I understand decentralization is what they're after; it's just that blockchain isn't the only way to do that. You have to justify specifically why you need to use that architecture otherwise it's overkill.
Really? Nixon being pardoned by the guy he nominated to the vice-presidency before resigning is your benchmark here?
Here's the case you want to bring up: Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, which bears exactly on this case. Marc Rich had fled the country so as not to face an indictment. And it was technically legal to do so in that case, although it drew condemnation, even from Jimmy Carter.
OK, I'll be the one to say it: I still don't see the point.
If you squint a little bit so the algorithms being used go out of focus, what you see is system into which information about events is entered and then extracted later to form an audit trail. This could be done on a stupendous scale with any kind of eventually consistent database.
The usefulness of blockchain is that it implements authentication and non-repudiation without the need for (or indeed possibility of) of a central authority. For example, you need something like blockchains for Bitcoin so that a court can't take your drug profits away without your cooperation. They can torture you until you give up your password, they can install a keylogger on your computer to steal it, but they can't simply declare that bitcoins in your "possession" are now in the state treasury. Bitcoins are designed not to leave your possession until you say they do. Or at least some piece of software in possession of your cryptographic secrets.
From a system design standpoint that's interesting, but it doesn't mean you need to bake that property into everything.
Sure there are always some dead trees in a forest, as anyone who's ever hunted or rambled in a forest knows. But one out of three? And from drought? It's not normal for the historical period.
However... There have been prehistoric droughts in California lasting decades, even centuries. Since we know this from tree rings, we know some rain must have fallen, but less than we are accustomed to as "normal" in historic times. These have been correlated to "radiative forcing", natural climate change mechanisms such as variations in the Earth's orbit and volcanic activity. Warmer Earth == drier California.
Which if I recall works to a slightly greater altitude in dual rotor systems. I remember reading about a company that's building a "flying car" which like this thing gets lift from a pair of large ducted fans arranged fore and aft; it's rate for 4m maximum operating altitude.
This is what is called a strawman argument. Yes, I agree it would be terrible if this official got to keep that $3 million dollars personally.
But the actual situation is pretty straightforward. You're allowed to drive your old, dirty car into the city as long as you pay a little bit extra per trip to offset the costs you're imposing on everyone else. In this case that means the people driving VWs into the city should have paid, but they only were in that situation because VW cheated them. Under the circumstances, asking VW to pony up $3 million to pay their customers fees isn't exactly draconian; after all VW had no difficulty in paying the outgoing CEO who oversaw this mess a $6.26 million dollar performance bonus after all the came out.
Now if it were up to me, dirty cars would be completely banned, and the officials and engineers of a company that cheats would go to jail.
If you eat plenty of green leafy vegetables you'll get your K1. As for K2, fermentation of that plant matter in your guy transforms some of that K1 into K2, and Bob's your uncle.
As for the anti-AGW argument, grass-fed beef as a smaller CO2 footprint than feedlot fattened beef, so your argument that the "AGW zealots" are trying to ruin your health. Grass fed beef is more expensive per pound of course, but another plus is more of the money goes to the farmer.
Adding a macroalgae to cattle feed is an interesting proposition from a carbon standpoint. Macroalgae are often quite easy to cultivate; it's done in aquaculture to provide feed in shellfish hatcheries. I've seen it done, you basically need the culture, water, and fiberglass tanks. It's something that could conceivably be done by small scale farmers, or on an industrial scale and used in feedlots, if the numbers can be made to work out. From a AGW standpoint replacing Methane with CO2 is a very good thing.
But it doesn't taste bad. "Umami", one of the five basic tastes, was discovered by studying seaweeds, and was named for the Japanese word for the flavor seaweeds lend to broth, literally "pleasant savory flavor."
