You need a new anti-monopoly law that doesn't depend on investigating complaints. I like the idea of raising their taxation based on their market share.
And then you have to nationalize common infrastructure, because it's really a bad idea to have every private company laying their own fiber or cable just like it'd be a bad idea if all roads were toll roads and different companies were not allowed to connect to each other.
Something tells me both those ideas run very much contrary to deeply-held American economic ideals and will never happen.
It'd be lovely, but the problem is in that lovely Gobbels quote, "If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth."
When the Trumpers start spewing their lies (and they're almost always lies, something like 5x per day minimum from Trump himself, with frequent repeats of previous falsified statements... that's not a partisan bias speaking), you simply have to challenge them. Every time.
Because when you don't, they win; people believe the unchallenged lie. You worry about being polite, but they see their brash rudeness as a positive thing. So yeah, until they're expunged from polite society, there's no polite society possible when they're around. You have to sink to their level because your level simply doesn't work with them.
...when the summary adequately communicates the size of the chip on the author's shoulders.
I don't doubt women still get sexually harassed, or that it was more common and accepted in the past. I ALSO don't doubt this 'historian' is so biased she sees sexual abuse in men saying 'good morning' to her and has no sense of humor at all.
When I talk about why I have a problem with feminists because people like this represent the movement (never mind that the movement itself is sexist because it's only interested in women - give me egalitarianism any day), THIS is the kind of person who is the velvet glove over the iron fist of the man-hating feminists.
Oddly enough, as a man, I have a huge issue with people who assume I'm a woman-abusing monster because I have a penis.
>Yes, I have a bank that is so security conscious, that if I use a cash machine that isn't part of my regular routine or even use EBay, they freeze the account until I call in and confirm that it was me making the purchase.
So no you don't, because you actually got your access back.
Do you remember when you had all that cash in your wallet but couldn't remember how to take it out? Or when your debit card stopped working and you lost your entire bank balance forever?
Bitcoin is such a revolutionary technology if you're looking for unique ways for your average person to lose access to their own wealth.
If your purchases pre-date regulated exchanges, or you didn't buy in the USA... the whales aren't new, they've probably been the same players for a very long time (with the exception of a few high profile purchases).
Essentially, you can churn those coins until it takes a major forensic analysis to figure out who owns what, and even then you won't have certainty. Of course, you're going to lose a lot on transaction fees with the current state of Bitcoin if you want to work with smaller amounts...
That is quite possibly the worst and most self-incriminating response you could have given from a PR standpoint without crossing the line into cursing or misusing Slashdot records to seek retribution against the AC's post.
Google 'slaying the bearwhale' for lolz; the last time a whale cashed out, Bitcoin nuts actually convinced each other to buy up the coins as fast as they were released in order to keep the coin value up. Obviously the smart move if you really believed in Bitcoin's long term viability would be to let the price crash and buy at the bottom, but the Bitcoin ecosystem isn't exactly chock full of rational players.
>Why did he start a tunnel boring company? Because he was sick and tired of being stuck in traffic and nobody was doing anything about it. He doesn't care if he makes money, he just wants to get rid of traffic jams.
I have trouble believing Musk personally worries about traffic jams. He must have his own helicopter and pilot by now, along with helipads wherever he wants to go.
If he really started the Boring Company to fix traffic jams... he's in for a big disappointment. Traffic flow studies show that traffic expands to clog the available capacity. In other words, as soon as those tunnels make driving more convenient, more people will start driving until the inconvenience reaches a level that encourages telecommuting, relocating, or use of public transit.
If he started it to make some coin, I'm sure he can sell the concept of increased road capacity.
I'm going to go a bit 'space nutter' here - but I'm not insanely enthusiastic to the point of being oblivious to the difficulties
>We still have decades of R&D to do in creating a self-sustainable miniature ecosystem
Agreed... but we don't need one that is self-sustaining. We need one that can last a round trip plus margin of error, and requires less mass than just taking all the one-time-use supplies.
This may already be possible.
Even if not, we can launch supplies on separate rockets ahead of time and have them waiting on Mars for humans to use.
>maintaining human physiology for 3 years in space
Gravity's it. Vibrating beds based on cat's purrs don't seem to be in the news anymore, so I'm assuming that NASA's decided they're ineffective at maintaining bone mass. There's no way to keep human fluids where they belong in free fall, with the vision and other health problems that brings.
So... a crew cabin and counterweight connected by a tether and rotating around their center of mass. Not easy, but not beyond our current tech, either. That removes the dangers of muscle and skeletal atrophy due to free fall from the trip. More importantly, if we really wanted to do it we could put such a system into orbit NOW (for long values of 'now', because it takes time to design, build, and launch a space craft) and spin it up to say, 0.38g and test the long term effects of partial g on humans.
