Makes you wonder. I have a oak that is about a century old on my property. The damn carpenter ants are attacking it. The arborist checked it out recently (I love this giant old tree). He said there is not much you can do. Bugs get oaks eventually its what ultimately kills them all. You take it down or you can just wait and let it fall down when its time comes (it won't hit anything but other trees) is what I was advised.
He also told me trees that age don't recover from shocks as easily as younger trees. Don't limb it anymore, if you want to let it go and see how long she lasts. Only cut obviously dead limbs out. Otherwise leave it alone, look enjoy don't touch. Was the rest of his advice.
A few points 1) Trees like all organisms have a finite life span (maybe these baobab trees are just getting to that age) 2) Trees like all things can only take so much abuse maybe being studied is in someway harmful to them.
Ideally everyone should be voting for good or for ill.
I strongly disagree with that statement. Democracy is about the people deciding how our nation will go forward. However before every election there is usually a set of questions that can be identified which will likely be decided by the next term of government. Frankly people should be 'responsible' in their voting. They should form whatever opinion they like and vote their conscience for sure but they also should:
1) Know what the current issues are 2) Know the policy options and where each candidate stands 2a) Know something about the personal history of each candidate and decide if they are appropriate / qualified. 3) Have some understanding of the basic facts around those issues.
If they are not willing to do those things than no they should not vote. There are way to many people who just vote for their team - or vote for someone because someone else told them to do it. I don't think that constructively contributes to our societal decision making at all. In fact it actually just brings us nearer to mob rule. Its one of the BIG reasons I am opposed to early voting (not absentee just early) like it should have to be post marked near the date of the election. Early voting amounts to voting often before the all facts are in; it irresponsible!
Interestingly I don't give a flying fuck about your personal health - I value my freedom and I want to protect the freedom of my children etc.
I am not trying to destroy the planet. I am not suggesting Amazon should just be able to dump about PCBs and lead batteries in the local wilderness area or something. I am saying they have basic rights to what they want with stuff that belongs to them. If you care so much go live in mud hut and eat only raw vegetation foraged etc and leave the rest of us alone.
Yes but buyer beware works in that case because you physically inspect the merchandise before purchase. Some larger GoodWill stores even have a bench in the back where you can plug electronics in and stuff to see if they work yourself!
That is hard to do online! So there would always be a question of did Amazon accurate represent the condition of the product, or did they not mention it rattles when you pick it up etc?
No I am describing a situation my primary concern is personal property rights. Its no business of yours or anyone else's what I do with my property or what Amazon does with theirs. If I want *want* purchase 1000 iPhone X's to use in place of clay pigeons over my field - that's all me.
You have all ready legislated all sorts of consumer rights where Amazon has to take returns in the first place and now you want to seek to tell them what they can with the returned goods - who they can sell it to when under what circumstances etc. You are basically going full command economy on them!
Should we have basic laws that prevent them from doing obviously harmful things like dumping them at sea or something - yes but beyond that they should be able to dispose them how they wish - resale, recycler, refuse heap etc. Keep in mind they probably have to PAY to have the trash hauled away too. They are not 'getting some kind of free ride here'.
No you want to dictate to them how they dispose of their property. You're a totalitarian a-hole just admit it.
Amazon IS accepting the consequences of their model. They accept most returns from their customers no questions asked. They eat the cost of the returned merchandise. Once they accept the return its their property again! They can do whatever they want with it! That is the way it should be!
Swift is otherwise not too native on Linux and Windows.
What exactly is native? I mean being native on Windows / Linux means being C/C++ or on Windows.Net thanks to a pretty herculean effort by MS to provide very complete platform integration (and you still have to call into even first party C/C++ libraries sometimes to get some things done effectively).
As to Python / Ruby neither can do anything at all natively other than file and socket operations. Both do offer good web stacks probably because socket operations were easier than doing any kind of native interface support. Pretty much anything else means calling into some C/C++ library and despite a lot effort one could level the same arguments the article makes about Swift at them. Try using GTK from either - hint you find you have to write code that does not look very much like what you would normally do in Ruby or Python its not that authors did not try hide the C-isms its just the paradigms don't match and there is only so much you can do. You will run into the same issues if you try to use any media encoding/decoding code etc. if its not file i/o, sockets, and maybe database access or web services it won't feel very native.
