1. Destruction of property (smash your car). 2. Physical harm (smash your head). 3. Psychological harm (stalking someone).
We already have laws that cover this stuff. We have plenty of settled cases that show what is and what isn't harmful. There's always going to be room in the law for some wiggle room - and that, I think, is okay. Every situation is going to be different (which is why mandatory sentencing laws are so terrible).
If someone wants to rot their brain with a kilo of coke, well, I don't approve but I'm not going to stop that person as long as they don't present a danger to life, liberty, or property. Want to squirt some krokodil into your veins? Have at it. Enjoy your short life. Just don't dick with me.
That actually may sound cruel; after all, we know that these drugs do serious damage to a person, and we could prevent that person from hurting themselves... but, little by little, as we have seen, it becomes, "drinking that beer is harmful, you can't do it" and "reading that book is harmful, you can't do it."
The best solution is somewhere between "go snort yourself to death" and "obscene nanny state"; you can tell which side I lean towards, obviously. (o:
Paying $250k to an administrator that sits in an office all day is very likely paying far too much.
Paying $60k to some guy who has to walk up to a car, not know who is inside, not know if that person is a criminal, and not know if that person has a firearm ready to shoot once the cop approaches the window... Well. I don't think it is nearly enough.
I agree; law enforcement should be funded through standard taxes just like everything else.
If you want to fix schools, though, well. Maybe you should think twice about money being the answer to your woes. It isn't. We spend more on our schools than any other developed nation. Money, on the whole, is not the problem. The problem lies elsewhere.
I've always lived in semi-rural areas. Out here, people in general seem to appreciate the police. We're not afraid of them. We trust them. If they're talking to you it is for a good reason - and it's usually to make sure that you're alright. Every single time I've interacted with law enforcement out here it's been a positive experience. The officers really are interested in helping and just want to make sure everyone is safe.
People from the suburbs and the metro areas seem to come from a completely different section of reality. The distrust of the police is pervasive. I don't know what is wrong with urban areas - maybe it's just the population density and our brains aren't built to deal with it well - but "city folk" tend to be far more mistrustful, conspiratorial, on edge, and willing to steal/lie/try to pull one over on someone else.
Not to be conspiratorial, but here we go. The first step is to have "smart" guns that will only fire when in the hands of the owner. The second step is to require all firearms to be "smart" guns. The third step is, for everyone's safety, to combat crime, and of course for the children, is to require that all smart guns now have a kill switch. That way the government can safely disable a criminal's firearm.
Since people like Bloomberg are unable to remove firearms from the populace entirely (right now), this is the kind of thing they will push for because it will effectively give them the control they want.
What? Don't throw junk into the environment? What is this madness?!
On a serious note, that's what it should really come down to. Don't toss junk into the environment, whatever it is. We should always be trying to reduce the amount of pollutants we produce. You can even find trace amounts of antidepressants and other prescription drugs in our water supply.
There's reasonable steps that society can - and does - take to reduce pollutants, but there's still a lot of things we could be doing more about. Plastics, for example. So much is packaged in giant wads of hard plastic or shrink wrapped plastic. Is it really necessary to keep piling this crap into our landfills? What is wrong with packaging something in paper or paperboard with a bit of natural glue to hold it shut?
I don't know what USPS service you have, but in my experience:
1. USPS is rarely less expensive sending packages than FedEx or UPS. 2. USPS has slower delivery times than FedEx or UPS. 3. USPS has a much higher rate of package damage than FedEx or UPS. 4. USPS has a generally less helpful and less polite staff in the offices than FedEx or UPS.
It is inferior in every way. We can talk about delivery of letters to mailboxes, but I'm sure you know that the mailboxes on the side of the road are considered to be property of USPS. It is illegal for anyone other than USPS to deliver a letter, package, or anything else to that mailbox.
This means that if FedEx or UPS wanted to enter that business they would forced to set up secondary post boxes or deliver directly to the house by foot. I don't know how much this enters into the economics, but god dammit, that's my fucking mailbox.
I paid for it. I dug the hold. I set the post. I poured the concrete. It's my mailbox. Their dictatorial annexation of the mailbox that came from me is exceptionally douchey and for that alone USPS should be smacked upside the head.
If you have USPS service so exceptional that you find it to be truly better than all other alternatives, well, great, good for you. It just doesn't seem to mirror the experience that I and everyone else I know has.