It's a fair bet that every pre-industrial community that lived by a productive ocean ate seaweed, although just like Brussels sprouts not being as popular as corn, not all varieties of seaweed are equally tasty. Nori and Kombu are very tasty. Dulse, fried and salted, is somewhat reminiscent of bacon (it's that umami flavor again). Carageenan is virtually tasteless, which is why it is used as a base for fancy puddings. It is extensively used in prepared foods as a texture improver: half-and-half, ice cream, reduced fat dairy products, candy bars, toothpaste, even soda. Americans are food wimps, but they eat a lot of the stuff without realizing because it's hidden in many of the prepared foods we like to eat, like fast food "shakes".
I like all kinds of pizza. I'm not one of those people who says it has to be done just one way. The pizza I grew up with as a city kid was thick sheet pizza sold by the square, which as a kid you could afford. It's still one of my favorites if you can find a place that does it well, which isn't easy.
As for NYC pizza -- Neapolitan is the default style, and competition has created very good examples of that style. It's a bit like getting a cheese steak in Philly. There's nothing particularly rocket-sciency about a cheese steak, but because of competition shops will upgrade the meat, and perhaps most importantly the bread which is nearly always overlooked outside of Philly. Where pizza competition is fierce you'll see upgrades in the sauce; if you can taste canned sauce it's not going to cut it. For Neapolitan pizza there's actually a huge variation in crusts. There's limp (which is one of the few variations that is unambiguously bad), but there's also cracker-like or biscuit-y. My favorite examples remind me a bit of a good baguette -- crispy on the outside and tender on the inside, which is really, really hard to do when the crust is thin.
Visiting Chicago for the pizza is on my bucket list. The only Chicago style pizza we have up here in New England is the Uno chain, which I refuse to visit because I don't want a chain to be my first experience of the style. Turning a pizzeria into a chain never works. Here in Boston probably the best old-school Neapolitan pizza is Pizzeria Regina in the North End, but they've licensed the Regina name to suburban restaurants and even mall food courts, with predictable results.
Then you've been to Keste's, Patsy's, or Grimaldi's under the Brooklyn Bridge. Oh yes, I have studied this topic seriously. I have notebooks.
It's not that you can't get good wood-fired Neapolitan style pizza outside NYC, it's just that in NYC it's commonplace and in most other cities that style is rare or non-existent. Most pizza in the US is actually Greek-style pizza (baked in a pan), which produces a bread-like crust, uses American style mozzarella (made with cow's milk instead of buffalo milk, so technically it's not mozz but fior di latte), and uses a heavily tomato paste based sauce heavy on the dried oregano. Greek pizza is not necessarily bad pizza, but it has less character. You'd never stand in line at a pizzeria serving that style because chances are there's another pizzeria down the street that serves an almost indistinguishable pie.
I hardly even notice which platform I'm using any longer, because everything stuff I use is cross platform. Even Bash. The main day-to-day differences are font rendering, minor differences in window decoration, notification mechanisms, and how much screen space the graphical shell claims for its own use.
I used to go to FL on business for many years, although not that often to Miami. I'll tell you one reason that's worth a visit: the Cuban sandwiches.
I've had them outside of South Florida, but it's usually a shadow of the real thing; like comparing pizzas from a national chain to pizzas from a wood-fired NYC neighborhood pizzeria.
The world has a whole bunch of ongoing disasters, so it sounds like they're simply reclassing Zika as one of those.
It's probably worth noting that Zika is still spreading actively in Florida, at present the CDC is recommending against pregnant women avoid traveling to Miami-Dade if they can, although the red zone (area of high intensity transmissions) is considerably smaller.
Well, it's one of a number of stocks I own, and has actually done pretty well, returning to its pre-crisis in about a year. So from a financial standpoint it isn't really so idiotic to hold this one stock in my portfolio.
Sure, updating sounds like it'd be a great project. Expecting it to be reliable after a hundred and twenty years would be too much. You wouldn't expect medical texts from 1890 to be trustworthy either.
Contrary to what many in this thread are assuming, homeopathic "remedies" do not contain anything but water. Homeopathy is based on the crackpot idea that you can take something, potentially poisonous, dilute it, then dilute it again. and again until nothing is left other than pure water that happens to retain the "molecular memory" of only medicinal properties. It makes no sense.
