What phone has a notch at the bottom? And, I'd much rather have stereo front facing speakers with a chin and no notch, than an edge-to-edge display.
But without an edge-to-edge display, it will be much harder for you to accidentally drop your new $1000+ toy while trying to hold it by its tiny little edges! While you're trying not to cause it inadvertently to respond to you touching the screen and accidentally working some control or another, stopping a video, opening or closing an app without meaning to, etc.?
And without users constantly dropping and instantly breaking them, how will Apple be able to afford to buy Amazon.com, in order to become "Applezon" the world's first 2-trillion dollar company?!?
If Apple applies these same ideas to their cars, (if/when they ever shit out any such automotive abomination,) they'll stick the gas and brake pedals on the outside, so the foot-well in front of you has a neat, clean, and uncluttered appearance!
Then they'll stop selling them with steering columns, because they've just absorbed a company that makes bluetooth steering wheels, and they'll be damned if they're going to INCLUDE one of those for free when people are dumb enough to pay for them! There's customers to be fleeced, damnit!
In the shareholder meeting, I wonder if they run things a LOT like their public-facing product announcements.
"The new iPhone X(R) has an edge-to-edge display that will allow us to part gullible fools from their money 117% more quickly, and efficiently than EVER before!"
(Shareholders applaud dutifully.)
"The Buzz-Word Bullshit Salad that is the A12 "Bionic" Chip (which has nothing whatsoever to do with life so it's a really stupid name,) enables us to convince people with a perfectly good iPhone that is only a year or two old, to fork over another thousand dollars between 12 and 18 months BEFORE they were expected to do so!"
(More dutiful applause.)
"Upcharging by terminating the policy of including an adapter dongle will allow us to convince between 11 and 23 percent of potential suckers to buy our overpriced Beats Headphones, or even more premium-priced AirPods increasing the value of your iNvestment by up to a total of 37.8% over the next 2 to 3 fiscal quarters!"
"The option would result in a less expensive vehicle with a shorter range and the option to pay to remotely enable the longer range at a later stage."
Can you imagine if a real automotive manufacturer pulled this shit? Imagine if Ford, for example, offered to sell you an F150 with a 32 gallon gas tank, but had built-in software in the Engine Control Computer Module that would cut off the fuel pump and shut down the ignition system whenever it detects only 6 gallons of fuel, or less in the tank, in the hopes that you'll get good and sick and tired of the reduced range, call them up, and pay them some more money so they will remotely change the software so that you're able to drive until the fuel is literally completely exhausted?
Meanwhile, the whole time you're driving this thing around, you're carrying around a bunch of dead-weight, (which sounds, in the case of the "Tesla" car, something like 20% of the battery's not-insubstantial-weight,) which you can't access without coughing up extra money. In the meantime, the extra weight means your car uses more energy per unit distance traveled, extra wear and tear on your "car's" bearings, wheels, brakes,... basically the entire suspension, propulsion and braking systems, making it harder for you to stop, (increasing the odds of a front-end collision, by the way,) just to fuck you for a little more money.
What a great way to screw and nickel-and-dime your customers. Remind me never to buy one of their piece of shit cars. They're basically overpriced toys with Bonus, Premium 'DLC'.
Daring Fireball's John Gruber notes that if Kuo is correct, "someone with a Mac, iPhone, and iPad would need three different headphone adapters." That takes courage, Apple...
No. Just someone who buys a NEW Mac, iPhone AND iPad. I have all three of those, and I have ONE kind of headphone that I use with each, without an adapter, and that's a 1/8" 3 or 4-conductor minijack plug. My Mac has one, my iPad has one, and my iPhone, goshdarnit, has one. How'd I manage that? Simple. I categorically REFUSE to buy a phone without a headphone jack. I will go back and use a goddamned DUMB phone before I pay Apple for a defective-by-design piece of SHIT like the iPhone 7 or beyond, or whichever bullshit iPhones are missing their headphone jacks. I actually still have my old MP3 player, and I may just pull that out and dust it off, and use THAT... if I have to.
If Apple ever DOES produce a car, I wonder if they'll pull the same shit. You know, sell a car that interoperates with the iPhone, and is really cool but underpowered and overpriced and get a bunch of people to buy them, then "update" the thing with a new version that doesn't come with a fucking steering wheel, because they just bought a company that makes Bluetooth steering wheels, and they want to force you to pay extra just to get the same level of functionality you already had before, and offer you an "adapter" that would have to sit in your lap allowing you to use a wired steering wheel...
Cryptocurrency Wipeout Deepens To $640 Billion As Ether Leads Declines
Imaginary thing without tangible value continues to not be worth shit. Film at 11.
Seriously... shit, the gold standard, if you'll pardon the metaphor, in worthlessness, is ironically, pretty valuable, especially compared to cryptocurrency. I think of this as like someone standing on a street corner with a battered paper bag, inflated and seemingly holding something, then with the top folded over and stapled. He tells passers-by that the bag could maybe contain something that at some unspecified point in the future, could be very valuable, and asks if any of them would you like to buy it from him.