Then there is the Java approach which is just ship an entire platform basically - UI toolkits, database drivers, etc solution to the problem - that shifts the issue though now it feels less native to the user, even if its all uniform and orthogonal to the developer. I
think the simple reality is that its kinda like how the width of rail-road track impacts the space shuttle. The track determined the size of the tunnel, the tunnel determined the size of an aluminum tube you can put on rail car, which constrained the size and shape of rocket booster, which in turn partly dictated the size of the shuttle. Same deal platform language semantics have effects all the way down to the pointy clicky UI. So when you go back and start doing stuff in some other language you still are dealing with structures defined by the platform language and in a lot of cases those were chosen not from a purely data science perspective but because they were comfortable to work with in the native language.
Off book or otherwise the money has to come from some place. It very possibly could just come from expanding the money supply. It might be possible for the economy to absorb the inflation effects of that but it would mean that money supply expansion would be a much more limited tool in terms of combating other economic problems.
At best taking more off book and funding the off book liabilities when they come due with expansion will just kick the can a little bit further. A decade or so beyond that and something will happen and the banks will have no arrows left in the quiver with which to fight it.
Yes but the US is going to crash again. SS and Medicare are headed from problems in less than 10 years. Sure there are fixes like moving the retirement age up, increasing SS taxes, reducing the benefits etc. Any of those changes will seriously upend the financial plans of a very large portion of the American public.
It will drastically reduce the spending money they have (or think they have) which will lower velocity and create an entirely new crisis.
We have pretended our way out of the crash by propping up the money supply, and not really addressed the core issues
Right and lets not pretend its not worse than it looks on paper too. A lot of those settlements require transfers of assets and sales of houses or other assets like stocks etc at inopportune times.
If your stock portfolio is evaluated at 300K and you are ordered to give 150K in cash to your ex you have to liquidate a lot of stocks which may have depreciated but you would otherwise have held on the reasonable assumption the share price would recover. Especially if its stuff you bought as dividend plays, where you don't watch the current price as closely.
Divorce is about the most economically devastating thing that can happen to someone in the middle class after perhaps some unexpected medical condition arising. Which is really another reason no-fault divorce should NOT be a thing. Neither party to a marriage contract should be permitted to unilaterally bring that kind of destruction on family and still be permitted to run off with half the assets.
1) People still cared about Sun at the time and it was a popular platform for running their database.
2) Java - they never gave a darn about developing further. They saw it as the next COBOL something that critical stuff was written in that would likely live on for decades. Just minimally supporting it would ensure a continuing lucrative revenue stream for years to come with no effort. Bonus points if they could con the "community" into doing a good deal of the work for them. Which is not say there have not been some good technical improvements in Java under Oracle's rule but a lot of those were why not's borrowed conceptually from other languages and stacks.
You've got it! That's the goal. When we get it there than everyone can have the cancers cured universal insurance coverage or no because it will be basically affordable the same way just about everyone can now afford a 42" TV which was considered a toy for rich folks just 25 years ago!
However getting there means doing it some largish number of times to increase the amount of people with first hand expertise; trying labor saving techniques and assessing their results. Right now though its far to pricey to offer anyone who needs it, based on their need alone. So either we let government pick who lives and who dies using some likely very stupid metrics and tax all of us to pay for it - or - we let Rich guys pay with their own money to extend their lives.
Either way we probably get their eventually but one path is a lot easier, and cheaper.
Which should pretty much tell you that OSX is dead now. Apple is just figuring out the recipe for boiling the frogs slowly enough they don't know what is happening. Looks like they go it down
0) Build a large library of applications in the locked down iOS eco system 2) Don't abandon but scale back the technical and QA investments in OSX just enough that people feel it across a few generations. 3) Choke out the MacOS ecosystem by making it complete with iOS apps that can now run on OSX. 4) Convince existing MacOS users to move to iOS devices because hey all your software is iOS apps now anyway. 5) Walled garden complete, semi open platform gone, most customers retained and locked in, profit!
