Gold mining gets more difficult as you run out of gold to mine. Like everything else... oil for example. We never run out because there is always a little bit left over but it becomes prohibitively expensive or too technically difficult to bother. We can MAKE gold atoms but that is purely academic; someday it might be realistic to do in quantity but it'll still cost too much...(until replicators)....but it might get cheaper than mining what is left the stuff in the ground.
Keep in mind that we inflate our money and even when gold backed inflation happens which makes the value seem to go up $ wise. We also no longer get official inflation numbers for US dollars since Bush stopped reporting of it... not that it wasn't likely a cooked number at many points in history of money. Also, when you add more gold into the equation you impact the relative worth of the money, slightly.
Authority is given by public support (even the oppressed support the oppressor; unless they are actively fighting.)
Gold was backed by a massive consensus. I used the term bankster for a reason, I suggest you look into that history further and see why gold can scale just fine and it did so for 100s of years as the backbone behind layers of other systems. Furthermore, you must be claiming the Swiss are not civilized? (until 2000. They keep having moves to restore the old ways.)
Gold is physically FIXED and tamper proof, unlike bankster run money systems and their puppet governments. Bitcoin's encryption is about as equally FIXED and tamper proof as gold but it's mathematical rather than based in physics.
To say gold can not scale when the many arbitrary systems build upon it are easily altered and comparatively unstable (hence the use of land/gold as a hedge) is ignorant. Such systems can change and adapt (and be corrupt) as they always have been for over a millennium, certainly they can scale.
Furthermore, if they discovered some graphene 20 years ago (from an acquired Russian object, meteor) it could easily sit in a secure location for decades before proper research results go public and it could sit decades afterwards as a forgotten item.
They could also just sit on the item for historical purposes because of related secrets still being kept. Some old Russian spy plane bits which no longer hold meaning, for example. Government over classifies and many times it is just to cover up possible mistakes. Some general could order something stored for any reason (being well educated is not a job requirement) and to remove a secure item MUST require more than 1 expert to sign off on it's removal simply for security purposes.
NYT might get somebody in government to inventory and clean house. It is not likely we will hear about it unless they need to downplay the importance of such a place.
All we have is YEARS of propaganda-- Bush had 8 years and investigated the whole time and for 6 years having more GOP controlled government ever. Found NOTHING. They only proposed solutions to problems they NEVER proved existed.
I've heard GOP strategist admit higher voter turn out kills them; they pray for rain and snow on election day. THE GOP FIGHTS EVERY ATTEMPT TO PROMOTE DEMOCRACY. Multiple days to vote? oppose it. Holiday to vote? oppose it. Easy process to vote? oppose it. They only sometimes allow something in specific situations where it is publicly known to help them (meaning it's so strong you can easily find why.)
Why don't we FIX social security numbers and most the Identity Theft problems in the USA (when other nations have already?) It's the GOP. seriously. A working Identifier system and Verification system would inevitably be used for voting. That is how much the GOP wants voting broken.
DRIVERS LICENSE / State ID. Yes, there are some illegals with them. There are SIMPLE solutions to that problem; but we are not even allowed to hear those without being drowned out with GOP propaganda. I've seen it 1st hand being involved in such issues lobbying and volunteering.
VOTER IDs are a SCAM... a HACK of the system. SIMPLE IS HARD TO HACK-- voter IDs are complex nightmares on purpose. No, they can't be done simple... the devil is in the details and even if you have perfect details; some corruption WILL happen to put in loopholes later! Which again is why it must be DEAD SIMPLE. Voter IDs are never simple!
Criminals are citizens and their alienable right to vote exists even if we stupidly infringe upon that right. it is NOT a privilege! When you take away voting rights of minorities (criminals) your actions prove you treat it as a privilege, not a right. Even more stupid is how many are in jail and when their "debt" is payed they still can't vote. You judge a society by how it treats the lowly. Criminals are a common excuse for many undemocratic laws. Illegals are a big one too. SIMPLE IS HARD TO HACK. proving citizenship is harder; I'm for it... but voting comes 1st, residency 2nd, citizenship 3rd. if you really believe in democracy, you would have your priorities straight.
Residency restrictions (double voting) is a bigger issue but it largely curbs illegals at the same time since they are similar problems.... devil is in the details. Yes, double voting is rare... but so are illegals. REMEMBER, it's been heavily investigated for decades by the same people claiming it is a problem. Now your state may be GOP fucked up so bad they created a problem on purpose, but some of us have fairly decent elections.
You want to fix things? Start with real IDENTITY THEFT solutions. It takes approx 2 years from breach to used identity (according to FBI) so plan now because recent breaches will start their impact then. If a foreign power is organized, they could bring down the nation with automated identity attacks. A crisis (the rate of theft now should be considered a crisis already) will need a solution and that is the time for a REAL solution to happen. Get prepared. LEARN.
Identifiers like Social Security should be PUBLIC knowledge and actually do not need to change (an upgrade to an easy to remember alphanumeric code with a larger number space but shorter length would be nice... and harder to filter out with regex.) They should be assigned to everybody; even dead people. Makes history easier, genealogy, etc. Your name and birthday mostly do this already; a serial number is same but better... but try telling the 666 freaks that. (maybe using base 36 instead of a number would help? at least it's shorter.) No encryption. keep it simple. Hey, Babylonians used base 60, so it's still simple enough. Don't think your face scan from a low res photo won't ID you well enough to anybody in the near future. Having a public # code doesn't mean you have to advertise it like your face.
Identity verification is a huge area which needs work. it MUST be
Gold can not scale. Limited amount, it has to be verified and processed; that takes time and money to do. Ever look into gold? You pay overhead costs in actually trading in gold plus you have to pay to securely store and transport any sizable amount of it.
How did gold become the foundation of everything until the banksters finally took over?
Abstract trading; not actual gold exchanges done on top of the real thing. Also, money was created ON TOP of gold and that is where all the action happened.
When you see other kinds of money float on top of bitcoin then you will see it scale. I see no reason why it can not become a kind of digital gold as long as the encryption holds up.
Gold is and hasn't been worth as much as we've made it for centuries. We based a system around it and that made it valuable. It has a silly jewelry value but that isn't what made it so expensive.
With futures trading and bigger banks involved... interesting times are coming. (not exactly a good thing; it's more of a curse but it is not dull)
Long ago, I put some extra cash into Bitcoins. I am just waiting to see how long I can wait before jumping ship. I did not think it would go this far or as high but trends continue to show higher is possible so I will continue wait. It's simply a maximization problem to me; as a form of gambling. I am not sure what to peg it at just yet still watching the social trends. It has no actual value at all unlike gold which does bottom out due to practical uses for it. It solely runs on mass investment supporting it in addition to faith people put into it. The more entrenched and wide spread the harder it will be for masses of people to ditch it. Figuring how low that will go is like predicting mob behavior.
Many people creating new kinds of bitcoins are just trying to cash in on the scheme. bitcoin is the 1st and oldest without a major crash so it's going to be the one everybody is going to watch. Money systems are not far from ponzi schemes; not the same but with people just inventing their own now the line between the two is blurring. It does not take much because they are so similar.
