Average transaction fee for Bitcoin is currently around $6, but peaked at $19 just a month ago. If you compare that to the amount of electricity that you can buy for that money, it seems a pretty close match.
What's wrong with the way bookmarks have worked forever?
It's extremely primitive and can't do anything more advanced than hold an URL. Possible new features I'd like to see:
* notifications when a webpage gets updated * full-text search through the content of bookmarks * thumbnail view of all the bookmarks * ability to sort them by host, directory, last access, last update, etc. * temporary bookmarks that fade away when not actively accessed * automatic bookmarks of pages frequently visited * save the actual content of the webpage when you bookmark it, not just the URL * ability to bookmark subsections of a webpage * ability to bookmark the complete current state of the browser (all the tabs, form data, etc.) * better ways to sort and cleanup bookmarks
There is a whole lot of things that one could do to make bookmarking a lot more powerful and useful. What browsers currently do is hardly more advanced than what Mosaic did 25 years ago. It's also not just bookmarking, the history suffers from much the same problems.
There are a few billionaires out there and that's it.
That's enough. Even just the eight richest people in the world have as much wealth as the poorest 50%. That's 8 people vs 3.5 billion. The wealth distribution in this world is completely out of whack. Give that money to the poor and they'll spend it in the local economy and get things going.
I don't necessarily disagree with the core idea of a robot tax, but in a globalized world you don't end up with people paying a robot tax, you end up with factories getting moved into countries that don't have a robot tax.
Also robots aren't really the core of the problem, the core problem is the accumulation of wealth within a very small number of people. Robots might make that situation worse and a robot tax could help slow it down a little, but much more drastic measures of wealth redistribution will be needed to actually get anywhere. Robot tax is a band aid and might at worst slow down technological progress.
How is that even a surprise? This is not a spam filtering tool that might catch a few wrong messages. This is explicitly advertised to perform censorship by getting rid of messages that might count as harassment or toxic. Since both of those are highly subjective, it will of course get rid of a lot valid messages, as that's it's job, that is what it was build for. If you want to automate your censorship, don't be surprise when your censorship happens automatically.
I find it ridiculous how much effort is spent on trying to cure toxicity, when most of it is the direct result of really basic usability flaws in the UI design. On Youtube for example you can only see the last 20 or so comments and higher ranked comments raise to the top. So of course you get clickbaity jokes and crap instead of good discussion, as you couldn't even have a good discussion within that comment system if you tried. Same with Twitter and it's 140 character limit. Comment system are more often than not so broken that you really can't hope to ever get good discussions out of them, no matter how much censorship you try.
The problem with eval() is that it's incredible power can't be used safely in most languages, as whatever you eval() becomes part of the main program. If you could eval() code in a sandbox and apply memory and CPU cycle limits to it, it would be very useful, but most languages don't have such features making eval() little more than a dangerous toy that sometimes becomes useful for debugging.
As for goto, the Linux kernel is full of it and quite readable because of it. But outside of C you tend to have other mechanism to deal with resource cleanup that make it no longer necessary (RAII in C++, 'with' statements in Python).
Recursion again depends heavily on the details. In Python you quickly run into stack overflows when you use recursion to much (1000 is the default), so it's best avoided. In Haskell or Scheme it's the normal way of doing things, thanks to tail recursion support.
Multi-inheritance I never found very useful, even single-inheritance is rarely a good solution and you are better of doing composition most of the time.
It's not exactly a new idea, people have been doing that since the 90's. Selling VR headsets to dentists was one of the way VR companies kept themselves afloat after the consumer market couldn't really get any traction.
Scott Meyers calls this the The Keyhole Problem and has a paper with a bunch of good examples.
My "favorite" modern example of the problem is Chrome's omnibox auto-completion, you get six results at maximum, they don't even give you a scroll bar or a "Show more" link, six results only. There used to be a command line option to increase it, but they removed it some years ago, it's now a hardcoded constant in the source code.
Talk is easy, I'd like to see some example how the self driving car would actually perform in those freak accident situations, especially in cases where it could avoid them by going outside the traffic rules (e.g. dodge a truck by driving into the grass or reversing).
