It seems a legitimate question: I've somehow managed to live through the last thirty years without _ever_ getting an infection - well, at least none that was detected by Norton, Avira, MSE, Checkpoint, or Antimalwarebytes, all of which I used at one time or another. Living without antivirus, then, seems quite well possible. Would I really have to go and set a registry key myself just to get updates again?
Inflation is where your coin gets worth less and less. In this case the coin gets worth more and more. That's called "deflation", and economists and politicians want you to believe that it is incredibly bad for you if you can buy more stuff with the same money.
Their reasoning is as follows: "if your money is going to be worth more, you'll wait before buying anything, and that's bad for the economy." Let's investigate that strange claim. Which of the following statements is true?
"I will wait with buying food, because next year it is cheaper." "I will wait with paying my mortgage, because next year it is cheaper." "I will wait with buying a car, because next year it is cheaper." "I will wait paying for a holiday, because next year it is cheaper."
The only category of product that might be affected in some way is replacements for luxury products, i.e. the following statement might actually be true:
"I will wait buying a new mobile, because next year it is cheaper, and my current one still works fine."
The real reason they want you to believe that deflation is bad is this: when new money gets created, it typically ends up in the hands of the richest individuals first. Then it "trickles" down to poorer individuals. However, the speed of price increases is not the same as the speed of trickling down money, and the people at the bottom of the pyramid get the disadvantage of price increases long before they get extra money. In this way, inflation is basically a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.
Deflation must therefore be the opposite: a wealth transfer from the rich to the poor. And that's why so many economists and politicians are fighting it.
If I had invested in (say) a couple thousand bitcoin when I first heard about it, for a price that was pretty much peanuts, I would now be a very rich man. That's the power of deflation at work.
Being so impossibly sensitive to even the most minor slights is a sign of extreme lack of power. A confident, happy, generally enabled individual simply does not feel harassed by minor slights. He will shrug it off without feeling threatened, because he is above that.
All those "harassed" people you see on the news are incredibly weak, fragile, meaningless, child-like individuals who have figured out a way to amplify their almost non-existent voices to the point where they can drown out everybody else. They have found a kind of power in showing how incredibly hurt they are, and how unfair they are being treated. And since they don't have any kind of perspective, they believe the world should somehow care about that. They are adults with the minds of toddlers, screaming for their immediate need, but without a parent to put an end to their tantrums.
As more and more people get fed up with hearing about imagined slights and how bad they hurt, a backlash will inevitably come. At that point, a bit of belated growing up will be in order for all those sad, harassed individuals, as they will finally be taught a few fundamental lessons: the world is not about them, their lives are their own responsibility, being insulted is a choice, and a paper-thin skin is neither a good survival trait, nor a good step towards living a happy, productive life.
So... Every time we read about that "97% of scientists agree", we are to understand that it is mere hyperbole? I call BS.
People were happily shouting 97%! 97%! And now you were called on it, and suddenly it is only hyperbole. I'd say it was lies and manipulation, perpetrated throughout the media.
Certainly not "about all the scientists in the world". You see, it is extremely unlikely that "about all the scientists in the world" actually studied our climate. The vast majority of them have different fields of study, and as far as climate is concerned, do not have any more authority than your average slashdot poster. At best they can claim to have read an article or two, in a popular magazine - same as the rest of us.
Appealing to the authority of people who really don't have any is, however, a highly suspicious tactic. I'm also struck by the fact that no government in the world is even considering investing in the only reliable, non-polluting form of energy that we have (i.e. nuclear). If climate change were a real problem, why isn't there a Manhattan project-style investment into nuclear fusion and thorium energy? Fusion research ambles along on minimal investment. Thorium is known to be a clean and safe source of nuclear energy, but nobody seems to care. Instead we blow billions on completely unreliable renewable energy sources that even after decades of investment and large scale destruction of the landscape still supply only a tiny fraction of our energy needs.
The Netherlands gets a little bit of extra money from this, yes. Of course those billions do get added to our GNP, which means that any costs that are GNP-related (such as EU-membership, NATO membership, and third world aid) also go up immediately. I don't know how much Google is paying, but it's not impossible that this is a netto loss for the Netherlands.
Of course we gets lots of high tech jobs... Wait, what? Zero employees? Right, so that's pointless then.
