sony is a malicious entity, and has been for the last 20 years.
From what they do as part of the *AA mafia, to rootkits, to pretty much every damned thing Sony does... they do not deserve your money or your respect.
A free market is predicated on the lie that people will have open information, and that people will not be gaming the system by buying laws and science.
If there is no available information, and the players are lying about the information, there can be no free market.
Because then it's not set by supply and demand, it's set by the players who will lie, cheat, and steal to come out ahead.
And then it isn't a free market. It's the usual broken bullshit which capitalists seem to both think is normal, and claim won't happen.
If you think a free market simply means "there's a sucker born every minute", then you desire the worst possible form of anarcho-capitalism there is.
And I will continue to shout loudly how the free market is a complete fucking lie, and cannot exist -- simply because it ignores the fact that humans will do anything to "win" the game, including cheating.
I can just imagine you, so many thousand years ago, seeing your first wheel, and telling all your neighbors not to bother getting one, that it'll never catch on...
No, I was the guy who rolled his eyes when someone put spinners on it.
And then I was furious at the first asshole to stand next to a tree telling me how I should go to Ugg's House of Spinners.
And then I was completely irate when I heard Ugg was selling his client information to other people who wanted to sell me shit -- even if I didn't buy anything from Ugg,
This is spinners, marketing, and privacy all rolled up in one shiny bauble, and sold to people who will take anything which says "now with intarwebs and, because, social and cloud, and we've got an app for that".
Nest is a fucking Dilbert Cartoon, and a privacy nightmare waiting to happen.
Sorry, but no. Having my house connected to the internet doesn't sound like it has any upsides to me.
Having it providing all of that information to Google and who knows who else... well, that's kind of my point. I don't want a thermostat and technology infrastructure in my house whose privacy policy can be rewritten any time they like.
I'll give you a privacy policy: no internet connections to crap like thermostats and washing machines; No security problems, and no problems which originate from Google et al being bigger assholes than they admit to.
I'm not prepared to provide my location information to Google so that it knows I'm not home. Fuck that.
If I'm on the tinfoil hat end of the spectrum... WTF would I add connectivity to my house for random appliances and enable more tracking for?
I'm staunchly against that kind of crap. I have no interest in that kind of crap. I'm actively avoiding that kind of crap. Nest is precisely that kind of crap in my opinion, and therefore not trustworthy.
Most of us recognize you're as get-off-my-lawn of a regular as Slashdot has
LOL... that's the nicest thing anybody has said to me so far this year.;-)
Nope. It's a thermostat. It works. It's $100 one time and you stick it on your wall.
No, you're kind of missing the point.
See, we already all have those now. Nest doesn't really bring anything new here until you connect it to the internet.
What I'm saying is the entire Nest platform, with it's interweb connnnectivity, and sending all of your data to Google... that's the thing I expect/hope to fail.
Let's not confuse the reality (phone controlled thermostats) with the strawman (smart homes riddled with security flaws).
I can almost guarantee you that Nest has a security flaw in it. That the mechanism by which you can control your thermostat with a cell phone will have a security flaws in it. And that the companies who make things for this ecosystem will create crap with security flaws in it.
If you think it is either possible or likely these things don't have security holes in them, you probably haven't been paying attention. Because companies who make internet connected devices are either indifferent or incompetent when it comes to security.
There is no straw man here.
This is technology, which is piggy backing on smart phones and the internet, providing marketing and analytics data to the mother ship, and which almost certainly will be demonstrated to be exploitable.
I think the entire premise of the Nest ecosystem is of dubious value, and of even less reliable security.
I think having a Nest thermostat means you already have a "smart" home riddled with security flaws. And every connection point to that doubles the ways in which it can be exploited. And, it makes sure Google has access to information from inside your home it never had before.
I'll pass on the entire technology. Because, as I initially said, I trust neither the intentions, integrity, or ability to implement security of anybody involved in this.
