Except Pepe the Frog wasn't adopted by racist sacks of shit.
You didn't even have to look hard to see plenty of asshole Trump supporters sporting the frog emoji (implied to be Pepe) in their username. This shit might've spawned from the filthy bowels of 4Chan as a joke, but Dogecoin started as a joke too and as of right now has a $384,751,531 market cap. Once people start taking a joke seriously, it ceases to be a joke.
Target is suffering from this as we speak but will likely not change course having painted themselves into a corner.
People who are boycotting Target over a fucking bathroom issue are the ones who are the real oversensitive snowflakes. It's also entirely possible that things have just been sucking lately for retail stores in general, and Target is feeling the squeeze. Hhgregg just went under, and I doubt bathrooms had anything to do with it.
It's kinda like how the anti-Seaworld activists claimed Blackfish was causing a huge drop in attendance - coincidentally, right about the same time Universal Resort and Disney World opened some major new attractions. Nope, that probably had nothing to do with it - it had to be the protesters. Uh-huh.
There's already a way to compress a movie down to a few KB. You simply post it as a torrent and let other people store it on their computers. After it's been well-shared, you can simply delete it from your machine. Can't beat that level of compression. See, I've included Big Buck Bunny in this post:
Why would they not simply use the existing Bitcoin ?
Because it suffers from the same flaw as all decentralized cryptocurrencies: the supply of coins in circulation is arbitrary - it isn't adjusted to stabilize their value in the marketplace. If deflationary currency was such a great idea, the US treasury would stop spitting out dollar bills tomorrow - and all hell would likely break loose.
It also takes fucking forever to confirm a transaction on the Bitcoin network. People complain about how slow the chip & pin readers are here in the USA - there's no way people would have the patience to wait for a Bitcoin transaction to complete.
Bitcoins are nothing but a commodity, like gold: there's a cost to produce more, and a current stock.
The difference with gold is that its limited availability is not an easily changed value in a line of code. Dogecoin was initially created as a parody to illustrate how "abundant" cryptocoins could be, if you tweaked Bitcoin's source a bit.
Bitcoin's rarity is simply an agreement by everyone on the "one true Bitcoin" blockchain that these are the rules they want to play by. The mining rewards with Bitcoin are designed to drop exponentially; the reward halves every four years. Pretty soon, that sliver of pie could be looking mighty small, and it's not unfathomable that miners could be persuaded to switch to a fork of Bitcoin which spits out more coins. Greed makes people do things like that.
The first 3 I found in a search had either pre-filled the current difficulty, or had a field for you to select the difficulty.
Yeah, they'll factor in the current difficulty but don't show you what your profitability (or lack-thereof) will be as the difficulty increases. It's kind of like calculating simple interest vs compounded interest. So, unless you're living in a Groundhog Day time loop and will always be mining at today's difficulty, you can't use a mining calculator to determine long-term profitability.
Now, it's entirely possible to perform a statistical analysis on the average rate of difficulty increase over time and factor that into your profitability calculation. But be prepared to be a sad panda when you see your profitability results.
3. The backdoor is active even when the machine is powered off:
How exactly do they manage to read data from a hard drive which is spun down? (sarcasm)
I'm sure this Intel backdoor could do plenty of nefarious things when the machine is at full power, but it's likely capable of nothing more than a glorified wake-on-lan when the machine is shut down. Of course, to me, "powered off" means you've physically cut power to the machine - and so long as Intel is still producing hardware based on the known laws of physics, that means the backdoor is inaccessible.
If the dude only wants one bitcoin, and you learn...
Well yeah, that genie isn't going back in the bottle. If cryptocurrency suddenly went *poof* overnight, ransomware authors would start asking for cash in the mail, prepaid phone cards, western union transfers or who knows what else. But Bitcoin did for ransomware what PayPal did for eBay - made it a whole lot easier to get more people in on the action.
I don't buy for a second that serious criminal organizations ever had much trouble moving cash. 'Fund terrorism'...oh noes...he said magic words...I peed 'em.
