It isn't afflicted with the awful fake user spam that Facebook has. I get assaulted with at least 5-10 fraudulent friend requests on Facebook every day.
I just hope it stays that way - the asymmetric model of G+ doesn't seem to reward fake user spam as strongly, but it remains to be seen how that's handled.
Yes, and Google+ has the same feature.:) You can view your public profile, your profile as visible to a given other Google+ member, or your profile as visible to a member of a particular circle of yours. It's pretty trivial to figure out if you are accidentally oversharing in your public profile.
A) As was already pointed out, he sells the binary engine, so he did redistribute it.
B) The rules of the competition require disclosure of any used third party libraries or components. Since he didn't disclose this usage, he violated the competition rules regardless of whether he was complying with the license conditions or not.
I suspect that most of Facebook's current growth, at least within the US, consists of fake/spam accounts... so yeah, definitely peaked out. Not sure how they'll do in other parts of the world though, there might be more opportunity there for them, though other parts of the world seem to have their own popular social networking sites already.
Let's just say I wouldn't be too quick to give Facebook a 10, or 70 or whatever billion dollar valuation.
The bitcoin effort needs the involvement of some economists with experience studying and understanding currencies, not just techies. It could also use some PR and marketing people, with all the bad press they've been getting lately for their poorly crafted currency system.
It sounds like they have the technology stuff reasonably well figured out, but they have utterly failed on the economics and marketing side of things.
I suspect that bitcoin needs to be replaced with a new system that has the advantages of the current without the raging disadvantages, re-branded without the negative associations of bitcoin, and work to make sure they don't fuck up again.
Like Friendster and MySpace before it, the club is only cool when it's too cool for other people. Once every yutz is a member, including your parents and grandparents and kids, it's so unbounded and open that you can basically only put things there that you'd share publicly. Which isn't much. Which makes it lose much of its appeal. It would still be a decent, easy place to share photos and stuff, but the creepy marketing aspects kind of kill that use for me.
Frankly, you are posting as AC which likely means you don't understand or are just full of shit.
I'm not old, I do understand, and I think Murdock is full of shit. My decade-long posting history on Slashdot should back that up. Just because I acknowledge the reality that newspapers have a tough go at it doesn't mean I think that erecting massive paywalls and trying to "block" people from "stealing" content is the answer (the Murdock response).
You and I are in agreement about what has happened. We just disagree about the cause and effect. I'd posit that by and large, local reporting has always had the gunk you describe, and simply became more saturated with AP repeats because of the budgetary issues I described.
I don't think anybody got lazy. The local beat reporters got laid off because the local newspapers were hemorrhaging money. If they got a job covering the celebrity beat, they would consider themselves lucky to be able to put food on the table.
This story has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with market forces. Craiglist and eBay killed the market for local classifieds, Monster et. al. killed the local job postings, and Google ate up the advertising dollars that used to go to print.
The only newspapers left solvent are large national papers, and even those are barely so for the most part.
I pay for a dead tree New York Times subscription because we need journalism to continue as an institution and a public good. The problem is in an era of free-on-the-margin information, it's mighty hard to get people to pay to cover the fixed costs of reporting, and the number of people willing to pay shrinks massively when you are talking about a local rather than national scale.
Still applies. That chart isn't the chart of a proper currency pair (USD/Bitcoin), it's the chart of the price of a speculative asset in a bubble.
The people who set up Bitcoin had some good ideas, but they didn't think things through properly and they need to start over. The way they set up the allocation of a fixed amount of bitcoin per day was bound to create huge value distortions as more people started trying to create bitcoins and entered the market for buying and selling bitcoins.
The value of a bitcoin is therefore actually not a direct function of calculation work performed, but rather a function of the number of users/number of total computing cycles used to compute bitcoins (because the number of bitcoins issued per day is nearly constant as workload to find them increases - it's not actually constant, but rather a gradually decreasing series over time, but the amount of computing power dedicated to it has grown much faster than this function).
This is completely nonsensical. It is making the asset more and more scarce and driving up prices, but also making it less and less likely that anybody real would ever want to accept the asset as a currency replacement.
Good computer science, bad economics. Bitcoin has already failed because of this. Nobody looking at these charts would ever want to accept this stuff as currency.
