You could buy drugs (among other illegal items) online with bitcoin though. There's a lot of utility to be had from being a black market currency that's widely accepted. You can't make shit with paper dollars or coins either, and we still spend energy to produce those, even when the face value of the coin is worth less than the cost to produce is, so this is hardly unique.
That's no different than buying stock in any company though. You just own the enterprise that does the work, which doesn't necessarily mean that any more or less work will be done as a result of that change of ownership. Maybe the closest thing would be running a high-frequency trading algorithm to spend electricity to attempt to gain value through arbitrage trading, but that market is already pretty saturated.
Bitcoin mining isn't difficult to understand. If people can get paid more for a bitcoin than it costs them to mine it in purchased electricity (and other capital investment such as the hardware to mine on) then they'll do that unless there's something more valuable they could do with that electricity instead. When the value drops, it's not financially worthwhile for people to make that exchange, so they stop doing it. It's no different than oil wells which have been set up but then shut down because the price per barrel is too low to justify the cost of extraction.
The difference is that the average schlub sitting at home mining bitcoin can't use the energy they have access to in order to mine gold, etc. so from their perspective it's a non-starter to even consider producing gold instead. Never mind the additional capital costs of mining gold, unless you're going to pan for it on public land.
And for all that say they'll be new jobs, what? I want specifics.
Anyone who knows the answer to that question is too busy trying to start a company to take advantage of the newly available cheap labor instead of stopping to satisfy your curiosity. If you wait long enough though, they'll tell you all about it in the ads that they run to attract your business.
So what do we do when the world doesn't need ditch diggers? Pretty obvious that it's time to figure that out.
The U.S. has more land than it needs for agriculture and will probably need even less as technology advances and we figure out how to grow meat in labs. Maybe the answer is to figure out how much land a person needs to feed themselves and give them a nice little parcel where they can live out the remainder of their days. That's probably the most human option without reducing a person to a sponge or requiring everyone else to serve them.
I'm not sure it's a long term problem though. If low IQ pretty much eliminates a person from the economy, they'll have far less mating prospects. This isn't going to create a world of super geniuses or anything like that, but it will serve as a selection mechanism against people who are incapable of participating in society. The other side is that we get good enough at genetic engineering that we cease to have incapable people. Either way, the universe will arrive at solution. Whether we like it at all is another matter.
No one is particularly worried. First, they would need a quantum computer with vastly more qubits, and no one is quite sure when that will happen. Next it also requires that no one implements a form of encryption that quantum computers are just as useless against as classical computers, and researchers are already working on those.
Quantum computing isn’t a magical silver bullet that solves any and all problems instantly through some kind of quantum voodoo. There are plenty of problems where you’re better off with a classical computer anyways. Quantum computers have potential in many domains, but there’s just as much misinformation about them as well.
[Why] don't we have THAT as an economy, rather than one chasing pointless money numbers going up.
Feel free to sell all of your possessions and contribute the proceeds to the betterment of humanity at any time. You might be able to look up and see someone in the top 1% of the western world who is wealthy beyond your imagination and wonder why he or she isn't more gregarious, but keep in mind that there's a whole world beneath you that's looking up and from their perspective you're as much a part of that top 1% as is everyone above you. Once you realize that you are the rich man, it becomes a little more difficult to act yourself as you wish others to do. Something, something, needle, camel.
The whole current economy is desperately missing a purpose, IMHO.
Here's where you're lacking understanding and why reality does not reflect your desires. The economy exists to direct the use of limited resources. There isn't automatically enough food, cars, televisions, etc. for everyone to have as much as they want. All of those things must be produced, typically using other resources (oil, aluminium, labor, etc.) that are in turn limited and could be used for a variety of different ends.
It doesn't matter whether you have a laissez-faire free market economy or one that is entirely centrally planned where all activities are directed by a monolithic entity, the purpose remains the same. You might think that the latter approach would be a good thing if only someone like you got to be in control of it, but history suggests that it's the same kind of psychopaths one often finds at the top of corporations that seize this power, often to disastrous ends.
So we just need to give the kids some EPO then? Seems to work for the cyclists.