While DK2 had some lower specs, it didn't have the god-ray problem, red-tint problems and it had exchangeable lenses that made it possible to use without glasses. Meanwhile CV1 didn't brought any new features (still no passthrough camera, no tracked controllers on launch), just a general bit of polish and upped specs. Given the drastic price increase of CV1 and all those problems it felt rather lackluster overall, especially since Vive pretty much stole the show with roomscale and tracked controllers. Oculus is just slowly catching up to that.
I am really not sure that the $600 price was a good idea, as the biggest problem VR has is not the quality, but a lack of content. A lack of VR gamers due to the expensive price isn't helping there. That said, the Oculus launch was a rushed clusterfuck with many month of waiting time anyway, with a $300 price people would probably still waiting for their Rift.
With PSVR now out and christmas not so far away, I am wondering who will make a price cut first. VR really needs that if it doesn't want to die a slow death again. Expensive VR hasn't worked the first time around in the 90's, I don't expect to work it this time around either.
Well, what's wrong with Android? It's based on Linux and somewhat Open Source. It would be nice if there would be more compatibility between desktop Linux and Android, but that's something that could be accomplished without reinventing everything. Ubuntu in fact worked on allowing you to run Android apps on desktop Linux, but they abandoned that many years ago and instead went the same "reinvent everything" route that Mozilla tried and they will probably fail just the same.
If Free Software wants to stay relevant in the long run they need to work more on interoperability, portability and mobility. Back in the day there was a "many user : single computer" environment and cloning Unix solved that reasonably well, but these days we live in a "single user : multiple computer" environment and so far Free Software isn't really handling that all that well and all these "let's write yet another OS" efforts aren't really helping, as they are just yet another OS that it mostly incompatible with the devices I already own.
Storing the.mp3 on their servers is where it gets iffy. So how about turning the whole thing into a Javascript application that does all the dirty work on the client instead of the server? Emscripten should make it possible to get video and mp3 coder into the Javascript world. Do current browsers allow enough access to get a Youtube video into a blob that can be processed with Javascript?
One thing with social media is that people seem to post a lot more pictures of themselves (third person camera) than they post about experiences they were having (first person camera). Meaning video glasses point essentially in the wrong direction, as they show what the user sees, but not the user itself. Selfiesticks seem to be more in tune to how people actually use social media.
Either way, the 10sec restriction makes those glasses a rather limited gadget without much use outside of Snapchat.
None of the aforementioned were forced on anybody.
They were very definitely forced on people. When Ubuntu 11.10 came out they removed Gnome2 and replaced it with the completely different and incompatible Gnome3. MATE didn't exist yet. There was no simple way to downgrade again either. You were stuck with a system that got completely broken duo to the upgrade and it took years before MATE made it into Ubuntu.
As fucked up as the Windows10 upgrade was, at least that one I could roll back with a few clicks. Linux package manager on the other side aren't quite clever enough to allow a system wide downgrade. Windows also has the advantage of having really good backward/forward compatibility, so it's much easier to run an outdated Windows than it is to run an outdated Linux. And before somebody says "Use LTS", those have a whole heap of problems of their own and the lack of support for third-party apps in Linux means you are stuck with two year old software or a lot of manual fiddling.
As much as I like Free Software, that Ubuntu 11.10 upgrade was easily the worst upgrade experience I ever had on any OS and Free Software is extremely lacking when it comes to software longlifety.
While C remains backward compatible, C99 and C10 have added quite a lot of stuff to C. But due to Microsoft's refusal to support newer C standards in Visual Studio and the problems that mixing new C with new C++ brings, they aren't in widespread use.
Yes, that's what broadcasting means. The problem is that email never had native broadcasting capabilities, it only got bolted on via mailing lists, which lacked a standard interface and made subscribe and unsubscribe extremely cumbersome. The other big problem with mail is that it lacked persistence, if you subscribed to a mailing list in the mid of a discussion, you would miss out on everything that happened before. You could look it up in a mail archive, assuming somebody provided it, but it was again a cobbled together mess with no standard interface or integration into the mail client.