What people are missing is my suggestions that it is similar to gold. Where some smart people figure out how to build practical use money ON TOP OF IT. gold is as impractical as salt, cotton, or other currency bases of the past so we EXCHANGED it slowly and securely for something easier -- not simply because banks run on debt; which obviously was a HUGE reason but because hauling around gold without standards or regulations is a big problem (especially with fools gold all over.) Bitcoin can remain slow and expensive to use-- have you looked into gold?? you have to pay to exchange it because you don't want to be ripped off. it's heavy but not enough that it is not easy to steal. It's better to buy Swiss Fracs and deal with that in a bank than pay a bank to hold your gold. (if swiss fracs die, then that gold won't be much use to you either.)
Math is not tangible but it's plenty real. 2+2 != 10 or 20 in a decade.
Scarcity is the real point of this so lets limit discussion to that critical aspect:
Bitcoin can not be inflated; it has a fixed limited amount. Intangible rules and math constraints in the definition.
Gold has limited amounts and can not be inflated. Tangible constraints. (You can't go into space and get more gold... When that is possible, then it's scarcity would diminish and thereby the value in doing that.)
Gold's practical use is not even close to it's value. It merely represents something desirable from which to exchange abstracted value.
Gold backed printed money. Hybrid of both problems. A fake money (paper) that represents a fixed money which is in reality (gold) Bitcoin is in reality; mathematically real despite not being physically real and it is fixed. The fact bitcoin is SLOW and not cheap to process does not mean anything more than it does for GOLD; which has to be processed to verify it too.
I see people making lots of new coin pyramids but I've not seen any think about the 2-tier system we had with money for most of history in creation of something new.
Futures trading ideally levels out crazy markets (it has bad sides too) but in this case it's even more valuable because bitcoin doesn't scale or really work... like gold does. Bitcoin is like markets worried about price flux-- except it is more than just a worry and it impacts everybody while oil price flux is not a big issue unless you are a big buyer like an airline or something.
So, you end up with middle men printing various kinds of money BACKED BY BITCOIN. They can inflate or whatever other scheme invented to create a futures contract like situation. So you print... ByteCoins? which are made up of bitcoins (forget the name is the inverse of their value) and you promise their value in bitcoins like a futures contract does. Make them move fast, etc. charge a middle man fee for the faster processing and the merging of bitcoin transactions to lower the overhead.
Bitcoin can be the bedrock for many attempted systems. stop trying to invent variations on the same pyramid scheme.
My own tests with Argon2 prove that with it's lowest setting it loads my current server down too much for the hash rate I was getting with bcrypt. I do not have the ability to fine tune it's server load well enough at this point so I've not switched over password hashing to it at this time. Also, I have less free RAM than I'd like to allocate so the benefits of argon2 are significantly limited for me at this time... It is going to be a trade off between server resources and massively parallel GPU attacks and the RAM use is primarily the new defense of Argon2 (not so much parallelism since that is still an area of growth for hardware.)
I've seen tests run with GPU hashing implementing a huge list of algorithms where bcrypt was 100x better than everything else and for the test it was only set to 5! Nobody uses bcrypt set at complexity 5! no benchmarks vs Argon2 other than my own (using server cpus.)
Somebody with bcrypt in FPGAs might knock the wind out of it but bcrypt at level 10+? Going forward, I've already been migrating to argon2 and I will look into formatting it into standard password hash format now that I know it's being used this way; however, I will still be limiting it until server upgrades... and further Argon2 benchmarks performed on gpus, fpgas because it won't matter if my server needs weaken Argon2 too much. (At which point I guess we need to start getting gpus for servers?)
Please realize that concepts and things almost always precede terminology used to describe them. Even detailed formal definitions placed upon old concepts CAN become vague representations returning back to the less formal origins.
When people put the needs of the many above the needs of the few, the whole concept is often labeled as socialist especially when it even remotely involves economics or government. Before Christ heavily promoted socialism the concept still existed... some would say it is Christian (or a Christian value) although they don't hold claim to it anymore than somebody coining a word or phrase. Some may object to my socialist Christ comment (sarcasm on) since the wealthy who do not give their wealth away DO go to hell that does not mean any man made policy which saves them from their damnation has been endorsed. Except of course when man-made polices prevent killing or any Commandments... those are ok, as long as you do not try to save the wealthy or powerful in any way... because that is socialism... (scarasm off)
The basic concepts of socialism extend before the term and outside of economics -- it's more like an observation of an existing commonly occurring behavior expressed within a domain... lacking a term motivated it's creation instead of the usual expansion of an existing definition to cover another topic. If one even bothers to go that far. If we had a good term we'd probably not have the word "socialism" or it would be narrow jargon few know, like the majority of the english ( >65k words with college level people being in the 20k range.)
Plenty of things... They'll have to figure out how to move forward without breaking add-ons with the latest firefox changes.
integrate some of the bigger add-ons.
Their message filter rule system needs drastic changes because it's a total mess. Configuration for a large organization is also nowhere near good enough. They should work on corporate setups for easy config and support since they are competing with webmail. The advantage of it over the cloud services is the mail filtering options and configuration abilities-- I HATE webmail because it doesn't come close to what I can do with desktop clients. I don't have the time but I have a lot of ideas on how powerful filtering should be implemented next time around... with plenty of configuration hooks for add-ons.
The addressbook needs a total redo. there is a big add-on which kind of does this... they should work with integrating that as a replacement. vcf files should be easier to work with.
Sync of addressbook is another one. calendar sync.
Apple's to do and notes apps just use IMAP for storage which is a clever idea which everybody should copy and standardize.
I just want a mario coin sound for EACH email coming in... and I can't get it to properly do that. it'll play either 1 sound for many. I had to put in an add-on and setup filters to get close to what I wanted. and filters for each account too... because the filtering is a pain.
Setting up keys to route/file emails quickly... a mess to setup. I should get an overlay below the listing showing me the destinations and keys - and setup all the mappings easily. plus have it list the last 3 I moved so I can go fix it. all with the keyboard. well, i could go into more detail... there are tons of things they could be doing to make it more productive. I would like markdown support... the add-on is nice but built-in would be better.
honeypot. email account just for attracting spam for auto training the mail filter. (already do this)
Email account masking. I have to manually set it up. with add-ons. 2 email accounts. 1 public, which is heavily filtered and another private which all filtered email goes to. I only use the private one. when I reply, it uses the public account. nobody emails my private account; it's really just IMAP storage and I'd prevent inbound except by mail routing if I could. Reason? I can edit my public account or have many of them-- and change them at will without messing with my private email account. I can auto reply and phase out old emails if they get too much spam... I can have harsh anti-spam rules on older emails that are phased out. Something to help manage such schemes would be nice... or at least less add-on use.
Capitalism was and still to a lesser degree rests upon socialist arguments. To sell stuff to the masses, everything is sold with socialist arguments. To give up so that the many benefit is the essence of socialism. It's a broad concept applied in many ways.
Capitalism argues it is the best system because it benefits the most people in the end. Twisted reasoning in a way but not illogical; it's justification for the inequality and many flaws is socialism. Keeping competition fair by regulation is part of it too and that is considered socialist... Today we've gone to extremes losing touch with purpose where Adam Smith would be attacked as too "left." It's become all dogma and no philosophy, like many religious people...
