Persecution increases pressure, which drives evolution. Criminals are under a survival-pressure to avoid detection, which means they will actively be looking for/experimenting with ways to avoid detection. The general population is under no such pressure, and so adopts more slowly. I'm willing to bet that child pornographers, or other criminals whose crime is generally one of communication, adopted encryption before the rest of the general population, too, for the same reason.
They received 90% of their total income from Google. By any reasonable definition, they were funded by Google.
What obligations that funding puts them under is a separate question. There may be no strings attached to that money, but even so, it gives Google leverage, even if that leverage isn't utilised. The question is whether you can be considered "independent" when one of the main actors in the market has that much leverage over you.
90% funded by Google doesn't really scream "independant" to me.
Personally, I think Google keeps the money flowing out of fear that if the Mozilla Foundation shuts down, somebody with a clue might turn Firefox into a competitive browser again.
The patent you're speaking of was a design patent... and the claim you're referencing was but one of many included in that particular patent...Suggesting that someone was able to patent merely "a rectangle" is a gross mischaracterization of what actually occurred.
Here is the patent in question. Please show me the "many" claims other than the rectangular shape that demonstrate the OPs "gross mischaracterization".
Once you spend them, your transaction (and your pseudonym) become part of the blockchain, and you are no longer anonymous (but are still pseudonymous). That is, anyone who checks the blockchain can find the id of who sent the coins. Anonymity relies on whether you can stop anyone making a connection between your blockchain id (pseudonym) and your actual identity - and you're correct, this is where things like Tor come in.
I would be expecting the NSA to be cracking Bitcoin / TOR as we speak to prosecute people for material support of terrorism.
Cracking bitcoin wouldn't help the feds track down anyone. All it would let them do is print free money, which they can pretty much do anyway. Bitcoin isn't anonymous; it's pseudonymous. The NSA can, with no effort at all, find out your Bitcoin pseudonym. Then they just need to associate your that with your real identity, which they can do via their traditional means of spying on everything that happens.
Sadly, you're reaping what others have sown. The mainstream content industry fought so hard against electronic distribution, that it normalised piracy. I'd bet if iTunes had predated Napster, you wouldn't have half the problem you do.
On the other hand, I do know companies that have made money from electronic content; they ran Kickstarters, and by the time their product was available to pirate, they'd already been paid for their time developing it. Not a model that will work for everyone, but it seems to be a more workable model than the current one, which relies on unenforceable laws.
First off, they paid for Harrison Ford, so they had to let him talk too much. In the book, Col. Graff doesn't say much. Also, Graff with his little aluminum thingie on his hand pulling in the kids in the battle room ("Use the force, Ford!") doesn't fit with the rest of the movie. Nowhere else do they have gravity control or tractor beams.
Haven't seen the movie, so can't comment on that scene. But the teachers in the book had "hooks" that let them move through zero-g without having to care manoeuvring like the kids (Ender comments that when he finally gets his own hook, he has ceased to need it, as manoeuvring in zero-g has become second nature for him) and they definitely do have gravity control (Ender mentions it - to Bean I think - when discussing how the battle rooms can maintain zero-g when still attached to the rotating space station, and hypothesises about its use as a weapon).
If he constructed his argument well, then he should have, too. Essay writing isn't about being correct - it's about how to presenting a premise, and defending it rhetorically. I've written many essays that I knew (and the marker knew) were "incorrect" in their premise, and received high marks because I argued well or cleverly.
First off, why be so pedantic about the word homophobia?I don't see you or anyone else complaining that the word hydrophobia doesn't mean that someone has a phobia about water, it just means that their throat is becoming paralyzed and it's becoming difficult to drink. There are lots of words in the English language that don't mean exactly what you'd think they mean by comparing them to other words.
Because the word isn't an innocuous curiosity of linguistic evolution; it's a deliberate construction of language to intended to manipulate people by controlling the words they use to communicate. Same as the current shifting of the word "terrorist" to mean "someone the government doesn't like", and a whole bunch of other examples.
I'm not much interested in Hollywood versions of classic books, ever since Peter Jackson took a book that is much shorter than any of the books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and stretched it out to what promises to be a trilogy in it's own right.
Well, actually he's taking the Hobbit and a bunch of the historical appendices from Return of the King (which were fairly large in their own right) and making them into a trilogy. The other thing to remember is that the Hobbit targeted a younger audience, and was far less wordy and more direct. That means that more events are crammed into a shorter page count, and that cutting has a disproportionate impact on the story.
It's all related; Apple's iron grip on their ecosystem is what allows them to position their device as "premium" and charge so much for it. If they'd done what IBM/Google did, and opened their OS so that everyone could make compatible clones, competition would drive the price down.