>and shielding space travelers from solar radiation
Well... I love the idea of a magnetically confined plasma shield, but that apparently requires a long wire made of a room temperature superconductor, so that's probably a no go for the foreseeable future. So you do your best with shielding based on mass allowance, then put a safe room in the middle of your water tanks and watch for solar flares so you know when to hide in it.
Compared to all the other risks of the trip, I think 'an elevated risk of cancer' rates near the bottom and wouldn't stop a single candidate from turning down the opportunity to explore a piece of Mars in person.
* * *
Essentially, I think you've focused on the wrong issues. I think keeping living space free of perchlorate dust for years might just be the biggest obstacle to a significant human visit to the red planet, because that's one that can't be solved right now with more money.
This weapon is useful against people who have progressed beyond purely mechanical/chemical weapons and are dependent on electronics... but who haven't quite caught on to shielding those electronics against EMPs.
I mean, anyone who has heard of nukes has heard of the EMP they generate that fries electronics, right? What's a tiny HERF weapon compared to that when you're talking shielding?
>I don't give a fuck about their convenience for the same reasons I don't give a fuck about what restaurant they were seen dining at and with whom.
And that is a depressingly uncommon attitude. Celebrities and their fans generate sufficient economic activity that there's a lot of interest in ignoring your preferences.
>Who the fuck are they and why are they important?
This isn't for you. I agree that celebrity worship is silly, but that won't make it go away. Fans have wallets, that makes celebrities important. Fans make or break celebrities' careers... so this happens.
Think about it from the celebrity's point of view, though... they get asked the same questions over and over every time they interact with their fans, and if they don't answer in a friendly way as if it's the first time that oh-so-fascinating question has been asked... a twitter-mob forms to harass them for it.
So they sit down on camera and answer the most common questions, once, and maybe they don't have to answer those same questions as often for the rest of their careers.
> if I am going to have a government spying on me, I would rather that it be a foreign one.
Not only that, but one that is currently considered at least somewhat 'hostile'. The UK's foreign, but they share data with the USA faster than Trump leaks it.
As surprisingly large as Bitcoin has become, it's still peanuts compared to anything that could affect the markets.
The tragedy will be at the individual level as the last of the greedy fools comes to the realization that they're the LAST of the fools, and have been left holding the bag.
Now... how long that takes, and how big the bag is when it happens... no idea. What I do know is I will have absolutely no sympathy for anyone losing their shirt when the crash comes. I will consider those people to have economically auto-Darwinated.
>. Businesses mostly use payment gateways that sell the BTC immediately
The last time I saw this model, it was where you'd give USD to a gateway and get a credit measured in Bitcoin at the current exchange rate. Then you'd find an online store to buy something, also measured in Bitcoin (though really a USD amount converted using the current exchange rate). Then the gateway would pay the online store in USD.
So you give USD to someone who gives USD to someone, but you PRETEND that you're using Bitcoin. And the middleman takes a cut for the service, either using the exchange rate or (thanks to Bitcoin's volatility) by delaying or retroactively processing the exchanges to make them more favourable.
So... a credit card company, only without the credit, regulation, purchase protection, or wide acceptance. But much faster than actually using Bitcoin, since the vendor and the payment company can settle up instantly instead of taking 10 minutes to never.
> (At the risk of being labelled a Russian Sock Puppet/Troll)
The American government has been caught doing abhorrent things surreptitiously often enough that you're more or less a fool if you accept what they say without independent corroboration.
Iraq/WMDs are the first thing that comes to mind (along with the babies and incubators propaganda), but there are plenty of other things that at one time would have people thinking you were late for your tinfoil hat fitting that we now know actually happened.
IF there's brain damage, I'd go looking for an infection. We know, for instance, that toxoplasma gondii causes brain damage in humans. I wouldn't rule out the affected people coming into contact with something that likes the auditory processing region of the brain for some reason.
Then again, maybe long term exposure to high levels of ultrasound can cause the brain to change - if your ear can pick up the sound in some way and your brain's trying to process it. Human brains are adaptive given time. Or maybe the doctors are experiencing apophenia and seeing patterns that aren't there because they're looking too hard.
Slashdot Mirror
>Either we break up the companies doing this
You need a new anti-monopoly law that doesn't depend on investigating complaints. I like the idea of raising their taxation based on their market share.
And then you have to nationalize common infrastructure, because it's really a bad idea to have every private company laying their own fiber or cable just like it'd be a bad idea if all roads were toll roads and different companies were not allowed to connect to each other.
Something tells me both those ideas run very much contrary to deeply-held American economic ideals and will never happen.
It'd be lovely, but the problem is in that lovely Gobbels quote, "If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth."