Communism and Fascism were both extremely authoritarian and needed to differentiate themselves. Go see PoliticalCompass.org. I blame the cold war propaganda for trying to destroy the word socialism; but I also think the situation was being exploited by authoritarians to undermine freedom... That propaganda still continues today. You can't have freedom without socialism. think. Dominance by the strongest oppresses the weak... and it's always a minority who is on top. To have the powerful minority give up power for the empowerment of the many is socialism. It's all in the implementation details and there is a great deal of propaganda involved in clouding all those issues.
Herding humans always seems to work best in a binary game of our tribe vs everybody else. It seems we always gravitate to simple reasoning that places things into 2 groups: us vs the rest. We can't get past our tribal territorial evolution.
1) MS has been attacking this from the start. Every Linux misstep is amplified and scrutinized with a double standard. 2) Massive multinationals have more power than most governments and outlast political careers. 3) Early adopters pay an additional price; even at a higher price, Open Source is a long term game. Commercial is a perpetual subscription to a 3rd party's short term game, on their terms. 4) THE TREND IS TO THE CLOUD even MS is going that way! Internal services (indoor cloud?) also. 5) When everything can run in the browser (and most government software should) it doesn't matter what OS you use. So why pay for the USA to copy all your data and raise your security threat? 6) 100s of apps is only possible with poor tech management. They must still have DOS apps! Migrating conditioned users is like deprogramming a cult member. Ask IT...ask a psychologist. ask a former cult member.
For investments, you want something that has a good stable return. In the economy, that is more fluid investing... Outside that, it's the valuation of something that just sits and has no economic value until it is sold.
Gold (minerals) or land (space.) They are deflationary... they are not too practical as currency. Same with any resource investment. Supply and Demand impact it's value; which is influenced by economic activity but it's not the sole driver unlike economic investments... which are less secure.
The problem is that a booming economy is going to return more on investing in it than a fixed resource and a poor economy is going to face increased competition with resource investments. If you wanted to measure an economy, you'd have to peg it to some fixed resources as a group to see it's actual progress; rather than just measuring relations to itself. Not easy to do this. But with us running out of resources but increasing demand it is not hard to see the economy will not be able to grow faster forever; before it collapses, it'll have huge problems competing with static investment (which will be part of the downfall as people pull out for more secure investments.)
If you have an infinite growth economy, then a fixed resource limit (deflation) does not match with that economy so it increases in scarcity at the rate of economic growth and therefore in value; all other factors being equal. Obviously, at some point the rate of valuation exceeds other forms of investment so holding it smarter. (valuation > profit )
Investing in the economy keeps it moving and probably growing; it fights the economic becoming stagnant. A fixed economy with a cap on growth would fit better with fixed resources; then the valuation of the fixed resources would basically be flat. There wouldn't be incentive to hold them but then a stagnant economy would also have little return on investments in that economy either. Much of the motivations behind things being done today would be gone. Not to say that it wouldn't be possible to design an economic system which mirrors reality's fixed limits, it probably is possible... but we do not put any effort into finding something where a fixed currency would fit.
Eventually the whole mess will be unavoidable because of resource limitations. Massive die offs from over population etc, or simply a low birth rate becomes a human resource limitation. Automation and lack of jobs are going to be economically similar to a mass die off. If you do not work in the economy, you are economically dead. It's rather simple why people are exploring hand outs; it gives life to the economically dead. But as I said earlier, solve that and you still have a physical population limit.
South had no legal rights, same in Spain. Human rights... they have those... South: despite the incredible irony... but with the slaves getting those rights too (to avoid contradiction, using the same rights argument) would they have had enough votes to leave? Probably.
It is all about JOBS. People will kill for jobs.... their "way of life" is often heavily linked to the jobs. Losing psychologically has more impact than gaining, so LOSING jobs and the lifestyle and security that affords is MOST IMPORTANT. It comes BEFORE their religion (especially when Jesus is such an extreme socialist and anti-capitalist it boggles the mind how much mass cognitive dissonance goes on in this area. think about it.)
It really was about slaves... because their whole economy was based upon the need for slave labor; it supported their jobs and their way of life. The NEED to believe that slavery was proper had to be part of the culture and unquestioned since their economics revolved around it. It's a vicious cycle. Sure academics can say it wasn't about slavery; but it literally was about slavery - all the rest is just background analysis... like explaining what makes a serial killer. YOU will kill to defend your life and your family's life... it doesn't take much to extend that primal drive and that is the true nature of evil; the stuff that makes the good do bad (for good, often righteous reasons.)
Letting them split to avoid a war... which THEY STARTED being the inbred fools they were was the best option. I don't know if Lincoln might have allowed that but they forced a fight. The real way to fight is economically. Economics drove their motives and beliefs. One could have invested less money into technology and made the cotton gin come out faster... hell, give them away free to the south. One could have planned an attack and won the war in months by doing what Lincoln did win the war with: banking. Lincoln won by burning up all the South's money. literally! The north used GOLD. The south used cotton instead!!! Lincoln burned it.
Spain: they are officially separatists now. If they attack Spain then they are traitors, just like our southern traitors. Hard to avoid being traitors in that situation especially when it is easy to throw that label around. Sedition laws are almost entirely against human rights; we have them in the USA.
Apple HAS the resources to aggressively work on ALL fronts. An investment manager will put most his eggs into the high growth investments and skip the lower growth ones; it's warped priorities. The Mac department makes plenty of profit to fund their own progress but instead they are funding stronger products with that money. They'd be doing better if they just isolated money from the two.
They should just serve their own customers; forget about innovation on the Mac line, just keeping up with their existing customer needs would be enough. They've not done anything to progress Macs in many years; it's all been steps backwards outside of tech updates which are too slow.
Pro Desktop: If you want to innovate and serve pro developers of iDevices... A rack mountable tower that makes NO SOUND. Like the old cheese grater but EVERYTHING can be swapped out... more like a PC. Sell motherboards and cpus finally. If Apple can't upgrade often they could at least make it easy to upgrade the parts... just subcontract with ASUS or something. If they want to "innovate" they'd make nice little plastic lego blocks out of everything; including the CPU and RAM. Sure I could buy ram and take apart your lego... but for a little premium a lot of people would just buy your lego brick and pop it in/out.
Schools: mini... bring back emac as weak mini. have little need of Apple anymore, except legacy. Mac mini's do not serve them anymore... no security ports. Too expensive to not have upgradable. iMacs too much to service. Innovation here would be to amortize costs to ease the school funding problems--- pay $200 per mini per year. Get a new one every couple years, quick replacements. Hell, operate parts of the service at a loss and take the PR and tax write offs. Contracts for the bond-funding schools deal with-- so pay upfront for X years being an option. Mac management used to be cheaper, now it's more work than windows. Virtual Box management like integration (or other VM.) since schools have old software needs.
Mini for headless uses: if there is a niche to fill that a weak cheap mini would meet. otherwise I think Intel and some other tiny business PCs are doing great; but the above emac mini would serve that too. Apple TV is supposed to take over the TV niche for the mini; make the leap already. HDMI? a joke.