Let Google pay the same on its income as I (Dutch person, living and working in the Netherlands) do. That's _52%_ income tax, for those interested... Corporations are people. Let them pay income tax like the rest of us.
I actually rode it, earlier this year. Three times, no less. I appreciated getting away from the crowds for a moment, so it is certainly good for something.
Alright, imagine that you are a company that has invested billions of dollars into billions of lines of code. And now someone wants you to rewrite all that because all of a sudden the syntax is different to conform to some random notion of "looking neater". Not gonna happen... C++ has a specific niche: it lets you write performant software on a large scale, and it guarantees that your investment will not be worthless overnight. There are plenty of places in the world where languages that change on a yearly basis are considered to be toys.
As for simplification: that's already happened and it will happen more in the future. Modern C++ is a very far cry from C++98. Yes, you _can_ write shitty code in it - but you can do that in any language, and in C++ you certainly don't have to.
Consistency is one of the hallmarks of a good UI. Windows 10 fails spectacularly.
Let's not (entirely) blame Microsoft for that, though. In the old days, you had a set of common controls that people generally used because they were convenient and everybody knew what they looked like and did. And then came the web, and mobile phones, and suddenly everybody wanted to build their own set of controls that looked and acted completely different from everything else. User interface design is now driven by how cool it looks, rather than functionality. And sure, it is less boring - but I do miss the old days where you knew what was going to happen before you experimented with it.
It is dead in that the centimetre is a deprecated unit in the SI system, which is what you should be adopting. The SI base length is a metre, and units derived from the base should be multiples of, or divisions by, 1000. Hence the next unit smaller than a meter should be a millimetre, and the next unit larger should be the kilometre. I work in an engineering design office and we never use centimeters, which is a unit for dressmakers if for anything.
Nonsense. There's nothing in SI that says prefixes like centi or deci should not be used; if they are a good match for what you're measuring, by all means use them.
I pay with cash because I don't to end up living in a world where the government has 100% visibility on all of my financial transactions. Not because I do anything fishy with them, but because once everything is electronic, confiscation will also become a trivial measure. At least with cash they'll have to go door to door.
Not to mention negative interest rates. The only thing that keeps interest rates in check now is the threat of people withdrawing all of their money at once. Once that threat is gone, there will be no limit on negative interest rate as well.
Linux will have the same problems as before: installing 3rd-party software will still be next to impossible unless it has been specially blessed by a "package maintainer". Despite its many flaws, this is one area that Windows managed to democratize (accidentally, and to Microsofts obvous chagrin): everyone can write software for Windows, and that software will run on every Windows OS. Compare that to Linux: I'd like to use GPIB drivers (yes, it's a specialist thing) but it is only available for Red Hat. But maybe I'd also like to use Oracle and that is only available on Oracle Linux. Oh, and I would like to use a special card driver that's not on every Linux either. And if at the end of the day I want to kick back and play some games... Oh, I need Steam OS. My own Windows computer fills all of those roles simultaneously, and it doesn't even have to reboot to switch from one role to another.
All of this is specialist software. All of it can be installed on Windows by clicking next-next-next-finish, and it just works. Sure, if you can get apt-get something from the appity app store, great for you. But that's not a democracy; that's the communist party blessing specific software and selecting what they consider to be useful to their perceived customers. All the software that's not blessed effectively doesn't exist, as far as Linux is concerned. And maybe with a _lot_ of tinkering you can get it to work... or maybe not. Again, on Windows it just works.
This being slashdot I can predict the course moderation will take for this message, but this is what I consider to be Linux' greatest weakness. Ignore it at your peril.
Wisdom is "the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgement; the quality of being wise." It has nothing to do with being able to understand someone else's perspective, nor does it have anything to do with class.
I have a serious problem with this kind of article redefining what words mean, and then ascribing positive traits to lower-class people and negative traits to upper-class people. It's the same story as with "emotional intelligence": that was just a crutch to allow less intelligent people to feel good about themselves and to let them look down on smarter people, because those are _obviously_ not emotionally intelligent as well.
And this is the same: being poor does not make you wise. I've seen poor people make horrendously unwise decisions, and in some cases they are poor because of that.
I find summertime to be much more pleasant anyway. But joke's on them: after the last switch to wintertime I never changed my hours. So now I go to work at 7:30, instead of 8:30. Sure, it's still dark, but at least I get to go home in daylight... Unlike the official time zone, which would have me arrive in the office and go home in the dark.