The original idea was simply to encourage others to build their own open source laptops at home
Yeah, um, let me see, I'll just fire up my clean room and source some rare earth stuff and plug in the old CPU creator I got at the garage sale, and I can bake screens in my oven I just add some plastic and finger paint and voila!
The single biggest problem with PHP is the tendency for old code and old programmers to keep their bad habits [...] code reviews will be rushed (or nonexistent)
I would be very surprised to learn that code review quality is language dependent. I always thought it depended on one's organization and the people working on the project. I also thought that a bad programmer would be bad no matter the language, too.
Here I was, writing well-formed PHP for over a decade (I had a background in C, C++, and Java before I started with PHP), using well known software patterns, dependency injection, and other best practices, but then I read this comment. Your well thought-out and decisive commentary has certainly changed my mind.
I haven't been writing good code at all! Obviously this is the fault of the language. I've never provided a good code review either, again, because of the language. That magic quotes thing? The thing that has been discouraged for the past decade, could always disabled, has been disabled by default many years, and has been removed completely? Yup, still a problem. It's the languages fault though, PHP made me use it, even though I could turn it off!
On a serious note, PHP does have its problems, but code review quality? Come on. Complaining about an ancient, deprecated, removed feature that nobody used (it wasn't a workaround, either - it was supposed to be a convenience feature)? Saying that the language itself creates bad developers? You're really reaching.
Poor education, bad mentoring, laziness, and plain stupidity make bad developers. Bad developers make bad code reviews. Bad developers rely on crap like magic quotes. Your problem isn't with the language. It's with the people who churn out crap. Let me tell you a secret: Bad developers will be bad no matter what language they're using.
Clunky indeed. Prepending var- in front of everything? It sure looks like a hack bolted on in desperation to provide this kind of functionality. I'm afraid I might need to DIM something next. Or perhaps even PIC.
Sure, it provides some nice functionality, but the great thing about the preprocessors like SASS and LESS is that they're very flexible, generally easy to read, and very extensible.
Thing is, with the tools available, I'm not convinced that CSS variables are even necessary. Do we really want to be injecting code into a style language? Wouldn't it be better to keep things relatively simple and leave the complex things to external tools, reducing the amount of cruft that browsers "have" to support?
Do you find the story objectionable, or do you find it objectionable to find this story on Slashdot?
I agree to the former but not the latter. I think it is very, very important that these kinds of stories get LOTS of exposure. A bright light shining on the people who think this is a good idea is the best way to prevent them from taking the next step - implementing that idea.
Maybe cities just don't have the right mix of amenities, price, space, parking, and other factors to make them better places to put certain businesses.
Not to mention the higher taxes inside of cities. In Cleveland, for example, Progressive Insurance wanted to put a big office building right in downtown Cleveland. Then they looked at the taxes they would be paying. The City of Cleveland refused to make an exemption for them. That is fully within their rights, of course. Anyway, where was the office built?
Right outside of the Cleveland city limits. Close to the city, but not where they'd have to pay the extra taxes. Cleveland City Council was pissed of course but they only have themselves to blame.
This stuff matters to businesses. It affects everything they do and it affects the end cost to the customer. After all - a customer, in order to purchase a product or service, needs to pay for all of the costs required to provide that good or service. That includes taxes the business must pay. People always clamoring for more taxes on business never seem to realize that in their fervor to punish businesses for being successful, the real person who is being punished is the customer. Not the business.
In a competitive market a company cannot afford to be paying unnecessary taxes.
Businesses aren't the only things leaving NYC either; many high profile wealthy people are leaving, or have left, for the same reason. Same in California.
I can't speak to the accuracy of historic weather data or modern weather models, but I can say this:
Global Warming / Climate Change (pick one, please) alarmists do themselves an incredible amount of damage when they do the following:
1. Grossly exaggerate predictions and base everything on the worst case they can find. 2. Manipulate charts to make changes look far more significant than they really are. 3. Instantly ridicule anyone who disagrees with them on anything, even if that disagreement is valid.
Let's say for the sake of argument that all of the predictions from these weather models are 100% accurate, all of the research and data is correct, and that the climate is indeed warming because of CO2 emissions, and that the climate will warm 5 Celsius degrees in the next 200 years. Let's pretend that the science is completely perfect.
Do you see why so many people don't listen to those who are trying to push human-caused climate change?