Then someone with FAR more money than sense, somehow, says, "SURE!" and buys the empty bag. When he complains, the seller says, first, he never guaranteed the bag had any specific thing in it, nor what its future value would be. Incidentally, the bag WAS full of air, and damnit, that could be really valuable. Just ask anyone who's choking, for example. Then the poor deluded fool who bought the bag turns around and starts, after publicly complaining that the previous asshole sold him a worthless empty bag full of air, MAYBE, trying to sell someone ELSE the bag. Eventually another dumbass comes along, and the process repeats.
How to do really well in the cryptocurrency marketplace: Don't. Buy. The. Empty. Fucking. Bag.
With this announcement, I'm done with "space". I hereby cease to give a flying fuck about NASA. Just the fact that they're CONSIDERING it... fuck them. I'll take this a step further... I don't give a completely sedentary, ground-based fuck, let alone a flying fuck, about anything they're doing from now on.
Soon as exploration for profit occurs... -sigh- Want to see an example of exploration for profit: look no further than the colonization of the so-called "new world".
Soon... NASA: Hey, look we're... ME: Fuck off, NASA, brought to you by Whoever-The-Fuck.
On the off chance NASA gives a damn about public perception of it, NASA's stock just took, with me, a 10,000% nosedive straight into Shitsville.
As the pacific garbage patch is supposedly microscopic particles that can't be seen by the human eye. The garbage patch has yet to be shown that it even exists.
If you can't see it, it doesn't exist? OH GAWD! I CAN'T BREATHE! I am in a hard vacuum, completely devoid of air, obviously, because I can't see any... no wait, I'm okay. Turns out that's not how it works.
Similarly, the gyre of plastic floating trash doesn't fail to exist because you can't see it. You just sample the seawater in different places, and see how many particles of plastic the samples have. You don't have to be able to see it with your eyes. It's like microbes. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there. Louis Pasteur demonstrated this once with a flask with a long, thin, curved neck. Read up!
The whole POINT of iOS is supposed to be that no additional security measures are necessary. That's the point of the walled-garden. If I need to pay someone to fix problems Apple leaves in (or puts in, the way Microsoft does,) on purpose, then there's no reason to pay the hefty Apple Premium, the Apple Tax, if you will, for having a smartphone. If I ever decide there's a need to resort to an extra app for security, I'm e-baying my damn iPhone and switching back to a dumb phone. Fie on all this technological nonsense.
You should take decisions assuming speculative execution is good. If you are wrong, you can always undo what you've done and start again.
But what if someone reads my mind to learn what I would have done had things turned out a particular way with speculative execution, because my brain is not designed to dispose properly and securely, of any possible results of considerations of what I might do if things turn out differently? Then what?
Technically French is Latin, or rather a descendant language of the Vulgar Latin spoken on Rome's Gaulish provinces. It adopted some words of Celtic and Germanic origin, but is a Romance language like Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Gallacian and Portuguese. It didn't borrow Latin words, it was Latin, with about 1500 years of linguistic evolution.
If French is Latin because parts of it were ONCE Latin, then it, (and all other Romance languages, Germanic languages, indeed, most languages spoken in Europe and Asia today,) are Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of them all, except perhaps languages of the Natives of Turtle Island, (aka North America) and other extreme isolates.
Not to get all argumentative, but the idea that a language is identical with, and indistinguishable from its parent language(s) and could, or worse, SHOULD (or even more absurdly, MUST) be called by the same name as its ancestor because it incorporates elements thereof, is specious and makes discussions of etymology impossible, because SOMEONE keeps insisting that all languages are the same, which is silliness. Also, there's more to a language than just vocabulary; construction, syntax, rules, etc., all play a part, and anyone who has ever studied more than one language, especially when the languages aren't extremely closely related, knows that there's a LOT more to learning a different language than learning the vocabulary. How words are assembled to express ideas varries considerably from one language to another. (This is why a verbatim translation is usually linguistically wrong, unless a sentence or fragment is extremely short and simple.)
Moreover, since languages change over time, a language can be said to descend from any of the earlier versions of the same language even if there has been no major change to the language resulting from influx or infusions due to the people speaking one language being conquered by those who speak another, (which is how all the Arabic that ends up being in modern Spanish got there, resulting in somewhere around 7% of Spanish being Arabic in origin,) due to internal changes over time in usage, vowel or consonant drift, changes in meaning, diversion, conversion, etc., etc., etc., you can't even really call a language the same thing as even a relatively recent version of itself, without anything being added from without. Modern Vernacular English of today has changed enough in even the last couple of centuries that it has at least become a different dialect, and if you compare Modern English, (even proper, rather than vernacular,) with Middle English or Old English, you'll find them completely different languages, even though all have the word "English" in the name. Yes, there's OFTEN commonality, though sometimes that's coincidental due to similar origins of words. For example, the word for mother, mom, or mama has an "m" sound somewhere in it, usually at/near the beginning in very nearly every human language. Hmm... I wonder why?
I have a sneaking suspicion that you don't know French, or Latin, let alone both, especially if you think they're the same language.
To linguists, the most basic measure of whether any two people are speaking the same language is whether they are mutually intelligible. Although you might be able to get by speaking one language amidst a group of people who speak only the other, able to communicate basic ideas and requests, such as, "I'm unwell, I need a doctor," or "where is the bathroom?" or "this is delicious, thanks!" when you start getting deep into a conversation and need to use advanced concepts for which simple words fall short, you will likely find the languages have diverged sufficiently for them to be mutually UNINTELLIGIBLE. I'll give you an example. Understanding that machine translation is less reliable the more esoteric, complicated, or sophisticated the ideas you try to encapsulate with words are, I'm going to use Google Translate here, and save you all the trouble.
