I've never felt the need to join FB or other social media to date.
And yet, nevertheless, you just posted that thought on social media.
Check back later to see if you got modded up! Maybe getting some karma points (or replies that agree with you -- they're just as good as upmods!) will get you to come back for more.
I guess I've just never felt compelled to being a voluntary part of their product they sell.
Slashdot's advertisers should be unhappy to read this, but considering where they're reading it, I suspect their frowns might be upside-down.
But what is the appeal of Bitcoin? There are really three strands; the limited nature of supply; fears about the long-term value of fiat currencies in an era of quantitative easing; and the appeal of anonymity.
And the fourth: veto-proof reliability. IMHO that totally overwhelms the relatively weak reasons listed above.
If you sell a product or service over the Internet, you need some way for people to pay you. Every single one of those, except cryptocurrencies, are unreliable, because it requires a third party who might say no and prevent the transaction from happening. Credit cards don't work, because they go to extra trouble to not-work. Paypal doesn't work, because they go to extra trouble to not-work. Bitcoin does work, because there's no one to maliciously prevent it from working.
The catch is that credit cards' and Paypal's unreliability is partly a function of the type of business that one of the transactors is doing. The reason they don't work is because someone is pressuring them to interfere. In some cases, these are illegal businesses, and in some cases, they're just a little shady, or maybe totally legit but unliked by someone. Once you get to "mainstream" commerce, Paypal and credit cards' unreliability, while still not quite in the league of Bitcoin, are Good Enough.
But the world is always changing. What's "legit" today might be murky tomorrow. And what isn't opposed by some powerful industry or monopoly today, is very likely to be opposed tomorrow (though whether that adversary is powerful enough to really get in your way, depends). If the adversarial power is able to influence government or the banking industry, then you're going to need some way to do business without the intermediaries saying "Sorry, I've got a gun to my head here. No can do. Account frozen." Thus, society needs Bitcoin or at least something like it, so that transactions can occur without anyone having the capacity to prevent them.
And the generic security goal is always: remove adversaries' capacity to harm you. (People need to be aware, though, that Bitcoin may ultimately fail on this. Beware the 51% attack.)
I think there's a parallel here, between the technology of financial payments, and the technology of interpersonal communication. In 1992 CALEA passed, but it "only" regulated communications providers. The solution to that problem was that people need to stop using providers (or treat them as dumb pipes which only have access to ciphertext), and be their own providers, independent. Before you communicate with someone, you think about what protocol to use, not what service to use. (The government can't ask you to wiretap yourself without telling you.) The news is constantly full of stories about people whose communications turned out to be vulnerable, because they didn't do that. (e.g. they used the whateverdu jourchat app, instead of an open crypto protocol (e.g. OpenPGP) over an open communications protocol (e.g. XMPP or SMTP)).
Similarly, 9/11 was used as a great excuse to add a bunch of laws to further regulate financial services providers. Thus, America needs a way to transact business without any service provider. Everything is going to be like this: aggressors will try to horn in between people, and people have to respond by not having anyone between them. So before you pay someone or take payment from someone, you need to decide on what protocol to use for payment, not what service. Corrupt law means everyone has to transition to the protocol-view of the world, and start severing ties with services providers. And I mean service providers in as many diverse industries as possible! As "geeks" we only normally think about one or two dimensions of all this, but it's going to be everywhere: the more money/liberties they try to skim from you, in every aspect of your life, the more it ma
Totally sucks to the point of being unusable, and can't even do something as simple as sizing a box correctly, and can't even show a PNG with transparency ten fucking years after the standard: not-checked.
Anyone who thinks Chrome is the new MSIE, totally doesn't remember how outrageously bad MSIE was. I understand if you blotted it out of your memory; that isn't your fault. But don't pretend things now are nearly as bad as they were back then.
Chrome does seem to be trying to do some kind of embrace-and-extend attack, but at least they got "embrace" mostly right. MSIE just plain didn't work.
