Those few people putting their foot down won't matter. Also, your understanding of Bitcoin is limited by the opinions you parrot.
Everything about Bitcoin - the algorithm, the source code, the markets, the Blockchain - is all out in the open. It's transparent, finite, and enables instant transfers of value anywhere in the world. IMO, sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting won't make it stop. It would be like trying to stop TCP/IP in 1992. Bitcoin is an entire protocol and understanding it may very well be as ubiquitous as typing is now. If not Bitcoin, then the next digital currency.
Just because they say 'we have no current plans for Bitcoin' does not mean they don't have people working on exploring the technical aspects, the legal aspects, the social, and financial aspects. It would be a huge decision for a company like Google to say anything definitive about Bitcoin at this point - considering anything positive from Google would most likely double the Bitcoin price. And, doubling the Bitcoin price would do that much more to solidify its place in the financial world.
In other words, it will happen with or without Google - starting with much smaller companies first. Two years ago, the Bitcoin community was excited to see a $1million/year revenue company announce they are taking Bitcoin. Now, Overstock.com and Tigerdirect both take Bitcoin. Don't expect anything from Google for a while..
I, for one.. I'm running Slackware now since Windows 8 pissed me off over and over. Slackware isn't great either - but at least it's something worth learning. I don't see Microsoft continuing being the only dominant player in the future.
Windows 8 has got to be the main reason laptop and PC sales have plummeted. Nobody likes the fucking interface on a PC and nobody wants to buy a new PC that forcefeeds you Windows 8 when they already have Windows 7.
Windows 8 is an asshole operating system. It was designed by a guy that decided to be an asshole and only have asshole programmers join him. It was designed so that you can only multitask when Windows 8 decides you can multitask. Did you launch 'full screen' Internet Explorer? You did? Ha! There's no way to move it back to a window. Because fuck you! Guess what? Here's a start menu. And, it only launches bullshit by default. Oh, you have a PC? We will go ahead and optimize it for a tablet anyway. Oh, you don't have a touchscreen monitor? We'll continue to act like you have a touchscreen. You have a sound card issue? You and like 10,000 other people? We will continue to act like you don't know how to update the drivers for the sound card and we will continue to act like it's your fault. Windows 8 crashed on you? We will continue to act like it never crashes and is the most stable piece of software marvel ever.
Fuck Windows 8. I've never had a piece of software piss me off more so quickly.. and I deal with old industrial software and IT for my career. I would love to see a revolt.
And, if you're a programmer for Windows 8, fuck you too.
Samzenpus, you deserve a big, "Fuck you" from the Slashdot community for running along with this completely obvious piece of propaganda. Snowden has not only proven most of this to be disinformation.. he has also proven over and over that the Obama administration, NSA, and CIA will continue to lie to the American people despite the fact that there is open and available evidence to prove these statements as lies. For example, Snowden showed that the NSA collected phone call records of the American people. The next day, Obama himself states that it is merely meta data. A week later, Snowden releases more information that shows that calls are recorded - all calls. Then, this piece of propaganda filth tries to say that somehow that all didn't happen.
You are simply repeating a lie. There have been numerous Slashdot discussions about Snowden's revelations - and then you go ahead and post propaganda that does little more than attack the messenger. It does not fucking matter what Snowden's intentions were any more - he proved that the US government is violating its own law. These same people tried to call Snowden a 'highschool dropout' and at the same time 'a genius.' They called him a traitor.
It only takes an hour if you elect to pay zero fee.. If you pay a higher fee (like 5 cents worth), your transaction will be processed near instantly. Then, it will be verified usually around 10 minutes to an hour later.
Also, the ledger is only gigs in size after years of Bitcoin use.. When it gets more popular, the ledger will increase faster. But, the size of hard drives is increasing - and you don't even need to have the whole ledger in order to participate. Lightweight clients, such as Multibit, allow you to only obtain enough of the ledger to be certain of the transactions. In the end, it might just be large institutions and hobbyists that all hold the Blockchain (ledger)..
As far as hacking, Bitcoin will get hacked the moment everything else is already hacked.
