But Bitcoin is (almost) infinitely divisible; you would just adjust your prices downward and uses smaller amounts. I think the presupposition that a money supply needs to grow with an economy is bunk. What are the drawbacks to deflation (if you're not a banker)?
Remember Hushmail? Turns out they were logging traffic after all. I would never trust a random VPN to not log traffic.
I'm currently at a university and don't bother running a VPN, but I'd check out AirVPN. They allow you to pay with BitCoin, so that they don't even have your payment information.
I thought home schoolers would be more receptive. They, as a group, are even more conservative, and are likely to condemn any and all use of IT in education.
As I homeschooled guy, now a college undergrad, I think you are wrong. Perhaps you've just met the wrong homeschoolers. My own homeschool curriculum was partially in the form of satellite broadcasts that we recorded with programmable VCR's (and eventually programmable DVD recorders). I have many younger siblings still at home (10, actually), and they are transitioning some of it to computers by ripping the archived DVD's. The school room has almost a dozen TV's and monitors, along with desks and bookshelves. Ironically enough, my dad is a public high-school math teacher, which has contributed to our decision to home school. (All the failures of public education, religion, etc.)
One of my closest friends here at college was home schooled; his family stored everything on a NAS and piped it around a home network. Another family I've met at church here has three high-school sons currently being homeschooled, and they are very tech-savvy. (Incidentally, they also hold the current world championship for 3-player teams in the Age of Empires III ladders.)
Where are these technophobe homeschoolers? Yes, I'm giving anecdotes, but it was really easy to think of them, and I could list more.
That. I wish I could buy a billboard in front of wherever Mozilla's people work and put up:
If we wanted Chrome, we'd use Chrome. Bring back Firefox. Sincerely, Everyone who used Firefox before the versions numbers went haywire
in MASSIVE text as a daily reminder of the old glory days.
Seriously, I shouldn't have to rearrange and twiddle with everything to get Firefox as much like 3.6 as possible every time I install it. What true UI improvements have we had since then? I can think of two: tabs that don't resize while I'm hovering on them, and tab groups. Why was the rest of it randomized?
Also, what's with the stupid launch defaults? I close Firefox when I want a clean slate, not a glorified minimize. "Restore my windows and tabs from last time" is antithetical to the whole idea of closing all the tabs! Can you imagine if Windows restored all your programs and junk from last time? People would come unglued.
Also, we live in an age of large LCD displays. I can spare a few pixels of screen space to keep the bookmarks and buttons I use all day long visible instead of burying them somewhere underneath gloss and shiny.
One last gripe: Tools > Add-ons should take me to Extensions, not the "Wonderful World of Stuff You Could Bloat Your Firefox With." I go to Add-ons to remove extensions other programs installed without asking far more often than I feel the urge to add bloviated toolbars. Speaking of which, can we finally make Firefox ask before allowing programs (like nearly every AV, Skype, whatever) to hang their useless (or worse, Google-search-invading) lampshade in Extensions?
He is a Republican, much to the party's chagrin. We had our first primary caucus two days ago, and Paul did well: Mitt Romney ----- 30,015 - 24.6% Rick Santorum --- 30,007 - 24.5% Ron Paul -------- 26,219 - 21.4% Newt Gingrich --- 16,251 - 13.3% Rick Perry ------ 12,604 - 10.3%
He might be our last best hope, if he's doesn't have an "accident."
It's quite easy: put CyanogenMod on it and you're good to go. The Motorola bootloader was this past summer, so whatever phone you have probably has a build now.
Couldn't they take Android as a base and built their lauded security and centralized control back into the codebase? Sure, it'd be tough, but it's not impossible. They would have to rewrite a large portion of the OS, as well as their own version of the Cloud to Device Messaging Service, but it's easier than starting from scratch. Messy apps that demand all kinds of random privileges could be run in some sort of Internet-access sandbox that pretends to grant low-level access.
Google+ also really, really needs to open up to teens. I'm a college student, but I still have a lot of high school friends who can't join. I can do all the inviting Google wants and carry their water, but it's unreasonable to invite people to something they can't join.
Seems like it would also be easy resist electronically. Get a vacuum tube and make a high-powered, messy x-ray emitter and just hose the van with it. (Also, carrying an x-ray detector to ensure you have the right van would probably be courteous to innocent van drivers.)