Stupidity Tests are awesome and I'm glad that the suits haven't taken over Facebook and forced them to lose their sense of humor. I like how Facebook gets to take things to the next level (they already have a population of volunteers who are pre-selected as being ok with Facebook in general). Let's see how many fall for it. 2018 needs good news stories too.
I think this is one of the very best prank ideas, ever. And would Google have thought of something so invasive? Would Microsoft have thought of something so dark? Would Apple have thought of something so limited and constraining? Would Amazon have thought of something this obviously-hair-brained? Facebook wins this round, period, beating everyone else at their own game.
Stalking, spying and harrassing people are illegal things if they are done for "creepy" reasons, where creepy is defined as.. uh, I don't know.
But "creepy" does not include trying to sell something to someone.
I can put a hidden camera inside your toilet bowl, if the purpose of that is to tell you the exact moment that you should consider buying Cajun Bowl (TM), the only toilet bowl cleaner that 7/10 focus group members said smells a bit like Jambalaya.
I can put a microphone in your bed, if the purpose is to gather your sex frequency so that I can sell you Cajun Lube (TM), the lube that tastes like hot sauce.
These aren't creepy intriusions; I just want your money. Next time you think you feel my cold hand on your ass, remember: that asscheek is where you hold your wallet. I'm just money-grubbing. Now let me give you a little squeeze. Mmmmmm, yes, I feel some 100s in there. You rich! Might I interest you in a Cajun Cask (TM), the only coffin proven to not float away in a flood?
I think every single one of Amazon's own product ideas is pretty weird and dubiously desirable on the face of it. They don't even get to the point of me trying it, getting disappointed, and then letting it collect dust. Their products all project a purity of uselessness that I think even outdoes Apple (and by a wide margin; I would totally get an iPhone way before I would ever get one of those buttons you press to order things). But that said...
I'm actually kinda surprised Amazon didn't see this one coming?
I think they did see it coming, five to ten seconds into the very first discussion about the idea at Amazon. One Amazon employee mentioned it to another, and the second guy was all, "Are you crazy? Fuck no, I wouldn't use that." And the 3rd, 4th and 5th guy said the same thing: "that's a really stupid idea, or at least it's not for me."
And the 6th guy said, "Holy shit, that's so fucking awesome. Sign me up yesterday!"
Nobody is surprised that most people aren't into it. Amazon knows that too. But the key word is "most." It's a niche thing. There are going to be some people who are into it. And if you're into it, then you'd probably like the convenience and lack of lost packages.
Your life isn't like everyone else's. You might not ever want to buy a glitter-trimmed triple-ripple buttplug with 2-speed vibrating motor and long-range wireless 915 MHz remote control, but someone would be all, "Daamn, I've been looking for a glittery one, and OMG a third ripple!!! It's even got a long enough wavelength so it'll get through all the bones and jewelry from the bodies I hid inside the house's walls back in my serial killer days."
saying "ha ha, we just reacted to your injunction in a way that hurt the party you're trying to protect, look at us we're so clever" is a way to get into a world of hurt
Wait a minute. Would leaving Equustek out of searches hurt Equustek? Or would it just stop helping Equustek? (I mean from a court/law point of view. Obviously dealing with advertisers might be trickier.)
It's not like local file servers are magically immune to failures.
A couple people were walking in a woods, when they spotted a hungry grizzly bear, and it started charging toward them. One of them started lacing up his shoes, preparing to run. "What's the point?" said the other, "You can't outrun a grizzly bear." The reply: "I just have to outrun you."
We're in a world gone mad, where incompetence and malice-or-corruption (depending on how charitable you wanna be about it) dominate. The benchmark for your home fileserver's reliably isn't perfection; it just has to be better than alternatives (e.g. "you're the product, not the customer" type services).
And that's pretty damn easy to achieve. My file server doesn't even have a "check if this file complies with my TOS, and then delete it just to spite myself" to ever possibly malfunction. Why would I deliberately build additional risk into it?
You can delude yourself for decades, infect others, and go to your grave without ever knowing what you missed.
