We don't even know all the inputs into the system. You repeat "physics!" like a madman while avoiding pesky things like that. We don't even know for certain what the actual composition of the planet is beyond about 40,000 feet down in one particular spot and while we have evidence of planetary magnetic field inversions we've never actually experienced one in recorded history.
We can't even get next week's weather forecast in any given place right more than 40% of the time. Since guessing the future climate is basically nothing more than a long-term generalized weather forecast for the entire planet, why should I assume that climate models for which several inputs aren't known and not all inputs are completely understood have more of a chance than that same 40% to be accurate?
Come on, Commander Physics. Explain how we can't predict the weather more than a week out correctly over half the time but we are supposed to predict the long-term global weather with high accuracy. "Physics" is not an answer, it's avoidance because you don't actually have one. Appeals to authority are not valid here.
In the USA the "food pyramid" was king for decades and only very recently was thrown out. The base of the "food pyramid" is 6-11 servings of grains/bread per day. That's a lot of carbs. Fruit and vegetables (easy sources of either sugar or starch for some vegetables) were big and meat/protein was supposed to be one of the things you ate the least. Needless to say, a body literally built on saturated fat, protein, and cholesterol does not respond well to being fed carbs as a primary energy source instead, so now we're fat. The notion that saturated fat and cholesterol are basically slow suicide has been pushed in the US for longer than most readers of Slashdot have been alive and is common knowledge, however flawed. We still have tons of low-fat/no-fat garbage available that has even more added sugar to replace the flavor lost with the fat.
Just because the IPCC makes predictions that come true doesn't mean that their theory behind those predictions is correct. Note that I'm not saying they're WRONG either, just that I don't believe they are capable of being accurate because all data available is very limited compared to the amount of time that major climate shifts take to complete. It'd be like taking a photo of a stretch of thousand-mile road and making big assumptions about the entire road based on that photo.
Sorry I can't just have faith like you; I'm not interested in joining that religion.
Battery claims don't matter when your browser royally sucks like Edge does. I will take a 50% loss of battery time if it means I can use a browser that can right-click and "save image" or "view image" or "copy image location." Edge can't even be used to save a copy of the current page. What a total piece of crap. Useless for any kind of real work.
BUT IT MAKES YER BATTERY LAST LONGER WHILE YOU GET NOTHING DONE, HURR DURR HURRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
The point was that scientists have claimed several things in the past that turned out to be false and that was even known to them to be false, usually because of political pressure and the threat of pulling grant money for going against the grain. Your attempt to distract from this point is laughable.
There are hundreds of weather monitoring stations that are installed improperly, including beside runways where hot jet exhaust will blow on them and next to concrete structures that will throw off measurements in either direction due to heat rolling off of and sunlight reflecting off of the concrete, or my favorite: the ones placed above trash burn barrels. Lest you attempt to sneer "Fox News!!!11" as if that's a valid logical dismissal, they are not the only ones mentioning this issue.
Personally, I doubt that 50-100 years of temperature measurements, regardless of accuracy, is sufficient to create climate models that are accurate since planetary climate change takes place over many thousands of years, not mere centuries. We have insufficient data to know if we are warming because of humans or if it's all just coincidental correlation based on a warming cycle that was set to happen anyway. My position is one of climate agnosticism; we simply do not have enough information and anyone claiming to have enough is making extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence.
There was "a link" between saturated fat and heart disease for decades. It was a lie and made society quite overweight. Forgive us if we say "wait, let's not rush to judgment on the basis of supposed scientific consensus, especially when dissent exists and has sound reasons to do so."
10 year terms with a single 10 year extension that the rightsholder must actively apply for. That's all that needs to exist. That has been good enough for patents, so why shouldn't it be good enough for copyrights? They're both limited monopolies granted to allow a creator to benefit from their work and dropping those works into the public domain after term expiration. A healthy public domain enriches the entire society. There is no excuse for copyright terms being longer than patent terms. At some point information must be freed from the millions of little walking paywalls that copyright creates. Copyright extending beyond the life of the creator should be eliminated outright. Once you're dead, your work should be owned by the public. Look no further for the toxicity of copyright than Martin Luther King Jr's family: they are the nastiest kind of copyright rent-seekers imaginable, holding the work of MLK's life and an extremely important part of the Civil Rights Era hostage behind financial demands. They are a shining example of the worst that perpetual copyright has to offer.
