Hey now, Chernobyl I can agree with, but Fukushima? I don't think the accident that happened there was in any way shape or form a result of human stupidity. You could make the arguement that human stupidity played a part in the aftermath and cleanup efforts (I don't think it did, but that's beside the point), but unlike Chernobyl, the damage to the Fukushima nuclear plant was not caused by the staff having no idea what they were doing.
That said, mass extinction would probably be good for the species as a whole (albeit pretty lousy for the people who didn't make it). As a species we've grown fat and lazy, we go to great lengths to preserve the life of those who carry unfavorable genes that would otherwise die out given natural selection, are instead allowed to procreate, creating further generations of people with unfavorable genes. We 'waste' our limited resources feeding and caring for the infirm, who cannot legitimately support themselves. A forest fire does a lot of damage to the vegetation, but the plants that survive are that much stronger for it.
Has anyone here *REALLY*, and I mean *REALLY* used bitcoin to trade anything valuable? Ever?"
I bought about $100 worth of used video games with it. I don't know if you'd consider that valuable, but I certainly enjoyed them. Frankly the only reason any fiat currency has value is because someone (usually a government) says it does. Frankly as long as people are willing to assign a value to bitcoins they have value. It's just like people who buy/sell WoW gold, as long as there's a market for it it has value.
Surprise! People are using money for something illegal, that's never been done with any other form of currency before. The only thing even remotely notable about using bitcoin instead of say a prepaid visa card, is it's a harder to trace down the source/destination of the funds.
Can I still blame Facebook and other social media sites for the gradual acceptance of butchered English? Since Zuckerberg doesn't seem like he goes around shortening 'cause' to 'cuz', leaving 'I' as 'i' and neglecting punctuation wherever possible; can I still put part of the blame on him when it becomes proper 'english' to open a formal letter with 'sup', and close it with 'holla back'?
Last time I was in a radio shack (last week), their Virgin Mobile phones were $30 more than they were at Best Buy.
Frankly that's retail for you, one store won't always have the best prices, and if you're willing to shop around then generally you can save a buck or 3. I'm sure there was a time when the situations were reversed.
All the same; not everyone has the time or willingness to shop around like that. To many people the possibility of saving $30 isn't worth the time that they have to spend going from store to store (or even web site to web site), especially when there's no garuntee of how much cheaper they'll be able to find it, or how much time they'll spend going from place to place.
Plus many people value the personal touch, you go to a big retailer and even if you can find an associate to help you, chances are they know fairly little about the products. Ever try to buy a TV from wal-mart? In a smaller store like Radioshack or Ace's there's a lot more employee presence. Maybe that's not important to everyone, there's plenty of people out there who like to do their own research, and determine their own needs (and frankly these sort of people are the kind that hate sales people in general), but there are also plenty of people who have no idea of the difference between an LCD tv and a plasma, and want to talk to an 'expert' who can explain it to them.
Frankly, it's expensive to run a store front. Especially if the only volume you do is $3 parts. Sure there may be a huge markup on parts at Radioshack, but $200 in parts sales (meaning a ludicrus amount for most Radioshack locations) per day won't get the bills paid. Even if you assume 90% profit margin, once you've paid your employees you'd be lucky to have 30 bucks left over to pay for all the other store expenses for that day. Frankly Radioshack NEEDS the cell phone business.
Consider this, on average only 1 in 30 customers at Radioshack purchase a wireless phone. Yet that 3% of customers result in 35% of Radioshack's sales. Is it any wonder that they're trying to strengthen that business, even to the detriment of the DIY crowd? Frankly I think Radioshack is willing to sacrifice $10 worth of random, generally slow moving parts sales (that are only really of interest to a niche group) in favor of $500 cellular sales that they can market to anyone.
Disclaimer: yes I work for Radioshack, and frankly I love helping DIY people build wierd shit, but frankly I understand why the company is going the way it is.
For the Record, yes I do work for Radioshack, but this is legitimate advice:
If you would have qualified for the 1 year upgrade before 6/30, but lost it due to sprint changing their Premier program's rules, Sprint gave Radioshack people authorization to do a one time over ride and give you the full upgrade pricing. You have to actually go into the store, and probably have to ask about the overide but I've done it for several customers so there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get an overide too.