Laptops: No MagSafe!@#! Lack of connectivity is too extreme in the consumer laptop. Make it stronger... it shouldn't break from 1 drop like a phone or tablet. It's life is short. tablet+keyboard. and the keyboards suck.
Pro Laptops: SUCK. Not enough balls to admit the mistakes either. Dongles negate portability. no magsafe. no upgrades. Needs reasonably priced RAM at high amounts, then i wouldn't care. thunderbolt 3 external cases would almost replace towers. PROs need USB-A and have cameras worth $$$$ using SD cards. USB-A and mini are standards that will not go away, people are not going to upgrade their USB-A powered toys. USB-C should have been fixed or disputed not just embraced because it's a total fuckup... 1 plug for everything should make you think lord of the rings... not in a good way either. ESC key needs to be tactile. F1 keys double function has been fucked up for many years... Apple never got it; they didn't need a touch screen to fix it. and the keyboards suck. they don't know buttons.
iMacs: Servicing is a mess; however, the stores are all over. OS X and software has been slipping for years. My old relatives and neighbors are happy... except extra sharp displays serve them no purpose. The keyboards and mice are horrible for those users... especially the batteries and charging issues for them. and the keyboards just suck.
iMac Pro:
I don't know but I'm only now thinking of replacing my 30" monitor with 5k. It has lasted over a decade thru at least a dozen macs. Tying that quality display to a CPU may not make sense long term unless resale works out well... but it's easier to sell an old tower than a display.
Apple like many companies has fallen to the bean counters which eventually put out successful companies to pasture. Not to die, but to become a zombie that barely resembles it's former self which feeds off the market: eating brains and following the zombie herd (mutual funds.)
Tim is another money man who transformed a company into an investment fund. The very kind of thing that he was good at within the company helped him rise to power to the point where the core purposes were overtaken with the sole purpose of increased profits from their capital investments. Steve's ego promoted Tim so his company would live on forever.... was probably the plan: a dead but immortal monument to his success, unlikely to eclipse him and whose soul he probably thought was himself... so without him, it may as well be a tome (many think this as well.)
Do not think Apple is above killing the Mac, they killed the iPods (which still were profitable, just a tiny tiny slice... to a bean counter, it was a waste because it didn't make enough profit. innovate means growth in profit for those type of people.)
Apple like many companies has fallen to the bean counters which eventually put out successful companies to pasture. Not to die, but to become a zombie that barely resembles it's former self that feeds of the market: eating brains and following the herd of mutual funds.
Tim is another money man who has transformed a company into a kind of mutual fund; the kind of thing that he was good at within the company helped him rise to power to the point where the core purposes were overtaken with the sole purpose of increased profits from their capital investments. Having him on the board may have helped Steve protect himself from another coup but it's a deal with the devil that risks the "soul" of the company (no matter how nice Tim may be, he is a bean counter.) Steve's ego was such that to promote Tim, so his company would live on forever.... was probably the plan: a dead but immortal monument to his success, unlikely to eclipse him and whose soul he probably thought was himself... so without him, it may as well be a tome (many think this as well.)
Do not think Apple is above killing the Mac, they killed the iPods (which still were profitable, just a tiny tiny slice... to a bean counter, it was a waste because it didn't make enough profit. innovate means growth in profit for those type of people. )
Instead of a bunch of TINY icons and research into safe cables, the fear of fire or burnout of expensive devices we need something that works as well as the old one.
USB 3/C was a mistake because only recently did every port go to USB3. It should have been tied to USB-C so it is clear and nobody would be plugging in high speed devices into USB 2 ports and getting upset with slow performance or lack of power. Thunderbolt needs a different plug because it requires a special cable AND a special connection that will take years (probably never) until every device has all ports be that capable. It was bad enough to put a little blue but to use TINY icons is worse.
Most stuff is fine with USB2. Leave it. Make a new plug anytime significant changes happen, USB2 took over ALL ports; if you can't do that then you need a new plug. Getting USB3 into USB2 could use a cheap simple SMALL adapter-- and you would clearly realize it is adapted and use the proper ports. No upset or confused users puzzled why blue matters. USB-C is the same mistakes amplified.
Prioritizing plugs under the premise of increased usability has resulted in missing the whole purpose in the 1st place.
1) MS has been attacking this from the start. Every Linux misstep is amplified and scrutinized with a double standard. 2) Massive multinationals have more power than most governments and outlast political careers. 3) Early adopters pay an additional price; even at a higher price, Open Source is a long term game. Commercial is a perpetual subscription to a 3rd party's short term game, on their terms. 4) THE TREND IS TO THE CLOUD even MS is going that way! Internal services (indoor cloud?) also. 5) When everything can run in the browser (and most government software should) it doesn't matter what OS you use. So why pay for the USA to copy all your data and raise your security threat?
We humans think too highly of our intelligence as shown in how mighty our demonstrations of Chess or Go or recognition of faces etc. Reality is that many things we do that are believed to be highly intelligent behaviors are actually are not. All the low hanging fruit WILL be picked by AI and it will progress upward with time into everything except the actually intelligent behaviors; those may be things that do not provide much gainful employment... That is the real problem.
Simulation: yes. brain scan tech was past the threshold about 2012; simulation capacity should be affordable around 2030. There is one problem, not that long ago there was some paper summary I read about how they discovered that quantum physics is involved in brain operations. So actual simulation is going to be nearly impossible. That is not to say that approximations will not product interesting results but it is not going to be as easily achieved as previously thought (if at all.)
A massive AI or simulation AI is going to just randomly flip out in crazy ways without warning or reasons we can understand... more so than people do; we have a huge number of mentally ill people and many more undiagnosed. It takes so little to mess up your brain's already marginal operation... how many beers does it take you?
Because plants only hold on to the CO2 for a short time period and then it ends up back out again. The CO2 we ADDED was outside the loop for a very long time until we released it at an extremely fast unnatural rate.
Storing it in plants that are not going to be stored underground for a million years is pointless unless you drastically increase the biomass to consume all that CO2 in a larger ecosystem. Which is even more unrealistic as humans continue to kill off everything and replace it with humans, deserts, corn, and farting cows.
We have plenty of food - we do not need to grow more, it's GMO propaganda making you think we need more production to feed the poor. Well, we don't have enough cows... for our demand but we have way more than is responsible.
When it's not terrorism there is some other FEAR they are trying to sell us their cure for it if we only hand them more money and power to implement it... It's always a snake oil salesman with a cure for the incurable disease of FEAR.
"Perfect is the enemy of good" and they always hype cures as much as possible as being as perfect as possible (because an imperfect cure or incomplete solution is just mitigation.) You don't see a good salesman selling partial plans of mitigation-- they sell "comprehensive plans" to "solve" problem X. We just suffered through Trump making idiotically blatant false promises to solve everything because "it's so easy" (for him.)
Think of all the wars in history which did not have access (or capacity) to gather this sort of information. They were a far far bigger threat than a small number of suicidal people. Somehow they managed....
Today's threat doesn't even pass car accidents and many classifications are less than the number cell phone drivers kill each year.
The real enemy is the pursuit of perfection (aka utopia;) furthermore, such pursuits are mostly cover for alternator motives.
