You're spoiled then. The non-profits around here gladly take any computers that they're given. Some get recycled and others get refurbished, but they aren't in the position of refusing to take a computer just because it's 5 years old.
The thing they won't take for free though is CRTs. Those things are expensive to recylcle because of all the toxic chemicals and it's getting to the point where those old 14" LCDs are flooding the gap that cheap CRTs vacated.
Not really, there's subsidies for power in many places and rarely if ever is there a subsidy for a new computer.
What's more, cash flow is an issue, it might cost more in the long run, but some people only have a few bucks a month and need the computer now. Getting a free or cheap computer that costs a couple bucks more a month in the long run might just be what they have to put up with.
The people who are getting these computers are frequently in a position where they can't save money either way because they have none. Yes, it would be better for them to not spend the extra money, but they don't necessarily have the luxury of money sitting around to buy a new computer when their current one breaks either.
Not really, what's going on there is that those people with ad blocking probably had somebody else setting up their computer for them. Which includes ad blocking all those dishonest ads.
Marketing people are basically just human garbage with no particular sense of right or wrong. They're up there withe the typical HR drone and the people at the welfare office that seem obsessed with making sure you're as humilated as possible and don't mind filing fraudulent paper work to keep it that way.
Perhaps if the previous Pope hadn't opted to make political hay out of the sex scandals that came round every week by trying to pin it on a massive homosexual conspiracy, we'd stop thinking Catholics as being small minded bigots.
The fact of the matter is that these ideas didn't just get out their on their own, the Church itself went a long ways towards encouraging it by not just cleaning house of the pedophiles and reforming things before they were forced into it. That sort of arrogance really begs for this sort of treatment.
No, it's true, the people own the spectrum and the broadcasters just license it. In practice, the FCC tends to be staffed by appointees that don't want to press the point, but the FCC can take back the licenses at any time.
And tha'ts a load of hogwash, not requiring a reason is not the same as having an unconstitutional reason.
The FCC decides what carriers are and are not licensed to use the spectrum in the US, they could easily demand that phones not be locked to a given carrier if that carrier wishes to retain its license to use the spectrum.
The FCC does not require any justification for taking back spectrum as the licensees are not to claim ownership over it.
Yes, and those are extremists, they're not going to succeed as Obamacare is incredibly popular and going to get even more so when the last provisions go into effect.
It's mostly the far right that decries anything that might help the working classes that's opposed to it.
You make it sound like becoming CEO has anything to do with talent and ability. If you take a look at the people who have managed to get the job, often times it's a matter of whom they know rather than what they know.
And the cajoling is working, when I was getting my degree in the Natural sciences my classes were roughly 2/3 women in all cases.
The DoD accounts for over $680bn as of 2010. The cost of Afghanistan and Iraq each have cost over $100bn a year and totaling to over $2.4tn for their duration.
There is no mandate that we start wars with other nations anywhere in the constitution. Nor does the constitution insist that we spend more money than the rest of the world combined on our military.
As for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, well, first off Medicaid is a state program, and second off, that's all covered under the "promote the general welfare" which is right next to "provide for the common defence" in the preamble to the constitution. So, it seems to me that programs that promote the general welfare are as constutionally mandated as providing for defense.
What's more, the inability of the conservatives to promote the general welfare of the people is itself a defense issue as there's dozens of people that aren't in the military for every individual that is in the military.
The cause of the debt in the US, is that the GOP believes in spontaneously generating wealth. They book the projected increases in revenue as being real when balancing the budget, but fail to make any adjustments when that turns out to not be the case.
Ultimately, the Democrats at least understand that you need real revenue in order to balance the budget and you have to actually make real cuts to the DoD which alone could more than finance Obamacre with the waste in war spending without having to cut back on things that actually matter.
That's why you don't vote for the party, you vote for the candidate. If you vote for the candidates that are right more often, there's at least some hope of positive change. But, if you vote for people that are can't manage to be write even 5% of the time, then well, why would you expect any improvements?
The point is, that the GOP lately has been promising to burn down the economy and people are surprised that the economy isn't doing any better, well maybe if the GOP would show some actual interest in working to solve the problems instead of terrorizing the nation we'd see some improvement. It's one thing to disagree with the Democrats plans and quite another to firebomb them without putting up any of your own ideas.
I used to work in security, and those security cameras you see? Well, the tapes are never made public, except in cases where they're used for prosecution or in case of a lawsuit, and they're typically destroyed within a couple of months of being taken.
