I'm not the OP, but this actually has the potential to depress prices of necessities (food/energy/housing), most of which are made locally in the US, especially if the Chinese stop buying from us in retaliation.
You're assuming none of these American businesses rely on goods from China. I work in the HVAC field and a significant portion of the materials I buy are manufactured in, you guessed it, China. Guess who gets the costs passed on to them when an ill-conceived tariff jacks up the prices?
Whether it's paying workers $15/hr to flip burgers or 20% tariffs on imported goods, the net result is the same: you're reducing the buying power of the US dollar.
It's gotta take a lot of cognitive dissonance to actually be happy knowing your hard earned money will now buy less shit.
There may be someone who figures out how to make Bitcoin derivatives that enable high volume, low-fee transactions...
And they still wouldn't have fixed the biggest flaw in cryptocurrency: instability. Since around noon today, BTC has gone from a high of $9,174, a low of $8,745, and was at $9,000 when I started writing this, but has since dropped about $8.
The whole concept of a transaction is an exchange of goods or services for an agreed upon sum of currency. Cryptocurrency completely fails at this. Hell, even used iPhones would be a more stable form of currency.
If you think that since it's worthless/useless and wastes electricity that I'll crash, then you put too much faith in rational behaviour of humans.
Bitcoin did languish at roughly 1/4th of its previous (at that time) high for most of 2015. Bitcoin will probably never crash completely down to $0, but the pool of "suckers" will eventually run dry.
in other words, he wants to cash-out his own bitcoin holdings but is pissed the market is down significantly from its all time high
He's probably not alone; I'm sure a lot of people who "invested" in BTC want out before all those Mt. Gox coins get dumped on the market. When it comes to cryptocurrency, beware of the pump - it's almost always a sign of an impending dump.
So, basically, if you try to take advantage of the system, they'll call you on it. Not seeing the problem here.
The problem with TRE is that there is absolutely no appeal process to a denied return. I tried returning an unwanted Christmas gift to Home Depot for store credit (yeah, really gaming the system there) and TRE denied it. You'd think they'd be a little bit more lenient around the holidays, but nope. Calling them accomplished nothing more than having some barely-fluent-in-English nimrod in a call center inform me that the return was denied because I didn't have a receipt (duh!), and that they do not ever make any exceptions to their policies.
IMHO, the best way to avoid TRE's bullshit is simply to not do business with any retailer utilizing their services.
Nothing provokes the typical Slashdotter's rage quite like the transition into - and out of - Daylight Saving Time.
And this year it's actually newsworthy (cue the whining about Slashdot being US-centric) because Florida is finally on the path to being rid of the biannual rigamarole of fucking up everyone's sleep schedule. I've lived in Florida for most of my life and wholeheartedly welcome this change. The bulk of our energy consumption is for air conditioning, and no amount chronographic tomfoolery can alter the underlying physics of the psychrometric process. Or, in layman's terms: your air conditioner doesn't give a shit what time your clock says, because science.
Yeah, in typical Florida idiocy, they've decided "permanent DST" will be our new time zone, but the end result is the same: We'll no longer have to change our clocks twice a year, and schools/businesses/farmers/street pharmacists will just adjust their own hours to suit the available daylight.
Every time there's one of these multiverse/we're living in a simulation/you can enter a black hole without being spaghettified to hell articles, I'm reminded of why religion is so persistent: people just love making shit up and trying to convince others to believe it.
On that note, did you know Bitcoin was invented by aliens? This crazy math formula I saw in my dream proves it!
Some folks can't deal with the fact that they will eventually die, and want to leave a monument behind as a remembrance of their fantastic existence.
Thing is, people are generally remembered best for their contributions to society. You know, things that we give people awards for. You don't necessarily have to be rich to leave the world a better place than you found it.
There's always some richer asshole with a bigger clock.
Won't be for long. It is only a matter of time before we pass law by law, making gun ownership illegal eventually, and bringing the US into the civilized world.
The Columbine perpetrators tried to blow up the school's cafeteria. The death toll would've been significantly higher than anything they did with their guns, had the bombs worked. Point being: kids who are sick in the head are going to find a way to try to cause harm to others - even if you managed to wave a magic wand and make all guns disappear.
Furthermore, as my original post has been modded into oblivion, the quip about "no wonder kids are shooting up their schools" was not intended as flamebait. It meant that if your society feels giving huge tax breaks to the rich is more important than providing healthcare as a basic human right, things such as mentally sick kids shooting up their schools are going to be part of your society. But at least some rich asshole gets his overpriced toy clock, amiright?