People are really bad at understanding statistics because the Mainstream Media purposely skews reporting to maintain current power structures. If the media did a halfway accurate job of reporting how well the Teslas perform compared to traditional cars, you would have a ton of lawmakers, lobbyists, power brokers, and other old-money individuals all 'making phone calls' to get those involved removed. Real journalism has died. Instead, we have 'mainstream journalism' and 'fringe journalism.' The truth is found more often in fringe journalism.
It's just like watching an NFL game on TV and trying to figure out who the announcers are rooting for.. Guess what? They're rooting for a close game and whatever team has the momentum. If Tesla gains enough 'momentum' and mainstream acceptance (industry is large enough to gain its own power brokers), you will start seeing sensational articles about how great the Tesla is.
Almost every major change in US government over the past 15 years can be attributed to a move towards fascism in order to protect current power structures that are increasingly threatened by transparency and a new generation that is looking for something real. Both the Democrats and Republicans are moving the same direction. The Democrats will do it by trying to take away guns. The Republicans will do it by an ever-increasing police state against the non-existent terrorists. If after reading every news article, the average American would ask, "How is this moving us towards fascism?" - we might have an awakening to see that this is exactly what is happening.
Our mainstream news and political leaders never question the state. They will never mention fascism. They will continue to move us towards this idea by demagoguing individual civil liberty as a security threat.
The idea that we can sell items that can be turned into weapons after airport security checkpoints shows that the claimed threat of terrorism is non-existent. I feel I should not even have to argue this point - it should be apparent to all by now. We didn't ban steak knives on airplanes to prevent stabbings - we banned them to continue to crack down on the responsible human behavior of asking, "Is this necessary?" The same can be applied to making us take our jackets, belts, and shoes off.
Also, for the recent event at LAX, instead of responding by arming only the TSA agents, we should be asking ourselves, "why couldn't anyone there just shoot back?" And also, "what the fuck is the point of a security agent that is unarmed?"
At least Lenovo is trying something different. Why not at least listen to the views of a very successful young person? We all know the current engineering teams at Lenovo (and pretty much every other PC brand) have been completely failing to design a good laptop lately.
When IBM owned Thinkpad, they were the definitive best professional laptop. Some people used to say that Mac made the best laptop - but it was usually countered with, "Then you've never used a Thinkpad." Now, Mac has definitively the best laptops. It is not even close. Thinkpad is merely a formerly-premium brand attached to a mediocre laptop.
The 'death of the PC industry' is being caused by the lack of innovation in the PC industry. Maybe Ashton will point out something so mind-numbingly obvious to those with their heads in the asses and Lenovo will start making a Thinkpad once again. Maybe he will say something like, "Why are we selling 1920*1080 screens when Mac is selling 2800*1800 screens?"
After seeing AMD bet the farm on Athlon and beat a company with 10x the r&d budget, I cannot help but be a fan. The biggest reason for AMD being behind in CPUs today is lack of r&d budget based on unfair duopoly competition from Intel during the years where AMD was superior. Hopefully, AMD can make up for this missing r&d money by being superior with graphics for a while.
I do not believe there is a tech company pushing more innovation with less resources..
I would be scared if I didn't have some Bitcoins right now. If they go to zero, oh well.. If they get adopted as a major international currency, then I completely miss out by not having them now.
There will never be enough Bitcoins for everyone to have one. If they do catch on, each one will be worth a fortune. So far, no government has been able to figure out a way to shut them down. Large governments such as China and Germany have announced no intentions against Bitcoin. It makes me believe the people that are Bitcoins' biggest detractors are the ones that don't own any yet.
The media tries to associate Bitcoin with lawbreakers and it calls it an insanely risky bet. But, the media does everything it can to preserve the status quo. Then, limit your risks.. You cannot risk more than the price you pay for the Bitcoins. I think it is a bigger risk to decide you will completely ignore the obvious next form of currency.
At some point, the people in charge need to define the scope of 'National Security.' Right now the scope seems to be defined as 'anything that security officials claim'. Because of this, anything a journalist publishes can be said to violate National Security since National Security covers everything.
For example, Martin Luther King's speeches criticized the status quo. Since the status quo is now matter of National Security, Martin Luther King's speeches were a threat to National Security, by today's standards.
So the real argument is what exactly is National Security? Is the status quo more important than civil liberty? Further, why are we not investigating whether or not secret laws used to justify anything violate the law?