Guy notorious for starting shitty company whose only real claim to fame is exploiting fear, uncertainty and doubt, aka FUD, and employing anticompetitive and illegal means to reap a theretofore previously undreamt fortune, doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about when it comes to software. Or economics. His company was and is shit, its fortune stolen from their betters, and he should seriously shut the fuck up before he convinces the last people who do not yet realize he was LUCKY and ruthless, not brilliant, that he is in fact, a dumbass.
Without CHEATING, without breaking laws designed to foster and protect healthy competition, Microsoft would have gone under almost before it got off the ground, you would never have heard of Bill Gates, and he would now be a night janitor at a junior college, bitter AF about his idiotic mistake dropping out rather than finishing his education.
Fuck him and his ignorant opinions. The laws of supply and demand DO apply to software... for example: If someone is selling a piece of software, i.e., an operating system, and no one wants it because it is a piece of dog shit, like for example... every other iteration of Microsoft Windows, there is little to no demand, and the price must be dropped to sell copies. If it is a hideous enough piece of shit, and there is NO price people will pay, you stop selling it because you lose money with every box you ship that gathers dust in perpetuity unsold.
On the other hand, if your OS (or whatever,) is awesome, you can charge real money for it and people will pay, even sometimes when there are cheaper alternatives. Gates does not know this because in his experience, he has never SOLD an operating system that was not a flaming pile of fetid shit.
Gates apparently thinks he has made some earthshaking insight that the fact that there exists a class of product where the majority of capital outlay in its creation is design, means somehow that product is exempt from laws of economics. Maybe his mind is going. The only real observation to be made here is that getting data to the customer has become trivially cheap.
This is only because price per bit transmitted has fallen far faster than inflation. If you wrote an OS, or indeed any piece of software where the amount of data is so large it cannot be supported conventionally, suddenly the laws of supply and demand would VERY much apply again, because in truth, they never STOPPED applying, and Gates is WRONG, and hilariously so.
I knew as soon as I heard the story that it was 100% pure, uncut bullshit. That much was obvious. I figured the "exact copy" of the website was the HTML code your computer downloads when visiting the site, and that THAT's what he allegedly changed, which is a bit like claiming someone can hack your car and open the doors because he can open the doors on HIS car, which happens to be the same kind as your car, and oh, we forgot to mention the doors were already unlocked... or something like that. In any case, even if for not precisely the right reasons, I was right about the fact that the story was total bullshit.
HOWEVER... I can't help but wonder if this is going to turn into a zombie-lie, you know, a fake, bullshit story that people go on citing over and over again either in stupid, pointless verbal arguments or in substantiate, meaningful, important debates on matters of policy, and that the dolts who are convinced that an 11 year old hacked into the voting system of a US state... will keep spouting this debunked claim over and over again. I'm sure in some circles, it will. Anything, for some people, that serves the point of their argument, they'll insist is "valid" even when it plainly ISN'T.
The seeming lack of a left or right bias is not your imagination. What they have is a pro-corporate bias, unsurprising as they're owned by corporations, just like most other "news" networks, which is why they're basically worthless and no one with any brains trusts them, giving rise to a nightmare hell-brew of conspiracy-theory fringe-lunatics masquerading as news, and opposing THEM both, the rag-tag rebel alliance of news sources that are paid for exclusively by their viewers, which these days are the only real source of reliable news and information, such as Democracy Now! (democracynow.org,) which doesn't take a penny from the American corporate oligarchs who own and exercise complete functional editorial control over what is aired on the "big 3" networks, and their equally useless cable alternatives like CNN.
The trouble with Democracy Now though, is that you can OD on it... finding out what actually the fuck is going on can be simultaneously infuriating and debilitatingly depressing.
I wonder how many Americans today have never heard of Standing Rock, for example, and have no idea that any kind of horrific crimes were committed there by jack-booted government thugs acting in their names, with their alleged consent, and using weapons paid for with their tax dollars, against peaceful protesters. Not many decades ago, but in fact just a very few years.
Sex is righteous. Sex is how our species survives. It is the reason everyone of us exists. And so on.
Sex is not dirty. It is perfectly natural and clean. Sexual desire is not dirty. It is an instinct that our species relies on for continuance.
Pornography is not dirty. It is the most automatic expression of our sexual instincts, given the tech available. It plays its part in assisting the entire enterprise of keeping our species alive.
People who want to block pornography usually have an ulterior motive. Either they actually want to block a whole bunch of other things and are just using a widespread cultural discomfort with our own survival instincts to get the necessary approval, or they are threatened by the fact that standards of beauty actually exist and aren't always trivially easy to achieve. Or they are just under-developed and hence erroneously believe their own sexual instincts are dirty. In any case, they insist that pornography is dirty, when it is not.
Isn't this the same setup for the story Tyrion begins telling but never gets to finish about walking into a brothel with a jackass and a honeycomb? It's a shame we didn't get to hear the rest of that story.:/
Pointing out that the headline very pointedly alleges what I DO... and it's of course, hilariously, stupidly fucking wrong. I spend maybe a minute or two in aggregate checking e-mail on a weekly basis. On the rare occasion I get an e-mail worthy of my time, rather than just bitch-slapping "delete," I actually READ it. This is READING, not checking.
