...We promoted him to Director and now he sits in his office being distracted by shiny things, allowing the rest of us to accomplish the actual business of operating our department.
Try it sometime! The only way it can backfire is if the person has actual-authority over something important--then the company might go out of business. But other than that I'm drawing a blank on negatives.
That's because we old farts have learned to tune out the ads and use the time to think about something else.
I'm about halfway between the two extremes: I find ads jarring and disruptive to the narrative of programs. It is especially unpleasant to watch a movie on TV. A movie "enjoyed" in this fashion is essentially a butchery of the original picture, with TV commercials awkwardly inserted every 20 minutes or so. TV shows are slightly-less-bad in that the writers of the show at least know where the commercials will go, but that's annoying and makes shows predictable since you we've all, by this point, become adept at recognizing the rhythm of TV shows... how many times have you looked at your watch or phone and "known" it was going to end with a " To Be Continued..."?
It's because you know how shows work--their narratives all flow int he same basic patterns because of TV commercial breaks.
Are you sure they have overlooked this? I think the words "google" and "car" and "driver" have been used in a lot of sentences over the last few years, especially with the word "driver" modified.
They have a vision, all right: About annoying human beings with advertisements at every waking moment. The part I suggested they were overlooking was the part where it is, at present, illegal to do what they're talking about doing. Yes, of course, they're google and they have scads of money to buy whatever laws they want, but I mean today.
And it is still working. As for the car, what about the car navigation voice telling you that you are nearing a burger drive-thru because it knows its time for you to be hungry again (it also know that you likely are hungover from activities day before and your Google searches...) and that you love your burgers..
For now, because there are so many of us old-fogeys from a time before advertisement skipping was possible/easily accessible to the masses.
Once we die off the advertisers are in for a world of shock: Young people do not tolerate advertisements. Without exception, NONE of the people I know under the age of 25 listen to the radio (and thus radio commercials) in their car, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of older people still do. Among that group, also, most won't watch TV without having the show recorded on DVR either entirely, or at least enough of it recorded to time-shift the start long-enough so they can zap the commercials.
They've been raised to be advertising-averse by the sheer volume of crap that's been shoved in their faces their entire lives. It's funny, but kids are actually smarter than us in a lot of ways.
As far as the automotive portion of this, they've overlooked a pretty critical detail: With the exception of navigation and car-control, the driver cannot be in a position to view moving video or flashy graphics--it's explicitly illegal to design a car in such a way that such garish distraction could catch the driver's eye at a critical moment.
And now the reason for the autonomous car research by Google is revealed. Somehow, I suspect that the laws prohibiting moving video and flashy graphics will go away, or stop being enforced once autonomous vehicles are common place.
You may be right, since by definition that person isn't "driving" anymore in his robot-car.
But since the other side of the robot-car equation is that most people won't own their own cars anymore because it would be essentially unnecessary, cars would become a much more communal resource--more like a taxicab that everybody owns. But unlike a taxicab, passengers are likely to be alone in the cars frequently, so it wouldn't surprise me if advertisement surfaces were regularly vandalized.
And if that means nobody can ride in the car until the advertising screen is repaired (because it's also the "enter your destination" screen) then I guess that's too bad, and maybe Google shouldn't be trying to skeeve more ad impressions out of us.
As far as the automotive portion of this, they've overlooked a pretty critical detail: With the exception of navigation and car-control, the driver cannot be in a position to view moving video or flashy graphics--it's explicitly illegal to design a car in such a way that such garish distraction could catch the driver's eye at a critical moment.
As for the rest: I know of few people that would do anything other than smash the screen out of a refrigerator that was blaring ads at them every time they walked past (since what's the point of showing ads when the door is opened and, presumably, the "screen" is facing away from the person you're trying to show an ad to?) so I imagine that's going to cut-down on their response-rate on those ads.
In short, I'm fucking laughing thinking about how disappointed they're likely to be. Humans are already on advertising overload--it was 5,000 impressions per day per person TWENTY YEARS AGO, before the Internet even existed. I can't even guesstimate how much ad-crap we see now... Probably a fair-bit more than 5,000 impressions per day, though.
