I'm not trying to say Bitcoin is the answer. It does appear to be the exchanges that are having problems and not the currency itself though.
The real point I want to make is that FDIC insurance has a limit. So if a bank goes under and loses all the money of the people that have put their money into that bank, each account only gets back $250,000. So people who have millions of dollars in the bank will lose out just the same as people who left their Bitcoins in Mt Gox. And in the FDIC case it is all legal, so there is no hope (however slight) that law enforcement might try to get it back for you.
In the end it just leads to shows like "Game of Thrones" being the most torrented show of all history. If they don't want to get their product to customers then the black market will find a way. That's where their thinking fails. They don't realize that they are still competing with the black market even if they try to eliminate their other more legal competition.
The human brain isn't a random network of neurons that gets trained into adulthood. If you take two random people and give them the same stimulus, they're going to use the same regions of the brain to respond to it, generally speaking. The part of your brain that recognizes faces is the same as the part of my brain which does this (well, several parts most likely).
There is some degree of flexibility around how it is wired as we grow, but if you have a stroke in the region of the brain that handles vision you're not suddenly going to regain your sight after 20 years of training and rewiring.
And then you have the things we are still learning about how these parts of the brain are used. There was an article here an slashdot a week or two ago where someone made a device that creates sounds from the images taken from a camera. Blind people were learning to navigate around rooms and objects and even learning to recognize people with the sounds created. Anyway, the interesting part was the parts of the brain that were active in decoding the sounds was the vision parts of the brain. So even though the input was coming through the ears, the fact that it was being decoded into visual data meant that part of the brain gets activated. We don't understand how our brain does than yet, so it will probably be quite a while before AI is that flexible.
With hindsight Zuckerberg made no mistake. But for every Zuckerberg who drops out and makes Billions anyway, there many more with equally good ideas that tried a similar path, and through worse luck ended up going bust. Anecdotes are not data.
Yeah, it sounds similar to saying that playing the lottery makes sense because you can look at the few people who win. It wasn't a bad idea for those winners to spend all that money playing the lottery so it must not be a bad idea for all the losers to play either, no matter how much money they lose.
If they are so extremely lucky, then why would they be facing poverty after 28 years? If their works were so popular that they are one of the top earners then they should have millions in the bank by then.
If you don't count infant death, then the life expectancy has not been increasing. The number of young people who die as infants or young children has gone down and that makes the average life expectancy go up. Other than that, the typical number of years that a healthy person would live after they have grown to an adult has not changed.
And perhaps that is why nobody will believe the people who say how safe all these shots are. Next thing you will see is vaccine for toe nail fungus. And these pro-vaxxers will still be claiming it is child abuse to allow them to possibly get toe nail fungus because they didn't get a vaccine.
You trying to tell me to get unknown things injected into myself is a much more real threat and I would not hesitate to kill you if you were coming at me with a needle.
So you are proposing that we make a car-accident vaccine and force everybody to get it. I have an anti-tiger rock to sell you, can I get a law made that will force everybody to buy my anti-tiger rocks so we don't end up with an infestation of tigers in our country!
This person actually know what they are talking about. It is quite strange to see so many people who usually appear to be quite intelligent acting so stupidly every time the issue of vaccines comes up. Autism isn't even the issue, it the over use of all drugs. If we were discussing the overuse of antibacterials that create the super bugs would people be demanding that we make a law requiring everybody to bathe in the antibacterial chemicals?
There are useful vaccines. Some of the ones they want to push into very young children are to stop an illness that is as harmful as getting a cold. And you are accepting the possible harmful effects from the vaccine as well as the weakening of that child's immune system in the bargain. And some of the new ones, Gardasil, can actually increase your risk of cervical cancer by 44% according to the maker Merck. But that's an acceptable trade off so we can ensure more money makes it into the hands of the elite and powerful.