So basically people are raging about voluntary payments in free or almost-free games? How about just not playing those games to begin with? I've found that that is a great way to deal with games I don't like...
I'd say triple damages plus a racketeering conviction, followed by jail time for the CEO and a breakup of the company, should be enough to convince the next runner up that doing this is a fundamentally bad idea. But of course I could be wrong.
You'd think copyright law would be more than enough to stop that kind of behaviour though. Comcast is altering an original work without permission, for financial benefit, and as part of an organisation. Seems an easy court case...
Wouldn't it be neat, if I had a question for an airline, if I could somehow contact them? Preferably without having to resort to pressure tactics on a public forum?
But alas, contacting an airline is next to impossible. You can deal with endless automated systems, but an actual human who can respond to your actual questions? Forget it. Not gonna happen.
It's good to know that Twitter is an option, and I guess I'll have to get a Twitter account now just so I can deal with issues I'd much rather deal with in private, but I guess that's the way the world works now.
The only party that might get damaged is the government. The people of Venezuela can at least use bitcoin as a way to store their value, and to conduct trade, free of the hyperinflation their government imposes on them with its rampant spending. For them bitcoin is a gift from heaven, a way out from their broken system.
The government, OTOH, should definitely be worried. Bitcoin offers no way for them to print money, so as their nation switches away from the old coin, government income will dwindle to nothing. They will be left with a valueless coin, and therefore without the means to effectively control their country.
And Venezuela is only the first country to go down this road. Eventually _all_ nations will end up in the same spot, as people will generally prefer bitcoin (which is free from inflation) over whatever local currency they are now stuck with. Governments that wake up to this in time will try to put a stop to it, using whatever draconian measures they can get away with. The people, who will have a major part of their wealth in bitcoin, will fight them.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems a legitimate question: I've somehow managed to live through the last thirty years without _ever_ getting an infection - well, at least none that was detected by Norton, Avira, MSE, Checkpoint, or Antimalwarebytes, all of which I used at one time or another. Living without antivirus, then, seems quite well possible. Would I really have to go and set a registry key myself just to get updates again?
Sounds like a situation from GTA 5...
Inflation is where your coin gets worth less and less. In this case the coin gets worth more and more. That's called "deflation", and economists and politicians want you to believe that it is incredibly bad for you if you can buy more stuff with the same money.
Their reasoning is as follows: "if your money is going to be worth more, you'll wait before buying anything, and that's bad for the economy." Let's investigate that strange claim. Which of the following statements is true?
"I will wait with buying food, because next year it is cheaper."
"I will wait with paying my mortgage, because next year it is cheaper."
"I will wait with buying a car, because next year it is cheaper."
"I will wait paying for a holiday, because next year it is cheaper."
The only category of product that might be affected in some way is replacements for luxury products, i.e. the following statement might actually be true:
"I will wait buying a new mobile, because next year it is cheaper, and my current one still works fine."
The real reason they want you to believe that deflation is bad is this: when new money gets created, it typically ends up in the hands of the richest individuals first. Then it "trickles" down to poorer individuals. However, the speed of price increases is not the same as the speed of trickling down money, and the people at the bottom of the pyramid get the disadvantage of price increases long before they get extra money. In this way, inflation is basically a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.
Deflation must therefore be the opposite: a wealth transfer from the rich to the poor. And that's why so many economists and politicians are fighting it.
If I had invested in (say) a couple thousand bitcoin when I first heard about it, for a price that was pretty much peanuts, I would now be a very rich man. That's the power of deflation at work.
Being so impossibly sensitive to even the most minor slights is a sign of extreme lack of power. A confident, happy, generally enabled individual simply does not feel harassed by minor slights. He will shrug it off without feeling threatened, because he is above that.
All those "harassed" people you see on the news are incredibly weak, fragile, meaningless, child-like individuals who have figured out a way to amplify their almost non-existent voices to the point where they can drown out everybody else. They have found a kind of power in showing how incredibly hurt they are, and how unfair they are being treated. And since they don't have any kind of perspective, they believe the world should somehow care about that. They are adults with the minds of toddlers, screaming for their immediate need, but without a parent to put an end to their tantrums.