Inflation at a modest rate (2-3%) is actually a good thing for the economy. It encourages present consumption, lending, or investment over currency hoarding. Noticeable changes in currency's purchasing power over a time scale of minutes, days, or weeks, however, is a bad thing because it causes major economic distortions and lots of wasted activity trying to avoid the negative consequences of these changes in value.
This is generally nonsense. Most high end fashion companies make very little money. Their labor costs are very, very high, and their sales volumes are very, very small because their price points are so high. In fact, these businesses would generally not even be viable if there weren't lots of well-to-do young women in New York and Paris willingly to work for free or nearly-free to "break in" to this industry. Same thing with the magazine world. Subsidized by nearly free labor, not much money to really go around, headquartered in very high rent, high cost-of-living areas, high production costs, etc.
The head designers at more mainstream fashion houses (the ones that guys posting on Slashdot would have heard of) may make many millions of dollars a year, but that's selling stuff that's carried in Bloomingdale's and Neiman Marcus, not the haute couture runway innovators.
And still I wouldn't really want to be a shareholder in any of these companies, compared to the many other investment opportunities out there.
Boy, it's really bad. Sad because bitcoin was a good concept, but the execution has been terrible. Just look at a chart of the USD/bitcoin exchange rate over the last year or so:
This asset has "gone parabolic", i.e. experienced an exponential increase in relative value. Like silver did just before coming crashing down the other week. I realize that during that time the US dollar has decreased in value marginally relative to other currencies and more significantly relative to commodities, but this sort of instability in value relative to one of the most significant baseline currencies (and therefore, relative to any other currency or even relative to hard assets like gold) doom bitcoin to me.
It's clear that bitcoin was set up in a way to promote massive early speculation in bitcoin. The awarding of a fixed amount of bitcoin per unit time regardless of the amount of resources being devoted to bitcoin mining has now created a situation where those mining before have an excess of an asset they need to pawn off on some greater fools, and where mining bitcoin is essentially worthless because there is so much competition for a small number of bitcoins awarded per unit time. As a result, bitcoin has simply become an arbitrary asset to speculate on - like a super-silver, but with no industrial use and no jewelry applications.
To show how worthless this is as a currency, in a 48-hour timeframe according to that same chart linked to above, the exchange rate has varied between $8 per bitcoin and $6.60 per bitcoin (i.e. it has lost almost 20% of its value in 48 hours). During the same 48 hour period, in one of its highest volatility phases in decades, silver has changed in value by about 5-6%, and gold by about 1% in US dollar terms.
The US dollar is imperfect in many ways, but there's a bunch of smart economists that work to create some relative stability in its value in terms of goods and services it buys so that it's useful as a currency, can be invested to generate returns, loaned out, or exchanged for goods and services.
The more I see of this, the less likely I would ever be to use bitcoin for anything. The value is too unstable and the management of the bitcoin economy too poor.
.. because you are including non-phone devices there (tablets and media playing devices) that run iOS. So yes, by that metric, iOS is still ahead of Android. If you look at iOS in the smartphone market, it's not.
This guy wasn't a "suspect" in a crime. He was a self-declared combatant in a war. We don't believe he did something, he told the whole world that he did it, then gathered together armed men to make war against the US in Afghanistan, then fled into Pakistan where they believed they could continue that war with less direct threat of intervention from the US.
And I don't think you are going to convince anybody that the life of a mass murderer whose goal is to impose a morally devoid system like Sharia on the West and impose the Caliphate around the world, killing non-Muslims as he goes, is just as valuable as the life of your average human being.
The Slashdot D2 discussion system sucks. Turn it off in your account options and use the old D1. That's what I do. I much prefer to be able to see all the comments at one time.
Lots of Android tablets came out that didn't have Honeycomb and thus weren't really ready to be used as tablets. They are fun for hackers in some cases (like the G Tablet) but not ready for prime time. The only Honeycomb tablet out so far is the Motorola Xoom. The Xoom fails in epic fashion on price - it has similar hardware specs as my $300 G Tablet for twice the price. I would never buy it because I'd feel like a huge sucker.
