This is one of the undocumented features of Capitalism, or its logical conclusion, if you will.
In publicly traded corporations, (and probably privately owned ones too,) the ONLY metrics of success involve MONEY, mostly something called ROI, return on investment, and dividends, stock value, etc.
When it is true, (and it is,) that a company could make more money, both up-front, or near-term, and in the end, (long term,) killing you and your family in broad daylight in front of a hundred witnesses, with cameras rolling, they’d do it unhesitatingly. The ONLY thing that might stop them, (and in practical reality, what DOES stop them,) is the fact that the actual employee pulling the trigger, and probably whoever told him to do it, would risk going to jail.
IF, however, there were no risk of that, the streets would run red with profit.
It is specifically BECAUSE profit, and related things I’ve mentioned above, are the only drivers that this is the case. It’s why companies make and sell cigarettes, loaded with chemicals that are there to addict you hopelessly, and why advertising exists. It’s why companies dump toxic chemicals into your family’s air and drinking water, even when that ends up killing them, (because there’s no one trigger-man who can go to jail,) because doing so makes them more money.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not decrying greed, private ownership of the “means of production,” or a completly decentralized approach to resource allocation and industrial decisionmaking regarding what exactly to bring to market. However, the result we see is a natural consequence of the system we have. There’s no need to round up the “filthy rich,” line them up against a wall, and shoot them dead. To fix this, we simply need to find an effective means to make the wellbeing of the people in the community, in the state, the country, and the world, a bigger, more important factor than money, in judging the success of a corporation. Then, implement that.
Social media would SEEM, via public shaming, for example, to be a vehicle for this BUT... it hasn’t, I don't think, lived up to its promise, because of problems with the design. Even WERE this effective, all it would do, through the very same evolutionary processes that made this species (and all others,) is create a new strain that exists without shame, that is impervious to any kind of criticism.
Some would argue that such a breed already, regrettably, exists. Some would argue further that the system did not breed that constellation of personality traits into being, but I’ll tell you... the system sure does seem to reward that kind of person disproportionately, which is sad, when you stop and think about it, because that kind of person often seems to have a disproportionate ability to inflict tremendous damage upon the world around them, and the people who have to live in it.
Why would I want to run Windows, AT ALL, even in a VM, even with a gun to my head, when there's GNU/Linux?
One possibility is that the hardware you have isn't very compatible, such as an ASUS Transformer Book T100TA, and PC makers specializing in GNU/Linux (such as System76) don't offer replacement laptops in your preferred size range. WSL makes Windows into a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for a GNU system.
Damnit, quit making sense! I was having a good time shitting on Microsoft...
LOL... Okay, that's... a grudgingly admitted point.
Trump was NOT a middle finger. Aside from the immature childish behavior of an FU vote (which is fitting given Trump's a man-child;) a middle finger is a huge understatement. Voting for Trump in protest is like a teenage girl running away out of spite with the 1st man who hits on her and ending up gang raped and thrown in some ditch. Yeah, that sure showed them...
Or the cattle/sheep escaping from their farmer for using and looking down on them; escaping to the butcher who reminds them of a pig so he must be one of them...
Every election game is rigged on multiple levels; with the "undecided" idiots in the middle swaying it either way... and on a bigger level the 2 choices are filtered so the established elite are untouchable.
DN: Honestly, I've not been to DN for years now. It is too depressing and I listened to it daily since 2000. If the news was competent, they'd all be like that and the masses would have risen up and fixed things. It's proof at just how dangerously powerful the news is when it no longer exists.
For some voters, voting for Trump, I'll stand by my assessment that it WAS a middle finger. And you of course have a good point. For SOME voters, voting for him was like being your erstwhile rebellious teenage girl, running away from home, and being abducted, drugged, beaten, gang-raped, urinated and defecated upon, then having her internal organs harvested and "waking up alone in a dirty motel room, in a bathtub full of ice," etc.
I think on-balance, most of the people who voted for him are worse off now, even if they don't realize it, in a lot of ways. But it's not ALL bad news, not for everyone.
After all, Trump's version of "presiding," if you can call it that, has been good for some. Like all the people he's helping by facilitating various misbehavior, by the rolling back of environmental regulations and allowing some people to do further damage that is ultimately beneficial for them financially, etc. The rich have, I think, by and large, done pretty well and managed to get richer than they were two years ago, (not like they were becoming dangerously impoverished under Obama, but my point here is, it's NOT happening under Trump's, for want of a better word, "administration," either). It's not like they're all broke and homeless now. Odds are they'd do okay whoever got elected, as that's how this system is rigged now. The only meaningful question for THEM, is, can they speculate how MUCH worse or better they'd be doing if someone else got into office?
I'm not defending anything he's done, apart from managing, (I am obliged out of a sense of honesty to pay him the following sincere, if backhanded compliment,) NOT to get us ALL killed. Yet. Most Americans alive in January 2016 are still alive today. This is FAR better than I'd had the heart to even HOPE for. Seems being a "president" is easier than it looked, OR, having a total fuckup kinda sorta doing the job, when he can be bothered, isn't as dangerous or damaging given all the various guardrails in-place. That's certainly a good sign.
Of course this does NOT make up for thousands who have died for no reason besides his malice and/or incompetence, the fecklessness and uselessness of his underlings, etc., but the point stands, I say... MOST of us are still here. Even the vast majority, I believe. World War III has NOT happened just yet as of the moment of this writing, though the night is young, and there are years to go, it appears, before we're safe. It does not excuse family separations, kids in cages, outrageous fraud, waste, and abuse throughout the Executive Branch, etc. literally ad nauseam,... but credit must be given where credit is due. He hasn't killed us all yet, and for that, a slow, soft golf-clap is in order, with appropriate amounts of sarcasm for what a low bar he's somehow managed to clear.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
It is a pathetically low bar, and one that is far below where it would, could, or even SHOULD be set even for some
Why would I want to run Linux in a Windows VM when I can do the opposite?
Why would I want to run Windows, AT ALL, even in a VM, even with a gun to my head, when there's GNU/Linux? Okay, maybe with a gun to my head, but that's about what you'd have to do...
NO, thanks. Just say no to more unnecessary tech cluttering our lives. I do not need a DASHBOARD to be "Android"ed. The dashboard of a car is a place we've pretty much got licked, thank you very much. There is no way this tech SIMPLIFIES anything, except MAYBE wiring, if you don't mind the possibility of RF interference jamming your INSTRUMENTS, or making them display something incorrect. I'm sure it won't be long before cars start getting hacked into displaying a speed that is either higher or lower than actual, causing traffic jams, speeding tickets, or collisions, perhaps even pileups. This one's a hard NO.
Tell you what, automakers... when there have been zero exploits, compromises, etc., to Android for more than the lifetime of a car, I'll think about it. In the meantime, NO. You make a car with an Android-based-computing-device powering the dashboard, and you've made a car I'll never buy. Screw that noise.
This idea makes as much sense as an Android-powered HAMMER. It's an unnecessary over complication that is just a problem waiting to happen.
Also, I don't want to have to wait for my DASHBOARD to BOOT to drive my car. This idea is full of "fail."
Oh, GOOOODDDD I'm so glad I don't use Misroshit Windfuck anymore. That would SOO piss me off. Misrofuck hasn't changed, it's just gotten older. Same old bullshit tactics.