Memes that defy reality do not necessarily get selected out, and memes based on reality do not necessarily survive. Reality is merely a factor within the fitness function.
Am I the only one that believes the whole Bin Laden assassination was faked?
Probably not. There are people who think Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison are still alive too. And Andy Kaufman! And I shit you not: many many years ago, I think I saw a tabloid headline claiming that even JFK was still alive (but brain-damaged, of course).
(Adolph Hitler was a good one too, but even if he had been alive after 1945, he'd have still died of old age by now.)
Why you do believe he's still alive? ("He" being bin Laden, but if you'd rather explain a Jim-Morrison-is-still-alive hypothesis that might be more fun, so go with whoever you prefer.)
We have zero images of his body. Absolutely no proper funeral and then they conveniently scatter his ashes into the ocean.
No, those are reasons for being unsure about whether he's alive or dead. To form a believe in him being alive, there would have to be a reason; something that tips you from I-don't-know-if-I-can-believe-these-untrustworthy-people to I've-caught-them-in-a-lie. Was it evidence? Or did an angel tell you? Or what?
(BTW, I changed my mind about going with whoever you prefer. If you only have time to do one, please do Jim Morrison instead!)
I mean, it is not obvious that hosting this on a CIA website is a means to track, collect, and monitor all IP addresses that potentially attempt to download this data?
How would that be useful?
If the CIA wants a list of arbitrary addresses (but why?!), they could either just randomly generate them, or query IANA for what ranges are allocated to ISPs. Those approaches would be faster and cheaper, and the second option would be more complete.
Now, if a private party (e.g. Google or Facebook) were releasing the info, then you could make a case that collecting a list of people who find the topic interesting, might make sense from an advertising perspective. If someone enjoyed perusing Osama's collection of files, then maybe they'd also be willing to pay to peruse other celebrities' (living or dead) collections. (e.g. Maybe Michael Jackson's heirs want to monetize his files collection, or Bill O'Reilly wants to show everyone what he personally collects (and he could even add product-placement files to make even more money).)
It sounds like you're not merely trying to write some program in two lines, but taking on the big job of interfacing with a web browser, i.e. one of the strangely most-complicated, shitty-APIed software that exists in our world. I think that's what AC meant by "A lot of what is hated about Javascript is the browser DOM."
(That said, I think Javascript is kind of "eww" because I like classes and Javascript is weird.)
You're still paying for the EPA, and they are still spending money on important things which I'm sure must be in the interests of the country. We know those things are important, because they're so sensitive.
Dude, you're using a proprietary voice assistant. Of course its primary purpose is to lock you in. That's the purpose of all proprietary communications tools. This is a whole area of software where, from the user's point of view, it is utterly insane and self-destructive to be using proprietary software.
If you want/need to run proprietary software, stick to games. For anything important, it doesn't make sense to use any software that treats you like an adversary.
You aren't your enemy, so you shouldn't be paying to have your computer act as though you are.
(2017 and the above opinion is probably still considered controversial. Everyone knows it's true but some people feel compelled to pretend that common sense is too "inconvenient.")
which lets owners of the Google Home "smart" speaker order items through voice commands like owners of the Echo can do from Amazon.
Seriously? You seriously believe anyone wants to do that?
One of two things is happening:
1) Everyone-except-me spends most of their time shopping. If you're not asleep, then you're probably shopping. We all just sit around thinking about things we want to buy, and we're all frustrated that it takes so much work (ugh, the clicking! the endless clicking!!) to get them purchased. It's hell on earth, we have a problem, and we need it fixed. If only I had a convenient thing that would take voice commands for shopping! I would pay for that. I would order it. I'm ordering things right now. Anyone wanna sell me one of those? Oh well. I'll be ordering more stuff again in 15 minutes, so maybe my fantasy shopping interface will be ready then.
2) The aforementioned isn't true, but the people who run Amazon and Google think it's true.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet, nevertheless, you just posted that thought on social media.
Check back later to see if you got modded up! Maybe getting some karma points (or replies that agree with you -- they're just as good as upmods!) will get you to come back for more.
