The Higgs boson has been hypothesized in the '60s, and several attempts have been made since to isolate it. If what you're saying were true, then the past few decades we have been accumulating evidence that the Higgs boson doesn't exist
Very cool example!
As it happens, most scientists would say that yes, they did accumulate evidence that it probably doesn't exist: for certain ranges of mass. A Y2K guy has a narrower Higgs boson hypothesis than a 1960s guy. The later guy knows things, thanks to experiment and absense of finding the particle, that the 1960s guy doesn't. The later guy's hypothesis is more specific.
I'll have a new respect for believers in the paranormal, when one of them says they've searched very hard, and through repeatable experiment have probably ruled out 721 names of Genesha, thereby refining their Ganesha-exists hypothesis to 279 names at most. Learning that Ganesha consistently fails to respond to appeals to 721 names wouldn't be proof that he doesn't have those names or that he doesn't exist, but it'd be something. It'd be evidence, weak though it be. It would pave the way toward further narrowing his names down to where eventually an experiment is performed, where it's learned that by concentrating on one of 3 names, Ganesha does respond to prayers, and then confirming the hypothesis that he exists.
As if.:-)
Some people will say you can't rule out or narrow down any of Ganesha's properties (e.g. his names); there's no experiment which could ever be performed. I agree. That's why I don't consider Ganesha to be a falsifiable theory (i.e. not a serious hypothesis) and why the idea contributes nothing to the body of knowledge. It is worthless bullshit.
I just want to say "bite me, smartass" to all the people who thought they were so clever to be the first person to realize that there are earthly teapots. Look, I didn't make up the analogy. Go spit on Bertrand Russell's grave, if you simply must have the last laugh (*). He knew the Earth (and all its teapots) orbits the sun too, but nevertheless picked the sun as the focus. It's not my fault, so give me a break, ok?
(*) You won't have it, though. Only the great cloven hooved god ever has the last laugh. Hail Satan!
Oh shit, I didn't mean to type that out loud. My slip has reveal to all the Christians, what this "science talk" is really about. Dammit. Lucifer is going to have my hide over this...
It does not require blind faith to have a general policy of rejecting unfalsifiable things as false.
Going from "there is no evidence of any gods" to "there are no gods" isn't any different than going from "there's no evidence of a teapot orbiting the sun" to "there is no teapot orbiting the sun." It's not blind faith; it's common sense.
Blind faith is when you go from "there is no evidence of a teapot orbiting the sun" to the amazing fantastical "there is a teapot orbiting the sun."
The two different conclusions stemming from the initial unknown condition aren't equivalent, because one takes a falsifiable position and one does not.
The guy who believes in the orbiting teapot and the gods, is no longer able to learn anything, because no new evidence can ever possibly change his estimate of how correct his belief is. Evidence plays no role at all; he has ceased to be able to obtain information. He doesn't have a theory and nothing ever happens to increase or decrease his estimate of his belief's truth. His "knowledge" is a pure fantasy with no connection to truth (except perhaps accidental).
The guy who says there are no orbiting teapots and no gods, has a falsifiable theory. Discovery of an orbiting teapot or a god will invalidate it, and continued absence of contrary evidence (especially after deliberate searches) will confirm the theory. His position contains knowledge. You can build on that kind of knowledge, as you might have noticed with all the rocket ships and cellphones and medicines.
Pastafarian: I have weird shit on my head, because [wink wink]
Christian: What's with the winking?
Pastafarian: You wouldn't understand.
Normal person: Would I understand?
Pastafarian: Maybe. [silence]
Normal person, impatient: Well?!
Pastafarian: I'm glad you asked. [silence]
Normal person:...
Pastafarian: [sigh] I wear it to make you ask.
Normal person: WTF is the point of making me ask?
Pastafarian: [points at Christian] He started it.
Normal person: If he jumped off a bridge, would you?
