You've (perhaps deliberately) misunderstood the argument. In your example, is you/are you, the choice of conjugation of the verb "to be" is based on "you" not "data". This is like people arguing about the difference between rope and line (on a boat or a ship) and you come along and say "a line is the shortest distance between two points, and that rope you're all arguing about is coiled up, so..." which has nothing to do with what they're talking about.
Incidentally, is it my family IS or my family ARE? Data can be multiple pieces of information even about multiple things, and as a single umbrella name for that information, it would be appropriate to say "the data is..." just like "my family is". Data is information, and we don't say "the information are missing". We say "the information IS missing"...
The data is all in, and my family entirely agrees with me on this point. (See, data here, multiple pieces of information is treated as a singular noun, just like family.) You could also say "The data are..." Hmm... actually I don't like that one. I came here to make ONE point and ended up taking a side instead. DAMNIT!
Okay, put me down as "Data IS". NOW... is it DAY-tuh, (first syllable rhymes with LAY) or DAA-tuh? (first syllable rhymes with CAT)?
I'm in the "rhymes with LAY" camp. So "The DAY-tuh IS..."
Damnit. I was going to make ONE comment and leave. ONE lousy stupid comment and get on with my fucking life... DON'T get drawn into this stupid arguement, I said to myself...
We're pretty sure, but we need to wait until more data is available before we officially close the debate.
We're pretty sure, but we need to wait until more data are available before we officially close the debate.
Well, that settles it: The second form just feels weird and stilted, like a grammar rule from a musty out-of-date dictionary. Debate closed.
Is it correct to say "I didn't" or "I did not"? How about we declare either (is it EEther or IIther?) is valid, and quit wasting time arguing over which is "correct"? That's all I came here to say. It's a stupid argument and apart from making this point, I want nothing to do with it. Y'all have fun now.
Glad that for a few days, weeks, months, or maybe years, that it's finally finished, since one end of it is about to disappear below the surface of the ocean.
According to https://miami.cbslocal.com/201... 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.
Yeah, I was just noticing that. Went to close the tab and saw that it was a page for a bundle, so I went to find the actual device itself, and... came back here to fix this.
Seems I may have spoken too soon on this one. I'm usually pretty careful to do at least a cursory check before making an assertion like this, so I'm kind of embarrassed that I missed this one. Lo siento mucho, todos.
HRMmmm... What was the point of the Voyage that justified the extra price verses the Paperwhite? I recall looking at these a year or two ago and not being able to figure it out. Thanks. I think the big diff was automatic light sensing or something.:-/
Seriously though... this is fear-mongering about the WRONG damned thing. AIs are not out to steal your jobs. Your BOSS is out to buy something that will do your job without requiring time off to take its little AI kids to soccer practice or whatever.
What fresh hell will this do to human society? How specifically is this the harbinger of the end-of-days?
It's not. We have lots of problems, many cited in the story, such as income inequality, etc. But AI isn't doing that any more than the advent of the motorized automobile destroyed society by putting farriers and saddlers, etc., out of work. They just ended up having to get new skills and do new jobs.
The "cotton 'gin" didn't end society despite automating the weaving of cloth (or whatever a cotton 'gin does,) making (whatever it does) probably about less than 10% as labor-intensive as it was before. The weavers found something else to do, I'm sure, by and large. The combine didn't end civilization by automating the collection of stalks of wheat, corn, and barley, hay, etc., etc., etc., it just made gathering natural inputs to other businesses more efficient, making it easier for the next step in the process to add value, (sorry about all these buzz words, folks, but they DO apply in this case,) resulting in increased gross output of our society, applying downward pressure on prices, raising the cap on the sheer volume of what we produced, which had a chain-reaction effect of making everything that depended on those products as inputs in some way to theirs to be made in greater abundance, increasing the quality of life, life-expectancy, etc., for many segments of society.
Rather, as a result, some, perhaps many of the people whose jobs were eliminated by the combine got jobs working the corn-flaking machines, giving rise to a whole new way to eat breakfast.
(While I'm sure it's true, it needs to be said, that some people benefited a lot damn more than others, that's kind of beside the point. The point was that humans are flexible, adaptable, and imaginative problem-solvers, and unless and until AI is able to solve every problem any human could possibly solve, there's still a need for us. Also, I rather doubt AI will reach the point of being any meaningful danger any time soon.)
Getting back to the topic, the digital electronic computer made human number-crunching professionals very nearly obsolete. Did they experience a mass die-off? No, they put their brain-power to different problems, too complex to be handled by the poor, stupid, dim-witted 8-bit computing devices that were able to replace them on tasks like, "add up this column of 500 numbers, then divide it by the result of step 14, and if the remainder is a non-terminating, repeating decimal..." and probably a lot of them took new jobs programming the very computers that replaced them.
SURE, it's true, some people can't or won't adapt. But to shake your fists at the bosses who replace you with a machine that can do your job better and cheaper is, looked at the situation from another perspective, like demanding that the boss, because he hired you, is obliged to pay you for EVER. That brings with it numerous problems, and it is besides unfair, and would tend to discourage people hiring folks in the FIRST place, if they know they're going to be punished for offering you a job to begin with, at some point down the road.
There is good in recognizing the virtue of an honest day's work, and in protecting the rights of laborers, but to pretend that businesses are all 100% evil, parasitic monsters, (the big ones I would more easily argue are that, more often, per capita, than the little ones,) but the way to solve this problem and many others facing us isn't to piss yourselves over AI stealing your job, and making moves to outlaw AI research, etc. That's like trying to plug a hole in a dam from the side the water's coming OUT of, rather than plugging the whole from the backside, with something that can withstand t
It's still for sale, right now, so... I have no idea what they're talking about. I guess this is like you go to a big box store, and you see they no longer have Campesso Beef with Barley Soup, and you go, OMG, THEY DON'T HAVE BEEF WITH... oh, wait, they just moved it to the end-cap between this aisle and the next. Never mind.
Maybe they are planning to phase them out, or maybe they just have lots more of the other models they'd rather sell, and so they want to steer people towards those other models. Just saying.
Reading books is much more important than owning them. EBooks eliminates waste.