The best you can do is look at each vaccine independently to see if it looks worth it. Balance the risk and effects of the disease against the particular vaccine and it's effects. Once vaccine's are mandated by law then where is the line. Are we going to end up with everybody forced to get vaccines against something almost impossible to contract where the side effects from the vaccine itself is quite high? The vaccine maker would not care, it's money in their pocket and they are immune from lawsuits to boot!
Sure, go move to a communist country if you want that. I'm sure the rulers in North Korea would love to inject everybody with zombie producing drugs that you don't have the right to refuse.
Yea, more likely to die from a bee sting because we vaccinate against it. Statistically, you are more likely to die from measles than a bee sting if you haven't been vaccinated against measles. These stupid douches are endangering their children's lives; it is child neglect/child abuse and they should be prosecuted as such.
I am pretty sure you are just making stuff up with this statement. And this is why the anti-vaxxers don't believe you pro-vaxxers. You keep lying all the time.
The people who need to be punished are the conmen who promote the anti-vaccine agenda..
But we will let the pro-vaccine con-men off the hook. Because they work for large corporations and pay lots of bribes. . . er, contributions to the lawmakers.
Vaccines have their place. But requiring them for all people by law is a bit much. Especially when you look at how many drugs are passed by the FDA that have had their studies faked or covered up to make them look safer and more effective than they actually are. We are constantly learning about another drug that has major harmful side effects that the company knew about but kept quiet. If everyone was required to get those drugs we would be having even more health problems than we do now. The vaccine studies are lies also. The effectiveness of one of the commonly given childhood vaccines has just come out that it isn't what the company claims it is and hasn't been for over 50 years. So we are giving something that is as effective as a placebo, but that does have possible harmful side effects. I don't see that as being a good thing. Are you aware that the HPV vaccine Gardasil can increase your risk of cervical cancer by over 44%? Merck's own research and filing with the FDA for approval gives that bit of information. And you want any and every vaccine that some company can come up with and claim with their own tests is effective and safe to be required by law? What kind of thought process is that? You must be from the newer generations that are taught not to think for yourself and to do what your rulers tell you to do. Go stand in a radiation scanner until you are sterile so you can save the rest of the population from more like you!
Actually even telling stories and showing pictures of the sick kids does not work. A recent story on NPR from last week covered this topic. The study looked at people's likelihood to get vaccinations. And after the people were given information about how the vaccines do not cause autism, and they actually believed the information, they were still less likely to get vaccinations for their kids. Other groups tried other methods like showing pictures of sick kids and in all the cases the likelihood after giving more information about vaccines made them less likely to get the vaccines. So from that study the best thing to do is nothing. But perhaps there is another way to get through to people that the study did not try. http://www.npr.org/2014/03/04/...
No, the United States has a negative birth rate. The only reason the population is not dropping is due to people emigrating to the country. This is why you hear the news every so often about how the minorities will be the largest population (thus no longer minorities, even though they will still be called that for political reasons) by 2020 or whatever date they give.
As someone who has never had kids, I find it offensive and idiotic when people use this bullshit excuse to shut down a debate. I've never existed in a two dimensional universe, but that doesn't stop me from talking about basic geometry. To suggest that only direct experience qualifies one to take up any subject of discourse is absurd and wrong.
In the context of parents talking down to non-parents, it makes you guys look stupid. Being a parent is stressful, exhausting, and unpredictable. It's not rocket surgery. You don't have some sort of magical insight into things unfathomable to the rest of us. Unwarranted elitism is comical from the outside looking in.