Politics needs to be taken out of the equation. Completely. Everything needs to be 100% transparent. The science needs to be broken down in ways the average person can understand. Even if that happens, it will be decades before the damage the global warming alarmists have caused can be reversed.
Yup, I'm a nerd, but I bet I'm in great company here.
Lately I have played the following systems:
D&D 3.5 / Lots o' House Rules: Chief among them getting rid of that chaos engine known as the d20. It has been replaced by 3d6 to allow for a probability curve. Some other numbers have been adjusted. Because of the bias towards rolling 10 and 11, those feats which add +2 to skills are actually worth something!
FATE: Fate's aspect system is fantastic, and we have been incorporating it into other games as well. Had a fun time recently where I was playing a mercenary during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a small team had to infiltrate a Russian-owned (or so we thought) secret military base. We didn't find missiles - we found cloning vats full of JFKs! Oh no! Is our president even the real JFK?!
(Old) World of Darkness: Specifically Werewolf. Can't get enough of this vastly underrated game. The themes carried throughout the game as a whole are fantastic, and it reaches into all kinds of place historically and metaphysically. Besides - werewolves are cool.
Like you I imagine, I've been playing online games for a long time. I even ran a half dozen TFC / Natural Selection / CounterStrike / Half-Life Deathmatch / etc. servers for three or four years. I never found cheating to be common except for CounterStrike. For some reason that game attracted cheaters like crazy. The other games, not so much. Cheating wasn't just uncommon - it was rare.
When PunkBuster and similar products became popular it was amazing how much better I became compared to other players when playing on a protected server. (o:
VAC has, in my opinion, done a very good job overall of keeping up with the cheating crowd. I can't remember the last time I came across a player that I suspected of cheating - and having had to do detection manually by watching player behavior, I'm very confident in this.
There's a few things you can look for manually when looking for cheaters.
Your typical aimbot is easy to detect. Jump into spectator mode or whatever and pick the first person view for the selected player. Instead of the smooth movements a typical player will have, you'll see the player's aim snap to positions on a screen. It's rare to see these anymore because detection is so incredibly easy.
Driver hacks to provide see-through textures, or model hacks that have a long cross through them that extend through walls, are also pretty easy to detect by watching the player. Is someone across the map and scoring head shots through walls? Does he always seem to know where the enemy is? He's using one of these.
The interesting cheat is the second one (wall / model hacks) which allows one to see opponents behind objects, because it's not a mechanical advantage like an aim bot; it's a strategic advantage, an information advantage. It doesn't change the ability of the cheater to aim more accurately; it changes the cheater's behavior. A player without the cheat information will act as if the opponent is not there; a player with the information will.
So, you'll see tactical advances / retreats, shots fired / grenades thrown, etc. that would not occur in normal non-cheating game play. Yes; there will always be the person who gets the lucky what-the-hell shot. That happens.Sometimes more than once. What you need to look for is a consistent pattern over time that cannot be attributed to simply being "good", having a better overall strategy, or having an unusual play style.
I bet that with enough information collected it would be possible to detect this kind of behavior and flag individual players for follow-up manual inspection. It would be a fascinating bit of research, really.
Resource hacks are very dead these days, as information about resources (ammunition carried, money earned, life amount, etc.) are all stored server-side for most games. There's no way for the client to fiddle with that data.
Yes, there may be these incredible "Hypersonic" missiles, but only the people with the capability to build or purchase them will have those missiles. Everyone else will be using conventional sub-sonic missiles. Also consider the many, many missiles (hundreds of thousands? I don't know) that currently exist right now and will be used in the future.
Today's anti-missile systems will be useful for many years to come.
What about the currency is artificial? It is no more artificial than the US Dollar. One is just generated using an algorithm while the other is generated by updating a row in some bank's database or by literal printing of dollars.
Neither has an intrinsic value. The numbers in your bank account right now have no intrinsic value. They only have value because people will accept your numbers in exchange for their goods and services. Things like BitCoin are no different. It has value not because it has an inherent value, but because someone is willing to offer you other things for it.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Destruction of property (smash your car).
2. Physical harm (smash your head).
3. Psychological harm (stalking someone).
We already have laws that cover this stuff. We have plenty of settled cases that show what is and what isn't harmful. There's always going to be room in the law for some wiggle room - and that, I think, is okay. Every situation is going to be different (which is why mandatory sentencing laws are so terrible).