Well, if you'd ever read Frazer's seminal anthropology-of-religion book, The Golden Bough, you'd recognize this nonsense as sympathetic magic -- in particular what he calls the "Law of Contact or Contagion". There's also an element of the law of similarity; in this case rather than like causing like (the pounding of a rain dance causing rain), you have like cures like.
In a European context people are reluctant to call homeopathy magic because it's practiced by supposedly educated white people, but in principle the theory isn't that different from something you'd hear from a shaman; although if the witch doctor practices folk herbalism he probably has a better chance of curing you. Of course an actual homeopathic remedy is less likely to make you sicker.
Yes. This is what marketers refer to as "communication", which is pretty much the polar opposite to what an engineer would consider "communication" -- the transfer of an unambiguous piece of information from one party to another.
In marketing "communication" is triggering behavior by exploiting associations people have. So while actual homeopathic preparations have at least one virtue -- they consist of harmless water -- what is marketed as "homeopathic" is in fact anyone's guess.
ISIS is taking a shellacking. Americans just don't realize it because we're not spending a trillion dollars and 4400 lives doing it. Mosul will probably fall before Trump takes office, and if Obama and Kerry can work out the problems with Turkey there's a good chance ISIS will be getting kicked out of its capital Raqqah as the new president takes office. This will destroy even the semblance of a claim to an ISIS caliphate since that requires holding territory.
And as for Al Qaeda... Al who?
Oh, and the destabilizing influences of energy dependency? US oil and gas production has soared under Obama's policies (much to the displeasure of his base) so that the US will be a net energy exporter this year for the first time since 1957. If Trump continues Obama's policies we'll be able to replace most of Russia's gas supply to our trading partners in Europe.
So yeah, I'll take "Obummer" on security over someone who was briefed a month in advance about 9/11 and dismissed it as CYA.
As for Orlando, a mass shootings of one sort of another are a regular event in the US. The last year we went without a mass shooting was 1995. Sometimes like this time it'll be Muslim nutjobs pledging allegiance to the flavor-of-the-month; but just as often it'll racists, misogynists, anti-gummint conspiracy theorists, or just plain apolitical nutjobs. Like always.
But here's the thing: we've decided essentially that mass shootings are rare enough we can live with them. Back in the 70s it used to be revolvers or hunting rifles with internal magazines. Now it's semi-automatics with big removable magazines, so the body count is higher. But statistically it's still rare enough that Amerians (rightly) treat these things as a negligible risk.
Except that bonuses are paid out even when the CEO presides over a disaster. Martin Winterkorn got 6.5 million dollars in performance bonuses for his last year, even though VW stock went from $253/share to $92. That's on top of a "base" salary of $1.5 million.
Citigroup paid out $5.3 billion in "performance bonuses" in 2008, the same year the federal government had to bail them out because the company at $39 billion dollars in sub-prime mortgage backed securities that nobody knew the exact value of, and the same year their stock value went from $435/share to $35/share. Since the banking sector has recovered -- I have bank stocks which tanked in 2009 but were back to their pre-crisis value by 2010, but Citigroup has never recovered it's share price; it hasn't gone up over $60 in the eight years since, but they continue to pay out massive "performance bonuses" every year, rain or shine.
The idea that "performance bonuses" have anything to do with accountability for results is ludicrous. They have everything to do with that these people are powerful enough to write the rules for themselves.
I have doubts that voters are actually as volatile as opinion polling shows them to be. It's hard to believe that people change their minds that many times, just based on how people thing in my experience. Once they make a decision, they discount contrary information.
If so, then swings in the polls may reflect differences in how the response rates of partisan groups react to news.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand decentralization is what they're after; it's just that blockchain isn't the only way to do that. You have to justify specifically why you need to use that architecture otherwise it's overkill.
