I was trying to conceptually work out a drug that would reverse some quantity of cells in the general body, to the point of dedifferentiation into stem cells. If you can trigger the cellular machinery to rebuild telomeres in that situation and convert, say, 0.01% of cells, then you have an effective regeneration drug. Not sure on anti-aging.
The main problem is fucking up means cancer, and reversing neurons means memory loss.
Patriarchal and matriarchal societies usually give credence to age. The old have knowledge of the past, especially when literacy is scarce, and so are your best resources. As such, a person's greatness can be shown by his age; should he live to be a thousand years, he must have died a great man, and lived a great man to have the wisdom to continue so long.
The chip contains an encryption key signed and certified by the bank. During processing, a challenge is sent to electronic circuitry on the card, and it uses the encryption key to create a digital signature and provide a response. That key is non-recoverable, unless they use a weak encryption standard (some early cards did).
It has to actually identify itself in a mathematically-meaningful way; it's basically PGP.
It's not an illegal trust action unless it abuses power. They have to use one monopoly to move into a new market, or they have to collude to enforce something like price fixing or some other profitable behavior.
Take price fixing, for example. If three manufacturers make a widget for $15 and try to sell it for $75, they can price war with each other until it's a $20 widget. If they all collude to sell for $75, they might not get a competitive edge; but they do get $55 more per unit, which is way more than getting three times as much business at $5 per unit ($55 is more than $15).
In this case, they've agreed on a processing and operating standard. This is similar to agreeing on the standard behind Wifi, or all agreeing to use USB-C instead of Mini-USB to charge cell phones. Someone else actually sells the terminals, which avoids the conflict of interest: the upgrade cost isn't part of the card companies's revenue stream.
So the companies have all standardized on a technology (chip-and-pin, NFC) and a security standard. Cryptographically-secure identifying transactions ensure the cardholder is physically present at POS, unless his card was stolen; magnetic stripes are vulnerable to card cloning and thus more-frequently allow fraudulent purchases. Retailers engaging in insecure practices are responsible for the consequences.
The card companies all adopted this standard at the same date. That means none of them is allowed to hang back and reap further profits by allowing the consumer to face a greater risk of credit card fraud. They protect the consumer from this fraud, and in doing so they reduce their costs from that fraud; this allows them to operate with lower fees (read: they don't have to raise processing fees as quickly--they might lower, or they might end up 0.3% higher rather than 0.8% higher 5 years from now), ultimately lowering the price of products (which factors in credit card processing fees) and maximizing the consumer's buying power.
None of this abuses the consumer or the retailer: the retailer is free to use an old, insecure standard, if they're willing to accept the costs that standard imposes (cost of fraud). Likewise, it doesn't drive a revenue stream to the credit card companies: they don't sell (or don't exclusively sell) processing terminals. There's not much ground for an anti-trust suit here.
Actually, rewards are hard-wired, unless you're defective (hi). They vary between people greatly, as well.
I've recently read a patent where some rats were given free access to rat chow, and could get better rat chow by operating a lever repeatedly (work). The rats in every group ate roughly the same amount of rat chow.
These rats, once trained to obtain rat chow, were given a vehicle (all inert ingredients) or drugs (inert ingredients plus amphetamine, methylphenidate, or a third drug). Rats fed the vehicle would operate the lever about 35 times on average in an attempt to get better food; rats on amphetamine ate about 80% as much of the free rat chow, and operated the lever about 60 times at maximum. The rats on the third drug ate a tiny amount of free rat chow (probably in an attempt to identify it now and then--"yep, still shit"), and operated that lever around 140 times. They did 4.5 times as much work to get a better result.
That's motivation--that particular operant chamber test is called a motivation measure. I've used that drug and yes, god damn. The thing with monkeys and cocaine? You give monkeys cocaine, then add a female monkey, and the males all wave her away while punching the button repeatedly and demanding to know when they get more cocaine? You give monkeys this stuff and give them a female, they'll all look at each other, high five, and get down to business.
Exercising feels good, man. Accomplishing something (allegedly) feels good. People (apparently) respond to feeling good by wanting to do that thing more. Feedback gives a reward: you can *see* your progress, and you get excited; that's what fitness trackers bank on.
We avoid pain, we avoid energy expenditure, we avoid discomfort; and a healthy animal will also seek reinforcing behaviors, like more food, sex, or social acceptance. Immediate feedback can give positive experiences when the long-term goal is far-off; humans are uniquely-adapted for long-term planning, but it's still hard because we will avoid energy expenditure for what is not clearly a good reward.
Study summary: Select a bunch of people who aren't currently using a tracker and encourage them to use a tracker. Then drop the encouragement and see what sticks.
If you want to see if fitness trackers work, use a self-selection group. Find a bunch of people who have been wanting to get in better shape but are not currently vigorous exercisers (or whatever standardizable measure of success you can use), and divide them up randomly. Give some fitness trackers. See how it impacts them. Doing it this way would take groups who are both interested (want to) but not necessarily motivated (experience reward which encourages effort) to exercise regularly and identify between them.
Problems with this approach: poor reporting (one group must self-report; the other has actual data); and masked reporting has an impact (a group with a fitness tracker that tells them nothing will do extra work to ensure data IS there). It's actually worth it to study a group without a tracker, a group with a tracker, and a group with an occluded tracker who are also self-reporting (to compare perception to data). Likewise, the act of reporting creates confounding.
Regulation risk is a good thing. If you can follow regulation for $50,000,000 or skip it for $2,000,000, you break a few rules. That's good. It's efficient, and prevents regulation from breaking everything.
Regulation risk is a good thing. If you keep flaunting regulations and breaking the rules because you can, the regulators can and should start raising criminal conspiracy charges, holding expensive investigations, and otherwise bringing actual threats to your business. That's good. It's efficient. It keeps businesses from fucking around too much, because the judiciaries and regulatory bodies will eventually express their complete lack of amusement if you keep doing this horse shit.
Regulation risk is a good thing. If our regulations can't keep businesses in line, we need to re-examine if our regulations are behind the current technology. Maybe it's time we lifted some restrictions; maybe we re-define some of the proscribed behaviors to exclude valid and beneficial behaviors; and maybe we didn't make ourselves clear the first time, and need to write more-stringent regulations to put these miscreants back in their pen. The situations change and the rules must adjust, either to allow what should no longer be contraband or to correct for a new method of achieving an unacceptable state without violating existing regulations.