As more and more people get fed up with hearing about imagined slights and how bad they hurt, a backlash will inevitably come. At that point, a bit of belated growing up will be in order for all those sad, harassed individuals, as they will finally be taught a few fundamental lessons: the world is not about them, their lives are their own responsibility, being insulted is a choice, and a paper-thin skin is neither a good survival trait, nor a good step towards living a happy, productive life.
So... Every time we read about that "97% of scientists agree", we are to understand that it is mere hyperbole? I call BS.
People were happily shouting 97%! 97%! And now you were called on it, and suddenly it is only hyperbole. I'd say it was lies and manipulation, perpetrated throughout the media.
Certainly not "about all the scientists in the world". You see, it is extremely unlikely that "about all the scientists in the world" actually studied our climate. The vast majority of them have different fields of study, and as far as climate is concerned, do not have any more authority than your average slashdot poster. At best they can claim to have read an article or two, in a popular magazine - same as the rest of us.
Appealing to the authority of people who really don't have any is, however, a highly suspicious tactic. I'm also struck by the fact that no government in the world is even considering investing in the only reliable, non-polluting form of energy that we have (i.e. nuclear). If climate change were a real problem, why isn't there a Manhattan project-style investment into nuclear fusion and thorium energy? Fusion research ambles along on minimal investment. Thorium is known to be a clean and safe source of nuclear energy, but nobody seems to care. Instead we blow billions on completely unreliable renewable energy sources that even after decades of investment and large scale destruction of the landscape still supply only a tiny fraction of our energy needs.
OK, so go ahead and let them. Why aren't you?
I have no idea. I'm not in charge here.
We primitives in the US are supposed to emulate you, right? Because you are so much better than us?
I have no idea where you got that idea. I would, however, suggest you get out more.
Zero employees?
It's right there in the summary: "...to a Dutch company with no employees..."
The Netherlands gets a little bit of extra money from this, yes. Of course those billions do get added to our GNP, which means that any costs that are GNP-related (such as EU-membership, NATO membership, and third world aid) also go up immediately. I don't know how much Google is paying, but it's not impossible that this is a netto loss for the Netherlands.
Of course we gets lots of high tech jobs... Wait, what? Zero employees? Right, so that's pointless then.
Let Google pay the same on its income as I (Dutch person, living and working in the Netherlands) do. That's _52%_ income tax, for those interested... Corporations are people. Let them pay income tax like the rest of us.
I actually rode it, earlier this year. Three times, no less. I appreciated getting away from the crowds for a moment, so it is certainly good for something.
Surely the original Chinese report included this vital information?
Alright, imagine that you are a company that has invested billions of dollars into billions of lines of code. And now someone wants you to rewrite all that because all of a sudden the syntax is different to conform to some random notion of "looking neater". Not gonna happen... C++ has a specific niche: it lets you write performant software on a large scale, and it guarantees that your investment will not be worthless overnight. There are plenty of places in the world where languages that change on a yearly basis are considered to be toys.
As for simplification: that's already happened and it will happen more in the future. Modern C++ is a very far cry from C++98. Yes, you _can_ write shitty code in it - but you can do that in any language, and in C++ you certainly don't have to.
Consistency is one of the hallmarks of a good UI. Windows 10 fails spectacularly.
Let's not (entirely) blame Microsoft for that, though. In the old days, you had a set of common controls that people generally used because they were convenient and everybody knew what they looked like and did. And then came the web, and mobile phones, and suddenly everybody wanted to build their own set of controls that looked and acted completely different from everything else. User interface design is now driven by how cool it looks, rather than functionality. And sure, it is less boring - but I do miss the old days where you knew what was going to happen before you experimented with it.
Now get off my lawn.
It is dead in that the centimetre is a deprecated unit in the SI system, which is what you should be adopting. The SI base length is a metre, and units derived from the base should be multiples of, or divisions by, 1000. Hence the next unit smaller than a meter should be a millimetre, and the next unit larger should be the kilometre. I work in an engineering design office and we never use centimeters, which is a unit for dressmakers if for anything.
Nonsense. There's nothing in SI that says prefixes like centi or deci should not be used; if they are a good match for what you're measuring, by all means use them.
I pay with cash because I don't to end up living in a world where the government has 100% visibility on all of my financial transactions. Not because I do anything fishy with them, but because once everything is electronic, confiscation will also become a trivial measure. At least with cash they'll have to go door to door.