I'm guessing the effect of an x-ray blaster on a van like this would be to wash out the image and maybe induce some concern in the operators about personal exposure. It could also get you in trouble if you just stood there and held it, but I'm sure some enterprising chap could make cheap, unattended units that one could simply embed somewhere.
I wonder - if powerful enough, could an x-ray emitter possible damage the van's sensors?
I would draw a bit of a parallel between your comments and economic planning. Which works better, a centralized planning system controlling every action and reaction, or a neural net of independent units making decisions at the smallest levels? Obviously, central economies tend to stagnate. However, a system where every room has it's own independent sensors and simple decision-makers may not fit Google's data-collection plans.
This kind of junk will continue until the carriers realize the phone belongs to the customer, not them.M
Carriers will continue to think the phone belongs to them until more customers start buying them outright. If it's subsidized, it might as well belong to the carrier.
It's very easy to see how this is a bad thing: look at Social Security Numbers. They were originally voluntary, opt-in, and only for specific purposes. Now, you receive one at birth, everybody you bump into wants it, and they are controlled exclusively by the government.
If a similar "internet security number" existed (even as multi-factor tokens), you can bet that the government would soon require to you get one for official online transactions, say, e-filing your taxes. It would be voluntary, because you could still mail them. (By the way, you'll probably need a computer with a Trusted Computing (TM) capable hardware platform and OS (ie. non-free).) Soon the Post Office would want it for your USPS account, banks would be all over it, facebook might offer it as an optional feature, and in time, little by little, online anonymity dies. Eventually it would reach the point where it's required for air travel, passports, cell phone and internet service, etc.
If it's revamped in a few decades for convenience, it could be easy enough to require it for credit card transactions (to combat identity theft, you know), and eventually could be merged with the RealID system (which is law, btw. It's just being effectively nullified by some state governments who missed the memo on libertarianism being outmoded). It would then be required for motor vehicle registration and similar systems.
However, woe are you if you do something to displease the issuers of such a critical token! It would be like not having a Social Security Number, or like having one tied to an E credit score or a sex offender list. Life could be made very hard on certain authors, people who condemn homosexuality (or other up-and-coming sins), journalists who are a little too critical of authority, libertarians, people who use "criminal" tools like BitTorrent or decentralized encryption, etc.
Despite all this doom and gloom, I don't think it will happen. Hyperinflation is a far more realistic fear. By the way, you'll notice I called homosexuality a sin. Imagine what could happen to me if I had posted this using a Trusted Internet ID that someone could report to whoever is in charge of hate crime prosecution!
This article clearly demonstrates what's wrong with America's science reporting.
America has no science reporting. It has sciency reporting, in the Steven-Colbert "truthiness" sense. Now consider that the media is the main way that "climate change" gets communicated to the people of America. The media... and politicians. Is there any surprise that lots of people are insanely skeptical of it? I'd even say that with those inputs, calling it all a load of nonsense is a very rational response.
The FCC's version of Net Neutrality is not what you think it is. Slashdotters should be rejoicing that Congress is putting the kibosh on this. We want a law, not an FCC regulatory regime. Why? Because the FCC can change whenever it gets a new chairman. Changing a law requires a vote. Unfortunately, it's also notoriously difficult to get legislation as tricky as Net Neutrality initially passed into law without having it mangled beyond recognition on the way there.
Berating, or worse taxing people who would require 7 or eight hours a day to get where you can get with 30 minutes of effort, is simply a horrible thing to do. It is inhumane.
No, no, no. This is not the way to do it. The "American way" is not to control people directly, but economically.
Instead of giving poor people checks (and I say this as a current college student who earned $12k last year), give them government credit cards that cannot be used to purchase junk food of any sort. No freezer meals, no chips, no candy, no boxed foods, no white bread, and especially no soda pop. Of course, people will then simply rearrange their spending to to cover the junk they want, but we can at least make it more difficult to use tax dollars on that stuff.
My last shopping trip, I purchased 3 bags (1 lb each) of pretzels for studying, a can of peas, a can of corn, 2 cans of potato soup, a half gallon of milk, 4 packets of Ramen, 2 cans of peaches, and a pack of black dress socks. The total was $19.33, and $5.50 of that was the socks. Now, I know that pretzels and Ramen are not particularly healthy, but it could be much worse. I eat in the dining hall on weekdays - I feed myself on the weekends. I made the potato soup with the milk and added a serving of tuna fish and a pack of crushed saltines to make two servings (lunch and dinner).