Remember: Congress can and has investigated businesses in expensive ways for not following the rules. Disney made promises a few years ago about regulatory changes, and then did exactly what they said they wouldn't; Congress, having passed new rules allowing them to do what they did, cost Disney quite a lot of money having a Congressional Hearing to allow Disney to explain themselves. They've done it to Microsoft. They've done it to Exxon. Enron had executives walked out in chains, because if you keep doing shit like that, the cost of coming to wet yourself in front of Congress will be the least of your eventual worries.
By all means, try to cherry tap the boundaries a bit. Hopefully you learn quickly that fire is hot, or maybe you get someone's attention and they redraw the lines. Error correction is an important part of a stable system.
Actually, big pharmacy new drugs require billions of dollars of testing. Once a new drug is discovered, it requires roughly $350 million of investment to get to market. The FDA requires 3.5 years of experiments on rats, several safety and efficacy human trials, and then a few years of sponsoring patient follow-ups once the drug hits market to collect more data on dosing, safety, efficacy, and side-effects. All that comes after the drug has been designed in the first place; and fewer than 10% of drugs make it to market, so the amortized cost is ridiculous.
It's part of why I want a big pharma co (I'm a fan of Shire and Sun Pharmaceuticals) to help me out in getting the FDA to GRASE Phenylpiracetam based on its 30 years of use to treat seizures, depression, and old-age dementia. $350M to get an old drug to market in the U.S. is a show-stopper, especially for something immediately-generic.
I'm on amphetamine now in an attempt to treat ADHD--amphetamine because it's dopamine reversing (the neuroreceptors which uptake dopamine instead pump more into your brain). I have anhedonia, which means I don't feel good; I don't feel bad (depression, dysphoria), but rather don't get a thrill and a reinforcing reward out of laughing, success, sex, or the like. On Phenylpiracetam, I feel friggin' great, and laughing at something funny causes a... tingly?... feeling inside that fades slowly over 10-15 minutes, and really just feels awesome; my psychiatrist informs me that's not me getting really fucking high (although there's mild euphoria--it's like the dramatic movie image of waking up and today is such a fucking great day, you decide to accomplish everything), but that normal people just feel that way all the time. He put me on amphetamine rather than atomoxetine to give me that feeling.
Amphetamine (dextro-alpha-methylphenethylamine, or d-a-m-ph-et-amine) is a dangerous drug. It's addictive (physical dependence, withdrawal), toxic (in moderately-high doses), and *very* readily-abused (it makes you want more); and it brings high heart rate, blood pressure, appetite suppression, sleep suppression, and psychosis both on its own and supported by those other issues. Adderall is a great treatment for ADHD, and amphetamine has a proven safety record when used properly; it is, however, a dangerous and addictive substance. That's not moral panic; the disease we face is abuse, not a toxic substance we should be looking to excise from our society and only accept out of necessity (although the methylated salt is probably that).
Phenylpiracetam is non-addictive. It has a problem with tolerance, but not withdrawal; and "tolerance" might actually go as far as "raise to 200-300mg doses eventually", although I'd rather take breaks. It's got a shorter (30-year) safety record; a dose of 100mg is standard, 750mg per day is manufacturer-listed MTD, and the manufacturer has suggested toxicity starts becoming a concern around 24,000mg. It's anti-convulsive (Amphetamine can--rarely--cause seizure, mostly if you overdose), anti-psychotic, and of course a stimulant. Its main problems are, thus, more about dosing than about possible toxic side-effects. As for my purpose (anhedonia), a German patent showed it as a better motivator for rats, who worked 4-5 times harder to get tasty food and mostly didn't bother with less-tasty food when they were on phenylpiracetam (each group of rats ate the same amount, roughly; they weren't starving themselves, they were just damned determined to have steak tonight instead of McDonalds bullshit)--largely because "good result" plugged that feel-good reward thing in their brain a lot harder.
Different drugs, different uses; and for my purposes, an un-approved drug is much safer and more-effective (it doesn't treat my attention issues, though, hence why I went for psychiatric care; I would really like to try this with Atomoxetine, but I'll have that discussion with my psychi
CPU-bound tasks can lose clock cycles to task switching and context switches. Task switching destroys CPU cache, causing major performance hits on certain types of applications, notably media-encoding applications; additional task switching by the host OS exacerbates this.
So a CPU-bound task like ffmpeg--that's going through a large span of memory and thus is sensitive to excessive cache flushes--is going to see a huge difference, depending on how much the hypervisor cooperates with the guest OS for task scheduling.
Actually I've been complaining a lot to Amazon about external addresses contacting me asking for Amazon reviews in exchange for a discount. There was a vendor selling a type of metal thermos with a handle held on by two rings for $30, giving me a $15 discount; I found another manufacturer making an identical thing and selling it for $16. I started pointing out to Amazon that they were giving me a "discount" on a product with an inflated price, which seems to suggest they'd make a profit anyway--JC Penny strategy, plus free review under favorable terms.
Vine requires you to provide a free product, and marks the review as a Vine review. Amazon gets to see the review was a Vine review; and they mediate everything, so if you post a negative review and the seller tries to retaliate, Amazon is well-aware of what went on with the review business. They don't get to contest or remove bad reviews, and they don't get to ply for profits by offering discounts on overpriced products.
I've been waiting for Amazon to come down on these people for over a year. I am, in fact, signed up for Vine; just nobody actually uses it, because they have to send a free product instead of giving you a $10 discount on a $20 product that cost them $8 to sell.
Wrong. IO-bound tasks are slow in VM because IO requires a kernel call. So does task switching, memory mapping (mmap(), brk()), getting the time, getting process information, changing memory protections, advising on memory use (madvise()), sleeping, interprocess communication (pipes), creating shared memory, and several other things. Modern VMs are faster because they eliminate the large amount of work required to make a kernel call.
CPU-bound tasks can lose clock cycles to task switching and context switches. Task switching destroys CPU cache, causing major performance hits on certain types of applications, notably media-encoding applications; additional task switching by the host OS exacerbates this.