Now to put this to work mining bitcoins!
Wait you mean there are legitimate reasons to have racks of supercomputing GPU's other than to solve arbitrary math problems in the name of psuedocurrency?
They're not really capping your bandwidth, even the 200mb per month plan technically allows for unlimited data transfer. What they're doing is throttling your speed down to EDGE instead of HSPA+ once you hit your 'cap'. If you happen to actually need higher data speeds than edge for more than 200mb per month, then t-mobile offers higher tiered data options.
Frankly I wish most cellular companies offered that sort of flexibility in their data offerings.
What company? There is no central authority to bitcoin, in fact even if the creator went offline and stopped all development bitcoin would continue to operate. Once bitcoin was released into the wild there was about as much ability to control the network as apple has on the new york stock exchange.
So how long until this becomes practical on a personal scale? I really want to see someone's ipod solar edition get stuck to a metal guardrail until the sun goes down.
I was under the impression that mandatory data plans function as a way for the carrier to make back the share of the phone they paid for.
Then why don't more U.S. carriers copy T-Mobile's "Even More Plus" plan and give a discount on plans designed for phones purchased up-front?
Because the average US consumer looks at the whole $400-$600 price tag of a high end smart phone purchased without a contract and says 'no way in hell am I paying that for a phone'
The US consumers have become so used to subsidised phones that the majority of them aren't all that interested in spending big bucks for a good piece of hardware.
The ones that are usually end up going prepaid anyways since the current prepaid offerings are almost universally a better deal than the equivelent post paid set up.
This is not exactly new, they've been working on this for a while now. The only thing stopping them from putting armor plating on it and turning it into power armor is the battery life of the suit. Even with the most expensive batteries we can manufacture, there's a maximum opperational time of about 30 minutes on the XOS-2 when disconnected from an external power source.
Needing to be plugged in to operate sort of limits their military applications to grunt work and MAYBE defensive deployments. Still if someone can work out the power issues, functional and deployable power armor is really only a manufacturing run away.
I prefer the 'choice cuts', or rather, I used to prefer the choice cuts before I found out what it was made out of. Now I eat a diet exclusively of soylent green.
Certainly true, unfortunately things rarely work that way in the real world, I mean look at how much the switch over to ATSC digital TV broadcast from the old analog NTSC system got screwed up. Even with the whole government inititive to get people the converter boxes, the switch wasn't exactly smooth or easy, even though there was plenty of advance notice.
From personal experience, I can say there were a LOT of very upset people who used to pick up analog broadcasts just fine but had insufficient signal strength for the digital feeds. Granted that probably had more to do with networks abandoning VHF frequencies for UHF ones, but I'm sure there were plenty of cases of 'fuzzy' analog stations that were still watchable falling off the digital cliff.
As an employee for a major electronics retailer, I can see that this whole situation is going to be brutal on the general internet going public, but more importantly it's going to be brutal on me when I have to try and explain to grandma Jones why her internet doesn't work right anymore on her 10 year old computer and how she's going to have to buy a new router/modem/network card/computer.
People don't want to deal with ugly inconvienent stuff like the switch to ipv6 (no matter how needed it might be) they just want their stuff to work. I really hope this transition goes a lot smoother than it looks like it's going to, but I don't have a lot of faith that it will.
Even if we do convert to a nuclear based power structure, it's only a matter of time before we run out of uranium. As long as we're dependant upon some non-renewable energy source it's just a matter of time before energy production peaks and we're no longer able to obtain the fuel we need for all of our everyday things, not the least of them being the production and transportation of food.
The only solution really is to either develop an energy infrastructure which does not rely on oil, or some other non-renewable energy source. Any thing else is just delaying the inevitible collapse, when resources are no longer relatively cheap and freely available.
But won't someone please think of the little codelings! All that legacy code they'd have to delete to do make longhorn run efficiently, it'd be Codeocide, we'd have millions of lines of little codelings who's legacy ancestors were deleted cause they're no longer needed.
