Not "centuries" -- just 141 years. The first attempt at paper money without a backing (Continental) was a resounding failure, and everyone reverted to "pieces of eight" as a stable currency. Real (ie, non-Real:p) dollar started existing only in 1792, and was stable until the US defaulted in 1933. Backing where you neither can exchange for the thing that it's supposedly backed with, and where the rate changes at the issuer's whim, is no backing. This pretense was dispensed of in 1971, and you can see how dollar's value goes since then.
Tomorrow someone can find a flaw in the system and liquidate everybody's value. And there's nothing you can do.
And what, pray tell, will happen when your Dear Leader decides to print oodles of money to pay for the wall -- or, a Democrite after him wants some cash for handouts?
Both dollar and crypto currencies are fiat money, and the latter at least can't be manipulated by the side that stands to gain the most from such manipulation.
"herbatka", always with an adjective. Same eg with butter: maslo vs maselko. Even cities get faked: Lwów vs Lwówek Slaski -- this matters as the former used to (and still does) make good beer, while the fake makes mostly swill.
According to the article, there are 37 exceptions out of 230 languages. Tea, with its two principal words, is actually above the average compared to a typical word for something that was unknown to the world at large until early modern times.
You can look this up by picking a word, going to its Wikipedia article, and hovering the mouse over the list of translations.
Let's take for example "aluminium". While variations are bigger than merely correct -nium vs US -num, it's obvious that all languages other than Buryat/Mongol, Czech/Polish/Slovak, nv, Kurdish, Malagasy, Runa Simi, za and possibly some scripts I can't read (not Latin/Cyrillic/Greek) come from a single root.
Well yeah, it's just a single data point. But it's a data point that's obvious to an average voter, not just scientifically minded people like you and me. That's why I continued with that "war on Christmas" remark.
Also, the number of locales that changed from consistent snow to consistent positive temperatures is so overwhelming compared to the number of locales with the opposite, that it's a valid argument by itself.
Well, when I was a kid, there was snow every single Christmas. Last several years in a row, not a speck of snow. This makes it a bit of hard to argue GW isn't real.
So here, you can argue that the oil companies are waging a War on Christmas...
5.99 inches (no indication if land, nautical, survey or avoirdupois ones). That $599 you're quoting is retail price (still $399 preorder days before shipping, so the retail might change). Not sure if this is a coincidence or intentional.
A 5.99 inches screen might already be too big for comfortable typing while handheld (N900 is 3.5), 13.3 requires you to sit with a solid surface to put it on.
The article advertises a "smartphone-style laptop", while there's nothing phoney about that big thing.
You know a technology is really ubiquitous when even a tech news site switches to it. Maybe, perhaps, I will see working Unicode on Slashdot within my lifetime. For dig -t AAAA slashdot.org returning something else than NXDOMAIN, though, my hopes are not so high.
I can't understand why superhero movies are so popular? Who, over 12 years old, is going to see them?
Sturgeon's law applies to everything, including people. And that 90% is an underestimate.
Obviously, because of Dunning-Kruger, I don't trust my assessment of myself, either. There's only a few niches where I have confidence of my ability being above the "crap" level, and film critic is not one of them.
But, regardless of whether or not I can adequately judge the quality of a particular movie, I also see that, with people who are not total morons being a small minority, almost all of money comes from tailoring the product for morons. Thus, Hollywood movies are utter crap not because of a lack of ability of its creators but because their purpose is to make as much money as possible.
Someone can steal physical media from you (ie, a licensed (or not) recording), but can't steal copyright (ie, intangible monopoly rights).
The definition of theft requires two elements:
taking of someone else's property without consent
with the intent to deprive the owner
It's easy to steal a physical medium, but uncommon to steal copyright. For this, you need enough clout to effectively ban the author from distributing the work on his/her own, then distribute it yourself.
A small-time crook may have luck with a fraudulent DMCA/DMCA-like takedown, but it's MAFIAA members who file takedowns in the millions, with no heed to their accuracy (or sometimes with intentional malice). They also don't follow laws they themselves bought when it comes to distributing works.