Pastafarian: No, but I might become inspired. My religion still lacks many of the symbols and trappings that his enjoys. Ritual suicide.. hmm.. tricky. I would need some sort of analogue.
Christian: Fuck you people. You're going to hell.
Pastafarian: And you will never Achieve Linguini.
What "original crime?" It's probably worth examining/repealing ML laws, though, if THAT is the original crime. I had no idea it was against any law to give someone 4 quarters for a dollar.
You missed his point. He's saying people did vote for Democrats and now we are totally fucked, because there are never any serious Republican candidates. If only someone would run against the Democrats, things could (maybe possibly if we're both really lucky and really try hard) get better. But since the Republicans have abandoned the country, the kind of people who limit themselves to voting R-or-D (users of the "lesser of two evils" strategy) have no choice but to vote Democrat. (Now, we might not respect people who use that strategy, but you can't deny they are a majority of voters, hold most of the power, and that political campaigns must take them into account as pretty much the prime consideration.)
The Democrats are withdrawing their support for America too, just not as rapidly as the Republicans, so the Democrats win by default.
And that's exactly what happened in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. (Also 2004, but the situation was reversed.) Take a look. Who ran against Obama? Nobody serious, that's who. The R's whole crop was just a bunch of characters written by The Daily Show for comedic value, rather than being actual people. The Republicans gave the office to Obama, by not putting forth any candidates (well, they did put forth two of them (Paul and Johnson in 2012, for example), but then the registered Republican voters squashed them both in the primaries).
Maybe it's not a matter of "vote Democrat." Maybe it's a matter of every single American needing to register as a Republican, and fucking voting in the primaries so that we can have a real presidential election some day. Because until American becomes willing to vote third party, we're going to continue to have R or D people. So why not get some real politicians onto those two ballot slots?
That's the spirit, Limey! But of course you're wrong. Everyone should be complaining about everyone's stupid bullshit braindead maliciously-intended anti-human laws, rather than everyone having to be silent out of fear of MAD. Nobody should ever fear charges of hypocrisy. Nothing you ever say about me not having boobies on my TV, will ever make your stupid shit trademark law not be stupid shit. Now let's all go kick our governments' asses. And if you wanna keep throwing those boobies in my face, that's fine with me.
What about Sky Broadband or Sky Subscriber services? Kind sounds like a product they might offer.
And if Sky did that, they should be crushed by a trademark claim from Microsoft. If I start selling Cajun Hell BBQ sauce and I am first to market, I shouldn't have to worry about some "Cajun Construction" business later also wanting to enter the BBQ sauce market, then taking my product name away from me.
What happened is that they were naive about the Brit's totally bullshit trademark law. Nobody, unless they're a lawyer or have done litigation with Brits in the past, would ever suspect that "SkyDrive" could possibly infringe the trademark of a company which does not sell any product or service called "SkyDrive." The Brits have an asinine law and their people need to kick their government's ass.
That said, Microsoft does have lawyers, and almost certain has litigated with Brits in the past, so they should have been informed about that country's ridiculous third world banana republic laws and the fact that you can't just do business there. They should have known that any new name must be at least 14 transformative mutations away from any other name, or else it is considered "trademark infringement."
I just like the fact that when several hundred dollars of fraudulent purchases were made against my card that I was notified and ultimately re-imbursed for the total amount.
Cool! I can definitely imagine a market for insured transactions, bonded sellers, or things like that. Maybe you're one of those people who would use it that way, for every single transaction. And there's nothing wrong with that. You would pay for it, though, just like you currently always pay for it whenever you use Visa and MasterCard.
The neat thing about Bitcoin, though, unlike Visa and MasterCard, is that you can opt differently (no insurance) whenever you want to. (Indeed, this is how (everyone AFAIK) currently uses it.) Remember that time you bought something with cash, because you didn't think you needed to pay extra for the insurance? Surely you've done it. When you think about why you chose to not pay extra in that scenario, you'll know why you might want to use Bitcoin the way that people currently do in 2013.
