Then again, if you remove those people and everyone else who only does it for 20% of their posts, suddenly the whole feed would feel quite empty.
You say that as if it was a bad thing. The fact is, my Facebook feed is quite empty. I only occasionally look at Facebook nowadays. I find that my quality of life has not suffered in the least.
Seriously... I will unfollow anyone who shares one of these idiotic Facebook petitions, the same way I unfollow anyone who insists on sharing every bit of braindead clickbait they see, or who insists on posting nonstop political screeds.
You can definitely tell that Facebook's engagement metrics are falling, and that Zuckerberg is sweating over it, when "features" like this are pushed into user's faces.
So far increased prices have kept revenues up as sales have declined. That train is now running out of steam.
I have a 6 year old MacBook Pro that needs to be upgraded. There's nothing available from Apple that I can buy. I do consulting work that requires me to be able to remove the SSD. I can't do that with any current Apple models, although competitors like Dell seem perfectly capable of offering removable storage.
Ditto for my aging Mac Pro. What is there to replace it with? The latest Mac Mini refresh is a joke, and the iMac Pro is ridiculously overpriced, again with soldered SSDs.
I have an iPhone 8 that I'll keep until it falls apart, for no other reason than I refuse to buy a phone with a larger screen. If I wanted to carry something as big as the XR or XS, I'd buy a Samsung.
To be fair, the Apple Watch is still a good product, as are the AirPods. Not everything has turned to crap in the Apple product line, but far too much has. The only thing that keeps Apple going (in my opinion) is that the competition is even worse. Every competitor who could possibly upend Apple seems bound and determined to copy Apple's worst impulses instead.
But any way you look at it, Apple is headed straight for a brick wall with the iPhone monoculture. Apple will have nothing to fall back on except for its services.
I expect that Tim Cook will be gone within five years, but what if his replacement is just another John Sculley? It is depressing to see what has happened to a once-great company.
If Die Hard come out in November or December, I would say that it was intended as a Christmas film. If I remember correctly, it came out in June, however. It was definitely summertime.
"Miracle on 34th Street", arguably one of the greatest Christmas films ever made, was released in June of 1947.
As for "Die Hard", it has several elements that make it a Christmas classic:
(1) It's all about a man who is determined to stop a villain who wants to spoil Christmas for a lot of other people.
(2) The focus is all about family; McClane will do anything to save them.
(3) The film provides a rejection of short-sighted greed and corruption through the execution of Harry Ellis.
(4) McClane plays the role of Santa Claus, dealing out punishment to everyone who is naughty, and saying, "Ho! Ho! Ho!"
So while many may regard the question of "Die Hard" being a Christmas movie as strictly tongue-in-cheek, the fact remains that it is a meme that keeps popping up every holiday season, and by that reason alone, it is very definitely a Christmas movie.
This story reminds me of the old joke about the scientists who proudly announced that their experiments proved that dogs and cats could live underwater... just not very long.
But as Richard Stallman recently pointed out [slashdot.org], each alternative that is currently available suffers from "serious problems, perhaps in its security or its scalability".
From what I've seen, they all suffer from exactly the same issues:
(1) Anyone can create a cryptocurrency, harvest the lion's share of the coins, pump it, dump it, cash out, then do it all over again. There have been approximately 600 new cryptocurrencies released in the past 6 months. That's an average of about 3 new cryptocurrencies each day.
(2) Every cryptocurrency promises untold wealth to those who get in early. Every major cryptocurrency advocate who isn't in it to scam the suckers instead is dreaming of becoming the new global elite, somehow thinking that the people in this world with the real wealth will be forced to use existing cryptocurrencies, instead of simply creating one of their own.
It's a fascinating mass delusion, fueled by modern media. In the long run, the true believers are their own worst enemies, because they're all competing for the same goal - to become the richest person on earth by doing nothing more than holding some digital tokens created by some unknown parties. So inevitably they will turn on each other, and the whole mess will come crashing down.
There's no proving a negative. Burden of proof is on Bloomberg and they don't have it.
Exactly. Supposedly thousands of motherboards were compromised, and sold to multiple customers. The failure of Bloomberg (or anyone else) to produce a single compromised piece of hardware, or even a die photo of the supposed spy chip, says it all. There's no evidence to be found because it doesn't exist.
Conspiracy believers aren't going to change their minds. But for everyone else in the industry, it has become blatantly clear that Bloomberg screwed up royally with this story.
Maybe it's just that people are finally starting to realize its true worth, ie. zero.