It makes a massive difference. I can't create the vast majority of forms of derivative works without begging the rightsholder(s) for permission and paying them whatever they want to obtain a license to do so. Selling or even giving away a mixtape is a violation of the distribution rights of several copyright holders, for example. Using a well-known song from the 1960s to help anchor a scene in a film or even just as a stinger in a short YouTube video is not possible without buying the rights and the original creator may very well be dead by now, or they or their estate may not even give you the time of day. Making a shirt with Mickey Mouse on it is a violation too. Works of art are how we shape and record our culture and having them under copyright protection effectively puts our cultural history behind a million little paywalls.
Came here to say this, though disagree with the hefty fee for renewal. The fee should not be high, the renewal should exist so that authors must express active interest in extending the copyright term for it to be extended, allowing authors not sufficiently concerned with doing so to drop their work into the public domain after 10 years by default. 20 years maximum, full stop. It's already 20 years for patents, I don't see any reason for copyrights to be different.
People who virtue signal to feel better about themselves don't need others to know it's them doing it. Virtue signaling can be for the broadcaster OR the recipients. In either case it's not a useful behavior; it's a lot harder to talk to people while not being a douchebag than to try to convince other people over the internet you're not a douchebag, whether that's true or not.
Don't waste everyone's time with your "let it update or the AIDS will get you" line. With major yet rare exceptions such as WannaCry, nearly every single security update I've seen for Windows since the XP days has patched some theoretical obscure vulnerability that usually required the person to already be logged into an account on the machine to exploit or it was plugging holes in the Swiss cheese that I don't use called Internet Explorer. Unless the security issue is really big, it's better to force updates to happen when you make the choice to do it than to run the high risk of the unattended updates hosing the machine somehow. I just did three clean Windows 10 reinstalls so far TODAY because of massively bungled updates going wrong and destroying the OS. Save your theoretical security concerns for ignorant people who don't use their computers to get real work done.
Perhaps you also missed the bit where I mentioned that Windows 10 Pro was ignoring the update group policy settings including the one that stops updating from restarting the computer automatically overnight. It is more important to me that my overnight 4K After Effects render completes than that I am "secure" a couple of days earlier than I care to be but have to start many hours worth of waiting over.
Forced updates and reboots are not okay. If you don't like that, that's fine; I don't care if you're unhappy over how my computer is set up.
Microsoft is shady as shit and despite disabling the Windows Update service on my Pro machines I find it re-enables and demanding restarts, even restarting in violation of the "no auto-restart with logged on user" group policy, so here's a solution to blocking Windows 10 updates that works.
Go to regedit, find HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\wuauserv, export that key to a.reg file somewhere, open an admin command prompt and "net stop wuauserv" and then DELETE that key. This disables and deletes the entire Windows Update service from the system. If you want to update, import that.reg file you saved and update. "net stop wuauserv" and delete it again when finished (you don't even need it once the settings panel indicates it needs a restart, the post-update work is done by internal Windows components.)
Make a.reg file with these contents as a companion to your "install wuauserv.reg" and call it "delete wuauserv.reg":
No, it's not a pretty solution and won't work for your mom and dad, but it keeps Microsoft from shooting update torpedoes up your computer's buttpipes.
That's a really ridiculous suggestion. Thunderbird is superior if no other reason than it works natively on every major desktop platform. I'm not running a VM to get my mail. I looked at Evolution, the interface is mostly a clone of Thunderbird so I see absolutely no point.
Keyboard shortcuts for handy things, even obscure ones. CTRL+U for "view message source" for example. This makes certain techie tasks way easier. To send a full message source to Spamcop's web interface, I just hold CTRL and go U, A, C, W, release CTRL, then ALT+TAB to Firefox and CTRL+V in the text box.
Since Thunderbird is based on Firefox's runtime, things like CTRL+[scroll wheel] zoom the contents of the message body as expected. If some asshole thinks it's funny to send 7-point light grey text (every unsubscribe line in every marketing email ever) you've got an easy way around that. You can also View - Message Body As - Plain Text, or ALT+V, B, P.
Thunderbird contacts can do mailing lists. Using the Mail Merge extension as described here you can send letters to those mailing lists using auto-filled variables; no need for third-party programs to send emails to a small mailing list.