Slashdot's advertisers should be unhappy to read this, but considering where they're reading it, I suspect their frowns might be upside-down.
No, it's We The People's fault, for being drug addicts. Don't blame the dealer.
And the fourth: veto-proof reliability. IMHO that totally overwhelms the relatively weak reasons listed above.
If you sell a product or service over the Internet, you need some way for people to pay you. Every single one of those, except cryptocurrencies, are unreliable, because it requires a third party who might say no and prevent the transaction from happening. Credit cards don't work, because they go to extra trouble to not-work. Paypal doesn't work, because they go to extra trouble to not-work. Bitcoin does work, because there's no one to maliciously prevent it from working.
The catch is that credit cards' and Paypal's unreliability is partly a function of the type of business that one of the transactors is doing. The reason they don't work is because someone is pressuring them to interfere. In some cases, these are illegal businesses, and in some cases, they're just a little shady, or maybe totally legit but unliked by someone. Once you get to "mainstream" commerce, Paypal and credit cards' unreliability, while still not quite in the league of Bitcoin, are Good Enough.
But the world is always changing. What's "legit" today might be murky tomorrow. And what isn't opposed by some powerful industry or monopoly today, is very likely to be opposed tomorrow (though whether that adversary is powerful enough to really get in your way, depends). If the adversarial power is able to influence government or the banking industry, then you're going to need some way to do business without the intermediaries saying "Sorry, I've got a gun to my head here. No can do. Account frozen." Thus, society needs Bitcoin or at least something like it, so that transactions can occur without anyone having the capacity to prevent them.
And the generic security goal is always: remove adversaries' capacity to harm you. (People need to be aware, though, that Bitcoin may ultimately fail on this. Beware the 51% attack.)
I think there's a parallel here, between the technology of financial payments, and the technology of interpersonal communication. In 1992 CALEA passed, but it "only" regulated communications providers. The solution to that problem was that people need to stop using providers (or treat them as dumb pipes which only have access to ciphertext), and be their own providers, independent. Before you communicate with someone, you think about what protocol to use, not what service to use. (The government can't ask you to wiretap yourself without telling you.) The news is constantly full of stories about people whose communications turned out to be vulnerable, because they didn't do that. (e.g. they used the whateverdu jourchat app, instead of an open crypto protocol (e.g. OpenPGP) over an open communications protocol (e.g. XMPP or SMTP)).
Similarly, 9/11 was used as a great excuse to add a bunch of laws to further regulate financial services providers. Thus, America needs a way to transact business without any service provider. Everything is going to be like this: aggressors will try to horn in between people, and people have to respond by not having anyone between them. So before you pay someone or take payment from someone, you need to decide on what protocol to use for payment, not what service. Corrupt law means everyone has to transition to the protocol-view of the world, and start severing ties with services providers. And I mean service providers in as many diverse industries as possible! As "geeks" we only normally think about one or two dimensions of all this, but it's going to be everywhere: the more money/liberties they try to skim from you, in every aspect of your life, the more it ma
I think I just figured out why Google is making this change to Chrome.
Totally sucks to the point of being unusable, and can't even do something as simple as sizing a box correctly, and can't even show a PNG with transparency ten fucking years after the standard: not-checked.
Anyone who thinks Chrome is the new MSIE, totally doesn't remember how outrageously bad MSIE was. I understand if you blotted it out of your memory; that isn't your fault. But don't pretend things now are nearly as bad as they were back then.
Chrome does seem to be trying to do some kind of embrace-and-extend attack, but at least they got "embrace" mostly right. MSIE just plain didn't work.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but Cloudflare must need a lot. How many bps of entropy can you get per lava lamp?
Stupidity Tests are awesome and I'm glad that the suits haven't taken over Facebook and forced them to lose their sense of humor. I like how Facebook gets to take things to the next level (they already have a population of volunteers who are pre-selected as being ok with Facebook in general). Let's see how many fall for it. 2018 needs good news stories too.
