If you read the letter from the IG, all he says is that he can't answer the question in an *unclassified* letter.
Like you, I wondered if this was typical Slashdot misrepresentation, so I read the letter. It's only two pages and most of that is boilerplate or whitespace.
In summary, you are full of shit. He really did say, "an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons". He did NOT say what you are saying, that the answers were provided elsewhere in classified reports. Exactly what letter do you pretend to be reading? Link and quotes.
the uproar will be so big that everybody would try to know who is actually spied
The press might make a stink about it, but most Americans are too complacent to get up in arms about privacy. You might remember back when FISA and the massive telco wiretapping was in the news during Obama's run for President, and how he reversed positions to give the telcos immunity and suffered no consequences.
If anything, he wanted to appear strong on defense and basically told his pissed off base that their other option was to vote for McCain, who would be even worse on such matters.
North Korea wants a bomb to threaten anyone, and will use it against the south, simply to use it.
Possibly, but unlikely, as at that point even China wouldn't protect them anymore and they'd be pulverized into the ground. Their main deterrent right now is that they could cause massive civilian damage to S. Korea in a war, which is why they can provoke the South any time they want attention without actually starting a war. Use a nuke and that deterrent is gone.
Considering that Gaddafi was playing along with the West with regards to Muslim extremists and WMD, that would be really stupid.
With marauding criminals from a hotbed of terrorism burning down court houses, who wouldn't send in the army?
Right, it's just "terrorists" and not protestors involved in the Arab Spring, which also swept through countries like Egypt, which the US and Israel had good relations with.
We hate any country who tries to acquire nuclear weapons.
Except India, Pakistan, and of course Israel.
The only reason we're fucking around with 'cyber' warfare instead of curb stomping them is it's an election year and our economy is in ruins
Wait, so you mean we couldn't have "curb stomped" them before?
thanks to fighting two unnecessary wars
Is going to war to stop Iran from acquiring nukes "necessary"?
our country having a momentary fit of stupidity where we had to kill everyone and everything wearing a funny hat because a couple of our sand castles got kicked over by a bully.
No hyperbole here, no sir. Yep, we killed everybody wearing a funny hat, and those skyscrapers in New York City were just sandcastles instead of economic centers of activity.
Your believe is based on mythology, it also has evidence which is interpeted to fit the story. This is the same for creationists. both are religious views.
Which is complete nonsense, as science changes its beliefs based on the evidence all the time, whereas somebody dedicated to the inerrant truth of the Bible can't change the Bible. Well, they can, but they have to resort to reinterpretation. Religion is based on supernatural explanations, faith, dogma, and testimonial evidence, the weakest kind.
What a surprise that God would actually do things in a book about him.
Which god, and which book, and why do you think your particular god and books have any more authenticity than the others? And why would an all-powerful being not get the same message to everybody, throughout all time?
All the major lines of science were by creationists.
Now the question is why have so many scientists abandoned it since then? Most of the scientists mentioned were before Darwin's theory became accepted. They set out to look at the evidence and it didn't support the Hebrew mythology, so they abandoned it.
I found a link describing alot of your questions about the Ark.
And I still find it ridiculous that a man and his family were able to prepare food for that many animals without it rotting. The whole project is an insanely Herculean task (there's some Greek mythology for you).
but the RFS that caused the first cut into the then freashly laid soft rock.
Sorry, my mistake. I missed the part about soft rock, probably because I thought this guy was at least trying to be somewhat serious instead of trying to treat the geologic layers of the earth as differentiated mud from a single flood event.
It then says the scenerio of the uniformitarian explanation also requires soft alluvium but yet there is none there.
A simple explanation is that it was swept away by erosion if it's a high plain with not enough rain to keep plants and soil. Example: "Very fine grained, light-colored sand and gravel; deposits poorly preserved; thickness 0-2 m. Elevation ranges from 949-952 m near cableway. Mostly an erosional zone along margin of Colorado River." Assuming, of course, that geologists would agree that there's no trace in the area he is talking about.
There's plenty of alluvium evidence around the Grand Canyon, though.
Hence when one dating technique says 220,000,000 years and another says 33,000 it shows that the 220,000,000 has hidden assumptions behind it proven to be incorrect as something can not be both 33K and 220M yrs old at the same time.
I don't know if there is a legitimate discrepancy here (as in I don't know if these results have been verified by mainstream scientists doing their own excavations and tests), but just because there's an anomaly that doesn't mean you can throw out all the other evidence that brought geologists to their current theories.