It's not that it is rocket surgery or that you are only allowed to think about this stuff if you are a parent. It's that the things are not really as you imagine them before you have kids. I can remember several things we planned on for a new youngun. But once they come along, and they have their own personality and do things the way they want to, you change your views on what to expect. You cannot reason with them, that's for sure. They are very interested in learning about things, so you can use that to your advantage. But I have learned not to expect anything to be how I imagine it anymore and to adapt to the situation at hand. One example we faced was potty training. We tried logic and reason, we tried the lure of the big girl underwear, what finally worked was bribery with wrapped 10 cent toys each time she went or stickers for trying. Before hand, we derided bribery as weak parenting and thought it would be a bad way to go. In our case it worked out really well. It gave her the motivation needed to learn to go and she didn't get spoiled by needing the presents afterwards. We are definitely not the "get the kid what they want at the store" parents and she does not have tantrums and problems like that, so to hear me advocating bribing with toys even sounds weird to me still. That's basically what it come to. You don't live in the two dimensional universe, but can imagine one. It would be much harder for the two dimensional being to imagine the third dimension. Having your first kid puts you into the third dimension.
My idea of use in the auto mechanic was simply handing me tools while I'm under the car or help lifting heavy items or something. There are lots of simple things a very basic bot could do. I do think a humanoid bot will be too expensive for a very long time, but ultimately that is the most useful shape for general interacting with the world we built for ourselves.
I just think it is quite short sighted to say that humaniform robots have no use. They may be too expensive right now, but as with all tech the price will come down. Everything we interact with was designed to be used by a human shaped person. If we need to make our environment and tools more useful for a robot to use then it gets less useful for us to use. If instead we make the robots able to use our environment and tools, then they have a pre-existing world to put to use.
But a robot that needed the track could not help out in the garden, or help carry the paving stones when laying the sidewalk outside. And since I didn't expect it to be needed in the garage, it can't even get in there to help me with auto repairs. I would have to install a new track going into the garage for the one instance where I might like some help in there. With such limitations on a robot, it would just be easier to not have one. Use the money spent on the robot and tracks and other upgrades needed for the house to pay a servant instead as they would be able to do anything I wanted them to do.
And what if the next years robot helper needed a different retrofit to the house. So every few years you have to do a whole new update to the buildings to get them able to use the latest robots. Imagine pulling cable through to all the rooms in your house. Then years later you now need to pull CAT5. Then, when even higher speeds are needed you need to pull fiber-optic. If the robot can use the existing infrastructure then no updates are needed. What if your robot comes with you to a place that hasn't been updated? A humanoid robot can easily fit in the seat of an existing car, no need to buy a trailer or take up the bed of a truck. The humanoid robot can use my cordless drill, no need to buy specialty robot drill attachment. (Of course, with the way companies like to make things non-compatible, they will make the special robot drill attachment anyway.) The humanoid robot could load an unload a dishwasher, or do them in a sink just like a person. No special equipment needed. Then they could put them into the cupboards easily.
There's a reason the press shies away from it. Mental health organizations have guidelines and recommendations on how to report responsibly on suicides.
The absolute worst is reporting on the contents of, or even mentioning, a note, because then people who are on the edge / suicidal think "Ah, I can get my letter published too!"
This sounds absurd, but it's well demonstrated that suicides are "infectious", and reports in the media about a suicide can cause others who are close to do it themselves. It's one of the reasons, after a suicide in a school/workplace/community, you see an immediate effort made to make resources available to everyone else.
These are the reasons I think the press needs to stop reporting on the suicide by school shooting rampage that many people are copying. If you give these people attention then other depressed people might start to think that it is a way to get attention for themselves. It doesn't seem to matter that the attention comes after they are dead, they do it anyway.
(It's like the thing you're searching for always being in the last place you look. It's not Murphy's law, It's because, when you find it, you stop looking.)
That is a nice trite little phrase, but when one thinks about if for a minute you can see situations where it is not always true. Sometimes the thing was in the first place you looked for it, but you failed to notice it or overlooked it for some reason. I find this happens to me often when hunting a geocache. I have developed good instincts to where they may be hidden and look in the most likely places. When the cases come up where I still haven't found it and have to keep looking over the object or area at ground zero I will start to look in other more creative places. Then sometimes it turns out it was where I looked in the first place but it was disguised or camouflaged enough to not be noticeable. So it wasn't the last place I looked, but the first or second or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not trying to say Bitcoin is the answer. It does appear to be the exchanges that are having problems and not the currency itself though.
