Gold is visibly unique, difficult to fake due to its density, very portable/workable, and very durable.
Your argument consists in telling me that gold has the combination of all the qualities that make gold gold. However none of these properties is special. There is not one single thing above that makes gold special - there are many materials that are denser, more rare, shinier, more portable, more durable, etc. In fact gold is no longer used as a daily currency because of its many flaws and other less adulterable materials are put into circulation instead.
No, the value of gold lies in its recognition as the de facto underlying currency for the past several thousand years. Things like plutonium are worth much more "dollars" per kg, but no one trades plutonium. Gold has been removed from general circulation, but most major financial institutions will issue currency to you in exchange for gold, properly assayed, inventoried or vouched for by recognized third parties.
The value is not in the signature or rubber stamp itself, it's in the fact that the bank is holding a copy at its office, and you are holding a copy at home, and both can be presented to a judge. Also neither of you have any intention of transferring said copy to anyone else. It exists as an insurance policy only.
While it may be theoretically hard to "forge" a cryptographic signature, apparently it's very easy to transfer them from person A to person B. Otherwise please explain to me how a bitcoin can be "stolen"?
And so, the NSA will have created a phone that the NSA itself could not use.
And this surprises you how, exactly?
Most security boils down to "security by obscurity" when you get past all the smoke and mirrors. Someone at the top above all the compartmentalization made the decision that he simply won't tell anyone about the back door. Except for Dan in Dept A where such a backdoor would be very VERY useful, you know, to keep tabs on the operatives, etc; and Roger in Dept B whose job it is to keep tabs on Dept A. Both Dan and Roger are trustworthy and sworn to secrecy, so there's no way that this back-door will be abused or leaked. Ever. Except...
About that - funny how inflation is eating away at the value of the dollar. When this law was made in the late 1970's, $10,000 was a chunk of change. It could certainly buy you a couple cars. My dad actually bought an apartment for $25,000 back then. Now $10,000 won't even buy you one car. But there's no sign of the limit being moved. So pretty soon we're all going to be criminals, or have to cross the border with less than a week's worth of spending/travel money with us. Fun how that works huh? Now think about tax brackets and how they suffer the same fate.
You needed to read on, to the part where it says (paraphrasing) "in any case if it IS negligence we're only liable for the service charges you would have had to pay". Kinda like when airlines say they're only liable for $200/suitcase or whatever. Hell $200 nowadays will hardly buy the suitcase, much less its contents. But there you go, you clicked "I agree".
Not true. I bet you in 10,000 years if the human race is still around, gold will still be tradeable for anything used as a form of currency anywhere on the planet. Bitcoins? LOL. People are quick to point out how worthless they think gold is. Not one of them would pass up the opportunity to grab a bunch of gold coins if they were just lying there. Why? Because they recognize the value. They just don't want to admit it. The value of gold is not in the gold itself, it's in the fact that everyone on the planet is taught from an early age that it has value.
You're missing the point. Even gold, cocoa beans, cows, or large rocks with a hole in the middle used as currency are imaginary. Because although you might convince someone to move off a piece of property because you gave him 3 cows, both parties have to be in agreement that the the land is worth 3 cows, and that 3 cows are worth the land. When you are starving what is the real value of a large rock with a hole in it? When you child is terminally ill how will a lump of gold fix your problem?
All currencies have an imaginary value attached to them which is assigned by people. Exactly how this value is arrived at and agreed upon by both parties to a transaction is a mystery, but it has to do with history (how many cocoa beans cows went for last time), the availability of the good or service, the quality of the good or service, and the availability of the currency as well as the ease with which the purchaser expects to be able to obtain more of the currency. It's hard to get a poor person to part with their last nickel, whereas a rich person could easily round to the nearest $10,000 on a million dollar purchase. But it's all imaginary.
Rofl yeah that makes a difference. A vote. You must be clueless if you haven't realized that the status quo is maintained no matter which political party is in power. The "vote" makes no difference. The only difference would be if you ran for office yourself, and even then you get caught by international treaties which override your puny national vote. And if all else fails, the person in power can simply ignore your vote. All of the above has happened, and is happening right now.
The internet has already been destroyed as far as I am concerned. There was a brief moment in the early 1990's where the sky was the limit and useful content was relatively easy to find. Now it has devolved into an endless and mindless recycling of garbage, all 100% optimized to make it at or near the top of the search engine pages. Some of this recycling is even done by bots. A lot of it is done by humans plagiarizing the same crap over and over. Occasionally, after about an hour's work, useful content can be found. Surely it used to take me less time to drive to the library and look stuff up on index cards?