While that's not the healthiest of menus, it's very cheap and at least marginally nutritious. However, when I visit my friend's place who's single mom is on welfare, they eat all sorts of nasty brand-name stuff. My family collects food for a food bank, and we tried to give them a box of food every week. However, they didn't want it! Why? Well, it's not the ready-to-eat stuff they are used to. Why does the government give them cash? If they're going to get aid from my tax dollars, it ought to come with some serious strings attached. As it is, it's just a vote-buying system, and everyone knows it.
In my irrelevant opinion, a true fiscal conservative is someone with a steel backbone who will veto spending projects (that's a cool term I made up) until they die, regardless of the political consequences. Such a person must be a principle fanatic who realizes that he probably won't be re-elected, because the financial systems move slowly enough that his term will be over before the gains are realized. He must also be heartless enough to ditch the special concerns of everyone who helped him get to the top, simply telling them, "Sorry, I'm doing what's Constitutional and best for the country."
In short, he's either a myth or something resembling Ron Paul. Regan a good start, but a) his priority was dealing with the Soviets, and b) he had too many political connections and favors to pay.
http://www.networknotary.org/ Perspectives is a wonderful little Firefox extension (with Chome beta) that does exactly as you suggest - uses a web of trust to automatically bypass errors for self-signed certificates, while also detecting stuff like these fraudulent Comodo certs.
I highly recommend the Perspectives Firefox extension. It basically compares the cert you are handed to the one everyone else received (including in the past), which would have detected the fraudulent Comodo certs. Much easier than running around to multiple connections.
I highly recommend the Perspectives Firefox extension. It basically compares the cert you are handed to the one everyone else received (including in the past), which would have detected the fraudulent Comodo certs.
Wine does not necessarily equal alcohol in the Bible.;) It was not possible to get drunk on normal Jewish wine. What we consider wine today was called "strong drink."
Slashdot Mirror
But Bitcoin is (almost) infinitely divisible; you would just adjust your prices downward and uses smaller amounts. I think the presupposition that a money supply needs to grow with an economy is bunk. What are the drawbacks to deflation (if you're not a banker)?
Remember Hushmail? Turns out they were logging traffic after all. I would never trust a random VPN to not log traffic.
I'm currently at a university and don't bother running a VPN, but I'd check out AirVPN. They allow you to pay with BitCoin, so that they don't even have your payment information.
I thought home schoolers would be more receptive. They, as a group, are even more conservative, and are likely to condemn any and all use of IT in education.
As I homeschooled guy, now a college undergrad, I think you are wrong. Perhaps you've just met the wrong homeschoolers. My own homeschool curriculum was partially in the form of satellite broadcasts that we recorded with programmable VCR's (and eventually programmable DVD recorders). I have many younger siblings still at home (10, actually), and they are transitioning some of it to computers by ripping the archived DVD's. The school room has almost a dozen TV's and monitors, along with desks and bookshelves. Ironically enough, my dad is a public high-school math teacher, which has contributed to our decision to home school. (All the failures of public education, religion, etc.)
One of my closest friends here at college was home schooled; his family stored everything on a NAS and piped it around a home network. Another family I've met at church here has three high-school sons currently being homeschooled, and they are very tech-savvy. (Incidentally, they also hold the current world championship for 3-player teams in the Age of Empires III ladders.)
Where are these technophobe homeschoolers? Yes, I'm giving anecdotes, but it was really easy to think of them, and I could list more.
a chrome ripoff
That. I wish I could buy a billboard in front of wherever Mozilla's people work and put up:
If we wanted Chrome, we'd use Chrome. Bring back Firefox.
Sincerely,
Everyone who used Firefox before the versions numbers went haywire
in MASSIVE text as a daily reminder of the old glory days.
Seriously, I shouldn't have to rearrange and twiddle with everything to get Firefox as much like 3.6 as possible every time I install it. What true UI improvements have we had since then? I can think of two: tabs that don't resize while I'm hovering on them, and tab groups. Why was the rest of it randomized?
Also, what's with the stupid launch defaults? I close Firefox when I want a clean slate, not a glorified minimize. "Restore my windows and tabs from last time" is antithetical to the whole idea of closing all the tabs! Can you imagine if Windows restored all your programs and junk from last time? People would come unglued.
Also, we live in an age of large LCD displays. I can spare a few pixels of screen space to keep the bookmarks and buttons I use all day long visible instead of burying them somewhere underneath gloss and shiny.