It's not cygwin-like. Cygwin tries to translate Unix calls to Windows calls, and provides a DLL to link your source code against. WSL actually provides an ELF loader and handles Linux system calls; it runs Linux programs the way a Linux kernel would, albeit the kernel is more of an academic project written from scratch (e.g. FreeBSD or Minix implementing Linux-compatible system calls so as to straight run a Linux userland).
WSL is excellent for those of us in an actual Windows enterprise environment doing Linux system development or administration. It gives a real Unix-like environment with real tools, rather than Cygwin. In general, it's kind of clunky and unpolished; but it's better than Cygwin.
I'd like to see Microsoft release a Winbind-type service that connects (via TCP) to localhost and mediates between the Winbind socket and the local authentication daemon. Otherwise you have to join your computer *and* the Bash shell on your computer to the domain. Would also like to see them implement Docker under WSL tbh.
That Universal Social Security is based on the United States's $1.7 trillion (2013) spending on welfare, including Social Security old-age pensions, Social Security disability insurance, unemployment insurance, food security (SNAP, WIC), and housing assistance (HUD). There are some transitional considerations (grandfathering of Old-age pensions; continuation or reduction of state programs; etc.) to avoid disrupting the financial situation of households receiving current benefits; none of this causes a bump in taxes, although I keep the payroll OASDI tax (reduced a little) initially to support grandfathered recipients.
It's based heavily on the U.S. government spending and tax policy, as well as retail costs of goods, risk cost, and theoretical models to supply services. The most important risk cost is landlord risk renting to low-incomes; this cost is reduced by making those incomes stable (fewer evictions, fewer empty units, thus rent per tenant doesn't have to cover as much of those costs), and there are other possible ways to reduce that more. The total amount of money in play is less than the current cost of welfare; no taxes are raised; and, when you consider displacement (i.e. the amount of money taken and given to someone else--if you pay $7,000 and get $5,000 back, that's $2,000 displaced to someone else), it's $1 trillion USD cheaper.
So, it's heavily-engineered for the U.S. The U.K. might be able to pull off similar; you'd have to start over, but you can follow the same development process I used and adjust it.
The whole thing is based on national wealth--that is, GDP per capita. In 1900, the median-income U.S. household spent 40% of its income on food; thanks to technical progress reducing the labor involved in making food, the median-income household now spends around 11% on food. Globalization has allowed us to purchase goods from countries whose industry can produce said goods cheaper, which has increased our local retailing and shipping jobs; we've shifted agricultural jobs to manufacture jobs, and now to doctors and IT workers. If the U.S. tried to implement my plan in 1950--when welfare cost 1.28% of all income (it costs 17% now)--they'd have had to levy an ADDITIONAL 35% flat tax on all income; incomes in 1950 went up to 91%, so we'd have essentially made everyone very poor, possibly eliminated the income gap entirely, and collapsed before the USSR.
Today, the U.S. can do it without actually raising the effective taxes on anyone.
As for the meat of the thing? It's a form of Universal Basic Income.
My Universal Social Security plan eliminates OASDI and adds a 17% USS tax on all income (business and personal). This actually lowers the business income tax by roughly 4.5% marginal (from 40% to around 35.5%), and eliminates the OASDI payroll tax (6.2% of wages paid--that is: we currently penalize businesses for employing workers rather than machines, and I put a stop to that). The top tax brackets don't increase; and everyone along the way from the bottom up ends up with more spendable income (thus, effectively, less taxes). It replaces HUD housing assistance, unemployment, and food stamps; however, assistance programs remain in effect for children of low-income households.
Every adult (age 18+; in the future, I would make this 16+) receives an equal share of that income. It's collected out of normal withholding, which is taken every two weeks or twice per month (the IRS allows businesses to select from either of two schedules) and stored in the Social Security Trust Fund. Each year, the prior year's totals are used to calculate the new payment. Over time, the buying power of this payout per-adult actually increases (see above discussion about 1900 vs 2015 food cost, and 1950 vs 2015 required tax funding); in recessions with high unemployment, it would decrease, and so the initial conditions have been tuned to survive a new 200
I mean, LinkedIn can already do that, and gain a competitive advantage. On the other hand, Microsoft has a monopoly in one area and can use its money and brand to acquire another brand, acquire that data, acquire its attached contracts (LinkedIn members), and gain a competitive advantage in another area--which is abusive monopoly power.
Packet inspection is non-monetizable without a product.
Typically, data collection warehouses categorize and aggregate demographics information. That is to say: businesses don't sell your name and address; they sell the service of identifying preferences among demographics, demographics in an area, and likely market penetration when targeting a demographic in an area. Without all the arbitrary big words: they tell you how the population responds to certain products, services, and ideals, where that population is, and how big it is, and then you can target an area (a city) or a demographic (buy targeted ads aimed at a large, highly-responsive audience).
Sifting through all that data is hard. It's a highly-specialized task, and businesses which do this as a service tend to build robust organizational knowledge: their employees get good at their jobs, share information among each other, and send it up to management to be packaged and distributed as standard operating procedure and training material. Asking them what the market looks like is a hell of a lot cheaper and provides much better results than getting their giant database of information and trying to analyze it yourself: your own people will suck payroll while spending excessive amounts of time digging around in it, scratching their heads, making up arbitrary queries that seem obvious, and then produce *a* result--instead of identifying the goals and then immediately and systematically producing an analysis strategy that produces a *high-quality* result.
AT&T probably has little vested interest in tracking your web behavior, and likely found ads weren't making them sufficient money for the infrastructure cost. They would have spent a lot of time looking at this, predicting the cost of scaling (which would improve ROI), and working out if the new ROI was likely to be significantly-higher and considerably profitable. They might have identified a small profit (e.g. 0.5% margin, or 0.01% of their existing profit, or the like) and decided that the risks (the likelihood of earning less and facing a loss as an aggregate over the long run) weren't worth it. They might have just identified that ads aren't going to make them money at all. In any case, they have little use for large-scale inspection now because it only puts them at risk (notably regulatory risk--you inspected this shit, how did you not know child porn was there?) with no likely profit.
Even the ad networks that could use AT&T's theoretical tracking data can't make much use of it. They'd have to coalesce it with their data--which has to be robust, because they have to be able to actually track and identify users across the Web anyway--which is expensive and poor ROI if their data is already robust enough to match up to AT&T's data. There's a high likelihood that the attempt would actually pollute the ad network's mined data with erroneous data, since coalescing might not be anywhere near 100% accurate, and measuring the false-positive rate is impossible (if you could do it automatically, you wouldn't have false-positives; if you can do it manually, you're working with dozens of people's data rather than millions).