Thus, nearly all instances of copyright theft is committed by this small group of companies. They also have the gall to label their propaganda organizations with names such as FACT.
Please tell me how theft would be good. As we're talking about copyright, the only theft (deprivation of property) here happens when one of the companies GP listed issue fraudulent DMCA/equivalent takedowns, not letting authors share and benefit from their own work, while the company claims the rights with impunity.
The quality of meat in many parts of the world is quite poor. Meat in China is not high quality, and they eat parts of the animal that westerners wouldn't like the feet of chickens
Actually, eating that meat is better for you than purely muscle meat. See for example cat food: manufacturers add bone ash to it to avoid nutritional deficiencies. Natural cat food (ie, a tit or a mouse) gets eaten whole (save for biggest flight feathers): bones, guts, connective tissue, plumage, beak -- everything, this includes substances absent or scarce in regular meat.
Thus, Chinese meat-eating diet is better than ours.
Nope, only some populations are genetically equipped for a vegetarian diet. For the rest, lack of meat causes brain shrinkage and mental disorders. And populations that originated from Europe tend to lack such genes -- and some, like the Inuit, are even more extreme.
That's vegetarian -- vegan diet is far more harmful. Especially for children, to the point of proposed bills that outlaw feeding children vegan.
64bit instruction set is faster than 32bit instruction set
Except that 64 bit sucks big time on x86. The amd64 ABI fares better than i386 only because the latter has to keep a ridiculously inefficient calling convention and similar constraints for compat reasons. If you try a modern ABI such as x32, it wins over amd64 by something like 40% in code that benefits from this, or around 7% overall.
64-bit does have other advantages, such as bigger address space, but speed is not one, at least not on x86.
Also, pointer size (which is what matters here) doesn't preclude having instructions that handle more than word size. 8086 had 32-bit MUL/DIV, x32 ABI allows 64-bit integers, modern x86 processors have 128-bit floating point, etc.
Costs you quoted include all the externalities that other sources of energy get to offload to human health, animal health and so on. Nuclear is the only one that is required to cover anything that could possibly have resulted from it, including a good heap of nuke-haters' paranoia.
Wind doesn't require fuel (besides inefficiently mooching from a fusion reactor a few light minutes away), but requires maintenance (each turbine generates little power) and a lot of land. It also causes a lot of bird deaths and so on.
And that is the reason people are building wind and not nuclear.
Funny that -- after subsidies were lowered, suddenly 70% of wind generators in Poland produce a net loss, and that's just ongoing costs for already constructed turbines.
You mean, beside being the safest source of energy, even including those 1960s reactors still in use? And that's by quite a margin above renewables.
If you count in the cost of externalities, it's also among the cheapest. For an iBooks-to-OPiPCs comparison, put a condom on every coal chimney and store both pollutants and CO2 forever (they don't decay with time like nuclear waste does) -- and only then we can talk about being fair.
Down-vote this comment if you hate puppies and children!
As a matter of fact, I do hate both: puppies are a larval form of an ugly yapping creature that might be a danger for a member of the Master Species caught away from a fence/tree -- and seeing what's happening to my brother and sister, I in no way want to get twenty years with no sleep or quiet.
But, I can't both down-mod (per your request) and up-mod ("funny") the same post.
Please look up the word "racist" in a dictionary. It would be also nice if you looked up "idiot", and researched cases when use of this word in a discussion is appropriate.
So if I decide to say I'm a doctor and dress as one, I get to perform surgeries? Or if that mental hospital inmate tells you he's Napoleon Bonaparte, should he get to rule France?
Call a spade a spade. Appeasing delusions of someone with working long-term memory is never the right thing to do.
"gender studies" is not a religion. Leftist ideology is not a religion.
They merely don't identify as a religion.
Let me tell you my biggest childhood formative moment. It was triggered by banner shapes.