Are you seriously trying to say that this was Russia's plan all along? You're saying it's pretty clear.. Just flat out fucking say it.
No matter what the liars in our national security apparatus (and Mainstream Media) have said, their actions and spin just wreaks of bullshit to any free-thinking person that hears it. There's no way you can explain away secret courts, secret laws, lack of oversight, Obama lying, Clapper lying, and keep a straight face. The US Government trashed its credibility here and Snowden revealed it perfectly. The US government is going full Nazi Germany on our freedoms and they're saying it's for our own good.
It's like you're trying to say that everything Snowden revealed means nothing because Russia was behind it. So fucking what. Russia also helped us out of a war in Syria. The injustices are being done to the American people in the name of their own security and those injustices are out of the bag. I, for one, don't trust people like you that keep trying to tarnish Snowden's reputation. He's the biggest hero my generation has and what he has done is inspirational.
The American People aren't afraid of their security being affected by terrorism. The American People are afraid of their way of life and freedoms being destroyed by their own Government. How can they claim to be doing things for our own security when the decisions made by the same people are continually putting us on the brink of collapse?
I need to parse through 1000's of XML files and make sure { } are around all 'tags' in the files. I need to make sure of about 40 other rules that apply to these particular XML files.
Since everyone likes to knock Perl and Regular Expressions, what could possibly be a quicker and easier way to handle this? FYI, I did it in Perl - and I just could not imagine the amount of code I would have had to write in anything else..
We're all going to find out there's some still-unexplained phenomenon where every object outside the solar system is actually much closer than it appears to us do to this flux event that distorts everything. We are told by the world's brightest scientists that everything is goddamn far away. Voyager 1 is going to go out and prove that all wrong. We used to think the Earth is flat.
Maybe the joke is on us.. We are constantly told how free we are.. But what happens to anyone in our society that actually tried to effect change? What happens to the honest journalists or the honest politicians? How's our incarceration rate?
How the fuck is this funny? We have a direct quote from the director of the NSA and you make a joke alluding to conspiracy theorists like they're the crazy ones. The thing that is crazy here is that the dumb useless clueless fucktarded people like you would rather make light of something and continue to act like something is nothing than actually effect some positive change..
The US Constitution is the supreme law of the land.. You would probably make fun of that too.
I absolutely hate how people talk about the negatives of automation like somehow things are better when humans did all the menial tasks. I remember an old Russian video where a worker was winding a ball of yarn by hand. That is degrading. What is even more degrading is paying a bunch of foreign people a lot less to do manual (and meaningless) tasks to make cheap products and then ship them across the world. Even further degrading is the layers of bullshit we have decided to surround ourselves with in other professions that waste the hours in our days.
The problem is not that 'there will be fewer jobs.' The problem is not that 'there are not enough resources.' The problem is that the jobs and the resources are all allocated wrong. We could (at least in America) have 20-30 hour work weeks, plenty of family time, decent pay, and a low unemployment rate.. if a certain select few did not make ALL the money and take control of ALL the resources.
I am an automation programmer. I work to automate any task I can possibly automate. I do not feel bad about it. Any automation I create has to be maintained.
As far as legislation forbidding the automation of certain industries.. Since the US Government fucks up everything it touches, I believe it will work to create laws to forbid the jobs that should be automated and laws to automate the jobs that should be manual. For example, the NSA said it will fire 90% of sysadmins and replace them with automation. Anyone in IT knows that idea is 100% stupid. Another example is the rise of red light cameras everywhere. As subjective as it is to enforce the law, our wonderful government has decided to make it legal for robots to do that for us. And, since the US military is having trouble finding new hires that have zero morality, they are working to automate drone warfare also. Great..
So, anyway, what I mean to say is.. Automation itself is not bad. It's the way we're using it that will be bad. Instead of using it to free ourselves, we are using it to enslave ourselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Those few people putting their foot down won't matter. Also, your understanding of Bitcoin is limited by the opinions you parrot.
Everything about Bitcoin - the algorithm, the source code, the markets, the Blockchain - is all out in the open. It's transparent, finite, and enables instant transfers of value anywhere in the world. IMO, sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting won't make it stop. It would be like trying to stop TCP/IP in 1992. Bitcoin is an entire protocol and understanding it may very well be as ubiquitous as typing is now. If not Bitcoin, then the next digital currency.
