I like to think of Bitcoin like gold. Nothing is backing gold. It's a material for which there is a limited supply in the world, and which is universally regarded as value because of various properties it has: perhaps beauty, fungibility, density, etc. Bitcoin is really the same, with a limited global supply, except that it has different properties, mainly ease of transfer over the internet, fungibility, storage efficiency, near-anonymity and built-in escrow.
You're missing the key property of gold: stability. You're not going to your fortune by amassing iron and risk having your empire rust away. While food is a valuable commodity--everyone needs to eat--it doesn't make a good basis for an economy. You can make investments of a sort--feeding workers, for example--but it isn't practical to save up for larger exchanges.
I find it interesting the number of comments in these BitCoin threads--from folks with all levels of skepticism in the BC system--who compare BC to gold yet seem to have no idea why gold is "gold". Mostly, it's treating as an accident of history.
Really? You can't eat it, in it's natural form it's not pretty, and until very recently you couldn't much with it--it's too soft for mechanical uses. It's main industrial uses are as a catalyst or conductor, which meant nothing 100 years ago.
Almost every human society that has known about gold has valued it, going back thousands of years. It's been a standard of trade been groups of people who had no other common values.
I don't think it's any more ludicrous for Bitcoin to have value than it is for gold to have value. And in the end, when I want to sell WoW weapons, buy webserver space, or play a few games of poker online, why would I use gold, cash or paypal, which all require me to remember log-in creditials, give away information and/or a bunch of third party fees.
BitCoin is similar to gold as a manifestation of work. One is digital, the other physical. Gold (as a tool of exchange, not ornamentation) represents the physical effort to mine, extract, purify, etc. BitCoin represents the computational effort to do whatever it is GPUs do.
To draw any other equivalency between gold and BitCoin is one of those lines of nerd thought that employs dispassionate logic at each step, and yet comes to a truly ridiculous conclusion.
Gold: has stood the test of time. Valued by humans in every corner of the world for thousands of years. Not a standard of currency, but openly traded in every major economy.
BitCoin: been around a few years(?). Valued by a very small group of people. Accepted by a small number of merchants.
How can there by any equivalency between these two as a vehicle of exchange? I'm not saying BitCoin is a scam or worthless. But to say it's anywhere near the level of gold is ridiculous.
Let's put it this way. When you have a vaccine that works 95% of the time, and 99% of the kids are vaccinated. You'll have ~5% of the population contracting the disease despite being vaccinated. And the 1% of the population will contract the disease because they weren't vaccinated. You end with way more students that are vaccinated with the disease than those who are not vaccinated (absolute number wise). But it also ignored the fact that 94% of the population was protected against the disease.
I'd like to know what % of children in CA are not vaccinated for whooping cough. TFA had the figure of 8% for the number of unvaccinated children in the population with whopping cough. If the number of unvaccinated children is much less than 8%, that'd be clear demonstration of the danger of not vaccinating.
I also wonder if that 8% figure is low. Some folks don't vaccinate because of lack of education or access to medical care. But for the folks who actively avoid vaccination, how many of them refuse other forms of medical care? How many unreported cases were there from parents who never take their children to a doctor under any circumstance?
So... either their was something wrong with the vaccine, there was a mutation, or else this particular vaccine is less effective than most other vaccines.
Or the booster given at 11-12 should be given at 8-9.
Unfortunately, most people will take this and generalize it to "vaccines don't work!!!"
Yeah, there is that. Though there really isn't enough detail in the article to make that conclusion.
Of the whooping cough cases, 81% were fully vaccinated, 11% were partially vaccinated, 8% were not vaccinated. If more than 8% of the population was not vaccinated, then you could start down the path to building a case against vaccination.
Not a game - or entertainment or luck. Just calculation of reall odds and risk.
Luck is a huge component, as the winner himself said he was ready to walk away with a $400k loss which could have happened had the cards come out differently.
Only if you have an infinite amount of time and an infinite loss tolerance (or if you cheat) can you avoid the impact of luck.
Just like the folks at CERN and the LHC are relying on luck. What an atom or subatomic particle does at any particular moment is as much subject to chance as what card is dealt next.
But just like the scientist doesn't fire a single particle down the collider, this guy didn't play a single hand.
Assault and battery and murder were illegal then as well as now. Hate crime laws do nothing to change that except to unfairly add to some peoples' sentences.