The real point I want to make is that FDIC insurance has a limit. So if a bank goes under and loses all the money of the people that have put their money into that bank, each account only gets back $250,000. So people who have millions of dollars in the bank will lose out just the same as people who left their Bitcoins in Mt Gox. And in the FDIC case it is all legal, so there is no hope (however slight) that law enforcement might try to get it back for you.
The title of this article points out that you can get a DRM-free copy from pirate bay. And it takes no money at all.
In the end it just leads to shows like "Game of Thrones" being the most torrented show of all history. If they don't want to get their product to customers then the black market will find a way. That's where their thinking fails. They don't realize that they are still competing with the black market even if they try to eliminate their other more legal competition.
The human brain isn't a random network of neurons that gets trained into adulthood. If you take two random people and give them the same stimulus, they're going to use the same regions of the brain to respond to it, generally speaking. The part of your brain that recognizes faces is the same as the part of my brain which does this (well, several parts most likely).
There is some degree of flexibility around how it is wired as we grow, but if you have a stroke in the region of the brain that handles vision you're not suddenly going to regain your sight after 20 years of training and rewiring.
And then you have the things we are still learning about how these parts of the brain are used. There was an article here an slashdot a week or two ago where someone made a device that creates sounds from the images taken from a camera. Blind people were learning to navigate around rooms and objects and even learning to recognize people with the sounds created. Anyway, the interesting part was the parts of the brain that were active in decoding the sounds was the vision parts of the brain. So even though the input was coming through the ears, the fact that it was being decoded into visual data meant that part of the brain gets activated. We don't understand how our brain does than yet, so it will probably be quite a while before AI is that flexible.
With hindsight Zuckerberg made no mistake. But for every Zuckerberg who drops out and makes Billions anyway, there many more with equally good ideas that tried a similar path, and through worse luck ended up going bust. Anecdotes are not data.
Yeah, it sounds similar to saying that playing the lottery makes sense because you can look at the few people who win. It wasn't a bad idea for those winners to spend all that money playing the lottery so it must not be a bad idea for all the losers to play either, no matter how much money they lose.
If they are so extremely lucky, then why would they be facing poverty after 28 years? If their works were so popular that they are one of the top earners then they should have millions in the bank by then.
If you don't count infant death, then the life expectancy has not been increasing. The number of young people who die as infants or young children has gone down and that makes the average life expectancy go up. Other than that, the typical number of years that a healthy person would live after they have grown to an adult has not changed.
And perhaps that is why nobody will believe the people who say how safe all these shots are. Next thing you will see is vaccine for toe nail fungus. And these pro-vaxxers will still be claiming it is child abuse to allow them to possibly get toe nail fungus because they didn't get a vaccine.
You trying to tell me to get unknown things injected into myself is a much more real threat and I would not hesitate to kill you if you were coming at me with a needle.
So you are proposing that we make a car-accident vaccine and force everybody to get it. I have an anti-tiger rock to sell you, can I get a law made that will force everybody to buy my anti-tiger rocks so we don't end up with an infestation of tigers in our country!
This person actually know what they are talking about. It is quite strange to see so many people who usually appear to be quite intelligent acting so stupidly every time the issue of vaccines comes up. Autism isn't even the issue, it the over use of all drugs. If we were discussing the overuse of antibacterials that create the super bugs would people be demanding that we make a law requiring everybody to bathe in the antibacterial chemicals?
There are useful vaccines. Some of the ones they want to push into very young children are to stop an illness that is as harmful as getting a cold. And you are accepting the possible harmful effects from the vaccine as well as the weakening of that child's immune system in the bargain. And some of the new ones, Gardasil, can actually increase your risk of cervical cancer by 44% according to the maker Merck. But that's an acceptable trade off so we can ensure more money makes it into the hands of the elite and powerful.