Just because they say 'we have no current plans for Bitcoin' does not mean they don't have people working on exploring the technical aspects, the legal aspects, the social, and financial aspects. It would be a huge decision for a company like Google to say anything definitive about Bitcoin at this point - considering anything positive from Google would most likely double the Bitcoin price. And, doubling the Bitcoin price would do that much more to solidify its place in the financial world.
In other words, it will happen with or without Google - starting with much smaller companies first. Two years ago, the Bitcoin community was excited to see a $1million/year revenue company announce they are taking Bitcoin. Now, Overstock.com and Tigerdirect both take Bitcoin. Don't expect anything from Google for a while..
Maybe they bashed Seagate drives and plan to buy a bunch at dirt-cheap prices when the average consumer (nerds like us) starts avoiding them..
I, for one.. I'm running Slackware now since Windows 8 pissed me off over and over. Slackware isn't great either - but at least it's something worth learning. I don't see Microsoft continuing being the only dominant player in the future.
Windows 8 has got to be the main reason laptop and PC sales have plummeted. Nobody likes the fucking interface on a PC and nobody wants to buy a new PC that forcefeeds you Windows 8 when they already have Windows 7.
Windows 8 is an asshole operating system. It was designed by a guy that decided to be an asshole and only have asshole programmers join him. It was designed so that you can only multitask when Windows 8 decides you can multitask. Did you launch 'full screen' Internet Explorer? You did? Ha! There's no way to move it back to a window. Because fuck you! Guess what? Here's a start menu. And, it only launches bullshit by default. Oh, you have a PC? We will go ahead and optimize it for a tablet anyway. Oh, you don't have a touchscreen monitor? We'll continue to act like you have a touchscreen. You have a sound card issue? You and like 10,000 other people? We will continue to act like you don't know how to update the drivers for the sound card and we will continue to act like it's your fault. Windows 8 crashed on you? We will continue to act like it never crashes and is the most stable piece of software marvel ever.
Fuck Windows 8. I've never had a piece of software piss me off more so quickly.. and I deal with old industrial software and IT for my career. I would love to see a revolt.
And, if you're a programmer for Windows 8, fuck you too.
Samzenpus, you deserve a big, "Fuck you" from the Slashdot community for running along with this completely obvious piece of propaganda. Snowden has not only proven most of this to be disinformation.. he has also proven over and over that the Obama administration, NSA, and CIA will continue to lie to the American people despite the fact that there is open and available evidence to prove these statements as lies. For example, Snowden showed that the NSA collected phone call records of the American people. The next day, Obama himself states that it is merely meta data. A week later, Snowden releases more information that shows that calls are recorded - all calls. Then, this piece of propaganda filth tries to say that somehow that all didn't happen.
You are simply repeating a lie. There have been numerous Slashdot discussions about Snowden's revelations - and then you go ahead and post propaganda that does little more than attack the messenger. It does not fucking matter what Snowden's intentions were any more - he proved that the US government is violating its own law. These same people tried to call Snowden a 'highschool dropout' and at the same time 'a genius.' They called him a traitor.
It only takes an hour if you elect to pay zero fee.. If you pay a higher fee (like 5 cents worth), your transaction will be processed near instantly. Then, it will be verified usually around 10 minutes to an hour later.
Also, the ledger is only gigs in size after years of Bitcoin use.. When it gets more popular, the ledger will increase faster. But, the size of hard drives is increasing - and you don't even need to have the whole ledger in order to participate. Lightweight clients, such as Multibit, allow you to only obtain enough of the ledger to be certain of the transactions. In the end, it might just be large institutions and hobbyists that all hold the Blockchain (ledger)..
As far as hacking, Bitcoin will get hacked the moment everything else is already hacked.
People are really bad at understanding statistics because the Mainstream Media purposely skews reporting to maintain current power structures. If the media did a halfway accurate job of reporting how well the Teslas perform compared to traditional cars, you would have a ton of lawmakers, lobbyists, power brokers, and other old-money individuals all 'making phone calls' to get those involved removed. Real journalism has died. Instead, we have 'mainstream journalism' and 'fringe journalism.' The truth is found more often in fringe journalism.