Really though, you don't need extensive exercise to lose weight, just better eating habits. I dropped 30 lbs. a few years back just by cutting out unnecessary snack foods and other crap without doing additional high-intensity exercise. It's much easier not to put an additional 600 calories into your body than it is to burn that 600 calories (on top of what you already do) off later.
Pretty much this. I have an iPad Air 2 which is what, 4 years old at this point? The new iPads look cool just because of how far the chips have come, but I’m not going to use photoshop on a tablet so I have no need of an upgrade. Given that I mostly use it for light web browsing and watching videos, it will probably last another 4 years. I rarely use it for more than a few hours at a time so even if the battery goes to complete shit, it won’t affect me much. There’s not much in the way of moveable parts or other stuff that might fail easily, so there’s no reason to think it won’t survive that long. It still gets OS updates, so the only real reason to upgrade is tech lust right now.
Also, most people's experience with black coffee is Folgers or similar low quality grounds that are much closer to loose dirt or discarded pencil shavings than it is to coffee. Get some good beans that you grind yourself and prepare appropriately and black coffee can have a wonderful flavor profile that needs no additives to enjoy.
Should Alexa by your child's friend? I would say "Why not?" I'd only start to worry if Alexa were the child's only friend.
Children (and people in general) bond with all manner of things that are non-human. Sometimes this relationship is healthy, and other times it isn't. I'm not sure that Alexa is any different from a pet snake or something on that level. There's even the trope of dogs being man's best friend and it's hardly uncommon to find young children who would claim that the family dog is their best friend. Alexa isn't as interactive, but I'm sure someone will strap an Echo to an Aibo at some point if this hasn't already been done.
In the little over an hour since this story about trolls being removed from Twitter was posted, 34 of the 38 comments posted here were from anonymous cowards, and most of those were trolling, with comments like, "only n i g g e r s use Twitter" and "go choke yourself" and "it's an attack against conservatives" and how "the bots stuff is bullshit".
To be fair, you could probably get something similar from most stories posted on Slashdot. I'm consistently amazed by the sheer amount of time that some people have to waste posting crap like that.
On a side note, get out their and vote, even if you think it's a waste or that it doesn't matter. There's a mountain of corpses strewn across history that secured your right to do so, so you may as well enjoy it while it lasts. Even if you think both sides a trash, you can still write in "Caligula's Horse" or at least vote on local ballot measures. Better yet, get out and participate yourself. If Trump can be president, anyone can get elected as far as I'm concerned.
They very well could be, at least in the future. Just imagine that anytime someone really wanted to say fuck, they just added some asterisks around the modified text instead. Eventually everyone figures it out to the point where asterisks are just read as someone cursing out you. Maybe it even ends up being a part of the language if it's popular enough over a long enough period of time. If you can't say "fuck" people will just find a new way to convey the same sentiment. Banning words does nothing to change the people or situations that gave rise to them in the first place. Eventually asterisks just become the new way of expressing that someone has fucked up.
I think there's actually a relevant example of this online now where apparently surrounding text in multiple sets of parenthesis is supposed to be an indication that the thing in parenthesis is a Jewish plot or something like that. I've seen it on/. enough times to look up what the fuck (sorry, I'm not really about the asterisks) it was supposed to be about. Maybe that meme dies like so many others probably until it gets censored and replaced with something else. I don't know when this started, but at some point, surrounding text in multiple set of parenthesis became an anti-Semitic remark, when prior to that it would have just been nonsense or a weird choice of formatting.
Robber barons indeed. That’s why North Korea and Venezuela have no problems with people getting enough food. Capitalist societies seem to have the opposite problem. There’s so much excess that obesity is killing far more people than a lack of food.
Wouldn’t they want it to go down though so they can buy up even more? The profits are obscene enough that the dividend will tide investors over and anyone on the inside could get a big payday if Apple gets enough control to make an offer to go private.
Or if they believe in the company, they could just hold the stock long term and only sell it after they leave. Or if they suck at their job, hold onto it and sell after being fired. If they are truly awful, the stock price would probably go up.
Fair enough, but this happens so rarely that it's kind of ridiculous when it does.