Twitter, Facebook and Co. are solving those problems and giving people broadcasting functionality and persistence by default along with slightly better multimedia support. But what you end up with is essentially email reinvented with broadcast capabilities. You could take all those services and merge them into one, as they are all doing the same thing now.
Where is the huge difference? You have a linear news feed where you can post messages and others can comment on your messages. It's the same as everything else. Back when Twitter started it was a different thing, the 140 characters were all that you got and there was no integration of pictures, but that has been eroded for years, pictures, video and Co. are now all normal on Twitter and natively supported. Even the page layout is mostly the same with friends and photo boxes on the left and news feed on the right.
The more time goes on, the more all the messaging services are becoming the same. Even today the differences between Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Co. is already rather slim, as they are all essentially used for the same things: post text, images or video to a group of people or the public. Even that fundamental 140 character limit on Twitter is constantly worked around by posting images of text or linking to sites like Twitlonger. The only real difference is the client, some client make it really fast to post video while other focus on images and text, but all of them allow you to do essentially the exact same things under the hood.
What we are seeing here is essentially see the slow and painful reinvention of email with broadcast functionality. I could even see that turning into an open standard in another few years, as it's rather pointless to have so many apps doing the same thing and be incompatible with each other.
What Amazon is doing looks more like demo-kiosks. All they are selling in these stores is Kindles and Fire tablets to get people to use their online store. Doesn't look like they want to offer their online catalogue in the shop.
Standard Bluetooth audio quality is so bad that the quality of the earplugs doesn't even enter into the discussion. When you want to use the mic on a Bluetooth headset you have to use the HSP profile which can only do mono at like 8000Hz, it is completely unusable by modern standards. When you don't need the mic you can get acceptable quality with A2DP, but then you are stuck with latency of up to half a second, which renders it unusable for anything interactive.
I heard one can better results with aptX, but there seems to be no easy way to tell who supports it or when it's actually in use.
Long story short, finding reliable information on Bluetooth audio is hard and the chance that you end up with absolutely horrible audio quality is pretty damn high. If Apple can clean up that situation, more power to them.
Focus an anonymity is all nice and good, but from my experience the biggest problem with Tor is that the exit nodes are so limited that the fact that you are using Tor is obvious for the server. Meaning websites will block you or become unusable due to requesting a CAPTCHA every few clicks. Thus you have anonymity, but your web access is so drastically limited that it becomes impractical to use Tor as every day Internet access, thus you switch back to a non-Tor browser and are left with no anonymity.
Lifetime of Blurays is said to be rather long, in the 50-100 years range. How trustworthy that data is, is hard to tell. The LTH variety of Bluray is supposed to be worse than the HTL version, so it might be worth to go for HTL as they cost more or less the same. There are also M-Disc BD-R for archival that claims to last around 1000 years, but they are quite a bit more pricey.
2TB is not a lot of data and can be stored on about 40-80 Bluray discs depending on if you use 25GB discs or 50GB discs. It's not exactly the fasted way to do it, but for long term archival it works quite well and requires no extra effort once the discs are created. On Linux dirsplit is a useful tool for chunking the data into BluRay sized portions. xoriso can be used for burning.
In addition to that get some USB HDDs for regular day to day backups. Rotate them to an offsite location for extra protection.
Because if you let it go in this case then you have to let it go in all cases, and if you let it go in all cases then the police are free to break into your home, car, office, etc, hack into your computer, read your mail, record your phone calls, use stingray type devices, and anything else privacy invading just any time they want just to find shit to send you to jail for.
How about fixing the problem at the core and making it illegal for police to break the law instead? Ignoring clear evidence seems like a incredible stupid "solution" to this problem.
Driverless cars exist. Records of past accidents exist as well. Take those driverless cars and put them into a simulation of those real world accidents of the past and see how they would react. If you find a lot of situations were the car might have saved people by killing the driver, then you can come back and have a discussion, but it's utterly pointless to worry about a hypothetical problem that might never arrive in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
Average transaction fee for Bitcoin is currently around $6, but peaked at $19 just a month ago. If you compare that to the amount of electricity that you can buy for that money, it seems a pretty close match.