As for the guns, I think we might want to keep them. Things in this country are going to get really interesting when you've got Mr. Bezos playing with his clock like scrooge McDuck in his money vault, while Bubba the NRA member truck driver just got laid off because his job was replaced by a drone.
Why the USA doesn't have universal healthcare, in a nutshell: because we believe the rich owe no debt for their success back to the betterment of society, and if they want to spend their wealth on hookers, blow, and giant fucking clocks - so be it.
It's no wonder kids are shooting up their schools.
Yup, when you're the copyright holder you can do exactly that. Allowing anyone to download it in no way implies any relinquishment of Microsoft's distribution rights. It's like when Weird Al made "Don't download this song" available as a free download. He can do that, but unless he gives you permission to do the same, you'd still be violating his copyright by redistributing it.
Also, the OEM license you'd typically find on a Dell or its ilk requires a specific OEM copy of Windows (or some hackery of the installation files, last I checked). You usually can't just download Windows from Microsoft and have it accept the OEM license serial number.
The best solution for these type of used computers is to simply restore Windows yourself (as part of the refurbishment process), and dump the Windows ISO onto the hard drive, for the end user to burn as a "recovery disc". That way, everything on the computer is licensed, and it's the end user making a "backup" (which they are legally entitled to do).
I have had minimal issues with DRM I've encountered. Windows 10 has many settings that cannot be turned off.
Can you resell your old games? Will they still install/work if the licensing server goes down? Is there anti-cheating, anti-patch malware bundled along for the ride?
We've entered an era where user-hostile software is the norm. Windows 10 is just the icing on the cake.
I know I look forward to the day when an alternative gaming operating system rivals Windows via Steam.
Steam turned PC gaming into a DRM-laden dystopia. Add to it the drama* that comes with playing online, cryptocoin miners running up GPU prices, and most games being uninspired formulaic FPS rehashes, and it's no wonder the term "PC master race" was originally coined with sarcastic intent. By comparison, having to run Windows is a pretty minor fault.
Besides, this article is a non-story. Every version of Windows has always shipped with a few annoying default settings, go in and turn that crap off - problem solved.
* Gaming is taken way too seriously today. In the good old LAN play days, we'd (my friends and I) all use cheats, custom maps and weapon hacks because we weren't trying to see who was the best, we were just fucking around and having fun.
Verizon promised, when they purchase the 700Mhz spectrum in 2007, not to do this for any device which uses the 700Mhz spectrum.
Verizon has been violating this spectrum license agreement with their prepaidphones for awhile now. But as you said, the current head of the FCC is an industry sock puppet, so Verizon can do whatever the hell they want.
In the grand scheme of things, ignoring Verizon's anti-consumer B.S. is one of the lesser sins of this administration. Some Americans are literally dying because they can't afford healthcare they need. But hey, if phone SIM locking and net neutrality being flushed down the toilet make a few people realize they "did a fuck" in 2016, it's a step in the right (or rather, "left") direction.
It's called getting old. Time filters out the crap from your youth and those times seem better than they were.
I recall most of the music played on pop radio in the early 90s being pretty shitty, when I was a kid. A huge portion of my music collection though, is 90s music. You got it half right - time filters out the crap. When you can fast forward through an entire decade and only pick out the stuff you liked, it's easy to forget all the garbage released in between.
Absolutely tear it up on piano (she's actually a very gifted, classically trained musician), and puts on a hell of a show. Her outlandish behavior was simply because no one in the "industry" noticed her until she borrowed a page out of Madonna's book.
Perhaps you're thinking of other modern "artists" with minimal talent, such as Justin Bieber, who rarely sings outside of a single octave. Another example is Kanye West, who apparently has an extremely poor grasp of the concept of rhyming (Katy Perry is a bit guilty of this, too).
He knows how to charge people $400 for a weed-removal product used in landscape maintenance that you can get for $30 at Harbor Freight. Brilliant!
No. He's already wealthy and famous enough that he is able to easily promote his extremely overpriced weed incinerator.
It's not difficult to come up with some overpriced and/or pseudoscience-based product for suckers/moronic investors. However, unless you're already rich or well-known enough to get people to listen to your snake oil sales pitch, forget it.
People have been making toy guns into flamethrowers ever since someone tried filling a "super soaker" with kerosene. Some of them got burned, none of them made 10 million dollars. What was missing? Elon Musk's money and fame, duh.
eBay will never allow cryptocurrency, because then they wouldn't be able to forcibly refund buyers at any time during their insanely long "180 days" buyer's remorse period. I'm actually surprised eBay has any sellers left at all, after they (eBay) decided their word was final when it came to matters of customer service.