Just to throw some historical perspective in to the mix, hate crime laws were born from local law enforcement turning a blind eye to or participating in crimes such as assault, battery, and murder.
In some places killing a black man isn't against the law. Murder isn't a federal crime, but civil rights violations are. It's basically a "this is why we can't have nice things" situation.
To all the states rights folks, you shat your own bed, now you have to sleep in it. When left to the states, people get away with murder (literally), so now you have feds all up in your business.
Why was Profiting from Crowdsourcing a movie, song, or book made illegal? And when did it happen.
My question as well. Follow the crowd sourcing link in TFS. It's actually not just a link to a wikipedia entry defining crowd sourcing.
As Amy Cortese writes in the NYTimes:
Under those laws, crafted largely in the 1930s, the sites would have to either limit the fund-raising to wealthy investors, who the S.E.C. deems sophisticated, or go through a registration process that would prove too costly given the small sums being sought
are you kidding me, that is one of my absolute favorite things about gmail. SO many times i do want to send an attachment and in my hurry forget to actually attach the file but because of the intuitiveness of gmail i am saved from looking like a fool (for that instance) and sending a blank email.
I am not kidding you. I want tools that help me do what I decide to do, not tools that decide to think for me. It's one thing to do a search and get "do you mean...," it's another thing to do a search and get, "Yeah, I know you typed in X, but I'm going to show you results for Y."
Yes, I've sent out emails and forgotten to add attachments. But I knew I forgot the attachment because I know when I intend to attach a file to an email. The folks at google do not know when I intend to attach a file to an email. People make mistakes. If that makes me look the fool, so be it.
I recently had to replace my android phone. When I downloaded my contacts to the new phone, android decided my wife Catherine and her friend Kate were the same person and combined their entries in my contact list.
How does that make sense? I created 2 entries in my contacts, but the folks at google know I meant to create only 1. And the person I know as Catherine, who sometimes goes by Cat, who happens to be my wife, who has never gone by 'Kate' the folks at google know better than I that the caller ID on my phone should display Kate when she calls.
It's one thing to have a good idea that hasn't had the perfect implementation. Turning computers from tools that help us doing anything we can think of to digital overlords that do the thinking for us is not a good idea.
The latest version of IE has progressed past "are you sure you want to run this download, it looks iffy" to "I don't like this program, I'm not running it."
Maybe you want Microsoft to decide what programs you can run and Google to decide what email you send, but I prefer to live and think and even make mistakes for myself.`
Google has passed it's Howard Hughes inventor, producer, philanthropist, most interesting man in the world phase,and entered its Howard Hughes locked in the penthouse, saving nail clippings, drug addict phase.
Today I was sending an email through Gmail, and a prompt asked if I needed to attach a file, which confused me because the email involved no files. It took me a while to figure out it was because I had the word "attached" in the body of the email.
What's next, chrome wipes my hard drive because I do a web search for "format"?
It's damn unfortunate for everyone involved. But even worse, Ravi is also going to have his life ruined by a man who decided to end his own. What Ravi did was punch in the nose wrong - not 10 years in prison and deportation. Heck, the stupid stuff we did on our floor in college was just as bad or worse. I'm sure 99% of every man who went to college in the dorms can say the same.
No, Ravi's life was ruined by Ravi (if at all).
Do I think criminal charges would have been filed if his roommate didn't kill himself? No. But does that mean Ravi is a victim of the roommate's actions? Heck no. If he doesn't realize there are other people in the world who might react to his actions, then he should be locked up.
If he was robbing a bank when a guard pulled a gun, he couldn't shoot the guard and claim self defense. He broke the law and as a result someone is dead. Is it murder? I don't think so. Even man slaughter? That's the jury's job to decide. But to say Ravi had nothing to do with the situation he is in is insane.
I infer from the rejection of the plea deal that this guy still doesn't understand what he did wrong.
As for his life being ruined, I doubt this was front page news in India. He has a better chance of finding a job there anyway.
If you try to take drugs through a border checkpoint, you're going to get caught. Should this surprise anyone?
It should if the people in question are driving from one part of the US to another part of the US. Why the FUCK do we have "border checkpoints" on roads that don't CROSS THE BORDER?
That is so mind-numbingly idiotic, thugish, and clearly unconstitutional I hadn't considered it as possibility. I was wondering why he was going to Austin by way of Mexico.
There is also the possibility there was nothing illegal in the vehicle, and the brown shirts on duty at the time just had a quota to fill.