Owning DVDs doesn't strike me as an important thing in life.
Still, despite these two things, I own a crapload of stuff.
Did you know that there has been a trend to reduce or even eliminate the savings that you, as a consumer, could realize by buying the electronic book as opposed to the physical one, despite how much more waste making and selling physical books creates?
When I asked a customer service rep at a company that shall remain namelesz, why in some cases the phsycial book is CHEAPER, NEW than the ebook when this retailer sells both, the response I got was that people are still buying physical books. (Inasmuch as that's not really an explanation why something that by rights SHOULD be cheaper ISN'T,) I replied with something like, "but... don't you have to pay the same royalties on both, based on intellectual property, but NOT have to pay to print the book itself, nor pay for the physical storage space of each in warehouses, on trucks, and ultimately on bookshelves in actual, brick-and-mortar stores whenever you start opening those for books, for the electronic books you DO sell? Why not make it easer to buy THOSE?"
The response I got basically was that they make more money pricing them this way, so this is the way they price them. (Sigh.)
It doesn't. Completely stupid idea. Google is full of stupid ideas, but they have a lot of employees so they need to keep looking like they are busy doing stuff.
That's why Google is a failing company with terrible ratings! Witch hunt!
You forgot to mention that Gmail's new confidential mode is totally rigged, that it's sad, and also that someone should investigate whether or not Hillary Clinton has ever used Gmail. No confidentialusion!
Yawn. Someone with an agenda at Bloomberg "News" wants us to be scared of something, specifically, the allegedly increasing tendency of people to share shit. Gee, I wonder why people whose bread & butter is encouraging people to work their asses off for next to nothing, and then to squander as much of a portion as possible of that next-to-nothing they somehow have to scrape by on, buying shit that the people who own Bloomberg "News" profit from the most whenever they're bought. Could there be a relationship there? Oh, and this isn't a new thing. Lending or sharing of books, etc., predates libraries, and libraries predate this country's existence. Any upward tick in this should be viewed of as a bad thing only inasmuch as people who would rather own their own copy CAN'T because they can't AFFORD to after paying through the nose for everything they NEED, and losing an arm and a leg as the cost of anything they want afterwards.
The real thing Bloomberg's readers should be afraid of is when people start buying Amazon Kindle books and Barnes & Noble Nook books, etc., on how to improvise pitchforks and torches, and how to construct GUILLOTINES.
There is an upper bound on the amount of economic inequality people are capable, on the whole, of tolerating before saying "fuck it" and then the lights go out, and you'll wish SOMEONE had stepped the fuck up and FDR'ed America again. Or I guess rolled the fuck up in a wheelchair and FDR'ed this motherfucker again. When the system is so rigged that you can't get by no matter how hard you work, you really don't have anything to lose. One more good housing crisis, credit bubble popping, flash crash, or episode of runaway inflation and you're going to start to see rich people running for the airports, only to learn that the people already know where they are, and it's hard to take off when there's overturned cars burning all over the runways, and people have shot their getaway planes full of holes.
"Don't worry. They can't do shit to me, I'm a fucking queen!" ~ Marie Antoinette, being famously, hilariously, and extremely goddamned wrong.
enable rant modeRANT MODE ENABLED AT FULL POWER (DEFAULT)
Meanwhile, in Washington DC, your politicians continue to have been bought and paid for, and plot to give even more money to people so rich they have no real idea how much fucking money they already have, and to take away your ability to vote, organize at work, or get healthcare after their jackbooted government thug cops shoot you, break your arms, crack your skull, sear your lungs and eyes with tear gas, etc., and then the corporate-owned-and-controlled-puppet-media manages to find something else to talk about because they're owned by the same fucking people the cops are actually serving when they're locking you up for having the temerity to exercise your first amendment and other rights, just like they did at Standing Rock. Film at 11... just not on any broadcast TV channel you can pick up because... did I mention they're all owned by the same cabal of too-rich slimy assholes?
How does it stop someone from taking a photo of your displayed e-mail with another device? Even if it somehow stops me taking a screenshot, there's no way from keeping me from taking a shot of the screen.
Australia really is just upside-down America. I thought it was just a weird coincidence of cartography, but... nope. Good thing I had no burning desire to go there. Wonder what they'll think up next? My guess is lifetime imprisonment on a giant island for just being Australian... oh, wait... they already HAVE that. LOL-Failstrailia.
The value of BTC, like that of any fiat currency, is based on the trust placed in it to have future value, which itself is based on trust. The price fluctuates wildly because, like you say, there's no underlying asset to assess fair value or to provide price stickiness. It fluctuates by the mental whim of those placing value in it, which is imprecise and fickle. But that doesn't mean it's all a gamble. Many phenomena are chaotic and it's impossibne to say anything precise about the phenomena in the immediate future, yet the phenomena can be analyzed through long term trends, and other tools to remove noise.
And it's hard to make a claim that BTC is about to fail when it's doing the same thing it's done for a decade. And it becomes increasingly harder to claim it will fail in the future with every passing year.
To each his own. Invest in it if you like, and best of luck to you; I, however, shall not, for the reasons I already stated.
Slashdot has blacklisted many unicode characters for long time. Curved quotation marks are part of those characters you can't use on this site (unless via HTML entities). [...]
Thanks... so it's a Unicode issue. Is there a setting somewhere in iOS I could change to make it so things work as they're supposed to?
When "smart" isn't. I'm happy I still have all "dumb" appliances because at least some schmuck reaching in through the internet and taking control of them is something I don't have to worry about. Paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to be able to adjust my thermostat from bed, instead of getting up, walking downstairs and pressing a button on its face, (or moving a lever) is not a SMART trade-off. I don't need my refrigerator to order groceries for me. I don't want my water-heater talking to my toaster; the two have NOTHING to discuss. The possibility of a conspiracy between my electric razor and the hedge-trimmer is something I don't even want to think about.
Sometimes what seems like a step forwards is just someone figuring a creative way to get you to buy some shit you didn't need with money you didn't have. The only thing I want, in terms of advancement in this area, is to have my own local source of power, from, i.e., solar panels and storage of the same, so it doesn't matter when a bunch of morons let script-kiddies or whatever, crash the entire electrical grid.