Cryptocurrency proponents haven't helped their case with all the forks and new coins being constantly produced. There are now approximately 2100 cryptocurrencies, up from 1600 just last June. Even Bitcoin Cash, which was a fork of Bitcoin, has now forked into BCH ABC and BCH SV.
It doesn't take much of nonsense for people to realize that cryptocurrencies are nothing more than electronic monopoly money. How can something have any real value when more of it keeps appearing every day, backed by yet another group of people who want to become rich?
"It's otherwise rational, sane people who're in Mark's orbit spouting full-blown anti-media rhetoric, saying that the press is ganging up on Facebook," said the former employee.
In a very real sense, that is true. The media have been in a continuous uproar since the 2016 Presidential election and the Brexit vote, because the "wrong side" won, and Facebook is a very convenient target for part of the blame. It's not as if Facebook's business model was any different before 2016; the company has always had slimy business practices. The media simply gave Facebook a free pass up to that point.
It must be enormously frustrating to Zuckerberg and Sandberg to fight this battle, because their political leanings are no doubt on the progressive side, and Facebook fundamentally did nothing different in 2016 than it did in 2012. They can't comprehend why they're suddenly the bad guys. It's just that in the modern world of social media (which they helped to create), when the mob goes hunting for witches, someone has to be thrown on the pyre.
The problem is that there is also no physical evidence - at all.
And that is the lynchpin of this entire matter. Supposedly tens of thousands of motherboards purchased by multiple companies were altered, yet not one piece of physical evidence, or even a photograph of a die, has been produced.
My research group has had some involvement with "trusted microelectronics". When the Bloomberg story first broke, we discussed between ourselves how bizarre it was that China would bother with a traceable hardware hack, when software exploits (which provide plausible deniability) have been so successful for them in the past. It made no sense to us.
Now, as the weeks have gone by, it has become clear that the story is essentially a fabrication. If it were not, hard evidence would have surfaced by now. Someone at Bloomberg wanted so much for it to be true that fact-checking and source-checking fell by the wayside. It has happened to other reputable news agencies in the past (e.g. New Republic, Rolling Stone, New York Times). When a story fits a desired narrative, all the checks and balances of good journalism fall by the wayside.
I am reminded of a scene from the movie "Shattered Glass", when a receptionist comments that the scandal with the fabricated stories by Stephen Glass could have been avoided if the New Republic had required him to provide photographs. Bloomberg should have taken that lesson to heart.
This story is getting a lot of hype from the BTC evangelists. Of course, the truth is that Ohio is only accepting dollars for taxes. The Ohio treasury is using BitPay to convert BTC immediately into dollars, minus whatever fees are charged for the conversion. Unless you've already had BTC in your possession prior to 2017, what's the point?
The question that BTC evangelists hope you won't ask next is "Who else is still accepting Bitcoin for payments?" Here's a list of companies as tallied last month: https://unblock.net/companies-...
You might recognize maybe half a dozen names from that list. As a means of conducting day-to-day retail transactions, BTC has dropped off the map. It is rarely even mentioned anymore.
If your answer is that bitcoin is worth $0, you are wrong.....at a minimum it has value as a money laundering and malware ransoming exchange medium.
The "true" value is probably a lot closer to $4 than $4000. After all, it isn't as if alternate cryptocurrencies couldn't substitute for BTC. For that matter, gift cards and Western Union money transfers remain very popular with criminals. BTC isn't a requirement for anonymous currency transfers.
The drop in BTC is hardly a surprise. BTC only rose in price while more money was flowing into the ecosystem than out of it. When BTC was a "thing", lots of suckers lined up with their money. But now its reputation is in the toilet. The general public sees it as nothing but the domain of criminals and scammers.
BTC simply isn't news anymore. If you think 2018 was a bad year, wait until 2019.
Forget ditching DST, get rid of standard time. Who cares if i go to work in the dark, I want to come home to enjoy some sunlight! During standard time in the winter I not only get the joy of coming to work in the dark, but getting home in the dark as well, because it's sunset by the time I leave.
I'd love to have an hour of daylight to get stuff done outside when i get home and not have to wait for the weekend!
And I am exactly the opposite. I want the extra hour of daylight in the morning, so I can exercise, walk the dogs, and get chores done before going to work.
DST just robs Peter to pay Paul. For every person who wants more daylight in the evening, I expect you'll find another who wants it in the morning.
I vote to keep the clocks at standard time, and adjust business hours to accommodate the longer summer days. Or at the very least, to adjust DST so that it starts in May, and ends in September, and actually does cover the summer months. The current insanity of starting in March and ending in November guarantees that we all spend at least two months each year stumbling around in the dark during the morning hours, because some idiots in Congress decided to "do something".