I'm sure terrorists, criminals, and other ne'er-do-wells have their ways of moving cash without Bitcoin. They did it just fine before Bitcoin. I just have a hard time accepting "easy money transfers for the world's most undesirable people" as a feature, not a bug.
As for Pirate Bay, I'd rather live in a world where it wasn't needed. I'm talking one with reasonable copyright term limits (sorry Disney), no DRM, abandoned/out-of-print IP automatically falls into the public domain (use it or lose it).
I kind of agree with you about people that hold bitcoin, that is _not_ it's purpose. It's about evading border controls on capital and tracking of transactions. That is enough. Volatility isn't such an issue when you're only going to hold it for a day or less before converting it into (cash/land/drugs/women/booze/influence).
The people who need to be evasive with money transfers generally aren't up to much good. It's a bit like saying "Pirate Bay is great because it allows a parent to easily replace their legally purchased copy of The Little Mermaid, after their kid accidentally broke the DVD." Well, yeah, but we know that's not what the majority of their userbase is doing.
I mean really, enabling malware authors to get paid and making it easier to fund terrorism really doesn't look good on Bitcoin's résumé.
I just played with one of the mining profit calculators
...which fail to take into account that the difficulty is constantly increasing, which means you'll have to continuously steal even more mining hardware if you want to turn a profit.
If you want to make money in cryptocurrency, forget mining - the real money is in starting your own exchange, waiting for it to get popular, claiming it was "hacked" and making off with everyone's BTC. That, and ransomware. But be warned, there will probably be a special place in hell reserved for ransomware authors, right next to the furnace.
Banning them won't do anything. Do you understand how cryptocurrencies work?
Yeah, generally when the government tries to protect people from their own stupidity, the "solution" is poorly implemented and doesn't end well. Maybe if the slimmest prospect of becoming wealthy didn't make most people immediately shut their brains off, we wouldn't need the nanny state to step in.
You realize they are currently being used to free humanity from government capital controls and asset thievery?
Damn, I almost choked on my covfefe there. So, you're telling me the government can't seize cryptocurrency? I guess this must be fake news, or something.
The primary uses of cryptocurrency are enabling rich people to play a game of Greater Fool Theory with each other, wasting electricity, and making ransomware authors cum in their pants. Don't get me wrong, the concept of digital currency as an encrypted blockchain on a peer-to-peer network isn't an inherently bad idea - it's just that people are too greedy to agree on an implementation which doesn't heavily reward the early adopters.
This goes to the heart of the purpose of a search engine. Should it solely return "free" results?
How about handling it the same way Google Maps deals with toll roads: let the users set their own preferences.
Hell, I'd love it if I could not only filter out paywall sites, but all sites which only exist to try to sell me shit. I don't want penis enlargement pills, clean-ur-PC software, VPN services, or amazing home business opportunities. I just want whatever free content is most relevant to what I've searched for.
I remember watching Hackers for the first time back in the mid '90s, and my suspension of disbelief couldn't get past all the things depicted as being hooked up to the internet. Apparently, some other fuckers were watching it, and thinking it was a great idea.
Mark my words, Hollywood probably got killer robots right too - they're just wrong on the date.
The primary purpose of the law is to make it possible for men to be evicted from women's restrooms.
Evicted by who? Bruno the bathroom bouncer?
Here's another brilliant idea: Perhaps we could make it easier for the police to catch fleeing criminals by instituting some sort of law which places restrictions on the speed which you're allowed to drive a motor vehicle? Oh right, we already have those, and funny thing - criminals intent on breaking laws tend to ignore that one, too.
Bathroom laws won't make anyone safer. They will, however, discriminate against transgender people, and very likely make a few fathers into sex offenders for taking their daughter to the bathroom.
You think someone willing to break that law, which is, and I can hope we can agree on that, a much worse transgression than dressing up as a woman and using the woman's bathroom, would give half a fuck about such a law?
Someone willing to break the law AND do it in a place he's highly likely to be caught is going to be pretty much undeterred by anything short of a taser/gun/mace/jiu-jitsu.
These bathroom laws are on the same level of idiocy as making airports "terrorist free zones", or whatever moronic security theater they're employing lately (I haven't flown in years).