You know, I have personally watched tech companies become less willing to invest in pure R&D, less willing to make new things that someone hasn't already made, and be much more beholden to whatever the heck the CEO thinks is the Next Big Thing.
I have been at companies where we went from being innovators to imitators, and where the CEO would routinely make moronic predictions which didn't happen based on what the trends were. And then in six months make an entirely new set of moronic predictions, based on whatever the trend was then.
So, I don't know if this has changed in my lifetime (as I perceive it), or if it's cyclic, or what.
If I could answer these questions... well, I'd be charging vast sums of money for those answers. Like Gartner does.
Only Gartner is just as full of shit as I am, so maybe I'm just doing it wrong, and need to find out how to charge people vast sums of money to identify emerging technologies which will never go anywhere.
It's not Daring. Its business as usual for a company that is doing actual R&D on leading edge products.
In all honesty, from looking around me these days... I conclude that doing actual R&D on the leading edge of stuff is itself daring.
Increasingly, companies want to make a "me too" product or do things based on what focus groups tell them is good.
Hell, even some tech companies seem to be retreating from meaningful R&D and focusing on "leveraging and monetizing their IP portfolio".
Nobody is willing to invest in R&D any more unless it gets them a tax break. And in that case, they'll try to tell you to categorize a ton of unrelated stuff as part of the R&D effort so the accountants can maximize the write off.
So, me, I'll still stick with daring. Saying you figure you have a less than 50% chance of success these days is pretty bold.
Hey, in all honesty, you are free to conclude I'm a crank. That's OK, my wife would agree with you.
But after 20 years in the tech industry, and 30+ years playing with technology... this is just another new bit of hype, which stands at least a 50/50 chance of utterly failing, and which provides little compelling need for 99% of us.
Go ahead, fetishize technology, lament how we don't have flying cars, and walk around all pie eyed and dreamy about the awesome future. I've seen enough to assume it never turns out as rosy as promised, and comes with a new bag of shit most people didn't think of.
I'm not saying "stop liking what I don't like", because I don't give a rats ass what you like.
I am saying that, like Microsoft's Smart Home they've been hawking for 15-20 years... this is overhyped technology which will never see the light of day for most people, and which is purely in the domain of people who have surplus money they wish to part with. It's the epitome of first world problems, and should be treated as such.
For the most part, I consider most forms of futurists to be deluded people who think The Next Big Thing is going to change all of our lives. And in 20 years will be laughed at in by going through old issues of Popular Mechanics.
Of course, these days, nobody will have a stack of old blogs, so they won't even remember it.
Once you've seen a bunch of "Next Big Things" become last years "Dumb Fucking Idea", it becomes a default position.:-P
It's your phone and your house, you do as you please with them.
I see neither a need for any of this stuff, nor do I see why I would trust the companies selling it.
Me, I expect this is written by incompetent chimps who need to get a product to market and don't give a crap about security, and I see all of this juicy data being collated and sorted and sold. And hacked, and subpoena'd and misused.
Every 6-12 months for the last 30 years there's always been "the next big thing". And except for a very small number of them, most of them have all failed and simply been nothing but hype. It's all marketing and no substance.
You kids might think your cell phone is the be-all and end-all. Me, I think texting is about as far as I'm interested in what my phone can do, because I have no need of it, and it doesn't actually improve my life in any way.
But, hey, I'm a grumpy old man with little interest in automation and other gizmos. Frankly, I'm bored with it, and have seen enough epic failures that I simply don't care enough to find out if I trust it.
And in many many cases, these technologies just die on their own anyway. So me bitching about it has pretty much no effect other than being able to laugh about it after it happens.
A bunch of people with money they need to part with. The rest of us will continue to not give a crap.
I neither trust, nor do I want this ecosystem of interconnected crap which puts my house on the internet so that I can access it via my fscking cell phone.
So, buy into this, suckers. Get your house hacked, or your personal habits sold, or whatever.
I'm going to continue to assume that most of the vendors jumping on this are a) interested in the analytics data for advertising, and b) grossly incompetent/indifferent to security. I trust neither the intention nor the competence of these companies.