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Gold mining gets more difficult as you run out of gold to mine. Like everything else... oil for example. We never run out because there is always a little bit left over but it becomes prohibitively expensive or too technically difficult to bother. We can MAKE gold atoms but that is purely academic; someday it might be realistic to do in quantity but it'll still cost too much...(until replicators)....but it might get cheaper than mining what is left the stuff in the ground.
Keep in mind that we inflate our money and even when gold backed inflation happens which makes the value seem to go up $ wise. We also no longer get official inflation numbers for US dollars since Bush stopped reporting of it... not that it wasn't likely a cooked number at many points in history of money. Also, when you add more gold into the equation you impact the relative worth of the money, slightly.
Authority is given by public support (even the oppressed support the oppressor; unless they are actively fighting.)
Gold was backed by a massive consensus. I used the term bankster for a reason, I suggest you look into that history further and see why gold can scale just fine and it did so for 100s of years as the backbone behind layers of other systems. Furthermore, you must be claiming the Swiss are not civilized? (until 2000. They keep having moves to restore the old ways.)
Gold is physically FIXED and tamper proof, unlike bankster run money systems and their puppet governments. Bitcoin's encryption is about as equally FIXED and tamper proof as gold but it's mathematical rather than based in physics.
To say gold can not scale when the many arbitrary systems build upon it are easily altered and comparatively unstable (hence the use of land/gold as a hedge) is ignorant. Such systems can change and adapt (and be corrupt) as they always have been for over a millennium, certainly they can scale.
Furthermore, if they discovered some graphene 20 years ago (from an acquired Russian object, meteor) it could easily sit in a secure location for decades before proper research results go public and it could sit decades afterwards as a forgotten item.
They could also just sit on the item for historical purposes because of related secrets still being kept. Some old Russian spy plane bits which no longer hold meaning, for example. Government over classifies and many times it is just to cover up possible mistakes. Some general could order something stored for any reason (being well educated is not a job requirement) and to remove a secure item MUST require more than 1 expert to sign off on it's removal simply for security purposes.
NYT might get somebody in government to inventory and clean house. It is not likely we will hear about it unless they need to downplay the importance of such a place.
All we have is YEARS of propaganda-- Bush had 8 years and investigated the whole time and for 6 years having more GOP controlled government ever. Found NOTHING. They only proposed solutions to problems they NEVER proved existed.
I've heard GOP strategist admit higher voter turn out kills them; they pray for rain and snow on election day. THE GOP FIGHTS EVERY ATTEMPT TO PROMOTE DEMOCRACY. Multiple days to vote? oppose it. Holiday to vote? oppose it. Easy process to vote? oppose it. They only sometimes allow something in specific situations where it is publicly known to help them (meaning it's so strong you can easily find why.)
Why don't we FIX social security numbers and most the Identity Theft problems in the USA (when other nations have already?) It's the GOP. seriously. A working Identifier system and Verification system would inevitably be used for voting. That is how much the GOP wants voting broken.
DRIVERS LICENSE / State ID. Yes, there are some illegals with them. There are SIMPLE solutions to that problem; but we are not even allowed to hear those without being drowned out with GOP propaganda. I've seen it 1st hand being involved in such issues lobbying and volunteering.
VOTER IDs are a SCAM... a HACK of the system. SIMPLE IS HARD TO HACK-- voter IDs are complex nightmares on purpose. No, they can't be done simple... the devil is in the details and even if you have perfect details; some corruption WILL happen to put in loopholes later! Which again is why it must be DEAD SIMPLE. Voter IDs are never simple!
Criminals are citizens and their alienable right to vote exists even if we stupidly infringe upon that right. it is NOT a privilege! When you take away voting rights of minorities (criminals) your actions prove you treat it as a privilege, not a right. Even more stupid is how many are in jail and when their "debt" is payed they still can't vote. You judge a society by how it treats the lowly. Criminals are a common excuse for many undemocratic laws. Illegals are a big one too. SIMPLE IS HARD TO HACK. proving citizenship is harder; I'm for it... but voting comes 1st, residency 2nd, citizenship 3rd. if you really believe in democracy, you would have your priorities straight.
Residency restrictions (double voting) is a bigger issue but it largely curbs illegals at the same time since they are similar problems.... devil is in the details. Yes, double voting is rare... but so are illegals. REMEMBER, it's been heavily investigated for decades by the same people claiming it is a problem. Now your state may be GOP fucked up so bad they created a problem on purpose, but some of us have fairly decent elections.
You want to fix things? Start with real IDENTITY THEFT solutions. It takes approx 2 years from breach to used identity (according to FBI) so plan now because recent breaches will start their impact then. If a foreign power is organized, they could bring down the nation with automated identity attacks. A crisis (the rate of theft now should be considered a crisis already) will need a solution and that is the time for a REAL solution to happen. Get prepared. LEARN.
Identifiers like Social Security should be PUBLIC knowledge and actually do not need to change (an upgrade to an easy to remember alphanumeric code with a larger number space but shorter length would be nice... and harder to filter out with regex.) They should be assigned to everybody; even dead people. Makes history easier, genealogy, etc. Your name and birthday mostly do this already; a serial number is same but better... but try telling the 666 freaks that. (maybe using base 36 instead of a number would help? at least it's shorter.) No encryption. keep it simple. Hey, Babylonians used base 60, so it's still simple enough. Don't think your face scan from a low res photo won't ID you well enough to anybody in the near future. Having a public # code doesn't mean you have to advertise it like your face.
Identity verification is a huge area which needs work. it MUST be
Gold can not scale. Limited amount, it has to be verified and processed; that takes time and money to do. Ever look into gold? You pay overhead costs in actually trading in gold plus you have to pay to securely store and transport any sizable amount of it.
How did gold become the foundation of everything until the banksters finally took over?
Abstract trading; not actual gold exchanges done on top of the real thing. Also, money was created ON TOP of gold and that is where all the action happened.
When you see other kinds of money float on top of bitcoin then you will see it scale. I see no reason why it can not become a kind of digital gold as long as the encryption holds up.
Gold is and hasn't been worth as much as we've made it for centuries. We based a system around it and that made it valuable. It has a silly jewelry value but that isn't what made it so expensive.
With futures trading and bigger banks involved... interesting times are coming. (not exactly a good thing; it's more of a curse but it is not dull)
Long ago, I put some extra cash into Bitcoins. I am just waiting to see how long I can wait before jumping ship. I did not think it would go this far or as high but trends continue to show higher is possible so I will continue wait. It's simply a maximization problem to me; as a form of gambling. I am not sure what to peg it at just yet still watching the social trends. It has no actual value at all unlike gold which does bottom out due to practical uses for it. It solely runs on mass investment supporting it in addition to faith people put into it. The more entrenched and wide spread the harder it will be for masses of people to ditch it. Figuring how low that will go is like predicting mob behavior.
Many people creating new kinds of bitcoins are just trying to cash in on the scheme. bitcoin is the 1st and oldest without a major crash so it's going to be the one everybody is going to watch. Money systems are not far from ponzi schemes; not the same but with people just inventing their own now the line between the two is blurring. It does not take much because they are so similar.