CHECKING my email goes like this: "COMMAND-TAB-TAB-TAB ah, there's the e-mail. Nope, no new messages. COMMAND TAB" That's a couple seconds most times. I do that roughly once or twice a day, depending on whether or not I'm expecting any messages. Some days I don't check it at all. When I sit down at my computer, if I HAD any new email that WASN'T spam, there'd be a lingering desktop notification. If I don't see THAT, there's no reason even to switch-tasks to the email app and un-minimize it from the dock to look at it. So on days when I DO check, it's maybe a minute every few WEEKS.
So, to the author(s) of this bullshit story, be careful to whom you say "you spend 5 hours each week checking your e-mail". (What followed here was extremely rude and grotesque, so I'm just going to leave it to your imagination as I'm trying to clean up my fucking language a little goddamned bit.)
Have we beaten this fucking point quite entirely to death yet? Good. Moving right along.
a child born today has basically no chance of driving a car around the streets of Miami, Florida. In fact, there are children old enough to to know what Miami is, understand what's happening to it, who will never be able to drive its streets... (nor ride around in an Ubber or a Lyeft or whatever,) BUT, on the plus side, that child WILL be able to paddle in an ocean-going kayak, or sail a shallow-bottomed boat around in the ocean above what WAS Miami, and look down and see the foundations of all the houses and buildings that have mostly been washed away thanks to the pounding of the waves and surf, before they too are reclaimed.
So, basically, they're saying Miami will be completely submerged in 15 years or less???
Not a chance in hell...
Miami averages a couple meters above Sealevel. Oceans aren't going to rise three meters+ in 15 years. Not even with worst-case sealevel rise. Hell, we won't see that much sealevel rise this century, much less in the next 15 years (again, worst case).
Maybe. But the the estimates you're using were based on conservative figures. Since the scientists are foretelling gloom and doom, they don't, as a group, want to risk their credibility by making predictions that don't come true, so they tend to err on the side of caution, I think.
There are a number of factors not being taken into consideration because they can't. Wars, for example. In an already dry environment, like parts of Northern California burning to the ground, it doesn't take much, just a casually discarded cigarette, a spark from a tailpipe, a lightning strike, etc., to touch off a blaze that puts a few more million tons of gaseous carbon into the atmosphere that already has entirely too much of that element, that wasn't counted on in the models. When wars are fought, incendiary devices are, I've heard, occasionally used.
As polar ice disappears, even more millions of tons of formerly-safely-sequestered carbon is exposed and allowed to finish rotting away, dumping even more dangerous methane into the air, spiraling into ever greater amounts of the heat-trapping gas. Then some idiot decides to undo all the rules that were slowing down the destruction, and wants to speed it back up, actively, because he apparently, like so many other people, can't do basic math... out, it seems, of sheer SPITE.
Also there are other possible contributors to flooding, like changes in weather patterns that are already happening. Increasing turbulence of the ocean's surface COULD cause variations in sea-levels near land to cause some water to overtop levees that it previously could not; or maybe storms pushing massive waves over when before they were not high enough to get over existing walls.
The estimates for the rate of sea-level rise COULD be right, BUT they could also be wrong. Let's all hope they're right. Because if Miami DOES get submerged below rising ocean waves, or otherwise rendered uninhabitable, it means all the people there will FLOOD (pun intended, sorry,) into the rest of the country. More people means more crowding, more cars, more noise, etc.
I was going for Flintstones actually. They (the writers of "The Simpsons") may themselves have referenced this, though I can't recall; I haven't seen every episode.
(I think in more than one episode of the Flintstones, the pterodactyl was used as the stylus of a record player, but it's the same basic idea.)
$5 for a homebrew antenna? That's pure luxury! I make mine from Pringles cans. They were on sale last week at 99 cents per can so I bought 50 of them.
I had a pterodactyl on top of my TV-set, who would periodically stare off into space and mutter "it's a living". To this day I have no idea what he was talking about or whom he was talking TO. We weren't PAYING him, so... I don't see how he was making a living doing it. He simply had no choice because we super-glued his feet to the thing, and told him if he didn't hold his wings out, we'd beat the shit out of him. Got pretty good reception most of the time.
But some rube who cannot access the internet or get a clear signal is nothing at all.
I can haz mail merge?
Screw mail MERGE, I need mail PURGE! I have too much mail! I'm tempted to just go into my e-mail client and hit Ctrl-A then DELETE, but I have a feeling I might need a FEW of those in the future.
With good light (natural or artificial) even smartphone cameras can take astounding shots.
And Picasso could have made great art with even with crayons on foolscap. Thank goodness he went with oil paint on canvas.
Thanks for adding "foolscap" to my vocabulary.:)
Had to look it up. I've heard of like, 10 kinds of material for drawing and painting on in my art class that I took, like bristol-board and newsprint and vellum, and learned what "tooth" was with reference to material choice... but I'd never heard of THAT one though.
Slashdot Mirror
What phone has a notch at the bottom? And, I'd much rather have stereo front facing speakers with a chin and no notch, than an edge-to-edge display.