The sorts of images that the bar owner is preventing people from taking, may never be deleted and may very well be available to every Tom, Dick and Harry with access to the public.
Just because you're too stupid to see the implications of huge troves of data being available on the internet, does not make it any more reasonable to go the surveillance society route. People have been fired for pictures of them holding red cups, with no evidence of what's in the cup, merely because they're cheap cups that are often times used for alcohol at college parties.
What you're suggesting is that stalking ought to be legal. It's one thing to take a couple pictures of somebody in public or to record them as part of the background and completely something else to have long systemized accounts of what people are doing via hidden cameras.
The rulings that established precedent were done during a time when it was costly to have small cameras with large amount of storage capacity and where the internet wasn't yet fast enough to allow for widespread sharing. And where one was likely to be able to see the people doing the recording.
In the past it wasn't an issue, now it is, it wasn't possible to accumulate much data from this in most cases because the processing power available to your average person was miniscule and one didn't have the ability to cross reference huge troves of data.
But, just because you're in a public place does not grant permission to take the photos of people, especially not if you're using hidden cameras or are taking photos in places where people don't expect to have their images taken.
Citation please. If there are cameras, those are publicly visible and there's likely a notice stating that there's surveilance. The tapes themselves are likely only viewed by security and even then most of what's on there gets discarded within a couple months.
As opposed to people surreptitiously taping for whatever reason and retaining it indefinitely with no notice.
But, I'm guessing that there are no cameras if he thinks this is going to be a net gain for the establishment.
Just because I'm out in public doesn't mean that you should have the right to record everything I'm doing. It just means that I should expect for other people to see me in public. But keeping records of what I'm doing in a surreptitious manner is a completely different matter.
Yeah, you can block that, but it's a lot harder to block. I personally block random ads because I don't trust the security of random 3rd parties to do the right thing. And that ultimately means that I don't see very many ads.
The fact that so many sites will also serve Flash ads that randomly obscure text to trick me into clicking on it or set the entire back ground to be a huge link without mentioning it, just makes me want to hurt those scumbags. Really, there's very little difference between the scum that spam and advertisers in general, they seem to have no understanding of how pissed people get by product placements and being tricked into buying something that will never perform as advertised.
Not true, this is the same supply side economics bullshit that got us into the current mess.
No, the reason why we got into the current economic mess is that people were spending more than they could afford to pay back and eventually the whole house of cards fell down when people realized that the overly leveraged and complicated financial instruments were based upon debt that people couldn't afford to pay back.
Businesses hire people in response to need when they can't just get the current employees to do more work. They do not do so because they have more money available to spend on employees. Spending money just because you have it is not one of the hallmarks of a well run company.
People in general will spend their money, save it in a bank or invest it properly, there are some people who do other things like buy gold or shove it in a mattress, but most people will do one of the first 3 things. That money is still in the system working its way around, but by keeping the interest rates so low, it means that people might as well just keep it out of the system by putting it in a mattress because.1% isn't appreciably better than 0% when inflation is being kept artificially over 2% to discourage savings.
What's more, because of the lack of savings, there was no surplus for people to spend, which meant that when the credit markets froze up, there was an immediate belt tightening that had to happen as many people just did not have the several months worth of living expenses saved up that they really should.
So, to sum it up, it was overspending that's keeping us in our current rut. People overspent what they could afford to spend and the rapid deleveraging was a large part of what triggered the current economic crisis. The other thing being the overleveraging of questionable securities that nobody really understood and an increased consolidation of investment dollars into a smaller number of hands.
Well, that's precisely why BTC will ultimately fail.
The strategy works provided that you manage to get out before the market freezes up permanently. There's a huge incentive to not sell as the BTC will be worth substantially more in the future than it is presently, what's more the work you have to engage in to earn them in the future is substantially more than in the past.
So, holding them is the wise strategy for the individual. However, if too many people do hold onto them as a strategy, which they are and will, you wind up with ever increasing paper values for the coins, and fewer people trading them. Which leads to increased volatility until the whole thing comes crashing down.
A currency should always be at roughly 0% inflation and deflation over the long term, when people expect otherwise, it leads to problems as people act expecting their money to be worth less in the future or more, which tends to negatively effect the economy. Just take a look at the way that spending has increased in the US over the last 30 years. The Fed ensures that there will be no deflation and keeps the interest rates low, since there's little incentive to keep small amounts of money in the bank, people spend it. Resulting in over spending and only those with the capital available to invest make any of that money. The rest lose money on anything they try to save.