For example, Back in my home country of New Zealand, there was a vocaino that exploded 3.5 million years ago on June 30, 1954. radioactive dating failure
"[..] the K-Ar method cannot be used to date samples that are much younger than 6,000 years old [..] their website clearly stated in a footnote that their equipment could not accurately date rocks that are younger than about 2 million years old [..] Considering the statements at the Geochron website and the lowest age limitations of the K-Ar method, why did Austin submit a recently erupted dacite to this laboratory and expect a reliable answer??? Contrary to Swenson's uninformed claim that ' Dr Aus
Sorry for the delayed response. I've been busy and this post takes a fair amount of research. In particular, there was a video I saw on YouTube a while ago where a paleontologist went into transitional forms in the fossil record, and I only found it again just recently.
I could say the same to you, you choose to believe the evolution and a made up story of history.
The difference is my belief is evidence based, not mythology based. Now you've stated that you believe the Bible isn't mythology, but it has all the markings of it. So you have to go out of your way to make the evidence fit the mythology. Scientists used to be much more religious, but abandoned it because the evidence didn't support it.
The bible said the animals came to him. Read the text to answer your questions. Also a simple answer as to stopping the animals from eating each other is cages.
Fair enough, but if God could make the animals come to Noah, he could make them behave on the boat too. For that matter, he didn't need Noah to undertake the superhuman task of creating such a large boat in the first place.
Hence you would only need to carry 20000-25000 kinds
Oh, is that all? Even allowing that, you suppose one man and his family was able to store food for 20,000 "kinds", which you then have to double for pairs (or 7 pairs, as the case may be), and have enough food to last for months? And the food didn't rot during this time? Come on, this story is fit for children, not grown adults with an education.
There is alot of evidence for a massive flood. There are huge sedimentary basins are all around the world. Map of sedimentary basins. The Grand Canyon which each of it's layers laid down in water. The Three Sisters of Australia.
The Grand Canyon is easy to pick on because of the meandering that it does. See this video for an explanation of why a flood wouldn't show that pattern through rock. The article you link to mentions this problem, and then inexplicably, to counter it they use the Wadden Sea as an example that shows meandering, but that's a sandbank! It doesn't cut through hard rock.
Even if I were to accept the creationist view that these are flood events, the challenge for you is to link all these features to the same time period. The Three Sisters article offered a date of "33,720 +/- 430 years". So where's the corresponding evidence with those dates?
Most importantly, where's the extinction event in the fossil record? It would be obvious from such a worldwide flood, especially one so recent. That's what early geologists who were raised in Hebrew mythology expected to find, but they didn't. That's why science has grown to dominantly rejects such myths.
Again you are trying to attack the creditably of the source but not attacking the data directly.
I did mention the data, the fossil and genetic record. Also, there's a good reason to attack the source, because it is spectacularly bad.
All over the world people made up different stories and mixed it in with history, ethics, miracles, fantastic tales, explanations of nature, and whatnot, yet we are supposed to believe your mythology is reliable and should cause people to go through vast contortions to try and make the evidence fit. Meanwhile, your all powerful and loving god can't provide clear evidence and the same message to everybody.
Again you have refused to talk about what evidence does the fossil record provide with transitional forms?
I said as much, but it was a touch mobile device that you could connect to your mobile phone, and it served as the basis for their later models that were phones.
They stuck a new window manager on Linux and tried to call it a mobile OS.
Which is pretty much what Apple did with BSD and OS X. Nokia tried. They failed. To say they "did nothing" is just bullshit. Microsoft "did nothing" back when they sat on IE 6 for a long time and let Firefox gain traction. That wasn't the case here.
I don't agree with their decision, but it was one of those high-risk, high-reward ones. Rather than being a late, "me-too" player in the highly competitive Android market, they had a chance to be the champion of a resurgent Windows Phone. It's not inconceivable they could have succeeded. Then again, if they had jumped in with Android and fell flat, they'd be getting smashed by the pundits for not innovating or differentiating themselves.
which is one of my darker fears: finding a solution, and having 40% of the money walk away. A million is a lot of money, true, but accounting for inflation and purchasing power, after taxes...it works out to two year's worth of salary for some of the better paid programmers out there.
I'd like to know just what percentage of programmers are getting paid 300k per year after taxes in salary. I'm guessing not a whole heck of a lot.
It's a complete fluff piece and doesn't contain any interesting new knowledge regarding human behavior or social networks, which you would expect from an "in depth" article about Facebook's data mining.