Get off my damned lawn with your pointless gizmos. I have a key and a programmable thermostat which isn't connected to the interweb.
I updated my iPod touch a few months ago. It originally came with iOS 7.x, and I got the new hotness of iOS 8.x. Two of my apps stopped working. Some stuff got slower. And I got annoyed.
I wish I'd left the fscking thing the way it shipped. Because, quite frankly, there was no net benefit in the upgrade, and some net losses in functionality.
They may think it's OK to upgrade the software until the device breaks. But for what it costs, I expect the device to last several years. I will probably never apply another Apple update to it again.
iTunes on Windows has also gone downhill over the last few years, and they've completely abandoned Safari on Windows.
So, yes, I'm afraid as a consumer I'm increasingly of the opinion that their software quality is going the wrong direction in favor of putting out the new shiny and expecting us to buy it.
Again...Bitcoin EXCHANGES are not BITCOIN. Bitcoin isn't sketchy, but the exchanges sound sketchy to me.
Blah blah blah... the whole fscking ecosystem of Bitcoin sounds like it's based on wishful thinking.
There is no damned spoon.
From all of the articles I've seen about BitCoin over the last 12-16 months... I conclude the whole thing is a shaky mess which will never actually live up claims.
I have yet to see the "BitCoin fails to suck" headline. It's hard not to conclude the entire premise isn't flawed.
No, better yet, accept that the guys father doesn't give a damn about GNU/Linux, and has made his own choice on the matter based on his own needs and research.
Your answer amounts to being asked "can you direct me to the food court" and you responding with "have you taken Jesus as your savior?" It deserves a kick in the nuts.
Seriously, if you have nothing to add besides "Yarg, teh Chomebook is the sux0r, run teh Lunix"... get over it.
The entire notion of bitcoin has always seemed a little sketchy to me.
We're going to make up a money, and we're going to simultaneously claim it's secure and private, but we'll attach every transaction to the history of the money -- and then put it in the hands of any old schmuck who makes a website.
We'll claim to be an awesome alternative to government issued money, free of regulations and taxation, but we'll still try to be honest players (we promise). And a fucking pony.
The whole ecosystem seems like a pipe dream, which completely ignored reality, and has been subject to fraud and abuse for pretty much as long as I've been aware of it. FAR worse than the 'real' financial system.
So, whine all you like about the tyranny of government issued money... you mostly sound insane, and have gotten into an overhyped, and apparently completely insecure currency.
The first time I heard of BitCoin I thought "what the heck is this for?". And pretty much every time I've heard it since, I've found myself thinking it sounds pretty sketchy.
I'm sure people will rabidly defend it, for whatever reasons they have... but, seriously, every time I hear about BitCoin it's because it's not living up to any of the expectations, and you're putting your money into a completely unregulated pool with dodgy players.
So, I'm afraid I continue to be underwhelmed by the existence of Bit Coin, and mostly keep laughing my ass off when people lose their shirts.
Don't believe the hype.
Me, I'll stick with my bank, which operates under identifiable laws, using currency for which there is at least a pretense for the valuation and exchange rates, and involving players with many more years of proven ability to actually play this game.
But, hey, feel free to put your money wherever the hell you like.
You have that a little wrong. God *can* (in principle) be proven. If the sky breaks open, choirs of angels break forth, a 10km-long arm reaches down from the skies and an 8km golden-haired, bearded face looks down upon humanity and utters words of unshakable truth...then God is proven.
Sounds like a bad acid trip, or a good rock concert. With sufficiently advanced technology you can do a lot of showmanship to claim to be god.
Proving that, however, is simply not possible. I would immediately assume any such display was pure sham, and assume any entity trying to convince me they're god was full of shit.
And, really, journalistic integrity? That's laughable. Whatever the WSJ used to be, that no longer applies. Since they're owned by News Corp, they do whatever the fuck Rupert Murdoch tells them to do -- just like all of the other media owned by him.