This almost reads like the backstory for the plot of Bioshock 7 after the developers ran out of every other possible reason for someone to go off and start their city on a hill.
If you were an organization dedicated to helping get people out of hate groups (these do exist) you might be interesting in advertising directly to Nazis. I suppose that most advertisers who wanted to target that group wouldn't have such good intentions though.
I wouldn't be surprised if you were to look at historical trends and see the rate of English increasing. People tend to forget that the U.S. had huge waves of immigration throughout its history and that it's still not uncommon for many people today to have grandparents who grew up speaking Italian, German, Polish, Norwegian, etc. at home instead of English.
The people who are in houses speaking Spanish today will have grandchildren that won't speak a word of it.
Although no one has tested it, the article indicates that the people who discovered this vulnerability think that AMD's SMT implementation would also be vulnerable to this kind of attack. While that isn't a confirmation, it does appear as though this exploit is general enough that it wouldn't be specific to Intel. Hopefully they also disclosed this to AMD so that they had time to explore this for themselves and work on a fix if necessary.
It's not a bad idea in general and it certainly made a lot of sense when Intel introduced it since the number of stages in their CPUs' pipelines were massive (eventually ~30 with the last generation of P4 chips) and adding the functionality cost very little in terms of additional die space for the performance boost you would get.
Get some perspective. This is the best time to be alive in all of human history and it's only going to get better in the future. That isn't to say it will be free of strife or that humanity won't have new sets of problems to solve, but if you take an objective measure of humanity on just about any metric, it's better now than at any point in time.
In 50 years, it's within the realm of possibility that extreme poverty will be eliminated. If you're overly concerned with the potential perils of modern society, you're more than free to move to any of the places on earth where they don't exist. Not that there isn't cause for concern with regards to the information that can now be collected on people with these new devices, but it pales in comparison to the concerns that many in the world still face over whether or not they'll be able to eat tomorrow.
Slashdot Mirror
Then explain why we are continuing to mine gold, when there are already huge reserves above ground sitting in vaults
To put it in the vaults, of course. It's not like it's going to get there itself. I mean, duh!
You could buy drugs (among other illegal items) online with bitcoin though. There's a lot of utility to be had from being a black market currency that's widely accepted. You can't make shit with paper dollars or coins either, and we still spend energy to produce those, even when the face value of the coin is worth less than the cost to produce is, so this is hardly unique.
That's no different than buying stock in any company though. You just own the enterprise that does the work, which doesn't necessarily mean that any more or less work will be done as a result of that change of ownership. Maybe the closest thing would be running a high-frequency trading algorithm to spend electricity to attempt to gain value through arbitrage trading, but that market is already pretty saturated.
Bitcoin mining isn't difficult to understand. If people can get paid more for a bitcoin than it costs them to mine it in purchased electricity (and other capital investment such as the hardware to mine on) then they'll do that unless there's something more valuable they could do with that electricity instead. When the value drops, it's not financially worthwhile for people to make that exchange, so they stop doing it. It's no different than oil wells which have been set up but then shut down because the price per barrel is too low to justify the cost of extraction.
The difference is that the average schlub sitting at home mining bitcoin can't use the energy they have access to in order to mine gold, etc. so from their perspective it's a non-starter to even consider producing gold instead. Never mind the additional capital costs of mining gold, unless you're going to pan for it on public land.
Sure, there's a graduate ramp up, but it eventually drops off.
And for all that say they'll be new jobs, what? I want specifics.
Anyone who knows the answer to that question is too busy trying to start a company to take advantage of the newly available cheap labor instead of stopping to satisfy your curiosity. If you wait long enough though, they'll tell you all about it in the ads that they run to attract your business.
So what do we do when the world doesn't need ditch diggers? Pretty obvious that it's time to figure that out.
The U.S. has more land than it needs for agriculture and will probably need even less as technology advances and we figure out how to grow meat in labs. Maybe the answer is to figure out how much land a person needs to feed themselves and give them a nice little parcel where they can live out the remainder of their days. That's probably the most human option without reducing a person to a sponge or requiring everyone else to serve them.