It's seeing exponential adoption because of the price appreciation and the price appreciation is the direct result of people flooding the market hoping to score big time. You see this in bubbles all the time. But, unlike other bubbles, this one is completely based upon nothing rather than being based upon overpriced assets that have at least some meager value.
I take it you don't know what a deflationary spiral is if you're saying that's one of the best things about BTC. Inflationary and deflationary expectations are bad, they encourage people to either spend or hoard money and the trend tends to be self fulfilling unless something comes in and disrupts the expectations. Unfortunately, because BTC is minted at a known rate and to a known maximum quantity, you will eventually hit the point where people refuse to sell any of it because it's going to be worth more tomorrow than it is today.
Now, if everybody were acting out of rational self interest and refusing to hoard their BTC, it might escape that death, but that won't happen because there's too much to be made from being one of the hold outs versus too little to gain from selling early.
The fact that there's now a hedge fund dealing in it is a pretty good indication that the bubble is going to be popping in the near future. I'd be going short on BTC if I had a way of doing that right now, as it's just a matter of time. You see this same thing before a stock bubble bursts where investment magazines have pages upon pages upon pages of mutual funds and the like being advertised, versus a much smaller number during earlier stages.
The difference is that video games don't kill people and guns do. Regardless of what the 2nd amendment folks say, the reality is that guns are more likely to be used to kill the owner than anybody else and that banning them would result in a decreased death rate from them.
I'm not saying that we necessarily want to go that route, but it's more a penis size issue than legitimate defense issue as there's no way in hell you'd be able to overthrow the government with the weapons that are generally accepted to be covered by the 2nd amendment. Nor are you likely to ever need one for self defense if you're not doing stupid things.
I think people always used to be exposed to that sort of stuff, it's just in the relative recent past we've had the option of avoiding that sort of exposure. Between war and just the process of getting that burnt bacon on the table, you'd have to be very familiar with death.
Slashdot Mirror
What is this Higgs Bosun?
You're spoiled then. The non-profits around here gladly take any computers that they're given. Some get recycled and others get refurbished, but they aren't in the position of refusing to take a computer just because it's 5 years old.
The thing they won't take for free though is CRTs. Those things are expensive to recylcle because of all the toxic chemicals and it's getting to the point where those old 14" LCDs are flooding the gap that cheap CRTs vacated.
Not really, there's subsidies for power in many places and rarely if ever is there a subsidy for a new computer.
What's more, cash flow is an issue, it might cost more in the long run, but some people only have a few bucks a month and need the computer now. Getting a free or cheap computer that costs a couple bucks more a month in the long run might just be what they have to put up with.
The people who are getting these computers are frequently in a position where they can't save money either way because they have none. Yes, it would be better for them to not spend the extra money, but they don't necessarily have the luxury of money sitting around to buy a new computer when their current one breaks either.
Not really, what's going on there is that those people with ad blocking probably had somebody else setting up their computer for them. Which includes ad blocking all those dishonest ads.
Marketing people are basically just human garbage with no particular sense of right or wrong. They're up there withe the typical HR drone and the people at the welfare office that seem obsessed with making sure you're as humilated as possible and don't mind filing fraudulent paper work to keep it that way.
Atheists don't do that. Statistically there are probably a few dozen world wide, but not anywhere near as much so as the Catholic Church does.
What's more, atheists aren't a religious group and don't have huge sums of money to force their lack of beliefs on other people.
Perhaps if the previous Pope hadn't opted to make political hay out of the sex scandals that came round every week by trying to pin it on a massive homosexual conspiracy, we'd stop thinking Catholics as being small minded bigots.
The fact of the matter is that these ideas didn't just get out their on their own, the Church itself went a long ways towards encouraging it by not just cleaning house of the pedophiles and reforming things before they were forced into it. That sort of arrogance really begs for this sort of treatment.
No, it's true, the people own the spectrum and the broadcasters just license it. In practice, the FCC tends to be staffed by appointees that don't want to press the point, but the FCC can take back the licenses at any time.
And tha'ts a load of hogwash, not requiring a reason is not the same as having an unconstitutional reason.
The FCC decides what carriers are and are not licensed to use the spectrum in the US, they could easily demand that phones not be locked to a given carrier if that carrier wishes to retain its license to use the spectrum.
The FCC does not require any justification for taking back spectrum as the licensees are not to claim ownership over it.
Yes, and those are extremists, they're not going to succeed as Obamacare is incredibly popular and going to get even more so when the last provisions go into effect.