The media is now basically just a mouth piece for the rich assholes who control it.
Journalistic integrity is a quaint notion which no longer applies in the modern world of media. It's whatever the hell you're told to publish to advance the agenda of the guy who owns it.
Basically WSJ has demonstrated themselves to be as biased and tainted as Fox News. And they're just pandering to the echo chamber.
Slashdot is haven for people who prefer an evidence based approach, and despise you idiots who need to boil everything down to "left" and "right" since both sides of the spectrum as seen by the US are full of hypocrisy.
If you blindly think the left is all good or the right is all good... you're a fucking moron who is driven by ideology and not intellect.
Ed-Tech vendors' so-called "weapons of mass instruction," argues Beyer, may show "gains" on the high-stakes tests because they mimic the targeted test format, but the learning gains don't necessarily transfer to the real world, or last much longer than the end of the school year.
Schools aren't funded on any of that crap.
Modern 'education' has become all about making the kids pass a standardized test and adhering to whatever crap the politicians are on about. They don't care about educating children, just getting their funding for next year.
And it's a big business to come up with all of these doo-dads and other crap which has no proven benefit.
Because the people in control of the educational system are morons who answer to morons.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's about the accuracy of their information. It's about your own "qualifications" to make a diagnosis based on a web page.
Reading a web page doesn't make you an MD. And if you spend your time reading descriptions of medical symptoms, sooner or later you'll find something you think applies to you. It happens to med students.
And then you go into your doctor screeching about how you have Snarfelitis and desperately need the medication you saw on TV to treat it which Astrazenica is hawking for you to go ask your doctor about.
When people get their medical information from the internet and TV commercials ... they're bound to end up clueless people who think they have some catastrophic disease.
Because the most mundane of symptoms can be blown out of proportion once you get paranoid about them.
A small amount of knowledge with insufficient context and education can be dangerous.
People have been using the interwebs to fuel hypochondria for at least a decade. Starting with WebMD and moving on.
I was once told by someone that pretty much a huge chunk of med students develop it for a period ... because you suddenly start to know what every symptom might suggest and you start looking for it.
It's called Medical Student's Disease, and sounds like it's been referenced for over 100 years.
So, surprise. Having access to the medical descriptions of disease can make you paranoid.
Only now it's digital and anybody can do it (and then go into their doctor with their own 'diagnosis').
That's far from the one and only problem with Sony.
They're assholes. They're anti-consumer. They're constantly trying to achieve vendor lock in. They treat the security of their consumers data as an afterthought.
Sony is a malicious entity, and has been for the last 20 years.
From what they do as part of the *AA mafia, to rootkits, to pretty much every damned thing Sony does ... they do not deserve your money or your respect.
A free market is predicated on the lie that people will have open information, and that people will not be gaming the system by buying laws and science.
If there is no available information, and the players are lying about the information, there can be no free market.
Because then it's not set by supply and demand, it's set by the players who will lie, cheat, and steal to come out ahead.
And then it isn't a free market. It's the usual broken bullshit which capitalists seem to both think is normal, and claim won't happen.
If you think a free market simply means "there's a sucker born every minute", then you desire the worst possible form of anarcho-capitalism there is.
And I will continue to shout loudly how the free market is a complete fucking lie, and cannot exist -- simply because it ignores the fact that humans will do anything to "win" the game, including cheating.
If everyone cheats, the market isn't free.
Everyone cheats.
Researchers do sketchy science to shill for corporations?
That unpossible.
And that, kids, is precisely why there is not, and never will be, a free market.
Because buying your own science is so much more lucrative, and the populace is so damned gullible.
No, I was the guy who rolled his eyes when someone put spinners on it.
And then I was furious at the first asshole to stand next to a tree telling me how I should go to Ugg's House of Spinners.