The "value" doesn't exist. Things don't have value; people place a valuation on things--a property of the observer, not the object. You might value (verb) a candy bar at $1, but it has no actual value (noun).
Things have a cost and a price. That cost is directly related to human labor time required to make the thing. All business expenses go to pay wages, buy from other businesses, and take profit. Recurse this and all business expenses reduce to wages, {alie profit+wages}, profit; which just becomes wages and profit. In aggregate, price can never be lower than wages; and the minimum sustainable wage is one that keeps your labor force alive (even slaves must eat and be sheltered from the cold, and it's cheaper to treat illness than to raise a new slave).
If that candy bar requires $1.80 to make and you value it at $1, you're not buying a candybar. If that's what people think of candy bars, then candy bars aren't a product until we invent technology to use roughly half as many people to make the same number of candy bars.
Your complaint essentially boils down to, "Stacker could have conned someone into paying a lot more than the business and its products were actually worth. You don't know how successful they'd have been at convincing people to overpay."
"Easy to audit" is bullshit. It's hard to hide; it's not easy to audit. The "public ledger" is a history of when each object has had its blockchain extended. The problem is an account consists of assets of value, such as dollars; those assets are semi-fungible, in the sense that the account has value and any set of assets producing that value is representative. Accounts typically have one or several kinds of fungible assets--a single currency or separate lots of fungible assets (e.g. your commodities account may contain oil, gold, and FCOJ; your stock account contains stocks)--because *which* of each of those things is irrelevant.
Blockchains mean you can tell which gold piece moved where; if you want to audit financial behavior, you need to know which accounts moved what. You might be able to piece that together from a blockchain; but only by auditing every single object to determine where it once stood, collecting all objects that ever entered a particular account, and then generating an account ledger from that. It'd be like going into every bank vault and every wallet and inspecting every dollar to see whose hands it's changed through in its history. If you don't have the ability to inspect the current state of every single piece of blockchain currency in existence *and* to guarantee that you've done exactly that (i.e. that you haven't missed any), you can't audit.
Any given dollar telling you the history of how it's been owned and spent is different than any given account describing its financial history in its ledger.
This is probably actually illegal. Sony had to pay a settlement for disabling Linux on the PS3; HP is doing the same, so has at least a civil suit. Uniquely, however, HP has proven that their product is compatible with third-party ink, and has taken action to specifically to lock-out competition. That's probably an instance of Tying, and HP has sufficient market power to show that Tying is anti-competitive.
The thing is big data lets you go to East Africa and use gajillions of samples to map out a statistical analysis of exactly what square meter of ground you want to tap into to get the most-likely absolute-best geothermal energy production. Rough knowledge lets you do... about the same thing, just without taking it to planck scale.
We're not talking about the difference between a 500 gigawatt production facility and a 900 gigawatt production facility; we're talking about 500 gigawatt versus 500.1 gigawatt.
That's why Apple [datacenterknowledge.com], Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. are all building huge data centers. They want a piece of the pie of influencing & controlling because ultimately it will bring profits.
Big data makes the difference between 30%-effective advertising and 70%-effective advertising. Big energy can go outside and run a thermal scan of the ground (from an air plane, using IR cameras) and then just pick somewhere for geothermal; THAT'S HOW ADVERTISING WORKS WITHOUT BIG DATA! If you just bluntly advertise based on a survey of demographics, you get significantly less conversion. You go into a city and say, "Hmm, lots of black people here, kind of poor, thug life, ok. Put up billboards about Ciroc featuring buff black dudes in do-rags with face tattoos." With big data, instead of running online ads that say, "You're in regional Baltimore, so let's show racially-profiled ads that basically assume you're a black gang thug," they can try to pinpoint exactly what behaviors describe the recipient of a particular ad, and serve an ad that matches their interests, thus get much more conversion.
So, again, while advertisers might more than double their effectiveness by churning through piles and piles of data, all that effort gets power companies roughly zero over just taking a fly-over with thermal or sonic imaging. The most important data tool in oil prospecting is AUTOTUNE. They don't much benefit at all from big data. Neither does most other things (farming, manufacturing, music production, pharmacology, chemistry).
Dissent on the +2 Troll moderation. This guy is an angry prick but I'm pretty sure the analogy makes no sense, at least not to any layman. Even to my senses, coal and oil are the basis of economy: all economy runs down to energy. Hunter-gatherers are solely concerned with food to power human muscle to hunt and gather; agrarian societies are similarly concerned, until they invent animal power (still food) and mills (water, wind, coal, oil, solar power). Societies require human time to produce the things required to live, and they reduce that time by technology, which eventually requires non-human energy: tractors harvest food more-quickly, mills process grain more-quickly, and we're freed from human labor time by extracting energy from coal and oil.
Data is a commodity processed by technology, like cloth or sand. It's not a source. Data requires energy, and energy doesn't require much data at all--so little, in fact, that just basic human knowledge such as knowing that Africa is sunny and has geothermal hot spots in the north-east can tell you where to drop your solar and geothermal power plants. Data might be nice for squeezing out 1% more efficiency--and 1% of ENERGY is a hell of a lot--but society runs on energy, and data *needs* energy; energy doesn't actually need data, and society can get all of its energy needs without energy being built using big data infrastructure.
Of course their analogy is highly questionable, since transmitting data over a network doesn't actually consume anything, now does it? You eat the cookie, the cookie is gone, but you transmit data over a network, the network is still there and can transmit data endlessly.
When you eat a cookie, it isn't gone. The biological cycle eventually moves that load of nutrients back around through plants and animals, with sunlight as input energy, and human work brings about a new cookie.
When you use a network's bandwidth, the remaining bandwidth is reduced. If your network has 1Tbit/s of bandwidth and you consume 200Gbit/s, that leaves you 800Gbit/s to work with. If people start pulling 700Gbit/s, that's half a Tbit of bandwidth that's being consumed. It's gone, unless you can beat back people's usage.
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Error correction does not mean bit-rot doesn't exist.