I'm not sure it's a long term problem though. If low IQ pretty much eliminates a person from the economy, they'll have far less mating prospects. This isn't going to create a world of super geniuses or anything like that, but it will serve as a selection mechanism against people who are incapable of participating in society. The other side is that we get good enough at genetic engineering that we cease to have incapable people. Either way, the universe will arrive at solution. Whether we like it at all is another matter.
No one is particularly worried. First, they would need a quantum computer with vastly more qubits, and no one is quite sure when that will happen. Next it also requires that no one implements a form of encryption that quantum computers are just as useless against as classical computers, and researchers are already working on those.
Quantum computing isn’t a magical silver bullet that solves any and all problems instantly through some kind of quantum voodoo. There are plenty of problems where you’re better off with a classical computer anyways. Quantum computers have potential in many domains, but there’s just as much misinformation about them as well.
[Why] don't we have THAT as an economy, rather than one chasing pointless money numbers going up.
Feel free to sell all of your possessions and contribute the proceeds to the betterment of humanity at any time. You might be able to look up and see someone in the top 1% of the western world who is wealthy beyond your imagination and wonder why he or she isn't more gregarious, but keep in mind that there's a whole world beneath you that's looking up and from their perspective you're as much a part of that top 1% as is everyone above you. Once you realize that you are the rich man, it becomes a little more difficult to act yourself as you wish others to do. Something, something, needle, camel.
The whole current economy is desperately missing a purpose, IMHO.
Here's where you're lacking understanding and why reality does not reflect your desires. The economy exists to direct the use of limited resources. There isn't automatically enough food, cars, televisions, etc. for everyone to have as much as they want. All of those things must be produced, typically using other resources (oil, aluminium, labor, etc.) that are in turn limited and could be used for a variety of different ends.
It doesn't matter whether you have a laissez-faire free market economy or one that is entirely centrally planned where all activities are directed by a monolithic entity, the purpose remains the same. You might think that the latter approach would be a good thing if only someone like you got to be in control of it, but history suggests that it's the same kind of psychopaths one often finds at the top of corporations that seize this power, often to disastrous ends.
So we just need to give the kids some EPO then? Seems to work for the cyclists.
Really though, you don't need extensive exercise to lose weight, just better eating habits. I dropped 30 lbs. a few years back just by cutting out unnecessary snack foods and other crap without doing additional high-intensity exercise. It's much easier not to put an additional 600 calories into your body than it is to burn that 600 calories (on top of what you already do) off later.
Pretty much this. I have an iPad Air 2 which is what, 4 years old at this point? The new iPads look cool just because of how far the chips have come, but I’m not going to use photoshop on a tablet so I have no need of an upgrade. Given that I mostly use it for light web browsing and watching videos, it will probably last another 4 years. I rarely use it for more than a few hours at a time so even if the battery goes to complete shit, it won’t affect me much. There’s not much in the way of moveable parts or other stuff that might fail easily, so there’s no reason to think it won’t survive that long. It still gets OS updates, so the only real reason to upgrade is tech lust right now.
I take like 80% milk.
No, you take your milk with 20% coffee.
Also, most people's experience with black coffee is Folgers or similar low quality grounds that are much closer to loose dirt or discarded pencil shavings than it is to coffee. Get some good beans that you grind yourself and prepare appropriately and black coffee can have a wonderful flavor profile that needs no additives to enjoy.
Should Alexa by your child's friend? I would say "Why not?" I'd only start to worry if Alexa were the child's only friend.
Children (and people in general) bond with all manner of things that are non-human. Sometimes this relationship is healthy, and other times it isn't. I'm not sure that Alexa is any different from a pet snake or something on that level. There's even the trope of dogs being man's best friend and it's hardly uncommon to find young children who would claim that the family dog is their best friend. Alexa isn't as interactive, but I'm sure someone will strap an Echo to an Aibo at some point if this hasn't already been done.
In the little over an hour since this story about trolls being removed from Twitter was posted, 34 of the 38 comments posted here were from anonymous cowards, and most of those were trolling, with comments like, "only n i g g e r s use Twitter" and "go choke yourself" and "it's an attack against conservatives" and how "the bots stuff is bullshit".