What's wrong with the way bookmarks have worked forever?
It's extremely primitive and can't do anything more advanced than hold an URL. Possible new features I'd like to see:
* notifications when a webpage gets updated
* full-text search through the content of bookmarks
* thumbnail view of all the bookmarks
* ability to sort them by host, directory, last access, last update, etc.
* temporary bookmarks that fade away when not actively accessed
* automatic bookmarks of pages frequently visited
* save the actual content of the webpage when you bookmark it, not just the URL
* ability to bookmark subsections of a webpage
* ability to bookmark the complete current state of the browser (all the tabs, form data, etc.)
* better ways to sort and cleanup bookmarks
There is a whole lot of things that one could do to make bookmarking a lot more powerful and useful. What browsers currently do is hardly more advanced than what Mosaic did 25 years ago. It's also not just bookmarking, the history suffers from much the same problems.
There are a few billionaires out there and that's it.
That's enough. Even just the eight richest people in the world have as much wealth as the poorest 50%. That's 8 people vs 3.5 billion. The wealth distribution in this world is completely out of whack. Give that money to the poor and they'll spend it in the local economy and get things going.
I don't necessarily disagree with the core idea of a robot tax, but in a globalized world you don't end up with people paying a robot tax, you end up with factories getting moved into countries that don't have a robot tax.
Also robots aren't really the core of the problem, the core problem is the accumulation of wealth within a very small number of people. Robots might make that situation worse and a robot tax could help slow it down a little, but much more drastic measures of wealth redistribution will be needed to actually get anywhere. Robot tax is a band aid and might at worst slow down technological progress.
How is that even a surprise? This is not a spam filtering tool that might catch a few wrong messages. This is explicitly advertised to perform censorship by getting rid of messages that might count as harassment or toxic. Since both of those are highly subjective, it will of course get rid of a lot valid messages, as that's it's job, that is what it was build for. If you want to automate your censorship, don't be surprise when your censorship happens automatically.
I find it ridiculous how much effort is spent on trying to cure toxicity, when most of it is the direct result of really basic usability flaws in the UI design. On Youtube for example you can only see the last 20 or so comments and higher ranked comments raise to the top. So of course you get clickbaity jokes and crap instead of good discussion, as you couldn't even have a good discussion within that comment system if you tried. Same with Twitter and it's 140 character limit. Comment system are more often than not so broken that you really can't hope to ever get good discussions out of them, no matter how much censorship you try.
The problem with eval() is that it's incredible power can't be used safely in most languages, as whatever you eval() becomes part of the main program. If you could eval() code in a sandbox and apply memory and CPU cycle limits to it, it would be very useful, but most languages don't have such features making eval() little more than a dangerous toy that sometimes becomes useful for debugging.
As for goto, the Linux kernel is full of it and quite readable because of it. But outside of C you tend to have other mechanism to deal with resource cleanup that make it no longer necessary (RAII in C++, 'with' statements in Python).
Recursion again depends heavily on the details. In Python you quickly run into stack overflows when you use recursion to much (1000 is the default), so it's best avoided. In Haskell or Scheme it's the normal way of doing things, thanks to tail recursion support.
Multi-inheritance I never found very useful, even single-inheritance is rarely a good solution and you are better of doing composition most of the time.
It's not exactly a new idea, people have been doing that since the 90's. Selling VR headsets to dentists was one of the way VR companies kept themselves afloat after the consumer market couldn't really get any traction.
Scott Meyers calls this the The Keyhole Problem and has a paper with a bunch of good examples.
My "favorite" modern example of the problem is Chrome's omnibox auto-completion, you get six results at maximum, they don't even give you a scroll bar or a "Show more" link, six results only. There used to be a command line option to increase it, but they removed it some years ago, it's now a hardcoded constant in the source code.
Talk is easy, I'd like to see some example how the self driving car would actually perform in those freak accident situations, especially in cases where it could avoid them by going outside the traffic rules (e.g. dodge a truck by driving into the grass or reversing).