I was trying to conceptually work out a drug that would reverse some quantity of cells in the general body, to the point of dedifferentiation into stem cells. If you can trigger the cellular machinery to rebuild telomeres in that situation and convert, say, 0.01% of cells, then you have an effective regeneration drug. Not sure on anti-aging.
The main problem is fucking up means cancer, and reversing neurons means memory loss.
Patriarchal and matriarchal societies usually give credence to age. The old have knowledge of the past, especially when literacy is scarce, and so are your best resources. As such, a person's greatness can be shown by his age; should he live to be a thousand years, he must have died a great man, and lived a great man to have the wisdom to continue so long.
The chip contains an encryption key signed and certified by the bank. During processing, a challenge is sent to electronic circuitry on the card, and it uses the encryption key to create a digital signature and provide a response. That key is non-recoverable, unless they use a weak encryption standard (some early cards did).
It has to actually identify itself in a mathematically-meaningful way; it's basically PGP.
It's not an illegal trust action unless it abuses power. They have to use one monopoly to move into a new market, or they have to collude to enforce something like price fixing or some other profitable behavior.
Take price fixing, for example. If three manufacturers make a widget for $15 and try to sell it for $75, they can price war with each other until it's a $20 widget. If they all collude to sell for $75, they might not get a competitive edge; but they do get $55 more per unit, which is way more than getting three times as much business at $5 per unit ($55 is more than $15).
In this case, they've agreed on a processing and operating standard. This is similar to agreeing on the standard behind Wifi, or all agreeing to use USB-C instead of Mini-USB to charge cell phones. Someone else actually sells the terminals, which avoids the conflict of interest: the upgrade cost isn't part of the card companies's revenue stream.
So the companies have all standardized on a technology (chip-and-pin, NFC) and a security standard. Cryptographically-secure identifying transactions ensure the cardholder is physically present at POS, unless his card was stolen; magnetic stripes are vulnerable to card cloning and thus more-frequently allow fraudulent purchases. Retailers engaging in insecure practices are responsible for the consequences.
The card companies all adopted this standard at the same date. That means none of them is allowed to hang back and reap further profits by allowing the consumer to face a greater risk of credit card fraud. They protect the consumer from this fraud, and in doing so they reduce their costs from that fraud; this allows them to operate with lower fees (read: they don't have to raise processing fees as quickly--they might lower, or they might end up 0.3% higher rather than 0.8% higher 5 years from now), ultimately lowering the price of products (which factors in credit card processing fees) and maximizing the consumer's buying power.
None of this abuses the consumer or the retailer: the retailer is free to use an old, insecure standard, if they're willing to accept the costs that standard imposes (cost of fraud). Likewise, it doesn't drive a revenue stream to the credit card companies: they don't sell (or don't exclusively sell) processing terminals. There's not much ground for an anti-trust suit here.
Actually, rewards are hard-wired, unless you're defective (hi). They vary between people greatly, as well.
I've recently read a patent where some rats were given free access to rat chow, and could get better rat chow by operating a lever repeatedly (work). The rats in every group ate roughly the same amount of rat chow.
These rats, once trained to obtain rat chow, were given a vehicle (all inert ingredients) or drugs (inert ingredients plus amphetamine, methylphenidate, or a third drug). Rats fed the vehicle would operate the lever about 35 times on average in an attempt to get better food; rats on amphetamine ate about 80% as much of the free rat chow, and operated the lever about 60 times at maximum. The rats on the third drug ate a tiny amount of free rat chow (probably in an attempt to identify it now and then--"yep, still shit"), and operated that lever around 140 times. They did 4.5 times as much work to get a better result.
That's motivation--that particular operant chamber test is called a motivation measure. I've used that drug and yes, god damn. The thing with monkeys and cocaine? You give monkeys cocaine, then add a female monkey, and the males all wave her away while punching the button repeatedly and demanding to know when they get more cocaine? You give monkeys this stuff and give them a female, they'll all look at each other, high five, and get down to business.
Exercising feels good, man. Accomplishing something (allegedly) feels good. People (apparently) respond to feeling good by wanting to do that thing more. Feedback gives a reward: you can *see* your progress, and you get excited; that's what fitness trackers bank on.
We avoid pain, we avoid energy expenditure, we avoid discomfort; and a healthy animal will also seek reinforcing behaviors, like more food, sex, or social acceptance. Immediate feedback can give positive experiences when the long-term goal is far-off; humans are uniquely-adapted for long-term planning, but it's still hard because we will avoid energy expenditure for what is not clearly a good reward.
Study summary: Select a bunch of people who aren't currently using a tracker and encourage them to use a tracker. Then drop the encouragement and see what sticks.
If you want to see if fitness trackers work, use a self-selection group. Find a bunch of people who have been wanting to get in better shape but are not currently vigorous exercisers (or whatever standardizable measure of success you can use), and divide them up randomly. Give some fitness trackers. See how it impacts them. Doing it this way would take groups who are both interested (want to) but not necessarily motivated (experience reward which encourages effort) to exercise regularly and identify between them.
Problems with this approach: poor reporting (one group must self-report; the other has actual data); and masked reporting has an impact (a group with a fitness tracker that tells them nothing will do extra work to ensure data IS there). It's actually worth it to study a group without a tracker, a group with a tracker, and a group with an occluded tracker who are also self-reporting (to compare perception to data). Likewise, the act of reporting creates confounding.
Regulation risk is a good thing. If you can follow regulation for $50,000,000 or skip it for $2,000,000, you break a few rules. That's good. It's efficient, and prevents regulation from breaking everything.
Regulation risk is a good thing. If you keep flaunting regulations and breaking the rules because you can, the regulators can and should start raising criminal conspiracy charges, holding expensive investigations, and otherwise bringing actual threats to your business. That's good. It's efficient. It keeps businesses from fucking around too much, because the judiciaries and regulatory bodies will eventually express their complete lack of amusement if you keep doing this horse shit.
Regulation risk is a good thing. If our regulations can't keep businesses in line, we need to re-examine if our regulations are behind the current technology. Maybe it's time we lifted some restrictions; maybe we re-define some of the proscribed behaviors to exclude valid and beneficial behaviors; and maybe we didn't make ourselves clear the first time, and need to write more-stringent regulations to put these miscreants back in their pen. The situations change and the rules must adjust, either to allow what should no longer be contraband or to correct for a new method of achieving an unacceptable state without violating existing regulations.