Maybe because we had to sit through a few too many movies where "diversity" became the main theme
Actually, the most compelling argument I've heard as to why Hollywood movies feature "diverse" casts and more CGI eye-candy than substance, is because it translates well when released globally.
In other words, they're not trying to appeal to the average straight, white US male because there's money to be made elsewhere.
Read the whole thread through before you respond indignantly to just one post in it. Animojo and I covered the whole "gays-in-the-entertainment-industry" numbers in a later post.
Don't care where the thread started or to which level of hell it sinks to - your argument is logical fallacy, plain and simple. The percentage of gays depicted in a work of fiction requires no more basis in reality than the number of talking animals, wizards, aliens, trolls, non-corporeal entities, etc.
If inaccurate depictions of social demographics in a sci-fi show (where people regularly risk their lives on interstellar space missions, encounter hostile aliens, and don't even get paid for it) bothers you so much, don't watch it. I'm sure there's some great documentaries on Netflix you can watch instead.
BTW, for future reference, if you and Animojo don't want people just jumping in with their 2, exchange phone numbers and have your glorious gays-in-Trek arguments over text. Whatever charges your anti-matter converter...
94% straight? In other words, 6% gay. Which means that the show over-represents gays in the ship's population by a factor of 2x to 3x, compared to current conventional population stats.
There are zero crewed interstellar capable starships today, too. Are you going to claim this show over-represents our space program by such-and-such factor, too?
Let me help you out here: The show is science fiction. Notice the "fiction". If the writers wanted to make the crew all black, or all British, or entirely talking dogs - they can. See, that's what fiction means - there's no need for the writing to based in fact.
But if you badly need a real-world example, go to Disney World in Orlando, and witness that a significant portion of the employees ("cast members" in Disney newspeak) are gay. Bonus points if you run around the park shouting "Statistically, this is inconceivable!"
After being rather satisfied with how well Amazon's 2nd gen Fire Stick runs Kodi, I figured one of their tablets might be equally as good for portable viewing of H.265 (HEVC) content. Until I looked at the specs, that is.
If you want to watch full HD video, these tablets are absolute turds.
Google, even Apple and Microsoft: they all make less-suspicious, more attractive stuff than Amazon. Amazon is the worst.
Clearly, you haven't used Windows 10. Its default settings make it nothing short of malware. I'm not even kidding - it automatically installs apps you don't want, shows ads for apps in the start menu, harasses you to sign into OneDrive, and constantly sends God-knows-what back to Microsoft.
At least when you buy one of Amazon's products, you can assume going into it that they're going to use it to try to sell you shit. In that regard, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Amazon really doesn't seem to mind if you want to buy their $40 Fire Stick and use it just for Kodi. Try that with a current generation Apple TV and get back to me in 8 days about which company is more user-hostile.
In case you hadn't noticed, the will of the people is dead. The average citizen doesn't have a fucking clue what Net Neutrality is, nor do they give a shit enough to care.
It's the entire reason why it will ultimately be defeated by those who maintain Control.
Problem is, "will of the people" also includes the people who believe the divine will of Trump is beyond contestation. The don't need to understand they might lose their healthcare or see their Netflix bill double, because glorious leader is doing what is best for them.
A big flaw in democracy is that you really can't fix stupid.
Color printing with the "special sauce" already baked into the paper has been around for awhile. ZINK paper is sold under the Polaroid brand name; it's used for making instant photos from digital sources.
The problem these type of technologies suffer from is that plain paper and ink is already ridiculously cheap to manufacture. A sheet of paper with a special coating covering its entire surface is always going to cost more per print.
Slashdot Mirror
Except Pepe the Frog wasn't adopted by racist sacks of shit.
You didn't even have to look hard to see plenty of asshole Trump supporters sporting the frog emoji (implied to be Pepe) in their username. This shit might've spawned from the filthy bowels of 4Chan as a joke, but Dogecoin started as a joke too and as of right now has a $384,751,531 market cap. Once people start taking a joke seriously, it ceases to be a joke.