And then I was completely irate when I heard Ugg was selling his client information to other people who wanted to sell me shit -- even if I didn't buy anything from Ugg,
This is spinners, marketing, and privacy all rolled up in one shiny bauble, and sold to people who will take anything which says "now with intarwebs and, because, social and cloud, and we've got an app for that".
Nest is a fucking Dilbert Cartoon, and a privacy nightmare waiting to happen.
Stupid.
Sorry, but no. Having my house connected to the internet doesn't sound like it has any upsides to me.
Having it providing all of that information to Google and who knows who else ... well, that's kind of my point. I don't want a thermostat and technology infrastructure in my house whose privacy policy can be rewritten any time they like.
I'll give you a privacy policy: no internet connections to crap like thermostats and washing machines; No security problems, and no problems which originate from Google et al being bigger assholes than they admit to.
I'm not prepared to provide my location information to Google so that it knows I'm not home. Fuck that.
If I'm on the tinfoil hat end of the spectrum ... WTF would I add connectivity to my house for random appliances and enable more tracking for?
I'm staunchly against that kind of crap. I have no interest in that kind of crap. I'm actively avoiding that kind of crap. Nest is precisely that kind of crap in my opinion, and therefore not trustworthy.
LOL ... that's the nicest thing anybody has said to me so far this year. ;-)
No, you're kind of missing the point.
See, we already all have those now. Nest doesn't really bring anything new here until you connect it to the internet.
What I'm saying is the entire Nest platform, with it's interweb connnnectivity, and sending all of your data to Google ... that's the thing I expect/hope to fail.
I can almost guarantee you that Nest has a security flaw in it. That the mechanism by which you can control your thermostat with a cell phone will have a security flaws in it. And that the companies who make things for this ecosystem will create crap with security flaws in it.
If you think it is either possible or likely these things don't have security holes in them, you probably haven't been paying attention. Because companies who make internet connected devices are either indifferent or incompetent when it comes to security.
There is no straw man here.
This is technology, which is piggy backing on smart phones and the internet, providing marketing and analytics data to the mother ship, and which almost certainly will be demonstrated to be exploitable.
I think the entire premise of the Nest ecosystem is of dubious value, and of even less reliable security.
I think having a Nest thermostat means you already have a "smart" home riddled with security flaws. And every connection point to that doubles the ways in which it can be exploited. And, it makes sure Google has access to information from inside your home it never had before.
I'll pass on the entire technology. Because, as I initially said, I trust neither the intentions, integrity, or ability to implement security of anybody involved in this.
You know, I have personally watched tech companies become less willing to invest in pure R&D, less willing to make new things that someone hasn't already made, and be much more beholden to whatever the heck the CEO thinks is the Next Big Thing.
I have been at companies where we went from being innovators to imitators, and where the CEO would routinely make moronic predictions which didn't happen based on what the trends were. And then in six months make an entirely new set of moronic predictions, based on whatever the trend was then.
So, I don't know if this has changed in my lifetime (as I perceive it), or if it's cyclic, or what.
If I could answer these questions ... well, I'd be charging vast sums of money for those answers. Like Gartner does.
Only Gartner is just as full of shit as I am, so maybe I'm just doing it wrong, and need to find out how to charge people vast sums of money to identify emerging technologies which will never go anywhere.
Because, I think that's where the real money is.
In all honesty, from looking around me these days ... I conclude that doing actual R&D on the leading edge of stuff is itself daring.
Increasingly, companies want to make a "me too" product or do things based on what focus groups tell them is good.
Hell, even some tech companies seem to be retreating from meaningful R&D and focusing on "leveraging and monetizing their IP portfolio".
Nobody is willing to invest in R&D any more unless it gets them a tax break. And in that case, they'll try to tell you to categorize a ton of unrelated stuff as part of the R&D effort so the accountants can maximize the write off.
So, me, I'll still stick with daring. Saying you figure you have a less than 50% chance of success these days is pretty bold.
Hey, in all honesty, you are free to conclude I'm a crank. That's OK, my wife would agree with you.