The best you can do is look at each vaccine independently to see if it looks worth it. Balance the risk and effects of the disease against the particular vaccine and it's effects. Once vaccine's are mandated by law then where is the line. Are we going to end up with everybody forced to get vaccines against something almost impossible to contract where the side effects from the vaccine itself is quite high? The vaccine maker would not care, it's money in their pocket and they are immune from lawsuits to boot!
Sure, go move to a communist country if you want that. I'm sure the rulers in North Korea would love to inject everybody with zombie producing drugs that you don't have the right to refuse.
Yea, more likely to die from a bee sting because we vaccinate against it. Statistically, you are more likely to die from measles than a bee sting if you haven't been vaccinated against measles. These stupid douches are endangering their children's lives; it is child neglect/child abuse and they should be prosecuted as such.
I am pretty sure you are just making stuff up with this statement. And this is why the anti-vaxxers don't believe you pro-vaxxers. You keep lying all the time.
The people who need to be punished are the conmen who promote the anti-vaccine agenda..
But we will let the pro-vaccine con-men off the hook. Because they work for large corporations and pay lots of bribes. . . er, contributions to the lawmakers.
In Italy, if you fail to predict an earthquake you go to prison. Not my kind of place.
Vaccines have their place. But requiring them for all people by law is a bit much. Especially when you look at how many drugs are passed by the FDA that have had their studies faked or covered up to make them look safer and more effective than they actually are. We are constantly learning about another drug that has major harmful side effects that the company knew about but kept quiet. If everyone was required to get those drugs we would be having even more health problems than we do now. The vaccine studies are lies also. The effectiveness of one of the commonly given childhood vaccines has just come out that it isn't what the company claims it is and hasn't been for over 50 years. So we are giving something that is as effective as a placebo, but that does have possible harmful side effects. I don't see that as being a good thing. Are you aware that the HPV vaccine Gardasil can increase your risk of cervical cancer by over 44%? Merck's own research and filing with the FDA for approval gives that bit of information. And you want any and every vaccine that some company can come up with and claim with their own tests is effective and safe to be required by law? What kind of thought process is that? You must be from the newer generations that are taught not to think for yourself and to do what your rulers tell you to do. Go stand in a radiation scanner until you are sterile so you can save the rest of the population from more like you!
Actually even telling stories and showing pictures of the sick kids does not work. A recent story on NPR from last week covered this topic. The study looked at people's likelihood to get vaccinations. And after the people were given information about how the vaccines do not cause autism, and they actually believed the information, they were still less likely to get vaccinations for their kids. Other groups tried other methods like showing pictures of sick kids and in all the cases the likelihood after giving more information about vaccines made them less likely to get the vaccines. So from that study the best thing to do is nothing. But perhaps there is another way to get through to people that the study did not try. http://www.npr.org/2014/03/04/...
No, the United States has a negative birth rate. The only reason the population is not dropping is due to people emigrating to the country. This is why you hear the news every so often about how the minorities will be the largest population (thus no longer minorities, even though they will still be called that for political reasons) by 2020 or whatever date they give.
As someone who has never had kids, I find it offensive and idiotic when people use this bullshit excuse to shut down a debate. I've never existed in a two dimensional universe, but that doesn't stop me from talking about basic geometry. To suggest that only direct experience qualifies one to take up any subject of discourse is absurd and wrong.
In the context of parents talking down to non-parents, it makes you guys look stupid. Being a parent is stressful, exhausting, and unpredictable. It's not rocket surgery. You don't have some sort of magical insight into things unfathomable to the rest of us. Unwarranted elitism is comical from the outside looking in.