And that is directly attributable to the police-state infrastructure created and perpetuated by the Federal government, just like Weev has stated.
True enough, but not exactly the poster-child we'd like espousing the point of view that the government is fucked and needs desperately to be reformed.
No, they have created a kook. Anyone that considers mass murders to be "patriots", and thinks that the likes of McVeigh, Stack and Heemeyer are admirable, has lost all credibility. Rather than making the government more accountable, people like this give everyone that opposes authoritarianism a bad name.
Actually, he was a kook before this happened--his idea of fun was rape-trolling. Hardly an upstanding citizen to start with. It's part of the reason the feds felt so free to mistreat him--they knew his political views would make him toxic-waste for any activists trying to stick up for him. I'm also not discounting the possibility that they knew who this guy was and jumped at the chance to try and make anything stick just to see a world-class asshole get his comeuppance.
Here's what's likely to happen: He'll get a lawyer who will tell him 1) You have a good lawsuit here, perhaps several, but 2) they'll never pay you in bitcoin, ever, and 3) Shut your goddamn mouth so you don't poison every potential juror on earth, because these swine will ALL roll the dice on trials with "official capacity lawsuit" lawyers defending them, so your best hope is to have jurors not know you're "pro-toddler murder" until AFTER the civil trial is over.
Then he'll either shut up and collect his money and fade into obscurity or go for his 15-minutes-as-Cliven-Bundy and then fade into obscurity, but not before developing a lucrative right-wing/nutter following that he'll exploit through book sales and speaking fees.
I was with him right up until he revealed his love of deranged, hillbilly trash like McVeigh. Weev did get a raw deal, but it is worth mentioning that the people in the justice system (that run it) are in fact people, and people (flawed as they are) love seeing assholes (like Weev) get their comeuppance. And given what an asshole he is, I'd say that comeuppance was a long time coming.
But hey, good news for him: He now has a legitimate cause to fight for the rest of his life. If this keeps him from discrediting other causes through his support (this manifesto essentially makes Weev completely toxic to any political activism on any topic, forever, period) then we should consider it a net win.
This. If you set the minimum H1B wage at 120% of the average wage in that area for that type of work and experience, then we can have confidence that the purpose of H1B is to fill skill shortages. By allowing them to be employed for less than the going rate of a local, employers are just encouraged to find loopholes to enable them to employ lower wage workers
There are two issues with this idea:
1) That's not a high enough premium--make it 250% of market so that the economics of training Americans (or offering more money to lure away American talent from existing jobs) makes sense.
2) The problem we have now is that the law doesn't allow the use of H1-Bs for less than you'd pay an American. But companies do it anyway, as nobody is enforcing that law. For this to work, there would need to be strict auditing of H1-B employers to make sure they're in compliance with the law, be it the current one or a new one requiring a premium pay rate.
But I do like where your head is, because raising the price of H1-Bs changes the equation for employers, perhaps enough that they might start taking Americans and having reasonable expectations about working conditions (i.e. not 60 hours per week, every week, forever.)
You're not negotiating for a big enough organization. All the vendors can be extremely helpful when the dollar signs in front of them are big enough.
...So what you're really saying is that Microsoft won't be remotely cheaper for anybody that isn't one of the biggest 500 companies on earth....And since most people don't work for those largest 500 companies, that most users experiences relating to price and flexibility will be utterly different than this article describes.
All of which makes it a great piece of astroturf. But not something that should be, you know, believed or relied on by anybody living outside that mega-enterprise bubble.
I've never had a GPS send me to somewhere that I didn't ask it to send me. The error people commonly report is in fact human error in entering the destination, not machine error in taking you there.
Congratulations on only entering destinations that have existed for at least a year! Those of us living in "newer" portions of cities enjoy the constant joy of having our street "not exist" on Google Maps/Mapquest/wherever people are going now besides those.
Where the hell are welders making 150k??? Probably like 5% of welders make that much. Most of the manual labor jobs (electrician, plumber, HVAC) make like 60k with 10 years of experience. New people start around 30k.