If someone wants to rot their brain with a kilo of coke, well, I don't approve but I'm not going to stop that person as long as they don't present a danger to life, liberty, or property. Want to squirt some krokodil into your veins? Have at it. Enjoy your short life. Just don't dick with me.
That actually may sound cruel; after all, we know that these drugs do serious damage to a person, and we could prevent that person from hurting themselves... but, little by little, as we have seen, it becomes, "drinking that beer is harmful, you can't do it" and "reading that book is harmful, you can't do it."
The best solution is somewhere between "go snort yourself to death" and "obscene nanny state"; you can tell which side I lean towards, obviously. (o:
Paying $250k to an administrator that sits in an office all day is very likely paying far too much.
Paying $60k to some guy who has to walk up to a car, not know who is inside, not know if that person is a criminal, and not know if that person has a firearm ready to shoot once the cop approaches the window... Well. I don't think it is nearly enough.
I agree; law enforcement should be funded through standard taxes just like everything else.
If you want to fix schools, though, well. Maybe you should think twice about money being the answer to your woes. It isn't. We spend more on our schools than any other developed nation. Money, on the whole, is not the problem. The problem lies elsewhere.
This must be a city thing.
I've always lived in semi-rural areas. Out here, people in general seem to appreciate the police. We're not afraid of them. We trust them. If they're talking to you it is for a good reason - and it's usually to make sure that you're alright. Every single time I've interacted with law enforcement out here it's been a positive experience. The officers really are interested in helping and just want to make sure everyone is safe.
People from the suburbs and the metro areas seem to come from a completely different section of reality. The distrust of the police is pervasive. I don't know what is wrong with urban areas - maybe it's just the population density and our brains aren't built to deal with it well - but "city folk" tend to be far more mistrustful, conspiratorial, on edge, and willing to steal/lie/try to pull one over on someone else.
Keep your cities away from me, please.
The Geese need somewhere to live, too. This stinks of homocentrism and speciesist thinking.
Not to be conspiratorial, but here we go. The first step is to have "smart" guns that will only fire when in the hands of the owner. The second step is to require all firearms to be "smart" guns. The third step is, for everyone's safety, to combat crime, and of course for the children, is to require that all smart guns now have a kill switch. That way the government can safely disable a criminal's firearm.
Since people like Bloomberg are unable to remove firearms from the populace entirely (right now), this is the kind of thing they will push for because it will effectively give them the control they want.
What? Don't throw junk into the environment? What is this madness?!
On a serious note, that's what it should really come down to. Don't toss junk into the environment, whatever it is. We should always be trying to reduce the amount of pollutants we produce. You can even find trace amounts of antidepressants and other prescription drugs in our water supply.
There's reasonable steps that society can - and does - take to reduce pollutants, but there's still a lot of things we could be doing more about. Plastics, for example. So much is packaged in giant wads of hard plastic or shrink wrapped plastic. Is it really necessary to keep piling this crap into our landfills? What is wrong with packaging something in paper or paperboard with a bit of natural glue to hold it shut?
You missed the global cooling scare of the 80s, don't forget that one. Back then we were headed for another ice age.
Stocks have no more intrinsic value than our paper currency.
Three grand is peanuts. How about spending $100,000?
What are some of the most interesting and promising recent innovations available to the home brewer?
I don't know what USPS service you have, but in my experience:
1. USPS is rarely less expensive sending packages than FedEx or UPS.
2. USPS has slower delivery times than FedEx or UPS.
3. USPS has a much higher rate of package damage than FedEx or UPS.
4. USPS has a generally less helpful and less polite staff in the offices than FedEx or UPS.
It is inferior in every way. We can talk about delivery of letters to mailboxes, but I'm sure you know that the mailboxes on the side of the road are considered to be property of USPS. It is illegal for anyone other than USPS to deliver a letter, package, or anything else to that mailbox.
This means that if FedEx or UPS wanted to enter that business they would forced to set up secondary post boxes or deliver directly to the house by foot. I don't know how much this enters into the economics, but god dammit, that's my fucking mailbox.
I paid for it. I dug the hold. I set the post. I poured the concrete. It's my mailbox. Their dictatorial annexation of the mailbox that came from me is exceptionally douchey and for that alone USPS should be smacked upside the head.