Really? Nixon being pardoned by the guy he nominated to the vice-presidency before resigning is your benchmark here?
Here's the case you want to bring up: Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, which bears exactly on this case. Marc Rich had fled the country so as not to face an indictment. And it was technically legal to do so in that case, although it drew condemnation, even from Jimmy Carter.
Well, OK. But stay away from white Persian cats. That'd be a little on-the-nose.
OK, I'll be the one to say it: I still don't see the point.
If you squint a little bit so the algorithms being used go out of focus, what you see is system into which information about events is entered and then extracted later to form an audit trail. This could be done on a stupendous scale with any kind of eventually consistent database.
The usefulness of blockchain is that it implements authentication and non-repudiation without the need for (or indeed possibility of) of a central authority. For example, you need something like blockchains for Bitcoin so that a court can't take your drug profits away without your cooperation. They can torture you until you give up your password, they can install a keylogger on your computer to steal it, but they can't simply declare that bitcoins in your "possession" are now in the state treasury. Bitcoins are designed not to leave your possession until you say they do. Or at least some piece of software in possession of your cryptographic secrets.
From a system design standpoint that's interesting, but it doesn't mean you need to bake that property into everything.
No
Or just as accurately: yes.
Sure there are always some dead trees in a forest, as anyone who's ever hunted or rambled in a forest knows. But one out of three? And from drought? It's not normal for the historical period.
However... There have been prehistoric droughts in California lasting decades, even centuries. Since we know this from tree rings, we know some rain must have fallen, but less than we are accustomed to as "normal" in historic times. These have been correlated to "radiative forcing", natural climate change mechanisms such as variations in the Earth's orbit and volcanic activity. Warmer Earth == drier California.
And He's coming for you, too.
go obsolete.
The hardest part of predicting the future of technology isn't what but when.
Which if I recall works to a slightly greater altitude in dual rotor systems. I remember reading about a company that's building a "flying car" which like this thing gets lift from a pair of large ducted fans arranged fore and aft; it's rate for 4m maximum operating altitude.
This is what is called a strawman argument. Yes, I agree it would be terrible if this official got to keep that $3 million dollars personally.
But the actual situation is pretty straightforward. You're allowed to drive your old, dirty car into the city as long as you pay a little bit extra per trip to offset the costs you're imposing on everyone else. In this case that means the people driving VWs into the city should have paid, but they only were in that situation because VW cheated them. Under the circumstances, asking VW to pony up $3 million to pay their customers fees isn't exactly draconian; after all VW had no difficulty in paying the outgoing CEO who oversaw this mess a $6.26 million dollar performance bonus after all the came out.
Now if it were up to me, dirty cars would be completely banned, and the officials and engineers of a company that cheats would go to jail.
If you eat plenty of green leafy vegetables you'll get your K1. As for K2, fermentation of that plant matter in your guy transforms some of that K1 into K2, and Bob's your uncle.
As for the anti-AGW argument, grass-fed beef as a smaller CO2 footprint than feedlot fattened beef, so your argument that the "AGW zealots" are trying to ruin your health. Grass fed beef is more expensive per pound of course, but another plus is more of the money goes to the farmer.
Adding a macroalgae to cattle feed is an interesting proposition from a carbon standpoint. Macroalgae are often quite easy to cultivate; it's done in aquaculture to provide feed in shellfish hatcheries. I've seen it done, you basically need the culture, water, and fiberglass tanks. It's something that could conceivably be done by small scale farmers, or on an industrial scale and used in feedlots, if the numbers can be made to work out. From a AGW standpoint replacing Methane with CO2 is a very good thing.
But it doesn't taste bad. "Umami", one of the five basic tastes, was discovered by studying seaweeds, and was named for the Japanese word for the flavor seaweeds lend to broth, literally "pleasant savory flavor."