After having to deal with eBay's bullshit one too many times, which included:
1. Scammers somehow using stolen credit cards on PayPal, with the shipping address still showing as confirmed. 2. Overseas scammers buying items, and using a US-based re-shipper - again, with a confirmed delivery address on PayPal. 3. Buyers who don't understand used items do not have a warranty. 4. Buyers remorse from people who couldn't be bothered to read that I don't accept returns (because selling things on eBay once in awhile is supposed to be like a running a garage sale, not Walmart). 5. Getting dinged on shipping speed when the USPS lives up to their reputation for being "snail mail". 6. eBay's 10% cut. Enough said....I primarily sell my used stuff on Craigslist, for cash. It's a hassle to deal with lowballers, no-shows, and tire kickers, but I get to keep 100% of my sale. And I never have to worry about spending hours on the phone with eBay/PayPal trying to explain to someone in India that I didn't do anything wrong, and could they please remove the hold on my PayPal funds.
If a plane crashes on the border of two countries, where are the survivors buried?
The typical "you don't bury survivors" answer is technically incorrect: everybody eventually dies. The correct answer is "the same places they were going to be buried, upon their respective deaths."
I fail to see what the problem is. Would it have been better to test it on humans...
The problem is this gives the PETA crowd more ammunition for their "animal testing = BAD!" agenda. There is little scientific knowledge to be gained by slightly poisoning a few monkeys, and it sounds disturbingly close to what Germany was doing to Jews during the Holocaust.
Thing is, there are legitimate reasons to test things on animals. You want to be pretty damn sure your experimental drug isn't going to kill anyone when you start human trials. But good luck trying to convince a bunch of emotion-driven PETA morons why it's necessary, when they start chanting about saving monkeys from the gas chamber.
Seaworld is going through exactly the same crap. They actually do a lot of good educating the public about marine life conservation, and they even rescue injured/stranded animals in the wild. But ask any "drain the tanks" activist and all they see is "Blackfish".
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not the OP, but this actually has the potential to depress prices of necessities (food/energy/housing), most of which are made locally in the US, especially if the Chinese stop buying from us in retaliation.
You're assuming none of these American businesses rely on goods from China. I work in the HVAC field and a significant portion of the materials I buy are manufactured in, you guessed it, China. Guess who gets the costs passed on to them when an ill-conceived tariff jacks up the prices?
Whether it's paying workers $15/hr to flip burgers or 20% tariffs on imported goods, the net result is the same: you're reducing the buying power of the US dollar.
It's gotta take a lot of cognitive dissonance to actually be happy knowing your hard earned money will now buy less shit.
There may be someone who figures out how to make Bitcoin derivatives that enable high volume, low-fee transactions...
And they still wouldn't have fixed the biggest flaw in cryptocurrency: instability. Since around noon today, BTC has gone from a high of $9,174, a low of $8,745, and was at $9,000 when I started writing this, but has since dropped about $8.
The whole concept of a transaction is an exchange of goods or services for an agreed upon sum of currency. Cryptocurrency completely fails at this. Hell, even used iPhones would be a more stable form of currency.
If you think that since it's worthless/useless and wastes electricity that I'll crash, then you put too much faith in rational behaviour of humans.
Bitcoin did languish at roughly 1/4th of its previous (at that time) high for most of 2015. Bitcoin will probably never crash completely down to $0, but the pool of "suckers" will eventually run dry.
in other words, he wants to cash-out his own bitcoin holdings but is pissed the market is down significantly from its all time high
He's probably not alone; I'm sure a lot of people who "invested" in BTC want out before all those Mt. Gox coins get dumped on the market. When it comes to cryptocurrency, beware of the pump - it's almost always a sign of an impending dump.
Not everyone has credit cards, and debit card chargeback policies are usually limited to protection against unauthorized transactions/fraud.
So, basically, if you try to take advantage of the system, they'll call you on it. Not seeing the problem here.
The problem with TRE is that there is absolutely no appeal process to a denied return. I tried returning an unwanted Christmas gift to Home Depot for store credit (yeah, really gaming the system there) and TRE denied it. You'd think they'd be a little bit more lenient around the holidays, but nope. Calling them accomplished nothing more than having some barely-fluent-in-English nimrod in a call center inform me that the return was denied because I didn't have a receipt (duh!), and that they do not ever make any exceptions to their policies.
IMHO, the best way to avoid TRE's bullshit is simply to not do business with any retailer utilizing their services.
Nothing provokes the typical Slashdotter's rage quite like the transition into - and out of - Daylight Saving Time.