If you have USPS service so exceptional that you find it to be truly better than all other alternatives, well, great, good for you. It just doesn't seem to mirror the experience that I and everyone else I know has.
Could not agree more. Sticking Libre! on the front of everything is getting annoying.
Yeah, um, let me see, I'll just fire up my clean room and source some rare earth stuff and plug in the old CPU creator I got at the garage sale, and I can bake screens in my oven I just add some plastic and finger paint and voila!
I would be very surprised to learn that code review quality is language dependent. I always thought it depended on one's organization and the people working on the project. I also thought that a bad programmer would be bad no matter the language, too.
Here I was, writing well-formed PHP for over a decade (I had a background in C, C++, and Java before I started with PHP), using well known software patterns, dependency injection, and other best practices, but then I read this comment. Your well thought-out and decisive commentary has certainly changed my mind.
I haven't been writing good code at all! Obviously this is the fault of the language. I've never provided a good code review either, again, because of the language. That magic quotes thing? The thing that has been discouraged for the past decade, could always disabled, has been disabled by default many years, and has been removed completely? Yup, still a problem. It's the languages fault though, PHP made me use it, even though I could turn it off!
On a serious note, PHP does have its problems, but code review quality? Come on. Complaining about an ancient, deprecated, removed feature that nobody used (it wasn't a workaround, either - it was supposed to be a convenience feature)? Saying that the language itself creates bad developers? You're really reaching.
Poor education, bad mentoring, laziness, and plain stupidity make bad developers. Bad developers make bad code reviews. Bad developers rely on crap like magic quotes. Your problem isn't with the language. It's with the people who churn out crap. Let me tell you a secret: Bad developers will be bad no matter what language they're using.
Clunky indeed. Prepending var- in front of everything? It sure looks like a hack bolted on in desperation to provide this kind of functionality. I'm afraid I might need to DIM something next. Or perhaps even PIC.
Sure, it provides some nice functionality, but the great thing about the preprocessors like SASS and LESS is that they're very flexible, generally easy to read, and very extensible.
Thing is, with the tools available, I'm not convinced that CSS variables are even necessary. Do we really want to be injecting code into a style language? Wouldn't it be better to keep things relatively simple and leave the complex things to external tools, reducing the amount of cruft that browsers "have" to support?
Do you find the story objectionable, or do you find it objectionable to find this story on Slashdot?
I agree to the former but not the latter. I think it is very, very important that these kinds of stories get LOTS of exposure. A bright light shining on the people who think this is a good idea is the best way to prevent them from taking the next step - implementing that idea.
I hope you're not implying that having a (D) in charge instead of an (R) would make a difference. Both parties are full of filth.
Not to mention the higher taxes inside of cities. In Cleveland, for example, Progressive Insurance wanted to put a big office building right in downtown Cleveland. Then they looked at the taxes they would be paying. The City of Cleveland refused to make an exemption for them. That is fully within their rights, of course. Anyway, where was the office built?
Right outside of the Cleveland city limits. Close to the city, but not where they'd have to pay the extra taxes. Cleveland City Council was pissed of course but they only have themselves to blame.
This stuff matters to businesses. It affects everything they do and it affects the end cost to the customer. After all - a customer, in order to purchase a product or service, needs to pay for all of the costs required to provide that good or service. That includes taxes the business must pay. People always clamoring for more taxes on business never seem to realize that in their fervor to punish businesses for being successful, the real person who is being punished is the customer. Not the business.
In a competitive market a company cannot afford to be paying unnecessary taxes.
Businesses aren't the only things leaving NYC either; many high profile wealthy people are leaving, or have left, for the same reason. Same in California.
I can't speak to the accuracy of historic weather data or modern weather models, but I can say this:
Global Warming / Climate Change (pick one, please) alarmists do themselves an incredible amount of damage when they do the following:
1. Grossly exaggerate predictions and base everything on the worst case they can find.
2. Manipulate charts to make changes look far more significant than they really are.
3. Instantly ridicule anyone who disagrees with them on anything, even if that disagreement is valid.
Let's say for the sake of argument that all of the predictions from these weather models are 100% accurate, all of the research and data is correct, and that the climate is indeed warming because of CO2 emissions, and that the climate will warm 5 Celsius degrees in the next 200 years. Let's pretend that the science is completely perfect.