The thought of a cure like this being validated and then made ready for the public, only to be priced out of reach for all but the top 10% and not covered by insurance would be a disgrace.
Why would that be?
If my understanding is correct this is not like a drug (chemical or compound) that one simply manufactures. Very specific cells from the individual have to be cultured and selected for genetically. The injection that cures you won't cure me; might very well kill me. To that end this all sounds like 100s of man hours that must be expended by some of the most highly talented, best, educated professionals our society produces and they need to utilize millions of dollars in capital equipment to do the work with to boot.
Sorry to break it to you but this the very problem with universal health care. We as a society can't make this type of treatment ( until we invent automation and mass production around it ) available to all. We probably need to make it available to some in order for us to advance the state of the art and develop the technology in hopes of a future were everyone get as many of their cancer specific t-cells cloned up while they wait. In mean time how do we decide who gets it? Well you can let government decide and we bicker endless about who got it because of their skin color, gender, immigration status or whatever - or we can let the market fairly decide. Lets face it by and large the cream still rises to the top, society probably is better served by letting the 10% who can afford this spend their money on it. So money does not have to be taken from you and I and so the people who likely generate the most wealth for all live the longest. Its called allocation efficiency.
Yes as an individual it feels unfair when you are not getting the outcome you'd like personally but remember the governments role is to promote the 'general welfare.' Not that it always does a good job of that given the power of certain special intrests.
Its not so much about how they lost a bitcoin its more about how they purposefully destroyed it!
I mean I can put a stack of $100 bills in the fireplace too and they will also be 'gone forever' as far as I am concerned personally. Its not like I can phone of the fed and ask them to print me some new ones.
Frankly the people at Wired are stupid, most journalists these days are, so no surprise there. I don't see why they could not have solved the conflict problem by selling the bitcoin for cash - so the value is not independant of the bitcoin, donating the money to their favorite charity before running the store about the mini miner thing they reviewed. Should have been and easy and obvious solution. Then you just conclude the story with "and we got a bitcoin which we sold for X at Mt. Gox (or wherever) the proceeds were donated to xyz foundation for the arts and orphans." No problems or conflicts there. XYZ is unaffected by and change in btc value because they got cash. Selling the coin on the currency exchange was an arms length transaction thru a broker, so again no real problems there in terms of conflict. It was totally unnecessary to destroy their private key.
Right! There is really really simple solution to this and that is frigging BOARDERS.
The US population could be perfect stable if we stopped allowing immigrants to enter. We don't want our population to shrink so we'd actually need to nudge the birth rate up a bit. Stability can work economically though. Existing assets can be conveyed to the next generation without major depreciation.
As to the rest of the world; well the developed world does not have a population problem - if they have the since to stop the migrant pipeline well they will be fine too after a short economic dislocation. The populations WILL stabilize in the other places as well. Technology and education are I think great enough even in remote parts of India, China, and the African region that birth rates will quickly fall if there is no outlet for people to leave. We might have to help them out with some food aide and such for half a generation or so but that is nothing new.
a) I don't know that is true - I live in a pretty rural area there are lots of farm roads and such that are both open to the public but not maintained by the state/county DOT. I suspect there are indeed combinations of just driving around that nobody has done in a single trip before me.
b) Sure they do but that isn't the point. Having and SDC take me on a scenic drive would be like taking a scenic train ride; its passive. Part of the fun of just exploring is a "Hmm can I get over to rt11 going this way?" And finding out yes or and no and ending up somewhere you did not expect. Maybe even being surprised when you arrive a landmark you are familiar with that is 10s of miles away from where you thought you'd end up. Actually this one of the best things about GPS you can get really really really lost and switch it on and ask it to find you a way home when the time comes- usually you might not be on a road in its database but usually you can at least find your way to one that is and it will take care of you from there.
c) Sure now they do. Backup camera's were option until now as well - not they are mandated on new cars. At some point the safety crowd will decide that computerized driving is safer and we will have the choice taken away. Just like you can't put your kid in the front seat anymore. The absolute difference in risk is really quite small but some a-hole nannies in some far away government building decided they needed to dictate what our bonding moments look like.
