Sure Bitcoin's value fluctuates compared to currency. Sure interchanges between hard currency and Bitcoin will likely be regulated (Bitcoin itself, of course, cannot be regulated in any useful manner)........... It's not anonymous in the sense that it absolutely can't be tracked. Hell, the blockchain is public, and the US Government, with FINTRAC, can most definitely see the money going in and/or out. (See above re: regulation.)
This is just one of the many paradoxes with Bitcoin. As you say, public perception is that this is an anonymous, unregulate-able, untraceable currency. Instead what we are seeing is a panopticon prone to speculative shocks and whose origins and now (post-NSA revelations) even basic algorithms are suspect.
The speed with which the mainstream has leaped aboard the Bitcoin bus has colored me skeptical. I don't believe that Bitcoin will survive widespread adoption intact.
If you can name a mathematician who is credited with developing the core structure of mathematics itself, who is NOT on this list, there is a cookie in it for you.
Absolutely. Having been born and raised in the "Bible Belt" I can attest first-hand to how very proud some people are of their ignorance and lack of education.
You expect them to be ashamed of it? To go around their whole lives feeling inferior and vulnerable because they weren't able to pass tests, or worse, never had the opportunity to?
What you may want to complain about are people who have no respect for education. But be aware that there are those who have no respect for lack of education either.
When these kids grow up, I wonder whether they would be able to get a job at NASA in Houston.
If Houston/NASA becomes a hotbed of ignorance fueled cronyism, corruption, and office politics, then yes, they will be able to get a job there. Spacecraft will fall out of the sky all around the facility, but they will get employment regardless.
Arguably, this has already happened at NASA management level.
The FCC's job here is to create rules to promote safety. If it's an annoyance issue then the airlines should be the ones making rules about it.
If this annoyance leads to air rage incidents, flight diversions, passenger stress/ panic attacks and more flight diversions, will it become the FCC's job to look at it then?
Keep in mind the FCC's rules goven the flights of billions every single year. That's a lot of places for yapping on cell phones to become a problem.
CFL's take about 30 seconds to come to full brightness. At full brightness, they are still dimmer than incandesants. These are in fact, actual issues with the tecnology.
Computer aided automation is not universally more cost efficient, or efficient in general. In fact, a lot of the time, computer automation is little more than an excuse to overpay the corporate class bonuses and consultation fees. See also: SAP installations.
Amen. My all time most watched videos on Youtube are video game Lets Plays. The prospect of these suddenly being plastered all over my Google+ profile is the reason I will never, ever use G+ in any professional or real name context so long as I live.
The alternative to this being that we as a species is doomed to forever live on a single world, and slowly but surely deplete all natural resources available to us here and then eventually die out and vanish forever.
Perhaps. But there is absolutely nothing stopping us from launching probes laden with colonising microorganisms at potentially life supporting planets. This is feasible with current technology even if generation ships lie forever out of practical reach.
Given the way our biological technologies are advancing, it's not unthinkable that we may actually be able to tailor microorganisms to survive and thrive on other exoplanets that aren't earth-like.
Of course, bombarding alien-life bearing planets with aggressive tailored colonizing bacteria is likely to lead to problems all of its own. But if it turns out that we really are the only life bearing planet in the universe, then I'd argue that such pan-spermia operations are actually quite feasible for even our present civilisation.
There is a local hospital where the keypad code (1234) for the 'Doctors Entrance' hasn't changed in 23 years, because the doctors refuse to remember their own 4-digit code
Why is there even a code on the Doctor's enterance in the first place? The Doctor's have enough to be concerned with without someone elses technological "solution" getting in their way.
Once I smirked at people who wrote down their passwords, but now with every second site and service needed at least once email address and passwords, the smirk has been wiped off my face.
I now have upwards of 100 passwords and logins across computers, websites, mailing lists, services, databases, devices and an increasing number of newly online ultilities. I would point to this hassle as the number one example of computers decreasing productivity.
I've remembered the most important logins, doubled up others, and now simply resorted to writing down most of the crud. Somehow the simple login became an unending beuracratic headache and the internets most common barrier.
Amen. The most used CPU architectures in the world today are directly descended from microcontroller architectures designed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, based on the work of a handful of designers. None of those designers could have planned for or envisaged their chips as being the widely used CPUs of today.
I think a better compassion is between Ford and Istagram.
The fact that you're even comparing Ford and Instagram is part of the problem. The nearest comparison with Ford is the likes of, maybe, Google. But the reality is that technology companies are a poor replacement for actual wealth producing, value adding manufacturing companies.
The problems we're experiencing aren't a consequence of technology, they're a consequence of society.
I would be more specific. These problems are a consequence of the Law.
Ultimately, it is not technology, or culture, or progress, or banks, or economics which determines how societies are shaped, run, and lived in. The ultimate shaper of society is the law.