Even if all of that is true, you will find a lot of people who won't even bother listening because they remember crazy predictions like "New York city will be underwater in 20 years!" and "We're all going to be cannibals! Cannibals, I say!"
Do you see why so many people don't listen to those who are trying to push human-caused climate change?
Politics needs to be taken out of the equation. Completely. Everything needs to be 100% transparent. The science needs to be broken down in ways the average person can understand. Even if that happens, it will be decades before the damage the global warming alarmists have caused can be reversed.
Yup, I'm a nerd, but I bet I'm in great company here.
Lately I have played the following systems:
D&D 3.5 / Lots o' House Rules: Chief among them getting rid of that chaos engine known as the d20. It has been replaced by 3d6 to allow for a probability curve. Some other numbers have been adjusted. Because of the bias towards rolling 10 and 11, those feats which add +2 to skills are actually worth something!
FATE: Fate's aspect system is fantastic, and we have been incorporating it into other games as well. Had a fun time recently where I was playing a mercenary during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a small team had to infiltrate a Russian-owned (or so we thought) secret military base. We didn't find missiles - we found cloning vats full of JFKs! Oh no! Is our president even the real JFK?!
(Old) World of Darkness: Specifically Werewolf. Can't get enough of this vastly underrated game. The themes carried throughout the game as a whole are fantastic, and it reaches into all kinds of place historically and metaphysically. Besides - werewolves are cool.
Like you I imagine, I've been playing online games for a long time. I even ran a half dozen TFC / Natural Selection / CounterStrike / Half-Life Deathmatch / etc. servers for three or four years. I never found cheating to be common except for CounterStrike. For some reason that game attracted cheaters like crazy. The other games, not so much. Cheating wasn't just uncommon - it was rare.
When PunkBuster and similar products became popular it was amazing how much better I became compared to other players when playing on a protected server. (o:
VAC has, in my opinion, done a very good job overall of keeping up with the cheating crowd. I can't remember the last time I came across a player that I suspected of cheating - and having had to do detection manually by watching player behavior, I'm very confident in this.
There's a few things you can look for manually when looking for cheaters.
Your typical aimbot is easy to detect. Jump into spectator mode or whatever and pick the first person view for the selected player. Instead of the smooth movements a typical player will have, you'll see the player's aim snap to positions on a screen. It's rare to see these anymore because detection is so incredibly easy.
Driver hacks to provide see-through textures, or model hacks that have a long cross through them that extend through walls, are also pretty easy to detect by watching the player. Is someone across the map and scoring head shots through walls? Does he always seem to know where the enemy is? He's using one of these.
The interesting cheat is the second one (wall / model hacks) which allows one to see opponents behind objects, because it's not a mechanical advantage like an aim bot; it's a strategic advantage, an information advantage. It doesn't change the ability of the cheater to aim more accurately; it changes the cheater's behavior. A player without the cheat information will act as if the opponent is not there; a player with the information will.
So, you'll see tactical advances / retreats, shots fired / grenades thrown, etc. that would not occur in normal non-cheating game play. Yes; there will always be the person who gets the lucky what-the-hell shot. That happens.Sometimes more than once. What you need to look for is a consistent pattern over time that cannot be attributed to simply being "good", having a better overall strategy, or having an unusual play style.
I bet that with enough information collected it would be possible to detect this kind of behavior and flag individual players for follow-up manual inspection. It would be a fascinating bit of research, really.
Resource hacks are very dead these days, as information about resources (ammunition carried, money earned, life amount, etc.) are all stored server-side for most games. There's no way for the client to fiddle with that data.
Sell it. I don't need the world's biggest laser. I'd much rather have the money.
Yes, there may be these incredible "Hypersonic" missiles, but only the people with the capability to build or purchase them will have those missiles. Everyone else will be using conventional sub-sonic missiles. Also consider the many, many missiles (hundreds of thousands? I don't know) that currently exist right now and will be used in the future.
Today's anti-missile systems will be useful for many years to come.
What about the currency is artificial? It is no more artificial than the US Dollar. One is just generated using an algorithm while the other is generated by updating a row in some bank's database or by literal printing of dollars.
Neither has an intrinsic value. The numbers in your bank account right now have no intrinsic value. They only have value because people will accept your numbers in exchange for their goods and services. Things like BitCoin are no different. It has value not because it has an inherent value, but because someone is willing to offer you other things for it.