Exactly there is a very fundamental issue with SDCs is they need a destination - My wife and I go for drives in the country in my 32 year Alfa Spider all the time - its fun. Its something to do around here. You can push the car into a curve now and again and get a little thrill, as you are appreciating the sprawling country side and the mountains in the distance.
Its going to take a pretty clever AI to be able to tell the car "just take me for a ride exploring the county roads and make it interesting here and there." How is the AI going to do things like decide lets keep a generally westerly direction or at least pick the roads that look like they are going to go that way so we can keep the ridge in view? Its just not a reasonable thing to ask a computer do.
Pleasure drive is still a big part of driving for a lot people and its still hard for me not see SDCs and sharing the roads with a large number of them as mostly in manually driven cars.
Jeremy Stoppelman: Because if you provide great content
Where is proof - Yelp! has certainly never provided anything I would label "great content". I wounder if he has any other examples and why he is so upset.
Google is far and away a greater monopoly than Facebook. Here we are socializing on Slashdot and unless you used Facebook login - no facebook need be involved. Request Policy is blocking all requests to their domain and this page works fine.
By contrast Google is essentially unavoidable. Some 90% of web searches are Google. If you send an e-mail odds are pretty high if you are not using GMail the recipient is or they are on whatever google for Domains is call this week. Find a commercial web site that does not do at least one of Google Analytics, ReCaptcha, googleapis, etc. Keeping in mind the data harvesting potential for Google if you use ANY of the above.
And than there is Android - for all intents now there are TWO smart phone platforms Apple or Google and Android phones home a lot in most cases. Finally Chrome - basically malware phone home all the time...
I know everyone likes to crack jokes about "we will make it up on volume" but it is rooted in sound practice.
You cost of goods sold includes everything fixed and variables costs a like. If you total costs are $100 and you produce a 100 widgets your COGS per widget is $1.
Now lets supposes you can only sell widgets for $0.50. Hmm -50 cents a widget. At first blush you might think that selling more widgets will result in greater losses. However if we look into the numbers and discover that the inputs to a widget are. $70 monthly rent on the factory building, $20 a month in salary of union employees you have to offer 160 hours of work to per month who could in that 160 hours assemble 1000 widgets, and $10 in widget materials per 100 widgets. The only variable cost there is the $10.
So while it costs $100 to make 100 widgets it also costs $110 to make 200 widgets it costs $120 to make 300 widgets = which if sold at $0.50... would bring $150 in revenue... So at this volume its profitable.
We honestly need - as a planet - to put in laws that stop this shite. I know the shareholders are the main ones being burned, but if after a year of operation you can't show overall profit (or at the very least, contracts GUARANTEEING that the profit will be repaid and progress towards fulfilling those contracts), you should just be shut down.
Depending on the specific contract requirements and the definition of "progress" I think this is a little harsh.
There are a lot of business that require significant up front capitalization and its hard to show a early profit in those cases.
I think some SEC rules for public companies requiring them to maybe post things like "Average Cost of customer acquisition" in financial statements might however be in order.
We already paid for the hardware and time with our taxes..
Right and I for one would like to see some actual ROI thank you very much. There no reason if the business etc that actually derive economic value from it should not shoulder the burden of supporting it.
Fee for service government is actually a GREAT model. Government has the capital resources to do things a lot of small business can't like put satellites with high resolution imaging equipment in orbit. On the other hand if you are making money with you mobile app or whatever using the resulting images than you can pay your share of the amortized costs among the other users.
Same goes for roads - toll roads are great! The people who use them can pay - the shippers that run the vehicles that ware the roads most can pay the most.
Even with electronic payments; there is a massive amount of 24x7 server and datacenter infrastructure to run JUST the banking functions, and these applications are closed-source, and not necessarily designed to be efficient in terms of the size and power consumption of the centralized infrastructures required to support them.
Yes but this is changing as well. I know one major leading Credit Card issuer for example plans to have no infrastructure of their own within 2 years - it will all be cloud probably mostly Amazon. They are already well on their way. So that massive data-center infrastructure become shared services. All those compute resources can do something else besides just idling while much of the Western Hemisphere is a asleep.