But without an edge-to-edge display, it will be much harder for you to accidentally drop your new $1000+ toy while trying to hold it by its tiny little edges! While you're trying not to cause it inadvertently to respond to you touching the screen and accidentally working some control or another, stopping a video, opening or closing an app without meaning to, etc.?
And without users constantly dropping and instantly breaking them, how will Apple be able to afford to buy Amazon.com, in order to become "Applezon" the world's first 2-trillion dollar company?!?
If Apple applies these same ideas to their cars, (if/when they ever shit out any such automotive abomination,) they'll stick the gas and brake pedals on the outside, so the foot-well in front of you has a neat, clean, and uncluttered appearance!
Then they'll stop selling them with steering columns, because they've just absorbed a company that makes bluetooth steering wheels, and they'll be damned if they're going to INCLUDE one of those for free when people are dumb enough to pay for them! There's customers to be fleeced, damnit!
In the shareholder meeting, I wonder if they run things a LOT like their public-facing product announcements.
"The new iPhone X(R) has an edge-to-edge display that will allow us to part gullible fools from their money 117% more quickly, and efficiently than EVER before!"
(Shareholders applaud dutifully.)
"The Buzz-Word Bullshit Salad that is the A12 "Bionic" Chip (which has nothing whatsoever to do with life so it's a really stupid name,) enables us to convince people with a perfectly good iPhone that is only a year or two old, to fork over another thousand dollars between 12 and 18 months BEFORE they were expected to do so!"
(More dutiful applause.)
"Upcharging by terminating the policy of including an adapter dongle will allow us to convince between 11 and 23 percent of potential suckers to buy our overpriced Beats Headphones, or even more premium-priced AirPods increasing the value of your iNvestment by up to a total of 37.8% over the next 2 to 3 fiscal quarters!"
(Delighted whoops and cheers.)
I'm getting soo sick of Apple.
"The option would result in a less expensive vehicle with a shorter range and the option to pay to remotely enable the longer range at a later stage."
Can you imagine if a real automotive manufacturer pulled this shit? Imagine if Ford, for example, offered to sell you an F150 with a 32 gallon gas tank, but had built-in software in the Engine Control Computer Module that would cut off the fuel pump and shut down the ignition system whenever it detects only 6 gallons of fuel, or less in the tank, in the hopes that you'll get good and sick and tired of the reduced range, call them up, and pay them some more money so they will remotely change the software so that you're able to drive until the fuel is literally completely exhausted?
Meanwhile, the whole time you're driving this thing around, you're carrying around a bunch of dead-weight, (which sounds, in the case of the "Tesla" car, something like 20% of the battery's not-insubstantial-weight,) which you can't access without coughing up extra money. In the meantime, the extra weight means your car uses more energy per unit distance traveled, extra wear and tear on your "car's" bearings, wheels, brakes,... basically the entire suspension, propulsion and braking systems, making it harder for you to stop, (increasing the odds of a front-end collision, by the way,) just to fuck you for a little more money.
What a great way to screw and nickel-and-dime your customers. Remind me never to buy one of their piece of shit cars. They're basically overpriced toys with Bonus, Premium 'DLC'.
Fuck 125% of that shit.
Daring Fireball's John Gruber notes that if Kuo is correct, "someone with a Mac, iPhone, and iPad would need three different headphone adapters." That takes courage, Apple...
No. Just someone who buys a NEW Mac, iPhone AND iPad. I have all three of those, and I have ONE kind of headphone that I use with each, without an adapter, and that's a 1/8" 3 or 4-conductor minijack plug. My Mac has one, my iPad has one, and my iPhone, goshdarnit, has one. How'd I manage that? Simple. I categorically REFUSE to buy a phone without a headphone jack. I will go back and use a goddamned DUMB phone before I pay Apple for a defective-by-design piece of SHIT like the iPhone 7 or beyond, or whichever bullshit iPhones are missing their headphone jacks. I actually still have my old MP3 player, and I may just pull that out and dust it off, and use THAT... if I have to.
If Apple ever DOES produce a car, I wonder if they'll pull the same shit. You know, sell a car that interoperates with the iPhone, and is really cool but underpowered and overpriced and get a bunch of people to buy them, then "update" the thing with a new version that doesn't come with a fucking steering wheel, because they just bought a company that makes Bluetooth steering wheels, and they want to force you to pay extra just to get the same level of functionality you already had before, and offer you an "adapter" that would have to sit in your lap allowing you to use a wired steering wheel...
It's the kind of shit they'd do, honestly.
Cryptocurrency Wipeout Deepens To $640 Billion As Ether Leads Declines
Imaginary thing without tangible value continues to not be worth shit. Film at 11.
Seriously... shit, the gold standard, if you'll pardon the metaphor, in worthlessness, is ironically, pretty valuable, especially compared to cryptocurrency. I think of this as like someone standing on a street corner with a battered paper bag, inflated and seemingly holding something, then with the top folded over and stapled. He tells passers-by that the bag could maybe contain something that at some unspecified point in the future, could be very valuable, and asks if any of them would you like to buy it from him.
Then someone with FAR more money than sense, somehow, says, "SURE!" and buys the empty bag. When he complains, the seller says, first, he never guaranteed the bag had any specific thing in it, nor what its future value would be. Incidentally, the bag WAS full of air, and damnit, that could be really valuable. Just ask anyone who's choking, for example. Then the poor deluded fool who bought the bag turns around and starts, after publicly complaining that the previous asshole sold him a worthless empty bag full of air, MAYBE, trying to sell someone ELSE the bag. Eventually another dumbass comes along, and the process repeats.