But an ARM CPU on par with the (relatively) high end Intel Core i7!?!?! This is big news!!!
Big news for Apple, and very bad news for Intel. The last thing they need is yet another indicator of how stagnant the Intel processor line has become.
Lots of people have speculated that the next generation of Apple laptops will drop Intel entirely. If Apple can fab a 7nm A12X variant at TSMC that runs Mac OS, the switch could happen as early as next year. TSMC already has at least a one-year lead over Intel. Intel's 10nm fab (comparable to TSMC's 7nm fab) won't ramp up until late 2019.
And if Apple abandons Intel for ARM / TSMC, how long will it take for other companies to do the same?
"I don't know if something like this even exists," this person said, noting that Apple was not provided with a malicious chip or motherboard to examine.
My colleagues and I were discussing this story last week. My research group has done some work in secure computing, and we were frankly surprised that someone would bother to add a compromised piece of hardware to a motherboard.
Software intrusions always provide plausible deniability to the attacker, which is critical to state-sponsored espionage. But a hardware hack, where someone succeeds in adding a component to a motherboard without the knowledge of the designer, is far more difficult and far more dangerous. A device in hand can be reverse-engineered, and forensics performed to determine exactly when and how it was inserted into the manufacturing chain. Experts can even determine the exact IC fab in which the chip was manufactured.
On top of that, a company that allows its manufacturing process to be compromised has essentially ruined itself. What customer would trust it again? Sure, it is possible that the Chinese government would be willing to spend the money to create a company that could be sacrificed to a state espionage effort, but the problem remains that if the espionage is uncovered, no one will trust any installed hardware purchased from them.
Software intrusions remain extremely successful. The Chinese purportedly breached the OPM and copied all of the personnel files for every U.S. citizen with a security clearance back in 2014, but to this day no one can be entirely sure who was behind it. Likewise, Russia constantly denies its own state-sponsored hacks. For that matter, so does the U.S.A., and everyone else. Why give up such a successful exploit vector in favor of one that provides an undeniable trail back to the perpetrator?
So exactly what is the story behind this Bloomberg article, and where is the proof that the hack actually happened? Someone needs to produce some hardware as proof. This story is definitely becoming even more interesting.
If it really works... Rumour has it that while it performed well in demonstrations it was not durable, which would have greatly limited its commercial applications. A cynic might suggest that he was hoping someone would pay him for the rights to his invention before discovering this, and hence he did not want to patent it or allow others to retain samples for longer term testing.
The whole affair smacks of pseudoscience. It has many of the classic symptoms:
(1) An inventor without any training or scientific background who purports to have invented a device or solved a problem that has eluded scientists and engineers.
(2) Unreasonable secrecy about the details of the invention, and reluctance even to work with impartial third parties operating under a non-disclosure agreement.
(3) Public demonstrations, but only when made under the direct control and supervision of the inventor.
(4) Proclaimed distrust of the patent system, or else an attempt to manipulate the patent system by filing a non-enabling patent disclosure.
(5) An attitude of "pay me the money first, and then I'll show you how to make it". In other words, you have to put your faith in the inventor and give him your money, and then he'll show you the way to "salvation". (The religious parallels are quite common with pseudoscientific inventions.)
Based on my own experiences dealing with a pseudoscientific invention (and inventor), I would bet that Ward did indeed have Starlite secretly tested, perhaps numerous times... but you never heard about those tests, because Starlite didn't work as claimed. That leads to the final symptom of pseudoscience:
(6) Despite claims of an amazing invention, the inventor seems completely incapable of doing anything useful with it on his own. It's the equivalent of the inventor who claims to have a machine that generates free electricity, but who still pays the power company to keep his lights on.
Right now, a very small percentage of the population holds any cryptocurrency
More accurately: "Right now, a very small percentage of the population holds all the available cryptocurrency." In a nutshell, that is why every cryptocurrency is doomed from the outset. The concentration of "wealth" in the hands of the crypto-elite would makes paupers and slaves of the rest of us, assuming the world was foolish enough to adopt one.
Think about it: some dude living in a basement creates a cryptocurrency which by design is limited to a specific number of tokens, and for which he happens to own 10% to 40% of the entire worldwide supply. And then he says to the world, "Hey people, fight the banks! Fight the government! Become the new wealthy class, and use my cryptocoins as money!" How delusional does he have to be to believe that the truly wealthy people in this world will hand over their assets to him, just so they can conduct transactions in a cryptocurrency created by someone else, when they could just as easily create one of their own?