Slashdot Mirror
Makes you wonder. I have a oak that is about a century old on my property. The damn carpenter ants are attacking it. The arborist checked it out recently (I love this giant old tree). He said there is not much you can do. Bugs get oaks eventually its what ultimately kills them all. You take it down or you can just wait and let it fall down when its time comes (it won't hit anything but other trees) is what I was advised.
He also told me trees that age don't recover from shocks as easily as younger trees. Don't limb it anymore, if you want to let it go and see how long she lasts. Only cut obviously dead limbs out. Otherwise leave it alone, look enjoy don't touch. Was the rest of his advice.
A few points
1) Trees like all organisms have a finite life span (maybe these baobab trees are just getting to that age)
2) Trees like all things can only take so much abuse maybe being studied is in someway harmful to them.
Ideally everyone should be voting for good or for ill.
I strongly disagree with that statement. Democracy is about the people deciding how our nation will go forward. However before every election there is usually a set of questions that can be identified which will likely be decided by the next term of government. Frankly people should be 'responsible' in their voting. They should form whatever opinion they like and vote their conscience for sure but they also should:
1) Know what the current issues are
2) Know the policy options and where each candidate stands
2a) Know something about the personal history of each candidate and decide if they are appropriate / qualified.
3) Have some understanding of the basic facts around those issues.
If they are not willing to do those things than no they should not vote. There are way to many people who just vote for their team - or vote for someone because someone else told them to do it. I don't think that constructively contributes to our societal decision making at all. In fact it actually just brings us nearer to mob rule. Its one of the BIG reasons I am opposed to early voting (not absentee just early) like it should have to be post marked near the date of the election. Early voting amounts to voting often before the all facts are in; it irresponsible!
Interestingly I don't give a flying fuck about your personal health - I value my freedom and I want to protect the freedom of my children etc.
I am not trying to destroy the planet. I am not suggesting Amazon should just be able to dump about PCBs and lead batteries in the local wilderness area or something. I am saying they have basic rights to what they want with stuff that belongs to them. If you care so much go live in mud hut and eat only raw vegetation foraged etc and leave the rest of us alone.
Yes but buyer beware works in that case because you physically inspect the merchandise before purchase. Some larger GoodWill stores even have a bench in the back where you can plug electronics in and stuff to see if they work yourself!
That is hard to do online! So there would always be a question of did Amazon accurate represent the condition of the product, or did they not mention it rattles when you pick it up etc?
No I am describing a situation my primary concern is personal property rights. Its no business of yours or anyone else's what I do with my property or what Amazon does with theirs. If I want *want* purchase 1000 iPhone X's to use in place of clay pigeons over my field - that's all me.
You have all ready legislated all sorts of consumer rights where Amazon has to take returns in the first place and now you want to seek to tell them what they can with the returned goods - who they can sell it to when under what circumstances etc. You are basically going full command economy on them!
Should we have basic laws that prevent them from doing obviously harmful things like dumping them at sea or something - yes but beyond that they should be able to dispose them how they wish - resale, recycler, refuse heap etc. Keep in mind they probably have to PAY to have the trash hauled away too. They are not 'getting some kind of free ride here'.
No you want to dictate to them how they dispose of their property. You're a totalitarian a-hole just admit it.
Amazon IS accepting the consequences of their model. They accept most returns from their customers no questions asked. They eat the cost of the returned merchandise. Once they accept the return its their property again! They can do whatever they want with it! That is the way it should be!
how about checking for malware on every IoT washer or fridge.
Swift is otherwise not too native on Linux and Windows.
What exactly is native? I mean being native on Windows / Linux means being C/C++ or on Windows .Net thanks to a pretty herculean effort by MS to provide very complete platform integration (and you still have to call into even first party C/C++ libraries sometimes to get some things done effectively).
As to Python / Ruby neither can do anything at all natively other than file and socket operations. Both do offer good web stacks probably because socket operations were easier than doing any kind of native interface support. Pretty much anything else means calling into some C/C++ library and despite a lot effort one could level the same arguments the article makes about Swift at them. Try using GTK from either - hint you find you have to write code that does not look very much like what you would normally do in Ruby or Python its not that authors did not try hide the C-isms its just the paradigms don't match and there is only so much you can do. You will run into the same issues if you try to use any media encoding/decoding code etc. if its not file i/o, sockets, and maybe database access or web services it won't feel very native.