How to do really well in the cryptocurrency marketplace: Don't. Buy. The. Empty. Fucking. Bag.
Ever.
You're welcome.
With this announcement, I'm done with "space". I hereby cease to give a flying fuck about NASA. Just the fact that they're CONSIDERING it... fuck them. I'll take this a step further... I don't give a completely sedentary, ground-based fuck, let alone a flying fuck, about anything they're doing from now on.
Soon as exploration for profit occurs... -sigh- Want to see an example of exploration for profit: look no further than the colonization of the so-called "new world".
Soon...
NASA: Hey, look we're...
ME: Fuck off, NASA, brought to you by Whoever-The-Fuck.
On the off chance NASA gives a damn about public perception of it, NASA's stock just took, with me, a 10,000% nosedive straight into Shitsville.
As the pacific garbage patch is supposedly microscopic particles that can't be seen by the human eye. The garbage patch has yet to be shown that it even exists.
If you can't see it, it doesn't exist? OH GAWD! I CAN'T BREATHE! I am in a hard vacuum, completely devoid of air, obviously, because I can't see any... no wait, I'm okay. Turns out that's not how it works.
Similarly, the gyre of plastic floating trash doesn't fail to exist because you can't see it. You just sample the seawater in different places, and see how many particles of plastic the samples have. You don't have to be able to see it with your eyes. It's like microbes. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there. Louis Pasteur demonstrated this once with a flask with a long, thin, curved neck. Read up!
It's like you read the first sentence of my post, but not the rest.
It's like you read the first sentence of my post, but not the rest. Don't worry about it though.
We'll just have to agree to disagree and leave it at that.
The whole POINT of iOS is supposed to be that no additional security measures are necessary. That's the point of the walled-garden. If I need to pay someone to fix problems Apple leaves in (or puts in, the way Microsoft does,) on purpose, then there's no reason to pay the hefty Apple Premium, the Apple Tax, if you will, for having a smartphone. If I ever decide there's a need to resort to an extra app for security, I'm e-baying my damn iPhone and switching back to a dumb phone. Fie on all this technological nonsense.
You should take decisions assuming speculative execution is good. If you are wrong, you can always undo what you've done and start again.
But what if someone reads my mind to learn what I would have done had things turned out a particular way with speculative execution, because my brain is not designed to dispose properly and securely, of any possible results of considerations of what I might do if things turn out differently? Then what?
Just... asking for a friend.
Technically French is Latin, or rather a descendant language of the Vulgar Latin spoken on Rome's Gaulish provinces. It adopted some words of Celtic and Germanic origin, but is a Romance language like Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Gallacian and Portuguese. It didn't borrow Latin words, it was Latin, with about 1500 years of linguistic evolution.
If French is Latin because parts of it were ONCE Latin, then it, (and all other Romance languages, Germanic languages, indeed, most languages spoken in Europe and Asia today,) are Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of them all, except perhaps languages of the Natives of Turtle Island, (aka North America) and other extreme isolates.
Not to get all argumentative, but the idea that a language is identical with, and indistinguishable from its parent language(s) and could, or worse, SHOULD (or even more absurdly, MUST) be called by the same name as its ancestor because it incorporates elements thereof, is specious and makes discussions of etymology impossible, because SOMEONE keeps insisting that all languages are the same, which is silliness. Also, there's more to a language than just vocabulary; construction, syntax, rules, etc., all play a part, and anyone who has ever studied more than one language, especially when the languages aren't extremely closely related, knows that there's a LOT more to learning a different language than learning the vocabulary. How words are assembled to express ideas varries considerably from one language to another. (This is why a verbatim translation is usually linguistically wrong, unless a sentence or fragment is extremely short and simple.)
Moreover, since languages change over time, a language can be said to descend from any of the earlier versions of the same language even if there has been no major change to the language resulting from influx or infusions due to the people speaking one language being conquered by those who speak another, (which is how all the Arabic that ends up being in modern Spanish got there, resulting in somewhere around 7% of Spanish being Arabic in origin,) due to internal changes over time in usage, vowel or consonant drift, changes in meaning, diversion, conversion, etc., etc., etc., you can't even really call a language the same thing as even a relatively recent version of itself, without anything being added from without. Modern Vernacular English of today has changed enough in even the last couple of centuries that it has at least become a different dialect, and if you compare Modern English, (even proper, rather than vernacular,) with Middle English or Old English, you'll find them completely different languages, even though all have the word "English" in the name. Yes, there's OFTEN commonality, though sometimes that's coincidental due to similar origins of words. For example, the word for mother, mom, or mama has an "m" sound somewhere in it, usually at/near the beginning in very nearly every human language. Hmm... I wonder why?
I have a sneaking suspicion that you don't know French, or Latin, let alone both, especially if you think they're the same language.