It's mostly the far right that decries anything that might help the working classes that's opposed to it.
China isn't a super power. They're at best 2nd world and that's in the urban areas, the rural areas are still very much 3rd world status.
What's more, they can't even wire the internet to stay on reliably, or hold meetings at predictable times and you think they're a superpower?
I've been to China, despite what you see in the news, they're nowhere near the point of reaching 1st world status, let alone super power status.
And how many women on these sites are really single?
You make it sound like becoming CEO has anything to do with talent and ability. If you take a look at the people who have managed to get the job, often times it's a matter of whom they know rather than what they know.
And the cajoling is working, when I was getting my degree in the Natural sciences my classes were roughly 2/3 women in all cases.
The DoD accounts for over $680bn as of 2010. The cost of Afghanistan and Iraq each have cost over $100bn a year and totaling to over $2.4tn for their duration.
There is no mandate that we start wars with other nations anywhere in the constitution. Nor does the constitution insist that we spend more money than the rest of the world combined on our military.
As for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, well, first off Medicaid is a state program, and second off, that's all covered under the "promote the general welfare" which is right next to "provide for the common defence" in the preamble to the constitution. So, it seems to me that programs that promote the general welfare are as constutionally mandated as providing for defense.
What's more, the inability of the conservatives to promote the general welfare of the people is itself a defense issue as there's dozens of people that aren't in the military for every individual that is in the military.
The cause of the debt in the US, is that the GOP believes in spontaneously generating wealth. They book the projected increases in revenue as being real when balancing the budget, but fail to make any adjustments when that turns out to not be the case.
Ultimately, the Democrats at least understand that you need real revenue in order to balance the budget and you have to actually make real cuts to the DoD which alone could more than finance Obamacre with the waste in war spending without having to cut back on things that actually matter.
That's why you don't vote for the party, you vote for the candidate. If you vote for the candidates that are right more often, there's at least some hope of positive change. But, if you vote for people that are can't manage to be write even 5% of the time, then well, why would you expect any improvements?
The point is, that the GOP lately has been promising to burn down the economy and people are surprised that the economy isn't doing any better, well maybe if the GOP would show some actual interest in working to solve the problems instead of terrorizing the nation we'd see some improvement. It's one thing to disagree with the Democrats plans and quite another to firebomb them without putting up any of your own ideas.
I used to work in security, and those security cameras you see? Well, the tapes are never made public, except in cases where they're used for prosecution or in case of a lawsuit, and they're typically destroyed within a couple of months of being taken.
The sorts of images that the bar owner is preventing people from taking, may never be deleted and may very well be available to every Tom, Dick and Harry with access to the public.
Just because you're too stupid to see the implications of huge troves of data being available on the internet, does not make it any more reasonable to go the surveillance society route. People have been fired for pictures of them holding red cups, with no evidence of what's in the cup, merely because they're cheap cups that are often times used for alcohol at college parties.
What you're suggesting is that stalking ought to be legal. It's one thing to take a couple pictures of somebody in public or to record them as part of the background and completely something else to have long systemized accounts of what people are doing via hidden cameras.
The rulings that established precedent were done during a time when it was costly to have small cameras with large amount of storage capacity and where the internet wasn't yet fast enough to allow for widespread sharing. And where one was likely to be able to see the people doing the recording.
In the past it wasn't an issue, now it is, it wasn't possible to accumulate much data from this in most cases because the processing power available to your average person was miniscule and one didn't have the ability to cross reference huge troves of data.
But, just because you're in a public place does not grant permission to take the photos of people, especially not if you're using hidden cameras or are taking photos in places where people don't expect to have their images taken.
In short that's bullshit right there.
Citation please. If there are cameras, those are publicly visible and there's likely a notice stating that there's surveilance. The tapes themselves are likely only viewed by security and even then most of what's on there gets discarded within a couple months.
As opposed to people surreptitiously taping for whatever reason and retaining it indefinitely with no notice.
But, I'm guessing that there are no cameras if he thinks this is going to be a net gain for the establishment.
There are degrees of private and public.
Just because I'm out in public doesn't mean that you should have the right to record everything I'm doing. It just means that I should expect for other people to see me in public. But keeping records of what I'm doing in a surreptitious manner is a completely different matter.
Yeah, you can block that, but it's a lot harder to block. I personally block random ads because I don't trust the security of random 3rd parties to do the right thing. And that ultimately means that I don't see very many ads.