One last gripe: Tools > Add-ons should take me to Extensions, not the "Wonderful World of Stuff You Could Bloat Your Firefox With." I go to Add-ons to remove extensions other programs installed without asking far more often than I feel the urge to add bloviated toolbars. Speaking of which, can we finally make Firefox ask before allowing programs (like nearly every AV, Skype, whatever) to hang their useless (or worse, Google-search-invading) lampshade in Extensions?
He is a Republican, much to the party's chagrin. We had our first primary caucus two days ago, and Paul did well:
Mitt Romney ----- 30,015 - 24.6%
Rick Santorum --- 30,007 - 24.5%
Ron Paul -------- 26,219 - 21.4%
Newt Gingrich --- 16,251 - 13.3%
Rick Perry ------ 12,604 - 10.3%
He might be our last best hope, if he's doesn't have an "accident."
It's quite easy: put CyanogenMod on it and you're good to go. The Motorola bootloader was this past summer, so whatever phone you have probably has a build now.
Couldn't they take Android as a base and built their lauded security and centralized control back into the codebase? Sure, it'd be tough, but it's not impossible. They would have to rewrite a large portion of the OS, as well as their own version of the Cloud to Device Messaging Service, but it's easier than starting from scratch. Messy apps that demand all kinds of random privileges could be run in some sort of Internet-access sandbox that pretends to grant low-level access.
Google+ also really, really needs to open up to teens. I'm a college student, but I still have a lot of high school friends who can't join. I can do all the inviting Google wants and carry their water, but it's unreasonable to invite people to something they can't join.
Source Links:
https://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/status/108261633859649536
https://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/status/108251897961517056
Seems like it would also be easy resist electronically. Get a vacuum tube and make a high-powered, messy x-ray emitter and just hose the van with it. (Also, carrying an x-ray detector to ensure you have the right van would probably be courteous to innocent van drivers.)
I'm guessing the effect of an x-ray blaster on a van like this would be to wash out the image and maybe induce some concern in the operators about personal exposure. It could also get you in trouble if you just stood there and held it, but I'm sure some enterprising chap could make cheap, unattended units that one could simply embed somewhere.
I wonder - if powerful enough, could an x-ray emitter possible damage the van's sensors?
I would draw a bit of a parallel between your comments and economic planning. Which works better, a centralized planning system controlling every action and reaction, or a neural net of independent units making decisions at the smallest levels? Obviously, central economies tend to stagnate. However, a system where every room has it's own independent sensors and simple decision-makers may not fit Google's data-collection plans.
This kind of junk will continue until the carriers realize the phone belongs to the customer, not them.M
Carriers will continue to think the phone belongs to them until more customers start buying them outright. If it's subsidized, it might as well belong to the carrier.
According to this article it has a range of 3 km.
depending on size - having not gotten to TFA yet
Here's a better article on it with some pictures that show scale (in case you're not on board with the video craze): http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/aeryon-scout-quadrotor-spies-on-bad-guys-from-above
It can easily fit in a small suitcase, so no, you're not going to be mounting firearms on it.
Oops, that should have been "whomever" in my last sentence. May the grammar nazis forgive me...
It's very easy to see how this is a bad thing: look at Social Security Numbers. They were originally voluntary, opt-in, and only for specific purposes. Now, you receive one at birth, everybody you bump into wants it, and they are controlled exclusively by the government.
If a similar "internet security number" existed (even as multi-factor tokens), you can bet that the government would soon require to you get one for official online transactions, say, e-filing your taxes. It would be voluntary, because you could still mail them. (By the way, you'll probably need a computer with a Trusted Computing (TM) capable hardware platform and OS (ie. non-free).) Soon the Post Office would want it for your USPS account, banks would be all over it, facebook might offer it as an optional feature, and in time, little by little, online anonymity dies. Eventually it would reach the point where it's required for air travel, passports, cell phone and internet service, etc.
If it's revamped in a few decades for convenience, it could be easy enough to require it for credit card transactions (to combat identity theft, you know), and eventually could be merged with the RealID system (which is law, btw. It's just being effectively nullified by some state governments who missed the memo on libertarianism being outmoded). It would then be required for motor vehicle registration and similar systems.
However, woe are you if you do something to displease the issuers of such a critical token! It would be like not having a Social Security Number, or like having one tied to an E credit score or a sex offender list. Life could be made very hard on certain authors, people who condemn homosexuality (or other up-and-coming sins), journalists who are a little too critical of authority, libertarians, people who use "criminal" tools like BitTorrent or decentralized encryption, etc.