What people are missing is my suggestions that it is similar to gold. Where some smart people figure out how to build practical use money ON TOP OF IT. gold is as impractical as salt, cotton, or other currency bases of the past so we EXCHANGED it slowly and securely for something easier -- not simply because banks run on debt; which obviously was a HUGE reason but because hauling around gold without standards or regulations is a big problem (especially with fools gold all over.) Bitcoin can remain slow and expensive to use-- have you looked into gold?? you have to pay to exchange it because you don't want to be ripped off. it's heavy but not enough that it is not easy to steal. It's better to buy Swiss Fracs and deal with that in a bank than pay a bank to hold your gold. (if swiss fracs die, then that gold won't be much use to you either.)
Math is not tangible but it's plenty real. 2+2 != 10 or 20 in a decade.
Scarcity is the real point of this so lets limit discussion to that critical aspect:
Bitcoin can not be inflated; it has a fixed limited amount. Intangible rules and math constraints in the definition.
Gold has limited amounts and can not be inflated. Tangible constraints. (You can't go into space and get more gold... When that is possible, then it's scarcity would diminish and thereby the value in doing that.)
Gold's practical use is not even close to it's value. It merely represents something desirable from which to exchange abstracted value.
Gold backed printed money. Hybrid of both problems. A fake money (paper) that represents a fixed money which is in reality (gold) Bitcoin is in reality; mathematically real despite not being physically real and it is fixed. The fact bitcoin is SLOW and not cheap to process does not mean anything more than it does for GOLD; which has to be processed to verify it too.
I see people making lots of new coin pyramids but I've not seen any think about the 2-tier system we had with money for most of history in creation of something new.
Futures trading ideally levels out crazy markets (it has bad sides too) but in this case it's even more valuable because bitcoin doesn't scale or really work... like gold does. Bitcoin is like markets worried about price flux-- except it is more than just a worry and it impacts everybody while oil price flux is not a big issue unless you are a big buyer like an airline or something.
So, you end up with middle men printing various kinds of money BACKED BY BITCOIN. They can inflate or whatever other scheme invented to create a futures contract like situation. So you print ... ByteCoins? which are made up of bitcoins (forget the name is the inverse of their value) and you promise their value in bitcoins like a futures contract does. Make them move fast, etc. charge a middle man fee for the faster processing and the merging of bitcoin transactions to lower the overhead.
Bitcoin can be the bedrock for many attempted systems. stop trying to invent variations on the same pyramid scheme.
My own tests with Argon2 prove that with it's lowest setting it loads my current server down too much for the hash rate I was getting with bcrypt. I do not have the ability to fine tune it's server load well enough at this point so I've not switched over password hashing to it at this time. Also, I have less free RAM than I'd like to allocate so the benefits of argon2 are significantly limited for me at this time... It is going to be a trade off between server resources and massively parallel GPU attacks and the RAM use is primarily the new defense of Argon2 (not so much parallelism since that is still an area of growth for hardware.)
I've seen tests run with GPU hashing implementing a huge list of algorithms where bcrypt was 100x better than everything else and for the test it was only set to 5! Nobody uses bcrypt set at complexity 5! no benchmarks vs Argon2 other than my own (using server cpus.)
Somebody with bcrypt in FPGAs might knock the wind out of it but bcrypt at level 10+? Going forward, I've already been migrating to argon2 and I will look into formatting it into standard password hash format now that I know it's being used this way; however, I will still be limiting it until server upgrades... and further Argon2 benchmarks performed on gpus, fpgas because it won't matter if my server needs weaken Argon2 too much. (At which point I guess we need to start getting gpus for servers?)
Please realize that concepts and things almost always precede terminology used to describe them. Even detailed formal definitions placed upon old concepts CAN become vague representations returning back to the less formal origins.
When people put the needs of the many above the needs of the few, the whole concept is often labeled as socialist especially when it even remotely involves economics or government. Before Christ heavily promoted socialism the concept still existed... some would say it is Christian (or a Christian value) although they don't hold claim to it anymore than somebody coining a word or phrase.
Some may object to my socialist Christ comment (sarcasm on) since the wealthy who do not give their wealth away DO go to hell that does not mean any man made policy which saves them from their damnation has been endorsed. Except of course when man-made polices prevent killing or any Commandments... those are ok, as long as you do not try to save the wealthy or powerful in any way... because that is socialism...
(scarasm off)
The basic concepts of socialism extend before the term and outside of economics -- it's more like an observation of an existing commonly occurring behavior expressed within a domain... lacking a term motivated it's creation instead of the usual expansion of an existing definition to cover another topic. If one even bothers to go that far. If we had a good term we'd probably not have the word "socialism" or it would be narrow jargon few know, like the majority of the english ( >65k words with college level people being in the 20k range.)
Plenty of things... They'll have to figure out how to move forward without breaking add-ons with the latest firefox changes.
integrate some of the bigger add-ons.
Their message filter rule system needs drastic changes because it's a total mess. Configuration for a large organization is also nowhere near good enough. They should work on corporate setups for easy config and support since they are competing with webmail. The advantage of it over the cloud services is the mail filtering options and configuration abilities-- I HATE webmail because it doesn't come close to what I can do with desktop clients. I don't have the time but I have a lot of ideas on how powerful filtering should be implemented next time around... with plenty of configuration hooks for add-ons.
The addressbook needs a total redo. there is a big add-on which kind of does this... they should work with integrating that as a replacement. vcf files should be easier to work with.
Sync of addressbook is another one.
calendar sync.
Apple's to do and notes apps just use IMAP for storage which is a clever idea which everybody should copy and standardize.
I just want a mario coin sound for EACH email coming in... and I can't get it to properly do that. it'll play either 1 sound for many. I had to put in an add-on and setup filters to get close to what I wanted. and filters for each account too... because the filtering is a pain.
Setting up keys to route/file emails quickly... a mess to setup. I should get an overlay below the listing showing me the destinations and keys - and setup all the mappings easily. plus have it list the last 3 I moved so I can go fix it. all with the keyboard. well, i could go into more detail... there are tons of things they could be doing to make it more productive. I would like markdown support... the add-on is nice but built-in would be better.
honeypot. email account just for attracting spam for auto training the mail filter. (already do this)
Email account masking. I have to manually set it up. with add-ons. 2 email accounts. 1 public, which is heavily filtered and another private which all filtered email goes to. I only use the private one. when I reply, it uses the public account. nobody emails my private account; it's really just IMAP storage and I'd prevent inbound except by mail routing if I could. Reason? I can edit my public account or have many of them-- and change them at will without messing with my private email account. I can auto reply and phase out old emails if they get too much spam... I can have harsh anti-spam rules on older emails that are phased out. Something to help manage such schemes would be nice... or at least less add-on use.
Capitalism was and still to a lesser degree rests upon socialist arguments. To sell stuff to the masses, everything is sold with socialist arguments. To give up so that the many benefit is the essence of socialism. It's a broad concept applied in many ways.
Capitalism argues it is the best system because it benefits the most people in the end. Twisted reasoning in a way but not illogical; it's justification for the inequality and many flaws is socialism. Keeping competition fair by regulation is part of it too and that is considered socialist... Today we've gone to extremes losing touch with purpose where Adam Smith would be attacked as too "left." It's become all dogma and no philosophy, like many religious people...