While DK2 had some lower specs, it didn't have the god-ray problem, red-tint problems and it had exchangeable lenses that made it possible to use without glasses. Meanwhile CV1 didn't brought any new features (still no passthrough camera, no tracked controllers on launch), just a general bit of polish and upped specs. Given the drastic price increase of CV1 and all those problems it felt rather lackluster overall, especially since Vive pretty much stole the show with roomscale and tracked controllers. Oculus is just slowly catching up to that.
I am really not sure that the $600 price was a good idea, as the biggest problem VR has is not the quality, but a lack of content. A lack of VR gamers due to the expensive price isn't helping there. That said, the Oculus launch was a rushed clusterfuck with many month of waiting time anyway, with a $300 price people would probably still waiting for their Rift.
With PSVR now out and christmas not so far away, I am wondering who will make a price cut first. VR really needs that if it doesn't want to die a slow death again. Expensive VR hasn't worked the first time around in the 90's, I don't expect to work it this time around either.
Well, what's wrong with Android? It's based on Linux and somewhat Open Source. It would be nice if there would be more compatibility between desktop Linux and Android, but that's something that could be accomplished without reinventing everything. Ubuntu in fact worked on allowing you to run Android apps on desktop Linux, but they abandoned that many years ago and instead went the same "reinvent everything" route that Mozilla tried and they will probably fail just the same.
If Free Software wants to stay relevant in the long run they need to work more on interoperability, portability and mobility. Back in the day there was a "many user : single computer" environment and cloning Unix solved that reasonably well, but these days we live in a "single user : multiple computer" environment and so far Free Software isn't really handling that all that well and all these "let's write yet another OS" efforts aren't really helping, as they are just yet another OS that it mostly incompatible with the devices I already own.
Storing the .mp3 on their servers is where it gets iffy. So how about turning the whole thing into a Javascript application that does all the dirty work on the client instead of the server? Emscripten should make it possible to get video and mp3 coder into the Javascript world. Do current browsers allow enough access to get a Youtube video into a blob that can be processed with Javascript?
One thing with social media is that people seem to post a lot more pictures of themselves (third person camera) than they post about experiences they were having (first person camera). Meaning video glasses point essentially in the wrong direction, as they show what the user sees, but not the user itself. Selfiesticks seem to be more in tune to how people actually use social media.
Either way, the 10sec restriction makes those glasses a rather limited gadget without much use outside of Snapchat.
None of the aforementioned were forced on anybody.
They were very definitely forced on people. When Ubuntu 11.10 came out they removed Gnome2 and replaced it with the completely different and incompatible Gnome3. MATE didn't exist yet. There was no simple way to downgrade again either. You were stuck with a system that got completely broken duo to the upgrade and it took years before MATE made it into Ubuntu.
As fucked up as the Windows10 upgrade was, at least that one I could roll back with a few clicks. Linux package manager on the other side aren't quite clever enough to allow a system wide downgrade. Windows also has the advantage of having really good backward/forward compatibility, so it's much easier to run an outdated Windows than it is to run an outdated Linux. And before somebody says "Use LTS", those have a whole heap of problems of their own and the lack of support for third-party apps in Linux means you are stuck with two year old software or a lot of manual fiddling.
As much as I like Free Software, that Ubuntu 11.10 upgrade was easily the worst upgrade experience I ever had on any OS and Free Software is extremely lacking when it comes to software longlifety.
While C remains backward compatible, C99 and C10 have added quite a lot of stuff to C. But due to Microsoft's refusal to support newer C standards in Visual Studio and the problems that mixing new C with new C++ brings, they aren't in widespread use.
Yes, that's what broadcasting means. The problem is that email never had native broadcasting capabilities, it only got bolted on via mailing lists, which lacked a standard interface and made subscribe and unsubscribe extremely cumbersome. The other big problem with mail is that it lacked persistence, if you subscribed to a mailing list in the mid of a discussion, you would miss out on everything that happened before. You could look it up in a mail archive, assuming somebody provided it, but it was again a cobbled together mess with no standard interface or integration into the mail client.