If I HAD to use a Windows computer, the ONLY thing MSIE (or whatever they're pretending it is this week,) is good for is downloading a real web browser. Fuck Miserableshit Internet Edgesplorer, fuck Microsuck, and fuck all their bullshit).
And established a roadmap for companies that are hit with data breaches in the future. Establish a holding company, move vulnerable portions of the business to that company, settle for pennies on the dollar. Bonuses all around!
All Yahoo! account holders will, as a result of the settlement, get a stiff, stale, brittle with oxidation, 1990's era Yahoo!-logo-ed beer koozie. Woo HOO! Or should I say, "Ya-Hoo-oo!"
So, in the grand tradition of class-action lawsuits, the lawyers will make multiple millions of dollars, and the plaintiff class will each get a check for between twenty-one and thirty-one dollars, (depending on the specifics of their case, one dollar for each year terminated before retirement,) and get a coupon good for a full-height, five and a quarter inch floppy drive, (installation extra, cables and mounting screws not included,) or a 10MB Bernoulli Drive diskette, (not the drive itself, but a single item of storage media) from the IBM N.O.S. warehouse.
When they object, IBM will ask, "Oh, what... you don't want these devices, maybe because what... they're OLD? Because they're OBSOLETE? Because they don't do what you'd like them to do, for the resources you want to allot to them? Who's age-discriminating NOW, huh?!?"
Anyone working in or around tech shouldn't be surprised that these days, they have the same philosophy of disposability when it comes to workers, that their customers have, to personal electronics.
DST is a waste of time. Now it is time for the U.S. to do the same.
Damnit. I have modpoints now, and you're already at Score:5. I'd like to make that 6... but Slashdot cannot deal with Score values in excess of 5.:-/ Suffice it to say I WHOLEHEARTEDLY agree. Abolish that pointless shit.
A so called "smart" phone or tablet can NEVER EVER replace a computer!
They cannot in any way come close to the capabilities of a desktop or laptop computer!
I would much rather have a modern LTE Ipad than any 486/modem combination of the 90s. There is pretty much nothing you could do on a dialup 486 that you can't do better with a modern Ipad. The exception might be secretarial or accountant work where you have to do a lot of typing but even then I would rather hook up a physical keyboard to an Ipad than deal with all the other limitations of a 486.
I'm just guessing you've never tried writing/compiling/debugging software on your iPad. That sort of thing requires a real computer. All you've really said, maligning the vernerable Intel 80486 series of processors and the computers they powered, is that you (likely, again,) never used yours to anything remotely resembling its full potential. And hey, a LOT of people didn't, it's nothing to be ashamed of, but that's what Apple's banking on in the "What's a computer" ad: that most people only need a tiny percent of what it can do, in fact, in a sense, that's the Chromebook approach-- 'most people just use their computers for light, casual gaming, webbrowsing, and minor office tasks... calendars, etc., so let's just sell them computers capable of doing that, and regard almost everything else as extraneous.'
They're good enough for some things, great at others, but for those of us who ask a little more from out computers, they're pretty toys masquerading as real, actual computers.
What's a computer? Oh, how about a general-purpose device that you can attach peripherals to, like a USB..., oh... ANYTHING AT ALL? Better still, a device with upgradable components... (iPads don't meet EITHER of those criteria.) Something you can use a mouse pointer with if you don't feel like having finger smudges all over your screen? (Possibly my LEAST favorite thing about the iPad, especially trying to use the iPencil with it, where it glides smoothly until it hits finger oils, and suddenly the coefficient of sliding friction changes... REALLY annoying.) How about a device that can be used to boot whatever operating system you want, or run whatever program is compatible with it without first getting your "computer" manufacturer's permission, as if you need their permission to do things with a computer YOU paid for... (and generally letting them take their "cut")? Sorry, the iPad is NOT, (as far as I'm concerned,) a real computer. Not a real, multipurpose, reporogramable, multifunctional computer. It's a computer-like device in tablet form, which though yes, it does contain a programmable multipurpose computer, but it has been dumbed down, handicapped, maybe even crippled, when compared to even a modest, real, actual computer. I'm not sure if Apple, (or whoever made that ad,) meant the main character to come off as such as smug little smartass, but that's the impression I'm left with.
I'll believe the iPad is a real computer, among other things, when I can: - Use a mouse with it, in addition to an external keyboard. (And it would be just DANDY to be able to attach a wired keyboard via the lightning port.) - Run LibreOffice on it. And Gimp. And a host of other pieces of software that WILL run on a Mac, (which has the same basic OS underneath... or at least, iOS and macOS-X have the same basic Unix underpinnings,) without having to "hack" it, or break it out of jail or whatever. Mostly I'd like to run F/L-OSS stuff on it, and it CANNOT. - Plug other devices into it, like a USB hub and a printer, a scanner, etc., besides the mouse. (Oh, and the iPencil is NOT a mouse.)
There are other things I have in mind as requirements before that thing can be a real computer, these are just off the top of my head.
Maybe Giuliani is right when he says "Truth isn't truth".
When anything and everything, such as photos, videos, audio, facts, etc., become as muddied and confused as a psychotic break, then does "Truth" still matter? When "Truth" becomes unknowable, then it becomes useless. You can only react to what you perceive. Like for a person having a psychotic break, that often means reacting in a chaotic or harmful way.
I can't imagine what this will do to society. Perhaps society will react to things in ways more fitting to ancient times, when people had no idea how nature really worked, and chalked events up to the gods, fate, or the supernatural.
Was "Truth" unknowable, and hence useless, before the advent of photography and audio recording?
As I've already mentioned in a previous post, losing these things as reliable and unimpeachable proof of the facts of a case won't demolish society, it will just require reverting to a paradigm of understanding and knowledge and trust, as existed before these technologies. We've done it before, hence, we can do it again. It just means an adjustment, just as the advent of these technologies did. I'll miss them, but it's a blessing in disguise. The use of photographic evidence, or sound recordings, etc., takes a lot of the humanity out of the discussion about what is true and what's not, and who's guilty and who's not, or at least not provably so.
If you'd rather see 10 innocent men be hanged than risk one guilty man going free, as the saying goes, you might pine for the age of photographic and audio-recorded evidence. If, on the other hand, you'd rather deal with letting 10 guilty men go free than hang one innocent, you'll probably be pleased that we aren't going to have to pretend anymore, that just because you have someone "on-tape," that it means you know for a fact that what that tape seems to allege is true, actually IS. It just about never WAS, and now it definitely ISN'T.
Incidentally, if anyone's interested in seeing what this technology is capeable of, there's a very entertaining podcast about it from a couple of guys named Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, called "Radiolab". https://www.wnycstudios.org/st... in this podcast, they watch someone put words into other people's mouths, just by feeding in a bunch of recordings, and make them say whatever they want them to, including in a video, etc. Scary stuff, really.
Deep Fakes didn't destroy the faith we could put in pictures, recordings, and videos, since all could be altered, manipulated, or faked BEFORE that came along. It just makes the manipulation easy, and puts it within reach of most people, rather than letting it be the province of those with a LOT of know-how and a LOT of equipment. It just moved the bar that evidence has to clear way up... it didn't INVENT the bar. The bar was already there.
Remember the War of the Worlds? It didn't take much to convince a WHOLE lot of people that aliens from another world were invading Earth. Today someone trying that, with that same specific level of sophistication, in today's world, would be LAUGHED at, at least here. We're all much too sophisticated to fall for that now. At least I like to think we are. Deep Fakes are troubling, but not the end of the world. We just will have to become a little more sophisticated, and find another way, a better way, to evaluate the truth or falsity of whatever we're seeing or hearing.