Not to mention negative interest rates. The only thing that keeps interest rates in check now is the threat of people withdrawing all of their money at once. Once that threat is gone, there will be no limit on negative interest rate as well.
...where you get hired and paid for ability, rather than commitment.
Linux will have the same problems as before: installing 3rd-party software will still be next to impossible unless it has been specially blessed by a "package maintainer". Despite its many flaws, this is one area that Windows managed to democratize (accidentally, and to Microsofts obvous chagrin): everyone can write software for Windows, and that software will run on every Windows OS. Compare that to Linux: I'd like to use GPIB drivers (yes, it's a specialist thing) but it is only available for Red Hat. But maybe I'd also like to use Oracle and that is only available on Oracle Linux. Oh, and I would like to use a special card driver that's not on every Linux either. And if at the end of the day I want to kick back and play some games... Oh, I need Steam OS. My own Windows computer fills all of those roles simultaneously, and it doesn't even have to reboot to switch from one role to another.
All of this is specialist software. All of it can be installed on Windows by clicking next-next-next-finish, and it just works. Sure, if you can get apt-get something from the appity app store, great for you. But that's not a democracy; that's the communist party blessing specific software and selecting what they consider to be useful to their perceived customers. All the software that's not blessed effectively doesn't exist, as far as Linux is concerned. And maybe with a _lot_ of tinkering you can get it to work... or maybe not. Again, on Windows it just works.
This being slashdot I can predict the course moderation will take for this message, but this is what I consider to be Linux' greatest weakness. Ignore it at your peril.
Wisdom is "the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgement; the quality of being wise." It has nothing to do with being able to understand someone else's perspective, nor does it have anything to do with class.
I have a serious problem with this kind of article redefining what words mean, and then ascribing positive traits to lower-class people and negative traits to upper-class people. It's the same story as with "emotional intelligence": that was just a crutch to allow less intelligent people to feel good about themselves and to let them look down on smarter people, because those are _obviously_ not emotionally intelligent as well.
And this is the same: being poor does not make you wise. I've seen poor people make horrendously unwise decisions, and in some cases they are poor because of that.
Shows what you know then. They only have the hottest women of all of Europe.
I find summertime to be much more pleasant anyway. But joke's on them: after the last switch to wintertime I never changed my hours. So now I go to work at 7:30, instead of 8:30. Sure, it's still dark, but at least I get to go home in daylight... Unlike the official time zone, which would have me arrive in the office and go home in the dark.
So basically people are raging about voluntary payments in free or almost-free games? How about just not playing those games to begin with? I've found that that is a great way to deal with games I don't like...
I'd say triple damages plus a racketeering conviction, followed by jail time for the CEO and a breakup of the company, should be enough to convince the next runner up that doing this is a fundamentally bad idea. But of course I could be wrong.
You'd think copyright law would be more than enough to stop that kind of behaviour though. Comcast is altering an original work without permission, for financial benefit, and as part of an organisation. Seems an easy court case...
Wouldn't it be neat, if I had a question for an airline, if I could somehow contact them? Preferably without having to resort to pressure tactics on a public forum?
But alas, contacting an airline is next to impossible. You can deal with endless automated systems, but an actual human who can respond to your actual questions? Forget it. Not gonna happen.
It's good to know that Twitter is an option, and I guess I'll have to get a Twitter account now just so I can deal with issues I'd much rather deal with in private, but I guess that's the way the world works now.
The only party that might get damaged is the government. The people of Venezuela can at least use bitcoin as a way to store their value, and to conduct trade, free of the hyperinflation their government imposes on them with its rampant spending. For them bitcoin is a gift from heaven, a way out from their broken system.
The government, OTOH, should definitely be worried. Bitcoin offers no way for them to print money, so as their nation switches away from the old coin, government income will dwindle to nothing. They will be left with a valueless coin, and therefore without the means to effectively control their country.
And Venezuela is only the first country to go down this road. Eventually _all_ nations will end up in the same spot, as people will generally prefer bitcoin (which is free from inflation) over whatever local currency they are now stuck with. Governments that wake up to this in time will try to put a stop to it, using whatever draconian measures they can get away with. The people, who will have a major part of their wealth in bitcoin, will fight them.
It will be interesting to see who will win.