It's a fair bet that every pre-industrial community that lived by a productive ocean ate seaweed, although just like Brussels sprouts not being as popular as corn, not all varieties of seaweed are equally tasty. Nori and Kombu are very tasty. Dulse, fried and salted, is somewhat reminiscent of bacon (it's that umami flavor again). Carageenan is virtually tasteless, which is why it is used as a base for fancy puddings. It is extensively used in prepared foods as a texture improver: half-and-half, ice cream, reduced fat dairy products, candy bars, toothpaste, even soda. Americans are food wimps, but they eat a lot of the stuff without realizing because it's hidden in many of the prepared foods we like to eat, like fast food "shakes".
I like all kinds of pizza. I'm not one of those people who says it has to be done just one way. The pizza I grew up with as a city kid was thick sheet pizza sold by the square, which as a kid you could afford. It's still one of my favorites if you can find a place that does it well, which isn't easy.
As for NYC pizza -- Neapolitan is the default style, and competition has created very good examples of that style. It's a bit like getting a cheese steak in Philly. There's nothing particularly rocket-sciency about a cheese steak, but because of competition shops will upgrade the meat, and perhaps most importantly the bread which is nearly always overlooked outside of Philly. Where pizza competition is fierce you'll see upgrades in the sauce; if you can taste canned sauce it's not going to cut it. For Neapolitan pizza there's actually a huge variation in crusts. There's limp (which is one of the few variations that is unambiguously bad), but there's also cracker-like or biscuit-y. My favorite examples remind me a bit of a good baguette -- crispy on the outside and tender on the inside, which is really, really hard to do when the crust is thin.
Visiting Chicago for the pizza is on my bucket list. The only Chicago style pizza we have up here in New England is the Uno chain, which I refuse to visit because I don't want a chain to be my first experience of the style. Turning a pizzeria into a chain never works. Here in Boston probably the best old-school Neapolitan pizza is Pizzeria Regina in the North End, but they've licensed the Regina name to suburban restaurants and even mall food courts, with predictable results.
Then you've been to Keste's, Patsy's, or Grimaldi's under the Brooklyn Bridge. Oh yes, I have studied this topic seriously. I have notebooks.
It's not that you can't get good wood-fired Neapolitan style pizza outside NYC, it's just that in NYC it's commonplace and in most other cities that style is rare or non-existent. Most pizza in the US is actually Greek-style pizza (baked in a pan), which produces a bread-like crust, uses American style mozzarella (made with cow's milk instead of buffalo milk, so technically it's not mozz but fior di latte), and uses a heavily tomato paste based sauce heavy on the dried oregano. Greek pizza is not necessarily bad pizza, but it has less character. You'd never stand in line at a pizzeria serving that style because chances are there's another pizzeria down the street that serves an almost indistinguishable pie.
I hardly even notice which platform I'm using any longer, because everything stuff I use is cross platform. Even Bash. The main day-to-day differences are font rendering, minor differences in window decoration, notification mechanisms, and how much screen space the graphical shell claims for its own use.
I used to go to FL on business for many years, although not that often to Miami. I'll tell you one reason that's worth a visit: the Cuban sandwiches.
I've had them outside of South Florida, but it's usually a shadow of the real thing; like comparing pizzas from a national chain to pizzas from a wood-fired NYC neighborhood pizzeria.
Uh.. The World Health Organization?
The world has a whole bunch of ongoing disasters, so it sounds like they're simply reclassing Zika as one of those.
It's probably worth noting that Zika is still spreading actively in Florida, at present the CDC is recommending against pregnant women avoid traveling to Miami-Dade if they can, although the red zone (area of high intensity transmissions) is considerably smaller.
Well, it's one of a number of stocks I own, and has actually done pretty well, returning to its pre-crisis in about a year. So from a financial standpoint it isn't really so idiotic to hold this one stock in my portfolio.
Thanks for the pointer. Looks like the kindle version for volume 1 is only $15, which is reasonable for a textbook.
Sure, updating sounds like it'd be a great project. Expecting it to be reliable after a hundred and twenty years would be too much. You wouldn't expect medical texts from 1890 to be trustworthy either.
