"The BTC economy has a market cap equivalent to USD 11.5 billion."
Which means absolutely nothing. I just started an (unincorporated) "company." I decided the company would have one billion shares. I sold only one, to my coworker, for a dollar (well, he might have though I was asking for change for the coffee machine but whatever). My "company" has a "market" cap of $1 billion. I can assure you that "we" would have great difficulty covering a multimillion dollar trade.
It's just like any other exchange. They don't buy your bitcoins, somebody else does. The US government will say "we have X bitcoins for sale". You come in and say, great, I'll take 5 for $10 each. The government either accepts or rejects your offer. Although, doesn't the US government usually do this sort of thing in an auction?
Either way, cashing in that many bitcoins will cause the price to fall. The interesting thing is, how much?
Scuba training costs a few hundred dollars and the equipment doesn't require any more maintenance than anything else. You'd need at least as much training to use this gill thing safely. And if you need only a short period of bottom time, compact air tanks are already available.
Seriously? Some dude who *might* some day run for president of a country makes a random, non-tech related, screwup, and you think it's a story of national importance, never mind deserving to be posted on Slashdot?
Use it as a (very brief) introduction to a story on the technology behind traffic simulation, sure. Otherwise stick it in some local news category so people who don't care can filter it out. Even the actual US election coverage gets put in a subcategory that the rest of us can either ignore or make popcorn before reading.
It's not really. It's local news. It seems very important to people who live there and have to drive on that road I'm sure, but it matters not a bit to anybody else.
Sure is. Police, military, whatever. It's a job that comes with specific rights and responsibilities. No matter what your screwed up bro code says, when you retire, get fired, suspended, whatever, you no longer have those rights and responsibilities.
An ex cop is a regular citizen who happens to have been a cop in the past.
Hey Slashdot, how about a "Local News That Doesn't Matter" or "American Regional Minutiae" section so we can filter stuff like this out?
Unless you're all interested in how the province I live in kinda forgot that you have to maintain bridges and as a result they're all (literally) falling down. Two out of three lanes? You've still got one left! Lucky bastards!
I doubt it would cost more to make a five element filter compared to the current three element ones if it were mass produced. The problem is that camera sensors aren't really very sensitive to IR or UV, almost nobody actually wants that functionality, and it would reduce the effective resolution of your camera.
Not far more sensitive. They are sensitive to IR, and do come with a filter to block it out, but they're not sensitive to very much of the IR spectrum, and not particularly sensitive to even that part, so taking IR photos is an exercise in low light photography.
You can. You just have to remove the filter in front of the sensor. Astrophotographers have been doing that to their SLRs for years, so much so that Canon released a special (and expensive) version of one of their digital SLRs without the filter.
Regular cameras have the filter so that the pictures don't look weird. But if you remove it and put on your own IR filter you can do IR imaging. It's difficult though, because the sensitivity of the sensor to IR and the properties of the filter mean you're essentially taking very low light pictures.
Sony famously released a camcorder with a low-light IR mode. It could see through clothes.
How is paying with cash more secure than a wireless credit card? If you lose the credit card you can cancel it as soon as you notice. If you lose the cash, too bad.
You miss his point. The system should be set up so that the retailer CAN'T compromise it. I don't live in the US. When I make an online credit card transaction, the retailer collects the number, then redirects me to a confirmation page from the card company. There I enter a password that the retailer never sees, and so cannot abuse.
A credit card number should be useless without a second factor that is never known by anyone other than the customer and the card issuer.
Maybe things are different in the US, but in Canada many merchants check ID, certainly in person. I've had online ones call me to confirm, and occasionally ask for a photocopied government ID to be e-mailed to them. Credit cards are all chip and pin now, and online transactions are password verified through VISA/Mastercard.
The real problem is the VISA and Mastercard still allow insecure transactions. The problem is not that companies are failing to protect credit card information, it's that those companies have information that can be used to make a valid transaction.
The problem is, Glass is basically designed to do all the things that are the most irritating about smartphones. What are some of the (few) things Glass does better than a regular smartphone? Record people without their knowing, check your mail, twitter, etc. covertly when you shouldn't be, and, well, there must be one or two more.
Glass is like bluetooth headsets. There are a few situations in which they're useful but in most actual use they're just annoying. It's not a coincidence that bluetooth headset and Glass wearers are made fun of in almost exactly the same ways.
They stop by and cyber-bully him? What do they do, walk over, push him off his standing treadmill, log into twitter on his computer and post something nasty about his glasses?
Subtlety is always the key. Idiots talking loudly with bluetooth dongles with blue LEDS hanging out of their ears are sneered at. Some guy talking quietly using a pair of ear buds with a microphone isn't even noticed.
I use a smart phone because I want a computer in my pocket. I couldn't really care less about the phone, but the best pocket computers all seem to have phones integrated into them. Might come in handy someday I guess.