I don't trust most of my countrymen to sit the right way on a toilet seat. These days, I'm convinced they could even fuck that up.
I'm glad SOMEONE is trying to secure our elections, since the people in power seem to have no interest in doing so... almost as if securing elections and ensuring the results are NOT fraudulent is against the interests of the people in power. Makes sense when you think about it, since their being put IN power, was through entirely fraudulent means in the first place, so of course they're not going to have any interest in doing something that might interfere with their holding onto their fraudulently-obtained authority.
I have no more faith or confidence in our government or its legitimacy. World War III was just fought, and no one noticed because the weapons used were even more powerful and destructive than the nuclear bombs everyone was convinced World War III would be fought with. This is the INFORMATION age, not the ATOMIC age, and so the weapons are of course, information-based, not atomic. Incidentally, we lost.
Russia is now, for all intents and purposes, the world's lone super-power, (though China and others might challenge that, it's not a real challenge, for now,) and Vladimir Putin is our king. King of the World, really, since he is now able to do whatever he wants and no one can stop him.
It is at this point that, on Slashdot, it would be customary to welcome our new Russian overlord, but I just can't bring myself to welcome this particular overlord, even in jest.
Bitcoin prices increase = it's a bubble Bitcoin prices decrease = it's collapsing Bitcoin prices are stable = it's a dead market
The problem. You have oversimplified it.
It's not that it's boom and bust, just like everything else has ups and downs. It's the REASON WHY it's going up and down. Let's say we're talking about a pharmaceutical company. They are worth a billion dollars. They have a new drug that will sell for a lot of money in testing. Tests go poorly, the drug probably will have to be withdrawn before it even goes to market. The stock goes down. They have another drug that they're in the middle of a patent lawsuit over. They win. The stock goes up. Traders understand why it happens and are comfortable in investing in such stocks because there are good and bad signs that tell them how a company, and therefore how a stock, is likely to perform.
The board of directors fires a half-dozen executives whose titles start with "C" (such as the CEO, CTO, CFO, etc.) This likely will drive the stock price either massively down or massively up, depending on WHY they fired them. IF the company had been in trouble, this could be a positive development, and stock value goes UP. Or, if they'd been doing incredibly well, (in the literal sense, doing so well it's hard to believe it's possible, seems to good to be true, etc.,) and they sack the leadership, it's probably the harbinger of bad tidings at that company, and for all people holding their stock.
It would only be weird if that action had no impact on stock prices at all, and they remained consistent with other, similar companies.
With Bitcoin, who the fuck KNOWS why it goes up or down? Or maybe it's because the "currency" doesn't DO anything, unlike a company that makes... oh, widgets or something, or a different company that perhaps sells consulting services on the installation and use of... oh, widgets or something. The value allegedly arises from the facilitating of trade itself. It would be if I got a stack of sticky notes, and put a little doodle on each one, and tried to tell people that because my doodles are unique, (let's pretend for a second they are,) that these stickies can be traded as if they're money, and they're therefore worth something, and what would you give me for one? Oh, or a stack of a few. Or a million of them? The entire trading ecosystem for cryptocurrencies is based on a perception of value without ties to reality. It's interesting, as a study in psychology, but I won't be putting real, actual money into it.
For those who ARE, you just about might as well be playing the damned lottery. The only real difference is that the lottery isn't contributing nearly as much, (according to what I've heard, dunno if it's actually TRUE or not,) to rising costs and cratering availability of good graphics cards, or to all the heat generated by computers around the world mining something that doesn't really have a demonstrable objective reality.
(I'm kinda against the idea of Bitcoin and the like. Is it obvi?)
What the fuck is the deal with slashdot's not being able to interpret quotation marks and apostrophes in posts from certain devices, (such is those running iOS)? Is this a problem with iOS? With slashdot? WhatÃ(TM)s (hahahah) What's up with this?
I notice it only happens when using the mobile version of a page. On an iPad, when using "Request Desktop Site," and posting, it handles punctuation marks like apostrophes and quotation marks fine. Anyone have any ideas? Is there some switch I can flip besides requesting the desktop version every time?
Facebook has outlawed tricking and bilking people? Does that mean Facebook is going to shut itself down? Because tricking people, (into giving up valuable information about themselves, and then profiting OFF that information,) is kind of their thing. It's what makes Facebook their money. Without that, Facebook will wither and die... (and good riddance too)!
But it's not entirely true. Last year, Apple came out with FaceID
Yawn. Another stupid idea. These things can be defeated easily with a photograph, or a projection. Nowhere near the security of an actual passphrase.
a phone that has a unique screen shape
You misspelled "stupid". It's spelled s-t-u-p-i-d, not u-n-i-q-u-e.
a phone with no home button
is missing a home button. Like missing a headphone jack, that's not a feature, it's the absence of a feature. You will miss the home button when something goes wrong, and you want to push the home button to escape a glitchy app, and you can't because there IS no home button, and the glitchy app has captured the device's input subsystem.
that normalized gestures as the primary input method
I've got a gesture for them, alright. It looks like a fist, but with the finger between the index and ring sticking up.
and they raised the bar on prices and proved that people would pay for more features in the iPhoneX.
They proved that a limited subset of their rich customers had more money than sense. Even if true, that ignores a possibility that people bought the iPhone X intending not to buy another for several years. I bet that when a lot of people who've bought overpriced iPhones over the last few years start finding out that no matter how well they take care of them, no matter how cautious they are to avoid having dust, dirt, and liquids from entering their phones, they'll end up becoming convinced to replace them more or less on Apple's schedule, regardless of how much money they forked over for phones that are defective by design, like ones that are missing their headphone jack.
Oh, and it had more cameras, a faster CPU, a better battery, and all the rest of the usual stuff.
Just for fun, how many cameras does your phone have to have before you find yourself saying, "that really is too many cameras," eh? Five? Seven? A higher number? As for everything else, that's to be expected, not applauded. At this point, at an annual event, I think most people would be surprised, shocked and chagrined, when a tech company announced their new crop of products, and they're indistinguishable from their previous generation of that particular product. What's to announce, "hear-ye, hear-ye hear-ye! Nothing whatever is new!"