But if he was carrying, dude it's Austin. You can pick up when you get there. Or, you know, just not toke up for a couple days. (Not anti-drug, but anti-PMITA prison.)
If you have a headache that a headache tablet gets rid of, or helps, you don't have a need for the tablet, it's just convenience.
WTF does that mean? If a drug helps, then you didn't really need the drug? Yeah, and if you don't feel hungry after eating, then you don't really need food. And if you can see after turning on a light, then it wasn't really dark.
As for "it's just convenience," are there any recorded cases of terminal migraines or headaches? Anything anyone does to alleviate headache pain is a convenience.
If you have a headache that *isn't* affected enough by paracetamol, you need to get your doctor to give you something stronger.
Well doctor, I get headaches that paracetamol has no effect on, but will go away if I take ibuprofen early enough. The only alternatives I've found for my headaches are taking oxycodone (or stronger) or just letting the pain get worse for usually 3 or 4 hours until I throw up and then almost immediately feel better.
As much as I'd love a steady supply of opiates, my brick-and-mortar doctor won't prescribe them. Instead he tells me to not try and be a tough guy (since I try not to take unnecessary, non-recreational drugs) and just take the ibuprofen before it gets too late.
But as an internet doctor, perhaps you can email me a prescription?
Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people.
Knowing nothing of James Whittaker other than what is in the summary, and having not RTFA, I'll assume he is a very intelligent and successful person.
He is also missing the obvious (and he's not the only one).
Facebook knows more of what people want other people to know. Google knows about what is really going on with people. People lie in surveys, whether it's to say what they want to be true or what they think is expected. Facebook is like a survey you create yourself.
Facebook has your holiday photos, knows you've been to an island, like partying on the beach. Google knows you're reading up on herpes treatments.
Maybe Facebook knows you're married. Google knows you're trying to find a divorce attorney.
If Google is relying on + to compete with Facebook, it has already lost the battle.
Surely if this is true the "light" is not the big story.
If you can take "heat" and convert it into another form of energy that is HUUUUUUUGE NEWS- yes I know, steam engines, etc, but they require a large difference in temperature.
Imagine if your fridge/freezer- GENERATED power- by taking heat energy and converted it into electricity?
Most of the DVD's from the 1960s and 1970s were analog. Digital DVDs started to become popular in the 1980s.
You skipped the part about how the world was black & white in the early 1900s. When everything was colorized, old movies stayed the same because they were color video of the black and white world.
How can you be so foolish as to think that students are the consumers? Let me introduce you to the concepts at work here. The CONSUMER is the one paying money for a service.
The consumer is the one consuming the product, the end user. How are students not the consumer of text books?
The one paying the money is not the consumer, it's the CUSTOMER. The CUSTOMER is the district administrator who decides to purchase a book or the state official who sponsors an education bill knowing only one publisher has books ready for sale that meet the new standard. Those are the folks who get the trips to the "educational conference" on the tropical island.
The folks who spend the money are the CUSTOMERS. The folks who get stuck eating the dog food are the CONSUMERS. The folks who supply the money but have minimal input in to how it is spent (the tax payers) are the MARKS.
So what you're saying is boys are better at maths than girls?
But seriously, the story doesn't make sense. I realize most folks aren't math whizzes, but "Government figures show that almost half the working population of England have only primary school math skills".
Does primary school math in England not cover greater than and less than? This is how much money I spend. Is it greater than or less than the amount I earn/have?
Trouble with a train time table? This is the time the train arrives. Is it greater than or less than the time I need to reach my destination?
We're not talking find the area under the curve or calculate the volume of water passing through an area for a given period of time. Primary math skills (add, subtract, multiply, divide, greater than, less than, equal to) should get you pretty far in life.
Slashdot Mirror
Gold is an element. New elements can't be created.
o_O
I like to think of Bitcoin like gold. Nothing is backing gold. It's a material for which there is a limited supply in the world, and which is universally regarded as value because of various properties it has: perhaps beauty, fungibility, density, etc. Bitcoin is really the same, with a limited global supply, except that it has different properties, mainly ease of transfer over the internet, fungibility, storage efficiency, near-anonymity and built-in escrow.
You're missing the key property of gold: stability. You're not going to your fortune by amassing iron and risk having your empire rust away. While food is a valuable commodity--everyone needs to eat--it doesn't make a good basis for an economy. You can make investments of a sort--feeding workers, for example--but it isn't practical to save up for larger exchanges.