And finally nearly everything is behind a paywall because, you know, the internet ain't free. We're all paying the telco tax of course but hey, it ain't free (read this as "I deserve a fucking cut too"). So if you don't have to pay because of a paywall, you have to pay through outright intrusion into your computer system (but don't worry, no PERSONALLY identifiable information will be shared) or even in the case of "social networking" sites, intrusion into your personal life.
Forums are just buffet troughs for trolls. Multi-player games are just one big grief-fest. And everything seems to be all about tricking you into clicking that useless link, a trick that used to be reserved for porn sites.
Translation: AC is a mindless sheep who believes that everything he reads is a brilliant idea put forward by highly intelligent selfless people without any agenda at all. Now stop questioning things and BELIEVE! Amen, brother.
1. House fails to go up on air cushion since the compressor did not start due to brown outs caused by 10 million other compressors attempting to draw power at the same time.
2. Transformers and substations explode all over Japan, and emergency services are left without power.
3. Occupants die, but at least are saved the embarassment of realizing how much money their government obliged them to waste on a useless system when they made installation mandatory.
Nice to know, especially when an earthquake starts and every hous in Japan starts to draw power at the same time to run their compressors. Combine maximum demand with the period of maximum likelyhood of power failure and what do you get? Something that sounds really neat on paper with the only practical use of chasing dumb people with VC dollars. Japan would benefit much more in making their houses say, waterproof...
Because their results make absolutely no sense. According to the study you are more likely to die from any cause because you were prescribed sleeping pills. Therefore the act of receiving a prescription somehow increases your risk of heart disease, cancer, etc. They also state that statistically these patients did not already have disease when the experiment was begun.
Well good thing science isn't just about explaining statistics. I'm waiting for an adequate plausible explanation for the above. The fact that their confidence interval bands overlap does not help their cause at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Gold is visibly unique, difficult to fake due to its density, very portable/workable, and very durable.
Your argument consists in telling me that gold has the combination of all the qualities that make gold gold. However none of these properties is special. There is not one single thing above that makes gold special - there are many materials that are denser, more rare, shinier, more portable, more durable, etc. In fact gold is no longer used as a daily currency because of its many flaws and other less adulterable materials are put into circulation instead.
No, the value of gold lies in its recognition as the de facto underlying currency for the past several thousand years. Things like plutonium are worth much more "dollars" per kg, but no one trades plutonium. Gold has been removed from general circulation, but most major financial institutions will issue currency to you in exchange for gold, properly assayed, inventoried or vouched for by recognized third parties.
The value is not in the signature or rubber stamp itself, it's in the fact that the bank is holding a copy at its office, and you are holding a copy at home, and both can be presented to a judge. Also neither of you have any intention of transferring said copy to anyone else. It exists as an insurance policy only.
While it may be theoretically hard to "forge" a cryptographic signature, apparently it's very easy to transfer them from person A to person B. Otherwise please explain to me how a bitcoin can be "stolen"?
My deductible.
And so, the NSA will have created a phone that the NSA itself could not use.
And this surprises you how, exactly?
Most security boils down to "security by obscurity" when you get past all the smoke and mirrors. Someone at the top above all the compartmentalization made the decision that he simply won't tell anyone about the back door. Except for Dan in Dept A where such a backdoor would be very VERY useful, you know, to keep tabs on the operatives, etc; and Roger in Dept B whose job it is to keep tabs on Dept A. Both Dan and Roger are trustworthy and sworn to secrecy, so there's no way that this back-door will be abused or leaked. Ever. Except...
About that - funny how inflation is eating away at the value of the dollar. When this law was made in the late 1970's, $10,000 was a chunk of change. It could certainly buy you a couple cars. My dad actually bought an apartment for $25,000 back then. Now $10,000 won't even buy you one car. But there's no sign of the limit being moved. So pretty soon we're all going to be criminals, or have to cross the border with less than a week's worth of spending/travel money with us. Fun how that works huh? Now think about tax brackets and how they suffer the same fate.
You needed to read on, to the part where it says (paraphrasing) "in any case if it IS negligence we're only liable for the service charges you would have had to pay". Kinda like when airlines say they're only liable for $200/suitcase or whatever. Hell $200 nowadays will hardly buy the suitcase, much less its contents. But there you go, you clicked "I agree".
or gold
Not true. I bet you in 10,000 years if the human race is still around, gold will still be tradeable for anything used as a form of currency anywhere on the planet. Bitcoins? LOL. People are quick to point out how worthless they think gold is. Not one of them would pass up the opportunity to grab a bunch of gold coins if they were just lying there. Why? Because they recognize the value. They just don't want to admit it. The value of gold is not in the gold itself, it's in the fact that everyone on the planet is taught from an early age that it has value.