Then there is the Java approach which is just ship an entire platform basically - UI toolkits, database drivers, etc solution to the problem - that shifts the issue though now it feels less native to the user, even if its all uniform and orthogonal to the developer. I
think the simple reality is that its kinda like how the width of rail-road track impacts the space shuttle. The track determined the size of the tunnel, the tunnel determined the size of an aluminum tube you can put on rail car, which constrained the size and shape of rocket booster, which in turn partly dictated the size of the shuttle. Same deal platform language semantics have effects all the way down to the pointy clicky UI. So when you go back and start doing stuff in some other language you still are dealing with structures defined by the platform language and in a lot of cases those were chosen not from a purely data science perspective but because they were comfortable to work with in the native language.
Off book or otherwise the money has to come from some place. It very possibly could just come from expanding the money supply. It might be possible for the economy to absorb the inflation effects of that but it would mean that money supply expansion would be a much more limited tool in terms of combating other economic problems.
At best taking more off book and funding the off book liabilities when they come due with expansion will just kick the can a little bit further. A decade or so beyond that and something will happen and the banks will have no arrows left in the quiver with which to fight it.
Yes but the US is going to crash again. SS and Medicare are headed from problems in less than 10 years. Sure there are fixes like moving the retirement age up, increasing SS taxes, reducing the benefits etc. Any of those changes will seriously upend the financial plans of a very large portion of the American public.
It will drastically reduce the spending money they have (or think they have) which will lower velocity and create an entirely new crisis.
We have pretended our way out of the crash by propping up the money supply, and not really addressed the core issues
Right and lets not pretend its not worse than it looks on paper too. A lot of those settlements require transfers of assets and sales of houses or other assets like stocks etc at inopportune times.
If your stock portfolio is evaluated at 300K and you are ordered to give 150K in cash to your ex you have to liquidate a lot of stocks which may have depreciated but you would otherwise have held on the reasonable assumption the share price would recover. Especially if its stuff you bought as dividend plays, where you don't watch the current price as closely.
Divorce is about the most economically devastating thing that can happen to someone in the middle class after perhaps some unexpected medical condition arising. Which is really another reason no-fault divorce should NOT be a thing. Neither party to a marriage contract should be permitted to unilaterally bring that kind of destruction on family and still be permitted to run off with half the assets.
Oracle acquired Sun/Java for two reasons
1) People still cared about Sun at the time and it was a popular platform for running their database.
2) Java - they never gave a darn about developing further. They saw it as the next COBOL something that critical stuff was written in that would likely live on for decades. Just minimally supporting it would ensure a continuing lucrative revenue stream for years to come with no effort. Bonus points if they could con the "community" into doing a good deal of the work for them. Which is not say there have not been some good technical improvements in Java under Oracle's rule but a lot of those were why not's borrowed conceptually from other languages and stacks.
You've got it! That's the goal. When we get it there than everyone can have the cancers cured universal insurance coverage or no because it will be basically affordable the same way just about everyone can now afford a 42" TV which was considered a toy for rich folks just 25 years ago!
However getting there means doing it some largish number of times to increase the amount of people with first hand expertise; trying labor saving techniques and assessing their results. Right now though its far to pricey to offer anyone who needs it, based on their need alone. So either we let government pick who lives and who dies using some likely very stupid metrics and tax all of us to pay for it - or - we let Rich guys pay with their own money to extend their lives.
Either way we probably get their eventually but one path is a lot easier, and cheaper.
Which should pretty much tell you that OSX is dead now. Apple is just figuring out the recipe for boiling the frogs slowly enough they don't know what is happening. Looks like they go it down
0) Build a large library of applications in the locked down iOS eco system
2) Don't abandon but scale back the technical and QA investments in OSX just enough that people feel it across a few generations.
3) Choke out the MacOS ecosystem by making it complete with iOS apps that can now run on OSX.
4) Convince existing MacOS users to move to iOS devices because hey all your software is iOS apps now anyway.
5) Walled garden complete, semi open platform gone, most customers retained and locked in, profit!