I find it interesting the number of comments in these BitCoin threads--from folks with all levels of skepticism in the BC system--who compare BC to gold yet seem to have no idea why gold is "gold". Mostly, it's treating as an accident of history.
Really? You can't eat it, in it's natural form it's not pretty, and until very recently you couldn't much with it--it's too soft for mechanical uses. It's main industrial uses are as a catalyst or conductor, which meant nothing 100 years ago.
Almost every human society that has known about gold has valued it, going back thousands of years. It's been a standard of trade been groups of people who had no other common values.
I don't think it's any more ludicrous for Bitcoin to have value than it is for gold to have value. And in the end, when I want to sell WoW weapons, buy webserver space, or play a few games of poker online, why would I use gold, cash or paypal, which all require me to remember log-in creditials, give away information and/or a bunch of third party fees.
BitCoin is similar to gold as a manifestation of work. One is digital, the other physical. Gold (as a tool of exchange, not ornamentation) represents the physical effort to mine, extract, purify, etc. BitCoin represents the computational effort to do whatever it is GPUs do.
To draw any other equivalency between gold and BitCoin is one of those lines of nerd thought that employs dispassionate logic at each step, and yet comes to a truly ridiculous conclusion.
Gold: has stood the test of time. Valued by humans in every corner of the world for thousands of years. Not a standard of currency, but openly traded in every major economy.
BitCoin: been around a few years(?). Valued by a very small group of people. Accepted by a small number of merchants.
How can there by any equivalency between these two as a vehicle of exchange? I'm not saying BitCoin is a scam or worthless. But to say it's anywhere near the level of gold is ridiculous.
Let's put it this way. When you have a vaccine that works 95% of the time, and 99% of the kids are vaccinated. You'll have ~5% of the population contracting the disease despite being vaccinated. And the 1% of the population will contract the disease because they weren't vaccinated. You end with way more students that are vaccinated with the disease than those who are not vaccinated (absolute number wise). But it also ignored the fact that 94% of the population was protected against the disease.
I'd like to know what % of children in CA are not vaccinated for whooping cough. TFA had the figure of 8% for the number of unvaccinated children in the population with whopping cough. If the number of unvaccinated children is much less than 8%, that'd be clear demonstration of the danger of not vaccinating.
I also wonder if that 8% figure is low. Some folks don't vaccinate because of lack of education or access to medical care. But for the folks who actively avoid vaccination, how many of them refuse other forms of medical care? How many unreported cases were there from parents who never take their children to a doctor under any circumstance?
So... either their was something wrong with the vaccine, there was a mutation, or else this particular vaccine is less effective than most other vaccines.
Or the booster given at 11-12 should be given at 8-9.
Unfortunately, most people will take this and generalize it to "vaccines don't work!!!"
Yeah, there is that. Though there really isn't enough detail in the article to make that conclusion.
Of the whooping cough cases, 81% were fully vaccinated, 11% were partially vaccinated, 8% were not vaccinated. If more than 8% of the population was not vaccinated, then you could start down the path to building a case against vaccination.
Recent ThinkPads have a removable CPU. I just replaced the main board in a W510 last week. The CPU drops in to a ZIF socket.
Came here to complain about the missing hyphen and the misleading headline.
Since that job is taken, I'll just add LSD and ecstasy are not narcotics.
I didn't RTFA, but I'm guessing whatever was done, it wasn't done by the Feds.
... two very important facts: 1.) There is a club and 2.) He's not in it.
But what are his feelings on frilly toothpicks?
They're asserting that 40% of the Moon's mass must have come from the impactor, and thus would have a different isotope balance.
Unless the same percentage of the Earth's mass came from the impactor as that of the moon.
Not a game - or entertainment or luck. Just calculation of reall odds and risk.
Luck is a huge component, as the winner himself said he was ready to walk away with a $400k loss which could have happened had the cards come out differently.
Only if you have an infinite amount of time and an infinite loss tolerance (or if you cheat) can you avoid the impact of luck.
Just like the folks at CERN and the LHC are relying on luck. What an atom or subatomic particle does at any particular moment is as much subject to chance as what card is dealt next.
But just like the scientist doesn't fire a single particle down the collider, this guy didn't play a single hand.
Assault and battery and murder were illegal then as well as now. Hate crime laws do nothing to change that except to unfairly add to some peoples' sentences.