I think this is one of the very best prank ideas, ever. And would Google have thought of something so invasive? Would Microsoft have thought of something so dark? Would Apple have thought of something so limited and constraining? Would Amazon have thought of something this obviously-hair-brained? Facebook wins this round, period, beating everyone else at their own game.
Stalking, spying and harrassing people are illegal things if they are done for "creepy" reasons, where creepy is defined as.. uh, I don't know.
But "creepy" does not include trying to sell something to someone.
I can put a hidden camera inside your toilet bowl, if the purpose of that is to tell you the exact moment that you should consider buying Cajun Bowl (TM), the only toilet bowl cleaner that 7/10 focus group members said smells a bit like Jambalaya.
I can put a microphone in your bed, if the purpose is to gather your sex frequency so that I can sell you Cajun Lube (TM), the lube that tastes like hot sauce.
These aren't creepy intriusions; I just want your money. Next time you think you feel my cold hand on your ass, remember: that asscheek is where you hold your wallet. I'm just money-grubbing. Now let me give you a little squeeze. Mmmmmm, yes, I feel some 100s in there. You rich! Might I interest you in a Cajun Cask (TM), the only coffin proven to not float away in a flood?
I think every single one of Amazon's own product ideas is pretty weird and dubiously desirable on the face of it. They don't even get to the point of me trying it, getting disappointed, and then letting it collect dust. Their products all project a purity of uselessness that I think even outdoes Apple (and by a wide margin; I would totally get an iPhone way before I would ever get one of those buttons you press to order things). But that said...
I think they did see it coming, five to ten seconds into the very first discussion about the idea at Amazon. One Amazon employee mentioned it to another, and the second guy was all, "Are you crazy? Fuck no, I wouldn't use that." And the 3rd, 4th and 5th guy said the same thing: "that's a really stupid idea, or at least it's not for me."
And the 6th guy said, "Holy shit, that's so fucking awesome. Sign me up yesterday!"
Nobody is surprised that most people aren't into it. Amazon knows that too. But the key word is "most." It's a niche thing. There are going to be some people who are into it. And if you're into it, then you'd probably like the convenience and lack of lost packages.
Your life isn't like everyone else's. You might not ever want to buy a glitter-trimmed triple-ripple buttplug with 2-speed vibrating motor and long-range wireless 915 MHz remote control, but someone would be all, "Daamn, I've been looking for a glittery one, and OMG a third ripple!!! It's even got a long enough wavelength so it'll get through all the bones and jewelry from the bodies I hid inside the house's walls back in my serial killer days."
As a taxpayer, I demand the State infringe your right to bear arms, and also quarter a soldier in your house during peacetime.
The mission: outsource the owning/responsibility without outsourcing the actual revenue.
There's gotta be a way. No way EU's law-drafters thought of everything. Hilton just needs some clever black hat lawyers.\
Wait a minute. Would leaving Equustek out of searches hurt Equustek? Or would it just stop helping Equustek? (I mean from a court/law point of view. Obviously dealing with advertisers might be trickier.)
Google provides a free service. They don't have to keep providing it, do they? The fact that someone else's service can't be relied upon, is one of the reasons techies are always saying users need to be more careful about their dependencies.
A couple people were walking in a woods, when they spotted a hungry grizzly bear, and it started charging toward them. One of them started lacing up his shoes, preparing to run. "What's the point?" said the other, "You can't outrun a grizzly bear." The reply: "I just have to outrun you."
We're in a world gone mad, where incompetence and malice-or-corruption (depending on how charitable you wanna be about it) dominate. The benchmark for your home fileserver's reliably isn't perfection; it just has to be better than alternatives (e.g. "you're the product, not the customer" type services).
And that's pretty damn easy to achieve. My file server doesn't even have a "check if this file complies with my TOS, and then delete it just to spite myself" to ever possibly malfunction. Why would I deliberately build additional risk into it?
WTF?! You already knew that.
But only from an objective viewpoint!
You can delude yourself for decades, infect others, and go to your grave without ever knowing what you missed.