Target is suffering from this as we speak but will likely not change course having painted themselves into a corner.
People who are boycotting Target over a fucking bathroom issue are the ones who are the real oversensitive snowflakes. It's also entirely possible that things have just been sucking lately for retail stores in general, and Target is feeling the squeeze. Hhgregg just went under, and I doubt bathrooms had anything to do with it.
It's kinda like how the anti-Seaworld activists claimed Blackfish was causing a huge drop in attendance - coincidentally, right about the same time Universal Resort and Disney World opened some major new attractions. Nope, that probably had nothing to do with it - it had to be the protesters. Uh-huh.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/retail-sales-post-worst-two-month-stretch-in-two-year-2017-04-14
There's already a way to compress a movie down to a few KB. You simply post it as a torrent and let other people store it on their computers. After it's been well-shared, you can simply delete it from your machine. Can't beat that level of compression. See, I've included Big Buck Bunny in this post:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:88594AAACBDE40EF3E2510C47374EC0AA396C08E&dn=bbb_sunflower_1080p_30fps_normal.mp4&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.publicbt.com%3a80%2fannounce&ws=http%3a%2f%2fdistribution.bbb3d.renderfarming.net%2fvideo%2fmp4%2fbbb_sunflower_1080p_30fps_normal.mp4
Why would they not simply use the existing Bitcoin ?
Because it suffers from the same flaw as all decentralized cryptocurrencies: the supply of coins in circulation is arbitrary - it isn't adjusted to stabilize their value in the marketplace. If deflationary currency was such a great idea, the US treasury would stop spitting out dollar bills tomorrow - and all hell would likely break loose.
It also takes fucking forever to confirm a transaction on the Bitcoin network. People complain about how slow the chip & pin readers are here in the USA - there's no way people would have the patience to wait for a Bitcoin transaction to complete.
Bitcoins are nothing but a commodity, like gold: there's a cost to produce more, and a current stock.
The difference with gold is that its limited availability is not an easily changed value in a line of code. Dogecoin was initially created as a parody to illustrate how "abundant" cryptocoins could be, if you tweaked Bitcoin's source a bit.
Bitcoin's rarity is simply an agreement by everyone on the "one true Bitcoin" blockchain that these are the rules they want to play by. The mining rewards with Bitcoin are designed to drop exponentially; the reward halves every four years. Pretty soon, that sliver of pie could be looking mighty small, and it's not unfathomable that miners could be persuaded to switch to a fork of Bitcoin which spits out more coins. Greed makes people do things like that.
The first 3 I found in a search had either pre-filled the current difficulty, or had a field for you to select the difficulty.
Yeah, they'll factor in the current difficulty but don't show you what your profitability (or lack-thereof) will be as the difficulty increases. It's kind of like calculating simple interest vs compounded interest. So, unless you're living in a Groundhog Day time loop and will always be mining at today's difficulty, you can't use a mining calculator to determine long-term profitability.
Now, it's entirely possible to perform a statistical analysis on the average rate of difficulty increase over time and factor that into your profitability calculation. But be prepared to be a sad panda when you see your profitability results.
3. The backdoor is active even when the machine is powered off:
How exactly do they manage to read data from a hard drive which is spun down? (sarcasm)
I'm sure this Intel backdoor could do plenty of nefarious things when the machine is at full power, but it's likely capable of nothing more than a glorified wake-on-lan when the machine is shut down. Of course, to me, "powered off" means you've physically cut power to the machine - and so long as Intel is still producing hardware based on the known laws of physics, that means the backdoor is inaccessible.
If the dude only wants one bitcoin, and you learn...
Well yeah, that genie isn't going back in the bottle. If cryptocurrency suddenly went *poof* overnight, ransomware authors would start asking for cash in the mail, prepaid phone cards, western union transfers or who knows what else. But Bitcoin did for ransomware what PayPal did for eBay - made it a whole lot easier to get more people in on the action.
I don't buy for a second that serious criminal organizations ever had much trouble moving cash. 'Fund terrorism'...oh noes...he said magic words...I peed 'em.