"only an absolute fucking idiot would rob a tourist bringing the wrath of their local authorities down on them HARD. "
Then there are an awful lot of absolute fucking idiots in the world. Tourists get robbed a lot. Perhaps you've never ventured more than 100 miles from where you were born?
I think it's kind of ironic that Facebook just applied for a frivolous patent for gathering and analyzing the information, but someone else already holds the frivolous patent for acting upon that information.
I see you've gone with the "vehemence" method of trying to convince people you're right. Normally you wouldn't be worth replying to, but someone else reading this thread might get some benefit.
Two of those "regulations" that makes a company "regulated' is that they a) have to very carefully specify exactly how they're making whatever-it-is, including precisely what's in it, and b) have to demonstrate in scientifically rigorous trials that it actually does more good than harm. So the chances of a REGULATED company selling you bad heart medication are vastly lower than those of an unregulated company doing it. A regulated drug producer can kill you if there's some accident, like a tainted batch. An unregulated one can kill you that way, or if they decided it would be cheaper to put a bit less of the active ingredient in, or change the process, or didn't have a reliable process in the first place, or were wrong about the drug working, or just made up the whole thing in the first place.
Don't think someone would make up imaginary treatments? Google "snake oil" and "homeopathy."
Yup. For the paper I'm reviewing at the moment the journal has helpfully sent a reminder five days after I agreed to review it. I appreciate their effort to reduce review times, but that's a bit ridiculous.
Tenure historically was important for arts and philosophy. The idea was that you could say things that were unpopular in safety because nobody could fire you.
Research professors don't really have terribly meaningful tenure anyway, because if you aren't performing you can't get grants and/or the university may deny you students. Either of those essentially means you're washed up.
You've got the problem right, but I disagree with the solution. We need to dilute professors.
Instead of being a postdoc for ten years and then either leaving broken and broke or scoring the big one (and getting to slave away for another twenty years as junior faculty...) make post doc a two year post-post-graduate thing. After that you become a professor. "Professor" stops meaning "old dude who writes grants" and starts meaning "person who does research and teaches." Grants get broken up into smaller pieces, so instead of one professor being responsible for keeping funding that keeps ten, fifteen or twenty students, post docs and techs fed, each professor gets personal operating funds. Professors have one or two students (or none) and do active research themselves.
The current position of "professor" is really a pretty crappy one that I don't think many who actually like doing science really want (I don't). What they DO want is the ability to apply for funding to support their research, get paid a reasonable wage, and maybe have students.
Slashdot Mirror
"The BTC economy has a market cap equivalent to USD 11.5 billion."
Which means absolutely nothing. I just started an (unincorporated) "company." I decided the company would have one billion shares. I sold only one, to my coworker, for a dollar (well, he might have though I was asking for change for the coffee machine but whatever). My "company" has a "market" cap of $1 billion. I can assure you that "we" would have great difficulty covering a multimillion dollar trade.
It's just like any other exchange. They don't buy your bitcoins, somebody else does. The US government will say "we have X bitcoins for sale". You come in and say, great, I'll take 5 for $10 each. The government either accepts or rejects your offer. Although, doesn't the US government usually do this sort of thing in an auction?
Either way, cashing in that many bitcoins will cause the price to fall. The interesting thing is, how much?
Scuba training costs a few hundred dollars and the equipment doesn't require any more maintenance than anything else. You'd need at least as much training to use this gill thing safely. And if you need only a short period of bottom time, compact air tanks are already available.
Seriously? Some dude who *might* some day run for president of a country makes a random, non-tech related, screwup, and you think it's a story of national importance, never mind deserving to be posted on Slashdot?
Use it as a (very brief) introduction to a story on the technology behind traffic simulation, sure. Otherwise stick it in some local news category so people who don't care can filter it out. Even the actual US election coverage gets put in a subcategory that the rest of us can either ignore or make popcorn before reading.
It's not really. It's local news. It seems very important to people who live there and have to drive on that road I'm sure, but it matters not a bit to anybody else.
Kind of ironic since in this situation people ran amok and it escalated to manslaughter.
Sure is. Police, military, whatever. It's a job that comes with specific rights and responsibilities. No matter what your screwed up bro code says, when you retire, get fired, suspended, whatever, you no longer have those rights and responsibilities.
An ex cop is a regular citizen who happens to have been a cop in the past.
Whoopsie, you had headphones on or the stereo turned up loud and he popped in to see if anyone was in danger from the chimney fire he spotted.
Stick with violent paranoia though, it makes life grander.
Hey Slashdot, how about a "Local News That Doesn't Matter" or "American Regional Minutiae" section so we can filter stuff like this out?
Unless you're all interested in how the province I live in kinda forgot that you have to maintain bridges and as a result they're all (literally) falling down. Two out of three lanes? You've still got one left! Lucky bastards!
I doubt it would cost more to make a five element filter compared to the current three element ones if it were mass produced. The problem is that camera sensors aren't really very sensitive to IR or UV, almost nobody actually wants that functionality, and it would reduce the effective resolution of your camera.