Heck there isnt even a ??? step
The thought of a cure like this being validated and then made ready for the public, only to be priced out of reach for all but the top 10% and not covered by insurance would be a disgrace.
Why would that be?
If my understanding is correct this is not like a drug (chemical or compound) that one simply manufactures. Very specific cells from the individual have to be cultured and selected for genetically. The injection that cures you won't cure me; might very well kill me. To that end this all sounds like 100s of man hours that must be expended by some of the most highly talented, best, educated professionals our society produces and they need to utilize millions of dollars in capital equipment to do the work with to boot.
Sorry to break it to you but this the very problem with universal health care. We as a society can't make this type of treatment ( until we invent automation and mass production around it ) available to all. We probably need to make it available to some in order for us to advance the state of the art and develop the technology in hopes of a future were everyone get as many of their cancer specific t-cells cloned up while they wait. In mean time how do we decide who gets it? Well you can let government decide and we bicker endless about who got it because of their skin color, gender, immigration status or whatever - or we can let the market fairly decide. Lets face it by and large the cream still rises to the top, society probably is better served by letting the 10% who can afford this spend their money on it. So money does not have to be taken from you and I and so the people who likely generate the most wealth for all live the longest. Its called allocation efficiency.
Yes as an individual it feels unfair when you are not getting the outcome you'd like personally but remember the governments role is to promote the 'general welfare.' Not that it always does a good job of that given the power of certain special intrests.
Its not so much about how they lost a bitcoin its more about how they purposefully destroyed it!
I mean I can put a stack of $100 bills in the fireplace too and they will also be 'gone forever' as far as I am concerned personally. Its not like I can phone of the fed and ask them to print me some new ones.
Frankly the people at Wired are stupid, most journalists these days are, so no surprise there. I don't see why they could not have solved the conflict problem by selling the bitcoin for cash - so the value is not independant of the bitcoin, donating the money to their favorite charity before running the store about the mini miner thing they reviewed. Should have been and easy and obvious solution. Then you just conclude the story with "and we got a bitcoin which we sold for X at Mt. Gox (or wherever) the proceeds were donated to xyz foundation for the arts and orphans." No problems or conflicts there. XYZ is unaffected by and change in btc value because they got cash. Selling the coin on the currency exchange was an arms length transaction thru a broker, so again no real problems there in terms of conflict. It was totally unnecessary to destroy their private key.
Right! There is really really simple solution to this and that is frigging BOARDERS.
The US population could be perfect stable if we stopped allowing immigrants to enter. We don't want our population to shrink so we'd actually need to nudge the birth rate up a bit. Stability can work economically though. Existing assets can be conveyed to the next generation without major depreciation.
As to the rest of the world; well the developed world does not have a population problem - if they have the since to stop the migrant pipeline well they will be fine too after a short economic dislocation. The populations WILL stabilize in the other places as well. Technology and education are I think great enough even in remote parts of India, China, and the African region that birth rates will quickly fall if there is no outlet for people to leave. We might have to help them out with some food aide and such for half a generation or so but that is nothing new.
(facepalm)
You comment proves you "don't get it".
a) I don't know that is true - I live in a pretty rural area there are lots of farm roads and such that are both open to the public but not maintained by the state/county DOT. I suspect there are indeed combinations of just driving around that nobody has done in a single trip before me.
b) Sure they do but that isn't the point. Having and SDC take me on a scenic drive would be like taking a scenic train ride; its passive. Part of the fun of just exploring is a "Hmm can I get over to rt11 going this way?" And finding out yes or and no and ending up somewhere you did not expect. Maybe even being surprised when you arrive a landmark you are familiar with that is 10s of miles away from where you thought you'd end up. Actually this one of the best things about GPS you can get really really really lost and switch it on and ask it to find you a way home when the time comes- usually you might not be on a road in its database but usually you can at least find your way to one that is and it will take care of you from there.
c) Sure now they do. Backup camera's were option until now as well - not they are mandated on new cars. At some point the safety crowd will decide that computerized driving is safer and we will have the choice taken away. Just like you can't put your kid in the front seat anymore. The absolute difference in risk is really quite small but some a-hole nannies in some far away government building decided they needed to dictate what our bonding moments look like.