And this year it's actually newsworthy (cue the whining about Slashdot being US-centric) because Florida is finally on the path to being rid of the biannual rigamarole of fucking up everyone's sleep schedule. I've lived in Florida for most of my life and wholeheartedly welcome this change. The bulk of our energy consumption is for air conditioning, and no amount chronographic tomfoolery can alter the underlying physics of the psychrometric process. Or, in layman's terms: your air conditioner doesn't give a shit what time your clock says, because science.
Yeah, in typical Florida idiocy, they've decided "permanent DST" will be our new time zone, but the end result is the same: We'll no longer have to change our clocks twice a year, and schools/businesses/farmers/street pharmacists will just adjust their own hours to suit the available daylight.
Jeff is the richest person in the world. Evidence suggests that you are not smarter than he is.
Any idiot can make money given sufficient start-up capital. See: Trump's "small loan of a million dollars".
Every time a cryptocoin goes to the moon, I always miss out. What is this 4G coin, anyway?
Every time there's one of these multiverse/we're living in a simulation/you can enter a black hole without being spaghettified to hell articles, I'm reminded of why religion is so persistent: people just love making shit up and trying to convince others to believe it.
On that note, did you know Bitcoin was invented by aliens? This crazy math formula I saw in my dream proves it!
Some folks can't deal with the fact that they will eventually die, and want to leave a monument behind as a remembrance of their fantastic existence.
Thing is, people are generally remembered best for their contributions to society. You know, things that we give people awards for. You don't necessarily have to be rich to leave the world a better place than you found it.
There's always some richer asshole with a bigger clock.
Won't be for long. It is only a matter of time before we pass law by law, making gun ownership illegal eventually, and bringing the US into the civilized world.
The Columbine perpetrators tried to blow up the school's cafeteria. The death toll would've been significantly higher than anything they did with their guns, had the bombs worked. Point being: kids who are sick in the head are going to find a way to try to cause harm to others - even if you managed to wave a magic wand and make all guns disappear.
Furthermore, as my original post has been modded into oblivion, the quip about "no wonder kids are shooting up their schools" was not intended as flamebait. It meant that if your society feels giving huge tax breaks to the rich is more important than providing healthcare as a basic human right, things such as mentally sick kids shooting up their schools are going to be part of your society. But at least some rich asshole gets his overpriced toy clock, amiright?
As for the guns, I think we might want to keep them. Things in this country are going to get really interesting when you've got Mr. Bezos playing with his clock like scrooge McDuck in his money vault, while Bubba the NRA member truck driver just got laid off because his job was replaced by a drone.
Why the USA doesn't have universal healthcare, in a nutshell: because we believe the rich owe no debt for their success back to the betterment of society, and if they want to spend their wealth on hookers, blow, and giant fucking clocks - so be it.
It's no wonder kids are shooting up their schools.
You can download windows images for free straight from microsoft.com
Yup, when you're the copyright holder you can do exactly that. Allowing anyone to download it in no way implies any relinquishment of Microsoft's distribution rights. It's like when Weird Al made "Don't download this song" available as a free download. He can do that, but unless he gives you permission to do the same, you'd still be violating his copyright by redistributing it.
Also, the OEM license you'd typically find on a Dell or its ilk requires a specific OEM copy of Windows (or some hackery of the installation files, last I checked). You usually can't just download Windows from Microsoft and have it accept the OEM license serial number.
The best solution for these type of used computers is to simply restore Windows yourself (as part of the refurbishment process), and dump the Windows ISO onto the hard drive, for the end user to burn as a "recovery disc". That way, everything on the computer is licensed, and it's the end user making a "backup" (which they are legally entitled to do).
I have had minimal issues with DRM I've encountered. Windows 10 has many settings that cannot be turned off.
Can you resell your old games? Will they still install/work if the licensing server goes down? Is there anti-cheating, anti-patch malware bundled along for the ride?
We've entered an era where user-hostile software is the norm. Windows 10 is just the icing on the cake.
RTFA. The point of the article is that you can't do exactly what you suggest people do. Per the article:
The "set internet connection as metered" workaround still works.
I know I look forward to the day when an alternative gaming operating system rivals Windows via Steam.
Steam turned PC gaming into a DRM-laden dystopia. Add to it the drama* that comes with playing online, cryptocoin miners running up GPU prices, and most games being uninspired formulaic FPS rehashes, and it's no wonder the term "PC master race" was originally coined with sarcastic intent. By comparison, having to run Windows is a pretty minor fault.
Besides, this article is a non-story. Every version of Windows has always shipped with a few annoying default settings, go in and turn that crap off - problem solved.