Won't someone please think of all the poor little codelings! Without their elders around to tell them about how they had to climb uphill both ways up the system bus to quiery Interupt 9, we'll have 1337 h4xor gangs of code all over the place, selling their spam, and spreading their viri all over the place.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, mass extinction would probably be good for the species as a whole (albeit pretty lousy for the people who didn't make it). As a species we've grown fat and lazy, we go to great lengths to preserve the life of those who carry unfavorable genes that would otherwise die out given natural selection, are instead allowed to procreate, creating further generations of people with unfavorable genes. We 'waste' our limited resources feeding and caring for the infirm, who cannot legitimately support themselves. A forest fire does a lot of damage to the vegetation, but the plants that survive are that much stronger for it.
Has anyone here *REALLY*, and I mean *REALLY* used bitcoin to trade anything valuable? Ever?"
I bought about $100 worth of used video games with it. I don't know if you'd consider that valuable, but I certainly enjoyed them. Frankly the only reason any fiat currency has value is because someone (usually a government) says it does. Frankly as long as people are willing to assign a value to bitcoins they have value. It's just like people who buy/sell WoW gold, as long as there's a market for it it has value.
Here you go, granted it's a Tor hidden service, so you'll either have to use TOR or a tor2web proxy like this to read it, but you wanted an example.
Surprise! People are using money for something illegal, that's never been done with any other form of currency before. The only thing even remotely notable about using bitcoin instead of say a prepaid visa card, is it's a harder to trace down the source/destination of the funds.
Can I still blame Facebook and other social media sites for the gradual acceptance of butchered English? Since Zuckerberg doesn't seem like he goes around shortening 'cause' to 'cuz', leaving 'I' as 'i' and neglecting punctuation wherever possible; can I still put part of the blame on him when it becomes proper 'english' to open a formal letter with 'sup', and close it with 'holla back'?
Last time I was in a radio shack (last week), their Virgin Mobile phones were $30 more than they were at Best Buy.
Frankly that's retail for you, one store won't always have the best prices, and if you're willing to shop around then generally you can save a buck or 3. I'm sure there was a time when the situations were reversed.
All the same; not everyone has the time or willingness to shop around like that. To many people the possibility of saving $30 isn't worth the time that they have to spend going from store to store (or even web site to web site), especially when there's no garuntee of how much cheaper they'll be able to find it, or how much time they'll spend going from place to place.
Plus many people value the personal touch, you go to a big retailer and even if you can find an associate to help you, chances are they know fairly little about the products. Ever try to buy a TV from wal-mart? In a smaller store like Radioshack or Ace's there's a lot more employee presence. Maybe that's not important to everyone, there's plenty of people out there who like to do their own research, and determine their own needs (and frankly these sort of people are the kind that hate sales people in general), but there are also plenty of people who have no idea of the difference between an LCD tv and a plasma, and want to talk to an 'expert' who can explain it to them.
Consider this, on average only 1 in 30 customers at Radioshack purchase a wireless phone. Yet that 3% of customers result in 35% of Radioshack's sales. Is it any wonder that they're trying to strengthen that business, even to the detriment of the DIY crowd? Frankly I think Radioshack is willing to sacrifice $10 worth of random, generally slow moving parts sales (that are only really of interest to a niche group) in favor of $500 cellular sales that they can market to anyone.
Disclaimer: yes I work for Radioshack, and frankly I love helping DIY people build wierd shit, but frankly I understand why the company is going the way it is.
If you would have qualified for the 1 year upgrade before 6/30, but lost it due to sprint changing their Premier program's rules, Sprint gave Radioshack people authorization to do a one time over ride and give you the full upgrade pricing. You have to actually go into the store, and probably have to ask about the overide but I've done it for several customers so there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get an overide too.
They're at a university and they live on caffeine. So they're just like any other university student right?
Now to put this to work mining bitcoins!
Wait you mean there are legitimate reasons to have racks of supercomputing GPU's other than to solve arbitrary math problems in the name of psuedocurrency?
They're not really capping your bandwidth, even the 200mb per month plan technically allows for unlimited data transfer. What they're doing is throttling your speed down to EDGE instead of HSPA+ once you hit your 'cap'. If you happen to actually need higher data speeds than edge for more than 200mb per month, then t-mobile offers higher tiered data options. Frankly I wish most cellular companies offered that sort of flexibility in their data offerings.
