That's not quite accurate. When the citizenry is armed and responsible for their own security, they will defend their town and drive out the black people. Take a look at your history sometime...
Which is far too tiny to actually support the current exchange rate. More interestingly, unlike the US dollar, Bitcoin isn't actually backed by those resources, goods and services at all - because everyone's costs are in dollars or some other currency and because the BTC-USD exchange rate is so wildly unstable, most people that accept bitcoins actually set their prices in dollars and either use automatic scripts to generate Bitcoin prices based on the latest exchange rate or expect you to do the conversion yourself.
The e-mail system doesn't benefit from users sending spam, and you'll find that where some provider within the e-mail system does benefit from spam there's a lot of pressure to shut them down. The Bitcoin system benefits from botnets mining bitcoins because they're helping to process transactions and secure Bitcoin. For this reason you'll find quite a few users on the official forums support the idea using botnets to mine bitcoins.
Bitcoin is not actually in any way suitable for microtransactions, and if you listen to its developers rather than its promoters they make that quite clear. Due to the way Bitcoin is designed, every Bitcoin node has to keep a record of every single transaction that ever happened, and there's no way to avoid this - the best you can do is improve it so that only a handful of supernodes have to keep the full record, but even that hasn't happened yet.
There are several layers of protection to stop Bitcoin being clogged with lots of tiny transactions. Firstly, it refuses to process transactions smaller than 0.01 BTC unless you pay a 0.0005 BTC minimum processing fee (that works out at about 10 US cents and a half-cent fee respectively at current exchange rates). Secondly, there's limits both on the number of transactions processed per block and the number of no-fee transactions processed. The fee required for inclusion also increases as the block fills up, so the more transactions there are the more you have to pay to get yours processed promptly. Thirdly, there's a form of rate limiting on transactions: if you want to spend the change from a recently-processed transaction, you again have to pay a fee.
You can build micropayments on top of Bitcoins, but only in the same way as you can with dollars or any other currency: someone can set up a central micropayment service that lets users fund their accounts with larger payments and then make micropayments from their stored balance.
Facebook obviously considers it a battle. (There were even some decidely plausible rumours they were quietly stopping links users posted to Google+ from showing up anywhere other than their own profile page.)
They're just being dumb - or favouring NVidia. The tesselation support is designed to make it pretty much trivial to adapt tesselation levels based on distance. While NVidia cards can cope with ludicrous levels of tesselation and polygons, ATI cards can't - and the penalty NVidia users pay for getting this support is that their hardware offers worse price/performance on everything else, which is why NVidia are so keen for all games to use this.
(There have been similarly fishy things before. For example, some game called Hawx which NVidia were involved in created all its terrain via a massive number of tesselation steps from a tiny number of polygons. This was static terrain - which meant it was a total waste of compute power to use tesselation to recompute it every frame - and I suspect NVidia were probably cheating and computing it in their drivers once because doing so every frame would cost them a lot too.)
Last time I looked, factoring in the whole cost of the system actually made Intel look worse. Intel motherboards are generally quite a bit more expensive than AMD ones...
Cost should be related to value, though. We know that Intel could afford to sell processors running at the faster speed for $200 and make a worthwhile profit, because they did actually sell processors capable of running at that speed for that price. If the free market worked as well as its proponents claimed the rational choice for Intel would be to sell processors running at that faster speed; if they didn't someone else would make more efficient processors and crush them. (Of course, this doesn't happen because there are massive barriers to entry.)
Intel's tactics are also inefficent from an economics perspective: they're taking resources that could be used to produce a good with higher utility (the faster, uncrippled processor) and instead using them to produce one with strictly lower utility (the same processor crippled to a lower speed).
If there was functioning competition in the CPU market, that would very much force them to pass the cost savings on. This is a pretty clear sign that the market isn't working.
Oh, Bing's favouring of its own services is definitely different: it's actually worse than Google's. For example, try searching for a stock ticker symbol like GOOG; on Google you'll get a nice eye-grabbing graph of the share price along with a row of well-organised links to information about those shares on all the major websites. On Bing you still get a nice eye-grabbing graph, but the only link next to it is the one to Bing Finance; if you prefer one of the other sites you have to trawl through the search results themselves to find a link to it.
I somehow doubt that, not least because totally rewriting Webkit would require breaking a lot of stuff for no good reason. (Also, Webkit and KHTML often have the exact same bugs...)