The law determines what may be made, sold, bought, buy whom and under what conditions. It determines the conditions of labour, and set the rules, bounds, and lack of both for capital, responsibility, and influence. Rulings like Citizen's United, and Roe vs Wade show how powerfully the law can shape society in the near term and over decades.
And over the last 3 decades, the law has lead the US in particular down the path of ruin. The law has supported, promoted, and permitted globalisation and outsourcing, to the detriment of the country at large. The law has allowed amoral corporate looting and destruction of entire industries, communities, services and utilities. The law has been at the vanguard of the voraciously destructive folly known as the War and Drugs, and the law has not simply slept, but slept in bed with the continued legal outrages of the War on Terror.
The great untold scandal of the present financial-economic-political-etc crisis is that behind every crooked bank deal, behind every shady trade talk, behind every wrongful imprisonment and death stood teams of paid, professional lawyers sworn to uphold both the law and justice. And worst of all, behind every unjust decision, behind every wrongful seizure, and behind every new corporate court coup sat a judge who more so than anyone else was meant to hold the law itself to account.
So don't blame all the people. Blame the people running the system. They are the ones to blame.
Ignorance is undermining the laws of war, the laws of commerce, and every other law our society used to have. This is what happens when you allow the world to be run by frat-echnocrats in suits.
First put in place the infrastructure for censorship -- eek, porn! -- and then slide on down the slippery slope.
Censorship is about power. There is no "infrastructure" needed for censorship so much as simply giving someone the power to stand between the public and certain types of information.
Power has been granted and it is being used for the purpose it was always intended: silencing those who people in power do not like.
The public did not call for or approve blocking child pornography, obscene content, etc etc per se. The public -- and the public is to blame here more so than politicians -- approved granting power to censors to shut-up malcontents and misfits. This is what those supporting censorship actually wanted; duct tape around the mouths of Lefties, wingnuts, geeks, gays, and truth-seekers. Pornography hardly entered the equation except as an emotive wedge.
A large segment of the public supported this, and played along with the pornography red herring. This mentality of a large part of the population is rarely ever acknowledged, much less discussed or analysed. But a five minute conversation with a on an innocuous topic such as, say, lolcats, will reveal that there are a many people who would be happy with seeing the vast majority of web-pages shut-down by fiat.
Honestly Management age brackets should start at 35 years old as the YOUNGEST unless they prove themselves to be some kind of people management savant.
And how exactly are you supposed to wreck and loot entire industires if you don't put inexpierienced, ambitious, rakish young lackies in charge of them?
The CFR is a bunch of hand picked academics and fucking yes men and women drawn from previous administrations and Ivy leagues universities whose main function is to think and live and produce "solutions" within the Skinner box out of which cookies , cake and ice cream have fallen to them their whole lives
I'm saving this one for posterity. Someone needs to put this in a sig, or preferably fortune.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just one of the many paradoxes with Bitcoin. As you say, public perception is that this is an anonymous, unregulate-able, untraceable currency. Instead what we are seeing is a panopticon prone to speculative shocks and whose origins and now (post-NSA revelations) even basic algorithms are suspect.
The speed with which the mainstream has leaped aboard the Bitcoin bus has colored me skeptical. I don't believe that Bitcoin will survive widespread adoption intact.
However if you mined them directly, it would be a lot more difficult to trace ownership.
Though it would probably be easier/cheaper to launder actualy money than successfuly mine Bitcoins at this stage.
Archimedes.
Double Chocolate chip please.
You expect them to be ashamed of it? To go around their whole lives feeling inferior and vulnerable because they weren't able to pass tests, or worse, never had the opportunity to?
What you may want to complain about are people who have no respect for education. But be aware that there are those who have no respect for lack of education either.
If Houston/NASA becomes a hotbed of ignorance fueled cronyism, corruption, and office politics, then yes, they will be able to get a job there. Spacecraft will fall out of the sky all around the facility, but they will get employment regardless.
Arguably, this has already happened at NASA management level.
If this annoyance leads to air rage incidents, flight diversions, passenger stress/ panic attacks and more flight diversions, will it become the FCC's job to look at it then?
Keep in mind the FCC's rules goven the flights of billions every single year. That's a lot of places for yapping on cell phones to become a problem.
CFL's take about 30 seconds to come to full brightness. At full brightness, they are still dimmer than incandesants. These are in fact, actual issues with the tecnology.
Meanwhile, in Ireland, it was revealed today that IBM were paid 44.8m euro in consultancy fees for setting up a billing system for Irish Water, a service that will bill, at most, 3 million customers.
Computer aided automation is not universally more cost efficient, or efficient in general. In fact, a lot of the time, computer automation is little more than an excuse to overpay the corporate class bonuses and consultation fees. See also: SAP installations.
Amen. My all time most watched videos on Youtube are video game Lets Plays. The prospect of these suddenly being plastered all over my Google+ profile is the reason I will never, ever use G+ in any professional or real name context so long as I live.