I'm sure terrorists, criminals, and other ne'er-do-wells have their ways of moving cash without Bitcoin. They did it just fine before Bitcoin. I just have a hard time accepting "easy money transfers for the world's most undesirable people" as a feature, not a bug.
As for Pirate Bay, I'd rather live in a world where it wasn't needed. I'm talking one with reasonable copyright term limits (sorry Disney), no DRM, abandoned/out-of-print IP automatically falls into the public domain (use it or lose it).
And thanks to the touchpad on my laptop, I accidentally posted as anon. Wonderful.
I kind of agree with you about people that hold bitcoin, that is _not_ it's purpose. It's about evading border controls on capital and tracking of transactions. That is enough. Volatility isn't such an issue when you're only going to hold it for a day or less before converting it into (cash/land/drugs/women/booze/influence).
The people who need to be evasive with money transfers generally aren't up to much good. It's a bit like saying "Pirate Bay is great because it allows a parent to easily replace their legally purchased copy of The Little Mermaid, after their kid accidentally broke the DVD." Well, yeah, but we know that's not what the majority of their userbase is doing.
I mean really, enabling malware authors to get paid and making it easier to fund terrorism really doesn't look good on Bitcoin's résumé.
I just played with one of the mining profit calculators
...which fail to take into account that the difficulty is constantly increasing, which means you'll have to continuously steal even more mining hardware if you want to turn a profit.
If you want to make money in cryptocurrency, forget mining - the real money is in starting your own exchange, waiting for it to get popular, claiming it was "hacked" and making off with everyone's BTC. That, and ransomware. But be warned, there will probably be a special place in hell reserved for ransomware authors, right next to the furnace.
Banning them won't do anything. Do you understand how cryptocurrencies work?
Yeah, generally when the government tries to protect people from their own stupidity, the "solution" is poorly implemented and doesn't end well. Maybe if the slimmest prospect of becoming wealthy didn't make most people immediately shut their brains off, we wouldn't need the nanny state to step in.
You realize they are currently being used to free humanity from government capital controls and asset thievery?
Damn, I almost choked on my covfefe there. So, you're telling me the government can't seize cryptocurrency? I guess this must be fake news, or something.
The primary uses of cryptocurrency are enabling rich people to play a game of Greater Fool Theory with each other, wasting electricity, and making ransomware authors cum in their pants. Don't get me wrong, the concept of digital currency as an encrypted blockchain on a peer-to-peer network isn't an inherently bad idea - it's just that people are too greedy to agree on an implementation which doesn't heavily reward the early adopters.
HEVC is a losing proposition. Apple's making a mistake here.
The fucking $40 Amazon Fire Stick supports HEVC. That's reason enough for Apple to get with the times.
x265 is where things are going. Look to the pirate scene to pick the best codec.
The pirate scene is still mostly using H.264 MP4 format so people can play it directly on their smart TVs and el cheapo Android boxes.
This goes to the heart of the purpose of a search engine. Should it solely return "free" results?
How about handling it the same way Google Maps deals with toll roads: let the users set their own preferences.
Hell, I'd love it if I could not only filter out paywall sites, but all sites which only exist to try to sell me shit. I don't want penis enlargement pills, clean-ur-PC software, VPN services, or amazing home business opportunities. I just want whatever free content is most relevant to what I've searched for.
I remember watching Hackers for the first time back in the mid '90s, and my suspension of disbelief couldn't get past all the things depicted as being hooked up to the internet. Apparently, some other fuckers were watching it, and thinking it was a great idea.
Mark my words, Hollywood probably got killer robots right too - they're just wrong on the date.
The primary purpose of the law is to make it possible for men to be evicted from women's restrooms.
Evicted by who? Bruno the bathroom bouncer?
Here's another brilliant idea: Perhaps we could make it easier for the police to catch fleeing criminals by instituting some sort of law which places restrictions on the speed which you're allowed to drive a motor vehicle? Oh right, we already have those, and funny thing - criminals intent on breaking laws tend to ignore that one, too.
Bathroom laws won't make anyone safer. They will, however, discriminate against transgender people, and very likely make a few fathers into sex offenders for taking their daughter to the bathroom.