They can already get away with blatant lying and fool 51% of voters. We are seeing just how extreme 1 side can go with it already.
Profound affects on everybody's lives are already happening. It's so fast that the majority are aware of the shift; but as it becomes the new normal it'll be hardly any different over time than the gradual slide we've had since WW2; when weaponized psychology became widespread.
It'll probably take another horrific shameful war before "Lying Press" becomes a taboo phrase in this culture like it did in Germany. They know what that helped create; people here do not-- hell, we named our unified federal police Fatherland Security - some neo-nazi must feel great having slipped that one bye everybody.
I don't know that they fooled 51%. Thanks to voter rolls purges, gerrymandering, denying rights to vote to people who do certain things that a populace presumed to vote a particular way get caught and successfully prosecuted for WAY disproportionately creates a situation that can only be called a democracy (or a republic) sarcastically. HOWEVER, I think even among those who DID vote for the End of Civilization As We Know It, (if I can borrow a turn of phrase, from whom specifically I regrettably cannot recall,) a lot were probably NOT fooled. They knew who and WHAT, more to the point, they were voting for, and I think of THOSE people, some portion were looking for payback for all those who voted for or supported Barrack Obama, for America having had a black President.
I think some of them looked at the options, and said via their votes, "oh YEAH? well, I'll see your black," (he was half white too*,) "Muslim," (he wasn't, not that that does or even should matter,) "foreign-born," (again, he wasn't, but you can't force knowledge into a closed mind,) "President, and raise you a crazy, stupid, incompetent, Russian-Mafia-backed/controlled 'president'! HA! Now what, huh?!?"
The rest of the ones who supported him and weren't fooled, (I'm sure some WERE absolutely fooled, but again, some were not,) knew who and more to the point, again, WHAT they were voting for, and didn't care... they just wanted to heave a giant, stupid, orange BRICK through the window of American politics, and honestly, it's hard for me to blame them at least for WANTING to do that. They saw the system as wrong, as rigged, as being only a sad caricature of a democracy or representative republic or whatever you wanna call it, and they wanted to give the people who have been rigging the system and ripping them off and expecting their loyalty a big, fat, orange middle finger. That's Donald Trump, I think, to some of them, (note THEM, not US; I didn't vote for that pathetic fucker,) Trump was their big, fat, fully extended, lone middle finger. Again, I can totally sympathize with the DESIRE even if I disapprove of the action. The system certainly seemed to NEED a brick heaved through its window, and for ME, that brick was an independent (or so I believed him to be,) Senator from the Great State of Vermont. A brick that would not only have broken the window, but then CLEANED FUCKING HOUSE. Instead the so-called "Democratic" (hahaha) party tried to shove Hilariously Rotten Clinton, (who can't be TOO upset with how things turned out, after all, it's not like all those people who paid her legalized-bribes had to be repaid, so she got to keep all those nice "speaking" fees... from Gold Man Sacks and whoever all else paid her whatever other money she took, to screw us over if she managed to slither her way into the White House,) down our throats, and we, many of us, refused.
(I voted instead for the only person running in the 2016 US General Election who had any qualifications for the office at all, even if I disagreed with him on a lot of things, and was embarrassed by how he'd apparently not bothered to keep up with current events he might be asked about. I WANTED to vote for Jill Stein, but unfortunately I can read, and I take the responsibility that comes
The most memorable use in film for me is The Running Man, where an autocracy implementing barbaric (and corrupt) punishments attempts to create footage showing our hero meeting his end. For a slice of 80's schlock it's actually a pretty decent guess at the future!
If I hadn't already commented in this thread, you'd get a +1 (Insightful). Then I'd wish for the ability to give you another +1. That's a really good point.
It will simply require that we, as a group, come to realize that video and audio recordings, once seen as the gold-standard in unimpeachable truth-telling about the facts of a case, will be relegated to the same dubious reliability as the "I seed it!" guy.
"I done seed it, I seed the whole thang! It was like this, right?" ~ I Seed The Whole Thang Guy.
They once had a saying, "don't believe everything you read," pointing out that people who WRITE things aren't necessarily writing the truth. Sometimes they write things, (specifically, in newspapers, magazines, and books,) that are accidentally not true due to implicit bias, due to the writer having been fooled or tricked, or due to the writer simply not having all the facts. Then some writers are just plain, flat-out, making shit up. Hence, you can't believe every single thing you read.
We will, as a society, simply have to come to grips with the fact that with the introduction, spread, and ever-widening availability to anyone and proliferation around the interwebz of "AI/DeepFake" technology, anyone can be made, almost trivially, to seem to be saying or doing anything in a sound or video recording. (Seen DOING? Oh, yes. You just take video of ONE person doing something, and plaster someone else's HEAD's image onto it in each frame, correcting for angle, position, movement, etc.) So we simply will have to get used to going back to eyewitnesses as the gold-colored, gold-appearing standard, if you will, because of course that's NEVER been that reliable.
In a sense, it would be like the power grid going irretrievably down. LOCALLY, you can still make power and all your electrically-powered devices will work, provided you can MAKE sufficient power to run them, with, i.e., solar power, wind power, etc., but you can't really KNOW that when you take your device anywhere with you, (by donkey-drawn cart, for instance,) that in the next village, there will be any way to get it to work. In this instance, when you're looking at footage you shot yourself, or a recording you yourself made, preferably on the device that made it, YOU know that's true, but you show that to anyone you don't know, and they should regard that with suspicion.
It's going to be a bitter pill to swallow, knowing as a society that video and audio recordings are no longer in any way reliable. Maybe a better analogy will be if it were announced that all processors of all computing devices since the Sperry UNIVAC, even seemingly air-gapped ones, locked in Faraday-cages, in underground vaults with platoons of Marines guarding them can STILL be hacked, and made to divulge any information they've EVER processed, and so the only way to safeguard your data is to take your computer, and the biggest sledgehammer you can wield, and USE ITEM, if you will, to smash the computer into tiny little pieces. The resulting society, in which even the digital CALCULATOR is seen as unsafe, does not "go back to zero". It simply dusts off its old slide-rules, and trig and log tables, and starts printing THEM again.
Then of course, someone points out that someone has corrupted the log tables, obviously it was printed on one of the haywire computers that wasn't smashed up, since it states plainly, in black & white, that the log to the base 10 of 1000 is 7, which hopefully, every slashdotter knows is totally wrong. It's negative 9. (LOL)
All kidding aside, we will survive this, but I think it does mean we are at the end of a golden age when you could just point to a recording, video or audio, of a given event or situation, and have your evidence regarded as indisputable. There will be a while, of course, before everyone realizes that video and audio recorded evidence is no longer anymore reliable than hearsay, and probably a lot of bad things will happen as a result before everyone gets it, but some people are still convinced the Earth is flat, the moon is made of green cheese, and no man has ever walked upon its surfac
Can you imagine if a real automotive manufacturer pulled this shit?
They already do. Your car's engine can produce more horsepower by changing a software setting. You're already carrying around extra dead weight.
The various "options" you can add to a car cost 10x what it would cost to add them after purchase.
The identical car could be sold under a different brand for a different price - A Cadillac whatever is just a re-badged Buick whatever which is just a re-badged Chevy whatever.