Remember: Congress can and has investigated businesses in expensive ways for not following the rules. Disney made promises a few years ago about regulatory changes, and then did exactly what they said they wouldn't; Congress, having passed new rules allowing them to do what they did, cost Disney quite a lot of money having a Congressional Hearing to allow Disney to explain themselves. They've done it to Microsoft. They've done it to Exxon. Enron had executives walked out in chains, because if you keep doing shit like that, the cost of coming to wet yourself in front of Congress will be the least of your eventual worries.
By all means, try to cherry tap the boundaries a bit. Hopefully you learn quickly that fire is hot, or maybe you get someone's attention and they redraw the lines. Error correction is an important part of a stable system.
Actually, big pharmacy new drugs require billions of dollars of testing. Once a new drug is discovered, it requires roughly $350 million of investment to get to market. The FDA requires 3.5 years of experiments on rats, several safety and efficacy human trials, and then a few years of sponsoring patient follow-ups once the drug hits market to collect more data on dosing, safety, efficacy, and side-effects. All that comes after the drug has been designed in the first place; and fewer than 10% of drugs make it to market, so the amortized cost is ridiculous.
It's part of why I want a big pharma co (I'm a fan of Shire and Sun Pharmaceuticals) to help me out in getting the FDA to GRASE Phenylpiracetam based on its 30 years of use to treat seizures, depression, and old-age dementia. $350M to get an old drug to market in the U.S. is a show-stopper, especially for something immediately-generic.
I'm on amphetamine now in an attempt to treat ADHD--amphetamine because it's dopamine reversing (the neuroreceptors which uptake dopamine instead pump more into your brain). I have anhedonia, which means I don't feel good; I don't feel bad (depression, dysphoria), but rather don't get a thrill and a reinforcing reward out of laughing, success, sex, or the like. On Phenylpiracetam, I feel friggin' great, and laughing at something funny causes a ... tingly? ... feeling inside that fades slowly over 10-15 minutes, and really just feels awesome; my psychiatrist informs me that's not me getting really fucking high (although there's mild euphoria--it's like the dramatic movie image of waking up and today is such a fucking great day, you decide to accomplish everything), but that normal people just feel that way all the time. He put me on amphetamine rather than atomoxetine to give me that feeling.
Amphetamine (dextro-alpha-methylphenethylamine, or d-a-m-ph-et-amine) is a dangerous drug. It's addictive (physical dependence, withdrawal), toxic (in moderately-high doses), and *very* readily-abused (it makes you want more); and it brings high heart rate, blood pressure, appetite suppression, sleep suppression, and psychosis both on its own and supported by those other issues. Adderall is a great treatment for ADHD, and amphetamine has a proven safety record when used properly; it is, however, a dangerous and addictive substance. That's not moral panic; the disease we face is abuse, not a toxic substance we should be looking to excise from our society and only accept out of necessity (although the methylated salt is probably that).
Phenylpiracetam is non-addictive. It has a problem with tolerance, but not withdrawal; and "tolerance" might actually go as far as "raise to 200-300mg doses eventually", although I'd rather take breaks. It's got a shorter (30-year) safety record; a dose of 100mg is standard, 750mg per day is manufacturer-listed MTD, and the manufacturer has suggested toxicity starts becoming a concern around 24,000mg. It's anti-convulsive (Amphetamine can--rarely--cause seizure, mostly if you overdose), anti-psychotic, and of course a stimulant. Its main problems are, thus, more about dosing than about possible toxic side-effects. As for my purpose (anhedonia), a German patent showed it as a better motivator for rats, who worked 4-5 times harder to get tasty food and mostly didn't bother with less-tasty food when they were on phenylpiracetam (each group of rats ate the same amount, roughly; they weren't starving themselves, they were just damned determined to have steak tonight instead of McDonalds bullshit)--largely because "good result" plugged that feel-good reward thing in their brain a lot harder.
Different drugs, different uses; and for my purposes, an un-approved drug is much safer and more-effective (it doesn't treat my attention issues, though, hence why I went for psychiatric care; I would really like to try this with Atomoxetine, but I'll have that discussion with my psychi
CPU-bound tasks can lose clock cycles to task switching and context switches. Task switching destroys CPU cache, causing major performance hits on certain types of applications, notably media-encoding applications; additional task switching by the host OS exacerbates this.
So a CPU-bound task like ffmpeg--that's going through a large span of memory and thus is sensitive to excessive cache flushes--is going to see a huge difference, depending on how much the hypervisor cooperates with the guest OS for task scheduling.
Actually I've been complaining a lot to Amazon about external addresses contacting me asking for Amazon reviews in exchange for a discount. There was a vendor selling a type of metal thermos with a handle held on by two rings for $30, giving me a $15 discount; I found another manufacturer making an identical thing and selling it for $16. I started pointing out to Amazon that they were giving me a "discount" on a product with an inflated price, which seems to suggest they'd make a profit anyway--JC Penny strategy, plus free review under favorable terms.
Vine requires you to provide a free product, and marks the review as a Vine review. Amazon gets to see the review was a Vine review; and they mediate everything, so if you post a negative review and the seller tries to retaliate, Amazon is well-aware of what went on with the review business. They don't get to contest or remove bad reviews, and they don't get to ply for profits by offering discounts on overpriced products.
I've been waiting for Amazon to come down on these people for over a year. I am, in fact, signed up for Vine; just nobody actually uses it, because they have to send a free product instead of giving you a $10 discount on a $20 product that cost them $8 to sell.
Waste of memory, CPU, and system stability. Cygwin suffices; WSL suffices better.
Wrong. IO-bound tasks are slow in VM because IO requires a kernel call. So does task switching, memory mapping (mmap(), brk()), getting the time, getting process information, changing memory protections, advising on memory use (madvise()), sleeping, interprocess communication (pipes), creating shared memory, and several other things. Modern VMs are faster because they eliminate the large amount of work required to make a kernel call.
CPU-bound tasks can lose clock cycles to task switching and context switches. Task switching destroys CPU cache, causing major performance hits on certain types of applications, notably media-encoding applications; additional task switching by the host OS exacerbates this.
