Yeah, and now conspiracy theorists in those regions can point to a high profile confirmed example of exactly what they were claiming, which makes debunking them all that much harder. The CIA just made doctor's jobs not only more difficult, but more dangerous.... but hey, what are doctors donating their time to save lives when you can make political points for assassinating the leader of a group you don't like. Polio might not be the CIA's problem, but they are not a group that is about to accept responsibility for their actions. They never do.... and people wonder why they are feared and hated..... look at all the messes they have caused over the decades that benefit one group and someone else has to pay for/clean up.
No, my argument is that we as spectators can not tell if the allegations are real because the US government has a history of making stuff like that up to discredit people. The boy who cried wolf is coming back to haunt them and we have a legitimate reason to be skeptical. This is not the same thing as a 'get out of jail free card'. In other words, cut out the black and white thinking....
Thus the word 'most'. Yes, there was some important stuff in the dumps, but the vast majority was just classified by default and had no real implications.
True, the people themselves are no a myth,. the myth is that such a course of action is a good plan. A staggering few have succeeded, but realistically these are people who probably would have done very well regardless of what they have done. The problem is other people are looking at their pattern and trying to use it as a template for success, and just like jumping off a building and just happening to land in a passing flatbed truck filled with pillows and models... yeah, it could happen, but banking on it is a very, very bad idea.
Yeah.. pity no such thing has happened. It was an effective piece of misinformation, but did not pan out in reality. It did give them a good excuse to discount things that actually mattered though, like the evidence the State Department made the Washington Post cover up the child prostitution stuff. But hey, what are little boys being bought with US money to pay off locals when we can claim lives were in danger. Mythological threats are so much more powerful of weapons then real ones...
Just like that doctor who pushed fake vaccinations to find Bin Laden.. this is a classic example of where real behaviors can come back to haunt an organization. People might claim that is just a conspiracy theory that our own government would fake rape charges to discredit someone, but is exactly the type of thing the state department used to do in order to fix elections in 3rd world countries that we had economic ties to. Thus it is impossible to tell if he is actually guilty, or it is just the US government using an old (but disavowed) technique to influence public opinion on a persion... and it will probably take 100 years for the documents to be published...
I thing the biggest thing he revealed was how mundane most information truly was.. and how out of control the US 'classified by default' culture has become.
Myths can still have kernels of truth to them. Like straw men, just because there exist examples doesn't make it any less of a myth, though of course this depends on which definition of 'myth' one is using.
*shrug* at least you are only dealing with the issues in the C implementation itself. With C++ not only do you have all the issues of C, you have whatever the upstream programmers overloaded on any specific operation for any specific object.
That is indeed my thought. Operator overloading and vtables are the boogie men that I found made C++ in embedded enviroments difficult. You never knew what that '+' was actually going to do, what functions it might spawn off and call instead of preforming the '+' operation, or how big a structure physically was going to be.
As someone else pointed out, macros are their own problem, but templates and operator overloading not only made the problem worse, but they they are taught as heavily encouraged (where macros were generally something to avoid, or if you are going to use them have them in upper case).
Not just control, but predictability. C does exactly what you tell it to do and you can see what it is doing more easily then other languages. You can tell C++ to do 'X', but it might slip in a 'Y' and 'Z' without telling you.
True, but ZCorp and other suppliers represent another end of the spectrum, high cost professional rigs that tend to require investment not only in money but time to learn and utilize the systems.
*nods* a more specific claim like that I can see, but even then it is a little dishonest since that last 10% is rather important. It is like saying 'I can make 90% of my linux box out of wood!' simply because you can built the case. The 90% you can replicate doesn't get you 90% of the functionality, it doesn't even get you 9%.
*shrug* geeks might lament the closed rip-off that is the inkjet printer market, but it did work quite well, resulting in low cost high quality printing in pretty much every livingroom. I still remember when 'high quality' printing was the exclusive domain of massive laser printer systems and plotters. You know what.. if one wants more open options they still exist. You have to pay more for them, but they have been driven down in cost over the decades.... in other words the open alternatives might not have gotten as much of a boost as the closed one but they still benefited from the market.
This 'all market segments should meet my requirements' thing is starting to drive me crazy. Sure, these devices are not ideologically pure, but your devices will still exist and mere morals interested in just printing things will have access to equipement that meets THEIR needs.
