Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.
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What seems to be lost on most, is that money has been coming “out of thin air” for close to a century already. The problem is that every time less money gets destroyed than created, it dilutes the worth of the total… and people who still think in terms of gold nuggets, are completely unprepared to propose anything that would make sense.
Gen Beta might have more of a grasp on things.
By the time they’re about to go belly up, companies no longer have the resources to ensure they comb through the code to remove the parts licensed from 3rd parties, and the liquidators see all assets as something to sell in order to cover whatever loans the company got.
In an ideal world, consumers would never buy a non-open sourced car, or phone, or IoT device.
In the real world, regulators need to force companies to give consumers at least some basic way to control the products they buy.
This is going to get interesting:
The decision imposes a daily fine of R$50,000 (£6,800) on individuals and companies that attempt to continue using X via VPN.
A judge’s ruling on a previous case makes that ruling law.
Previous rulings are a precedent in Common Law systems like the US, UK, Canada, or Australia.
Only Supreme Court rulings become a precedent in Civil Law systems like the EU, Russia,most of the rest of America.
To draw an example, the EU never made a law about cookie splash screens.
A very poor example; Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive 2002/58/EC.
The EU at its top level creates “Directives”, which member states then are bound to transpose into their national Civil Law systems. Judges can interprete that law in different ways, none of which creates a precedent. Only a country’s Supreme Court decision creates a precedent for that country, but even then it can be recurred up to the EU Tribunal, which has the last saying.
Where I am, the news said:
- “Telegram is a social network” (it isn’t)
- “that allows terrorism from Russia and Iran” (it’s used by Russian and Iranian oppositors)
- “drug trafficking” (because it’s encrypted, I guess)
- “fraud” (scams are also part of email and the web)
- “money laundering” (…what?)
- “piracy” (sigh…)
- “and distribution of child pornography.” (so does email)
- “It doesn’t honor removal requests from the film/music industry organizations” (that’s piracy twice)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse
Terrorists, pedophiles/child molesters, organized crime like drug dealers, intellectual property pirates, and money launderers are cited commonly
Do we have a BINGO?
It may not be just the Kremlin. I’ve had several cases where I wrote about something in a Telegram chat, stuff I had never talked about before, and in a matter of seconds started seeing related ads on Facebook.
Alternatively, it could be the keyboard leaking all text, or I could have some other spyware, but I’ve only had that happen to me between Telegram and Facebook.
Then again, Telegram group chats are unencrypted, and personal chats are unencrypted by default.
On the bright sight, he also promised Saudi Arabia to build a Hyperloop, also for The Line city in Neom, that’s turning out to be a great way to syphon SA’s oil sales state fund.
But seriously, a Hyperloop would work best on Mars, where the pressure differential would be minimal, while a tube would keep the dust out. Elon’s master plan is still to build a Mars colony with indentured servants under threat of no air. On the way, he’s scamming whoever it takes, and getting any investment or benefit he can land.
US company enacting puritanical culture erasure guidelines? What’s new?
If they want their culture preserved, there is peertube and archive.org, but they may have trouble monetizing them.
Crazy talk, and you’re onto something… that’s been solved already.
First part: you hate that a 10+ years old game is only getting cosmetic changes instead of a rehaul of the whole character model. That’s crazy, nobody’s going to do that, not the ones expecting a profit, and not the modding community doing it for free. If you feel it’s a silly change, you’re right, but realize that it’s the only change they could do.
You’re onto something: body feature sliders. Male, female, giraffe, and turtle bodies, have some structural differences, that however mostly match to the same bones having different shapes. The solution is a body shape slider, or 50. It’s something that existed, in some games, since at least the 2000s. Others were lazy and didn’t do it.
For reference of how far this could go, the following all have the same bones, only change in shape, size, and muscle placemen:
$2000/year per person, would be $167/year per person. It’s not $0, but sounds like a reasonable amount for anyone except the most marginalized groups
Medical procedures are indeed a problem, but my understanding is their price is artificially inflated due to intermediaries, so taking a harder approach to that, would partially solve the issue, and pave the way for further regulation.
M4A should be the goal, something most 1st World countries have already, but I also understand it would mean upending a lot of industries and their interrelationship in the US, so a step-by-step approach seems like a wise one.