I'd say more things but I have work to do. Needless to say, there's a lot of goodies in Thunderbird once you start digging. I hate Outlook so very much because I'm spoiled by Thunderbird.
I don't think Thunderbird is receiving the WebExtensions architecture. At least, I have heard nothing of that sort. Mozilla has basically stated that they're leaving Thunderbird alone and I think that's a good thing. While WebExtensions may be appropriate for a browser long-term, Thunderbird is not a browser and the added capabilities of "legacy" extensions to latch into deeper parts of the Thunderbird framework are arguably far more important than on Firefox.
Thunderbird can two-way sync with Google Calendar and Contacts. Outlook didn't the last time I checked, although I hear it can as of the newest version.
Outlook stores everything in a huge PST file; Thunderbird uses textual mbox files and a simple directory structure.
Moving a Thunderbird profile (which includes all settings, contacts, mail, saved passwords, accounts, everything) from one place to another is as simple as copying the ~/.thunderbird or %appdata%\Thunderbird folder to the same place in the other user account; Outlook has to be set up from scratch every single time and have the PST files imported and the placeholder empty PST they forcibly create (again, perhaps not with newer versions) disabled and deleted manually.
Thunderbird is light-years faster than Outlook.
Thunderbird is open source.
Thunderbird works on Linux.
Thunderbird is free as in both beer and freedom.
Thunderbird has better view options, a simpler interface, a massively better heuristic junk mail filter, way nicer IMAP integration (none of that strike-through nonsense when you delete mail), and it even handles RSS feeds extremely well.
Relative to Gmail, it's a local mail app so it's much faster to work with, it's less confusing that Gmail, the icons for everything are clearer than the stupid decisions made by Gmail, and the folder organization is much easier to use than the brain-dead "labels-as-folders" in Gmail.
The message filter capabilities are way better and more useful than both Outlook and Gmail, the search functionality is more robust than both, and searches can be saved as "search folders" that dynamically build based on a desired search.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Source: used Thunderbird for roughly a decade, converted many businesses to it despite external pressures to use Outlook.
Oh, one tip: if someone sends an Outlook-specific winmail.dat email to you, get the LookOut extension for Thunderbird and it'll let you view it as a normal email.
What is really needed there is how many movies of theirs end up in theaters. Lots of people make movies but most of those never grace a silver screen. My short films are really not worth putting in a theater but if I went the extraordinary lengths needed to made a decent feature film I can guarantee you it'd never be able to compete with the latest Star Trek abomination that has Roddenberry spinning in his grave so hard they're using him to generate electricity.
I have this older (chunky compared to the new stuff) Vizio 43" LCD HDTV that I got for nearly free. I routinely lift and move it alone. It's thick enough that I don't have to worry about splitting the LCD down the middle and it doesn't really weigh much; most of it is empty space in there, it's basically just a hollow plastic frame that supports the LCD.
I have never seen the value of cryptocurrency (as commonly implemented today.) The way that the systems are designed require that all transactions be made public on the network and tied to a unique set of numbers corresponding to particular "wallets." There is ultimately zero anonymity with cryptocurrency long-term. Decentralization doesn't matter once the currency becomes widespread. It was always destined to become the same kind of gambling that Forex trading tends to be: dump in money, wait for increase in value due to others dumping in money, bail out with their money if they don't bail first with yours. If I wanted to do that, I may as well just be a penny stock day trader.
Cryptocurrency as commonly implemented today has been garbage from the start and anyone who tries to make money off of it does so at their own extreme peril. This just reeks of a way for really rich people to be in greater control of it as they are with Forex.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't even know all the inputs into the system. You repeat "physics!" like a madman while avoiding pesky things like that. We don't even know for certain what the actual composition of the planet is beyond about 40,000 feet down in one particular spot and while we have evidence of planetary magnetic field inversions we've never actually experienced one in recorded history.
We can't even get next week's weather forecast in any given place right more than 40% of the time. Since guessing the future climate is basically nothing more than a long-term generalized weather forecast for the entire planet, why should I assume that climate models for which several inputs aren't known and not all inputs are completely understood have more of a chance than that same 40% to be accurate?
Come on, Commander Physics. Explain how we can't predict the weather more than a week out correctly over half the time but we are supposed to predict the long-term global weather with high accuracy. "Physics" is not an answer, it's avoidance because you don't actually have one. Appeals to authority are not valid here.