Memes that defy reality do not necessarily get selected out, and memes based on reality do not necessarily survive. Reality is merely a factor within the fitness function.
Probably not. There are people who think Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison are still alive too. And Andy Kaufman! And I shit you not: many many years ago, I think I saw a tabloid headline claiming that even JFK was still alive (but brain-damaged, of course).
(Adolph Hitler was a good one too, but even if he had been alive after 1945, he'd have still died of old age by now.)
Why you do believe he's still alive? ("He" being bin Laden, but if you'd rather explain a Jim-Morrison-is-still-alive hypothesis that might be more fun, so go with whoever you prefer.)
No, those are reasons for being unsure about whether he's alive or dead. To form a believe in him being alive, there would have to be a reason; something that tips you from I-don't-know-if-I-can-believe-these-untrustworthy-people to I've-caught-them-in-a-lie. Was it evidence? Or did an angel tell you? Or what?
(BTW, I changed my mind about going with whoever you prefer. If you only have time to do one, please do Jim Morrison instead!)
How would that be useful?
If the CIA wants a list of arbitrary addresses (but why?!), they could either just randomly generate them, or query IANA for what ranges are allocated to ISPs. Those approaches would be faster and cheaper, and the second option would be more complete.
Now, if a private party (e.g. Google or Facebook) were releasing the info, then you could make a case that collecting a list of people who find the topic interesting, might make sense from an advertising perspective. If someone enjoyed perusing Osama's collection of files, then maybe they'd also be willing to pay to peruse other celebrities' (living or dead) collections. (e.g. Maybe Michael Jackson's heirs want to monetize his files collection, or Bill O'Reilly wants to show everyone what he personally collects (and he could even add product-placement files to make even more money).)
But government? What'd be the point?
..I figured out why he wasn't able to get his vehicle up to 55 MPH. Get your fucking left foot off the brake pedal.
In other news, there are many ways rock.
Someone else can, but they never fucking do. They just come ask me to google for them. I have Sigourney Weaver's job from Galaxy Quest.
It sounds like you're not merely trying to write some program in two lines, but taking on the big job of interfacing with a web browser , i.e. one of the strangely most-complicated, shitty-APIed software that exists in our world. I think that's what AC meant by "A lot of what is hated about Javascript is the browser DOM."
(That said, I think Javascript is kind of "eww" because I like classes and Javascript is weird.)
OMFG, a gun-phone. That's it. That's how you make texting and driving legal in Texas.
"Hey asshole who cut me off, we're gonna play war-dialing roulette! [click] You win! (This time.)"
Welcome to 2017. Paranoid not enough?
You're still paying for the EPA, and they are still spending money on important things which I'm sure must be in the interests of the country. We know those things are important, because they're so sensitive.
Dude, you're using a proprietary voice assistant. Of course its primary purpose is to lock you in. That's the purpose of all proprietary communications tools. This is a whole area of software where, from the user's point of view, it is utterly insane and self-destructive to be using proprietary software.
If you want/need to run proprietary software, stick to games. For anything important, it doesn't make sense to use any software that treats you like an adversary.
You aren't your enemy, so you shouldn't be paying to have your computer act as though you are.
(2017 and the above opinion is probably still considered controversial. Everyone knows it's true but some people feel compelled to pretend that common sense is too "inconvenient.")
Seriously? You seriously believe anyone wants to do that?
One of two things is happening:
1) Everyone-except-me spends most of their time shopping. If you're not asleep, then you're probably shopping. We all just sit around thinking about things we want to buy, and we're all frustrated that it takes so much work (ugh, the clicking! the endless clicking!!) to get them purchased. It's hell on earth, we have a problem, and we need it fixed. If only I had a convenient thing that would take voice commands for shopping! I would pay for that. I would order it. I'm ordering things right now. Anyone wanna sell me one of those? Oh well. I'll be ordering more stuff again in 15 minutes, so maybe my fantasy shopping interface will be ready then.
2) The aforementioned isn't true, but the people who run Amazon and Google think it's true.