Despite all this doom and gloom, I don't think it will happen. Hyperinflation is a far more realistic fear. By the way, you'll notice I called homosexuality a sin. Imagine what could happen to me if I had posted this using a Trusted Internet ID that someone could report to whoever is in charge of hate crime prosecution!
America has no science reporting. It has sciency reporting, in the Steven-Colbert "truthiness" sense. Now consider that the media is the main way that "climate change" gets communicated to the people of America. The media... and politicians. Is there any surprise that lots of people are insanely skeptical of it? I'd even say that with those inputs, calling it all a load of nonsense is a very rational response.
Uh, this article is by an Australian author. http://asiancorrespondent.com/author/gavinatkins/
As a side note, here's a direct link to the map: http://maps.grida.no/library/files/storage/11kap9climat.png
The FCC's version of Net Neutrality is not what you think it is. Slashdotters should be rejoicing that Congress is putting the kibosh on this. We want a law, not an FCC regulatory regime. Why? Because the FCC can change whenever it gets a new chairman. Changing a law requires a vote. Unfortunately, it's also notoriously difficult to get legislation as tricky as Net Neutrality initially passed into law without having it mangled beyond recognition on the way there.
Berating, or worse taxing people who would require 7 or eight hours a day to get where you can get with 30 minutes of effort, is simply a horrible thing to do. It is inhumane.
No, no, no. This is not the way to do it. The "American way" is not to control people directly, but economically.
Instead of giving poor people checks (and I say this as a current college student who earned $12k last year), give them government credit cards that cannot be used to purchase junk food of any sort. No freezer meals, no chips, no candy, no boxed foods, no white bread, and especially no soda pop. Of course, people will then simply rearrange their spending to to cover the junk they want, but we can at least make it more difficult to use tax dollars on that stuff.
My last shopping trip, I purchased 3 bags (1 lb each) of pretzels for studying, a can of peas, a can of corn, 2 cans of potato soup, a half gallon of milk, 4 packets of Ramen, 2 cans of peaches, and a pack of black dress socks. The total was $19.33, and $5.50 of that was the socks. Now, I know that pretzels and Ramen are not particularly healthy, but it could be much worse. I eat in the dining hall on weekdays - I feed myself on the weekends. I made the potato soup with the milk and added a serving of tuna fish and a pack of crushed saltines to make two servings (lunch and dinner).
While that's not the healthiest of menus, it's very cheap and at least marginally nutritious. However, when I visit my friend's place who's single mom is on welfare, they eat all sorts of nasty brand-name stuff. My family collects food for a food bank, and we tried to give them a box of food every week. However, they didn't want it! Why? Well, it's not the ready-to-eat stuff they are used to. Why does the government give them cash? If they're going to get aid from my tax dollars, it ought to come with some serious strings attached. As it is, it's just a vote-buying system, and everyone knows it.
In my irrelevant opinion, a true fiscal conservative is someone with a steel backbone who will veto spending projects (that's a cool term I made up) until they die, regardless of the political consequences. Such a person must be a principle fanatic who realizes that he probably won't be re-elected, because the financial systems move slowly enough that his term will be over before the gains are realized. He must also be heartless enough to ditch the special concerns of everyone who helped him get to the top, simply telling them, "Sorry, I'm doing what's Constitutional and best for the country."
In short, he's either a myth or something resembling Ron Paul. Regan a good start, but a) his priority was dealing with the Soviets, and b) he had too many political connections and favors to pay.
http://www.networknotary.org/
Perspectives is a wonderful little Firefox extension (with Chome beta) that does exactly as you suggest - uses a web of trust to automatically bypass errors for self-signed certificates, while also detecting stuff like these fraudulent Comodo certs.
I highly recommend the Perspectives Firefox extension. It basically compares the cert you are handed to the one everyone else received (including in the past), which would have detected the fraudulent Comodo certs. Much easier than running around to multiple connections.
I highly recommend the Perspectives Firefox extension. It basically compares the cert you are handed to the one everyone else received (including in the past), which would have detected the fraudulent Comodo certs.
Wine does not necessarily equal alcohol in the Bible. ;) It was not possible to get drunk on normal Jewish wine. What we consider wine today was called "strong drink."
The castle is advertising, not search. Correcting that fixes your tunnel.