Perhaps. But there is absolutely nothing stopping us from launching probes laden with colonising microorganisms at potentially life supporting planets. This is feasible with current technology even if generation ships lie forever out of practical reach.
Given the way our biological technologies are advancing, it's not unthinkable that we may actually be able to tailor microorganisms to survive and thrive on other exoplanets that aren't earth-like.
Of course, bombarding alien-life bearing planets with aggressive tailored colonizing bacteria is likely to lead to problems all of its own. But if it turns out that we really are the only life bearing planet in the universe, then I'd argue that such pan-spermia operations are actually quite feasible for even our present civilisation.
The Legal maxim is "Qui tacet consentire": "Silence gives consent".
In modern corporate legal language this translates to -- "(Consumer) Ignorence is (Our) Bliss".
Why is there even a code on the Doctor's enterance in the first place? The Doctor's have enough to be concerned with without someone elses technological "solution" getting in their way.
Once I smirked at people who wrote down their passwords, but now with every second site and service needed at least once email address and passwords, the smirk has been wiped off my face.
I now have upwards of 100 passwords and logins across computers, websites, mailing lists, services, databases, devices and an increasing number of newly online ultilities. I would point to this hassle as the number one example of computers decreasing productivity.
I've remembered the most important logins, doubled up others, and now simply resorted to writing down most of the crud. Somehow the simple login became an unending beuracratic headache and the internets most common barrier.
Yes. HSBC.
Amen. The most used CPU architectures in the world today are directly descended from microcontroller architectures designed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, based on the work of a handful of designers. None of those designers could have planned for or envisaged their chips as being the widely used CPUs of today.
Hexadecimal nothing! And you can can leave aside these tables as well. The Ancient Chinese were able to solve linear systems using Guass Elimination. Most undergraduate still aren't able to do that.
I personally suspect that many of our basic and even advanced mathematical methods are much older than we assumme. Much, much older.
The fact that you're even comparing Ford and Instagram is part of the problem. The nearest comparison with Ford is the likes of, maybe, Google. But the reality is that technology companies are a poor replacement for actual wealth producing, value adding manufacturing companies.
I would be more specific. These problems are a consequence of the Law.
Ultimately, it is not technology, or culture, or progress, or banks, or economics which determines how societies are shaped, run, and lived in. The ultimate shaper of society is the law.
The law determines what may be made, sold, bought, buy whom and under what conditions. It determines the conditions of labour, and set the rules, bounds, and lack of both for capital, responsibility, and influence. Rulings like Citizen's United, and Roe vs Wade show how powerfully the law can shape society in the near term and over decades.
And over the last 3 decades, the law has lead the US in particular down the path of ruin. The law has supported, promoted, and permitted globalisation and outsourcing, to the detriment of the country at large. The law has allowed amoral corporate looting and destruction of entire industries, communities, services and utilities. The law has been at the vanguard of the voraciously destructive folly known as the War and Drugs, and the law has not simply slept, but slept in bed with the continued legal outrages of the War on Terror.
The great untold scandal of the present financial-economic-political-etc crisis is that behind every crooked bank deal, behind every shady trade talk, behind every wrongful imprisonment and death stood teams of paid, professional lawyers sworn to uphold both the law and justice. And worst of all, behind every unjust decision, behind every wrongful seizure, and behind every new corporate court coup sat a judge who more so than anyone else was meant to hold the law itself to account.
So don't blame all the people. Blame the people running the system. They are the ones to blame.
Actually there is a multitude of groups screaming for reform, though I appreciate that the largest one labelling itself "the left" is not one of them.
It would take one BBC-esque national public broadcaster. One.
Look, please, it's not that the thought isn't appreciated... but really people should just go to the equations.
Ignorance is undermining the laws of war, the laws of commerce, and every other law our society used to have. This is what happens when you allow the world to be run by frat-echnocrats in suits.
Censorship is about power. There is no "infrastructure" needed for censorship so much as simply giving someone the power to stand between the public and certain types of information.
Power has been granted and it is being used for the purpose it was always intended: silencing those who people in power do not like.
The public did not call for or approve blocking child pornography, obscene content, etc etc per se. The public -- and the public is to blame here more so than politicians -- approved granting power to censors to shut-up malcontents and misfits. This is what those supporting censorship actually wanted; duct tape around the mouths of Lefties, wingnuts, geeks, gays, and truth-seekers. Pornography hardly entered the equation except as an emotive wedge.
A large segment of the public supported this, and played along with the pornography red herring. This mentality of a large part of the population is rarely ever acknowledged, much less discussed or analysed. But a five minute conversation with a on an innocuous topic such as, say, lolcats, will reveal that there are a many people who would be happy with seeing the vast majority of web-pages shut-down by fiat.
And how exactly are you supposed to wreck and loot entire industires if you don't put inexpierienced, ambitious, rakish young lackies in charge of them?
I'm saving this one for posterity. Someone needs to put this in a sig, or preferably fortune.