The cryptocurrency craze is driven by people who are foolish enough to think that they will become the new wealthy class by "investing" their money in what is effectively a pyramid scheme. And the craze is manipulated by people who are laughing all the way to the bank as they separate the fools from their money.
No cryptocurrency will ever gain any long-term traction so long as it is designed to make early adopters fabulously wealthy by default. The problem is that almost every cryptocurrency is designed precisely that way, because promising riches and power to those who get in on the ground floor is their main appeal - just as with any other pyramid scheme.
Once cars arrived, nearly every U.S. transit agency slashed service to cut costs, instead of improving service to stay competitive.
That statement presupposes that "improving service" could ever have allowed mass transit to keep up. How do you "compete" with personal transit that takes you from door to door, on your own schedule, day or night, from the convenience of your own home, without having to worry about being assaulted or robbed by someone riding with you? It was inevitable that mass transit would lose out when automobiles came on the scene.
The problem with the mass transit debate is two-fold:
(1) It is dominated by people who moan and moralize about what other people "ought" to be doing, rather than what they choose to do as a matter of personal convenience and time savings.
(2) Many of the people doing the moaning and moralizing don't believe in eating the dog food being served to the plebes; they drive their own vehicles. You see, their personal time is extremely valuable, even if they don't consider yours to be.
There is no "conspiracy" against mass transit. Commuters are quite capable of making their own choices about the quickest, safest, most convenient way to getting from point A to point B. Mass transit just can't compete with personal transportation, except in the very densest urban environments.
Is $1,000 survivable? It is significantly less than minimum wage, which people already struggle with.
$1000 / month may turn out to be worth next to nothing at all. If UBI is implemented by the process of the government printing more money, then inflation will rapidly devalue the UBI. That will also make the minimum wage worth far less, along with everyone else's wages for that matter. You can't arbitrarily create more fiat money unless it matches a corresponding increase in productivity and economic value.
The only way UBI can "work" without inflation is if economic value is taken from those who produce it (in the form of taxes), and then redistributed. So yes, if you are making $3000 / month, and your neighbor is unemployed, then UBI can be implemented by the government taxing you for $2000 / month, then giving you $1000 / month as your UBI, and your neighbor $1000 / month as his UBI.
But assuming that people could convince themselves that such a massive transfer of wealth was politically achievable, there's still the problem of human nature. The UBI assumes that everyone who receives it will spend it wisely, hence eliminating dozens of other government entitlement programs, and that just won't happen.
Read about Oprah Winfrey's "Families for a Better Life" program back in the early 90's. She tried to use her fortune to lift 100 families out of poverty. It failed miserably, because so few of the people enrolled in the program were able to effectively manage the resources provided to them. The UBI will suffer the same fate, as a significant percentage of the population will immediately squander their monthly UBI. So you'll still wind up needing the government entitlements to "help" the people who are unable to help themselves.
UBI only becomes possible if we undergo an economic "singularity" where AI + robotics + cheap energy creates a society where basic food, clothing, and shelter become effectively "free". And in that case, you'll find that your government-produced commodities will be treated as undesirable assets because "only poor people accept them".
Evidence is Piling Up That Facebook Can Incite Racial Violence
The entire purpose of Facebook is to monetize having people at each others' throats... because it increases engagement, and makes Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's shareholders that much richer. Of course Facebook is inciting racial violence, along with political violence, criminal violence, school violence, and any other violence you can think of. If money can be made from it, Facebook will provide more of it.
I have friends who have stopped speaking to each other because of Facebook. It will only get worse, because Wall Street demands higher returns from the company, which means.... more violence.
The problem with many crypto currencies are the currency part - the difficulty, delay, and uncertainty (in value) of actually paying with them has held them back.
In my opinion, what has held back all of them has been the inherent "early adopters get rich" architecture. The concentration of wealth in the BTC community makes the concentration of USD by the upper 1% look like a socialist paradise by comparison, and every major cryptocurrency since then has copied it... because of course, everyone wants to be the "new" 1%.
Think about it: someone invents a new currency for which he just happens to own 20% or 30% of the total worldwide supply, and wants everyone to adopt it as "money". How deluded does he have to be to think that the people holding the actual wealth in this world will just hand over their power and assets to a guy holding some digital tokens that he personally created?
The BTC community is dominated by this mindset of adopters hoping to become the "new" wealthy class. It drives the speculative frenzy and the irrational behavior. And ultimately, that mindset is exactly what will bring the BTC experiment to an end, even if one could solve the problems of transaction throughput and ease of use.
Every week, I get one or more solicitations inviting me to be a keynote speaker at a conference, serve as an editor of a journal, or submit an invited paper, all from conferences and journals that I've never heard of before. In the grand scheme of things, I am far from being an academic superstar. I can only imagine how much worse it must be for some of my colleagues.