It's not cygwin-like. Cygwin tries to translate Unix calls to Windows calls, and provides a DLL to link your source code against. WSL actually provides an ELF loader and handles Linux system calls; it runs Linux programs the way a Linux kernel would, albeit the kernel is more of an academic project written from scratch (e.g. FreeBSD or Minix implementing Linux-compatible system calls so as to straight run a Linux userland).
WSL is excellent for those of us in an actual Windows enterprise environment doing Linux system development or administration. It gives a real Unix-like environment with real tools, rather than Cygwin. In general, it's kind of clunky and unpolished; but it's better than Cygwin.
I'd like to see Microsoft release a Winbind-type service that connects (via TCP) to localhost and mediates between the Winbind socket and the local authentication daemon. Otherwise you have to join your computer *and* the Bash shell on your computer to the domain. Would also like to see them implement Docker under WSL tbh.
That Universal Social Security is based on the United States's $1.7 trillion (2013) spending on welfare, including Social Security old-age pensions, Social Security disability insurance, unemployment insurance, food security (SNAP, WIC), and housing assistance (HUD). There are some transitional considerations (grandfathering of Old-age pensions; continuation or reduction of state programs; etc.) to avoid disrupting the financial situation of households receiving current benefits; none of this causes a bump in taxes, although I keep the payroll OASDI tax (reduced a little) initially to support grandfathered recipients.
It's based heavily on the U.S. government spending and tax policy, as well as retail costs of goods, risk cost, and theoretical models to supply services. The most important risk cost is landlord risk renting to low-incomes; this cost is reduced by making those incomes stable (fewer evictions, fewer empty units, thus rent per tenant doesn't have to cover as much of those costs), and there are other possible ways to reduce that more. The total amount of money in play is less than the current cost of welfare; no taxes are raised; and, when you consider displacement (i.e. the amount of money taken and given to someone else--if you pay $7,000 and get $5,000 back, that's $2,000 displaced to someone else), it's $1 trillion USD cheaper.
So, it's heavily-engineered for the U.S. The U.K. might be able to pull off similar; you'd have to start over, but you can follow the same development process I used and adjust it.
The whole thing is based on national wealth--that is, GDP per capita. In 1900, the median-income U.S. household spent 40% of its income on food; thanks to technical progress reducing the labor involved in making food, the median-income household now spends around 11% on food. Globalization has allowed us to purchase goods from countries whose industry can produce said goods cheaper, which has increased our local retailing and shipping jobs; we've shifted agricultural jobs to manufacture jobs, and now to doctors and IT workers. If the U.S. tried to implement my plan in 1950--when welfare cost 1.28% of all income (it costs 17% now)--they'd have had to levy an ADDITIONAL 35% flat tax on all income; incomes in 1950 went up to 91%, so we'd have essentially made everyone very poor, possibly eliminated the income gap entirely, and collapsed before the USSR.
Today, the U.S. can do it without actually raising the effective taxes on anyone.
As for the meat of the thing? It's a form of Universal Basic Income.
My Universal Social Security plan eliminates OASDI and adds a 17% USS tax on all income (business and personal). This actually lowers the business income tax by roughly 4.5% marginal (from 40% to around 35.5%), and eliminates the OASDI payroll tax (6.2% of wages paid--that is: we currently penalize businesses for employing workers rather than machines, and I put a stop to that). The top tax brackets don't increase; and everyone along the way from the bottom up ends up with more spendable income (thus, effectively, less taxes). It replaces HUD housing assistance, unemployment, and food stamps; however, assistance programs remain in effect for children of low-income households.
Every adult (age 18+; in the future, I would make this 16+) receives an equal share of that income. It's collected out of normal withholding, which is taken every two weeks or twice per month (the IRS allows businesses to select from either of two schedules) and stored in the Social Security Trust Fund. Each year, the prior year's totals are used to calculate the new payment. Over time, the buying power of this payout per-adult actually increases (see above discussion about 1900 vs 2015 food cost, and 1950 vs 2015 required tax funding); in recessions with high unemployment, it would decrease, and so the initial conditions have been tuned to survive a new 200
I mean, LinkedIn can already do that, and gain a competitive advantage. On the other hand, Microsoft has a monopoly in one area and can use its money and brand to acquire another brand, acquire that data, acquire its attached contracts (LinkedIn members), and gain a competitive advantage in another area--which is abusive monopoly power.
Packet inspection is non-monetizable without a product.
Typically, data collection warehouses categorize and aggregate demographics information. That is to say: businesses don't sell your name and address; they sell the service of identifying preferences among demographics, demographics in an area, and likely market penetration when targeting a demographic in an area. Without all the arbitrary big words: they tell you how the population responds to certain products, services, and ideals, where that population is, and how big it is, and then you can target an area (a city) or a demographic (buy targeted ads aimed at a large, highly-responsive audience).
Sifting through all that data is hard. It's a highly-specialized task, and businesses which do this as a service tend to build robust organizational knowledge: their employees get good at their jobs, share information among each other, and send it up to management to be packaged and distributed as standard operating procedure and training material. Asking them what the market looks like is a hell of a lot cheaper and provides much better results than getting their giant database of information and trying to analyze it yourself: your own people will suck payroll while spending excessive amounts of time digging around in it, scratching their heads, making up arbitrary queries that seem obvious, and then produce *a* result--instead of identifying the goals and then immediately and systematically producing an analysis strategy that produces a *high-quality* result.
AT&T probably has little vested interest in tracking your web behavior, and likely found ads weren't making them sufficient money for the infrastructure cost. They would have spent a lot of time looking at this, predicting the cost of scaling (which would improve ROI), and working out if the new ROI was likely to be significantly-higher and considerably profitable. They might have identified a small profit (e.g. 0.5% margin, or 0.01% of their existing profit, or the like) and decided that the risks (the likelihood of earning less and facing a loss as an aggregate over the long run) weren't worth it. They might have just identified that ads aren't going to make them money at all. In any case, they have little use for large-scale inspection now because it only puts them at risk (notably regulatory risk--you inspected this shit, how did you not know child porn was there?) with no likely profit.
Even the ad networks that could use AT&T's theoretical tracking data can't make much use of it. They'd have to coalesce it with their data--which has to be robust, because they have to be able to actually track and identify users across the Web anyway--which is expensive and poor ROI if their data is already robust enough to match up to AT&T's data. There's a high likelihood that the attempt would actually pollute the ad network's mined data with erroneous data, since coalescing might not be anywhere near 100% accurate, and measuring the false-positive rate is impossible (if you could do it automatically, you wouldn't have false-positives; if you can do it manually, you're working with dozens of people's data rather than millions).