The thing with the engine is SO not the same thing. If you "tune" your car so that your engine produces more horsepower via changing either computer or software controlling the engine, the engine likely won't last as long, due to increased mechanical wear with every stroke; also there's a pretty 100% chance your car will perform less efficiently, especially with respect to the EPA data that the cars actually ON the road have to live up to, the average emissions the vehicles they sell as a fleet have to live up to for CARB requirements, or whatever....
You're not tapping into extra capability, you're trading longevity and probably environmental regulatory compliance, for performance. (Also, other components probably wear out more quickly too.)
Of course, it's possible that I'm wrong. Stranger things have on occasion happened.
(Not because of this tho this does not help,) Apple has joined AT&T and Microsoft on my shit list of companies ineligible for any of my future business.
That said, please support GNU and Linux. Maybe you meant that, but it should probably be spelled out because I am pretty sure there are a LOT of people using GNU software every day who have no idea WTF GNU is, let alone how mightily they benefit from their efforts.
Let me untwist your tongue. I will simply call it the eye phone Smacks The other I will refer to as the eye phone Pixar.
Not that it really matters what stupid-sounding name Apple slaps on their latest overpriced abominations. They discontinued the last iPhone with a headphone jack! They have now passed the last day I was willing to give them to update (and actually IMPROVE) the Mac Mini. I give up. I am done with them and sick of their shit.
I've been doing "decentralized transactions" all my life for decades, before cryptocurrency
it's a very bad solution (illiquid, volatile) looking for a problem
Mmm... yeah, you may have been doing decentralized transactions... but have you done them with some random stranger you didn't know, and executing the transaction entirely online?
It's one thing to say 'cash is decentralized' when the transaction is in person, but it's a little hard to slide dollar bills into your CD-ROM drive slot, and have them pop out of another one in some other computer in some other part of the world, neat as THAT would be.
(I'm assuming cash transactions were what you were referring to here. Apologies if I was wrong about that, and I misunderstood.) The magic of the cryptocurrency is that you don't have to know or trust the other person, and can do the deed online, with no one having to handle cash, or give up a bank card or account number, etc.
I think. I don't use them or have any myself, for the reasons I outlined previously, so I'm not an expert on the ins and outs, the pros and cons, besides the obvious ones. But they aren't entirely without their USES; my objection however, is with the underlying concept.
Indeed, cash money generally has the same problem, BUT, (and here's the difference,) it has value either by being directly exchangeable (as Gold and Silver Certificates used to be,) for some commonly-accepted-as-valuable thing, like gold or silver, or as an in-effect share in an overall economy even without the guarantee of free convertibility into precious metals, etc., in the case of Federal Reserve Notes, because the centralized nature of their control, (in the case of the US dollar,) and the fact that the US insists on people using them, (at least internally,) as a medium of value-storage and exchange, and will give them OUT in the form of social programs, government expenditures and contracts, and accept them back IN in the form of payment of taxes, fines, fees, etc., and for the purchase of LAND that states ceded to the federal government as part of their becoming states in the Union.
With a cryptocurrency, lacking as they do cash's resistance to counterfeiting, (and that resistance is partly innate, in the complexity of design and security features, and admittedly partially external, in the form of the Secret Service or FBI, etc., showing up and arresting you if you try to pass a fraudulent note...) of cash such as US dollars, the problem is implicit, and to illustrate it, imagine for a moment if each of the 50 state governments, and all the territories and dependencies, or protectorates, or whatever, of the US, could EACH issue US dollars, and the federal government was powerless even to regulate that, let alone STOP it. The dollar's value would spiral out of control... now imagine if further that the amount of money required to PRINT each new dollar was a function of the number currently in circulation? It would be like Germany between the Great Wars, when a wheelbarrow-load of Marks were needed to buy a loaf of bread, or what happened in Zimbabwe... Some state would decide it needed more money than the US government was giving them, so it prints a few trillion dollars of its own. Not to be outdone... etc. In Iraq, if memory serves, the government was counterfeiting its OWN money, which is a crazy concept in itself... but yeah.
I've kind of lost the thread here so I'll stop, except to say this...
IRT an earlier remark, yes, my "don't buy the empty fucking bag" comment was my way of saying "it is unwise to invest any money you care about losing in cryptocurrencies". If it's money you can stand to lose, and it won't hurt you, (i.e., if you were thinking of using it for lottery tickets, or betting in Vegas, or whatever,) and that makes you happy, enjoy. And good luck to you.
In defense of NASA, this was an idea floated by a political appointee. I highly doubt this is something being pushed by the NASA rank and file. I suspect their reaction is the same as yours and mine.
But in the meantime, NASA is still doing exploration and useful science. They launched the Parker solar probe just a few weeks ago. People are still living on the International Space Station. We have a nuclear-powered rover on Mars that was delivered by a rocket skycrane. On New Years's Day, the New Horizons probe will fly past a Kuiper Belt Object - a spec so tiny they needed teams of telescopesin remote places just to confirm where it's orbit is. And then there's NASA's ongoing development of commercial crew vehicles. SpaceX and Boeing are, naturally, doing the bulk of the work, but NASA has a lot of say in the design and certification. NASA also happens to be the customer. And, oh yeah, when those capsules launch, they'll be crewed by NASA astronauts.
God... can't I grouse about shit at all?
You're right of course... I know. I know. -sigh-
I just need to vent sometimes and slashdot is like, I think, 50%+ people being pissed off and venting. If that ever becomes a real problem, I will have to fork Slashcode and create a new site: Ventdot: The weblog/forum for people to come and just... scream incoherently into the digital void.
It seems that we don't know if he will be dead or alive when we learn if quantum computing will or will not work!:-)
Inasmuch as he's currently alive, the only way to ensure he never dies is to watch Linus Torvalds 24 hours a day, 7 days a week... actually, there's probably not just a few organizations already doing that, so... I expect he'll live forever.
On an almost completely unrelated note... OH MY GOD If I had a tomcat, I would totally name him Linus.
Then I'd get a little mouse, you know, one of the ones they raise to give to snakes? The mouse I would name Nvidia.
Apple's removal of the 1/8" headphone jack isn't about headphone jacks, nor is it about updating to new technology. It's about control and is just one small front in the war to erode the user controlling their own data. Headphone jacks are completely audio, analog, and offer no form of DRM. They are something Apple can't control once the signal is on the jack. You can do anything with it. Re-digitize it (this isn't the 80's where duping a cassette tape lead to rapid quality degradation), or pipe it to any device. The sound was yours once it got to that jack. Apple really doesn't like that, and they are basically tossing an invite to the entire industry to follow along and start down a more restrictive path. Follow us and you can get in on the action too. Erode what you can do with your audio one tiny tenth of a step at a time.
If anyone thinks that it's about device jack real estate, upgrading with the times, or innovation, they are hopelessly naive.
I completely disagree. The analog hole is still wide-open... until they start insisting that no Bluetooth device can have an analog output... there's no HDCP standard for Bluetooth now, is there?
On the contrary, I believe their "courage" comes from the fact that they just HAPPEN to have just bought a company that only makes BLUETOOTH HEADPHONES, right before they did that. (Unless I have my iChronology backwards!) Could be coincidence, but I kinda doubt it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of the undocumented features of Capitalism, or its logical conclusion, if you will.
In publicly traded corporations, (and probably privately owned ones too,) the ONLY metrics of success involve MONEY, mostly something called ROI, return on investment, and dividends, stock value, etc.