Bitcoin is the digital equivalent of burying a chest of gold coins in your backyard.
This is incorrect, to such a deep level that I wonder if you need to refamiliarize yourself with what Bitcoin really is. Bitcoin is the rough equivalent of the coins themselves, without any verb, whether it be "bury" or "spend." The user decides whether to spend them or save them, the same way people make such decisions with metal coins. If you're not currently burying gold in your backyard, then there is no reason to suspect that you might opt for that strategy with Bitcoin.
I'm certainly not and anyone else in that group should be very cautious of placing any significant sum of funds into Bitcoin.
You're probably right. And I bet you came to the same decision, with regards to dollars in your physical wallet. I tend to lazily withdraw about $40 from my ATM whenever I use it, not $5000. Is your behavior similar? Good. I believe you have struck on an excellent strategy for limiting how badly things can possibly wrong, in the unlikely event that things go wrong. I've never been mugged and I've never had my own computer subverted, but just like you, I can imagine it possibly happening. Keep that in mind, when/if you start using Bitcoin, just like you already keep it in mind whenever you use a physical wallet containing paper money.
Who do I talk to if I need to be reimbursed for a fraudulent transaction or loss of my Bitcoin wallet?
Unless you've found someone to sell you insurance, then you talk to the same person that you talk to, whenever you need to be reimbursed for a fraudulent transaction or loss of the paper money in your physical wallet: yourself. And you either learn from the experience, or (more likely) you have anticipated it and have to decided to either prevent it from happening, or to limit how badly it can happen. Your statements lead me to believe you have already discovered the latter approach.
I doubt it was the president's point but when you include the part about the robots, it is a good sign. The implication is that people won't have to do "crap" jobs forever. We should all look forward to the day that we hear about sweatshop jobs all the time: from our unhappy robot slaves. If I'm going to be killed by Terminators, I want them to have a reason to do it.
Wait, now we're talking about dedicated links, "hammering things," oversubscribing, something other than "reasonable usage" and "gobbling up bandwidth?" All reasonable points, and of course only 50% of users should expect to use more than average bandwidth. But I thought we were talking about servers and answering inbound connections, and utterly different topic. You're posting in the wrong story; this is the one about Google opposing home servers.
I would agree with you but frankly very few people care about Bitcoin or have any reason to care about Bitcoin.
You probably don't care much about Yuan-Dollar exchange rates much either, but you sure as hell have reason to care about it!
We used to see the (approximate and debatable) 3% that Visa and Mastercard skims from nearly all sales transactions, as merely the cost of doing business, and a worthwhile expense in exchange for the service they offer. And yet, now The People have the tech to avoid that charge, so what used to be a 3% expense is considered 3% economic damage, a parasite. Most of us probably don't really have visceral bad feelings about Visa quite on the scale implied by the word "parasite" and yet, whenever you're buying a larger ticket item (a house, a car) you negotiate like hell over figures much smaller than 3%. And when I think about how much money I spent on my car, compared to how much money I have spend on fueling and maintaining my car with a plastic card, the plastic card's costs dwarf anything I ever negotiated with my car dealer. Visa and Mastercard's expenses are right there in your face, for anyone who looks into it. There's reason to move to something cheaper.
Or threaten to move to something cheaper. You don't necessarily have to do it, as long as you can prove you're willing to do it. Who knows, maybe Bitcoin is what'll get Visa merchant charges down to 0.3%. Isn't it interesting that your grandparents had the same percentage skimmed off their lives, whereas you today live in a higher tech world where the expenses of providing transactions services, are tiny by comparison.
In the end, Bitcoin is just another market force. There are plenty of indirect ones out there (exchange rates, decisions made by central banks, etc) that you don't think about much, or ever take actions on, and yet they have a profound effect on your economic well-being. It's fine to say you don't care, but for fuck's sake, don't say people don't have reason to care!