In the USA the "food pyramid" was king for decades and only very recently was thrown out. The base of the "food pyramid" is 6-11 servings of grains/bread per day. That's a lot of carbs. Fruit and vegetables (easy sources of either sugar or starch for some vegetables) were big and meat/protein was supposed to be one of the things you ate the least. Needless to say, a body literally built on saturated fat, protein, and cholesterol does not respond well to being fed carbs as a primary energy source instead, so now we're fat. The notion that saturated fat and cholesterol are basically slow suicide has been pushed in the US for longer than most readers of Slashdot have been alive and is common knowledge, however flawed. We still have tons of low-fat/no-fat garbage available that has even more added sugar to replace the flavor lost with the fat.
Per capita consumption of margarine dropping correlates to a lower divorce rate in Maine. Oh, while we're at it, we need to lower the cost of potato chips to reduce deaths by falling out of wheelchairs. We can observe trends and make incorrect assumptions based on them all day long.
Just because the IPCC makes predictions that come true doesn't mean that their theory behind those predictions is correct. Note that I'm not saying they're WRONG either, just that I don't believe they are capable of being accurate because all data available is very limited compared to the amount of time that major climate shifts take to complete. It'd be like taking a photo of a stretch of thousand-mile road and making big assumptions about the entire road based on that photo.
Sorry I can't just have faith like you; I'm not interested in joining that religion.
LOL, no. Nothing but grossly fallacious nonsense, vague statements, and ad hominem. If you have to lob "stupid" at me, you're done. Enjoy your -1.
Battery claims don't matter when your browser royally sucks like Edge does. I will take a 50% loss of battery time if it means I can use a browser that can right-click and "save image" or "view image" or "copy image location." Edge can't even be used to save a copy of the current page. What a total piece of crap. Useless for any kind of real work.
BUT IT MAKES YER BATTERY LAST LONGER WHILE YOU GET NOTHING DONE, HURR DURR HURRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
The point was that scientists have claimed several things in the past that turned out to be false and that was even known to them to be false, usually because of political pressure and the threat of pulling grant money for going against the grain. Your attempt to distract from this point is laughable.
Distorted data? Feds close 600 weather stations amid criticism they're situated to report warming quote: "the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has closed some 600 out of nearly 9,000 weather stations over the past two years that it has deemed problematic or unnecessary, after a long campaign by one critic highlighting the problem of using unreliable data."
There are hundreds of weather monitoring stations that are installed improperly, including beside runways where hot jet exhaust will blow on them and next to concrete structures that will throw off measurements in either direction due to heat rolling off of and sunlight reflecting off of the concrete, or my favorite: the ones placed above trash burn barrels. Lest you attempt to sneer "Fox News!!!11" as if that's a valid logical dismissal, they are not the only ones mentioning this issue.
Then there's this handy Wikipedia list of scientists that go against the consensus.
Personally, I doubt that 50-100 years of temperature measurements, regardless of accuracy, is sufficient to create climate models that are accurate since planetary climate change takes place over many thousands of years, not mere centuries. We have insufficient data to know if we are warming because of humans or if it's all just coincidental correlation based on a warming cycle that was set to happen anyway. My position is one of climate agnosticism; we simply do not have enough information and anyone claiming to have enough is making extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence.
There was "a link" between saturated fat and heart disease for decades. It was a lie and made society quite overweight. Forgive us if we say "wait, let's not rush to judgment on the basis of supposed scientific consensus, especially when dissent exists and has sound reasons to do so."
10 year terms with a single 10 year extension that the rightsholder must actively apply for. That's all that needs to exist. That has been good enough for patents, so why shouldn't it be good enough for copyrights? They're both limited monopolies granted to allow a creator to benefit from their work and dropping those works into the public domain after term expiration. A healthy public domain enriches the entire society. There is no excuse for copyright terms being longer than patent terms. At some point information must be freed from the millions of little walking paywalls that copyright creates. Copyright extending beyond the life of the creator should be eliminated outright. Once you're dead, your work should be owned by the public. Look no further for the toxicity of copyright than Martin Luther King Jr's family: they are the nastiest kind of copyright rent-seekers imaginable, holding the work of MLK's life and an extremely important part of the Civil Rights Era hostage behind financial demands. They are a shining example of the worst that perpetual copyright has to offer.