Communism in Poland fell when I was in early elementary school, yet I still got to be forced to attend a Labor Day parade. By then, even the threat was degraded (instead of "anyone missing without a valid excuse will be expelled from school" it was down to "will have semester's grade lowered") but we still had to go. Then, a few years later, there were Corpus Christi parades. By the letter of law not mandatory, but a kid who didn't attend still received strong verbal chew-out. Both parades looked the same: a guy blabbing something through loudspeakers, the public chanting slogans, dozens of people carrying banners of a specific shape. The very same shape, only the images and texts changed.
Scripture? Check (works of Marx, Engels and Lenin). Clergy? Check. Rituals? Check. Portraits of prophets and saints everywhere? Check. Proselitysm? Check. Hatred for unbelievers? Big fat check.
So if the community standards and wishes means they prefer to rely on religion, superstition and other make-beliefs mumbo-jumbo, science has to stand aside?
Well yes, you have "gender studies" taught in schools. All that changes is which religion gets to get taught.
My wild guess is for Christianity to have slowed scientific progress by ~1500 years. Leftist ideologies are much younger, but already have overtaken Christianity's death count (180M to 100M) -- but then, if you take together the sum of Abrahamic faiths, the race is about neck-to-neck.
Flags and slogans change, sanctimonious self-righteous anti-scientific ideologies continue to rule.
I can't currently play on Linux one way or another over plain old VGA so I'm not sure why I would knowing install this patch?
That's the entire point -- to make you unable to play some shit over that plain old VGA (or DVI, HDMI or that hacked 18-pin GPIO display).
You got that neat tidy tent, currently devoid of camel shit. This nose definitely shouldn't be let in, considering how many other tents that particular camel defecated into.
Don't forget disabling all existing privacy extensions. Oh, and mails you get from Mozilla are pure gold: "Keep trackers off your trail" blah blah "evade tracking technology" blah blah "https://click.e.mozilla.org/?qs=e7bb0dcf14b1013fca3820..."
Slashdot Mirror
dollars have centuries of stability
Not "centuries" -- just 141 years. The first attempt at paper money without a backing (Continental) was a resounding failure, and everyone reverted to "pieces of eight" as a stable currency. Real (ie, non-Real :p) dollar started existing only in 1792, and was stable until the US defaulted in 1933. Backing where you neither can exchange for the thing that it's supposedly backed with, and where the rate changes at the issuer's whim, is no backing. This pretense was dispensed of in 1971, and you can see how dollar's value goes since then.
Tomorrow someone can find a flaw in the system and liquidate everybody's value. And there's nothing you can do.
And what, pray tell, will happen when your Dear Leader decides to print oodles of money to pay for the wall -- or, a Democrite after him wants some cash for handouts?
Both dollar and crypto currencies are fiat money, and the latter at least can't be manipulated by the side that stands to gain the most from such manipulation.
The line "97% of all bitcoins are held by 4% of addresses," is completely uninformed.
And how many of USD are held by how many of owners.?
A great deal of that 97% is bitcoins held on exchanges
or banks.
Hmm, I wonder if Warren Buffett should have an idea about either of these.
"herbatka", always with an adjective. Same eg with butter: maslo vs maselko. Even cities get faked: Lwów vs Lwówek Slaski -- this matters as the former used to (and still does) make good beer, while the fake makes mostly swill.
According to the article, there are 37 exceptions out of 230 languages. Tea, with its two principal words, is actually above the average compared to a typical word for something that was unknown to the world at large until early modern times.
You can look this up by picking a word, going to its Wikipedia article, and hovering the mouse over the list of translations.
Let's take for example "aluminium". While variations are bigger than merely correct -nium vs US -num, it's obvious that all languages other than Buryat/Mongol, Czech/Polish/Slovak, nv, Kurdish, Malagasy, Runa Simi, za and possibly some scripts I can't read (not Latin/Cyrillic/Greek) come from a single root.
Well yeah, it's just a single data point. But it's a data point that's obvious to an average voter, not just scientifically minded people like you and me. That's why I continued with that "war on Christmas" remark.
Also, the number of locales that changed from consistent snow to consistent positive temperatures is so overwhelming compared to the number of locales with the opposite, that it's a valid argument by itself.
Well, when I was a kid, there was snow every single Christmas. Last several years in a row, not a speck of snow. This makes it a bit of hard to argue GW isn't real.