North Dakota and Texas, primarily, due to the shale oil and oil-to-gasoline-refinery booms, respectively, a lot of jobs that don't seem like they'd pay $150k are paying tons of money due to the laws of supply and demand in order to entice people to move there.
I actually know a guy that sells fairly expensive cars down in Texas and he says it would blow my mind how often people come in, missing teeth, looking really fucked up and generally like they can't afford a $100,000+ automobile and plop down cash on the barrelhead for their new M5. Where do they work? Oil refinery. Oil field. Oil drilling. Oil services...
Once home / small business switch over the content providers are going to be virtualized. Which means that service will stop working, geolocation being the first to go.
"That word... I don't think it means what you think it means..."
Most consumer content will switch with a few years of the carriers being ready.
Carriers have been "ready" for years--nothing whatsoever is stopping Comcast, AT&T and everybody else from flipping 100% of their users to IPv6 tomorrow, in fact....But there's no content to access via IPv6... So what's the rush?
The odds of us ever actually "transitioning" to IPv6 are somewhere between slim and none for the foreseeable future. The most likely way it will work out is mobile applications (where it doesn't matter what you're using because it's a mobile phone that mates only to the provider's network) will be mostly IPv6 before too long, if they aren't already. Some consumer ISPs may move customers to IPv6, but that will be somewhat delayed by the incredibly slow pace that content providers are switching to IPv6--that is to say, as Akamai has illustrated for us here by getting themselves a/10 (FUCK ME, that's a shitload of IPs for a company that already controls multiple other swaths of space this big) the content providers just aren't bothering to move to IPv6.
And yeah, the ISPs can choose maintain a bridge between the universes, but the more traffic you pour through that bridge the more resources it requires to operate... Eventually, if the ISP can't force the issue it stops making sense to transition any more users to IPv6 until more content providers get on-board.
I fully anticipate retiring in another 25 years or so and still having IPv4 be the vast majority of IP networks in operation because in the end, even if your ISP switches, what's the point of changing your internal network over? Any company of decent size will have a security team that says "No fucking way will outsiders directly connect to your IPv6 address" and block it with some kind of firewall/NAT arrangement which almost instantly negates the biggest "advantage" of IPv6. And once that "advantage" is off the table there is zero business reason to incur the expense involved in such a change-over.
Yeah man totally. VISA and Mastercard won't be able to maintain their business model of processing transactions much longer.
Apples to zebras, my friend: VISA and MasterCard process transactions in hundreds of currencies. Even if one of those currencies (or even ten) were to simply become worthless it wouldn't really do any damage to them: They'd just figure out how to process Visa card transactions in the currency that replaced whatever disappeared.
Bitcoin processors are basically fucked. Maybe they can repurpose some of their uber-expensive GPU rigs to mine other currencies, too.... But maybe not.
I think it would be hysterical if, in three years, eBay had 10,000 auctions running for these overpriced "GPU in a box" rigs that were selling like hotcakes last year before the late-adopters figured out BitCoin wasn't really a workable currency.
When I see how much hardware and electricity is being wasted on these various mining processes, I can only shake my head.
I'm not sure when BTC is slated to have all of its coins mined, but it will be instructive to see what happens to it at that point.
Its value will plunge precipitously. There simply isn't enough money "processing transactions" for other people for a reasonable "business" to be run doing so, and that is all that would be left for "miners" once all the bitcoins are found. So "processors" will start disappearing almost immediately. This will in turn drastically reduce the ability to spend your bitcoins which will in turn demolish their "value."
All of that is to say "Dump them now, avoid the rush, maybe get some of your money back."
Perhaps one or more of these sites were running expoitable software, and were hijacked to serve porn without their owners knowledge.
I know of at least one federal agency that had a poorly secured FTP server loaded with child porn back in to 90's
Perhaps, but most of these devices have a separate category for that (so you can run a report and quantify just how much "more secure" you are than if you'd stayed with your old product.)
It isn't "fascism" to say your unvaccinated-child may not infect my too-young-to-be-vaccinated child with a preventable disease and risk his life/kill him. In general, your "freedom" to choose an activity end at the point that you're harming another person.