You think someone willing to break that law, which is, and I can hope we can agree on that, a much worse transgression than dressing up as a woman and using the woman's bathroom, would give half a fuck about such a law?
Someone willing to break the law AND do it in a place he's highly likely to be caught is going to be pretty much undeterred by anything short of a taser/gun/mace/jiu-jitsu.
These bathroom laws are on the same level of idiocy as making airports "terrorist free zones", or whatever moronic security theater they're employing lately (I haven't flown in years).
Maybe because we had to sit through a few too many movies where "diversity" became the main theme
Actually, the most compelling argument I've heard as to why Hollywood movies feature "diverse" casts and more CGI eye-candy than substance, is because it translates well when released globally.
In other words, they're not trying to appeal to the average straight, white US male because there's money to be made elsewhere.
Read the whole thread through before you respond indignantly to just one post in it. Animojo and I covered the whole "gays-in-the-entertainment-industry" numbers in a later post.
Don't care where the thread started or to which level of hell it sinks to - your argument is logical fallacy, plain and simple. The percentage of gays depicted in a work of fiction requires no more basis in reality than the number of talking animals, wizards, aliens, trolls, non-corporeal entities, etc.
If inaccurate depictions of social demographics in a sci-fi show (where people regularly risk their lives on interstellar space missions, encounter hostile aliens, and don't even get paid for it) bothers you so much, don't watch it. I'm sure there's some great documentaries on Netflix you can watch instead.
BTW, for future reference, if you and Animojo don't want people just jumping in with their 2, exchange phone numbers and have your glorious gays-in-Trek arguments over text. Whatever charges your anti-matter converter...
94% straight? In other words, 6% gay. Which means that the show over-represents gays in the ship's population by a factor of 2x to 3x, compared to current conventional population stats.
There are zero crewed interstellar capable starships today, too. Are you going to claim this show over-represents our space program by such-and-such factor, too?
Let me help you out here: The show is science fiction. Notice the "fiction". If the writers wanted to make the crew all black, or all British, or entirely talking dogs - they can. See, that's what fiction means - there's no need for the writing to based in fact.
But if you badly need a real-world example, go to Disney World in Orlando, and witness that a significant portion of the employees ("cast members" in Disney newspeak) are gay. Bonus points if you run around the park shouting "Statistically, this is inconceivable!"
After being rather satisfied with how well Amazon's 2nd gen Fire Stick runs Kodi, I figured one of their tablets might be equally as good for portable viewing of H.265 (HEVC) content. Until I looked at the specs, that is.
If you want to watch full HD video, these tablets are absolute turds.
Google, even Apple and Microsoft: they all make less-suspicious, more attractive stuff than Amazon. Amazon is the worst.
Clearly, you haven't used Windows 10. Its default settings make it nothing short of malware. I'm not even kidding - it automatically installs apps you don't want, shows ads for apps in the start menu, harasses you to sign into OneDrive, and constantly sends God-knows-what back to Microsoft.
At least when you buy one of Amazon's products, you can assume going into it that they're going to use it to try to sell you shit. In that regard, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Amazon really doesn't seem to mind if you want to buy their $40 Fire Stick and use it just for Kodi. Try that with a current generation Apple TV and get back to me in 8 days about which company is more user-hostile.
In case you hadn't noticed, the will of the people is dead. The average citizen doesn't have a fucking clue what Net Neutrality is, nor do they give a shit enough to care.
It's the entire reason why it will ultimately be defeated by those who maintain Control.
Problem is, "will of the people" also includes the people who believe the divine will of Trump is beyond contestation. The don't need to understand they might lose their healthcare or see their Netflix bill double, because glorious leader is doing what is best for them.
A big flaw in democracy is that you really can't fix stupid.
Color printing with the "special sauce" already baked into the paper has been around for awhile. ZINK paper is sold under the Polaroid brand name; it's used for making instant photos from digital sources.
The problem these type of technologies suffer from is that plain paper and ink is already ridiculously cheap to manufacture. A sheet of paper with a special coating covering its entire surface is always going to cost more per print.