When it is true, (and it is,) that a company could make more money, both up-front, or near-term, and in the end, (long term,) killing you and your family in broad daylight in front of a hundred witnesses, with cameras rolling, they’d do it unhesitatingly. The ONLY thing that might stop them, (and in practical reality, what DOES stop them,) is the fact that the actual employee pulling the trigger, and probably whoever told him to do it, would risk going to jail.
IF, however, there were no risk of that, the streets would run red with profit.
It is specifically BECAUSE profit, and related things I’ve mentioned above, are the only drivers that this is the case. It’s why companies make and sell cigarettes, loaded with chemicals that are there to addict you hopelessly, and why advertising exists. It’s why companies dump toxic chemicals into your family’s air and drinking water, even when that ends up killing them, (because there’s no one trigger-man who can go to jail,) because doing so makes them more money.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not decrying greed, private ownership of the “means of production,” or a completly decentralized approach to resource allocation and industrial decisionmaking regarding what exactly to bring to market. However, the result we see is a natural consequence of the system we have. There’s no need to round up the “filthy rich,” line them up against a wall, and shoot them dead. To fix this, we simply need to find an effective means to make the wellbeing of the people in the community, in the state, the country, and the world, a bigger, more important factor than money, in judging the success of a corporation. Then, implement that.
Social media would SEEM, via public shaming, for example, to be a vehicle for this BUT... it hasn’t, I don't think, lived up to its promise, because of problems with the design. Even WERE this effective, all it would do, through the very same evolutionary processes that made this species (and all others,) is create a new strain that exists without shame, that is impervious to any kind of criticism.
Some would argue that such a breed already, regrettably, exists. Some would argue further that the system did not breed that constellation of personality traits into being, but I’ll tell you... the system sure does seem to reward that kind of person disproportionately, which is sad, when you stop and think about it, because that kind of person often seems to have a disproportionate ability to inflict tremendous damage upon the world around them, and the people who have to live in it.
Why would I want to run Windows, AT ALL, even in a VM, even with a gun to my head, when there's GNU/Linux?
One possibility is that the hardware you have isn't very compatible, such as an ASUS Transformer Book T100TA, and PC makers specializing in GNU/Linux (such as System76) don't offer replacement laptops in your preferred size range. WSL makes Windows into a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for a GNU system.
Damnit, quit making sense! I was having a good time shitting on Microsoft...
LOL... Okay, that's... a grudgingly admitted point.
Trump was NOT a middle finger. Aside from the immature childish behavior of an FU vote (which is fitting given Trump's a man-child;) a middle finger is a huge understatement. Voting for Trump in protest is like a teenage girl running away out of spite with the 1st man who hits on her and ending up gang raped and thrown in some ditch. Yeah, that sure showed them...
Or the cattle/sheep escaping from their farmer for using and looking down on them; escaping to the butcher who reminds them of a pig so he must be one of them...
Every election game is rigged on multiple levels; with the "undecided" idiots in the middle swaying it either way... and on a bigger level the 2 choices are filtered so the established elite are untouchable.
DN: Honestly, I've not been to DN for years now. It is too depressing and I listened to it daily since 2000. If the news was competent, they'd all be like that and the masses would have risen up and fixed things. It's proof at just how dangerously powerful the news is when it no longer exists.
For some voters, voting for Trump, I'll stand by my assessment that it WAS a middle finger. And you of course have a good point. For SOME voters, voting for him was like being your erstwhile rebellious teenage girl, running away from home, and being abducted, drugged, beaten, gang-raped, urinated and defecated upon, then having her internal organs harvested and "waking up alone in a dirty motel room, in a bathtub full of ice," etc.
I think on-balance, most of the people who voted for him are worse off now, even if they don't realize it, in a lot of ways. But it's not ALL bad news, not for everyone.
After all, Trump's version of "presiding," if you can call it that, has been good for some. Like all the people he's helping by facilitating various misbehavior, by the rolling back of environmental regulations and allowing some people to do further damage that is ultimately beneficial for them financially, etc. The rich have, I think, by and large, done pretty well and managed to get richer than they were two years ago, (not like they were becoming dangerously impoverished under Obama, but my point here is, it's NOT happening under Trump's, for want of a better word, "administration," either). It's not like they're all broke and homeless now. Odds are they'd do okay whoever got elected, as that's how this system is rigged now. The only meaningful question for THEM, is, can they speculate how MUCH worse or better they'd be doing if someone else got into office?
I'm not defending anything he's done, apart from managing, (I am obliged out of a sense of honesty to pay him the following sincere, if backhanded compliment,) NOT to get us ALL killed. Yet. Most Americans alive in January 2016 are still alive today. This is FAR better than I'd had the heart to even HOPE for. Seems being a "president" is easier than it looked, OR, having a total fuckup kinda sorta doing the job, when he can be bothered, isn't as dangerous or damaging given all the various guardrails in-place. That's certainly a good sign.
Of course this does NOT make up for thousands who have died for no reason besides his malice and/or incompetence, the fecklessness and uselessness of his underlings, etc., but the point stands, I say... MOST of us are still here. Even the vast majority, I believe. World War III has NOT happened just yet as of the moment of this writing, though the night is young, and there are years to go, it appears, before we're safe. It does not excuse family separations, kids in cages, outrageous fraud, waste, and abuse throughout the Executive Branch, etc. literally ad nauseam,... but credit must be given where credit is due. He hasn't killed us all yet, and for that, a slow, soft golf-clap is in order, with appropriate amounts of sarcasm for what a low bar he's somehow managed to clear.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
It is a pathetically low bar, and one that is far below where it would, could, or even SHOULD be set even for some
Why would I want to run Linux in a Windows VM when I can do the opposite?
Why would I want to run Windows, AT ALL, even in a VM, even with a gun to my head, when there's GNU/Linux? Okay, maybe with a gun to my head, but that's about what you'd have to do...
NO, thanks. Just say no to more unnecessary tech cluttering our lives. I do not need a DASHBOARD to be "Android"ed. The dashboard of a car is a place we've pretty much got licked, thank you very much. There is no way this tech SIMPLIFIES anything, except MAYBE wiring, if you don't mind the possibility of RF interference jamming your INSTRUMENTS, or making them display something incorrect. I'm sure it won't be long before cars start getting hacked into displaying a speed that is either higher or lower than actual, causing traffic jams, speeding tickets, or collisions, perhaps even pileups. This one's a hard NO.
Tell you what, automakers... when there have been zero exploits, compromises, etc., to Android for more than the lifetime of a car, I'll think about it. In the meantime, NO. You make a car with an Android-based-computing-device powering the dashboard, and you've made a car I'll never buy. Screw that noise.
This idea makes as much sense as an Android-powered HAMMER. It's an unnecessary over complication that is just a problem waiting to happen.
Also, I don't want to have to wait for my DASHBOARD to BOOT to drive my car. This idea is full of "fail."
Oh, GOOOODDDD I'm so glad I don't use Misroshit Windfuck anymore. That would SOO piss me off. Misrofuck hasn't changed, it's just gotten older. Same old bullshit tactics.
If I HAD to use a Windows computer, the ONLY thing MSIE (or whatever they're pretending it is this week,) is good for is downloading a real web browser. Fuck Miserableshit Internet Edgesplorer, fuck Microsuck, and fuck all their bullshit).
If you like, I'll tell you how I really feel.
An iOS release where older devices open apps FASTER than in the previous version? I find that difficult to believe. (Source: HISTORY.)