It makes a massive difference. I can't create the vast majority of forms of derivative works without begging the rightsholder(s) for permission and paying them whatever they want to obtain a license to do so. Selling or even giving away a mixtape is a violation of the distribution rights of several copyright holders, for example. Using a well-known song from the 1960s to help anchor a scene in a film or even just as a stinger in a short YouTube video is not possible without buying the rights and the original creator may very well be dead by now, or they or their estate may not even give you the time of day. Making a shirt with Mickey Mouse on it is a violation too. Works of art are how we shape and record our culture and having them under copyright protection effectively puts our cultural history behind a million little paywalls.
Came here to say this, though disagree with the hefty fee for renewal. The fee should not be high, the renewal should exist so that authors must express active interest in extending the copyright term for it to be extended, allowing authors not sufficiently concerned with doing so to drop their work into the public domain after 10 years by default. 20 years maximum, full stop. It's already 20 years for patents, I don't see any reason for copyrights to be different.
People who virtue signal to feel better about themselves don't need others to know it's them doing it. Virtue signaling can be for the broadcaster OR the recipients. In either case it's not a useful behavior; it's a lot harder to talk to people while not being a douchebag than to try to convince other people over the internet you're not a douchebag, whether that's true or not.
I figure we're about here in this virtuous interaction now: r/niceguys Top Posts of All Time [3] @ 5:19
Oh please, another update absolutist.
Don't waste everyone's time with your "let it update or the AIDS will get you" line. With major yet rare exceptions such as WannaCry, nearly every single security update I've seen for Windows since the XP days has patched some theoretical obscure vulnerability that usually required the person to already be logged into an account on the machine to exploit or it was plugging holes in the Swiss cheese that I don't use called Internet Explorer. Unless the security issue is really big, it's better to force updates to happen when you make the choice to do it than to run the high risk of the unattended updates hosing the machine somehow. I just did three clean Windows 10 reinstalls so far TODAY because of massively bungled updates going wrong and destroying the OS. Save your theoretical security concerns for ignorant people who don't use their computers to get real work done.
Perhaps you also missed the bit where I mentioned that Windows 10 Pro was ignoring the update group policy settings including the one that stops updating from restarting the computer automatically overnight. It is more important to me that my overnight 4K After Effects render completes than that I am "secure" a couple of days earlier than I care to be but have to start many hours worth of waiting over.
Forced updates and reboots are not okay. If you don't like that, that's fine; I don't care if you're unhappy over how my computer is set up.
Microsoft is shady as shit and despite disabling the Windows Update service on my Pro machines I find it re-enables and demanding restarts, even restarting in violation of the "no auto-restart with logged on user" group policy, so here's a solution to blocking Windows 10 updates that works.
.reg file somewhere, open an admin command prompt and "net stop wuauserv" and then DELETE that key. This disables and deletes the entire Windows Update service from the system. If you want to update, import that .reg file you saved and update. "net stop wuauserv" and delete it again when finished (you don't even need it once the settings panel indicates it needs a restart, the post-update work is done by internal Windows components.)
.reg file with these contents as a companion to your "install wuauserv.reg" and call it "delete wuauserv.reg":
Go to regedit, find HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\wuauserv, export that key to a
Make a
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\wuauserv]
No, it's not a pretty solution and won't work for your mom and dad, but it keeps Microsoft from shooting update torpedoes up your computer's buttpipes.
Sadly, I'm not stupid enough to be a politician. ;-) Thanks for the kind words.
It's even worse because the same people can't seem to follow the very simple directions on how to switch the compose mode from "rich text" to "HTML."
Lightning for calendaring, included with Thunderbird
Provider for Google Calendar
gContactSync
Pair all that with a Gmail account and you've got IMAP, calendar, and contacts two-way sync. Easy peasy!
That's a really ridiculous suggestion. Thunderbird is superior if no other reason than it works natively on every major desktop platform. I'm not running a VM to get my mail. I looked at Evolution, the interface is mostly a clone of Thunderbird so I see absolutely no point.
Evolution is not available for Windows, the OS that the majority of people use. Feel free to prove otherwise; all I find is "defunct ports."
...crap.