It seems to me very much like Wayland is simple by virtue of making all the hard parts Someone Else's Problem. Want network transparency? Someone else will write an application to send individual windows over the network, and figure out a way of dealing with the fact that Wayland apps require OpenGL ES which doesn't run very fast in software and isn't designed to run over RDP. Of course, every application will have to add seperate code paths for it because Wayland uses the DRI device interface directly with no abstraction layer over the top - the developers don't care about network transparency and don't want to have to do any work to support it. Want to run your Wayland apps on anything except Linux with a modern KMS driver? Someone else will write Wayland replacements for the other platforms (because we can't be bothered dealing with bloat like portability and abstraction). Want to run them on graphics hardware that doesn't support OpenGL ES 2.0? Someone else will write fast software emulation.
Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
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· Score: 1
5FU is out of patent. The cash cows are newer patented cancer drugs. Many of them aren't even that effective (which is why the NHS here in the UK tries to refuse to pay for them, usually with little success due to media pressure) but so long as they can convince people the drugs might extend their lives by a few months...
Which is interesting, because if I'm doing my maths right they'd have to convert 1% of the total mass of the thorium into energy in order to achieve this...
Yeah - as far as I know the only Android phones that don't let you choose your search provider are the ones that Microsoft have paid providers to use Bing on...
Well, aside from all the looting and vandalism in Egypt which for some odd reason didn't get quite so widely reported. (A whole bunch of irreplacable historic artifacts got trashed, for a start.)
They're doing things like sending someone that happened to be passing a store that had been looted and stole a £3.50 pack of bottled water to jail for 4 months. They don't care whether they're actually getting the hardcore rioters, they just want to find someone - anyone - to make an example of!
Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 1
Of course, given that Osama bin Laden was killed partly due to him allowing CIA spies posing as vaccination workers into his house, blocking vaccinations is at least somewhat rational from a political perspective now if it wasn't already.
I could've sworn that Apple announced they were using exactly this technique - saving a system snapshot after the boot process had completed and resuming from it to speed up the boot process the next time around - in OS X Lion.
The Turkish version of secularism isn't exactly compatible with democracy; until recently the army were overthrowing the elected governments through coups on a regular basis. Turkey could well end up becoming more democratic thanks to the Islamic party currently in power.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not quite accurate. When the citizenry is armed and responsible for their own security, they will defend their town and drive out the black people. Take a look at your history sometime...
Last time I looked, you had to go to each games' page and block it individually. Have Facebook changed this?
Whoosh!
Not one person has been reported in the media as having a political statement. I can point to at least one person with a political statement though...
So inform us all.
Which is far too tiny to actually support the current exchange rate. More interestingly, unlike the US dollar, Bitcoin isn't actually backed by those resources, goods and services at all - because everyone's costs are in dollars or some other currency and because the BTC-USD exchange rate is so wildly unstable, most people that accept bitcoins actually set their prices in dollars and either use automatic scripts to generate Bitcoin prices based on the latest exchange rate or expect you to do the conversion yourself.
The e-mail system doesn't benefit from users sending spam, and you'll find that where some provider within the e-mail system does benefit from spam there's a lot of pressure to shut them down. The Bitcoin system benefits from botnets mining bitcoins because they're helping to process transactions and secure Bitcoin. For this reason you'll find quite a few users on the official forums support the idea using botnets to mine bitcoins.
Bitcoin is not actually in any way suitable for microtransactions, and if you listen to its developers rather than its promoters they make that quite clear. Due to the way Bitcoin is designed, every Bitcoin node has to keep a record of every single transaction that ever happened, and there's no way to avoid this - the best you can do is improve it so that only a handful of supernodes have to keep the full record, but even that hasn't happened yet.
There are several layers of protection to stop Bitcoin being clogged with lots of tiny transactions. Firstly, it refuses to process transactions smaller than 0.01 BTC unless you pay a 0.0005 BTC minimum processing fee (that works out at about 10 US cents and a half-cent fee respectively at current exchange rates). Secondly, there's limits both on the number of transactions processed per block and the number of no-fee transactions processed. The fee required for inclusion also increases as the block fills up, so the more transactions there are the more you have to pay to get yours processed promptly. Thirdly, there's a form of rate limiting on transactions: if you want to spend the change from a recently-processed transaction, you again have to pay a fee.
You can build micropayments on top of Bitcoins, but only in the same way as you can with dollars or any other currency: someone can set up a central micropayment service that lets users fund their accounts with larger payments and then make micropayments from their stored balance.
Facebook obviously considers it a battle. (There were even some decidely plausible rumours they were quietly stopping links users posted to Google+ from showing up anywhere other than their own profile page.)