What is surprising to me about this story isn't that some researchers are padding their CVs with publications in bogus journals, but that they aren't being called on it. If I were to list such a publication on my own annual report, my department chair would have me in his office in an instant, demanding to know why I was trying to damage the school's reputation with such idiocy.
So the question is this: why isn't this oversight also taking place at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford? Is there really so little departmental supervision that researchers at those schools can actually get away with this?
(Remember: Only about 6 Bitcoin transactions per second are possible in the entire world - nobody will be able to sell:-) )
The average BTC transaction fee is still under $1 USD, so the panic selling hasn't started yet. The fun part will be when BTC starts to plummet while the transaction fee skyrockets. The really fun part will happen if the transaction fee climbs to the point where people realize their remaining BTC balance will cost them more money to liquidate than if they simply deleted their wallet.
Slashdot Mirror
You say that as if it was a bad thing. The fact is, my Facebook feed is quite empty. I only occasionally look at Facebook nowadays. I find that my quality of life has not suffered in the least.
Seriously ... I will unfollow anyone who shares one of these idiotic Facebook petitions, the same way I unfollow anyone who insists on sharing every bit of braindead clickbait they see, or who insists on posting nonstop political screeds.
You can definitely tell that Facebook's engagement metrics are falling, and that Zuckerberg is sweating over it, when "features" like this are pushed into user's faces.
So far increased prices have kept revenues up as sales have declined. That train is now running out of steam.
I have a 6 year old MacBook Pro that needs to be upgraded. There's nothing available from Apple that I can buy. I do consulting work that requires me to be able to remove the SSD. I can't do that with any current Apple models, although competitors like Dell seem perfectly capable of offering removable storage.
Ditto for my aging Mac Pro. What is there to replace it with? The latest Mac Mini refresh is a joke, and the iMac Pro is ridiculously overpriced, again with soldered SSDs.
I have an iPhone 8 that I'll keep until it falls apart, for no other reason than I refuse to buy a phone with a larger screen. If I wanted to carry something as big as the XR or XS, I'd buy a Samsung.
To be fair, the Apple Watch is still a good product, as are the AirPods. Not everything has turned to crap in the Apple product line, but far too much has. The only thing that keeps Apple going (in my opinion) is that the competition is even worse. Every competitor who could possibly upend Apple seems bound and determined to copy Apple's worst impulses instead.
But any way you look at it, Apple is headed straight for a brick wall with the iPhone monoculture. Apple will have nothing to fall back on except for its services.
I expect that Tim Cook will be gone within five years, but what if his replacement is just another John Sculley? It is depressing to see what has happened to a once-great company.
"Miracle on 34th Street", arguably one of the greatest Christmas films ever made, was released in June of 1947.
As for "Die Hard", it has several elements that make it a Christmas classic:
(1) It's all about a man who is determined to stop a villain who wants to spoil Christmas for a lot of other people.
(2) The focus is all about family; McClane will do anything to save them.
(3) The film provides a rejection of short-sighted greed and corruption through the execution of Harry Ellis.
(4) McClane plays the role of Santa Claus, dealing out punishment to everyone who is naughty, and saying, "Ho! Ho! Ho!"
So while many may regard the question of "Die Hard" being a Christmas movie as strictly tongue-in-cheek, the fact remains that it is a meme that keeps popping up every holiday season, and by that reason alone, it is very definitely a Christmas movie.
This story reminds me of the old joke about the scientists who proudly announced that their experiments proved that dogs and cats could live underwater ... just not very long.
From what I've seen, they all suffer from exactly the same issues:
(1) Anyone can create a cryptocurrency, harvest the lion's share of the coins, pump it, dump it, cash out, then do it all over again. There have been approximately 600 new cryptocurrencies released in the past 6 months. That's an average of about 3 new cryptocurrencies each day.
(2) Every cryptocurrency promises untold wealth to those who get in early. Every major cryptocurrency advocate who isn't in it to scam the suckers instead is dreaming of becoming the new global elite, somehow thinking that the people in this world with the real wealth will be forced to use existing cryptocurrencies, instead of simply creating one of their own.
It's a fascinating mass delusion, fueled by modern media. In the long run, the true believers are their own worst enemies, because they're all competing for the same goal - to become the richest person on earth by doing nothing more than holding some digital tokens created by some unknown parties. So inevitably they will turn on each other, and the whole mess will come crashing down.