You're comparing a thing that you decide to buy, with a thing that you decide to not buy. I noticed you said "my" Yugo and "a" Mercedes. It's pretty clear who presented you with the superior offer. One of those companies was more serious about getting your money than the other.
"but I'm leery of spending quite so much on any phone" - how much did that 64Gb iPhone cost again?
$0, because I didn't buy one. So you're right: zero iPhones in exchange for $0 is a fair deal and I'd do it again. Same goes for a $0 Ubuntu phone: I'll take zero and be a happy customer.
This reminds me of unplayable DRMed copies of movies. Those are a fair deal for the price I pay, too;-)
Which infrastructure can you harm with an RC plane and the tiny amount of explosives it can carry?
[Devil's Advocate]
Let's say you fly your radio controlled plane into a bridge with a small explosive, in plain view by many people. The charge goes off, leaving a dark sooty mark on some concrete.
What happens after that?
The bridge is closed. It's not damaged, but it's closed, while people both irrationally over-react and maybe rationally "just check to make sure."
And there's a traffic jam. And the UPS driver fails to make his delivery containing the Prime Minister's Wife's birthday gift, which the Prime Minister next-day-shipped the previous day when he suddenly remembered his wife's birthday. She dumps him. He falls into an alcoholic depression, says "what does anything matter?" and he launches a full scale nuclear attack on the neighboring country, using his secret stockpile of old V2 rockets and the super-secret resulting weapons from the heavy water experiments.
The fallout drifts back toward the launching country, and a stray beta particle hits one of the Prime Minister's constituents' DNA molecules. Did I mention this constituent is a mere 5-hour-old zygote? It grows into a mutant three-testicled lad, who is later mocked and ridiculed by another kid in the school locker room. Angered by the unprovoked and insensitive remark, the young lad takes note of the ethnicity of the other kid, and he forms a demented hypothesis.
30 years later, the Fourth Reich marches across Europe. They are eventually defeated, but the cost of the war eventually persuades the voters to vote fundamentally differently.
These extensions allow playback of premium video (read: with DRM protection) directly in the browser without the need to install plugins such as Silverlight or Flash.
Geez, talk about stretching the meaning of "such as." The whole point of this is that it lets you play it in the browser by installing a proprietary single-source plugin. Sure, you can argue that your plugin isn't "like" Sliverlight or Flash, just like Microsoft might say Silverlight is also not a plugin like Flash, and Adobe might argue that Flash is not a plugin like Java. And the guy serving malware on porn sites might argue his video codec is not a malware plugin like the other ones are. "My plugin takes spam-sending orders from this botnet, not that botnet! See? It's totally different!"
That is exactly how these extensions are not plugins like Flash or Silverlight. In other words: totally meaningless bullshit. It's just another plugin, which happens to use a newer API.
Lie all you want about it not being a plugin, but the lie is pretty transparent and does more to discredit the speaker than it does to really deceive anyone.
We're somehow supposed to believe there's thousands of alien souls occupying us? This magic machine you have is going to cure my problems when it has no basis in science?
Seriously, just look at Tom Cruise and his claims that anti-depressants don't work. You think Katie Holmes went running away because of any other reason than the idiocy there?
*sigh* Wacky beliefs without any foundation in observations, is not what makes Scientology special. Mainstream religions make assertions that are no less crazy that the above.
What makes it special, is its specific behavior and techniques, not its paranormal beliefs. A "church" becomes a "cult" much like how a murderer becomes a "terrorist," by working within some narrow definitions that people decided are unusually bad, rather than mundanely bad.
Body Thetans don't exist and people who say they do are full of shit, but it's not any different sort of bullshit, than the son of a virgin feeling better a few days after his crucifixion, talking snakes, lake-of-fire-afterlife vs a different afterlife, and so on. If you happen to not enjoy the myths within Scientology that's cool, but that's not the right reason to hate 'em. Hate them because they're evil people.