The Miriam-Webster was the second entry on Google for "define wean", and the only one I checked. I went for it over the first entry, thefreedictionary.com, as I figured it was more reputable, although checking now, thefreedictionary has a similar definition: "To detach from that to which one is strongly habituated or devoted:"
The other top five definitions include: - "to withdraw (a person, the affections, one's dependency, etc.) from some object, habit, form of enjoyment, or the like" (dictionary.reference.com) - "accustom (someone) to managing without something which they have become dependent on "(oxforddictionaries.com) - " to make someone gradually stop depending on something that they like and have become used to, especially a drug or a bad habit" (macmillandictionary.com)
It's always easy to win an argument when you just make up your own definitions.
wean: 1: to accustom (as a young child or animal) to take food otherwise than by nursing 2: to detach from a source of dependence; also to free from a usually unwholesome habit or interest 3: to accustom to something from an early age
Obviously, it's the second meaning that's being used here, which does not necessitate any form of replacement. The distinction between weaning and cold-turkey in drug dependency isn't the presence or a substitute, but gradation. My wife was on some nasty anti-migraine medication that she had to be weaned off before she could fall pregnant. The weaning process involved gradually decreasing the dose of medication daily, until it fell below therepeutic levels, not by substituting another drug.
15% (the difference between 33 and 38) isn't significant? I guess we disagree on what's significant. You still didn't address the rest of my post - there's countries on that list significantly (by any definition) higher than the US, with a far lower standard of living (Zimbabwe: 97%, Bosnia: 50%), as well as lower. Government spending doesn't appear to have a consistent correlation with standard of living at all.
Because "running out of money" and "inflating your currency into uselessness" have such different outcomes in practice. If you inflate your currency, then you are, to all intents and purposes, spending the buying power of anyone who holds your currency.
No matter what games you play with the means used to represent value, and the end of the day, there is a finite amount of value available at any given time, which means it can be exhausted.
I guess "debt-scare obsessives" being empirically wrong is why Greece is such a great economic state...
Slashdot Mirror
That was always going to be true.
Persecution increases pressure, which drives evolution. Criminals are under a survival-pressure to avoid detection, which means they will actively be looking for/experimenting with ways to avoid detection. The general population is under no such pressure, and so adopts more slowly. I'm willing to bet that child pornographers, or other criminals whose crime is generally one of communication, adopted encryption before the rest of the general population, too, for the same reason.
They received 90% of their total income from Google. By any reasonable definition, they were funded by Google.
What obligations that funding puts them under is a separate question. There may be no strings attached to that money, but even so, it gives Google leverage, even if that leverage isn't utilised. The question is whether you can be considered "independent" when one of the main actors in the market has that much leverage over you.
90% funded by Google doesn't really scream "independant" to me.
Personally, I think Google keeps the money flowing out of fear that if the Mozilla Foundation shuts down, somebody with a clue might turn Firefox into a competitive browser again.
The patent you're speaking of was a design patent ... and the claim you're referencing was but one of many included in that particular patent...Suggesting that someone was able to patent merely "a rectangle" is a gross mischaracterization of what actually occurred.
Here is the patent in question. Please show me the "many" claims other than the rectangular shape that demonstrate the OPs "gross mischaracterization".
Once you spend them, your transaction (and your pseudonym) become part of the blockchain, and you are no longer anonymous (but are still pseudonymous). That is, anyone who checks the blockchain can find the id of who sent the coins. Anonymity relies on whether you can stop anyone making a connection between your blockchain id (pseudonym) and your actual identity - and you're correct, this is where things like Tor come in.
I would be expecting the NSA to be cracking Bitcoin / TOR as we speak to prosecute people for material support of terrorism.
Cracking bitcoin wouldn't help the feds track down anyone. All it would let them do is print free money, which they can pretty much do anyway. Bitcoin isn't anonymous; it's pseudonymous. The NSA can, with no effort at all, find out your Bitcoin pseudonym. Then they just need to associate your that with your real identity, which they can do via their traditional means of spying on everything that happens.
Because although they gave it the NSA, they still don't want the Chinese government to compromise it?
Also, not.
Sadly, you're reaping what others have sown. The mainstream content industry fought so hard against electronic distribution, that it normalised piracy. I'd bet if iTunes had predated Napster, you wouldn't have half the problem you do.
On the other hand, I do know companies that have made money from electronic content; they ran Kickstarters, and by the time their product was available to pirate, they'd already been paid for their time developing it. Not a model that will work for everyone, but it seems to be a more workable model than the current one, which relies on unenforceable laws.
Yeah, I'm sure it's because they have free childcare, and not because don't they send in a SWAT team every time someone lights up a joint.