Exactly. Supposedly thousands of motherboards were compromised, and sold to multiple customers. The failure of Bloomberg (or anyone else) to produce a single compromised piece of hardware, or even a die photo of the supposed spy chip, says it all. There's no evidence to be found because it doesn't exist.
Conspiracy believers aren't going to change their minds. But for everyone else in the industry, it has become blatantly clear that Bloomberg screwed up royally with this story.
Cryptocurrency proponents haven't helped their case with all the forks and new coins being constantly produced. There are now approximately 2100 cryptocurrencies, up from 1600 just last June. Even Bitcoin Cash, which was a fork of Bitcoin, has now forked into BCH ABC and BCH SV.
It doesn't take much of nonsense for people to realize that cryptocurrencies are nothing more than electronic monopoly money. How can something have any real value when more of it keeps appearing every day, backed by yet another group of people who want to become rich?
In a very real sense, that is true. The media have been in a continuous uproar since the 2016 Presidential election and the Brexit vote, because the "wrong side" won, and Facebook is a very convenient target for part of the blame. It's not as if Facebook's business model was any different before 2016; the company has always had slimy business practices. The media simply gave Facebook a free pass up to that point.
It must be enormously frustrating to Zuckerberg and Sandberg to fight this battle, because their political leanings are no doubt on the progressive side, and Facebook fundamentally did nothing different in 2016 than it did in 2012. They can't comprehend why they're suddenly the bad guys. It's just that in the modern world of social media (which they helped to create), when the mob goes hunting for witches, someone has to be thrown on the pyre.
And that is the lynchpin of this entire matter. Supposedly tens of thousands of motherboards purchased by multiple companies were altered, yet not one piece of physical evidence, or even a photograph of a die, has been produced.
My research group has had some involvement with "trusted microelectronics". When the Bloomberg story first broke, we discussed between ourselves how bizarre it was that China would bother with a traceable hardware hack, when software exploits (which provide plausible deniability) have been so successful for them in the past. It made no sense to us.
Now, as the weeks have gone by, it has become clear that the story is essentially a fabrication. If it were not, hard evidence would have surfaced by now. Someone at Bloomberg wanted so much for it to be true that fact-checking and source-checking fell by the wayside. It has happened to other reputable news agencies in the past (e.g. New Republic, Rolling Stone, New York Times). When a story fits a desired narrative, all the checks and balances of good journalism fall by the wayside.
I am reminded of a scene from the movie "Shattered Glass", when a receptionist comments that the scandal with the fabricated stories by Stephen Glass could have been avoided if the New Republic had required him to provide photographs. Bloomberg should have taken that lesson to heart.
Iran should switch to Bitcoin!
Then, once the next cryptocurrency hack cleans out the Iranian treasury, the entire country will be flat on its back. No more nuclear weapons program!
Stuxnet couldn't hold a candle to the damage that BTC would do to Iran. :-)
This story is getting a lot of hype from the BTC evangelists. Of course, the truth is that Ohio is only accepting dollars for taxes. The Ohio treasury is using BitPay to convert BTC immediately into dollars, minus whatever fees are charged for the conversion. Unless you've already had BTC in your possession prior to 2017, what's the point?
The question that BTC evangelists hope you won't ask next is "Who else is still accepting Bitcoin for payments?" Here's a list of companies as tallied last month: https://unblock.net/companies-...
You might recognize maybe half a dozen names from that list. As a means of conducting day-to-day retail transactions, BTC has dropped off the map. It is rarely even mentioned anymore.
The "true" value is probably a lot closer to $4 than $4000. After all, it isn't as if alternate cryptocurrencies couldn't substitute for BTC. For that matter, gift cards and Western Union money transfers remain very popular with criminals. BTC isn't a requirement for anonymous currency transfers.
The drop in BTC is hardly a surprise. BTC only rose in price while more money was flowing into the ecosystem than out of it. When BTC was a "thing", lots of suckers lined up with their money. But now its reputation is in the toilet. The general public sees it as nothing but the domain of criminals and scammers.
BTC simply isn't news anymore. If you think 2018 was a bad year, wait until 2019.
And I am exactly the opposite. I want the extra hour of daylight in the morning, so I can exercise, walk the dogs, and get chores done before going to work.
DST just robs Peter to pay Paul. For every person who wants more daylight in the evening, I expect you'll find another who wants it in the morning.
I vote to keep the clocks at standard time, and adjust business hours to accommodate the longer summer days. Or at the very least, to adjust DST so that it starts in May, and ends in September, and actually does cover the summer months. The current insanity of starting in March and ending in November guarantees that we all spend at least two months each year stumbling around in the dark during the morning hours, because some idiots in Congress decided to "do something".