And established a roadmap for companies that are hit with data breaches in the future. Establish a holding company, move vulnerable portions of the business to that company, settle for pennies on the dollar. Bonuses all around!
All Yahoo! account holders will, as a result of the settlement, get a stiff, stale, brittle with oxidation, 1990's era Yahoo!-logo-ed beer koozie. Woo HOO! Or should I say, "Ya-Hoo-oo!"
So, in the grand tradition of class-action lawsuits, the lawyers will make multiple millions of dollars, and the plaintiff class will each get a check for between twenty-one and thirty-one dollars, (depending on the specifics of their case, one dollar for each year terminated before retirement,) and get a coupon good for a full-height, five and a quarter inch floppy drive, (installation extra, cables and mounting screws not included,) or a 10MB Bernoulli Drive diskette, (not the drive itself, but a single item of storage media) from the IBM N.O.S. warehouse.
When they object, IBM will ask, "Oh, what... you don't want these devices, maybe because what... they're OLD? Because they're OBSOLETE? Because they don't do what you'd like them to do, for the resources you want to allot to them? Who's age-discriminating NOW, huh?!?"
Anyone working in or around tech shouldn't be surprised that these days, they have the same philosophy of disposability when it comes to workers, that their customers have, to personal electronics.
DST is a waste of time. Now it is time for the U.S. to do the same.
Damnit. I have modpoints now, and you're already at Score:5. I'd like to make that 6... but Slashdot cannot deal with Score values in excess of 5. :-/ Suffice it to say I WHOLEHEARTEDLY agree. Abolish that pointless shit.
A so called "smart" phone or tablet can NEVER EVER replace a computer!
They cannot in any way come close to the capabilities of a desktop or laptop computer!
I would much rather have a modern LTE Ipad than any 486/modem combination of the 90s. There is pretty much nothing you could do on a dialup 486 that you can't do better with a modern Ipad. The exception might be secretarial or accountant work where you have to do a lot of typing but even then I would rather hook up a physical keyboard to an Ipad than deal with all the other limitations of a 486.
I'm just guessing you've never tried writing/compiling/debugging software on your iPad. That sort of thing requires a real computer. All you've really said, maligning the vernerable Intel 80486 series of processors and the computers they powered, is that you (likely, again,) never used yours to anything remotely resembling its full potential. And hey, a LOT of people didn't, it's nothing to be ashamed of, but that's what Apple's banking on in the "What's a computer" ad: that most people only need a tiny percent of what it can do, in fact, in a sense, that's the Chromebook approach-- 'most people just use their computers for light, casual gaming, webbrowsing, and minor office tasks... calendars, etc., so let's just sell them computers capable of doing that, and regard almost everything else as extraneous.'
They're good enough for some things, great at others, but for those of us who ask a little more from out computers, they're pretty toys masquerading as real, actual computers.
Never more relevant... What's a computer?
What's a computer? Oh, how about a general-purpose device that you can attach peripherals to, like a USB..., oh... ANYTHING AT ALL? Better still, a device with upgradable components... (iPads don't meet EITHER of those criteria.) Something you can use a mouse pointer with if you don't feel like having finger smudges all over your screen? (Possibly my LEAST favorite thing about the iPad, especially trying to use the iPencil with it, where it glides smoothly until it hits finger oils, and suddenly the coefficient of sliding friction changes... REALLY annoying.) How about a device that can be used to boot whatever operating system you want, or run whatever program is compatible with it without first getting your "computer" manufacturer's permission, as if you need their permission to do things with a computer YOU paid for... (and generally letting them take their "cut")? Sorry, the iPad is NOT, (as far as I'm concerned,) a real computer. Not a real, multipurpose, reporogramable, multifunctional computer. It's a computer-like device in tablet form, which though yes, it does contain a programmable multipurpose computer, but it has been dumbed down, handicapped, maybe even crippled, when compared to even a modest, real, actual computer. I'm not sure if Apple, (or whoever made that ad,) meant the main character to come off as such as smug little smartass, but that's the impression I'm left with.
I'll believe the iPad is a real computer, among other things, when I can:
- Use a mouse with it, in addition to an external keyboard. (And it would be just DANDY to be able to attach a wired keyboard via the lightning port.)
- Run LibreOffice on it. And Gimp. And a host of other pieces of software that WILL run on a Mac, (which has the same basic OS underneath... or at least, iOS and macOS-X have the same basic Unix underpinnings,) without having to "hack" it, or break it out of jail or whatever. Mostly I'd like to run F/L-OSS stuff on it, and it CANNOT.
- Plug other devices into it, like a USB hub and a printer, a scanner, etc., besides the mouse. (Oh, and the iPencil is NOT a mouse.)
There are other things I have in mind as requirements before that thing can be a real computer, these are just off the top of my head.
Alice!
As Smokie sang... or maybe the audience sang it... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw08Py5nz1w) "Who the fuck is Alice?"
Maybe Giuliani is right when he says "Truth isn't truth".
When anything and everything, such as photos, videos, audio, facts, etc., become as muddied and confused as a psychotic break, then does "Truth" still matter? When "Truth" becomes unknowable, then it becomes useless. You can only react to what you perceive. Like for a person having a psychotic break, that often means reacting in a chaotic or harmful way.
I can't imagine what this will do to society. Perhaps society will react to things in ways more fitting to ancient times, when people had no idea how nature really worked, and chalked events up to the gods, fate, or the supernatural.
Was "Truth" unknowable, and hence useless, before the advent of photography and audio recording?
As I've already mentioned in a previous post, losing these things as reliable and unimpeachable proof of the facts of a case won't demolish society, it will just require reverting to a paradigm of understanding and knowledge and trust, as existed before these technologies. We've done it before, hence, we can do it again. It just means an adjustment, just as the advent of these technologies did. I'll miss them, but it's a blessing in disguise. The use of photographic evidence, or sound recordings, etc., takes a lot of the humanity out of the discussion about what is true and what's not, and who's guilty and who's not, or at least not provably so.
If you'd rather see 10 innocent men be hanged than risk one guilty man going free, as the saying goes, you might pine for the age of photographic and audio-recorded evidence. If, on the other hand, you'd rather deal with letting 10 guilty men go free than hang one innocent, you'll probably be pleased that we aren't going to have to pretend anymore, that just because you have someone "on-tape," that it means you know for a fact that what that tape seems to allege is true, actually IS. It just about never WAS, and now it definitely ISN'T.
Incidentally, if anyone's interested in seeing what this technology is capeable of, there's a very entertaining podcast about it from a couple of guys named Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, called "Radiolab". https://www.wnycstudios.org/st... in this podcast, they watch someone put words into other people's mouths, just by feeding in a bunch of recordings, and make them say whatever they want them to, including in a video, etc. Scary stuff, really.
Deep Fakes didn't destroy the faith we could put in pictures, recordings, and videos, since all could be altered, manipulated, or faked BEFORE that came along. It just makes the manipulation easy, and puts it within reach of most people, rather than letting it be the province of those with a LOT of know-how and a LOT of equipment. It just moved the bar that evidence has to clear way up... it didn't INVENT the bar. The bar was already there.
Remember the War of the Worlds? It didn't take much to convince a WHOLE lot of people that aliens from another world were invading Earth. Today someone trying that, with that same specific level of sophistication, in today's world, would be LAUGHED at, at least here. We're all much too sophisticated to fall for that now. At least I like to think we are. Deep Fakes are troubling, but not the end of the world. We just will have to become a little more sophisticated, and find another way, a better way, to evaluate the truth or falsity of whatever we're seeing or hearing.