Don't tell them "you're crazy if you believe that nonsense," tell them "fuck you, asshole." I know plenty of Christians who by definition (it's what makes them Christians) believe stuff that is just as wacked. But unlike Scientologists, these people mean well so they deserve a shitload of slack. Not everyone who is delusional, is a sociopath.
Slashdot Mirror
Very cool example!
As it happens, most scientists would say that yes, they did accumulate evidence that it probably doesn't exist: for certain ranges of mass. A Y2K guy has a narrower Higgs boson hypothesis than a 1960s guy. The later guy knows things, thanks to experiment and absense of finding the particle, that the 1960s guy doesn't. The later guy's hypothesis is more specific.
I'll have a new respect for believers in the paranormal, when one of them says they've searched very hard, and through repeatable experiment have probably ruled out 721 names of Genesha, thereby refining their Ganesha-exists hypothesis to 279 names at most. Learning that Ganesha consistently fails to respond to appeals to 721 names wouldn't be proof that he doesn't have those names or that he doesn't exist, but it'd be something. It'd be evidence, weak though it be. It would pave the way toward further narrowing his names down to where eventually an experiment is performed, where it's learned that by concentrating on one of 3 names, Ganesha does respond to prayers, and then confirming the hypothesis that he exists.
As if. :-)
Some people will say you can't rule out or narrow down any of Ganesha's properties (e.g. his names); there's no experiment which could ever be performed. I agree. That's why I don't consider Ganesha to be a falsifiable theory (i.e. not a serious hypothesis) and why the idea contributes nothing to the body of knowledge. It is worthless bullshit.
I just want to say "bite me, smartass" to all the people who thought they were so clever to be the first person to realize that there are earthly teapots. Look, I didn't make up the analogy. Go spit on Bertrand Russell's grave, if you simply must have the last laugh (*). He knew the Earth (and all its teapots) orbits the sun too, but nevertheless picked the sun as the focus. It's not my fault, so give me a break, ok?
(*) You won't have it, though. Only the great cloven hooved god ever has the last laugh. Hail Satan!
Oh shit, I didn't mean to type that out loud. My slip has reveal to all the Christians, what this "science talk" is really about. Dammit. Lucifer is going to have my hide over this...
It does not require blind faith to have a general policy of rejecting unfalsifiable things as false.
Going from "there is no evidence of any gods" to "there are no gods" isn't any different than going from "there's no evidence of a teapot orbiting the sun" to "there is no teapot orbiting the sun." It's not blind faith; it's common sense.
Blind faith is when you go from "there is no evidence of a teapot orbiting the sun" to the amazing fantastical "there is a teapot orbiting the sun."
The two different conclusions stemming from the initial unknown condition aren't equivalent, because one takes a falsifiable position and one does not.
The guy who believes in the orbiting teapot and the gods, is no longer able to learn anything, because no new evidence can ever possibly change his estimate of how correct his belief is. Evidence plays no role at all; he has ceased to be able to obtain information. He doesn't have a theory and nothing ever happens to increase or decrease his estimate of his belief's truth. His "knowledge" is a pure fantasy with no connection to truth (except perhaps accidental).
The guy who says there are no orbiting teapots and no gods, has a falsifiable theory. Discovery of an orbiting teapot or a god will invalidate it, and continued absence of contrary evidence (especially after deliberate searches) will confirm the theory. His position contains knowledge. You can build on that kind of knowledge, as you might have noticed with all the rocket ships and cellphones and medicines.
Pastafarian: I have weird shit on my head, because [wink wink] ...
Christian: What's with the winking?
Pastafarian: You wouldn't understand.
Normal person: Would I understand?
Pastafarian: Maybe. [silence]
Normal person, impatient: Well?!
Pastafarian: I'm glad you asked. [silence]
Normal person:
Pastafarian: [sigh] I wear it to make you ask.
Normal person: WTF is the point of making me ask?