People are upgrading, which is why in its last earnings report, Apple posted record sales for the quarter, to the tune of 40+ million sales of iPhone, the new one (X) being the most popular.
So Apple says. Do you believe EVERYTHING they say? Do you believe that the "MacMini remains an important part of" (their) "long term strategy."?!? Just because someone asserts something, doens't make it true. And again, past performance, (as they like to say as a standard disclaimer before trying to push their junk "investment" products,) are no guarantee of future results.
Just because Samsung is in a me-too funk with the rest of the android ecosystem, doesn't mean the industry is done innovating. Evidence points out that Apple certainly isn't. Their last keynote was a smashing success.
Sure hope there wasn't anything untoward in that KoolAid you've clearly been guzzling. A smashing success? By what standard of measure, how loudly and enthusiastically the sheep in the live-audience were slapping their palms together? Were we even watching the same thing? I don't know... maybe you just had to be there, in person. I have no idea what "innovations" Apple has made in recent memory, because you can't be referring to something like ripping features out as innovations. What evidence are you talking about? The last innovation that Apple made to the "smartphone" was going from the obsolete 30-pin plug to a more-nearly universal "lightning" connector.
Wwooowwwwww... amazing!. And yeah, I'm being sarcastic.
Apple's entire product line has the design-equivalent of an eating disorder. Apple CEO Tim Cook looks at the prototype of the next generation of each product and thinks, "Oh gawd, it is SO fat and disgusting and worthless! Thinner! It needs to be even thinner!"
Then he sends his designers back to the drawing board telling them, "THINNNERRR!!!" On the plus side, I think we know which is Tim Cook's favorite adaptation of a Stephen King novel.
Also, you're all wrong. (Well, most of you are.) If your computer is the best you can afford, and your algorithm for deciding on whether or not and when to to make a trade is as efficient as possible, and your bid or order or whatever is less than 1 microsecond BEHIND the one that it could have beaten if your signal had managed to be only 1 microsecond faster, that can make a VERY big difference if your order was to buy all the shares of this one stock, and the one that beat you said, "buy all the share of this one stock," you go from being able to buy all the shares of this one stock, to being able to buy NONE of them. Or something like that.
Inside the exchange itself, they let traders put their computers inside the actual exchange, and the cable-runs provided are all carefully measured so that no matter how far a given computer is from the one that handles the requests, physically, they are all the exact same distance in TIME, meaning the time it takes for the signal to go from the back of your computer to the other endÂis exactly the same for all the others, so it's fair. Timing matters THAT much.
If you get beaten by only 1 microsecond, that microsecond might as well be an eternity. Ask anyone who's ever lost by a nose in a photo-finish, or anyone who had money on the loser.
Here's more on this. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/267124-speed/ (There's multiple segments of this podcast: the first is about the Pitch Drop Experiment, not really relevant here, but about 24 minutes in, they talk about HFT.)
What is the mass, in grams, (or milligrams or micrograms or nanograms or...etc.) of one Bitcoin? Does it have any mass, or take up space? It is imaginary, and the scarcity is based on something like a given sequence of numbers being either in, or not in, the "blockchain," or whatever, right? Something like that?
It does not possess objective reality. Also, while you could argue that any money (such as dollars) not directly exchangeable for some hard, tangible thing of worth by the issuing agency, i.e., gold or silver, is also imaginary*, at least you CAN pay your taxes with them. When you can pay ALL your taxes in Bitcoin, federal, state, and local, wherever you are, then we'll talk. In the meantime, it's not worth (far as I'm concerned,) the paper it's NOT printed on.
See, you could sell a necklace of silver and/or gold, for example, even if they stop being traded as money. You might not get much for them, but they're still metals, still shiny, and to many people's way of thinking, still pretty. But no one has any need to buy "701923486..." because any of us can produce that simply by writing, typing, or saying "7," followed by "0," followed by "1," etc. This is the difference between objective existence and being imaginary. Once Pythagoras (or whoever) publicized the observation that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is always about 22 to 7, they didn't really need his 2s, nor his 7 anymore, to be able to work out how many cubits of cloth would be needed to go around a circle if its diameter was known.
Here's the thing though. As an admitted trader of Bitcoins, you have a vested interest in other people (such as anyone reading this,) being convinced that they not only exist, but that they're worth a LOT of money, and that their value will only go up and up and up. I , on the other hand, have NO interest either way, not owning Bitcoins and having no intention either ever TO buy, sell, OR own any. So of the two of us, I am the one NOT trying to sell anyone anything here.
But it seems we'll just have to agree to disagree on the matter. I doubt anything I can write will convince you, and you're not going to convince me, so we seem to have reached a rhetorical impasse. But the good and gentle readers of slashdot will have to decide which of us is right, and good luck to them too.
In summary, to each his own. Enjoy trading and investing in your imaginary currency, and best of luck to you.
*Some HAVE made the argument about dollars being fundamentally worthless since they're no longer exchangeable for precious metals by the government, I personally don't, but that's not relevant to the case. You can use them to pay your taxes, they are legal tender, and in other places, whatever THEIR local currency is, you can, again, pay taxes THERE if any taxes you must, using THEIR local currency. Gold and silver fluctuate in value and while both have little intrinsic value (sorry, it's germane to the conversation and a perfectly valid point,) compared to their assigned value due to scarcity and difficulty forging or producing either artificially. But even if people STOP trading them, they don't suddenly turn to smoke and drift away on the breeze. You can still make stuff out of them. Art of various kinds can be made with silver and gold, for example. Plus there are other uses, such as in electronics and biology and medicine, BESIDES as money for them, and others, like copper.
If (or rather when) people stop trading Bitcoin, it doesn't matter how many you have. They are UTTERLY worthless, and on that day they will become meaningless strings of numbers, and no one will ever pay you even a penny for them.
Slashdot Mirror
You've (perhaps deliberately) misunderstood the argument. In your example, is you/are you, the choice of conjugation of the verb "to be" is based on "you" not "data". This is like people arguing about the difference between rope and line (on a boat or a ship) and you come along and say "a line is the shortest distance between two points, and that rope you're all arguing about is coiled up, so..." which has nothing to do with what they're talking about.