It's just like watching an NFL game on TV and trying to figure out who the announcers are rooting for.. Guess what? They're rooting for a close game and whatever team has the momentum. If Tesla gains enough 'momentum' and mainstream acceptance (industry is large enough to gain its own power brokers), you will start seeing sensational articles about how great the Tesla is.
If it's not both sides, how do you explain Dianne Feinstein? or Barack Obama's continuing of W Bush's policies?
Almost every major change in US government over the past 15 years can be attributed to a move towards fascism in order to protect current power structures that are increasingly threatened by transparency and a new generation that is looking for something real. Both the Democrats and Republicans are moving the same direction. The Democrats will do it by trying to take away guns. The Republicans will do it by an ever-increasing police state against the non-existent terrorists. If after reading every news article, the average American would ask, "How is this moving us towards fascism?" - we might have an awakening to see that this is exactly what is happening.
Our mainstream news and political leaders never question the state. They will never mention fascism. They will continue to move us towards this idea by demagoguing individual civil liberty as a security threat.
The idea that we can sell items that can be turned into weapons after airport security checkpoints shows that the claimed threat of terrorism is non-existent. I feel I should not even have to argue this point - it should be apparent to all by now. We didn't ban steak knives on airplanes to prevent stabbings - we banned them to continue to crack down on the responsible human behavior of asking, "Is this necessary?" The same can be applied to making us take our jackets, belts, and shoes off.
Also, for the recent event at LAX, instead of responding by arming only the TSA agents, we should be asking ourselves, "why couldn't anyone there just shoot back?" And also, "what the fuck is the point of a security agent that is unarmed?"
At least Lenovo is trying something different. Why not at least listen to the views of a very successful young person? We all know the current engineering teams at Lenovo (and pretty much every other PC brand) have been completely failing to design a good laptop lately.
When IBM owned Thinkpad, they were the definitive best professional laptop. Some people used to say that Mac made the best laptop - but it was usually countered with, "Then you've never used a Thinkpad." Now, Mac has definitively the best laptops. It is not even close. Thinkpad is merely a formerly-premium brand attached to a mediocre laptop.
The 'death of the PC industry' is being caused by the lack of innovation in the PC industry. Maybe Ashton will point out something so mind-numbingly obvious to those with their heads in the asses and Lenovo will start making a Thinkpad once again. Maybe he will say something like, "Why are we selling 1920*1080 screens when Mac is selling 2800*1800 screens?"
After seeing AMD bet the farm on Athlon and beat a company with 10x the r&d budget, I cannot help but be a fan. The biggest reason for AMD being behind in CPUs today is lack of r&d budget based on unfair duopoly competition from Intel during the years where AMD was superior. Hopefully, AMD can make up for this missing r&d money by being superior with graphics for a while.
I do not believe there is a tech company pushing more innovation with less resources..
They can sell that information to the government that will pay for it with our tax dollars!
maybe
You do know that a Bitcoin can be divided, right? Your argument implies that you did not know that.
I would be scared if I didn't have some Bitcoins right now. If they go to zero, oh well.. If they get adopted as a major international currency, then I completely miss out by not having them now.
There will never be enough Bitcoins for everyone to have one. If they do catch on, each one will be worth a fortune. So far, no government has been able to figure out a way to shut them down. Large governments such as China and Germany have announced no intentions against Bitcoin. It makes me believe the people that are Bitcoins' biggest detractors are the ones that don't own any yet.
The media tries to associate Bitcoin with lawbreakers and it calls it an insanely risky bet. But, the media does everything it can to preserve the status quo. Then, limit your risks.. You cannot risk more than the price you pay for the Bitcoins. I think it is a bigger risk to decide you will completely ignore the obvious next form of currency.
National security analysts are a threat to national security.
I define national security as 'maximized individual civil liberty.'
At some point, the people in charge need to define the scope of 'National Security.' Right now the scope seems to be defined as 'anything that security officials claim'. Because of this, anything a journalist publishes can be said to violate National Security since National Security covers everything.
For example, Martin Luther King's speeches criticized the status quo. Since the status quo is now matter of National Security, Martin Luther King's speeches were a threat to National Security, by today's standards.