Really? I found a lot in the article interesting:
"Since last fall, Facebook has also been able to collect data on users' online lives beyond its borders automatically: in certain apps or websites, when users listen to a song or read a news article, the information is passed along to Facebook, even if no one clicks "Like." Within the feature's first five months, Facebook catalogued more than five billion instances of people listening to songs online."
"For the first time," Marlow says, "we have a microscope that not only lets us examine social behavior at a very fine level that we've never been able to see before but allows us to run experiments that millions of users are exposed to." [emphasis mine]
"So he messed with how Facebook operated for a quarter of a billion users. Over a seven-week period, the 76 million links that those users shared with each other were logged. Then, on 219 million randomly chosen occasions, Facebook prevented someone from seeing a link shared by a friend. Hiding links this way created a control group so that Bakshy could assess how often people end up promoting the same links because they have similar information sources and interests. " [emphasis mine]
"He found that our close friends strongly sway which information we share, but overall their impact is dwarfed by the collective influence of numerous more distant contacts--what sociologists call "weak ties." It is our diverse collection of weak ties that most powerfully determines what information we're exposed to."
"One of Marlow's researchers has developed a way to calculate a country's "gross national happiness" from its Facebook activity by logging the occurrence of words and phrases that signal positive or negative emotion. Gross national happiness fluctuates in a way that suggests the measure is accurate: it jumps during holidays and dips when popular public figures die. After a major earthquake in Chile in February 2010, the country's score plummeted and took many months to return to normal. That event seemed to make the country as a whole more sympathetic when Japan suffered its own big earthquake and subsequent tsunami in March 2011; while Chile's gross national happiness dipped, the figure didn't waver in any other countries tracked (Japan wasn't among them). "
"But some of his team's work and the attitudes of Facebook's leaders show that the company is not above using its platform to tweak users' behavior. [..] In April, influenced in part by conversations over dinner with his med-student girlfriend (now his wife), Zuckerberg decided that he should use social influence within Facebook to increase organ donor registrations. Users were given an opportunity to click a box on their Timeline pages to signal that they were registered donors, which triggered a notification to their friends. The new feature started a cascade of social pressure, and organ donor enrollment increased by a factor of 23 across 44 states. "
"Marlow says that in the 2010 election his group matched voter registration logs with the data to see which of the Facebook users who got nudges actually went to the polls. (He stresses that the researchers worked with cryptographically "anonymized" data and could not match specific users with their voting records.) "
"In a kind of passing of the technological baton, Facebook built its data storage system by expanding the power of open-source software called Hadoop, which was inspired by work at Google and built at Yahoo. Hadoop can tame seemingly impossible computational tasks--like working on all the data Facebook's users have entrusted to it--by spreading them across many machines inside a data center. But Hadoop wasn't built with data science in mind, and using it for that purpose requires speci
Nokia did the exact same thing that RIM did: Nothing. Apple showed up with IOS and Google showed up with Android, and Nokia told everyone how great Symbian still is.
Which ignores what I said in my post: "I don't think Nokia failed for lack of trying (like, for example, the N800)."
That was in 2007, the same time as when the iPhone came out. While not a smart phone, it had Bluetooth to connect to a mobile phone and offered similar capabilities as the iPhone. That led to the N900 in 2009 which was a smartphone. They tried to advance with Maemo. It didn't catch on.
Samsung sent them a C&D to stop advertising tat their TVs used Samsung panels............which they bought from Samsung and still have Samsung logos on them.
Apple also successfully stopped them from selling grey import iPads at international prices.
I couldn't find a source for this. See, for example, this article from last month. I did find that Apple got them to "voluntarily" stop selling Samsung Galaxy Tabs:
"Online retailer Ruslan Kogan has agreed to pull the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 from its store after Apple threatened to sue. Apple is currently in a legal battle with Samsung to ban the device from Australia due to patent infringements. Samsung had agreed not to sell in Australia until the hearing in Sydney is concluded."
When somebody asks you for clarification, it's poor form to repeat what you said, unless your purpose is to hide a shallow, ignorant comment behind Zen-like, pseudo-intelligence.
Queue the replies from people wanting MS to suffer at the expense of Nokia employees
You can add me to that list. Microsoft for a long time was an abusive monopoly, and they still have a very profitable monopoly on the desktop, even if that market is at risk. While Android isn't as open as it could be, it's at least a big step in the right direction.