Just to throw some historical perspective in to the mix, hate crime laws were born from local law enforcement turning a blind eye to or participating in crimes such as assault, battery, and murder.
In some places killing a black man isn't against the law. Murder isn't a federal crime, but civil rights violations are. It's basically a "this is why we can't have nice things" situation.
To all the states rights folks, you shat your own bed, now you have to sleep in it. When left to the states, people get away with murder (literally), so now you have feds all up in your business.
Why was Profiting from Crowdsourcing a movie, song, or book made illegal? And when did it happen.
My question as well. Follow the crowd sourcing link in TFS. It's actually not just a link to a wikipedia entry defining crowd sourcing.
As Amy Cortese writes in the NYTimes:
Under those laws, crafted largely in the 1930s, the sites would have to either limit the fund-raising to wealthy investors, who the S.E.C. deems sophisticated, or go through a registration process that would prove too costly given the small sums being sought
are you kidding me, that is one of my absolute favorite things about gmail. SO many times i do want to send an attachment and in my hurry forget to actually attach the file but because of the intuitiveness of gmail i am saved from looking like a fool (for that instance) and sending a blank email .
I am not kidding you. I want tools that help me do what I decide to do, not tools that decide to think for me. It's one thing to do a search and get "do you mean...," it's another thing to do a search and get, "Yeah, I know you typed in X, but I'm going to show you results for Y."
Yes, I've sent out emails and forgotten to add attachments. But I knew I forgot the attachment because I know when I intend to attach a file to an email. The folks at google do not know when I intend to attach a file to an email. People make mistakes. If that makes me look the fool, so be it.
I recently had to replace my android phone. When I downloaded my contacts to the new phone, android decided my wife Catherine and her friend Kate were the same person and combined their entries in my contact list.
How does that make sense? I created 2 entries in my contacts, but the folks at google know I meant to create only 1. And the person I know as Catherine, who sometimes goes by Cat, who happens to be my wife, who has never gone by 'Kate' the folks at google know better than I that the caller ID on my phone should display Kate when she calls.
It's one thing to have a good idea that hasn't had the perfect implementation. Turning computers from tools that help us doing anything we can think of to digital overlords that do the thinking for us is not a good idea.
The latest version of IE has progressed past "are you sure you want to run this download, it looks iffy" to "I don't like this program, I'm not running it."
Maybe you want Microsoft to decide what programs you can run and Google to decide what email you send, but I prefer to live and think and even make mistakes for myself.`
Google has passed it's Howard Hughes inventor, producer, philanthropist, most interesting man in the world phase,and entered its Howard Hughes locked in the penthouse, saving nail clippings, drug addict phase.
Today I was sending an email through Gmail, and a prompt asked if I needed to attach a file, which confused me because the email involved no files. It took me a while to figure out it was because I had the word "attached" in the body of the email.
What's next, chrome wipes my hard drive because I do a web search for "format"?
It's damn unfortunate for everyone involved. But even worse, Ravi is also going to have his life ruined by a man who decided to end his own. What Ravi did was punch in the nose wrong - not 10 years in prison and deportation. Heck, the stupid stuff we did on our floor in college was just as bad or worse. I'm sure 99% of every man who went to college in the dorms can say the same.
No, Ravi's life was ruined by Ravi (if at all).
Do I think criminal charges would have been filed if his roommate didn't kill himself? No. But does that mean Ravi is a victim of the roommate's actions? Heck no. If he doesn't realize there are other people in the world who might react to his actions, then he should be locked up.
If he was robbing a bank when a guard pulled a gun, he couldn't shoot the guard and claim self defense. He broke the law and as a result someone is dead. Is it murder? I don't think so. Even man slaughter? That's the jury's job to decide. But to say Ravi had nothing to do with the situation he is in is insane.
I infer from the rejection of the plea deal that this guy still doesn't understand what he did wrong.
As for his life being ruined, I doubt this was front page news in India. He has a better chance of finding a job there anyway.
According to wikipedia, Compton's was the first multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedia. I think we had a copy of it, too.
Do you have a primary source for that information?
If you try to take drugs through a border checkpoint, you're going to get caught. Should this surprise anyone?
It should if the people in question are driving from one part of the US to another part of the US. Why the FUCK do we have "border checkpoints" on roads that don't CROSS THE BORDER?