So the real argument is what exactly is National Security? Is the status quo more important than civil liberty? Further, why are we not investigating whether or not secret laws used to justify anything violate the law?
Are you seriously trying to say that this was Russia's plan all along? You're saying it's pretty clear.. Just flat out fucking say it.
No matter what the liars in our national security apparatus (and Mainstream Media) have said, their actions and spin just wreaks of bullshit to any free-thinking person that hears it. There's no way you can explain away secret courts, secret laws, lack of oversight, Obama lying, Clapper lying, and keep a straight face. The US Government trashed its credibility here and Snowden revealed it perfectly. The US government is going full Nazi Germany on our freedoms and they're saying it's for our own good.
It's like you're trying to say that everything Snowden revealed means nothing because Russia was behind it. So fucking what. Russia also helped us out of a war in Syria. The injustices are being done to the American people in the name of their own security and those injustices are out of the bag. I, for one, don't trust people like you that keep trying to tarnish Snowden's reputation. He's the biggest hero my generation has and what he has done is inspirational.
The American People aren't afraid of their security being affected by terrorism. The American People are afraid of their way of life and freedoms being destroyed by their own Government. How can they claim to be doing things for our own security when the decisions made by the same people are continually putting us on the brink of collapse?
I would like to know what you mean by that. Do you think it is a fair argument to merely label me?
I need to parse through 1000's of XML files and make sure { } are around all 'tags' in the files. I need to make sure of about 40 other rules that apply to these particular XML files.
Since everyone likes to knock Perl and Regular Expressions, what could possibly be a quicker and easier way to handle this? FYI, I did it in Perl - and I just could not imagine the amount of code I would have had to write in anything else..
^^^ A bunch of people that allow themselves to be divided by the people that are screwing them
We're all going to find out there's some still-unexplained phenomenon where every object outside the solar system is actually much closer than it appears to us do to this flux event that distorts everything. We are told by the world's brightest scientists that everything is goddamn far away. Voyager 1 is going to go out and prove that all wrong. We used to think the Earth is flat.
Maybe the joke is on us.. We are constantly told how free we are.. But what happens to anyone in our society that actually tried to effect change? What happens to the honest journalists or the honest politicians? How's our incarceration rate?
How the fuck is this funny? We have a direct quote from the director of the NSA and you make a joke alluding to conspiracy theorists like they're the crazy ones. The thing that is crazy here is that the dumb useless clueless fucktarded people like you would rather make light of something and continue to act like something is nothing than actually effect some positive change..
The US Constitution is the supreme law of the land.. You would probably make fun of that too.
I disagree with you about Snowden.. Snowden has proved that he was the only one trustworthy enough with that kind of information.
I absolutely hate how people talk about the negatives of automation like somehow things are better when humans did all the menial tasks. I remember an old Russian video where a worker was winding a ball of yarn by hand. That is degrading. What is even more degrading is paying a bunch of foreign people a lot less to do manual (and meaningless) tasks to make cheap products and then ship them across the world. Even further degrading is the layers of bullshit we have decided to surround ourselves with in other professions that waste the hours in our days.
The problem is not that 'there will be fewer jobs.' The problem is not that 'there are not enough resources.' The problem is that the jobs and the resources are all allocated wrong. We could (at least in America) have 20-30 hour work weeks, plenty of family time, decent pay, and a low unemployment rate.. if a certain select few did not make ALL the money and take control of ALL the resources.
I am an automation programmer. I work to automate any task I can possibly automate. I do not feel bad about it. Any automation I create has to be maintained.
As far as legislation forbidding the automation of certain industries.. Since the US Government fucks up everything it touches, I believe it will work to create laws to forbid the jobs that should be automated and laws to automate the jobs that should be manual. For example, the NSA said it will fire 90% of sysadmins and replace them with automation. Anyone in IT knows that idea is 100% stupid. Another example is the rise of red light cameras everywhere. As subjective as it is to enforce the law, our wonderful government has decided to make it legal for robots to do that for us. And, since the US military is having trouble finding new hires that have zero morality, they are working to automate drone warfare also. Great..
So, anyway, what I mean to say is.. Automation itself is not bad. It's the way we're using it that will be bad. Instead of using it to free ourselves, we are using it to enslave ourselves.