It's not that it is rocket surgery or that you are only allowed to think about this stuff if you are a parent. It's that the things are not really as you imagine them before you have kids. I can remember several things we planned on for a new youngun. But once they come along, and they have their own personality and do things the way they want to, you change your views on what to expect. You cannot reason with them, that's for sure. They are very interested in learning about things, so you can use that to your advantage. But I have learned not to expect anything to be how I imagine it anymore and to adapt to the situation at hand. One example we faced was potty training. We tried logic and reason, we tried the lure of the big girl underwear, what finally worked was bribery with wrapped 10 cent toys each time she went or stickers for trying. Before hand, we derided bribery as weak parenting and thought it would be a bad way to go. In our case it worked out really well. It gave her the motivation needed to learn to go and she didn't get spoiled by needing the presents afterwards. We are definitely not the "get the kid what they want at the store" parents and she does not have tantrums and problems like that, so to hear me advocating bribing with toys even sounds weird to me still. That's basically what it come to. You don't live in the two dimensional universe, but can imagine one. It would be much harder for the two dimensional being to imagine the third dimension. Having your first kid puts you into the third dimension.
My idea of use in the auto mechanic was simply handing me tools while I'm under the car or help lifting heavy items or something. There are lots of simple things a very basic bot could do. I do think a humanoid bot will be too expensive for a very long time, but ultimately that is the most useful shape for general interacting with the world we built for ourselves.
I just think it is quite short sighted to say that humaniform robots have no use. They may be too expensive right now, but as with all tech the price will come down. Everything we interact with was designed to be used by a human shaped person. If we need to make our environment and tools more useful for a robot to use then it gets less useful for us to use. If instead we make the robots able to use our environment and tools, then they have a pre-existing world to put to use.
But a robot that needed the track could not help out in the garden, or help carry the paving stones when laying the sidewalk outside. And since I didn't expect it to be needed in the garage, it can't even get in there to help me with auto repairs. I would have to install a new track going into the garage for the one instance where I might like some help in there. With such limitations on a robot, it would just be easier to not have one. Use the money spent on the robot and tracks and other upgrades needed for the house to pay a servant instead as they would be able to do anything I wanted them to do.
And what if the next years robot helper needed a different retrofit to the house. So every few years you have to do a whole new update to the buildings to get them able to use the latest robots. Imagine pulling cable through to all the rooms in your house. Then years later you now need to pull CAT5. Then, when even higher speeds are needed you need to pull fiber-optic. If the robot can use the existing infrastructure then no updates are needed. What if your robot comes with you to a place that hasn't been updated? A humanoid robot can easily fit in the seat of an existing car, no need to buy a trailer or take up the bed of a truck. The humanoid robot can use my cordless drill, no need to buy specialty robot drill attachment. (Of course, with the way companies like to make things non-compatible, they will make the special robot drill attachment anyway.) The humanoid robot could load an unload a dishwasher, or do them in a sink just like a person. No special equipment needed. Then they could put them into the cupboards easily.
There's a reason the press shies away from it. Mental health organizations have guidelines and recommendations on how to report responsibly on suicides.
The absolute worst is reporting on the contents of, or even mentioning, a note, because then people who are on the edge / suicidal think "Ah, I can get my letter published too!"
This sounds absurd, but it's well demonstrated that suicides are "infectious", and reports in the media about a suicide can cause others who are close to do it themselves. It's one of the reasons, after a suicide in a school/workplace/community, you see an immediate effort made to make resources available to everyone else.
These are the reasons I think the press needs to stop reporting on the suicide by school shooting rampage that many people are copying. If you give these people attention then other depressed people might start to think that it is a way to get attention for themselves. It doesn't seem to matter that the attention comes after they are dead, they do it anyway.
(It's like the thing you're searching for always being in the last place you look. It's not Murphy's law, It's because, when you find it, you stop looking.)
That is a nice trite little phrase, but when one thinks about if for a minute you can see situations where it is not always true. Sometimes the thing was in the first place you looked for it, but you failed to notice it or overlooked it for some reason. I find this happens to me often when hunting a geocache. I have developed good instincts to where they may be hidden and look in the most likely places. When the cases come up where I still haven't found it and have to keep looking over the object or area at ground zero I will start to look in other more creative places. Then sometimes it turns out it was where I looked in the first place but it was disguised or camouflaged enough to not be noticeable. So it wasn't the last place I looked, but the first or second or whatever.