Pastafarian: [points at Christian] He started it.
Normal person: If he jumped off a bridge, would you?
Pastafarian: No, but I might become inspired. My religion still lacks many of the symbols and trappings that his enjoys. Ritual suicide.. hmm.. tricky. I would need some sort of analogue.
Christian: Fuck you people. You're going to hell.
Pastafarian: And you will never Achieve Linguini.
What "original crime?" It's probably worth examining/repealing ML laws, though, if THAT is the original crime. I had no idea it was against any law to give someone 4 quarters for a dollar.
Holy crap. And people worry about bitcoin?
Couldn't we just pick some arbitrary group to blame? Republicans or Vikings or Buddhists or whatever?
You missed his point. He's saying people did vote for Democrats and now we are totally fucked, because there are never any serious Republican candidates. If only someone would run against the Democrats, things could (maybe possibly if we're both really lucky and really try hard) get better. But since the Republicans have abandoned the country, the kind of people who limit themselves to voting R-or-D (users of the "lesser of two evils" strategy) have no choice but to vote Democrat. (Now, we might not respect people who use that strategy, but you can't deny they are a majority of voters, hold most of the power, and that political campaigns must take them into account as pretty much the prime consideration.)
The Democrats are withdrawing their support for America too, just not as rapidly as the Republicans, so the Democrats win by default.
And that's exactly what happened in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. (Also 2004, but the situation was reversed.) Take a look. Who ran against Obama? Nobody serious, that's who. The R's whole crop was just a bunch of characters written by The Daily Show for comedic value, rather than being actual people. The Republicans gave the office to Obama, by not putting forth any candidates (well, they did put forth two of them (Paul and Johnson in 2012, for example), but then the registered Republican voters squashed them both in the primaries).
Maybe it's not a matter of "vote Democrat." Maybe it's a matter of every single American needing to register as a Republican, and fucking voting in the primaries so that we can have a real presidential election some day. Because until American becomes willing to vote third party, we're going to continue to have R or D people. So why not get some real politicians onto those two ballot slots?
That's the spirit, Limey! But of course you're wrong. Everyone should be complaining about everyone's stupid bullshit braindead maliciously-intended anti-human laws, rather than everyone having to be silent out of fear of MAD. Nobody should ever fear charges of hypocrisy. Nothing you ever say about me not having boobies on my TV, will ever make your stupid shit trademark law not be stupid shit. Now let's all go kick our governments' asses. And if you wanna keep throwing those boobies in my face, that's fine with me.
And if Sky did that, they should be crushed by a trademark claim from Microsoft. If I start selling Cajun Hell BBQ sauce and I am first to market, I shouldn't have to worry about some "Cajun Construction" business later also wanting to enter the BBQ sauce market, then taking my product name away from me.
What happened is that they were naive about the Brit's totally bullshit trademark law. Nobody, unless they're a lawyer or have done litigation with Brits in the past, would ever suspect that "SkyDrive" could possibly infringe the trademark of a company which does not sell any product or service called "SkyDrive." The Brits have an asinine law and their people need to kick their government's ass.
That said, Microsoft does have lawyers, and almost certain has litigated with Brits in the past, so they should have been informed about that country's ridiculous third world banana republic laws and the fact that you can't just do business there. They should have known that any new name must be at least 14 transformative mutations away from any other name, or else it is considered "trademark infringement."
Cool! I can definitely imagine a market for insured transactions, bonded sellers, or things like that. Maybe you're one of those people who would use it that way, for every single transaction. And there's nothing wrong with that. You would pay for it, though, just like you currently always pay for it whenever you use Visa and MasterCard.
The neat thing about Bitcoin, though, unlike Visa and MasterCard, is that you can opt differently (no insurance) whenever you want to. (Indeed, this is how (everyone AFAIK) currently uses it.) Remember that time you bought something with cash, because you didn't think you needed to pay extra for the insurance? Surely you've done it. When you think about why you chose to not pay extra in that scenario, you'll know why you might want to use Bitcoin the way that people currently do in 2013.