To linguists, the most basic measure of whether any two people are speaking the same language is whether they are mutually intelligible. Although you might be able to get by speaking one language amidst a group of people who speak only the other, able to communicate basic ideas and requests, such as, "I'm unwell, I need a doctor," or "where is the bathroom?" or "this is delicious, thanks!" when you start getting deep into a conversation and need to use advanced concepts for which simple words fall short, you will likely find the languages have diverged sufficiently for them to be mutually UNINTELLIGIBLE. I'll give you an example. Understanding that machine translation is less reliable the more esoteric, complicated, or sophisticated the ideas you try to encapsulate with words are, I'm going to use Google Translate here, and save you all the trouble.
The following paragrap
Despite 'Painful' Spectre Response, Linus Torvalds Says He Still Loves Speculative Execution
I love speculative execution too... in theory. Hypothetically. In truth, how I feel about it depends on certain considerations, to be determined.
-Sigh-.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Guy notorious for starting shitty company whose only real claim to fame is exploiting fear, uncertainty and doubt, aka FUD, and employing anticompetitive and illegal means to reap a theretofore previously undreamt fortune, doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about when it comes to software. Or economics. His company was and is shit, its fortune stolen from their betters, and he should seriously shut the fuck up before he convinces the last people who do not yet realize he was LUCKY and ruthless, not brilliant, that he is in fact, a dumbass.
Without CHEATING, without breaking laws designed to foster and protect healthy competition, Microsoft would have gone under almost before it got off the ground, you would never have heard of Bill Gates, and he would now be a night janitor at a junior college, bitter AF about his idiotic mistake dropping out rather than finishing his education.
Fuck him and his ignorant opinions. The laws of supply and demand DO apply to software... for example: If someone is selling a piece of software, i.e., an operating system, and no one wants it because it is a piece of dog shit, like for example... every other iteration of Microsoft Windows, there is little to no demand, and the price must be dropped to sell copies. If it is a hideous enough piece of shit, and there is NO price people will pay, you stop selling it because you lose money with every box you ship that gathers dust in perpetuity unsold.
On the other hand, if your OS (or whatever,) is awesome, you can charge real money for it and people will pay, even sometimes when there are cheaper alternatives. Gates does not know this because in his experience, he has never SOLD an operating system that was not a flaming pile of fetid shit.
Gates apparently thinks he has made some earthshaking insight that the fact that there exists a class of product where the majority of capital outlay in its creation is design, means somehow that product is exempt from laws of economics. Maybe his mind is going. The only real observation to be made here is that getting data to the customer has become trivially cheap.
This is only because price per bit transmitted has fallen far faster than inflation. If you wrote an OS, or indeed any piece of software where the amount of data is so large it cannot be supported conventionally, suddenly the laws of supply and demand would VERY much apply again, because in truth, they never STOPPED applying, and Gates is WRONG, and hilariously so.
I knew as soon as I heard the story that it was 100% pure, uncut bullshit. That much was obvious. I figured the "exact copy" of the website was the HTML code your computer downloads when visiting the site, and that THAT's what he allegedly changed, which is a bit like claiming someone can hack your car and open the doors because he can open the doors on HIS car, which happens to be the same kind as your car, and oh, we forgot to mention the doors were already unlocked... or something like that. In any case, even if for not precisely the right reasons, I was right about the fact that the story was total bullshit.
HOWEVER... I can't help but wonder if this is going to turn into a zombie-lie, you know, a fake, bullshit story that people go on citing over and over again either in stupid, pointless verbal arguments or in substantiate, meaningful, important debates on matters of policy, and that the dolts who are convinced that an 11 year old hacked into the voting system of a US state... will keep spouting this debunked claim over and over again. I'm sure in some circles, it will. Anything, for some people, that serves the point of their argument, they'll insist is "valid" even when it plainly ISN'T.
Here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The seeming lack of a left or right bias is not your imagination. What they have is a pro-corporate bias, unsurprising as they're owned by corporations, just like most other "news" networks, which is why they're basically worthless and no one with any brains trusts them, giving rise to a nightmare hell-brew of conspiracy-theory fringe-lunatics masquerading as news, and opposing THEM both, the rag-tag rebel alliance of news sources that are paid for exclusively by their viewers, which these days are the only real source of reliable news and information, such as Democracy Now! (democracynow.org,) which doesn't take a penny from the American corporate oligarchs who own and exercise complete functional editorial control over what is aired on the "big 3" networks, and their equally useless cable alternatives like CNN.
The trouble with Democracy Now though, is that you can OD on it... finding out what actually the fuck is going on can be simultaneously infuriating and debilitatingly depressing.
I wonder how many Americans today have never heard of Standing Rock, for example, and have no idea that any kind of horrific crimes were committed there by jack-booted government thugs acting in their names, with their alleged consent, and using weapons paid for with their tax dollars, against peaceful protesters. Not many decades ago, but in fact just a very few years.
My guess is "pretty damned few." Pathetic.
Sex is righteous. Sex is how our species survives. It is the reason everyone of us exists. And so on.
Sex is not dirty. It is perfectly natural and clean. Sexual desire is not dirty. It is an instinct that our species relies on for continuance.
Pornography is not dirty. It is the most automatic expression of our sexual instincts, given the tech available. It plays its part in assisting the entire enterprise of keeping our species alive.
People who want to block pornography usually have an ulterior motive. Either they actually want to block a whole bunch of other things and are just using a widespread cultural discomfort with our own survival instincts to get the necessary approval, or they are threatened by the fact that standards of beauty actually exist and aren't always trivially easy to achieve. Or they are just under-developed and hence erroneously believe their own sexual instincts are dirty. In any case, they insist that pornography is dirty, when it is not.