They can already get away with blatant lying and fool 51% of voters. We are seeing just how extreme 1 side can go with it already.
Profound affects on everybody's lives are already happening. It's so fast that the majority are aware of the shift; but as it becomes the new normal it'll be hardly any different over time than the gradual slide we've had since WW2; when weaponized psychology became widespread.
It'll probably take another horrific shameful war before "Lying Press" becomes a taboo phrase in this culture like it did in Germany. They know what that helped create; people here do not-- hell, we named our unified federal police Fatherland Security - some neo-nazi must feel great having slipped that one bye everybody.
I don't know that they fooled 51%. Thanks to voter rolls purges, gerrymandering, denying rights to vote to people who do certain things that a populace presumed to vote a particular way get caught and successfully prosecuted for WAY disproportionately creates a situation that can only be called a democracy (or a republic) sarcastically. HOWEVER, I think even among those who DID vote for the End of Civilization As We Know It, (if I can borrow a turn of phrase, from whom specifically I regrettably cannot recall,) a lot were probably NOT fooled. They knew who and WHAT, more to the point, they were voting for, and I think of THOSE people, some portion were looking for payback for all those who voted for or supported Barrack Obama, for America having had a black President.
I think some of them looked at the options, and said via their votes, "oh YEAH? well, I'll see your black," (he was half white too*,) "Muslim," (he wasn't, not that that does or even should matter,) "foreign-born," (again, he wasn't, but you can't force knowledge into a closed mind,) "President, and raise you a crazy, stupid, incompetent, Russian-Mafia-backed/controlled 'president'! HA! Now what, huh?!?"
The rest of the ones who supported him and weren't fooled, (I'm sure some WERE absolutely fooled, but again, some were not,) knew who and more to the point, again, WHAT they were voting for, and didn't care... they just wanted to heave a giant, stupid, orange BRICK through the window of American politics, and honestly, it's hard for me to blame them at least for WANTING to do that. They saw the system as wrong, as rigged, as being only a sad caricature of a democracy or representative republic or whatever you wanna call it, and they wanted to give the people who have been rigging the system and ripping them off and expecting their loyalty a big, fat, orange middle finger. That's Donald Trump, I think, to some of them, (note THEM, not US; I didn't vote for that pathetic fucker,) Trump was their big, fat, fully extended, lone middle finger. Again, I can totally sympathize with the DESIRE even if I disapprove of the action. The system certainly seemed to NEED a brick heaved through its window, and for ME, that brick was an independent (or so I believed him to be,) Senator from the Great State of Vermont. A brick that would not only have broken the window, but then CLEANED FUCKING HOUSE. Instead the so-called "Democratic" (hahaha) party tried to shove Hilariously Rotten Clinton, (who can't be TOO upset with how things turned out, after all, it's not like all those people who paid her legalized-bribes had to be repaid, so she got to keep all those nice "speaking" fees... from Gold Man Sacks and whoever all else paid her whatever other money she took, to screw us over if she managed to slither her way into the White House,) down our throats, and we, many of us, refused.
(I voted instead for the only person running in the 2016 US General Election who had any qualifications for the office at all, even if I disagreed with him on a lot of things, and was embarrassed by how he'd apparently not bothered to keep up with current events he might be asked about. I WANTED to vote for Jill Stein, but unfortunately I can read, and I take the responsibility that comes
The most memorable use in film for me is The Running Man, where an autocracy implementing barbaric (and corrupt) punishments attempts to create footage showing our hero meeting his end.
For a slice of 80's schlock it's actually a pretty decent guess at the future!
If I hadn't already commented in this thread, you'd get a +1 (Insightful). Then I'd wish for the ability to give you another +1. That's a really good point.
For what that's worth.
I don't see this as demolishing our society.
It will simply require that we, as a group, come to realize that video and audio recordings, once seen as the gold-standard in unimpeachable truth-telling about the facts of a case, will be relegated to the same dubious reliability as the "I seed it!" guy.
"I done seed it, I seed the whole thang! It was like this, right?" ~ I Seed The Whole Thang Guy.
They once had a saying, "don't believe everything you read," pointing out that people who WRITE things aren't necessarily writing the truth. Sometimes they write things, (specifically, in newspapers, magazines, and books,) that are accidentally not true due to implicit bias, due to the writer having been fooled or tricked, or due to the writer simply not having all the facts. Then some writers are just plain, flat-out, making shit up. Hence, you can't believe every single thing you read.
We will, as a society, simply have to come to grips with the fact that with the introduction, spread, and ever-widening availability to anyone and proliferation around the interwebz of "AI/DeepFake" technology, anyone can be made, almost trivially, to seem to be saying or doing anything in a sound or video recording. (Seen DOING? Oh, yes. You just take video of ONE person doing something, and plaster someone else's HEAD's image onto it in each frame, correcting for angle, position, movement, etc.) So we simply will have to get used to going back to eyewitnesses as the gold-colored, gold-appearing standard, if you will, because of course that's NEVER been that reliable.
In a sense, it would be like the power grid going irretrievably down. LOCALLY, you can still make power and all your electrically-powered devices will work, provided you can MAKE sufficient power to run them, with, i.e., solar power, wind power, etc., but you can't really KNOW that when you take your device anywhere with you, (by donkey-drawn cart, for instance,) that in the next village, there will be any way to get it to work. In this instance, when you're looking at footage you shot yourself, or a recording you yourself made, preferably on the device that made it, YOU know that's true, but you show that to anyone you don't know, and they should regard that with suspicion.
It's going to be a bitter pill to swallow, knowing as a society that video and audio recordings are no longer in any way reliable. Maybe a better analogy will be if it were announced that all processors of all computing devices since the Sperry UNIVAC, even seemingly air-gapped ones, locked in Faraday-cages, in underground vaults with platoons of Marines guarding them can STILL be hacked, and made to divulge any information they've EVER processed, and so the only way to safeguard your data is to take your computer, and the biggest sledgehammer you can wield, and USE ITEM, if you will, to smash the computer into tiny little pieces. The resulting society, in which even the digital CALCULATOR is seen as unsafe, does not "go back to zero". It simply dusts off its old slide-rules, and trig and log tables, and starts printing THEM again.
Then of course, someone points out that someone has corrupted the log tables, obviously it was printed on one of the haywire computers that wasn't smashed up, since it states plainly, in black & white, that the log to the base 10 of 1000 is 7, which hopefully, every slashdotter knows is totally wrong. It's negative 9. (LOL)
All kidding aside, we will survive this, but I think it does mean we are at the end of a golden age when you could just point to a recording, video or audio, of a given event or situation, and have your evidence regarded as indisputable. There will be a while, of course, before everyone realizes that video and audio recorded evidence is no longer anymore reliable than hearsay, and probably a lot of bad things will happen as a result before everyone gets it, but some people are still convinced the Earth is flat, the moon is made of green cheese, and no man has ever walked upon its surfac
Can you imagine if a real automotive manufacturer pulled this shit?
They already do. Your car's engine can produce more horsepower by changing a software setting. You're already carrying around extra dead weight.
The various "options" you can add to a car cost 10x what it would cost to add them after purchase.
The identical car could be sold under a different brand for a different price - A Cadillac whatever is just a re-badged Buick whatever which is just a re-badged Chevy whatever.