You're missing the point. Even gold, cocoa beans, cows, or large rocks with a hole in the middle used as currency are imaginary. Because although you might convince someone to move off a piece of property because you gave him 3 cows, both parties have to be in agreement that the the land is worth 3 cows, and that 3 cows are worth the land. When you are starving what is the real value of a large rock with a hole in it? When you child is terminally ill how will a lump of gold fix your problem?
All currencies have an imaginary value attached to them which is assigned by people. Exactly how this value is arrived at and agreed upon by both parties to a transaction is a mystery, but it has to do with history (how many cocoa beans cows went for last time), the availability of the good or service, the quality of the good or service, and the availability of the currency as well as the ease with which the purchaser expects to be able to obtain more of the currency. It's hard to get a poor person to part with their last nickel, whereas a rich person could easily round to the nearest $10,000 on a million dollar purchase. But it's all imaginary.
But those bits have a paper-trail complete with signatures and rubber stamps.
Tell me, how much do you lose if your bank gets robbed?
Why don't you ask the Romans?
Watches the contrails of the age-old ROT-13 twice joke go streaming by far, far above AC's head.
Surely you mean all three sides of the conversation...
Rofl yeah that makes a difference. A vote. You must be clueless if you haven't realized that the status quo is maintained no matter which political party is in power. The "vote" makes no difference. The only difference would be if you ran for office yourself, and even then you get caught by international treaties which override your puny national vote. And if all else fails, the person in power can simply ignore your vote. All of the above has happened, and is happening right now.
Governments have never cared about people. They care about power. They get power by pretending to care about people.
The internet has already been destroyed as far as I am concerned. There was a brief moment in the early 1990's where the sky was the limit and useful content was relatively easy to find. Now it has devolved into an endless and mindless recycling of garbage, all 100% optimized to make it at or near the top of the search engine pages. Some of this recycling is even done by bots. A lot of it is done by humans plagiarizing the same crap over and over. Occasionally, after about an hour's work, useful content can be found. Surely it used to take me less time to drive to the library and look stuff up on index cards?
And finally nearly everything is behind a paywall because, you know, the internet ain't free. We're all paying the telco tax of course but hey, it ain't free (read this as "I deserve a fucking cut too"). So if you don't have to pay because of a paywall, you have to pay through outright intrusion into your computer system (but don't worry, no PERSONALLY identifiable information will be shared) or even in the case of "social networking" sites, intrusion into your personal life.
Forums are just buffet troughs for trolls. Multi-player games are just one big grief-fest. And everything seems to be all about tricking you into clicking that useless link, a trick that used to be reserved for porn sites.
If Canada had the oil the middle east does
Apparently it has more.
Translation: AC is a mindless sheep who believes that everything he reads is a brilliant idea put forward by highly intelligent selfless people without any agenda at all. Now stop questioning things and BELIEVE! Amen, brother.
1. House fails to go up on air cushion since the compressor did not start due to brown outs caused by 10 million other compressors attempting to draw power at the same time.
2. Transformers and substations explode all over Japan, and emergency services are left without power.
3. Occupants die, but at least are saved the embarassment of realizing how much money their government obliged them to waste on a useless system when they made installation mandatory.
Nice to know, especially when an earthquake starts and every hous in Japan starts to draw power at the same time to run their compressors. Combine maximum demand with the period of maximum likelyhood of power failure and what do you get? Something that sounds really neat on paper with the only practical use of chasing dumb people with VC dollars. Japan would benefit much more in making their houses say, waterproof...
Wouldn't be the worst thing a woman has done for money.
The beauty of politics is that there is always a mob willing to scream about anything. Success is determined by how you are prepared to use that mob.
In my experience that's how rich people become poor people. Rarely do children hang on to their parents' riches.
According to the study thr results were adjusted for age, so age as a factor is not supposed to be relevant.
Because their results make absolutely no sense. According to the study you are more likely to die from any cause because you were prescribed sleeping pills. Therefore the act of receiving a prescription somehow increases your risk of heart disease, cancer, etc. They also state that statistically these patients did not already have disease when the experiment was begun.
Well good thing science isn't just about explaining statistics. I'm waiting for an adequate plausible explanation for the above. The fact that their confidence interval bands overlap does not help their cause at all.