So here, you can argue that the oil companies are waging a War on Christmas...
5.99 inches (no indication if land, nautical, survey or avoirdupois ones). That $599 you're quoting is retail price (still $399 preorder days before shipping, so the retail might change). Not sure if this is a coincidence or intentional.
A 5.99 inches screen might already be too big for comfortable typing while handheld (N900 is 3.5), 13.3 requires you to sit with a solid surface to put it on.
The article advertises a "smartphone-style laptop", while there's nothing phoney about that big thing.
Phone with a big screen and decent keyboard? Sounds great.
13.3 is not a phone, it's a laptop with a modem. For a phone, you're looking for this, at 5.99.
You know a technology is really ubiquitous when even a tech news site switches to it. Maybe, perhaps, I will see working Unicode on Slashdot within my lifetime. For dig -t AAAA slashdot.org returning something else than NXDOMAIN, though, my hopes are not so high.
I can't understand why superhero movies are so popular? Who, over 12 years old, is going to see them?
Sturgeon's law applies to everything, including people. And that 90% is an underestimate.
Obviously, because of Dunning-Kruger, I don't trust my assessment of myself, either. There's only a few niches where I have confidence of my ability being above the "crap" level, and film critic is not one of them.
But, regardless of whether or not I can adequately judge the quality of a particular movie, I also see that, with people who are not total morons being a small minority, almost all of money comes from tailoring the product for morons. Thus, Hollywood movies are utter crap not because of a lack of ability of its creators but because their purpose is to make as much money as possible.
Someone can steal physical media from you (ie, a licensed (or not) recording), but can't steal copyright (ie, intangible monopoly rights).
The definition of theft requires two elements:
It's easy to steal a physical medium, but uncommon to steal copyright. For this, you need enough clout to effectively ban the author from distributing the work on his/her own, then distribute it yourself.
A small-time crook may have luck with a fraudulent DMCA/DMCA-like takedown, but it's MAFIAA members who file takedowns in the millions, with no heed to their accuracy (or sometimes with intentional malice). They also don't follow laws they themselves bought when it comes to distributing works.
Thus, nearly all instances of copyright theft is committed by this small group of companies. They also have the gall to label their propaganda organizations with names such as FACT.
Yeah, theft is both good and bad.
Please tell me how theft would be good. As we're talking about copyright, the only theft (deprivation of property) here happens when one of the companies GP listed issue fraudulent DMCA/equivalent takedowns, not letting authors share and benefit from their own work, while the company claims the rights with impunity.
The quality of meat in many parts of the world is quite poor. Meat in China is not high quality, and they eat parts of the animal that westerners wouldn't like the feet of chickens
Actually, eating that meat is better for you than purely muscle meat. See for example cat food: manufacturers add bone ash to it to avoid nutritional deficiencies. Natural cat food (ie, a tit or a mouse) gets eaten whole (save for biggest flight feathers): bones, guts, connective tissue, plumage, beak -- everything, this includes substances absent or scarce in regular meat.
Thus, Chinese meat-eating diet is better than ours.
Nope, only some populations are genetically equipped for a vegetarian diet. For the rest, lack of meat causes brain shrinkage and mental disorders. And populations that originated from Europe tend to lack such genes -- and some, like the Inuit, are even more extreme.
That's vegetarian -- vegan diet is far more harmful. Especially for children, to the point of proposed bills that outlaw feeding children vegan.
64bit instruction set is faster than 32bit instruction set
Except that 64 bit sucks big time on x86. The amd64 ABI fares better than i386 only because the latter has to keep a ridiculously inefficient calling convention and similar constraints for compat reasons. If you try a modern ABI such as x32, it wins over amd64 by something like 40% in code that benefits from this, or around 7% overall.
64-bit does have other advantages, such as bigger address space, but speed is not one, at least not on x86.
Also, pointer size (which is what matters here) doesn't preclude having instructions that handle more than word size. 8086 had 32-bit MUL/DIV, x32 ABI allows 64-bit integers, modern x86 processors have 128-bit floating point, etc.