The thing with the engine is SO not the same thing. If you "tune" your car so that your engine produces more horsepower via changing either computer or software controlling the engine, the engine likely won't last as long, due to increased mechanical wear with every stroke; also there's a pretty 100% chance your car will perform less efficiently, especially with respect to the EPA data that the cars actually ON the road have to live up to, the average emissions the vehicles they sell as a fleet have to live up to for CARB requirements, or whatever....
You're not tapping into extra capability, you're trading longevity and probably environmental regulatory compliance, for performance. (Also, other components probably wear out more quickly too.)
Of course, it's possible that I'm wrong. Stranger things have on occasion happened.
I thought that announcement was supposed to be today, (or well, yesterday, or whatever,) not in another month. (sigh)
(Not because of this tho this does not help,) Apple has joined AT&T and Microsoft on my shit list of companies ineligible for any of my future business.
That said, please support GNU and Linux. Maybe you meant that, but it should probably be spelled out because I am pretty sure there are a LOT of people using GNU software every day who have no idea WTF GNU is, let alone how mightily they benefit from their efforts.
Let me untwist your tongue. I will simply call it the eye phone Smacks The other I will refer to as the eye phone Pixar.
Not that it really matters what stupid-sounding name Apple slaps on their latest overpriced abominations. They discontinued the last iPhone with a headphone jack! They have now passed the last day I was willing to give them to update (and actually IMPROVE) the Mac Mini. I give up. I am done with them and sick of their shit.
Apple is dead to me.
I've been doing "decentralized transactions" all my life for decades, before cryptocurrency
it's a very bad solution (illiquid, volatile) looking for a problem
Mmm... yeah, you may have been doing decentralized transactions... but have you done them with some random stranger you didn't know, and executing the transaction entirely online?
It's one thing to say 'cash is decentralized' when the transaction is in person, but it's a little hard to slide dollar bills into your CD-ROM drive slot, and have them pop out of another one in some other computer in some other part of the world, neat as THAT would be.
(I'm assuming cash transactions were what you were referring to here. Apologies if I was wrong about that, and I misunderstood.) The magic of the cryptocurrency is that you don't have to know or trust the other person, and can do the deed online, with no one having to handle cash, or give up a bank card or account number, etc.
I think. I don't use them or have any myself, for the reasons I outlined previously, so I'm not an expert on the ins and outs, the pros and cons, besides the obvious ones. But they aren't entirely without their USES; my objection however, is with the underlying concept.
Indeed, cash money generally has the same problem, BUT, (and here's the difference,) it has value either by being directly exchangeable (as Gold and Silver Certificates used to be,) for some commonly-accepted-as-valuable thing, like gold or silver, or as an in-effect share in an overall economy even without the guarantee of free convertibility into precious metals, etc., in the case of Federal Reserve Notes, because the centralized nature of their control, (in the case of the US dollar,) and the fact that the US insists on people using them, (at least internally,) as a medium of value-storage and exchange, and will give them OUT in the form of social programs, government expenditures and contracts, and accept them back IN in the form of payment of taxes, fines, fees, etc., and for the purchase of LAND that states ceded to the federal government as part of their becoming states in the Union.
With a cryptocurrency, lacking as they do cash's resistance to counterfeiting, (and that resistance is partly innate, in the complexity of design and security features, and admittedly partially external, in the form of the Secret Service or FBI, etc., showing up and arresting you if you try to pass a fraudulent note...) of cash such as US dollars, the problem is implicit, and to illustrate it, imagine for a moment if each of the 50 state governments, and all the territories and dependencies, or protectorates, or whatever, of the US, could EACH issue US dollars, and the federal government was powerless even to regulate that, let alone STOP it. The dollar's value would spiral out of control... now imagine if further that the amount of money required to PRINT each new dollar was a function of the number currently in circulation? It would be like Germany between the Great Wars, when a wheelbarrow-load of Marks were needed to buy a loaf of bread, or what happened in Zimbabwe... Some state would decide it needed more money than the US government was giving them, so it prints a few trillion dollars of its own. Not to be outdone... etc. In Iraq, if memory serves, the government was counterfeiting its OWN money, which is a crazy concept in itself... but yeah.
I've kind of lost the thread here so I'll stop, except to say this...
IRT an earlier remark, yes, my "don't buy the empty fucking bag" comment was my way of saying "it is unwise to invest any money you care about losing in cryptocurrencies". If it's money you can stand to lose, and it won't hurt you, (i.e., if you were thinking of using it for lottery tickets, or betting in Vegas, or whatever,) and that makes you happy, enjoy. And good luck to you.
In defense of NASA, this was an idea floated by a political appointee. I highly doubt this is something being pushed by the NASA rank and file. I suspect their reaction is the same as yours and mine.
But in the meantime, NASA is still doing exploration and useful science. They launched the Parker solar probe just a few weeks ago. People are still living on the International Space Station. We have a nuclear-powered rover on Mars that was delivered by a rocket skycrane. On New Years's Day, the New Horizons probe will fly past a Kuiper Belt Object - a spec so tiny they needed teams of telescopes in remote places just to confirm where it's orbit is. And then there's NASA's ongoing development of commercial crew vehicles. SpaceX and Boeing are, naturally, doing the bulk of the work, but NASA has a lot of say in the design and certification. NASA also happens to be the customer. And, oh yeah, when those capsules launch, they'll be crewed by NASA astronauts.
God... can't I grouse about shit at all?
You're right of course... I know. I know. -sigh-
I just need to vent sometimes and slashdot is like, I think, 50%+ people being pissed off and venting. If that ever becomes a real problem, I will have to fork Slashcode and create a new site: Ventdot: The weblog/forum for people to come and just... scream incoherently into the digital void.
Oh wait, did I just describe Reddit? LOL
It seems that we don't know if he will be dead or alive when we learn if quantum computing will or will not work! :-)
Inasmuch as he's currently alive, the only way to ensure he never dies is to watch Linus Torvalds 24 hours a day, 7 days a week... actually, there's probably not just a few organizations already doing that, so... I expect he'll live forever.
On an almost completely unrelated note... OH MY GOD If I had a tomcat, I would totally name him Linus.
Then I'd get a little mouse, you know, one of the ones they raise to give to snakes? The mouse I would name Nvidia.
Hehehe... :) That'd be fun.
Apple's removal of the 1/8" headphone jack isn't about headphone jacks, nor is it about updating to new technology. It's about control and is just one small front in the war to erode the user controlling their own data. Headphone jacks are completely audio, analog, and offer no form of DRM. They are something Apple can't control once the signal is on the jack. You can do anything with it. Re-digitize it (this isn't the 80's where duping a cassette tape lead to rapid quality degradation), or pipe it to any device. The sound was yours once it got to that jack. Apple really doesn't like that, and they are basically tossing an invite to the entire industry to follow along and start down a more restrictive path. Follow us and you can get in on the action too. Erode what you can do with your audio one tiny tenth of a step at a time.
If anyone thinks that it's about device jack real estate, upgrading with the times, or innovation, they are hopelessly naive.
I completely disagree. The analog hole is still wide-open... until they start insisting that no Bluetooth device can have an analog output... there's no HDCP standard for Bluetooth now, is there?
On the contrary, I believe their "courage" comes from the fact that they just HAPPEN to have just bought a company that only makes BLUETOOTH HEADPHONES, right before they did that. (Unless I have my iChronology backwards!) Could be coincidence, but I kinda doubt it.