They also have a big messaging problem. When a person gets a polio vaccine the assumption is that they won't get polio. Yet every year these same people hear the newscasters saying that they should get a flu vaccine. The words don't mean the same thing to the public as they do to the researchers or the doctors. If they would clean up the language I suspect their success rates would improve.
We have a problem, but it is only partly the "messaging." The other part is the "population that can barely read at an aggregate 4th grade level" problem. Specifically, we live in a nation of morons that squeaks through high school with a minimal amount of required "hard-science" and can even get university degrees that require minimal or zero science education (Bachelor of Arts, anyone?) and can then consider themselves "educated" besides knowing neither jack nor shit beyond 12th grade science, and only having a passing familiarity with even that basic level of material.
Certainly if every newscaster mentioned, every time they mentioned flu vaccinations, that it was a vaccination for specific flus and that you can still get other flus, that might help. But if Americans weren't so fucking blidningly stupid when it comes to science, more of us would be able to imply such information by using our noodles.
However, the problem is that the school boards have also allowed exclusions for "religious or personal beliefs", which is a crock.
Exemptions for religious beliefs are a crock? Those are well supported in the case law. School boards allow them because the case law says they'll lose if they try to fight it in Court and most school districts don't have spare cash laying around to throw at lawyers.
Religious and personal beliefs are a crock in this situation. Specifically, your right to believe that vaccinations are a direct ejaculation from Satan's loins is one thing, but when your unvaccinated child goes to a park and spreads the disease to younger children, too young to be vaccinated, that's the point where their religious beliefs become irrelevant.
You have the right to believe anything you want--what you don't have the right to do is risk other peoples' lives for your beliefs.
Slashdot Mirror
...We promoted him to Director and now he sits in his office being distracted by shiny things, allowing the rest of us to accomplish the actual business of operating our department.
Try it sometime! The only way it can backfire is if the person has actual-authority over something important--then the company might go out of business. But other than that I'm drawing a blank on negatives.
That's because we old farts have learned to tune out the ads and use the time to think about something else.
I'm about halfway between the two extremes: I find ads jarring and disruptive to the narrative of programs. It is especially unpleasant to watch a movie on TV. A movie "enjoyed" in this fashion is essentially a butchery of the original picture, with TV commercials awkwardly inserted every 20 minutes or so. TV shows are slightly-less-bad in that the writers of the show at least know where the commercials will go, but that's annoying and makes shows predictable since you we've all, by this point, become adept at recognizing the rhythm of TV shows... how many times have you looked at your watch or phone and "known" it was going to end with a " To Be Continued..."?
It's because you know how shows work--their narratives all flow int he same basic patterns because of TV commercial breaks.
Are you sure they have overlooked this? I think the words "google" and "car" and "driver" have been used in a lot of sentences over the last few years, especially with the word "driver" modified.
They have a vision, all right: About annoying human beings with advertisements at every waking moment. The part I suggested they were overlooking was the part where it is, at present, illegal to do what they're talking about doing. Yes, of course, they're google and they have scads of money to buy whatever laws they want, but I mean today.
And it is still working. As for the car, what about the car navigation voice telling you that you are nearing a burger drive-thru because it knows its time for you to be hungry again (it also know that you likely are hungover from activities day before and your Google searches...) and that you love your burgers..
For now, because there are so many of us old-fogeys from a time before advertisement skipping was possible/easily accessible to the masses.
Once we die off the advertisers are in for a world of shock: Young people do not tolerate advertisements. Without exception, NONE of the people I know under the age of 25 listen to the radio (and thus radio commercials) in their car, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of older people still do. Among that group, also, most won't watch TV without having the show recorded on DVR either entirely, or at least enough of it recorded to time-shift the start long-enough so they can zap the commercials.
They've been raised to be advertising-averse by the sheer volume of crap that's been shoved in their faces their entire lives. It's funny, but kids are actually smarter than us in a lot of ways.
As far as the automotive portion of this, they've overlooked a pretty critical detail: With the exception of navigation and car-control, the driver cannot be in a position to view moving video or flashy graphics--it's explicitly illegal to design a car in such a way that such garish distraction could catch the driver's eye at a critical moment.