The fact that so many sites will also serve Flash ads that randomly obscure text to trick me into clicking on it or set the entire back ground to be a huge link without mentioning it, just makes me want to hurt those scumbags. Really, there's very little difference between the scum that spam and advertisers in general, they seem to have no understanding of how pissed people get by product placements and being tricked into buying something that will never perform as advertised.
Not true, this is the same supply side economics bullshit that got us into the current mess.
No, the reason why we got into the current economic mess is that people were spending more than they could afford to pay back and eventually the whole house of cards fell down when people realized that the overly leveraged and complicated financial instruments were based upon debt that people couldn't afford to pay back.
Businesses hire people in response to need when they can't just get the current employees to do more work. They do not do so because they have more money available to spend on employees. Spending money just because you have it is not one of the hallmarks of a well run company.
People in general will spend their money, save it in a bank or invest it properly, there are some people who do other things like buy gold or shove it in a mattress, but most people will do one of the first 3 things. That money is still in the system working its way around, but by keeping the interest rates so low, it means that people might as well just keep it out of the system by putting it in a mattress because .1% isn't appreciably better than 0% when inflation is being kept artificially over 2% to discourage savings.
What's more, because of the lack of savings, there was no surplus for people to spend, which meant that when the credit markets froze up, there was an immediate belt tightening that had to happen as many people just did not have the several months worth of living expenses saved up that they really should.
So, to sum it up, it was overspending that's keeping us in our current rut. People overspent what they could afford to spend and the rapid deleveraging was a large part of what triggered the current economic crisis. The other thing being the overleveraging of questionable securities that nobody really understood and an increased consolidation of investment dollars into a smaller number of hands.
Well, that's precisely why BTC will ultimately fail.
The strategy works provided that you manage to get out before the market freezes up permanently. There's a huge incentive to not sell as the BTC will be worth substantially more in the future than it is presently, what's more the work you have to engage in to earn them in the future is substantially more than in the past.
So, holding them is the wise strategy for the individual. However, if too many people do hold onto them as a strategy, which they are and will, you wind up with ever increasing paper values for the coins, and fewer people trading them. Which leads to increased volatility until the whole thing comes crashing down.
A currency should always be at roughly 0% inflation and deflation over the long term, when people expect otherwise, it leads to problems as people act expecting their money to be worth less in the future or more, which tends to negatively effect the economy. Just take a look at the way that spending has increased in the US over the last 30 years. The Fed ensures that there will be no deflation and keeps the interest rates low, since there's little incentive to keep small amounts of money in the bank, people spend it. Resulting in over spending and only those with the capital available to invest make any of that money. The rest lose money on anything they try to save.
Bull fucking shit.
It's seeing exponential adoption because of the price appreciation and the price appreciation is the direct result of people flooding the market hoping to score big time. You see this in bubbles all the time. But, unlike other bubbles, this one is completely based upon nothing rather than being based upon overpriced assets that have at least some meager value.
I take it you don't know what a deflationary spiral is if you're saying that's one of the best things about BTC. Inflationary and deflationary expectations are bad, they encourage people to either spend or hoard money and the trend tends to be self fulfilling unless something comes in and disrupts the expectations. Unfortunately, because BTC is minted at a known rate and to a known maximum quantity, you will eventually hit the point where people refuse to sell any of it because it's going to be worth more tomorrow than it is today.
Now, if everybody were acting out of rational self interest and refusing to hoard their BTC, it might escape that death, but that won't happen because there's too much to be made from being one of the hold outs versus too little to gain from selling early.
The fact that there's now a hedge fund dealing in it is a pretty good indication that the bubble is going to be popping in the near future. I'd be going short on BTC if I had a way of doing that right now, as it's just a matter of time. You see this same thing before a stock bubble bursts where investment magazines have pages upon pages upon pages of mutual funds and the like being advertised, versus a much smaller number during earlier stages.
The difference is that video games don't kill people and guns do. Regardless of what the 2nd amendment folks say, the reality is that guns are more likely to be used to kill the owner than anybody else and that banning them would result in a decreased death rate from them.
I'm not saying that we necessarily want to go that route, but it's more a penis size issue than legitimate defense issue as there's no way in hell you'd be able to overthrow the government with the weapons that are generally accepted to be covered by the 2nd amendment. Nor are you likely to ever need one for self defense if you're not doing stupid things.
I think people always used to be exposed to that sort of stuff, it's just in the relative recent past we've had the option of avoiding that sort of exposure. Between war and just the process of getting that burnt bacon on the table, you'd have to be very familiar with death.