Incidentally, is it my family IS or my family ARE? Data can be multiple pieces of information even about multiple things, and as a single umbrella name for that information, it would be appropriate to say "the data is..." just like "my family is". Data is information, and we don't say "the information are missing". We say "the information IS missing"...
The data is all in, and my family entirely agrees with me on this point. (See, data here, multiple pieces of information is treated as a singular noun, just like family.) ..." Hmm... actually I don't like that one. I came here to make ONE point and ended up taking a side instead. DAMNIT!
You could also say "The data are
Okay, put me down as "Data IS". NOW... is it DAY-tuh, (first syllable rhymes with LAY) or DAA-tuh? (first syllable rhymes with CAT)?
I'm in the "rhymes with LAY" camp. So "The DAY-tuh IS..."
Damnit. I was going to make ONE comment and leave. ONE lousy stupid comment and get on with my fucking life... DON'T get drawn into this stupid arguement, I said to myself...
(Wanders off muttering to self)
Are we sure it is?
We're pretty sure, but we need to wait until more data is available before we officially close the debate.
We're pretty sure, but we need to wait until more data are available before we officially close the debate.
Well, that settles it: The second form just feels weird and stilted, like a grammar rule from a musty out-of-date dictionary. Debate closed.
Is it correct to say "I didn't" or "I did not"? How about we declare either (is it EEther or IIther?) is valid, and quit wasting time arguing over which is "correct"? That's all I came here to say. It's a stupid argument and apart from making this point, I want nothing to do with it. Y'all have fun now.
Glad that for a few days, weeks, months, or maybe years, that it's finally finished, since one end of it is about to disappear below the surface of the ocean.
According to https://miami.cbslocal.com/201... 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.
The link you provided only shows used models.
Note: This item is only available from third-party sellers (see all offers).
If you go to the Kindle frontpage on Amazon there are no Voyage models shown in the comparison table.
Yeah, I was just noticing that. Went to close the tab and saw that it was a page for a bundle, so I went to find the actual device itself, and... came back here to fix this.
Seems I may have spoken too soon on this one. I'm usually pretty careful to do at least a cursory check before making an assertion like this, so I'm kind of embarrassed that I missed this one. Lo siento mucho, todos.
HRMmmm... What was the point of the Voyage that justified the extra price verses the Paperwhite? I recall looking at these a year or two ago and not being able to figure it out. Thanks. I think the big diff was automatic light sensing or something. :-/
AIs do the jobs humans don't want to do.
Seriously though... this is fear-mongering about the WRONG damned thing. AIs are not out to steal your jobs. Your BOSS is out to buy something that will do your job without requiring time off to take its little AI kids to soccer practice or whatever.
What fresh hell will this do to human society? How specifically is this the harbinger of the end-of-days?
It's not. We have lots of problems, many cited in the story, such as income inequality, etc. But AI isn't doing that any more than the advent of the motorized automobile destroyed society by putting farriers and saddlers, etc., out of work. They just ended up having to get new skills and do new jobs.
The "cotton 'gin" didn't end society despite automating the weaving of cloth (or whatever a cotton 'gin does,) making (whatever it does) probably about less than 10% as labor-intensive as it was before. The weavers found something else to do, I'm sure, by and large. The combine didn't end civilization by automating the collection of stalks of wheat, corn, and barley, hay, etc., etc., etc., it just made gathering natural inputs to other businesses more efficient, making it easier for the next step in the process to add value, (sorry about all these buzz words, folks, but they DO apply in this case,) resulting in increased gross output of our society, applying downward pressure on prices, raising the cap on the sheer volume of what we produced, which had a chain-reaction effect of making everything that depended on those products as inputs in some way to theirs to be made in greater abundance, increasing the quality of life, life-expectancy, etc., for many segments of society.
Rather, as a result, some, perhaps many of the people whose jobs were eliminated by the combine got jobs working the corn-flaking machines, giving rise to a whole new way to eat breakfast.
(While I'm sure it's true, it needs to be said, that some people benefited a lot damn more than others, that's kind of beside the point. The point was that humans are flexible, adaptable, and imaginative problem-solvers, and unless and until AI is able to solve every problem any human could possibly solve, there's still a need for us. Also, I rather doubt AI will reach the point of being any meaningful danger any time soon.)
Getting back to the topic, the digital electronic computer made human number-crunching professionals very nearly obsolete. Did they experience a mass die-off? No, they put their brain-power to different problems, too complex to be handled by the poor, stupid, dim-witted 8-bit computing devices that were able to replace them on tasks like, "add up this column of 500 numbers, then divide it by the result of step 14, and if the remainder is a non-terminating, repeating decimal..." and probably a lot of them took new jobs programming the very computers that replaced them.
SURE, it's true, some people can't or won't adapt. But to shake your fists at the bosses who replace you with a machine that can do your job better and cheaper is, looked at the situation from another perspective, like demanding that the boss, because he hired you, is obliged to pay you for EVER. That brings with it numerous problems, and it is besides unfair, and would tend to discourage people hiring folks in the FIRST place, if they know they're going to be punished for offering you a job to begin with, at some point down the road.
There is good in recognizing the virtue of an honest day's work, and in protecting the rights of laborers, but to pretend that businesses are all 100% evil, parasitic monsters, (the big ones I would more easily argue are that, more often, per capita, than the little ones,) but the way to solve this problem and many others facing us isn't to piss yourselves over AI stealing your job, and making moves to outlaw AI research, etc. That's like trying to plug a hole in a dam from the side the water's coming OUT of, rather than plugging the whole from the backside, with something that can withstand t
Kindle Voyage E-reader, 6" High-Resolution Display (300 ppi) with Adaptive Built-in Light, PagePress Sensors, Wi-Fi - Includes Special Offers:
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-...
It's still for sale, right now, so... I have no idea what they're talking about. I guess this is like you go to a big box store, and you see they no longer have Campesso Beef with Barley Soup, and you go, OMG, THEY DON'T HAVE BEEF WITH... oh, wait, they just moved it to the end-cap between this aisle and the next. Never mind.