* Gaming is taken way too seriously today. In the good old LAN play days, we'd (my friends and I) all use cheats, custom maps and weapon hacks because we weren't trying to see who was the best, we were just fucking around and having fun.
Verizon promised, when they purchase the 700Mhz spectrum in 2007, not to do this for any device which uses the 700Mhz spectrum.
Verizon has been violating this spectrum license agreement with their prepaid phones for awhile now. But as you said, the current head of the FCC is an industry sock puppet, so Verizon can do whatever the hell they want.
In the grand scheme of things, ignoring Verizon's anti-consumer B.S. is one of the lesser sins of this administration. Some Americans are literally dying because they can't afford healthcare they need. But hey, if phone SIM locking and net neutrality being flushed down the toilet make a few people realize they "did a fuck" in 2016, it's a step in the right (or rather, "left") direction.
It's called getting old. Time filters out the crap from your youth and those times seem better than they were.
I recall most of the music played on pop radio in the early 90s being pretty shitty, when I was a kid. A huge portion of my music collection though, is 90s music. You got it half right - time filters out the crap. When you can fast forward through an entire decade and only pick out the stuff you liked, it's easy to forget all the garbage released in between.
Now we have Lady Gaga...who can
Absolutely tear it up on piano (she's actually a very gifted, classically trained musician), and puts on a hell of a show. Her outlandish behavior was simply because no one in the "industry" noticed her until she borrowed a page out of Madonna's book.
Perhaps you're thinking of other modern "artists" with minimal talent, such as Justin Bieber, who rarely sings outside of a single octave. Another example is Kanye West, who apparently has an extremely poor grasp of the concept of rhyming (Katy Perry is a bit guilty of this, too).
He knows how to charge people $400 for a weed-removal product used in landscape maintenance that you can get for $30 at Harbor Freight. Brilliant!
No. He's already wealthy and famous enough that he is able to easily promote his extremely overpriced weed incinerator.
It's not difficult to come up with some overpriced and/or pseudoscience-based product for suckers/moronic investors. However, unless you're already rich or well-known enough to get people to listen to your snake oil sales pitch, forget it.
People have been making toy guns into flamethrowers ever since someone tried filling a "super soaker" with kerosene. Some of them got burned, none of them made 10 million dollars. What was missing? Elon Musk's money and fame, duh.
eBay will never allow cryptocurrency, because then they wouldn't be able to forcibly refund buyers at any time during their insanely long "180 days" buyer's remorse period. I'm actually surprised eBay has any sellers left at all, after they (eBay) decided their word was final when it came to matters of customer service.
After having to deal with eBay's bullshit one too many times, which included:
1. Scammers somehow using stolen credit cards on PayPal, with the shipping address still showing as confirmed. ...I primarily sell my used stuff on Craigslist, for cash. It's a hassle to deal with lowballers, no-shows, and tire kickers, but I get to keep 100% of my sale. And I never have to worry about spending hours on the phone with eBay/PayPal trying to explain to someone in India that I didn't do anything wrong, and could they please remove the hold on my PayPal funds.
2. Overseas scammers buying items, and using a US-based re-shipper - again, with a confirmed delivery address on PayPal.
3. Buyers who don't understand used items do not have a warranty.
4. Buyers remorse from people who couldn't be bothered to read that I don't accept returns (because selling things on eBay once in awhile is supposed to be like a running a garage sale, not Walmart).
5. Getting dinged on shipping speed when the USPS lives up to their reputation for being "snail mail".
6. eBay's 10% cut. Enough said.
If a plane crashes on the border of two countries, where are the survivors buried?
The typical "you don't bury survivors" answer is technically incorrect: everybody eventually dies. The correct answer is "the same places they were going to be buried, upon their respective deaths."
I fail to see what the problem is. Would it have been better to test it on humans...
The problem is this gives the PETA crowd more ammunition for their "animal testing = BAD!" agenda. There is little scientific knowledge to be gained by slightly poisoning a few monkeys, and it sounds disturbingly close to what Germany was doing to Jews during the Holocaust.
Thing is, there are legitimate reasons to test things on animals. You want to be pretty damn sure your experimental drug isn't going to kill anyone when you start human trials. But good luck trying to convince a bunch of emotion-driven PETA morons why it's necessary, when they start chanting about saving monkeys from the gas chamber.
Seaworld is going through exactly the same crap. They actually do a lot of good educating the public about marine life conservation, and they even rescue injured/stranded animals in the wild. But ask any "drain the tanks" activist and all they see is "Blackfish".
VW condemned for testing diesel fumes on humans and monkeys
That's what the preview button is there for...