Simplicity is what jumps something from a niche geek toy to a mass market devices, which results in driving down the price not only for the 'simple' devices but also for the niche ones. If this takes off, you will still be able to get your community centric ideologically specced devices, but probably for a lot cheaper and powerful then today, just like computers.
Though it should be noted, even the 'best' 3D printers today do not even come close to 'replicating themselves'. Yeah you can print out the plastic parts, but they do not make up the lion's share of the cost of producing one and you still have to go to more specialized producers for all the critical pieces. The whole 'raprap can duplicate itself' is a somewhat dishonest tagline that I wish the community would stop spreading.
Well, that is why market variety is a good thing. 'hackerspace' is a pretty broad group, with one hacker's tools being another hacker's toys. These more propriety devices will generally be better for people who want a device who's purpose is to produce parts for their actual interest as opposed to something that is a goal unto itself.
Personally I have been considering things like the Makerbox, RepRap, Rapman, etc... but so far they are too in the 'toys unto themselves' category whereas what I want is an out of the box device for producing components. I do not think this device will be what I want either, but I imagine that in a few years we will see a few converances.
I think that is the key word... a rather hazy that doesn't really mean anything.
CLI isn't just for 'tech support and IT', but most users don't have much use for it. Though some people are just going to like it even if they are 'consumers', there are times where it can be a real time saver for common 'consumer' tasks. Though I do have to agree that no 'consumer' app should actually require its usage at this point.
Change the conversation? I think if we are talking about moving to a cashless society, mentioning the people who are still entirely cash-based is pretty relevant.
Keep in mind, we are not talking about a tiny part of the population, closer to 10% actually. They just tend to be invisible to the rather well off middle class.
This tends to be one of the problems with geek culture, people within it tend to look at the people around them and assume they are not only representative, but the only demographic that matters.
You also forget, societies are complex places, there is room for more then one way of doing things. The middle and upper class can have their cashless living just like they can have their bank accounts and land and cars and all those other things. People on the lower end of the scale can still have their cash.
True, the pre-paid cards are an option, though they do not really get you out of the basic pattern since (a) you generally have to buy them with cash and (b) they can not be used for identification, so they are not a gateway to other account types. So all it really does is abstract the problem by one step.
Try to get a bank account with no birth certificate or driver's license.
A few weeks ago I helped a woman get a bank account, she just barely skirted the minimal amount of documentation necessary to open the account. If she had been one form of identity less she would have been denied. And once you are in that situation you get a real chicken&egg situation getting out of it.
I am guessing you do not interact with marginalized poor people then. It is actually considered a serious problem among the rural poor.
As for credit cards, it is less an issue of 'bad credit' and more 'not in the system, so you don't exist'. People under a certain level often have pretty much no footprint and work almost entirely through cash. Some are lucky to even have paperwork like a birth certificate or social security number. And yep, this is a first world problem.
Financial derivatives are a tradable goods, not a currency... so they behave like gold.. sure they can be used but the bookkeeping/taxes is still done in the government backed currency. Which essentially is what Bitcoin is and will likely to remain.
BItcoin would need something VERY compelling for mass adoption to take place, which it doesn't have since it mostly exists for a philosophical victory as opposed to tangible benefit. The only way it could really catch on is if the banking system (which is regulated in terms of local currency for things like reserves, so this is some serious inertia) decided to move over to it, and that would filter down.
You would be surprised at how many people don't have bank accounts or credit cards. Both can actually be pretty hard to get if you do not already have them.
As another poster pointed out, lack of government backing drastically impacts who will accept the payment. Traditional business that pay taxes have trouble working with anything not government backed,.. which cuts out a lot of critical things like food, fuel, utilities, banking, etc. So while payment methods outside government sanction can exist, the lack of backing severally limits the scope of their utility... in other words they can not rise to the level of 'I can work exclusively in this currency' for the vast majority of people. The people who can live exclusively off bitcoin are kinda like those people who live off-grid, it is possible if you have the right social connections, resources, and are willing to forgo participating in significant parts of society.
Granted, as a limited scope currency, lack of government approval can indeed be a good thing, but like disney dollars... can not stand on its own and is really only useful within certain communities/domains.
What can be done mathematically in an abstract environment is one thing, what can be done in the real world with competing interests and (rather importantly) physical implementations.. are often two very different things.