Exactly there is a very fundamental issue with SDCs is they need a destination - My wife and I go for drives in the country in my 32 year Alfa Spider all the time - its fun. Its something to do around here. You can push the car into a curve now and again and get a little thrill, as you are appreciating the sprawling country side and the mountains in the distance.
Its going to take a pretty clever AI to be able to tell the car "just take me for a ride exploring the county roads and make it interesting here and there." How is the AI going to do things like decide lets keep a generally westerly direction or at least pick the roads that look like they are going to go that way so we can keep the ridge in view? Its just not a reasonable thing to ask a computer do.
Pleasure drive is still a big part of driving for a lot people and its still hard for me not see SDCs and sharing the roads with a large number of them as mostly in manually driven cars.
Jeremy Stoppelman: Because if you provide great content
Where is proof - Yelp! has certainly never provided anything I would label "great content". I wounder if he has any other examples and why he is so upset.
Google is far and away a greater monopoly than Facebook. Here we are socializing on Slashdot and unless you used Facebook login - no facebook need be involved. Request Policy is blocking all requests to their domain and this page works fine.
By contrast Google is essentially unavoidable. Some 90% of web searches are Google. If you send an e-mail odds are pretty high if you are not using GMail the recipient is or they are on whatever google for Domains is call this week. Find a commercial web site that does not do at least one of Google Analytics, ReCaptcha, googleapis, etc. Keeping in mind the data harvesting potential for Google if you use ANY of the above.
And than there is Android - for all intents now there are TWO smart phone platforms Apple or Google and Android phones home a lot in most cases. Finally Chrome - basically malware phone home all the time...
I know everyone likes to crack jokes about "we will make it up on volume" but it is rooted in sound practice.
You cost of goods sold includes everything fixed and variables costs a like. If you total costs are $100 and you produce a 100 widgets your COGS per widget is $1.
Now lets supposes you can only sell widgets for $0.50. Hmm -50 cents a widget. At first blush you might think that selling more widgets will result in greater losses. However if we look into the numbers and discover that the inputs to a widget are. $70 monthly rent on the factory building, $20 a month in salary of union employees you have to offer 160 hours of work to per month who could in that 160 hours assemble 1000 widgets, and $10 in widget materials per 100 widgets. The only variable cost there is the $10.
So while it costs $100 to make 100 widgets ... would bring $150 in revenue... So at this volume its profitable.
it also costs $110 to make 200 widgets
it costs $120 to make 300 widgets = which if sold at $0.50
We honestly need - as a planet - to put in laws that stop this shite. I know the shareholders are the main ones being burned, but if after a year of operation you can't show overall profit (or at the very least, contracts GUARANTEEING that the profit will be repaid and progress towards fulfilling those contracts), you should just be shut down.
Depending on the specific contract requirements and the definition of "progress" I think this is a little harsh.
There are a lot of business that require significant up front capitalization and its hard to show a early profit in those cases.
I think some SEC rules for public companies requiring them to maybe post things like "Average Cost of customer acquisition" in financial statements might however be in order.
We already paid for the hardware and time with our taxes..
Right and I for one would like to see some actual ROI thank you very much. There no reason if the business etc that actually derive economic value from it should not shoulder the burden of supporting it.
Fee for service government is actually a GREAT model. Government has the capital resources to do things a lot of small business can't like put satellites with high resolution imaging equipment in orbit. On the other hand if you are making money with you mobile app or whatever using the resulting images than you can pay your share of the amortized costs among the other users.
Same goes for roads - toll roads are great! The people who use them can pay - the shippers that run the vehicles that ware the roads most can pay the most.
Even with electronic payments; there is a massive amount of 24x7 server and datacenter infrastructure to run JUST the banking functions, and these applications are closed-source, and not necessarily designed to be efficient in terms of the size and power consumption of the centralized infrastructures required to support them.
Yes but this is changing as well. I know one major leading Credit Card issuer for example plans to have no infrastructure of their own within 2 years - it will all be cloud probably mostly Amazon. They are already well on their way. So that massive data-center infrastructure become shared services. All those compute resources can do something else besides just idling while much of the Western Hemisphere is a asleep.