Contrary to what many in this thread are assuming, homeopathic "remedies" do not contain anything but water. Homeopathy is based on the crackpot idea that you can take something, potentially poisonous, dilute it, then dilute it again. and again until nothing is left other than pure water that happens to retain the "molecular memory" of only medicinal properties. It makes no sense.
Well, if you'd ever read Frazer's seminal anthropology-of-religion book, The Golden Bough, you'd recognize this nonsense as sympathetic magic -- in particular what he calls the "Law of Contact or Contagion". There's also an element of the law of similarity; in this case rather than like causing like (the pounding of a rain dance causing rain), you have like cures like.
In a European context people are reluctant to call homeopathy magic because it's practiced by supposedly educated white people, but in principle the theory isn't that different from something you'd hear from a shaman; although if the witch doctor practices folk herbalism he probably has a better chance of curing you. Of course an actual homeopathic remedy is less likely to make you sicker.
Yes. This is what marketers refer to as "communication", which is pretty much the polar opposite to what an engineer would consider "communication" -- the transfer of an unambiguous piece of information from one party to another.
In marketing "communication" is triggering behavior by exploiting associations people have. So while actual homeopathic preparations have at least one virtue -- they consist of harmless water -- what is marketed as "homeopathic" is in fact anyone's guess.
ISIS is taking a shellacking. Americans just don't realize it because we're not spending a trillion dollars and 4400 lives doing it. Mosul will probably fall before Trump takes office, and if Obama and Kerry can work out the problems with Turkey there's a good chance ISIS will be getting kicked out of its capital Raqqah as the new president takes office. This will destroy even the semblance of a claim to an ISIS caliphate since that requires holding territory.
And as for Al Qaeda... Al who?
Oh, and the destabilizing influences of energy dependency? US oil and gas production has soared under Obama's policies (much to the displeasure of his base) so that the US will be a net energy exporter this year for the first time since 1957. If Trump continues Obama's policies we'll be able to replace most of Russia's gas supply to our trading partners in Europe.
So yeah, I'll take "Obummer" on security over someone who was briefed a month in advance about 9/11 and dismissed it as CYA.
As for Orlando, a mass shootings of one sort of another are a regular event in the US. The last year we went without a mass shooting was 1995. Sometimes like this time it'll be Muslim nutjobs pledging allegiance to the flavor-of-the-month; but just as often it'll racists, misogynists, anti-gummint conspiracy theorists, or just plain apolitical nutjobs. Like always.
But here's the thing: we've decided essentially that mass shootings are rare enough we can live with them. Back in the 70s it used to be revolvers or hunting rifles with internal magazines. Now it's semi-automatics with big removable magazines, so the body count is higher. But statistically it's still rare enough that Amerians (rightly) treat these things as a negligible risk.
Except that bonuses are paid out even when the CEO presides over a disaster. Martin Winterkorn got 6.5 million dollars in performance bonuses for his last year, even though VW stock went from $253/share to $92. That's on top of a "base" salary of $1.5 million.
Citigroup paid out $5.3 billion in "performance bonuses" in 2008, the same year the federal government had to bail them out because the company at $39 billion dollars in sub-prime mortgage backed securities that nobody knew the exact value of, and the same year their stock value went from $435/share to $35/share. Since the banking sector has recovered -- I have bank stocks which tanked in 2009 but were back to their pre-crisis value by 2010, but Citigroup has never recovered it's share price; it hasn't gone up over $60 in the eight years since, but they continue to pay out massive "performance bonuses" every year, rain or shine.
The idea that "performance bonuses" have anything to do with accountability for results is ludicrous. They have everything to do with that these people are powerful enough to write the rules for themselves.
I have doubts that voters are actually as volatile as opinion polling shows them to be. It's hard to believe that people change their minds that many times, just based on how people thing in my experience. Once they make a decision, they discount contrary information.
If so, then swings in the polls may reflect differences in how the response rates of partisan groups react to news.