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Yeah, and now conspiracy theorists in those regions can point to a high profile confirmed example of exactly what they were claiming, which makes debunking them all that much harder. The CIA just made doctor's jobs not only more difficult, but more dangerous.... but hey, what are doctors donating their time to save lives when you can make political points for assassinating the leader of a group you don't like. Polio might not be the CIA's problem, but they are not a group that is about to accept responsibility for their actions. They never do.... and people wonder why they are feared and hated..... look at all the messes they have caused over the decades that benefit one group and someone else has to pay for/clean up.
No, my argument is that we as spectators can not tell if the allegations are real because the US government has a history of making stuff like that up to discredit people. The boy who cried wolf is coming back to haunt them and we have a legitimate reason to be skeptical. This is not the same thing as a 'get out of jail free card'. In other words, cut out the black and white thinking....
Thus the word 'most'. Yes, there was some important stuff in the dumps, but the vast majority was just classified by default and had no real implications.
True, the people themselves are no a myth,. the myth is that such a course of action is a good plan. A staggering few have succeeded, but realistically these are people who probably would have done very well regardless of what they have done. The problem is other people are looking at their pattern and trying to use it as a template for success, and just like jumping off a building and just happening to land in a passing flatbed truck filled with pillows and models... yeah, it could happen, but banking on it is a very, very bad idea.
Yeah.. pity no such thing has happened. It was an effective piece of misinformation, but did not pan out in reality. It did give them a good excuse to discount things that actually mattered though, like the evidence the State Department made the Washington Post cover up the child prostitution stuff. But hey, what are little boys being bought with US money to pay off locals when we can claim lives were in danger. Mythological threats are so much more powerful of weapons then real ones...
Just like that doctor who pushed fake vaccinations to find Bin Laden.. this is a classic example of where real behaviors can come back to haunt an organization. People might claim that is just a conspiracy theory that our own government would fake rape charges to discredit someone, but is exactly the type of thing the state department used to do in order to fix elections in 3rd world countries that we had economic ties to. Thus it is impossible to tell if he is actually guilty, or it is just the US government using an old (but disavowed) technique to influence public opinion on a persion... and it will probably take 100 years for the documents to be published...
I thing the biggest thing he revealed was how mundane most information truly was.. and how out of control the US 'classified by default' culture has become.
Myths can still have kernels of truth to them. Like straw men, just because there exist examples doesn't make it any less of a myth, though of course this depends on which definition of 'myth' one is using.
*shrug* at least you are only dealing with the issues in the C implementation itself. With C++ not only do you have all the issues of C, you have whatever the upstream programmers overloaded on any specific operation for any specific object.
That is indeed my thought. Operator overloading and vtables are the boogie men that I found made C++ in embedded enviroments difficult. You never knew what that '+' was actually going to do, what functions it might spawn off and call instead of preforming the '+' operation, or how big a structure physically was going to be.
As someone else pointed out, macros are their own problem, but templates and operator overloading not only made the problem worse, but they they are taught as heavily encouraged (where macros were generally something to avoid, or if you are going to use them have them in upper case).
Not just control, but predictability. C does exactly what you tell it to do and you can see what it is doing more easily then other languages. You can tell C++ to do 'X', but it might slip in a 'Y' and 'Z' without telling you.
True, but ZCorp and other suppliers represent another end of the spectrum, high cost professional rigs that tend to require investment not only in money but time to learn and utilize the systems.
*nods* a more specific claim like that I can see, but even then it is a little dishonest since that last 10% is rather important. It is like saying 'I can make 90% of my linux box out of wood!' simply because you can built the case. The 90% you can replicate doesn't get you 90% of the functionality, it doesn't even get you 9%.
*shrug* geeks might lament the closed rip-off that is the inkjet printer market, but it did work quite well, resulting in low cost high quality printing in pretty much every livingroom. I still remember when 'high quality' printing was the exclusive domain of massive laser printer systems and plotters. You know what.. if one wants more open options they still exist. You have to pay more for them, but they have been driven down in cost over the decades.... in other words the open alternatives might not have gotten as much of a boost as the closed one but they still benefited from the market.
This 'all market segments should meet my requirements' thing is starting to drive me crazy. Sure, these devices are not ideologically pure, but your devices will still exist and mere morals interested in just printing things will have access to equipement that meets THEIR needs.