Big news for Apple, and very bad news for Intel. The last thing they need is yet another indicator of how stagnant the Intel processor line has become.
Lots of people have speculated that the next generation of Apple laptops will drop Intel entirely. If Apple can fab a 7nm A12X variant at TSMC that runs Mac OS, the switch could happen as early as next year. TSMC already has at least a one-year lead over Intel. Intel's 10nm fab (comparable to TSMC's 7nm fab) won't ramp up until late 2019.
And if Apple abandons Intel for ARM / TSMC, how long will it take for other companies to do the same?
That's what's so brilliant about it.
No one can tell the difference.
Next up: mining malware that installs a legitimate copy of McAfee antivirus on your computer.
My colleagues and I were discussing this story last week. My research group has done some work in secure computing, and we were frankly surprised that someone would bother to add a compromised piece of hardware to a motherboard.
Software intrusions always provide plausible deniability to the attacker, which is critical to state-sponsored espionage. But a hardware hack, where someone succeeds in adding a component to a motherboard without the knowledge of the designer, is far more difficult and far more dangerous. A device in hand can be reverse-engineered, and forensics performed to determine exactly when and how it was inserted into the manufacturing chain. Experts can even determine the exact IC fab in which the chip was manufactured.
On top of that, a company that allows its manufacturing process to be compromised has essentially ruined itself. What customer would trust it again? Sure, it is possible that the Chinese government would be willing to spend the money to create a company that could be sacrificed to a state espionage effort, but the problem remains that if the espionage is uncovered, no one will trust any installed hardware purchased from them.
Software intrusions remain extremely successful. The Chinese purportedly breached the OPM and copied all of the personnel files for every U.S. citizen with a security clearance back in 2014, but to this day no one can be entirely sure who was behind it. Likewise, Russia constantly denies its own state-sponsored hacks. For that matter, so does the U.S.A., and everyone else. Why give up such a successful exploit vector in favor of one that provides an undeniable trail back to the perpetrator?
So exactly what is the story behind this Bloomberg article, and where is the proof that the hack actually happened? Someone needs to produce some hardware as proof. This story is definitely becoming even more interesting.
The whole affair smacks of pseudoscience. It has many of the classic symptoms:
(1) An inventor without any training or scientific background who purports to have invented a device or solved a problem that has eluded scientists and engineers.
(2) Unreasonable secrecy about the details of the invention, and reluctance even to work with impartial third parties operating under a non-disclosure agreement.
(3) Public demonstrations, but only when made under the direct control and supervision of the inventor.
(4) Proclaimed distrust of the patent system, or else an attempt to manipulate the patent system by filing a non-enabling patent disclosure.
(5) An attitude of "pay me the money first, and then I'll show you how to make it". In other words, you have to put your faith in the inventor and give him your money, and then he'll show you the way to "salvation". (The religious parallels are quite common with pseudoscientific inventions.)
Based on my own experiences dealing with a pseudoscientific invention (and inventor), I would bet that Ward did indeed have Starlite secretly tested, perhaps numerous times ... but you never heard about those tests, because Starlite didn't work as claimed. That leads to the final symptom of pseudoscience:
(6) Despite claims of an amazing invention, the inventor seems completely incapable of doing anything useful with it on his own. It's the equivalent of the inventor who claims to have a machine that generates free electricity, but who still pays the power company to keep his lights on.
More accurately: "Right now, a very small percentage of the population holds all the available cryptocurrency." In a nutshell, that is why every cryptocurrency is doomed from the outset. The concentration of "wealth" in the hands of the crypto-elite would makes paupers and slaves of the rest of us, assuming the world was foolish enough to adopt one.
Think about it: some dude living in a basement creates a cryptocurrency which by design is limited to a specific number of tokens, and for which he happens to own 10% to 40% of the entire worldwide supply. And then he says to the world, "Hey people, fight the banks! Fight the government! Become the new wealthy class, and use my cryptocoins as money!" How delusional does he have to be to believe that the truly wealthy people in this world will hand over their assets to him, just so they can conduct transactions in a cryptocurrency created by someone else, when they could just as easily create one of their own?
The cryptocurrency craze is driven by people who are foolish enough to think that they will become the new wealthy class by "investing" their money in what is effectively a pyramid scheme. And the craze is manipulated by people who are laughing all the way to the bank as they separate the fools from their money.
No cryptocurrency will ever gain any long-term traction so long as it is designed to make early adopters fabulously wealthy by default. The problem is that almost every cryptocurrency is designed precisely that way, because promising riches and power to those who get in on the ground floor is their main appeal - just as with any other pyramid scheme.