Australia would like to talk to you about ANZAC Day.
All AC postings start out at 0 until someone mods them up
"Content distribution" is just as valid an extrapolation of "content cartel" as "content production" is.
First off, they paid for Harrison Ford, so they had to let him talk too much. In the book, Col. Graff doesn't say much. Also, Graff with his little aluminum thingie on his hand pulling in the kids in the battle room ("Use the force, Ford!") doesn't fit with the rest of the movie. Nowhere else do they have gravity control or tractor beams.
Haven't seen the movie, so can't comment on that scene. But the teachers in the book had "hooks" that let them move through zero-g without having to care manoeuvring like the kids (Ender comments that when he finally gets his own hook, he has ceased to need it, as manoeuvring in zero-g has become second nature for him) and they definitely do have gravity control (Ender mentions it - to Bean I think - when discussing how the battle rooms can maintain zero-g when still attached to the rotating space station, and hypothesises about its use as a weapon).
If he constructed his argument well, then he should have, too. Essay writing isn't about being correct - it's about how to presenting a premise, and defending it rhetorically. I've written many essays that I knew (and the marker knew) were "incorrect" in their premise, and received high marks because I argued well or cleverly.
Did anyone feel any compassion for the people that Ender killed?
Ender did.
First off, why be so pedantic about the word homophobia?I don't see you or anyone else complaining that the word hydrophobia doesn't mean that someone has a phobia about water, it just means that their throat is becoming paralyzed and it's becoming difficult to drink. There are lots of words in the English language that don't mean exactly what you'd think they mean by comparing them to other words.
Because the word isn't an innocuous curiosity of linguistic evolution; it's a deliberate construction of language to intended to manipulate people by controlling the words they use to communicate. Same as the current shifting of the word "terrorist" to mean "someone the government doesn't like", and a whole bunch of other examples.
I'm not much interested in Hollywood versions of classic books, ever since Peter Jackson took a book that is much shorter than any of the books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and stretched it out to what promises to be a trilogy in it's own right.
Well, actually he's taking the Hobbit and a bunch of the historical appendices from Return of the King (which were fairly large in their own right) and making them into a trilogy. The other thing to remember is that the Hobbit targeted a younger audience, and was far less wordy and more direct. That means that more events are crammed into a shorter page count, and that cutting has a disproportionate impact on the story.
It's all related; Apple's iron grip on their ecosystem is what allows them to position their device as "premium" and charge so much for it. If they'd done what IBM/Google did, and opened their OS so that everyone could make compatible clones, competition would drive the price down.
The Miriam-Webster was the second entry on Google for "define wean", and the only one I checked. I went for it over the first entry, thefreedictionary.com, as I figured it was more reputable, although checking now, thefreedictionary has a similar definition: "To detach from that to which one is strongly habituated or devoted:"
The other top five definitions include:
- "to withdraw (a person, the affections, one's dependency, etc.) from some object, habit, form of enjoyment, or the like" (dictionary.reference.com)
- "accustom (someone) to managing without something which they have become dependent on "(oxforddictionaries.com)
- " to make someone gradually stop depending on something that they like and have become used to, especially a drug or a bad habit" (macmillandictionary.com)
All of which support my statement.
It's always easy to win an argument when you just make up your own definitions.
wean:
1: to accustom (as a young child or animal) to take food otherwise than by nursing
2: to detach from a source of dependence; also to free from a usually unwholesome habit or interest
3: to accustom to something from an early age
Obviously, it's the second meaning that's being used here, which does not necessitate any form of replacement. The distinction between weaning and cold-turkey in drug dependency isn't the presence or a substitute, but gradation. My wife was on some nasty anti-migraine medication that she had to be weaned off before she could fall pregnant. The weaning process involved gradually decreasing the dose of medication daily, until it fell below therepeutic levels, not by substituting another drug.
The effect of this is to remove secure competitors from the market and force users onto overseas services.
Fixed that for you.
15% (the difference between 33 and 38) isn't significant? I guess we disagree on what's significant. You still didn't address the rest of my post - there's countries on that list significantly (by any definition) higher than the US, with a far lower standard of living (Zimbabwe: 97%, Bosnia: 50%), as well as lower. Government spending doesn't appear to have a consistent correlation with standard of living at all.
Because "running out of money" and "inflating your currency into uselessness" have such different outcomes in practice. If you inflate your currency, then you are, to all intents and purposes, spending the buying power of anyone who holds your currency.
No matter what games you play with the means used to represent value, and the end of the day, there is a finite amount of value available at any given time, which means it can be exhausted.
I guess "debt-scare obsessives" being empirically wrong is why Greece is such a great economic state...
Not unless you lied on your application form.