When the Trumpers start spewing their lies (and they're almost always lies, something like 5x per day minimum from Trump himself, with frequent repeats of previous falsified statements... that's not a partisan bias speaking), you simply have to challenge them. Every time.
Because when you don't, they win; people believe the unchallenged lie. You worry about being polite, but they see their brash rudeness as a positive thing. So yeah, until they're expunged from polite society, there's no polite society possible when they're around. You have to sink to their level because your level simply doesn't work with them.
...when the summary adequately communicates the size of the chip on the author's shoulders.
I don't doubt women still get sexually harassed, or that it was more common and accepted in the past. I ALSO don't doubt this 'historian' is so biased she sees sexual abuse in men saying 'good morning' to her and has no sense of humor at all.
When I talk about why I have a problem with feminists because people like this represent the movement (never mind that the movement itself is sexist because it's only interested in women - give me egalitarianism any day), THIS is the kind of person who is the velvet glove over the iron fist of the man-hating feminists.
Oddly enough, as a man, I have a huge issue with people who assume I'm a woman-abusing monster because I have a penis.
>Yes, I have a bank that is so security conscious, that if I use a cash machine that isn't part of my regular routine or even use EBay, they freeze the account until I call in and confirm that it was me making the purchase.
So no you don't, because you actually got your access back.
This isn't a particularly complicated concept.
Do you remember when you had all that cash in your wallet but couldn't remember how to take it out? Or when your debit card stopped working and you lost your entire bank balance forever?
Bitcoin is such a revolutionary technology if you're looking for unique ways for your average person to lose access to their own wealth.
If your purchases pre-date regulated exchanges, or you didn't buy in the USA... the whales aren't new, they've probably been the same players for a very long time (with the exception of a few high profile purchases).
If you're tired of the spherical cow joke, you're not human!
>So exactly what part of "Pyramid Scheme" do these idiot "investors" not understand.
"Shut up you're just jealous because you didn't get in early and I'm going to be rich for doing nothing while you work like a sucker".
I think that about covers it.
They allow those special characters in usernames? Well hell, Slashdot ought to correct that and wipe the troll account.
Amusingly enough, all you have to do to my previous post is change the word 'worst' to 'best' and it applies to the troll perfectly.
If own an exchange, you can run a mixing service.
Essentially, you can churn those coins until it takes a major forensic analysis to figure out who owns what, and even then you won't have certainty. Of course, you're going to lose a lot on transaction fees with the current state of Bitcoin if you want to work with smaller amounts...
That is quite possibly the worst and most self-incriminating response you could have given from a PR standpoint without crossing the line into cursing or misusing Slashdot records to seek retribution against the AC's post.
Google 'slaying the bearwhale' for lolz; the last time a whale cashed out, Bitcoin nuts actually convinced each other to buy up the coins as fast as they were released in order to keep the coin value up. Obviously the smart move if you really believed in Bitcoin's long term viability would be to let the price crash and buy at the bottom, but the Bitcoin ecosystem isn't exactly chock full of rational players.
>Why did he start a tunnel boring company? Because he was sick and tired of being stuck in traffic and nobody was doing anything about it. He doesn't care if he makes money, he just wants to get rid of traffic jams.
I have trouble believing Musk personally worries about traffic jams. He must have his own helicopter and pilot by now, along with helipads wherever he wants to go.
If he really started the Boring Company to fix traffic jams... he's in for a big disappointment. Traffic flow studies show that traffic expands to clog the available capacity. In other words, as soon as those tunnels make driving more convenient, more people will start driving until the inconvenience reaches a level that encourages telecommuting, relocating, or use of public transit.
If he started it to make some coin, I'm sure he can sell the concept of increased road capacity.
I'm going to go a bit 'space nutter' here - but I'm not insanely enthusiastic to the point of being oblivious to the difficulties
>We still have decades of R&D to do in creating a self-sustainable miniature ecosystem
Agreed... but we don't need one that is self-sustaining. We need one that can last a round trip plus margin of error, and requires less mass than just taking all the one-time-use supplies.
This may already be possible.
Even if not, we can launch supplies on separate rockets ahead of time and have them waiting on Mars for humans to use.
>maintaining human physiology for 3 years in space
Gravity's it. Vibrating beds based on cat's purrs don't seem to be in the news anymore, so I'm assuming that NASA's decided they're ineffective at maintaining bone mass. There's no way to keep human fluids where they belong in free fall, with the vision and other health problems that brings.
So... a crew cabin and counterweight connected by a tether and rotating around their center of mass. Not easy, but not beyond our current tech, either. That removes the dangers of muscle and skeletal atrophy due to free fall from the trip. More importantly, if we really wanted to do it we could put such a system into orbit NOW (for long values of 'now', because it takes time to design, build, and launch a space craft) and spin it up to say, 0.38g and test the long term effects of partial g on humans.