That is so mind-numbingly idiotic, thugish, and clearly unconstitutional I hadn't considered it as possibility. I was wondering why he was going to Austin by way of Mexico.
There is also the possibility there was nothing illegal in the vehicle, and the brown shirts on duty at the time just had a quota to fill.
But if he was carrying, dude it's Austin. You can pick up when you get there. Or, you know, just not toke up for a couple days. (Not anti-drug, but anti-PMITA prison.)
Why would you go through a border checkpoint with marijuana unless you wanted to get caught?
If you have a headache that a headache tablet gets rid of, or helps, you don't have a need for the tablet, it's just convenience.
WTF does that mean? If a drug helps, then you didn't really need the drug? Yeah, and if you don't feel hungry after eating, then you don't really need food. And if you can see after turning on a light, then it wasn't really dark.
As for "it's just convenience," are there any recorded cases of terminal migraines or headaches? Anything anyone does to alleviate headache pain is a convenience.
If you have a headache that *isn't* affected enough by paracetamol, you need to get your doctor to give you something stronger.
Well doctor, I get headaches that paracetamol has no effect on, but will go away if I take ibuprofen early enough. The only alternatives I've found for my headaches are taking oxycodone (or stronger) or just letting the pain get worse for usually 3 or 4 hours until I throw up and then almost immediately feel better.
As much as I'd love a steady supply of opiates, my brick-and-mortar doctor won't prescribe them. Instead he tells me to not try and be a tough guy (since I try not to take unnecessary, non-recreational drugs) and just take the ibuprofen before it gets too late.
But as an internet doctor, perhaps you can email me a prescription?
Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people.
Knowing nothing of James Whittaker other than what is in the summary, and having not RTFA, I'll assume he is a very intelligent and successful person.
He is also missing the obvious (and he's not the only one).
Facebook knows more of what people want other people to know. Google knows about what is really going on with people. People lie in surveys, whether it's to say what they want to be true or what they think is expected. Facebook is like a survey you create yourself.
Facebook has your holiday photos, knows you've been to an island, like partying on the beach. Google knows you're reading up on herpes treatments.
Maybe Facebook knows you're married. Google knows you're trying to find a divorce attorney.
If Google is relying on + to compete with Facebook, it has already lost the battle.
Surely if this is true the "light" is not the big story.
If you can take "heat" and convert it into another form of energy that is HUUUUUUUGE NEWS- yes I know, steam engines, etc, but they require a large difference in temperature.
Imagine if your fridge/freezer- GENERATED power- by taking heat energy and converted it into electricity?
And don't call him Shirley.
There are analog DVDs?
Most of the DVD's from the 1960s and 1970s were analog. Digital DVDs started to become popular in the 1980s.
You skipped the part about how the world was black & white in the early 1900s. When everything was colorized, old movies stayed the same because they were color video of the black and white world.
How can you be so foolish as to think that students are the consumers? Let me introduce you to the concepts at work here. The CONSUMER is the one paying money for a service.
The consumer is the one consuming the product, the end user. How are students not the consumer of text books?
The one paying the money is not the consumer, it's the CUSTOMER. The CUSTOMER is the district administrator who decides to purchase a book or the state official who sponsors an education bill knowing only one publisher has books ready for sale that meet the new standard. Those are the folks who get the trips to the "educational conference" on the tropical island.
The folks who spend the money are the CUSTOMERS. The folks who get stuck eating the dog food are the CONSUMERS. The folks who supply the money but have minimal input in to how it is spent (the tax payers) are the MARKS.
Sadly omitted from the summary (albeit in the article) — the user gets "free" storage in exchange for the analytics.
AKA, the Google business plan.
The only difference here is their transfer is 'pull' while Google waits for you to 'push' your life on to their servers.
So what you're saying is boys are better at maths than girls?
But seriously, the story doesn't make sense. I realize most folks aren't math whizzes, but "Government figures show that almost half the working population of England have only primary school math skills".
Does primary school math in England not cover greater than and less than? This is how much money I spend. Is it greater than or less than the amount I earn/have?
Trouble with a train time table? This is the time the train arrives. Is it greater than or less than the time I need to reach my destination?
We're not talking find the area under the curve or calculate the volume of water passing through an area for a given period of time. Primary math skills (add, subtract, multiply, divide, greater than, less than, equal to) should get you pretty far in life.
If you have a problem looking away from a screen, you have a problem.
Given the number of people I see in public with their face buried in a phone or tablet, I'm not the only one.