Communism and Fascism were both extremely authoritarian and needed to differentiate themselves. Go see PoliticalCompass.org. I blame the cold war propaganda for trying to destroy the word socialism; but I also think the situation was being exploited by authoritarians to undermine freedom... That propaganda still continues today. You can't have freedom without socialism. think. Dominance by the strongest oppresses the weak... and it's always a minority who is on top. To have the powerful minority give up power for the empowerment of the many is socialism. It's all in the implementation details and there is a great deal of propaganda involved in clouding all those issues.
Herding humans always seems to work best in a binary game of our tribe vs everybody else. It seems we always gravitate to simple reasoning that places things into 2 groups: us vs the rest. We can't get past our tribal territorial evolution.
1) MS has been attacking this from the start. Every Linux misstep is amplified and scrutinized with a double standard.
2) Massive multinationals have more power than most governments and outlast political careers.
3) Early adopters pay an additional price; even at a higher price, Open Source is a long term game. Commercial is a perpetual subscription to a 3rd party's short term game, on their terms.
4) THE TREND IS TO THE CLOUD even MS is going that way! Internal services (indoor cloud?) also.
5) When everything can run in the browser (and most government software should) it doesn't matter what OS you use. So why pay for the USA to copy all your data and raise your security threat?
6) 100s of apps is only possible with poor tech management. They must still have DOS apps! Migrating conditioned users is like deprogramming a cult member. Ask IT...ask a psychologist. ask a former cult member.
For investments, you want something that has a good stable return. In the economy, that is more fluid investing... Outside that, it's the valuation of something that just sits and has no economic value until it is sold.
Gold (minerals) or land (space.) They are deflationary... they are not too practical as currency. Same with any resource investment. Supply and Demand impact it's value; which is influenced by economic activity but it's not the sole driver unlike economic investments... which are less secure.
The problem is that a booming economy is going to return more on investing in it than a fixed resource and a poor economy is going to face increased competition with resource investments. If you wanted to measure an economy, you'd have to peg it to some fixed resources as a group to see it's actual progress; rather than just measuring relations to itself. Not easy to do this. But with us running out of resources but increasing demand it is not hard to see the economy will not be able to grow faster forever; before it collapses, it'll have huge problems competing with static investment (which will be part of the downfall as people pull out for more secure investments.)
If you have an infinite growth economy, then a fixed resource limit (deflation) does not match with that economy so it increases in scarcity at the rate of economic growth and therefore in value; all other factors being equal. Obviously, at some point the rate of valuation exceeds other forms of investment so holding it smarter. (valuation > profit )
Investing in the economy keeps it moving and probably growing; it fights the economic becoming stagnant. A fixed economy with a cap on growth would fit better with fixed resources; then the valuation of the fixed resources would basically be flat. There wouldn't be incentive to hold them but then a stagnant economy would also have little return on investments in that economy either. Much of the motivations behind things being done today would be gone. Not to say that it wouldn't be possible to design an economic system which mirrors reality's fixed limits, it probably is possible... but we do not put any effort into finding something where a fixed currency would fit.
Eventually the whole mess will be unavoidable because of resource limitations. Massive die offs from over population etc, or simply a low birth rate becomes a human resource limitation. Automation and lack of jobs are going to be economically similar to a mass die off. If you do not work in the economy, you are economically dead. It's rather simple why people are exploring hand outs; it gives life to the economically dead. But as I said earlier, solve that and you still have a physical population limit.
South had no legal rights, same in Spain. Human rights... they have those... South: despite the incredible irony... but with the slaves getting those rights too (to avoid contradiction, using the same rights argument) would they have had enough votes to leave? Probably.
It is all about JOBS. People will kill for jobs.... their "way of life" is often heavily linked to the jobs. Losing psychologically has more impact than gaining, so LOSING jobs and the lifestyle and security that affords is MOST IMPORTANT. It comes BEFORE their religion (especially when Jesus is such an extreme socialist and anti-capitalist it boggles the mind how much mass cognitive dissonance goes on in this area. think about it.)
It really was about slaves... because their whole economy was based upon the need for slave labor; it supported their jobs and their way of life. The NEED to believe that slavery was proper had to be part of the culture and unquestioned since their economics revolved around it. It's a vicious cycle. Sure academics can say it wasn't about slavery; but it literally was about slavery - all the rest is just background analysis... like explaining what makes a serial killer. YOU will kill to defend your life and your family's life... it doesn't take much to extend that primal drive and that is the true nature of evil; the stuff that makes the good do bad (for good, often righteous reasons.)
Letting them split to avoid a war... which THEY STARTED being the inbred fools they were was the best option. I don't know if Lincoln might have allowed that but they forced a fight. The real way to fight is economically. Economics drove their motives and beliefs. One could have invested less money into technology and made the cotton gin come out faster... hell, give them away free to the south. One could have planned an attack and won the war in months by doing what Lincoln did win the war with: banking. Lincoln won by burning up all the South's money. literally! The north used GOLD. The south used cotton instead!!! Lincoln burned it.
Spain: they are officially separatists now. If they attack Spain then they are traitors, just like our southern traitors. Hard to avoid being traitors in that situation especially when it is easy to throw that label around. Sedition laws are almost entirely against human rights; we have them in the USA.
Apple HAS the resources to aggressively work on ALL fronts. An investment manager will put most his eggs into the high growth investments and skip the lower growth ones; it's warped priorities. The Mac department makes plenty of profit to fund their own progress but instead they are funding stronger products with that money. They'd be doing better if they just isolated money from the two.
They should just serve their own customers; forget about innovation on the Mac line, just keeping up with their existing customer needs would be enough. They've not done anything to progress Macs in many years; it's all been steps backwards outside of tech updates which are too slow.
Pro Desktop:
If you want to innovate and serve pro developers of iDevices... A rack mountable tower that makes NO SOUND. Like the old cheese grater but EVERYTHING can be swapped out... more like a PC. Sell motherboards and cpus finally. If Apple can't upgrade often they could at least make it easy to upgrade the parts... just subcontract with ASUS or something. If they want to "innovate" they'd make nice little plastic lego blocks out of everything; including the CPU and RAM. Sure I could buy ram and take apart your lego... but for a little premium a lot of people would just buy your lego brick and pop it in/out.
Schools: mini... bring back emac as weak mini.
have little need of Apple anymore, except legacy. Mac mini's do not serve them anymore... no security ports. Too expensive to not have upgradable. iMacs too much to service. Innovation here would be to amortize costs to ease the school funding problems--- pay $200 per mini per year. Get a new one every couple years, quick replacements. Hell, operate parts of the service at a loss and take the PR and tax write offs. Contracts for the bond-funding schools deal with-- so pay upfront for X years being an option. Mac management used to be cheaper, now it's more work than windows. Virtual Box management like integration (or other VM.) since schools have old software needs.
Mini for headless uses:
if there is a niche to fill that a weak cheap mini would meet. otherwise I think Intel and some other tiny business PCs are doing great; but the above emac mini would serve that too. Apple TV is supposed to take over the TV niche for the mini; make the leap already. HDMI? a joke.