>and shielding space travelers from solar radiation
Well... I love the idea of a magnetically confined plasma shield, but that apparently requires a long wire made of a room temperature superconductor, so that's probably a no go for the foreseeable future. So you do your best with shielding based on mass allowance, then put a safe room in the middle of your water tanks and watch for solar flares so you know when to hide in it.
Compared to all the other risks of the trip, I think 'an elevated risk of cancer' rates near the bottom and wouldn't stop a single candidate from turning down the opportunity to explore a piece of Mars in person.
* * *
Essentially, I think you've focused on the wrong issues. I think keeping living space free of perchlorate dust for years might just be the biggest obstacle to a significant human visit to the red planet, because that's one that can't be solved right now with more money.
This weapon is useful against people who have progressed beyond purely mechanical/chemical weapons and are dependent on electronics... but who haven't quite caught on to shielding those electronics against EMPs.
I mean, anyone who has heard of nukes has heard of the EMP they generate that fries electronics, right? What's a tiny HERF weapon compared to that when you're talking shielding?
>I don't give a fuck about their convenience for the same reasons I don't give a fuck about what restaurant they were seen dining at and with whom.
And that is a depressingly uncommon attitude. Celebrities and their fans generate sufficient economic activity that there's a lot of interest in ignoring your preferences.
>Who the fuck are they and why are they important?
This isn't for you. I agree that celebrity worship is silly, but that won't make it go away. Fans have wallets, that makes celebrities important. Fans make or break celebrities' careers... so this happens.
Think about it from the celebrity's point of view, though... they get asked the same questions over and over every time they interact with their fans, and if they don't answer in a friendly way as if it's the first time that oh-so-fascinating question has been asked... a twitter-mob forms to harass them for it.
So they sit down on camera and answer the most common questions, once, and maybe they don't have to answer those same questions as often for the rest of their careers.
> if I am going to have a government spying on me, I would rather that it be a foreign one.
Not only that, but one that is currently considered at least somewhat 'hostile'. The UK's foreign, but they share data with the USA faster than Trump leaks it.
Next time you're trying to be clever, make sure you actually read and understood the post you're replying to.
Once again, an AC posts something that wasn't worth my time and should have been ignored.
>every crash has recovered, eventually.
How's your Beanie Baby portfolio?
>Bitcoin is a recipe for epic financial disaster.
As surprisingly large as Bitcoin has become, it's still peanuts compared to anything that could affect the markets.
The tragedy will be at the individual level as the last of the greedy fools comes to the realization that they're the LAST of the fools, and have been left holding the bag.
Now... how long that takes, and how big the bag is when it happens... no idea. What I do know is I will have absolutely no sympathy for anyone losing their shirt when the crash comes. I will consider those people to have economically auto-Darwinated.
>. Businesses mostly use payment gateways that sell the BTC immediately
The last time I saw this model, it was where you'd give USD to a gateway and get a credit measured in Bitcoin at the current exchange rate. Then you'd find an online store to buy something, also measured in Bitcoin (though really a USD amount converted using the current exchange rate). Then the gateway would pay the online store in USD.
So you give USD to someone who gives USD to someone, but you PRETEND that you're using Bitcoin. And the middleman takes a cut for the service, either using the exchange rate or (thanks to Bitcoin's volatility) by delaying or retroactively processing the exchanges to make them more favourable.
So... a credit card company, only without the credit, regulation, purchase protection, or wide acceptance. But much faster than actually using Bitcoin, since the vendor and the payment company can settle up instantly instead of taking 10 minutes to never.
> (At the risk of being labelled a Russian Sock Puppet/Troll)
The American government has been caught doing abhorrent things surreptitiously often enough that you're more or less a fool if you accept what they say without independent corroboration.
Iraq/WMDs are the first thing that comes to mind (along with the babies and incubators propaganda), but there are plenty of other things that at one time would have people thinking you were late for your tinfoil hat fitting that we now know actually happened.
IF there's brain damage, I'd go looking for an infection. We know, for instance, that toxoplasma gondii causes brain damage in humans. I wouldn't rule out the affected people coming into contact with something that likes the auditory processing region of the brain for some reason.
Then again, maybe long term exposure to high levels of ultrasound can cause the brain to change - if your ear can pick up the sound in some way and your brain's trying to process it. Human brains are adaptive given time. Or maybe the doctors are experiencing apophenia and seeing patterns that aren't there because they're looking too hard.
>Seems like the new normal is cover the accusation as a scandal and don't cover the follow-up result.
You know how I know you're young (or unusually sheltered)?