Not far more sensitive. They are sensitive to IR, and do come with a filter to block it out, but they're not sensitive to very much of the IR spectrum, and not particularly sensitive to even that part, so taking IR photos is an exercise in low light photography.
You can. You just have to remove the filter in front of the sensor. Astrophotographers have been doing that to their SLRs for years, so much so that Canon released a special (and expensive) version of one of their digital SLRs without the filter.
Regular cameras have the filter so that the pictures don't look weird. But if you remove it and put on your own IR filter you can do IR imaging. It's difficult though, because the sensitivity of the sensor to IR and the properties of the filter mean you're essentially taking very low light pictures.
Sony famously released a camcorder with a low-light IR mode. It could see through clothes.
How is paying with cash more secure than a wireless credit card? If you lose the credit card you can cancel it as soon as you notice. If you lose the cash, too bad.
You miss his point. The system should be set up so that the retailer CAN'T compromise it. I don't live in the US. When I make an online credit card transaction, the retailer collects the number, then redirects me to a confirmation page from the card company. There I enter a password that the retailer never sees, and so cannot abuse.
A credit card number should be useless without a second factor that is never known by anyone other than the customer and the card issuer.
Maybe things are different in the US, but in Canada many merchants check ID, certainly in person. I've had online ones call me to confirm, and occasionally ask for a photocopied government ID to be e-mailed to them. Credit cards are all chip and pin now, and online transactions are password verified through VISA/Mastercard.
The real problem is the VISA and Mastercard still allow insecure transactions. The problem is not that companies are failing to protect credit card information, it's that those companies have information that can be used to make a valid transaction.
The problem is, Glass is basically designed to do all the things that are the most irritating about smartphones. What are some of the (few) things Glass does better than a regular smartphone? Record people without their knowing, check your mail, twitter, etc. covertly when you shouldn't be, and, well, there must be one or two more.
Glass is like bluetooth headsets. There are a few situations in which they're useful but in most actual use they're just annoying. It's not a coincidence that bluetooth headset and Glass wearers are made fun of in almost exactly the same ways.
They stop by and cyber-bully him? What do they do, walk over, push him off his standing treadmill, log into twitter on his computer and post something nasty about his glasses?
Subtlety is always the key. Idiots talking loudly with bluetooth dongles with blue LEDS hanging out of their ears are sneered at. Some guy talking quietly using a pair of ear buds with a microphone isn't even noticed.
I use a smart phone because I want a computer in my pocket. I couldn't really care less about the phone, but the best pocket computers all seem to have phones integrated into them. Might come in handy someday I guess.
"only an absolute fucking idiot would rob a tourist bringing the wrath of their local authorities down on them HARD. "
Then there are an awful lot of absolute fucking idiots in the world. Tourists get robbed a lot. Perhaps you've never ventured more than 100 miles from where you were born?
I think it's kind of ironic that Facebook just applied for a frivolous patent for gathering and analyzing the information, but someone else already holds the frivolous patent for acting upon that information.
I see you've gone with the "vehemence" method of trying to convince people you're right. Normally you wouldn't be worth replying to, but someone else reading this thread might get some benefit.
Two of those "regulations" that makes a company "regulated' is that they a) have to very carefully specify exactly how they're making whatever-it-is, including precisely what's in it, and b) have to demonstrate in scientifically rigorous trials that it actually does more good than harm. So the chances of a REGULATED company selling you bad heart medication are vastly lower than those of an unregulated company doing it. A regulated drug producer can kill you if there's some accident, like a tainted batch. An unregulated one can kill you that way, or if they decided it would be cheaper to put a bit less of the active ingredient in, or change the process, or didn't have a reliable process in the first place, or were wrong about the drug working, or just made up the whole thing in the first place.
Don't think someone would make up imaginary treatments? Google "snake oil" and "homeopathy."
Yup. For the paper I'm reviewing at the moment the journal has helpfully sent a reminder five days after I agreed to review it. I appreciate their effort to reduce review times, but that's a bit ridiculous.
Tenure historically was important for arts and philosophy. The idea was that you could say things that were unpopular in safety because nobody could fire you.
Research professors don't really have terribly meaningful tenure anyway, because if you aren't performing you can't get grants and/or the university may deny you students. Either of those essentially means you're washed up.
You've got the problem right, but I disagree with the solution. We need to dilute professors.
Instead of being a postdoc for ten years and then either leaving broken and broke or scoring the big one (and getting to slave away for another twenty years as junior faculty...) make post doc a two year post-post-graduate thing. After that you become a professor. "Professor" stops meaning "old dude who writes grants" and starts meaning "person who does research and teaches." Grants get broken up into smaller pieces, so instead of one professor being responsible for keeping funding that keeps ten, fifteen or twenty students, post docs and techs fed, each professor gets personal operating funds. Professors have one or two students (or none) and do active research themselves.
The current position of "professor" is really a pretty crappy one that I don't think many who actually like doing science really want (I don't). What they DO want is the ability to apply for funding to support their research, get paid a reasonable wage, and maybe have students.