Keyboard shortcuts for handy things, even obscure ones. CTRL+U for "view message source" for example. This makes certain techie tasks way easier. To send a full message source to Spamcop's web interface, I just hold CTRL and go U, A, C, W, release CTRL, then ALT+TAB to Firefox and CTRL+V in the text box.
Since Thunderbird is based on Firefox's runtime, things like CTRL+[scroll wheel] zoom the contents of the message body as expected. If some asshole thinks it's funny to send 7-point light grey text (every unsubscribe line in every marketing email ever) you've got an easy way around that. You can also View - Message Body As - Plain Text, or ALT+V, B, P.
Thunderbird contacts can do mailing lists. Using the Mail Merge extension as described here you can send letters to those mailing lists using auto-filled variables; no need for third-party programs to send emails to a small mailing list.
I'd say more things but I have work to do. Needless to say, there's a lot of goodies in Thunderbird once you start digging. I hate Outlook so very much because I'm spoiled by Thunderbird.
I don't think Thunderbird is receiving the WebExtensions architecture. At least, I have heard nothing of that sort. Mozilla has basically stated that they're leaving Thunderbird alone and I think that's a good thing. While WebExtensions may be appropriate for a browser long-term, Thunderbird is not a browser and the added capabilities of "legacy" extensions to latch into deeper parts of the Thunderbird framework are arguably far more important than on Firefox.
Thunderbird can two-way sync with Google Calendar and Contacts. Outlook didn't the last time I checked, although I hear it can as of the newest version.
Outlook stores everything in a huge PST file; Thunderbird uses textual mbox files and a simple directory structure.
Moving a Thunderbird profile (which includes all settings, contacts, mail, saved passwords, accounts, everything) from one place to another is as simple as copying the ~/.thunderbird or %appdata%\Thunderbird folder to the same place in the other user account; Outlook has to be set up from scratch every single time and have the PST files imported and the placeholder empty PST they forcibly create (again, perhaps not with newer versions) disabled and deleted manually.
Thunderbird is light-years faster than Outlook.
Thunderbird is open source.
Thunderbird works on Linux.
Thunderbird is free as in both beer and freedom.
Thunderbird has better view options, a simpler interface, a massively better heuristic junk mail filter, way nicer IMAP integration (none of that strike-through nonsense when you delete mail), and it even handles RSS feeds extremely well.
Relative to Gmail, it's a local mail app so it's much faster to work with, it's less confusing that Gmail, the icons for everything are clearer than the stupid decisions made by Gmail, and the folder organization is much easier to use than the brain-dead "labels-as-folders" in Gmail.
The message filter capabilities are way better and more useful than both Outlook and Gmail, the search functionality is more robust than both, and searches can be saved as "search folders" that dynamically build based on a desired search.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Source: used Thunderbird for roughly a decade, converted many businesses to it despite external pressures to use Outlook.
Oh, one tip: if someone sends an Outlook-specific winmail.dat email to you, get the LookOut extension for Thunderbird and it'll let you view it as a normal email.
What is really needed there is how many movies of theirs end up in theaters. Lots of people make movies but most of those never grace a silver screen. My short films are really not worth putting in a theater but if I went the extraordinary lengths needed to made a decent feature film I can guarantee you it'd never be able to compete with the latest Star Trek abomination that has Roddenberry spinning in his grave so hard they're using him to generate electricity.
I have this older (chunky compared to the new stuff) Vizio 43" LCD HDTV that I got for nearly free. I routinely lift and move it alone. It's thick enough that I don't have to worry about splitting the LCD down the middle and it doesn't really weigh much; most of it is empty space in there, it's basically just a hollow plastic frame that supports the LCD.
I have never seen the value of cryptocurrency (as commonly implemented today.) The way that the systems are designed require that all transactions be made public on the network and tied to a unique set of numbers corresponding to particular "wallets." There is ultimately zero anonymity with cryptocurrency long-term. Decentralization doesn't matter once the currency becomes widespread. It was always destined to become the same kind of gambling that Forex trading tends to be: dump in money, wait for increase in value due to others dumping in money, bail out with their money if they don't bail first with yours. If I wanted to do that, I may as well just be a penny stock day trader.
Cryptocurrency as commonly implemented today has been garbage from the start and anyone who tries to make money off of it does so at their own extreme peril. This just reeks of a way for really rich people to be in greater control of it as they are with Forex.