Maybe they are planning to phase them out, or maybe they just have lots more of the other models they'd rather sell, and so they want to steer people towards those other models. Just saying.
Reading books is much more important than owning them. EBooks eliminates waste.
Owning DVDs doesn't strike me as an important thing in life.
Still, despite these two things, I own a crapload of stuff.
Did you know that there has been a trend to reduce or even eliminate the savings that you, as a consumer, could realize by buying the electronic book as opposed to the physical one, despite how much more waste making and selling physical books creates?
When I asked a customer service rep at a company that shall remain namelesz, why in some cases the phsycial book is CHEAPER, NEW than the ebook when this retailer sells both, the response I got was that people are still buying physical books. (Inasmuch as that's not really an explanation why something that by rights SHOULD be cheaper ISN'T,) I replied with something like, "but... don't you have to pay the same royalties on both, based on intellectual property, but NOT have to pay to print the book itself, nor pay for the physical storage space of each in warehouses, on trucks, and ultimately on bookshelves in actual, brick-and-mortar stores whenever you start opening those for books, for the electronic books you DO sell? Why not make it easer to buy THOSE?"
The response I got basically was that they make more money pricing them this way, so this is the way they price them. (Sigh.)
That's why Google is a failing company with terrible ratings! Witch hunt!
You forgot to mention that Gmail's new confidential mode is totally rigged, that it's sad, and also that someone should investigate whether or not Hillary Clinton has ever used Gmail. No confidentialusion!
Yawn. Someone with an agenda at Bloomberg "News" wants us to be scared of something, specifically, the allegedly increasing tendency of people to share shit. Gee, I wonder why people whose bread & butter is encouraging people to work their asses off for next to nothing, and then to squander as much of a portion as possible of that next-to-nothing they somehow have to scrape by on, buying shit that the people who own Bloomberg "News" profit from the most whenever they're bought. Could there be a relationship there? Oh, and this isn't a new thing. Lending or sharing of books, etc., predates libraries, and libraries predate this country's existence. Any upward tick in this should be viewed of as a bad thing only inasmuch as people who would rather own their own copy CAN'T because they can't AFFORD to after paying through the nose for everything they NEED, and losing an arm and a leg as the cost of anything they want afterwards.
The real thing Bloomberg's readers should be afraid of is when people start buying Amazon Kindle books and Barnes & Noble Nook books, etc., on how to improvise pitchforks and torches, and how to construct GUILLOTINES.
There is an upper bound on the amount of economic inequality people are capable, on the whole, of tolerating before saying "fuck it" and then the lights go out, and you'll wish SOMEONE had stepped the fuck up and FDR'ed America again. Or I guess rolled the fuck up in a wheelchair and FDR'ed this motherfucker again. When the system is so rigged that you can't get by no matter how hard you work, you really don't have anything to lose. One more good housing crisis, credit bubble popping, flash crash, or episode of runaway inflation and you're going to start to see rich people running for the airports, only to learn that the people already know where they are, and it's hard to take off when there's overturned cars burning all over the runways, and people have shot their getaway planes full of holes.
"Don't worry. They can't do shit to me, I'm a fucking queen!" ~ Marie Antoinette, being famously, hilariously, and extremely goddamned wrong.
enable rant mode RANT MODE ENABLED AT FULL POWER (DEFAULT)
Meanwhile, in Washington DC, your politicians continue to have been bought and paid for, and plot to give even more money to people so rich they have no real idea how much fucking money they already have, and to take away your ability to vote, organize at work, or get healthcare after their jackbooted government thug cops shoot you, break your arms, crack your skull, sear your lungs and eyes with tear gas, etc., and then the corporate-owned-and-controlled-puppet-media manages to find something else to talk about because they're owned by the same fucking people the cops are actually serving when they're locking you up for having the temerity to exercise your first amendment and other rights, just like they did at Standing Rock. Film at 11... just not on any broadcast TV channel you can pick up because... did I mention they're all owned by the same cabal of too-rich slimy assholes?
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How does it stop someone from taking a photo of your displayed e-mail with another device? Even if it somehow stops me taking a screenshot, there's no way from keeping me from taking a shot of the screen.
Sounds like privacy-theater to me.
Australia really is just upside-down America. I thought it was just a weird coincidence of cartography, but... nope. Good thing I had no burning desire to go there. Wonder what they'll think up next? My guess is lifetime imprisonment on a giant island for just being Australian... oh, wait... they already HAVE that. LOL-Failstrailia.
That is the proportion of that digestive waste material with which they may, as far as I'm concerned, fornicate.
In plainer English, fuck ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of that shit.
The value of BTC, like that of any fiat currency, is based on the trust placed in it to have future value, which itself is based on trust. The price fluctuates wildly because, like you say, there's no underlying asset to assess fair value or to provide price stickiness. It fluctuates by the mental whim of those placing value in it, which is imprecise and fickle. But that doesn't mean it's all a gamble. Many phenomena are chaotic and it's impossibne to say anything precise about the phenomena in the immediate future, yet the phenomena can be analyzed through long term trends, and other tools to remove noise.
And it's hard to make a claim that BTC is about to fail when it's doing the same thing it's done for a decade. And it becomes increasingly harder to claim it will fail in the future with every passing year.
To each his own. Invest in it if you like, and best of luck to you; I, however, shall not, for the reasons I already stated.
I recently banned Facebook, so... yeah. Might have to get Kodi just to spite all these people.
Slashdot has blacklisted many unicode characters for long time. Curved quotation marks are part of those characters you can't use on this site (unless via HTML entities). [...]
Thanks... so it's a Unicode issue. Is there a setting somewhere in iOS I could change to make it so things work as they're supposed to?
When "smart" isn't. I'm happy I still have all "dumb" appliances because at least some schmuck reaching in through the internet and taking control of them is something I don't have to worry about. Paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to be able to adjust my thermostat from bed, instead of getting up, walking downstairs and pressing a button on its face, (or moving a lever) is not a SMART trade-off. I don't need my refrigerator to order groceries for me. I don't want my water-heater talking to my toaster; the two have NOTHING to discuss. The possibility of a conspiracy between my electric razor and the hedge-trimmer is something I don't even want to think about.