This is incorrect, to such a deep level that I wonder if you need to refamiliarize yourself with what Bitcoin really is. Bitcoin is the rough equivalent of the coins themselves, without any verb, whether it be "bury" or "spend." The user decides whether to spend them or save them, the same way people make such decisions with metal coins. If you're not currently burying gold in your backyard, then there is no reason to suspect that you might opt for that strategy with Bitcoin.
You're probably right. And I bet you came to the same decision, with regards to dollars in your physical wallet. I tend to lazily withdraw about $40 from my ATM whenever I use it, not $5000. Is your behavior similar? Good. I believe you have struck on an excellent strategy for limiting how badly things can possibly wrong, in the unlikely event that things go wrong. I've never been mugged and I've never had my own computer subverted, but just like you, I can imagine it possibly happening. Keep that in mind, when/if you start using Bitcoin, just like you already keep it in mind whenever you use a physical wallet containing paper money.
Unless you've found someone to sell you insurance, then you talk to the same person that you talk to, whenever you need to be reimbursed for a fraudulent transaction or loss of the paper money in your physical wallet: yourself. And you either learn from the experience, or (more likely) you have anticipated it and have to decided to either prevent it from happening, or to limit how badly it can happen. Your statements lead me to believe you have already discovered the latter approach.
I doubt it was the president's point but when you include the part about the robots, it is a good sign. The implication is that people won't have to do "crap" jobs forever. We should all look forward to the day that we hear about sweatshop jobs all the time: from our unhappy robot slaves. If I'm going to be killed by Terminators, I want them to have a reason to do it.
Wait, now we're talking about dedicated links, "hammering things," oversubscribing, something other than "reasonable usage" and "gobbling up bandwidth?" All reasonable points, and of course only 50% of users should expect to use more than average bandwidth. But I thought we were talking about servers and answering inbound connections, and utterly different topic. You're posting in the wrong story; this is the one about Google opposing home servers.
You probably don't care much about Yuan-Dollar exchange rates much either, but you sure as hell have reason to care about it!
We used to see the (approximate and debatable) 3% that Visa and Mastercard skims from nearly all sales transactions, as merely the cost of doing business, and a worthwhile expense in exchange for the service they offer. And yet, now The People have the tech to avoid that charge, so what used to be a 3% expense is considered 3% economic damage, a parasite. Most of us probably don't really have visceral bad feelings about Visa quite on the scale implied by the word "parasite" and yet, whenever you're buying a larger ticket item (a house, a car) you negotiate like hell over figures much smaller than 3%. And when I think about how much money I spent on my car, compared to how much money I have spend on fueling and maintaining my car with a plastic card, the plastic card's costs dwarf anything I ever negotiated with my car dealer. Visa and Mastercard's expenses are right there in your face, for anyone who looks into it. There's reason to move to something cheaper.
Or threaten to move to something cheaper. You don't necessarily have to do it, as long as you can prove you're willing to do it. Who knows, maybe Bitcoin is what'll get Visa merchant charges down to 0.3%. Isn't it interesting that your grandparents had the same percentage skimmed off their lives, whereas you today live in a higher tech world where the expenses of providing transactions services, are tiny by comparison.
In the end, Bitcoin is just another market force. There are plenty of indirect ones out there (exchange rates, decisions made by central banks, etc) that you don't think about much, or ever take actions on, and yet they have a profound effect on your economic well-being. It's fine to say you don't care, but for fuck's sake, don't say people don't have reason to care!
You're comparing a thing that you decide to buy, with a thing that you decide to not buy. I noticed you said "my" Yugo and "a" Mercedes. It's pretty clear who presented you with the superior offer. One of those companies was more serious about getting your money than the other.