To be fair, you could probably get something similar from most stories posted on Slashdot. I'm consistently amazed by the sheer amount of time that some people have to waste posting crap like that.
On a side note, get out their and vote, even if you think it's a waste or that it doesn't matter. There's a mountain of corpses strewn across history that secured your right to do so, so you may as well enjoy it while it lasts. Even if you think both sides a trash, you can still write in "Caligula's Horse" or at least vote on local ballot measures. Better yet, get out and participate yourself. If Trump can be president, anyone can get elected as far as I'm concerned.
They very well could be, at least in the future. Just imagine that anytime someone really wanted to say fuck, they just added some asterisks around the modified text instead. Eventually everyone figures it out to the point where asterisks are just read as someone cursing out you. Maybe it even ends up being a part of the language if it's popular enough over a long enough period of time. If you can't say "fuck" people will just find a new way to convey the same sentiment. Banning words does nothing to change the people or situations that gave rise to them in the first place. Eventually asterisks just become the new way of expressing that someone has fucked up.
/. enough times to look up what the fuck (sorry, I'm not really about the asterisks) it was supposed to be about. Maybe that meme dies like so many others probably until it gets censored and replaced with something else. I don't know when this started, but at some point, surrounding text in multiple set of parenthesis became an anti-Semitic remark, when prior to that it would have just been nonsense or a weird choice of formatting.
I think there's actually a relevant example of this online now where apparently surrounding text in multiple sets of parenthesis is supposed to be an indication that the thing in parenthesis is a Jewish plot or something like that. I've seen it on
Robber barons indeed. That’s why North Korea and Venezuela have no problems with people getting enough food. Capitalist societies seem to have the opposite problem. There’s so much excess that obesity is killing far more people than a lack of food.
I bought some powdered water at the store once. I had no idea what I was supposed to add to it though.
Wouldn’t they want it to go down though so they can buy up even more? The profits are obscene enough that the dividend will tide investors over and anyone on the inside could get a big payday if Apple gets enough control to make an offer to go private.
Or if they believe in the company, they could just hold the stock long term and only sell it after they leave. Or if they suck at their job, hold onto it and sell after being fired. If they are truly awful, the stock price would probably go up.
Fair enough, but this happens so rarely that it's kind of ridiculous when it does.
This almost reads like the backstory for the plot of Bioshock 7 after the developers ran out of every other possible reason for someone to go off and start their city on a hill.
If you were an organization dedicated to helping get people out of hate groups (these do exist) you might be interesting in advertising directly to Nazis. I suppose that most advertisers who wanted to target that group wouldn't have such good intentions though.
I wouldn't be surprised if you were to look at historical trends and see the rate of English increasing. People tend to forget that the U.S. had huge waves of immigration throughout its history and that it's still not uncommon for many people today to have grandparents who grew up speaking Italian, German, Polish, Norwegian, etc. at home instead of English.
The people who are in houses speaking Spanish today will have grandchildren that won't speak a word of it.
Although no one has tested it, the article indicates that the people who discovered this vulnerability think that AMD's SMT implementation would also be vulnerable to this kind of attack. While that isn't a confirmation, it does appear as though this exploit is general enough that it wouldn't be specific to Intel. Hopefully they also disclosed this to AMD so that they had time to explore this for themselves and work on a fix if necessary.
It's not a bad idea in general and it certainly made a lot of sense when Intel introduced it since the number of stages in their CPUs' pipelines were massive (eventually ~30 with the last generation of P4 chips) and adding the functionality cost very little in terms of additional die space for the performance boost you would get.
Get some perspective. This is the best time to be alive in all of human history and it's only going to get better in the future. That isn't to say it will be free of strife or that humanity won't have new sets of problems to solve, but if you take an objective measure of humanity on just about any metric, it's better now than at any point in time.
In 50 years, it's within the realm of possibility that extreme poverty will be eliminated. If you're overly concerned with the potential perils of modern society, you're more than free to move to any of the places on earth where they don't exist. Not that there isn't cause for concern with regards to the information that can now be collected on people with these new devices, but it pales in comparison to the concerns that many in the world still face over whether or not they'll be able to eat tomorrow.