And now the reason for the autonomous car research by Google is revealed. Somehow, I suspect that the laws prohibiting moving video and flashy graphics will go away, or stop being enforced once autonomous vehicles are common place.
You may be right, since by definition that person isn't "driving" anymore in his robot-car.
But since the other side of the robot-car equation is that most people won't own their own cars anymore because it would be essentially unnecessary, cars would become a much more communal resource--more like a taxicab that everybody owns. But unlike a taxicab, passengers are likely to be alone in the cars frequently, so it wouldn't surprise me if advertisement surfaces were regularly vandalized.
And if that means nobody can ride in the car until the advertising screen is repaired (because it's also the "enter your destination" screen) then I guess that's too bad, and maybe Google shouldn't be trying to skeeve more ad impressions out of us.
As far as the automotive portion of this, they've overlooked a pretty critical detail: With the exception of navigation and car-control, the driver cannot be in a position to view moving video or flashy graphics--it's explicitly illegal to design a car in such a way that such garish distraction could catch the driver's eye at a critical moment.
As for the rest: I know of few people that would do anything other than smash the screen out of a refrigerator that was blaring ads at them every time they walked past (since what's the point of showing ads when the door is opened and, presumably, the "screen" is facing away from the person you're trying to show an ad to?) so I imagine that's going to cut-down on their response-rate on those ads.
In short, I'm fucking laughing thinking about how disappointed they're likely to be. Humans are already on advertising overload--it was 5,000 impressions per day per person TWENTY YEARS AGO, before the Internet even existed. I can't even guesstimate how much ad-crap we see now... Probably a fair-bit more than 5,000 impressions per day, though.
And that is directly attributable to the police-state infrastructure created and perpetuated by the Federal government, just like Weev has stated.
True enough, but not exactly the poster-child we'd like espousing the point of view that the government is fucked and needs desperately to be reformed.
The government has created a martyr.
No, they have created a kook. Anyone that considers mass murders to be "patriots", and thinks that the likes of McVeigh, Stack and Heemeyer are admirable, has lost all credibility. Rather than making the government more accountable, people like this give everyone that opposes authoritarianism a bad name.
Actually, he was a kook before this happened--his idea of fun was rape-trolling. Hardly an upstanding citizen to start with. It's part of the reason the feds felt so free to mistreat him--they knew his political views would make him toxic-waste for any activists trying to stick up for him. I'm also not discounting the possibility that they knew who this guy was and jumped at the chance to try and make anything stick just to see a world-class asshole get his comeuppance.
Here's what's likely to happen: He'll get a lawyer who will tell him 1) You have a good lawsuit here, perhaps several, but 2) they'll never pay you in bitcoin, ever, and 3) Shut your goddamn mouth so you don't poison every potential juror on earth, because these swine will ALL roll the dice on trials with "official capacity lawsuit" lawyers defending them, so your best hope is to have jurors not know you're "pro-toddler murder" until AFTER the civil trial is over.
Then he'll either shut up and collect his money and fade into obscurity or go for his 15-minutes-as-Cliven-Bundy and then fade into obscurity, but not before developing a lucrative right-wing/nutter following that he'll exploit through book sales and speaking fees.
I was with him right up until he revealed his love of deranged, hillbilly trash like McVeigh. Weev did get a raw deal, but it is worth mentioning that the people in the justice system (that run it) are in fact people, and people (flawed as they are) love seeing assholes (like Weev) get their comeuppance. And given what an asshole he is, I'd say that comeuppance was a long time coming.
But hey, good news for him: He now has a legitimate cause to fight for the rest of his life. If this keeps him from discrediting other causes through his support (this manifesto essentially makes Weev completely toxic to any political activism on any topic, forever, period) then we should consider it a net win.
Marvin Heemeyer is the man though..
Really? The label I'd apply would be "deranged hillbilly trash," but I guess to each their own, eh?
Which just steals secrets from the states, vs corporate secrets and giving them to GM, Apple, General Electric, etc.
Actually, a couple of NSA's sub-programs relate specifically to industrial-espionage in the oil industry. So it is total hypocrisy.