That statement presupposes that "improving service" could ever have allowed mass transit to keep up. How do you "compete" with personal transit that takes you from door to door, on your own schedule, day or night, from the convenience of your own home, without having to worry about being assaulted or robbed by someone riding with you? It was inevitable that mass transit would lose out when automobiles came on the scene.
The problem with the mass transit debate is two-fold:
(1) It is dominated by people who moan and moralize about what other people "ought" to be doing, rather than what they choose to do as a matter of personal convenience and time savings.
(2) Many of the people doing the moaning and moralizing don't believe in eating the dog food being served to the plebes; they drive their own vehicles. You see, their personal time is extremely valuable, even if they don't consider yours to be.
There is no "conspiracy" against mass transit. Commuters are quite capable of making their own choices about the quickest, safest, most convenient way to getting from point A to point B. Mass transit just can't compete with personal transportation, except in the very densest urban environments.
$1000 / month may turn out to be worth next to nothing at all. If UBI is implemented by the process of the government printing more money, then inflation will rapidly devalue the UBI. That will also make the minimum wage worth far less, along with everyone else's wages for that matter. You can't arbitrarily create more fiat money unless it matches a corresponding increase in productivity and economic value.
The only way UBI can "work" without inflation is if economic value is taken from those who produce it (in the form of taxes), and then redistributed. So yes, if you are making $3000 / month, and your neighbor is unemployed, then UBI can be implemented by the government taxing you for $2000 / month, then giving you $1000 / month as your UBI, and your neighbor $1000 / month as his UBI.
But assuming that people could convince themselves that such a massive transfer of wealth was politically achievable, there's still the problem of human nature. The UBI assumes that everyone who receives it will spend it wisely, hence eliminating dozens of other government entitlement programs, and that just won't happen.
Read about Oprah Winfrey's "Families for a Better Life" program back in the early 90's. She tried to use her fortune to lift 100 families out of poverty. It failed miserably, because so few of the people enrolled in the program were able to effectively manage the resources provided to them. The UBI will suffer the same fate, as a significant percentage of the population will immediately squander their monthly UBI. So you'll still wind up needing the government entitlements to "help" the people who are unable to help themselves.
UBI only becomes possible if we undergo an economic "singularity" where AI + robotics + cheap energy creates a society where basic food, clothing, and shelter become effectively "free". And in that case, you'll find that your government-produced commodities will be treated as undesirable assets because "only poor people accept them".
The entire purpose of Facebook is to monetize having people at each others' throats ... because it increases engagement, and makes Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's shareholders that much richer. Of course Facebook is inciting racial violence, along with political violence, criminal violence, school violence, and any other violence you can think of. If money can be made from it, Facebook will provide more of it.
I have friends who have stopped speaking to each other because of Facebook. It will only get worse, because Wall Street demands higher returns from the company, which means .... more violence.
In my opinion, what has held back all of them has been the inherent "early adopters get rich" architecture. The concentration of wealth in the BTC community makes the concentration of USD by the upper 1% look like a socialist paradise by comparison, and every major cryptocurrency since then has copied it ... because of course, everyone wants to be the "new" 1%.
Think about it: someone invents a new currency for which he just happens to own 20% or 30% of the total worldwide supply, and wants everyone to adopt it as "money". How deluded does he have to be to think that the people holding the actual wealth in this world will just hand over their power and assets to a guy holding some digital tokens that he personally created?
The BTC community is dominated by this mindset of adopters hoping to become the "new" wealthy class. It drives the speculative frenzy and the irrational behavior. And ultimately, that mindset is exactly what will bring the BTC experiment to an end, even if one could solve the problems of transaction throughput and ease of use.
Every week, I get one or more solicitations inviting me to be a keynote speaker at a conference, serve as an editor of a journal, or submit an invited paper, all from conferences and journals that I've never heard of before. In the grand scheme of things, I am far from being an academic superstar. I can only imagine how much worse it must be for some of my colleagues.
What is surprising to me about this story isn't that some researchers are padding their CVs with publications in bogus journals, but that they aren't being called on it. If I were to list such a publication on my own annual report, my department chair would have me in his office in an instant, demanding to know why I was trying to damage the school's reputation with such idiocy.
So the question is this: why isn't this oversight also taking place at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford? Is there really so little departmental supervision that researchers at those schools can actually get away with this?
The average BTC transaction fee is still under $1 USD, so the panic selling hasn't started yet. The fun part will be when BTC starts to plummet while the transaction fee skyrockets. The really fun part will happen if the transaction fee climbs to the point where people realize their remaining BTC balance will cost them more money to liquidate than if they simply deleted their wallet.