Sometimes what seems like a step forwards is just someone figuring a creative way to get you to buy some shit you didn't need with money you didn't have. The only thing I want, in terms of advancement in this area, is to have my own local source of power, from, i.e., solar panels and storage of the same, so it doesn't matter when a bunch of morons let script-kiddies or whatever, crash the entire electrical grid.
I don't trust most of my countrymen to sit the right way on a toilet seat. These days, I'm convinced they could even fuck that up.
I'm glad SOMEONE is trying to secure our elections, since the people in power seem to have no interest in doing so... almost as if securing elections and ensuring the results are NOT fraudulent is against the interests of the people in power. Makes sense when you think about it, since their being put IN power,
was through entirely fraudulent means in the first place, so of course they're not going to have any interest in doing something that might interfere with their holding onto their fraudulently-obtained authority.
I have no more faith or confidence in our government or its legitimacy. World War III was just fought, and no one noticed because the weapons used were even more powerful and destructive than the nuclear bombs everyone was convinced World War III would be fought with. This is the INFORMATION age, not the ATOMIC age, and so the weapons are of course, information-based, not atomic. Incidentally, we lost.
Russia is now, for all intents and purposes, the world's lone super-power, (though China and others might challenge that, it's not a real challenge, for now,) and Vladimir Putin is our king. King of the World, really, since he is now able to do whatever he wants and no one can stop him.
It is at this point that, on Slashdot, it would be customary to welcome our new Russian overlord, but I just can't bring myself to welcome this particular overlord, even in jest.
Bitcoin prices increase = it's a bubble
Bitcoin prices decrease = it's collapsing
Bitcoin prices are stable = it's a dead market
The problem. You have oversimplified it.
It's not that it's boom and bust, just like everything else has ups and downs. It's the REASON WHY it's going up and down. Let's say we're talking about a pharmaceutical company. They are worth a billion dollars. They have a new drug that will sell for a lot of money in testing. Tests go poorly, the drug probably will have to be withdrawn before it even goes to market. The stock goes down. They have another drug that they're in the middle of a patent lawsuit over. They win. The stock goes up. Traders understand why it happens and are comfortable in investing in such stocks because there are good and bad signs that tell them how a company, and therefore how a stock, is likely to perform.
The board of directors fires a half-dozen executives whose titles start with "C" (such as the CEO, CTO, CFO, etc.) This likely will drive the stock price either massively down or massively up, depending on WHY they fired them. IF the company had been in trouble, this could be a positive development, and stock value goes UP. Or, if they'd been doing incredibly well, (in the literal sense, doing so well it's hard to believe it's possible, seems to good to be true, etc.,) and they sack the leadership, it's probably the harbinger of bad tidings at that company, and for all people holding their stock.
It would only be weird if that action had no impact on stock prices at all, and they remained consistent with other, similar companies.
With Bitcoin, who the fuck KNOWS why it goes up or down? Or maybe it's because the "currency" doesn't DO anything, unlike a company that makes... oh, widgets or something, or a different company that perhaps sells consulting services on the installation and use of... oh, widgets or something. The value allegedly arises from the facilitating of trade itself. It would be if I got a stack of sticky notes, and put a little doodle on each one, and tried to tell people that because my doodles are unique, (let's pretend for a second they are,) that these stickies can be traded as if they're money, and they're therefore worth something, and what would you give me for one? Oh, or a stack of a few. Or a million of them? The entire trading ecosystem for cryptocurrencies is based on a perception of value without ties to reality. It's interesting, as a study in psychology, but I won't be putting real, actual money into it.
For those who ARE, you just about might as well be playing the damned lottery. The only real difference is that the lottery isn't contributing nearly as much, (according to what I've heard, dunno if it's actually TRUE or not,) to rising costs and cratering availability of good graphics cards, or to all the heat generated by computers around the world mining something that doesn't really have a demonstrable objective reality.
(I'm kinda against the idea of Bitcoin and the like. Is it obvi?)
What the fuck is the deal with slashdot's not being able to interpret quotation marks and apostrophes in posts from certain devices, (such is those running iOS)? Is this a problem with iOS? With slashdot? WhatÃ(TM)s (hahahah) What's up with this?
I notice it only happens when using the mobile version of a page. On an iPad, when using "Request Desktop Site," and posting, it handles punctuation marks like apostrophes and quotation marks fine. Anyone have any ideas? Is there some switch I can flip besides requesting the desktop version every time?
Facebook has outlawed tricking and bilking people? Does that mean Facebook is going to shut itself down? Because tricking people, (into giving up valuable information about themselves, and then profiting OFF that information,) is kind of their thing. It's what makes Facebook their money. Without that, Facebook will wither and die... (and good riddance too)!
But it's not entirely true. Last year, Apple came out with FaceID
Yawn. Another stupid idea. These things can be defeated easily with a photograph, or a projection. Nowhere near the security of an actual passphrase.
a phone that has a unique screen shape
You misspelled "stupid". It's spelled s-t-u-p-i-d, not u-n-i-q-u-e.
a phone with no home button
is missing a home button. Like missing a headphone jack, that's not a feature, it's the absence of a feature. You will miss the home button when something goes wrong, and you want to push the home button to escape a glitchy app, and you can't because there IS no home button, and the glitchy app has captured the device's input subsystem.
that normalized gestures as the primary input method
I've got a gesture for them, alright. It looks like a fist, but with the finger between the index and ring sticking up.
and they raised the bar on prices and proved that people would pay for more features in the iPhoneX.
They proved that a limited subset of their rich customers had more money than sense. Even if true, that ignores a possibility that people bought the iPhone X intending not to buy another for several years. I bet that when a lot of people who've bought overpriced iPhones over the last few years start finding out that no matter how well they take care of them, no matter how cautious they are to avoid having dust, dirt, and liquids from entering their phones, they'll end up becoming convinced to replace them more or less on Apple's schedule, regardless of how much money they forked over for phones that are defective by design, like ones that are missing their headphone jack.
Oh, and it had more cameras, a faster CPU, a better battery, and all the rest of the usual stuff.