Apparently Honeycomb needs a bit more polish before it's ready.
But until Google lets other manufacturers come out with Honeycomb tablets, or releases the Honeycomb source code, we aren't going to have Android tablets that have mass appeal.
This doesn't really require a particularly in depth analysis, or any conspiracy theories or anything else.
So true. I used to love Discovery and Science Channel. The History Channel was great, even though they used to have lots of filler WW-II documentaries - but hey, who ever gets tired of watching Panzers rolling over the French countryside and Messerschmitts and Spitfires shooting each other down?
I got through graduate school by watching this stuff in my downtime. That was several years back now, so I guess before things really went down hill. Discovery in particular seems to have very little to do with Discovery these days. I used to enjoy the occasional chop-and-hack-at-cars-and-motorcycles show, but it gets dull really fast. And the logging shows - well, I just can't wrap my head around the appeal of some of this stuff.
100 rem is 1 Sv, not the other way around. 1Sv of exposure is around the threshold for radiation poisoning and 8-10 Sv is considered untreatable with death guaranteed to follow shortly thereafter.
So a room at 100Sv/hour would give a guaranteed fatal exposure within about 90 seconds. Radiation poisoning would onset after 30 seconds of exposure.
So you can safely say that 100 Sv/hour is about the threshold for "instadeath".
This article is awful. Terribly written, incoherent and obviously inaccurate.
This sounds like an extension of previous quantum state "teleportation" via entanglement. These are interesting phenomena, but cannot be used to transmit information faster than the speed of light.
It's not really quite clear what the breakthrough is here. But I'm fairly certain it doesn't involve a group velocity (i.e. information transmission) greater than c.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't afflicted with the awful fake user spam that Facebook has. I get assaulted with at least 5-10 fraudulent friend requests on Facebook every day.
I just hope it stays that way - the asymmetric model of G+ doesn't seem to reward fake user spam as strongly, but it remains to be seen how that's handled.
You fools are only benchmarking Firefox 8!! Well I benchmarked Firefox 14 and it's plus 10 faster than Firefox 4.
I appreciate the benefits of rapid versioning and release cycles, but really, this is ridiculous.
Yes, and Google+ has the same feature. :) You can view your public profile, your profile as visible to a given other Google+ member, or your profile as visible to a member of a particular circle of yours. It's pretty trivial to figure out if you are accidentally oversharing in your public profile.
A) As was already pointed out, he sells the binary engine, so he did redistribute it.
B) The rules of the competition require disclosure of any used third party libraries or components. Since he didn't disclose this usage, he violated the competition rules regardless of whether he was complying with the license conditions or not.
I suspect that most of Facebook's current growth, at least within the US, consists of fake/spam accounts... so yeah, definitely peaked out. Not sure how they'll do in other parts of the world though, there might be more opportunity there for them, though other parts of the world seem to have their own popular social networking sites already.
Let's just say I wouldn't be too quick to give Facebook a 10, or 70 or whatever billion dollar valuation.
The bitcoin effort needs the involvement of some economists with experience studying and understanding currencies, not just techies. It could also use some PR and marketing people, with all the bad press they've been getting lately for their poorly crafted currency system.
It sounds like they have the technology stuff reasonably well figured out, but they have utterly failed on the economics and marketing side of things.
I suspect that bitcoin needs to be replaced with a new system that has the advantages of the current without the raging disadvantages, re-branded without the negative associations of bitcoin, and work to make sure they don't fuck up again.
Like Friendster and MySpace before it, the club is only cool when it's too cool for other people. Once every yutz is a member, including your parents and grandparents and kids, it's so unbounded and open that you can basically only put things there that you'd share publicly. Which isn't much. Which makes it lose much of its appeal. It would still be a decent, easy place to share photos and stuff, but the creepy marketing aspects kind of kill that use for me.
Frankly, you are posting as AC which likely means you don't understand or are just full of shit.
I'm not old, I do understand, and I think Murdock is full of shit. My decade-long posting history on Slashdot should back that up. Just because I acknowledge the reality that newspapers have a tough go at it doesn't mean I think that erecting massive paywalls and trying to "block" people from "stealing" content is the answer (the Murdock response).