What company? There is no central authority to bitcoin, in fact even if the creator went offline and stopped all development bitcoin would continue to operate. Once bitcoin was released into the wild there was about as much ability to control the network as apple has on the new york stock exchange.
So how long until this becomes practical on a personal scale? I really want to see someone's ipod solar edition get stuck to a metal guardrail until the sun goes down.
Warning Goatse Link, I'd mod down if I had mod points
I was under the impression that mandatory data plans function as a way for the carrier to make back the share of the phone they paid for.
Then why don't more U.S. carriers copy T-Mobile's "Even More Plus" plan and give a discount on plans designed for phones purchased up-front?
Because the average US consumer looks at the whole $400-$600 price tag of a high end smart phone purchased without a contract and says 'no way in hell am I paying that for a phone'
The US consumers have become so used to subsidised phones that the majority of them aren't all that interested in spending big bucks for a good piece of hardware.
The ones that are usually end up going prepaid anyways since the current prepaid offerings are almost universally a better deal than the equivelent post paid set up.
This is not exactly new, they've been working on this for a while now. The only thing stopping them from putting armor plating on it and turning it into power armor is the battery life of the suit. Even with the most expensive batteries we can manufacture, there's a maximum opperational time of about 30 minutes on the XOS-2 when disconnected from an external power source. Needing to be plugged in to operate sort of limits their military applications to grunt work and MAYBE defensive deployments. Still if someone can work out the power issues, functional and deployable power armor is really only a manufacturing run away.
I prefer the 'choice cuts', or rather, I used to prefer the choice cuts before I found out what it was made out of. Now I eat a diet exclusively of soylent green.
I for one welcome our new android overlords.
Microsoft and Adobe are now going to be Microbe, I always suspected they virus'
Certainly true, unfortunately things rarely work that way in the real world, I mean look at how much the switch over to ATSC digital TV broadcast from the old analog NTSC system got screwed up. Even with the whole government inititive to get people the converter boxes, the switch wasn't exactly smooth or easy, even though there was plenty of advance notice.
From personal experience, I can say there were a LOT of very upset people who used to pick up analog broadcasts just fine but had insufficient signal strength for the digital feeds. Granted that probably had more to do with networks abandoning VHF frequencies for UHF ones, but I'm sure there were plenty of cases of 'fuzzy' analog stations that were still watchable falling off the digital cliff.
As an employee for a major electronics retailer, I can see that this whole situation is going to be brutal on the general internet going public, but more importantly it's going to be brutal on me when I have to try and explain to grandma Jones why her internet doesn't work right anymore on her 10 year old computer and how she's going to have to buy a new router/modem/network card/computer. People don't want to deal with ugly inconvienent stuff like the switch to ipv6 (no matter how needed it might be) they just want their stuff to work. I really hope this transition goes a lot smoother than it looks like it's going to, but I don't have a lot of faith that it will.
. . . Great Balls of Fire
I for one welcome our new android overlords
Even if we do convert to a nuclear based power structure, it's only a matter of time before we run out of uranium. As long as we're dependant upon some non-renewable energy source it's just a matter of time before energy production peaks and we're no longer able to obtain the fuel we need for all of our everyday things, not the least of them being the production and transportation of food.
The only solution really is to either develop an energy infrastructure which does not rely on oil, or some other non-renewable energy source. Any thing else is just delaying the inevitible collapse, when resources are no longer relatively cheap and freely available.
I advise everyone to read over this website if they get a free moment, it'll be well worth your time http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
But won't someone please think of the little codelings! All that legacy code they'd have to delete to do make longhorn run efficiently, it'd be Codeocide, we'd have millions of lines of little codelings who's legacy ancestors were deleted cause they're no longer needed. Won't someone please think of all the poor little codelings! Without their elders around to tell them about how they had to climb uphill both ways up the system bus to quiery Interupt 9, we'll have 1337 h4xor gangs of code all over the place, selling their spam, and spreading their viri all over the place.