But after 20 years in the tech industry, and 30+ years playing with technology ... this is just another new bit of hype, which stands at least a 50/50 chance of utterly failing, and which provides little compelling need for 99% of us.
Go ahead, fetishize technology, lament how we don't have flying cars, and walk around all pie eyed and dreamy about the awesome future. I've seen enough to assume it never turns out as rosy as promised, and comes with a new bag of shit most people didn't think of.
I'm not saying "stop liking what I don't like", because I don't give a rats ass what you like.
I am saying that, like Microsoft's Smart Home they've been hawking for 15-20 years ... this is overhyped technology which will never see the light of day for most people, and which is purely in the domain of people who have surplus money they wish to part with. It's the epitome of first world problems, and should be treated as such.
For the most part, I consider most forms of futurists to be deluded people who think The Next Big Thing is going to change all of our lives. And in 20 years will be laughed at in by going through old issues of Popular Mechanics.
Of course, these days, nobody will have a stack of old blogs, so they won't even remember it.
Once you've seen a bunch of "Next Big Things" become last years "Dumb Fucking Idea", it becomes a default position. :-P
It's your phone and your house, you do as you please with them.
I see neither a need for any of this stuff, nor do I see why I would trust the companies selling it.
Me, I expect this is written by incompetent chimps who need to get a product to market and don't give a crap about security, and I see all of this juicy data being collated and sorted and sold. And hacked, and subpoena'd and misused.
Every 6-12 months for the last 30 years there's always been "the next big thing". And except for a very small number of them, most of them have all failed and simply been nothing but hype. It's all marketing and no substance.
You kids might think your cell phone is the be-all and end-all. Me, I think texting is about as far as I'm interested in what my phone can do, because I have no need of it, and it doesn't actually improve my life in any way.
But, hey, I'm a grumpy old man with little interest in automation and other gizmos. Frankly, I'm bored with it, and have seen enough epic failures that I simply don't care enough to find out if I trust it.
And in many many cases, these technologies just die on their own anyway. So me bitching about it has pretty much no effect other than being able to laugh about it after it happens.
A bunch of people with money they need to part with. The rest of us will continue to not give a crap.
I neither trust, nor do I want this ecosystem of interconnected crap which puts my house on the internet so that I can access it via my fscking cell phone.
So, buy into this, suckers. Get your house hacked, or your personal habits sold, or whatever.
I'm going to continue to assume that most of the vendors jumping on this are a) interested in the analytics data for advertising, and b) grossly incompetent/indifferent to security. I trust neither the intention nor the competence of these companies.
Get off my damned lawn with your pointless gizmos. I have a key and a programmable thermostat which isn't connected to the interweb.
Ding, we have a winner.
All of that crap is purely spin by Uber to paint themselves as some romantic underdog who is beating the big bad existing players.
It's a lie, of course.
Uber just wants to have a commercial car-for-hire service and act like the laws don't apply to them.
This is just complete bullshit and PR by a company who wants to re-frame the debate.
OK, I'll give you one.
I updated my iPod touch a few months ago. It originally came with iOS 7.x, and I got the new hotness of iOS 8.x. Two of my apps stopped working. Some stuff got slower. And I got annoyed.
I wish I'd left the fscking thing the way it shipped. Because, quite frankly, there was no net benefit in the upgrade, and some net losses in functionality.
They may think it's OK to upgrade the software until the device breaks. But for what it costs, I expect the device to last several years. I will probably never apply another Apple update to it again.
iTunes on Windows has also gone downhill over the last few years, and they've completely abandoned Safari on Windows.
So, yes, I'm afraid as a consumer I'm increasingly of the opinion that their software quality is going the wrong direction in favor of putting out the new shiny and expecting us to buy it.
Blah blah blah ... the whole fscking ecosystem of Bitcoin sounds like it's based on wishful thinking.
There is no damned spoon.
From all of the articles I've seen about BitCoin over the last 12-16 months ... I conclude the whole thing is a shaky mess which will never actually live up claims.