You and I are in agreement about what has happened. We just disagree about the cause and effect. I'd posit that by and large, local reporting has always had the gunk you describe, and simply became more saturated with AP repeats because of the budgetary issues I described.
I don't think anybody got lazy. The local beat reporters got laid off because the local newspapers were hemorrhaging money. If they got a job covering the celebrity beat, they would consider themselves lucky to be able to put food on the table.
This story has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with market forces. Craiglist and eBay killed the market for local classifieds, Monster et. al. killed the local job postings, and Google ate up the advertising dollars that used to go to print.
The only newspapers left solvent are large national papers, and even those are barely so for the most part.
I pay for a dead tree New York Times subscription because we need journalism to continue as an institution and a public good. The problem is in an era of free-on-the-margin information, it's mighty hard to get people to pay to cover the fixed costs of reporting, and the number of people willing to pay shrinks massively when you are talking about a local rather than national scale.
I discussed this in my post from May 19th:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2167958&cid=36176946
Still applies. That chart isn't the chart of a proper currency pair (USD/Bitcoin), it's the chart of the price of a speculative asset in a bubble.
The people who set up Bitcoin had some good ideas, but they didn't think things through properly and they need to start over. The way they set up the allocation of a fixed amount of bitcoin per day was bound to create huge value distortions as more people started trying to create bitcoins and entered the market for buying and selling bitcoins.
The value of a bitcoin is therefore actually not a direct function of calculation work performed, but rather a function of the number of users/number of total computing cycles used to compute bitcoins (because the number of bitcoins issued per day is nearly constant as workload to find them increases - it's not actually constant, but rather a gradually decreasing series over time, but the amount of computing power dedicated to it has grown much faster than this function).
This is completely nonsensical. It is making the asset more and more scarce and driving up prices, but also making it less and less likely that anybody real would ever want to accept the asset as a currency replacement.
Good computer science, bad economics. Bitcoin has already failed because of this. Nobody looking at these charts would ever want to accept this stuff as currency.
Inflation at a modest rate (2-3%) is actually a good thing for the economy. It encourages present consumption, lending, or investment over currency hoarding. Noticeable changes in currency's purchasing power over a time scale of minutes, days, or weeks, however, is a bad thing because it causes major economic distortions and lots of wasted activity trying to avoid the negative consequences of these changes in value.
but the designers still make plenty of money ...
This is generally nonsense. Most high end fashion companies make very little money. Their labor costs are very, very high, and their sales volumes are very, very small because their price points are so high. In fact, these businesses would generally not even be viable if there weren't lots of well-to-do young women in New York and Paris willingly to work for free or nearly-free to "break in" to this industry. Same thing with the magazine world. Subsidized by nearly free labor, not much money to really go around, headquartered in very high rent, high cost-of-living areas, high production costs, etc.
The head designers at more mainstream fashion houses (the ones that guys posting on Slashdot would have heard of) may make many millions of dollars a year, but that's selling stuff that's carried in Bloomingdale's and Neiman Marcus, not the haute couture runway innovators.
And still I wouldn't really want to be a shareholder in any of these companies, compared to the many other investment opportunities out there.
Boy, it's really bad. Sad because bitcoin was a good concept, but the execution has been terrible. Just look at a chart of the USD/bitcoin exchange rate over the last year or so:
https://mtgox.com/trade/history
This asset has "gone parabolic", i.e. experienced an exponential increase in relative value. Like silver did just before coming crashing down the other week. I realize that during that time the US dollar has decreased in value marginally relative to other currencies and more significantly relative to commodities, but this sort of instability in value relative to one of the most significant baseline currencies (and therefore, relative to any other currency or even relative to hard assets like gold) doom bitcoin to me.
It's clear that bitcoin was set up in a way to promote massive early speculation in bitcoin. The awarding of a fixed amount of bitcoin per unit time regardless of the amount of resources being devoted to bitcoin mining has now created a situation where those mining before have an excess of an asset they need to pawn off on some greater fools, and where mining bitcoin is essentially worthless because there is so much competition for a small number of bitcoins awarded per unit time. As a result, bitcoin has simply become an arbitrary asset to speculate on - like a super-silver, but with no industrial use and no jewelry applications.