This. If you set the minimum H1B wage at 120% of the average wage in that area for that type of work and experience, then we can have confidence that the purpose of H1B is to fill skill shortages. By allowing them to be employed for less than the going rate of a local, employers are just encouraged to find loopholes to enable them to employ lower wage workers
There are two issues with this idea:
1) That's not a high enough premium--make it 250% of market so that the economics of training Americans (or offering more money to lure away American talent from existing jobs) makes sense.
2) The problem we have now is that the law doesn't allow the use of H1-Bs for less than you'd pay an American. But companies do it anyway, as nobody is enforcing that law. For this to work, there would need to be strict auditing of H1-B employers to make sure they're in compliance with the law, be it the current one or a new one requiring a premium pay rate.
But I do like where your head is, because raising the price of H1-Bs changes the equation for employers, perhaps enough that they might start taking Americans and having reasonable expectations about working conditions (i.e. not 60 hours per week, every week, forever.)
You're not negotiating for a big enough organization. All the vendors can be extremely helpful when the dollar signs in front of them are big enough.
...So what you're really saying is that Microsoft won't be remotely cheaper for anybody that isn't one of the biggest 500 companies on earth. ...And since most people don't work for those largest 500 companies, that most users experiences relating to price and flexibility will be utterly different than this article describes.
All of which makes it a great piece of astroturf. But not something that should be, you know, believed or relied on by anybody living outside that mega-enterprise bubble.
I've never had a GPS send me to somewhere that I didn't ask it to send me. The error people commonly report is in fact human error in entering the destination, not machine error in taking you there.
Congratulations on only entering destinations that have existed for at least a year! Those of us living in "newer" portions of cities enjoy the constant joy of having our street "not exist" on Google Maps/Mapquest/wherever people are going now besides those.
Where the hell are welders making 150k??? Probably like 5% of welders make that much. Most of the manual labor jobs (electrician, plumber, HVAC) make like 60k with 10 years of experience. New people start around 30k.
North Dakota and Texas, primarily, due to the shale oil and oil-to-gasoline-refinery booms, respectively, a lot of jobs that don't seem like they'd pay $150k are paying tons of money due to the laws of supply and demand in order to entice people to move there.
I actually know a guy that sells fairly expensive cars down in Texas and he says it would blow my mind how often people come in, missing teeth, looking really fucked up and generally like they can't afford a $100,000+ automobile and plop down cash on the barrelhead for their new M5. Where do they work? Oil refinery. Oil field. Oil drilling. Oil services...
Once home / small business switch over the content providers are going to be virtualized . Which means that service will stop working, geolocation being the first to go.
"That word... I don't think it means what you think it means..."
Most consumer content will switch with a few years of the carriers being ready.
Carriers have been "ready" for years--nothing whatsoever is stopping Comcast, AT&T and everybody else from flipping 100% of their users to IPv6 tomorrow, in fact. ...But there's no content to access via IPv6... So what's the rush?
Should hold of IPv6 for another 10 years or so.
The odds of us ever actually "transitioning" to IPv6 are somewhere between slim and none for the foreseeable future. The most likely way it will work out is mobile applications (where it doesn't matter what you're using because it's a mobile phone that mates only to the provider's network) will be mostly IPv6 before too long, if they aren't already. Some consumer ISPs may move customers to IPv6, but that will be somewhat delayed by the incredibly slow pace that content providers are switching to IPv6--that is to say, as Akamai has illustrated for us here by getting themselves a /10 (FUCK ME, that's a shitload of IPs for a company that already controls multiple other swaths of space this big) the content providers just aren't bothering to move to IPv6.
And yeah, the ISPs can choose maintain a bridge between the universes, but the more traffic you pour through that bridge the more resources it requires to operate... Eventually, if the ISP can't force the issue it stops making sense to transition any more users to IPv6 until more content providers get on-board.
I fully anticipate retiring in another 25 years or so and still having IPv4 be the vast majority of IP networks in operation because in the end, even if your ISP switches, what's the point of changing your internal network over? Any company of decent size will have a security team that says "No fucking way will outsiders directly connect to your IPv6 address" and block it with some kind of firewall/NAT arrangement which almost instantly negates the biggest "advantage" of IPv6. And once that "advantage" is off the table there is zero business reason to incur the expense involved in such a change-over.