Costs you quoted include all the externalities that other sources of energy get to offload to human health, animal health and so on. Nuclear is the only one that is required to cover anything that could possibly have resulted from it, including a good heap of nuke-haters' paranoia.
Wind doesn't require fuel (besides inefficiently mooching from a fusion reactor a few light minutes away), but requires maintenance (each turbine generates little power) and a lot of land. It also causes a lot of bird deaths and so on.
And that is the reason people are building wind and not nuclear.
Funny that -- after subsidies were lowered, suddenly 70% of wind generators in Poland produce a net loss, and that's just ongoing costs for already constructed turbines.
Humans + Nuclear power is just bad news.
You mean, beside being the safest source of energy, even including those 1960s reactors still in use? And that's by quite a margin above renewables.
If you count in the cost of externalities, it's also among the cheapest. For an iBooks-to-OPiPCs comparison, put a condom on every coal chimney and store both pollutants and CO2 forever (they don't decay with time like nuclear waste does) -- and only then we can talk about being fair.
Down-vote this comment if you hate puppies and children!
As a matter of fact, I do hate both: puppies are a larval form of an ugly yapping creature that might be a danger for a member of the Master Species caught away from a fence/tree -- and seeing what's happening to my brother and sister, I in no way want to get twenty years with no sleep or quiet.
But, I can't both down-mod (per your request) and up-mod ("funny") the same post.
So not only are you racist but an idiot.
Please look up the word "racist" in a dictionary. It would be also nice if you looked up "idiot", and researched cases when use of this word in a discussion is appropriate.
So if I decide to say I'm a doctor and dress as one, I get to perform surgeries? Or if that mental hospital inmate tells you he's Napoleon Bonaparte, should he get to rule France?
Call a spade a spade. Appeasing delusions of someone with working long-term memory is never the right thing to do.
"gender studies" is not a religion. Leftist ideology is not a religion.
They merely don't identify as a religion.
Let me tell you my biggest childhood formative moment. It was triggered by banner shapes.
Communism in Poland fell when I was in early elementary school, yet I still got to be forced to attend a Labor Day parade. By then, even the threat was degraded (instead of "anyone missing without a valid excuse will be expelled from school" it was down to "will have semester's grade lowered") but we still had to go. Then, a few years later, there were Corpus Christi parades. By the letter of law not mandatory, but a kid who didn't attend still received strong verbal chew-out. Both parades looked the same: a guy blabbing something through loudspeakers, the public chanting slogans, dozens of people carrying banners of a specific shape. The very same shape, only the images and texts changed.
Scripture? Check (works of Marx, Engels and Lenin). Clergy? Check. Rituals? Check. Portraits of prophets and saints everywhere? Check. Proselitysm? Check. Hatred for unbelievers? Big fat check.
So if the community standards and wishes means they prefer to rely on religion, superstition and other make-beliefs mumbo-jumbo, science has to stand aside?
Well yes, you have "gender studies" taught in schools. All that changes is which religion gets to get taught.
My wild guess is for Christianity to have slowed scientific progress by ~1500 years. Leftist ideologies are much younger, but already have overtaken Christianity's death count (180M to 100M) -- but then, if you take together the sum of Abrahamic faiths, the race is about neck-to-neck.
Flags and slogans change, sanctimonious self-righteous anti-scientific ideologies continue to rule.
I can't currently play on Linux one way or another over plain old VGA so I'm not sure why I would knowing install this patch?
That's the entire point -- to make you unable to play some shit over that plain old VGA (or DVI, HDMI or that hacked 18-pin GPIO display).
You got that neat tidy tent, currently devoid of camel shit. This nose definitely shouldn't be let in, considering how many other tents that particular camel defecated into.
They didn't disable all of the existing privacy extensions.
All that I'm using; I find no replacements that are at feature parity. The API to reimplement them for webext aren't there.
Don't forget disabling all existing privacy extensions. Oh, and mails you get from Mozilla are pure gold: "Keep trackers off your trail" blah blah "evade tracking technology" blah blah "https://click.e.mozilla.org/?qs=e7bb0dcf14b1013fca3820..."