Just for fun, how many cameras does your phone have to have before you find yourself saying, "that really is too many cameras," eh? Five? Seven? A higher number? As for everything else, that's to be expected, not applauded. At this point, at an annual event, I think most people would be surprised, shocked and chagrined, when a tech company announced their new crop of products, and they're indistinguishable from their previous generation of that particular product. What's to announce, "hear-ye, hear-ye hear-ye! Nothing whatever is new!"
People are upgrading, which is why in its last earnings report, Apple posted record sales for the quarter, to the tune of 40+ million sales of iPhone, the new one (X) being the most popular.
So Apple says. Do you believe EVERYTHING they say? Do you believe that the "MacMini remains an important part of" (their) "long term strategy."?!? Just because someone asserts something, doens't make it true. And again, past performance, (as they like to say as a standard disclaimer before trying to push their junk "investment" products,) are no guarantee of future results.
Just because Samsung is in a me-too funk with the rest of the android ecosystem, doesn't mean the industry is done innovating. Evidence points out that Apple certainly isn't. Their last keynote was a smashing success.
Sure hope there wasn't anything untoward in that KoolAid you've clearly been guzzling. A smashing success? By what standard of measure, how loudly and enthusiastically the sheep in the live-audience were slapping their palms together? Were we even watching the same thing? I don't know... maybe you just had to be there, in person. I have no idea what "innovations" Apple has made in recent memory, because you can't be referring to something like ripping features out as innovations. What evidence are you talking about? The last innovation that Apple made to the "smartphone" was going from the obsolete 30-pin plug to a more-nearly universal "lightning" connector.
Wwooowwwwww... amazing!. And yeah, I'm being sarcastic.
I'm holding out for the FEELpad. :-D LOL
Apple's entire product line has the design-equivalent of an eating disorder. Apple CEO Tim Cook looks at the prototype of the next generation of each product and thinks, "Oh gawd, it is SO fat and disgusting and worthless! Thinner! It needs to be even thinner!"
Then he sends his designers back to the drawing board telling them, "THINNNERRR!!!" On the plus side, I think we know which is Tim Cook's favorite adaptation of a Stephen King novel.
Also, you're all wrong. (Well, most of you are.) If your computer is the best you can afford, and your algorithm for deciding on whether or not and when to to make a trade is as efficient as possible, and your bid or order or whatever is less than 1 microsecond BEHIND the one that it could have beaten if your signal had managed to be only 1 microsecond faster, that can make a VERY big difference if your order was to buy all the shares of this one stock, and the one that beat you said, "buy all the share of this one stock," you go from being able to buy all the shares of this one stock, to being able to buy NONE of them. Or something like that.
Inside the exchange itself, they let traders put their computers inside the actual exchange, and the cable-runs provided are all carefully measured so that no matter how far a given computer is from the one that handles the requests, physically, they are all the exact same distance in TIME, meaning the time it takes for the signal to go from the back of your computer to the other endÂis exactly the same for all the others, so it's fair. Timing matters THAT much.
If you get beaten by only 1 microsecond, that microsecond might as well be an eternity. Ask anyone who's ever lost by a nose in a photo-finish, or anyone who had money on the loser.
Here's more on this. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/267124-speed/
(There's multiple segments of this podcast: the first is about the Pitch Drop Experiment, not really relevant here, but about 24 minutes in, they talk about HFT.)
...
What is the mass, in grams, (or milligrams or micrograms or nanograms or ...etc.) of one Bitcoin? Does it have any mass, or take up space? It is imaginary, and the scarcity is based on something like a given sequence of numbers being either in, or not in, the "blockchain," or whatever, right? Something like that?
It does not possess objective reality. Also, while you could argue that any money (such as dollars) not directly exchangeable for some hard, tangible thing of worth by the issuing agency, i.e., gold or silver, is also imaginary*, at least you CAN pay your taxes with them. When you can pay ALL your taxes in Bitcoin, federal, state, and local, wherever you are, then we'll talk. In the meantime, it's not worth (far as I'm concerned,) the paper it's NOT printed on.
See, you could sell a necklace of silver and/or gold, for example, even if they stop being traded as money. You might not get much for them, but they're still metals, still shiny, and to many people's way of thinking, still pretty. But no one has any need to buy "701923486..." because any of us can produce that simply by writing, typing, or saying "7," followed by "0," followed by "1," etc. This is the difference between objective existence and being imaginary. Once Pythagoras (or whoever) publicized the observation that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is always about 22 to 7, they didn't really need his 2s, nor his 7 anymore, to be able to work out how many cubits of cloth would be needed to go around a circle if its diameter was known.
Here's the thing though. As an admitted trader of Bitcoins, you have a vested interest in other people (such as anyone reading this,) being convinced that they not only exist, but that they're worth a LOT of money, and that their value will only go up and up and up. I , on the other hand, have NO interest either way, not owning Bitcoins and having no intention either ever TO buy, sell, OR own any. So of the two of us, I am the one NOT trying to sell anyone anything here.
But it seems we'll just have to agree to disagree on the matter. I doubt anything I can write will convince you, and you're not going to convince me, so we seem to have reached a rhetorical impasse. But the good and gentle readers of slashdot will have to decide which of us is right, and good luck to them too.
In summary, to each his own. Enjoy trading and investing in your imaginary currency, and best of luck to you.
*Some HAVE made the argument about dollars being fundamentally worthless since they're no longer exchangeable for precious metals by the government, I personally don't, but that's not relevant to the case. You can use them to pay your taxes, they are legal tender, and in other places, whatever THEIR local currency is, you can, again, pay taxes THERE if any taxes you must, using THEIR local currency. Gold and silver fluctuate in value and while both have little intrinsic value (sorry, it's germane to the conversation and a perfectly valid point,) compared to their assigned value due to scarcity and difficulty forging or producing either artificially. But even if people STOP trading them, they don't suddenly turn to smoke and drift away on the breeze. You can still make stuff out of them. Art of various kinds can be made with silver and gold, for example. Plus there are other uses, such as in electronics and biology and medicine, BESIDES as money for them, and others, like copper.
If (or rather when) people stop trading Bitcoin, it doesn't matter how many you have. They are UTTERLY worthless, and on that day they will become meaningless strings of numbers, and no one will ever pay you even a penny for them.