Sorry for those Nokia employees, but if you're working on behalf of a company that I consider harmful then I can't root for your success.
What warning would that be? Don't get driven out by Apple and Google+"everybody else"? I don't think Nokia failed for lack of trying (like, for example, the N800).
Then don't use phrases like "They increase the entropy of the universe". And my entire point, which you did not make, is that beyond not doing anything useful, they are actively wasting valuable resources.
This is getting rather pedantic, and I understand you are correct strictly speaking as to physics, but the connotation of what you originally said isn't the same as the point I made. One of the major points of Bitcoin is just how hard it is to "mine" them, as opposed to just conjuring them up like a public/private key pair.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the letter from the IG, all he says is that he can't answer the question in an *unclassified* letter.
Like you, I wondered if this was typical Slashdot misrepresentation, so I read the letter. It's only two pages and most of that is boilerplate or whitespace.
In summary, you are full of shit. He really did say, "an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons". He did NOT say what you are saying, that the answers were provided elsewhere in classified reports. Exactly what letter do you pretend to be reading? Link and quotes.
the uproar will be so big that everybody would try to know who is actually spied
The press might make a stink about it, but most Americans are too complacent to get up in arms about privacy. You might remember back when FISA and the massive telco wiretapping was in the news during Obama's run for President, and how he reversed positions to give the telcos immunity and suffered no consequences.
If anything, he wanted to appear strong on defense and basically told his pissed off base that their other option was to vote for McCain, who would be even worse on such matters.
Reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/world/americas/02iht-obama.1.14161755.html
North Korea wants a bomb to threaten anyone, and will use it against the south, simply to use it.
Possibly, but unlikely, as at that point even China wouldn't protect them anymore and they'd be pulverized into the ground. Their main deterrent right now is that they could cause massive civilian damage to S. Korea in a war, which is why they can provoke the South any time they want attention without actually starting a war. Use a nuke and that deterrent is gone.
You say potato, I say CIA.
Considering that Gaddafi was playing along with the West with regards to Muslim extremists and WMD, that would be really stupid.
With marauding criminals from a hotbed of terrorism burning down court houses, who wouldn't send in the army?
Right, it's just "terrorists" and not protestors involved in the Arab Spring, which also swept through countries like Egypt, which the US and Israel had good relations with.
Iran is trying its best to be recognized by the international community as a modern Islamic democracy
Is that a joke? 2009-2010 Iranian election protests
We hate any country who tries to acquire nuclear weapons.
Except India, Pakistan, and of course Israel.
The only reason we're fucking around with 'cyber' warfare instead of curb stomping them is it's an election year and our economy is in ruins
Wait, so you mean we couldn't have "curb stomped" them before?
thanks to fighting two unnecessary wars
Is going to war to stop Iran from acquiring nukes "necessary"?
our country having a momentary fit of stupidity where we had to kill everyone and everything wearing a funny hat because a couple of our sand castles got kicked over by a bully.
No hyperbole here, no sir. Yep, we killed everybody wearing a funny hat, and those skyscrapers in New York City were just sandcastles instead of economic centers of activity.
Your believe is based on mythology, it also has evidence which is interpeted to fit the story. This is the same for creationists. both are religious views.
Which is complete nonsense, as science changes its beliefs based on the evidence all the time, whereas somebody dedicated to the inerrant truth of the Bible can't change the Bible. Well, they can, but they have to resort to reinterpretation. Religion is based on supernatural explanations, faith, dogma, and testimonial evidence, the weakest kind.
What a surprise that God would actually do things in a book about him.
Which god, and which book, and why do you think your particular god and books have any more authenticity than the others? And why would an all-powerful being not get the same message to everybody, throughout all time?
All the major lines of science were by creationists.
Now the question is why have so many scientists abandoned it since then? Most of the scientists mentioned were before Darwin's theory became accepted. They set out to look at the evidence and it didn't support the Hebrew mythology, so they abandoned it.
I found a link describing alot of your questions about the Ark.
And I still find it ridiculous that a man and his family were able to prepare food for that many animals without it rotting. The whole project is an insanely Herculean task (there's some Greek mythology for you).
but the RFS that caused the first cut into the then freashly laid soft rock.
Sorry, my mistake. I missed the part about soft rock, probably because I thought this guy was at least trying to be somewhat serious instead of trying to treat the geologic layers of the earth as differentiated mud from a single flood event.
It then says the scenerio of the uniformitarian explanation also requires soft alluvium but yet there is none there.