They're just being dumb - or favouring NVidia. The tesselation support is designed to make it pretty much trivial to adapt tesselation levels based on distance. While NVidia cards can cope with ludicrous levels of tesselation and polygons, ATI cards can't - and the penalty NVidia users pay for getting this support is that their hardware offers worse price/performance on everything else, which is why NVidia are so keen for all games to use this.
(There have been similarly fishy things before. For example, some game called Hawx which NVidia were involved in created all its terrain via a massive number of tesselation steps from a tiny number of polygons. This was static terrain - which meant it was a total waste of compute power to use tesselation to recompute it every frame - and I suspect NVidia were probably cheating and computing it in their drivers once because doing so every frame would cost them a lot too.)
Last time I looked, factoring in the whole cost of the system actually made Intel look worse. Intel motherboards are generally quite a bit more expensive than AMD ones...
Cost should be related to value, though. We know that Intel could afford to sell processors running at the faster speed for $200 and make a worthwhile profit, because they did actually sell processors capable of running at that speed for that price. If the free market worked as well as its proponents claimed the rational choice for Intel would be to sell processors running at that faster speed; if they didn't someone else would make more efficient processors and crush them. (Of course, this doesn't happen because there are massive barriers to entry.)
Intel's tactics are also inefficent from an economics perspective: they're taking resources that could be used to produce a good with higher utility (the faster, uncrippled processor) and instead using them to produce one with strictly lower utility (the same processor crippled to a lower speed).
If there was functioning competition in the CPU market, that would very much force them to pass the cost savings on. This is a pretty clear sign that the market isn't working.
Oh, Bing's favouring of its own services is definitely different: it's actually worse than Google's. For example, try searching for a stock ticker symbol like GOOG; on Google you'll get a nice eye-grabbing graph of the share price along with a row of well-organised links to information about those shares on all the major websites. On Bing you still get a nice eye-grabbing graph, but the only link next to it is the one to Bing Finance; if you prefer one of the other sites you have to trawl through the search results themselves to find a link to it.
I somehow doubt that, not least because totally rewriting Webkit would require breaking a lot of stuff for no good reason. (Also, Webkit and KHTML often have the exact same bugs...)
It seems to me very much like Wayland is simple by virtue of making all the hard parts Someone Else's Problem. Want network transparency? Someone else will write an application to send individual windows over the network, and figure out a way of dealing with the fact that Wayland apps require OpenGL ES which doesn't run very fast in software and isn't designed to run over RDP. Of course, every application will have to add seperate code paths for it because Wayland uses the DRI device interface directly with no abstraction layer over the top - the developers don't care about network transparency and don't want to have to do any work to support it. Want to run your Wayland apps on anything except Linux with a modern KMS driver? Someone else will write Wayland replacements for the other platforms (because we can't be bothered dealing with bloat like portability and abstraction). Want to run them on graphics hardware that doesn't support OpenGL ES 2.0? Someone else will write fast software emulation.
5FU is out of patent. The cash cows are newer patented cancer drugs. Many of them aren't even that effective (which is why the NHS here in the UK tries to refuse to pay for them, usually with little success due to media pressure) but so long as they can convince people the drugs might extend their lives by a few months...
Which is interesting, because if I'm doing my maths right they'd have to convert 1% of the total mass of the thorium into energy in order to achieve this...
What that doesn't mention is that that the way Motorola and Skyhook decided to set this up - by presenting the Skyhook data as GPS data - risked contaminating Google's database with data from Skyhook that they'd have no way to identify or exclude, exposing them to a lawsuit from Skyhook...
Yeah - as far as I know the only Android phones that don't let you choose your search provider are the ones that Microsoft have paid providers to use Bing on...
Well, aside from all the looting and vandalism in Egypt which for some odd reason didn't get quite so widely reported. (A whole bunch of irreplacable historic artifacts got trashed, for a start.)
They're doing things like sending someone that happened to be passing a store that had been looted and stole a £3.50 pack of bottled water to jail for 4 months. They don't care whether they're actually getting the hardcore rioters, they just want to find someone - anyone - to make an example of!
Of course, given that Osama bin Laden was killed partly due to him allowing CIA spies posing as vaccination workers into his house, blocking vaccinations is at least somewhat rational from a political perspective now if it wasn't already.
I could've sworn that Apple announced they were using exactly this technique - saving a system snapshot after the boot process had completed and resuming from it to speed up the boot process the next time around - in OS X Lion.
The Turkish version of secularism isn't exactly compatible with democracy; until recently the army were overthrowing the elected governments through coups on a regular basis. Turkey could well end up becoming more democratic thanks to the Islamic party currently in power.