$0, because I didn't buy one. So you're right: zero iPhones in exchange for $0 is a fair deal and I'd do it again. Same goes for a $0 Ubuntu phone: I'll take zero and be a happy customer.
This reminds me of unplayable DRMed copies of movies. Those are a fair deal for the price I pay, too ;-)
I think I can save the value in Microsoft's warehouses, but I have a question first:
Does it run Linux?
Oh. Oh. Secure what? Oh. Are you sure they have ARMs? Oh. And they really wrote that into the contract? Ok. I see.
Never mind, these paperweights are worthless and cannot be saved.
Imagine that! People get bored with "Ow! My Balls!" by the third episode.
What's so great about countries?
Emphasis mine. That's like saying someone doesn't smoke, despite being a doctor.
[Devil's Advocate]
Let's say you fly your radio controlled plane into a bridge with a small explosive, in plain view by many people. The charge goes off, leaving a dark sooty mark on some concrete.
What happens after that?
The bridge is closed. It's not damaged, but it's closed, while people both irrationally over-react and maybe rationally "just check to make sure."
And there's a traffic jam. And the UPS driver fails to make his delivery containing the Prime Minister's Wife's birthday gift, which the Prime Minister next-day-shipped the previous day when he suddenly remembered his wife's birthday. She dumps him. He falls into an alcoholic depression, says "what does anything matter?" and he launches a full scale nuclear attack on the neighboring country, using his secret stockpile of old V2 rockets and the super-secret resulting weapons from the heavy water experiments.
The fallout drifts back toward the launching country, and a stray beta particle hits one of the Prime Minister's constituents' DNA molecules. Did I mention this constituent is a mere 5-hour-old zygote? It grows into a mutant three-testicled lad, who is later mocked and ridiculed by another kid in the school locker room. Angered by the unprovoked and insensitive remark, the young lad takes note of the ethnicity of the other kid, and he forms a demented hypothesis.
30 years later, the Fourth Reich marches across Europe. They are eventually defeated, but the cost of the war eventually persuades the voters to vote fundamentally differently.
Mission: Destabilize State. Status: Complete.
Geez, talk about stretching the meaning of "such as." The whole point of this is that it lets you play it in the browser by installing a proprietary single-source plugin. Sure, you can argue that your plugin isn't "like" Sliverlight or Flash, just like Microsoft might say Silverlight is also not a plugin like Flash, and Adobe might argue that Flash is not a plugin like Java. And the guy serving malware on porn sites might argue his video codec is not a malware plugin like the other ones are. "My plugin takes spam-sending orders from this botnet, not that botnet! See? It's totally different!"
That is exactly how these extensions are not plugins like Flash or Silverlight. In other words: totally meaningless bullshit. It's just another plugin, which happens to use a newer API.
Lie all you want about it not being a plugin, but the lie is pretty transparent and does more to discredit the speaker than it does to really deceive anyone.
Everyone, let's make this our quest of the day: find the Buddhist asshole.
*sigh* Wacky beliefs without any foundation in observations, is not what makes Scientology special. Mainstream religions make assertions that are no less crazy that the above.
What makes it special, is its specific behavior and techniques, not its paranormal beliefs. A "church" becomes a "cult" much like how a murderer becomes a "terrorist," by working within some narrow definitions that people decided are unusually bad, rather than mundanely bad.
Body Thetans don't exist and people who say they do are full of shit, but it's not any different sort of bullshit, than the son of a virgin feeling better a few days after his crucifixion, talking snakes, lake-of-fire-afterlife vs a different afterlife, and so on. If you happen to not enjoy the myths within Scientology that's cool, but that's not the right reason to hate 'em. Hate them because they're evil people.
Don't tell them "you're crazy if you believe that nonsense," tell them "fuck you, asshole." I know plenty of Christians who by definition (it's what makes them Christians) believe stuff that is just as wacked. But unlike Scientologists, these people mean well so they deserve a shitload of slack. Not everyone who is delusional, is a sociopath.