A simple explanation is that it was swept away by erosion if it's a high plain with not enough rain to keep plants and soil. Example: "Very fine grained, light-colored sand and gravel; deposits poorly preserved; thickness 0-2 m. Elevation ranges from 949-952 m near cableway. Mostly an erosional zone along margin of Colorado River." Assuming, of course, that geologists would agree that there's no trace in the area he is talking about.
There's plenty of alluvium evidence around the Grand Canyon, though.
Hence when one dating technique says 220,000,000 years and another says 33,000 it shows that the 220,000,000 has hidden assumptions behind it proven to be incorrect as something can not be both 33K and 220M yrs old at the same time.
I don't know if there is a legitimate discrepancy here (as in I don't know if these results have been verified by mainstream scientists doing their own excavations and tests), but just because there's an anomaly that doesn't mean you can throw out all the other evidence that brought geologists to their current theories.
For example, Back in my home country of New Zealand, there was a vocaino that exploded 3.5 million years ago on June 30, 1954. radioactive dating failure
Anti-link:
"[..] the K-Ar method cannot be used to date samples that are much younger than 6,000 years old [..] their website clearly stated in a footnote that their equipment could not accurately date rocks that are younger than about 2 million years old [..] Considering the statements at the Geochron website and the lowest age limitations of the K-Ar method, why did Austin submit a recently erupted dacite to this laboratory and expect a reliable answer??? Contrary to Swenson's uninformed claim that ' Dr Aus
Sorry for the delayed response. I've been busy and this post takes a fair amount of research. In particular, there was a video I saw on YouTube a while ago where a paleontologist went into transitional forms in the fossil record, and I only found it again just recently.
I could say the same to you, you choose to believe the evolution and a made up story of history.
The difference is my belief is evidence based, not mythology based. Now you've stated that you believe the Bible isn't mythology, but it has all the markings of it. So you have to go out of your way to make the evidence fit the mythology. Scientists used to be much more religious, but abandoned it because the evidence didn't support it.
The bible said the animals came to him. Read the text to answer your questions. Also a simple answer as to stopping the animals from eating each other is cages.
Fair enough, but if God could make the animals come to Noah, he could make them behave on the boat too. For that matter, he didn't need Noah to undertake the superhuman task of creating such a large boat in the first place.
Hence you would only need to carry 20000-25000 kinds
Oh, is that all? Even allowing that, you suppose one man and his family was able to store food for 20,000 "kinds", which you then have to double for pairs (or 7 pairs, as the case may be), and have enough food to last for months? And the food didn't rot during this time? Come on, this story is fit for children, not grown adults with an education.
There is alot of evidence for a massive flood. There are huge sedimentary basins are all around the world. Map of sedimentary basins. The Grand Canyon which each of it's layers laid down in water. The Three Sisters of Australia.
The Grand Canyon is easy to pick on because of the meandering that it does. See this video for an explanation of why a flood wouldn't show that pattern through rock. The article you link to mentions this problem, and then inexplicably, to counter it they use the Wadden Sea as an example that shows meandering, but that's a sandbank! It doesn't cut through hard rock.
Even if I were to accept the creationist view that these are flood events, the challenge for you is to link all these features to the same time period. The Three Sisters article offered a date of "33,720 +/- 430 years". So where's the corresponding evidence with those dates?
Most importantly, where's the extinction event in the fossil record? It would be obvious from such a worldwide flood, especially one so recent. That's what early geologists who were raised in Hebrew mythology expected to find, but they didn't. That's why science has grown to dominantly rejects such myths.
Again you are trying to attack the creditably of the source but not attacking the data directly.
I did mention the data, the fossil and genetic record. Also, there's a good reason to attack the source, because it is spectacularly bad.
All over the world people made up different stories and mixed it in with history, ethics, miracles, fantastic tales, explanations of nature, and whatnot, yet we are supposed to believe your mythology is reliable and should cause people to go through vast contortions to try and make the evidence fit. Meanwhile, your all powerful and loving god can't provide clear evidence and the same message to everybody.
Again you have refused to talk about what evidence does the fossil record provide with transitional forms?
Here's the video I mentioned at the start of my post, directly linked to the part of the talk where the paleontologist covers transitional forms.
The problem is so great for evolutionists that they invented another theory called punctuated
The N800 isn't a phone.
I said as much, but it was a touch mobile device that you could connect to your mobile phone, and it served as the basis for their later models that were phones.