Laptops:
No MagSafe!@#! Lack of connectivity is too extreme in the consumer laptop. Make it stronger... it shouldn't break from 1 drop like a phone or tablet. It's life is short. tablet+keyboard. and the keyboards suck.
Pro Laptops:
SUCK. Not enough balls to admit the mistakes either. Dongles negate portability. no magsafe. no upgrades. Needs reasonably priced RAM at high amounts, then i wouldn't care. thunderbolt 3 external cases would almost replace towers. PROs need USB-A and have cameras worth $$$$ using SD cards. USB-A and mini are standards that will not go away, people are not going to upgrade their USB-A powered toys. USB-C should have been fixed or disputed not just embraced because it's a total fuckup... 1 plug for everything should make you think lord of the rings... not in a good way either. ESC key needs to be tactile. F1 keys double function has been fucked up for many years... Apple never got it; they didn't need a touch screen to fix it. and the keyboards suck. they don't know buttons.
iMacs:
Servicing is a mess; however, the stores are all over. OS X and software has been slipping for years. My old relatives and neighbors are happy... except extra sharp displays serve them no purpose. The keyboards and mice are horrible for those users... especially the batteries and charging issues for them. and the keyboards just suck.
iMac Pro:
I don't know but I'm only now thinking of replacing my 30" monitor with 5k. It has lasted over a decade thru at least a dozen macs. Tying that quality display to a CPU may not make sense long term unless resale works out well... but it's easier to sell an old tower than a display.
Apple like many companies has fallen to the bean counters which eventually put out successful companies to pasture. Not to die, but to become a zombie that barely resembles it's former self which feeds off the market: eating brains and following the zombie herd (mutual funds.)
Tim is another money man who transformed a company into an investment fund. The very kind of thing that he was good at within the company helped him rise to power to the point where the core purposes were overtaken with the sole purpose of increased profits from their capital investments. Steve's ego promoted Tim so his company would live on forever.... was probably the plan: a dead but immortal monument to his success, unlikely to eclipse him and whose soul he probably thought was himself... so without him, it may as well be a tome (many think this as well.)
Do not think Apple is above killing the Mac, they killed the iPods (which still were profitable, just a tiny tiny slice... to a bean counter, it was a waste because it didn't make enough profit. innovate means growth in profit for those type of people.)
Apple like many companies has fallen to the bean counters which eventually put out successful companies to pasture. Not to die, but to become a zombie that barely resembles it's former self that feeds of the market: eating brains and following the herd of mutual funds.
Tim is another money man who has transformed a company into a kind of mutual fund; the kind of thing that he was good at within the company helped him rise to power to the point where the core purposes were overtaken with the sole purpose of increased profits from their capital investments. Having him on the board may have helped Steve protect himself from another coup but it's a deal with the devil that risks the "soul" of the company (no matter how nice Tim may be, he is a bean counter.) Steve's ego was such that to promote Tim, so his company would live on forever.... was probably the plan: a dead but immortal monument to his success, unlikely to eclipse him and whose soul he probably thought was himself... so without him, it may as well be a tome (many think this as well.)
Do not think Apple is above killing the Mac, they killed the iPods (which still were profitable, just a tiny tiny slice... to a bean counter, it was a waste because it didn't make enough profit. innovate means growth in profit for those type of people. )
Instead of a bunch of TINY icons and research into safe cables, the fear of fire or burnout of expensive devices we need something that works as well as the old one.
USB 3/C was a mistake because only recently did every port go to USB3. It should have been tied to USB-C so it is clear and nobody would be plugging in high speed devices into USB 2 ports and getting upset with slow performance or lack of power. Thunderbolt needs a different plug because it requires a special cable AND a special connection that will take years (probably never) until every device has all ports be that capable. It was bad enough to put a little blue but to use TINY icons is worse.
Most stuff is fine with USB2. Leave it. Make a new plug anytime significant changes happen, USB2 took over ALL ports; if you can't do that then you need a new plug. Getting USB3 into USB2 could use a cheap simple SMALL adapter-- and you would clearly realize it is adapted and use the proper ports. No upset or confused users puzzled why blue matters. USB-C is the same mistakes amplified.
Prioritizing plugs under the premise of increased usability has resulted in missing the whole purpose in the 1st place.
1) MS has been attacking this from the start. Every Linux misstep is amplified and scrutinized with a double standard.
2) Massive multinationals have more power than most governments and outlast political careers.
3) Early adopters pay an additional price; even at a higher price, Open Source is a long term game. Commercial is a perpetual subscription to a 3rd party's short term game, on their terms.
4) THE TREND IS TO THE CLOUD even MS is going that way! Internal services (indoor cloud?) also.
5) When everything can run in the browser (and most government software should) it doesn't matter what OS you use. So why pay for the USA to copy all your data and raise your security threat?
We humans think too highly of our intelligence as shown in how mighty our demonstrations of Chess or Go or recognition of faces etc. Reality is that many things we do that are believed to be highly intelligent behaviors are actually are not. All the low hanging fruit WILL be picked by AI and it will progress upward with time into everything except the actually intelligent behaviors; those may be things that do not provide much gainful employment... That is the real problem.
Simulation: yes. brain scan tech was past the threshold about 2012; simulation capacity should be affordable around 2030. There is one problem, not that long ago there was some paper summary I read about how they discovered that quantum physics is involved in brain operations. So actual simulation is going to be nearly impossible. That is not to say that approximations will not product interesting results but it is not going to be as easily achieved as previously thought (if at all.)
A massive AI or simulation AI is going to just randomly flip out in crazy ways without warning or reasons we can understand... more so than people do; we have a huge number of mentally ill people and many more undiagnosed. It takes so little to mess up your brain's already marginal operation... how many beers does it take you?
Because plants only hold on to the CO2 for a short time period and then it ends up back out again. The CO2 we ADDED was outside the loop for a very long time until we released it at an extremely fast unnatural rate.
Storing it in plants that are not going to be stored underground for a million years is pointless unless you drastically increase the biomass to consume all that CO2 in a larger ecosystem. Which is even more unrealistic as humans continue to kill off everything and replace it with humans, deserts, corn, and farting cows.
We have plenty of food - we do not need to grow more, it's GMO propaganda making you think we need more production to feed the poor. Well, we don't have enough cows... for our demand but we have way more than is responsible.
When it's not terrorism there is some other FEAR they are trying to sell us their cure for it if we only hand them more money and power to implement it... It's always a snake oil salesman with a cure for the incurable disease of FEAR.
"Perfect is the enemy of good" and they always hype cures as much as possible as being as perfect as possible (because an imperfect cure or incomplete solution is just mitigation.) You don't see a good salesman selling partial plans of mitigation-- they sell "comprehensive plans" to "solve" problem X. We just suffered through Trump making idiotically blatant false promises to solve everything because "it's so easy" (for him.)
Think of all the wars in history which did not have access (or capacity) to gather this sort of information. They were a far far bigger threat than a small number of suicidal people. Somehow they managed....
Today's threat doesn't even pass car accidents and many classifications are less than the number cell phone drivers kill each year.
The real enemy is the pursuit of perfection (aka utopia;) furthermore, such pursuits are mostly cover for alternator motives.