And this is the correct response.
(((echo)))
The "value" doesn't exist. Things don't have value; people place a valuation on things--a property of the observer, not the object. You might value (verb) a candy bar at $1, but it has no actual value (noun).
Things have a cost and a price. That cost is directly related to human labor time required to make the thing. All business expenses go to pay wages, buy from other businesses, and take profit. Recurse this and all business expenses reduce to wages, {alie profit+wages}, profit; which just becomes wages and profit. In aggregate, price can never be lower than wages; and the minimum sustainable wage is one that keeps your labor force alive (even slaves must eat and be sheltered from the cold, and it's cheaper to treat illness than to raise a new slave).
If that candy bar requires $1.80 to make and you value it at $1, you're not buying a candybar. If that's what people think of candy bars, then candy bars aren't a product until we invent technology to use roughly half as many people to make the same number of candy bars.
Your complaint essentially boils down to, "Stacker could have conned someone into paying a lot more than the business and its products were actually worth. You don't know how successful they'd have been at convincing people to overpay."
A tax deduction is a smaller fine or fee. You get a $1 million fine, you deduct $1 million, you pay only $600,000.
"Easy to audit" is bullshit. It's hard to hide; it's not easy to audit. The "public ledger" is a history of when each object has had its blockchain extended. The problem is an account consists of assets of value, such as dollars; those assets are semi-fungible, in the sense that the account has value and any set of assets producing that value is representative. Accounts typically have one or several kinds of fungible assets--a single currency or separate lots of fungible assets (e.g. your commodities account may contain oil, gold, and FCOJ; your stock account contains stocks)--because *which* of each of those things is irrelevant.
Blockchains mean you can tell which gold piece moved where; if you want to audit financial behavior, you need to know which accounts moved what. You might be able to piece that together from a blockchain; but only by auditing every single object to determine where it once stood, collecting all objects that ever entered a particular account, and then generating an account ledger from that. It'd be like going into every bank vault and every wallet and inspecting every dollar to see whose hands it's changed through in its history. If you don't have the ability to inspect the current state of every single piece of blockchain currency in existence *and* to guarantee that you've done exactly that (i.e. that you haven't missed any), you can't audit.
Any given dollar telling you the history of how it's been owned and spent is different than any given account describing its financial history in its ledger.
This is probably actually illegal. Sony had to pay a settlement for disabling Linux on the PS3; HP is doing the same, so has at least a civil suit. Uniquely, however, HP has proven that their product is compatible with third-party ink, and has taken action to specifically to lock-out competition. That's probably an instance of Tying, and HP has sufficient market power to show that Tying is anti-competitive.
The thing is big data lets you go to East Africa and use gajillions of samples to map out a statistical analysis of exactly what square meter of ground you want to tap into to get the most-likely absolute-best geothermal energy production. Rough knowledge lets you do ... about the same thing, just without taking it to planck scale.
We're not talking about the difference between a 500 gigawatt production facility and a 900 gigawatt production facility; we're talking about 500 gigawatt versus 500.1 gigawatt.
That's why Apple [datacenterknowledge.com], Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. are all building huge data centers. They want a piece of the pie of influencing & controlling because ultimately it will bring profits.
Big data makes the difference between 30%-effective advertising and 70%-effective advertising. Big energy can go outside and run a thermal scan of the ground (from an air plane, using IR cameras) and then just pick somewhere for geothermal; THAT'S HOW ADVERTISING WORKS WITHOUT BIG DATA! If you just bluntly advertise based on a survey of demographics, you get significantly less conversion. You go into a city and say, "Hmm, lots of black people here, kind of poor, thug life, ok. Put up billboards about Ciroc featuring buff black dudes in do-rags with face tattoos." With big data, instead of running online ads that say, "You're in regional Baltimore, so let's show racially-profiled ads that basically assume you're a black gang thug," they can try to pinpoint exactly what behaviors describe the recipient of a particular ad, and serve an ad that matches their interests, thus get much more conversion.
So, again, while advertisers might more than double their effectiveness by churning through piles and piles of data, all that effort gets power companies roughly zero over just taking a fly-over with thermal or sonic imaging. The most important data tool in oil prospecting is AUTOTUNE. They don't much benefit at all from big data. Neither does most other things (farming, manufacturing, music production, pharmacology, chemistry).
Dissent on the +2 Troll moderation. This guy is an angry prick but I'm pretty sure the analogy makes no sense, at least not to any layman. Even to my senses, coal and oil are the basis of economy: all economy runs down to energy. Hunter-gatherers are solely concerned with food to power human muscle to hunt and gather; agrarian societies are similarly concerned, until they invent animal power (still food) and mills (water, wind, coal, oil, solar power). Societies require human time to produce the things required to live, and they reduce that time by technology, which eventually requires non-human energy: tractors harvest food more-quickly, mills process grain more-quickly, and we're freed from human labor time by extracting energy from coal and oil.
Data is a commodity processed by technology, like cloth or sand. It's not a source. Data requires energy, and energy doesn't require much data at all--so little, in fact, that just basic human knowledge such as knowing that Africa is sunny and has geothermal hot spots in the north-east can tell you where to drop your solar and geothermal power plants. Data might be nice for squeezing out 1% more efficiency--and 1% of ENERGY is a hell of a lot--but society runs on energy, and data *needs* energy; energy doesn't actually need data, and society can get all of its energy needs without energy being built using big data infrastructure.
The other argument is ridiculous, too.
Of course their analogy is highly questionable, since transmitting data over a network doesn't actually consume anything, now does it? You eat the cookie, the cookie is gone, but you transmit data over a network, the network is still there and can transmit data endlessly.
When you eat a cookie, it isn't gone. The biological cycle eventually moves that load of nutrients back around through plants and animals, with sunlight as input energy, and human work brings about a new cookie.
When you use a network's bandwidth, the remaining bandwidth is reduced. If your network has 1Tbit/s of bandwidth and you consume 200Gbit/s, that leaves you 800Gbit/s to work with. If people start pulling 700Gbit/s, that's half a Tbit of bandwidth that's being consumed. It's gone, unless you can beat back people's usage.