DON'T BE A DICK ON THE HIGHWAY! Drive conservatively, dress conservatively, and be completely (able to pass a blood test) sober.
Most importantly: Don't draw attention to yourself.
Yeah man totally. VISA and Mastercard won't be able to maintain their business model of processing transactions much longer.
Apples to zebras, my friend: VISA and MasterCard process transactions in hundreds of currencies. Even if one of those currencies (or even ten) were to simply become worthless it wouldn't really do any damage to them: They'd just figure out how to process Visa card transactions in the currency that replaced whatever disappeared.
Bitcoin processors are basically fucked. Maybe they can repurpose some of their uber-expensive GPU rigs to mine other currencies, too.... But maybe not.
I think it would be hysterical if, in three years, eBay had 10,000 auctions running for these overpriced "GPU in a box" rigs that were selling like hotcakes last year before the late-adopters figured out BitCoin wasn't really a workable currency.
When I see how much hardware and electricity is being wasted on these various mining processes, I can only shake my head.
I'm not sure when BTC is slated to have all of its coins mined, but it will be instructive to see what happens to it at that point.
Its value will plunge precipitously. There simply isn't enough money "processing transactions" for other people for a reasonable "business" to be run doing so, and that is all that would be left for "miners" once all the bitcoins are found. So "processors" will start disappearing almost immediately. This will in turn drastically reduce the ability to spend your bitcoins which will in turn demolish their "value."
All of that is to say "Dump them now, avoid the rush, maybe get some of your money back."
Perhaps one or more of these sites were running expoitable software, and were hijacked to serve porn without their owners knowledge.
I know of at least one federal agency that had a poorly secured FTP server loaded with child porn back in to 90's
Perhaps, but most of these devices have a separate category for that (so you can run a report and quantify just how much "more secure" you are than if you'd stayed with your old product.)
Mandatory? Fascism much?
Uh, no.
It isn't "fascism" to say your unvaccinated-child may not infect my too-young-to-be-vaccinated child with a preventable disease and risk his life/kill him. In general, your "freedom" to choose an activity end at the point that you're harming another person.
They also have a big messaging problem. When a person gets a polio vaccine the assumption is that they won't get polio. Yet every year these same people hear the newscasters saying that they should get a flu vaccine. The words don't mean the same thing to the public as they do to the researchers or the doctors. If they would clean up the language I suspect their success rates would improve.
We have a problem, but it is only partly the "messaging." The other part is the "population that can barely read at an aggregate 4th grade level" problem. Specifically, we live in a nation of morons that squeaks through high school with a minimal amount of required "hard-science" and can even get university degrees that require minimal or zero science education (Bachelor of Arts, anyone?) and can then consider themselves "educated" besides knowing neither jack nor shit beyond 12th grade science, and only having a passing familiarity with even that basic level of material.
Certainly if every newscaster mentioned, every time they mentioned flu vaccinations, that it was a vaccination for specific flus and that you can still get other flus, that might help. But if Americans weren't so fucking blidningly stupid when it comes to science, more of us would be able to imply such information by using our noodles.
However, the problem is that the school boards have also allowed exclusions for "religious or personal beliefs", which is a crock.
Exemptions for religious beliefs are a crock? Those are well supported in the case law. School boards allow them because the case law says they'll lose if they try to fight it in Court and most school districts don't have spare cash laying around to throw at lawyers.
Religious and personal beliefs are a crock in this situation. Specifically, your right to believe that vaccinations are a direct ejaculation from Satan's loins is one thing, but when your unvaccinated child goes to a park and spreads the disease to younger children, too young to be vaccinated, that's the point where their religious beliefs become irrelevant.
You have the right to believe anything you want--what you don't have the right to do is risk other peoples' lives for your beliefs.
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: And this is my Universal Translator. Unfortunately, so far it only translates into an incomprehensible dead language.
Cubert J. Farnsworth: [into the translator's microphone] Hello.
Translator Machine: Bonjour!
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Crazy gibberish!
Best. Throwaway. Shot. At. The. French. Ever.
Thanks!