To show how worthless this is as a currency, in a 48-hour timeframe according to that same chart linked to above, the exchange rate has varied between $8 per bitcoin and $6.60 per bitcoin (i.e. it has lost almost 20% of its value in 48 hours). During the same 48 hour period, in one of its highest volatility phases in decades, silver has changed in value by about 5-6%, and gold by about 1% in US dollar terms.
The US dollar is imperfect in many ways, but there's a bunch of smart economists that work to create some relative stability in its value in terms of goods and services it buys so that it's useful as a currency, can be invested to generate returns, loaned out, or exchanged for goods and services.
The more I see of this, the less likely I would ever be to use bitcoin for anything. The value is too unstable and the management of the bitcoin economy too poor.
Something tells me when they heard that RSA encryption was named after Rivest, Shamir and Adleman they would think it was part of a Jewish conspiracy.
.. because you are including non-phone devices there (tablets and media playing devices) that run iOS. So yes, by that metric, iOS is still ahead of Android. If you look at iOS in the smartphone market, it's not.
This guy wasn't a "suspect" in a crime. He was a self-declared combatant in a war. We don't believe he did something, he told the whole world that he did it, then gathered together armed men to make war against the US in Afghanistan, then fled into Pakistan where they believed they could continue that war with less direct threat of intervention from the US.
And I don't think you are going to convince anybody that the life of a mass murderer whose goal is to impose a morally devoid system like Sharia on the West and impose the Caliphate around the world, killing non-Muslims as he goes, is just as valuable as the life of your average human being.
The Slashdot D2 discussion system sucks. Turn it off in your account options and use the old D1. That's what I do. I much prefer to be able to see all the comments at one time.
Lots of Android tablets came out that didn't have Honeycomb and thus weren't really ready to be used as tablets. They are fun for hackers in some cases (like the G Tablet) but not ready for prime time. The only Honeycomb tablet out so far is the Motorola Xoom. The Xoom fails in epic fashion on price - it has similar hardware specs as my $300 G Tablet for twice the price. I would never buy it because I'd feel like a huge sucker.
Apparently Honeycomb needs a bit more polish before it's ready.
But until Google lets other manufacturers come out with Honeycomb tablets, or releases the Honeycomb source code, we aren't going to have Android tablets that have mass appeal.
This doesn't really require a particularly in depth analysis, or any conspiracy theories or anything else.
So true. I used to love Discovery and Science Channel. The History Channel was great, even though they used to have lots of filler WW-II documentaries - but hey, who ever gets tired of watching Panzers rolling over the French countryside and Messerschmitts and Spitfires shooting each other down?
I got through graduate school by watching this stuff in my downtime. That was several years back now, so I guess before things really went down hill. Discovery in particular seems to have very little to do with Discovery these days. I used to enjoy the occasional chop-and-hack-at-cars-and-motorcycles show, but it gets dull really fast. And the logging shows - well, I just can't wrap my head around the appeal of some of this stuff.
Grr, posting too early in the AM. 10 Sv would take around 6 minutes not 90 seconds. Still pretty damn close to "instadeath".
Hehe, minor conversion error.
100 rem is 1 Sv, not the other way around. 1Sv of exposure is around the threshold for radiation poisoning and 8-10 Sv is considered untreatable with death guaranteed to follow shortly thereafter.
So a room at 100Sv/hour would give a guaranteed fatal exposure within about 90 seconds. Radiation poisoning would onset after 30 seconds of exposure.
So you can safely say that 100 Sv/hour is about the threshold for "instadeath".
Somebody's obviously been to more than a few Renaissance Faires.
Yes, the service is 105Mbit. The question was about the *cap*, not the data rate of the service. The cap is not 250 gigabits, it's 250 gigabytes.
This article is awful. Terribly written, incoherent and obviously inaccurate.
This sounds like an extension of previous quantum state "teleportation" via entanglement. These are interesting phenomena, but cannot be used to transmit information faster than the speed of light.
It's not really quite clear what the breakthrough is here. But I'm fairly certain it doesn't involve a group velocity (i.e. information transmission) greater than c.
Right, why do you need a toilet when you can just take a leak on the reactor to cool it down?