"Do you think sex is dirty?"
"It is if you're doing it right!"
~ Some Woody Allen movie.
Isn't this the same setup for the story Tyrion begins telling but never gets to finish about walking into a brothel with a jackass and a honeycomb? It's a shame we didn't get to hear the rest of that story. :/
Pointing out that the headline very pointedly alleges what I DO... and it's of course, hilariously, stupidly fucking wrong. I spend maybe a minute or two in aggregate checking e-mail on a weekly basis. On the rare occasion I get an e-mail worthy of my time, rather than just bitch-slapping "delete," I actually READ it. This is READING, not checking.
CHECKING my email goes like this: "COMMAND-TAB-TAB-TAB ah, there's the e-mail. Nope, no new messages. COMMAND TAB" That's a couple seconds most times. I do that roughly once or twice a day, depending on whether or not I'm expecting any messages. Some days I don't check it at all. When I sit down at my computer, if I HAD any new email that WASN'T spam, there'd be a lingering desktop notification. If I don't see THAT, there's no reason even to switch-tasks to the email app and un-minimize it from the dock to look at it. So on days when I DO check, it's maybe a minute every few WEEKS.
So, to the author(s) of this bullshit story, be careful to whom you say "you spend 5 hours each week checking your e-mail". (What followed here was extremely rude and grotesque, so I'm just going to leave it to your imagination as I'm trying to clean up my fucking language a little goddamned bit.)
Have we beaten this fucking point quite entirely to death yet? Good. Moving right along.
So, basically, they're saying Miami will be completely submerged in 15 years or less???
Not a chance in hell...
Miami averages a couple meters above Sealevel. Oceans aren't going to rise three meters+ in 15 years. Not even with worst-case sealevel rise. Hell, we won't see that much sealevel rise this century, much less in the next 15 years (again, worst case).
Maybe. But the the estimates you're using were based on conservative figures. Since the scientists are foretelling gloom and doom, they don't, as a group, want to risk their credibility by making predictions that don't come true, so they tend to err on the side of caution, I think.
There are a number of factors not being taken into consideration because they can't. Wars, for example. In an already dry environment, like parts of Northern California burning to the ground, it doesn't take much, just a casually discarded cigarette, a spark from a tailpipe, a lightning strike, etc., to touch off a blaze that puts a few more million tons of gaseous carbon into the atmosphere that already has entirely too much of that element, that wasn't counted on in the models. When wars are fought, incendiary devices are, I've heard, occasionally used.
As polar ice disappears, even more millions of tons of formerly-safely-sequestered carbon is exposed and allowed to finish rotting away, dumping even more dangerous methane into the air, spiraling into ever greater amounts of the heat-trapping gas. Then some idiot decides to undo all the rules that were slowing down the destruction, and wants to speed it back up, actively, because he apparently, like so many other people, can't do basic math... out, it seems, of sheer SPITE.
Also there are other possible contributors to flooding, like changes in weather patterns that are already happening. Increasing turbulence of the ocean's surface COULD cause variations in sea-levels near land to cause some water to overtop levees that it previously could not; or maybe storms pushing massive waves over when before they were not high enough to get over existing walls.
The estimates for the rate of sea-level rise COULD be right, BUT they could also be wrong. Let's all hope they're right. Because if Miami DOES get submerged below rising ocean waves, or otherwise rendered uninhabitable, it means all the people there will FLOOD (pun intended, sorry,) into the rest of the country. More people means more crowding, more cars, more noise, etc.
That's a nice Simpsons reference.
I was going for Flintstones actually. They (the writers of "The Simpsons") may themselves have referenced this, though I can't recall; I haven't seen every episode.
(I think in more than one episode of the Flintstones, the pterodactyl was used as the stylus of a record player, but it's the same basic idea.)
I have already rated Facebook. They get a zero.
Facebook is a blight upon humanity that should be abandoned by all and abolished as a grievous mistake that we as a species should never have made.
That is all.
$5 for a homebrew antenna? That's pure luxury! I make mine from Pringles cans. They were on sale last week at 99 cents per can so I bought 50 of them.
I had a pterodactyl on top of my TV-set, who would periodically stare off into space and mutter "it's a living". To this day I have no idea what he was talking about or whom he was talking TO. We weren't PAYING him, so... I don't see how he was making a living doing it. He simply had no choice because we super-glued his feet to the thing, and told him if he didn't hold his wings out, we'd beat the shit out of him. Got pretty good reception most of the time.
But some rube who cannot access the internet or get a clear signal is nothing at all.
I can haz mail merge?
Screw mail MERGE, I need mail PURGE! I have too much mail! I'm tempted to just go into my e-mail client and hit Ctrl-A then DELETE, but I have a feeling I might need a FEW of those in the future.
With good light (natural or artificial) even smartphone cameras can take astounding shots.
And Picasso could have made great art with even with crayons on foolscap. Thank goodness he went with oil paint on canvas.
Thanks for adding "foolscap" to my vocabulary. :)
Had to look it up. I've heard of like, 10 kinds of material for drawing and painting on in my art class that I took, like bristol-board and newsprint and vellum, and learned what "tooth" was with reference to material choice... but I'd never heard of THAT one though.