Twitter, Facebook and Co. are solving those problems and giving people broadcasting functionality and persistence by default along with slightly better multimedia support. But what you end up with is essentially email reinvented with broadcast capabilities. You could take all those services and merge them into one, as they are all doing the same thing now.
Where is the huge difference? You have a linear news feed where you can post messages and others can comment on your messages. It's the same as everything else. Back when Twitter started it was a different thing, the 140 characters were all that you got and there was no integration of pictures, but that has been eroded for years, pictures, video and Co. are now all normal on Twitter and natively supported. Even the page layout is mostly the same with friends and photo boxes on the left and news feed on the right.
The more time goes on, the more all the messaging services are becoming the same. Even today the differences between Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Co. is already rather slim, as they are all essentially used for the same things: post text, images or video to a group of people or the public. Even that fundamental 140 character limit on Twitter is constantly worked around by posting images of text or linking to sites like Twitlonger. The only real difference is the client, some client make it really fast to post video while other focus on images and text, but all of them allow you to do essentially the exact same things under the hood.
What we are seeing here is essentially see the slow and painful reinvention of email with broadcast functionality. I could even see that turning into an open standard in another few years, as it's rather pointless to have so many apps doing the same thing and be incompatible with each other.
What Amazon is doing looks more like demo-kiosks. All they are selling in these stores is Kindles and Fire tablets to get people to use their online store. Doesn't look like they want to offer their online catalogue in the shop.
Standard Bluetooth audio quality is so bad that the quality of the earplugs doesn't even enter into the discussion. When you want to use the mic on a Bluetooth headset you have to use the HSP profile which can only do mono at like 8000Hz, it is completely unusable by modern standards. When you don't need the mic you can get acceptable quality with A2DP, but then you are stuck with latency of up to half a second, which renders it unusable for anything interactive.
I heard one can better results with aptX, but there seems to be no easy way to tell who supports it or when it's actually in use.
Long story short, finding reliable information on Bluetooth audio is hard and the chance that you end up with absolutely horrible audio quality is pretty damn high. If Apple can clean up that situation, more power to them.
Focus an anonymity is all nice and good, but from my experience the biggest problem with Tor is that the exit nodes are so limited that the fact that you are using Tor is obvious for the server. Meaning websites will block you or become unusable due to requesting a CAPTCHA every few clicks. Thus you have anonymity, but your web access is so drastically limited that it becomes impractical to use Tor as every day Internet access, thus you switch back to a non-Tor browser and are left with no anonymity.
Lifetime of Blurays is said to be rather long, in the 50-100 years range. How trustworthy that data is, is hard to tell. The LTH variety of Bluray is supposed to be worse than the HTL version, so it might be worth to go for HTL as they cost more or less the same. There are also M-Disc BD-R for archival that claims to last around 1000 years, but they are quite a bit more pricey.
2TB is not a lot of data and can be stored on about 40-80 Bluray discs depending on if you use 25GB discs or 50GB discs. It's not exactly the fasted way to do it, but for long term archival it works quite well and requires no extra effort once the discs are created. On Linux dirsplit is a useful tool for chunking the data into BluRay sized portions. xoriso can be used for burning.
In addition to that get some USB HDDs for regular day to day backups. Rotate them to an offsite location for extra protection.
Because if you let it go in this case then you have to let it go in all cases, and if you let it go in all cases then the police are free to break into your home, car, office, etc, hack into your computer, read your mail, record your phone calls, use stingray type devices, and anything else privacy invading just any time they want just to find shit to send you to jail for.
How about fixing the problem at the core and making it illegal for police to break the law instead? Ignoring clear evidence seems like a incredible stupid "solution" to this problem.
Driverless cars exist. Records of past accidents exist as well. Take those driverless cars and put them into a simulation of those real world accidents of the past and see how they would react. If you find a lot of situations were the car might have saved people by killing the driver, then you can come back and have a discussion, but it's utterly pointless to worry about a hypothetical problem that might never arrive in the real world.