They stuck a new window manager on Linux and tried to call it a mobile OS.
Which is pretty much what Apple did with BSD and OS X. Nokia tried. They failed. To say they "did nothing" is just bullshit. Microsoft "did nothing" back when they sat on IE 6 for a long time and let Firefox gain traction. That wasn't the case here.
I don't agree with their decision, but it was one of those high-risk, high-reward ones. Rather than being a late, "me-too" player in the highly competitive Android market, they had a chance to be the champion of a resurgent Windows Phone. It's not inconceivable they could have succeeded. Then again, if they had jumped in with Android and fell flat, they'd be getting smashed by the pundits for not innovating or differentiating themselves.
which is one of my darker fears: finding a solution, and having 40% of the money walk away. A million is a lot of money, true, but accounting for inflation and purchasing power, after taxes...it works out to two year's worth of salary for some of the better paid programmers out there.
I'd like to know just what percentage of programmers are getting paid 300k per year after taxes in salary. I'm guessing not a whole heck of a lot.
It's a complete fluff piece and doesn't contain any interesting new knowledge regarding human behavior or social networks, which you would expect from an "in depth" article about Facebook's data mining.
Really? I found a lot in the article interesting:
Oh no! It's popular, it must not be good. Only the shit I like deserves to be called music.
Nokia did the exact same thing that RIM did: Nothing. Apple showed up with IOS and Google showed up with Android, and Nokia told everyone how great Symbian still is.
Which ignores what I said in my post: "I don't think Nokia failed for lack of trying (like, for example, the N800)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800
That was in 2007, the same time as when the iPhone came out. While not a smart phone, it had Bluetooth to connect to a mobile phone and offered similar capabilities as the iPhone. That led to the N900 in 2009 which was a smartphone. They tried to advance with Maemo. It didn't catch on.
That implies no need for pixel perfectness, which means you don't have a nontechie boss
I wish there was a way to hit these guys with a clue bat about the nature of the web and stupidity of designing down to pixels.
I've stopped updating FF beyond a certain point
Which means you've stopped getting security fixes.
Samsung sent them a C&D to stop advertising tat their TVs used Samsung panels............which they bought from Samsung and still have Samsung logos on them.
You can see the ad here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8zafrNUsUs
The ad seems honest enough.
Apple also successfully stopped them from selling grey import iPads at international prices.
I couldn't find a source for this. See, for example, this article from last month. I did find that Apple got them to "voluntarily" stop selling Samsung Galaxy Tabs:
"Online retailer Ruslan Kogan has agreed to pull the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 from its store after Apple threatened to sue. Apple is currently in a legal battle with Samsung to ban the device from Australia due to patent infringements. Samsung had agreed not to sell in Australia until the hearing in Sydney is concluded."
When somebody asks you for clarification, it's poor form to repeat what you said, unless your purpose is to hide a shallow, ignorant comment behind Zen-like, pseudo-intelligence.
Good job coming off like a condescending know-it-all with no ability to argue his side. It's easy to throw stones, but not as easy to be constructive.
Queue the replies from people wanting MS to suffer at the expense of Nokia employees
You can add me to that list. Microsoft for a long time was an abusive monopoly, and they still have a very profitable monopoly on the desktop, even if that market is at risk. While Android isn't as open as it could be, it's at least a big step in the right direction.
Sorry for those Nokia employees, but if you're working on behalf of a company that I consider harmful then I can't root for your success.
What warning would that be? Don't get driven out by Apple and Google+"everybody else"? I don't think Nokia failed for lack of trying (like, for example, the N800).
BMO Downmods coming in 3... 2 ... 1...
Oh look, it's the special-pleading-to-get-upmods trick.
First let me say that it's remarkable that too people in general agreement about the uselessness of Bitcoins are at such odds with each other.
I'm still missing why you believe that 'wasting electricity and computer cycles' is the opposite of 'not doing any useful work'.
You're interpreting that wrong. Let me rephrase: Not only do they not do any useful work, they do the opposite of useful work: they waste resources.
I'm not talking about physics at all.
Then don't use phrases like "They increase the entropy of the universe". And my entire point, which you did not make, is that beyond not doing anything useful, they are actively wasting valuable resources.
This is getting rather pedantic, and I understand you are correct strictly speaking as to physics, but the connotation of what you originally said isn't the same as the point I made. One of the major points of Bitcoin is just how hard it is to "mine" them, as opposed to just conjuring them up like a public/private key pair.