I have yet to see the "BitCoin fails to suck" headline. It's hard not to conclude the entire premise isn't flawed.
No, better yet, accept that the guys father doesn't give a damn about GNU/Linux, and has made his own choice on the matter based on his own needs and research.
Your answer amounts to being asked "can you direct me to the food court" and you responding with "have you taken Jesus as your savior?" It deserves a kick in the nuts.
Seriously, if you have nothing to add besides "Yarg, teh Chomebook is the sux0r, run teh Lunix" ... get over it.
I make no claim about the veracity of this link. Or this one. Or even this one.
But googling for "nixon enterprise nukes india", those are the first 3 results.
Do I find it implausible that America threw around some weight to bully someone into doing something they wanted for their own ends?
Not even a little.
The entire notion of bitcoin has always seemed a little sketchy to me.
We're going to make up a money, and we're going to simultaneously claim it's secure and private, but we'll attach every transaction to the history of the money -- and then put it in the hands of any old schmuck who makes a website.
We'll claim to be an awesome alternative to government issued money, free of regulations and taxation, but we'll still try to be honest players (we promise). And a fucking pony.
The whole ecosystem seems like a pipe dream, which completely ignored reality, and has been subject to fraud and abuse for pretty much as long as I've been aware of it. FAR worse than the 'real' financial system.
So, whine all you like about the tyranny of government issued money ... you mostly sound insane, and have gotten into an overhyped, and apparently completely insecure currency.
The first time I heard of BitCoin I thought "what the heck is this for?". And pretty much every time I've heard it since, I've found myself thinking it sounds pretty sketchy.
I'm sure people will rabidly defend it, for whatever reasons they have ... but, seriously, every time I hear about BitCoin it's because it's not living up to any of the expectations, and you're putting your money into a completely unregulated pool with dodgy players.
So, I'm afraid I continue to be underwhelmed by the existence of Bit Coin, and mostly keep laughing my ass off when people lose their shirts.
Don't believe the hype.
Me, I'll stick with my bank, which operates under identifiable laws, using currency for which there is at least a pretense for the valuation and exchange rates, and involving players with many more years of proven ability to actually play this game.
But, hey, feel free to put your money wherever the hell you like.
Sounds like a bad acid trip, or a good rock concert. With sufficiently advanced technology you can do a lot of showmanship to claim to be god.
Proving that, however, is simply not possible. I would immediately assume any such display was pure sham, and assume any entity trying to convince me they're god was full of shit.
And, really, journalistic integrity? That's laughable. Whatever the WSJ used to be, that no longer applies. Since they're owned by News Corp, they do whatever the fuck Rupert Murdoch tells them to do -- just like all of the other media owned by him.
The media is now basically just a mouth piece for the rich assholes who control it.
Journalistic integrity is a quaint notion which no longer applies in the modern world of media. It's whatever the hell you're told to publish to advance the agenda of the guy who owns it.
Basically WSJ has demonstrated themselves to be as biased and tainted as Fox News. And they're just pandering to the echo chamber.
I honestly can't tell if you're being ironical, or moronical.
TFS is two sentences long. You clearly understood neither.
What WAS printed was a claim by a non-scientist that science had proven god.
What was NOT printed was a rebuttal by a scientist saying "science has proven no such thing and stop speaking for science".
Slashdot is haven for people who prefer an evidence based approach, and despise you idiots who need to boil everything down to "left" and "right" since both sides of the spectrum as seen by the US are full of hypocrisy.
If you blindly think the left is all good or the right is all good ... you're a fucking moron who is driven by ideology and not intellect.
Thankfully, I'm pretty sure my golf buddies would completely disagree with that statement.
Schools aren't funded on any of that crap.
Modern 'education' has become all about making the kids pass a standardized test and adhering to whatever crap the politicians are on about. They don't care about educating children, just getting their funding for next year.
And it's a big business to come up with all of these doo-dads and other crap which has no proven benefit.
Because the people in control of the educational system are morons who answer to morons.