Simplicity is what jumps something from a niche geek toy to a mass market devices, which results in driving down the price not only for the 'simple' devices but also for the niche ones. If this takes off, you will still be able to get your community centric ideologically specced devices, but probably for a lot cheaper and powerful then today, just like computers.
Though it should be noted, even the 'best' 3D printers today do not even come close to 'replicating themselves'. Yeah you can print out the plastic parts, but they do not make up the lion's share of the cost of producing one and you still have to go to more specialized producers for all the critical pieces. The whole 'raprap can duplicate itself' is a somewhat dishonest tagline that I wish the community would stop spreading.
Well, that is why market variety is a good thing. 'hackerspace' is a pretty broad group, with one hacker's tools being another hacker's toys. These more propriety devices will generally be better for people who want a device who's purpose is to produce parts for their actual interest as opposed to something that is a goal unto itself.
Personally I have been considering things like the Makerbox, RepRap, Rapman, etc... but so far they are too in the 'toys unto themselves' category whereas what I want is an out of the box device for producing components. I do not think this device will be what I want either, but I imagine that in a few years we will see a few converances.
I think that is the key word... a rather hazy that doesn't really mean anything.
CLI isn't just for 'tech support and IT', but most users don't have much use for it. Though some people are just going to like it even if they are 'consumers', there are times where it can be a real time saver for common 'consumer' tasks. Though I do have to agree that no 'consumer' app should actually require its usage at this point.
Change the conversation? I think if we are talking about moving to a cashless society, mentioning the people who are still entirely cash-based is pretty relevant.
Keep in mind, we are not talking about a tiny part of the population, closer to 10% actually. They just tend to be invisible to the rather well off middle class.
This tends to be one of the problems with geek culture, people within it tend to look at the people around them and assume they are not only representative, but the only demographic that matters.
You also forget, societies are complex places, there is room for more then one way of doing things. The middle and upper class can have their cashless living just like they can have their bank accounts and land and cars and all those other things. People on the lower end of the scale can still have their cash.
True, the pre-paid cards are an option, though they do not really get you out of the basic pattern since (a) you generally have to buy them with cash and (b) they can not be used for identification, so they are not a gateway to other account types. So all it really does is abstract the problem by one step.
Try to get a bank account with no birth certificate or driver's license.
A few weeks ago I helped a woman get a bank account, she just barely skirted the minimal amount of documentation necessary to open the account. If she had been one form of identity less she would have been denied. And once you are in that situation you get a real chicken&egg situation getting out of it.
I am guessing you do not interact with marginalized poor people then. It is actually considered a serious problem among the rural poor.
As for credit cards, it is less an issue of 'bad credit' and more 'not in the system, so you don't exist'. People under a certain level often have pretty much no footprint and work almost entirely through cash. Some are lucky to even have paperwork like a birth certificate or social security number. And yep, this is a first world problem.
Financial derivatives are a tradable goods, not a currency... so they behave like gold.. sure they can be used but the bookkeeping/taxes is still done in the government backed currency. Which essentially is what Bitcoin is and will likely to remain.
BItcoin would need something VERY compelling for mass adoption to take place, which it doesn't have since it mostly exists for a philosophical victory as opposed to tangible benefit. The only way it could really catch on is if the banking system (which is regulated in terms of local currency for things like reserves, so this is some serious inertia) decided to move over to it, and that would filter down.
You would be surprised at how many people don't have bank accounts or credit cards. Both can actually be pretty hard to get if you do not already have them.
As another poster pointed out, lack of government backing drastically impacts who will accept the payment. Traditional business that pay taxes have trouble working with anything not government backed,.. which cuts out a lot of critical things like food, fuel, utilities, banking, etc. So while payment methods outside government sanction can exist, the lack of backing severally limits the scope of their utility... in other words they can not rise to the level of 'I can work exclusively in this currency' for the vast majority of people. The people who can live exclusively off bitcoin are kinda like those people who live off-grid, it is possible if you have the right social connections, resources, and are willing to forgo participating in significant parts of society.
Granted, as a limited scope currency, lack of government approval can indeed be a good thing, but like disney dollars... can not stand on its own and is really only useful within certain communities/domains.
What can be done mathematically in an abstract environment is one thing, what can be done in the real world with competing interests and (rather importantly) physical implementations.. are often two very different things.