Maybe… but before sharing files, his priors include selling stolen phone numbers, some shady stock manipulation, an embezzlement sentence, running an illegal hedge fund, and other shenanigans.
As well as copyright infringement, Dotcom faces more serious charges, including money laundering and racketeering. He has long argued that he should not be held liable for copyright infringement carried out using his site
Ok… so what about that money laundering and racketeering, once again?
Really not sure how to feel about this. The copyright infringement damage claims are bonkers, but this guy is not exactly an upstanding citizen either. He already got some jail time in the 90s, fled to NZ, changed his name to a joke, and has been involved in random shady stuff over the last decade.
consumer cameras were made with a certain type of complexion in mind
Not sure if it’s what you’re talking about, but consumer cameras, and most graphics systems, have been using logarithmic encoding (gamma) to fit a larger dynamic range into a reduced data range… which has the effect of reducing de detail level of larger areas of an image, with the idea that the human eye would struggle to see them anyway. It didn’t have anything to do with complexion, but with pushing technology to a minimally acceptable level on a limited budget. HDR cameras with linear encoding, are still quite expensive, way out of the consumer market range, and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to change too soon.
Air dominance means being able to fly anywhere anytime, without having to worry too much about the enemy. In post-WW2 wars, it meant ground troops didn’t need to worry about random bombs falling on them from the sky.
Right now, neither Russia or Ukraine have achieved that… which is kind of crazy; at the beginning of the “special operation”, everyone assumed that Russia would control the skies from day 1. And yet, Ukrainian jets and drones keep flying around, slowing Russia’s progress on the front to a crawl.
We will indeed see how things evolve, but Russia faces a problem now: if they pull troops from the front, which they’re barely holding, it can mean the difference between crawling forward, and crawling backwards.
Lightning Network is not centralized, anyone can run a node with their own wallet. Not everyone will want to, since there are management and safety tasks involved, but that’s up to each one.
Funds are stored in your own wallet… but again, you can use some bank’s wallet if you want to, up to each one.
Transactions are almost instantaneous, no need to wait for the channels to settle. You only need to wait when moving Bitcoin between non-LN and LN wallets or, if running your own node, when a channel closes.
You can find a list of physical stores accepting LN… mostly in El Salvador, but still.
They’re not legal tender, not at all commonly accepted, and anyone accepting them (mostly in tourist areas) will charge an exchange fee because nobody’s going to take them as payment for their bills.
They’re all the same as casino tokens though, because they don’t have an intrinsic value, like for example an ounce of gold.
- Fiat represents the trust an issuing bank has in everyone trusting it at a faster pace than the expiry of its loans.
- Casino tokens represent the trust a person has in the casino paying out when getting the token back.
- Crypto represents the trust in that someone will want to exchange it for something in the future.
Since the end of the gold standard, economy has been running on trust (aka: credit). These are just different representations of that.
HIMARS is a launch platform, its range depends on which rockets it launches.
ATACMS is a missile that can be launched from HIMARS, it has a way longer range, the difference between a rocket and a missile is that a missile can maneuver freely, and the ATACMS can also carry a nuclear payload.
I know about the eternal warning stuff. In this case I think it’s more about plausible deniability: it’s harder to accuse Ukraine of initiating a nuclear war, if they don’t even use nuclear-capable missiles against Russian territory. I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin was ready to nuke some small city of his own, just to have an excuse to launch some tactical nukes against Ukraine.
Russia hasn’t been able to establish air dominance for 4 years, they advance at a snails pace, fighting for every 100m of land against swarms of drones decimating their troops, while Ukraine has been conceding each 100m of land by losing drones with as few people as possible.
Now Ukraine has invaded Russia, taken over a GazProm control station, and gained control of a rail line that Russia used to supply its troops on the front. For how long will they be able to advance those 100m by 100m, without supplies?
Ukraine now also has some F16s they can use to tip the scales in air dominance.
A month or so ago, Ukraine announced plans to produce at least one million drones by end of year. That’s a thousand drones for each Km of the Russian front, or one drone per meter, organized in swarms and waves with “mothership” control drones. It’s a strategy with no historical precedent, that Russia has no clue how to respond to… or at least has been highly ineffective in responding to.
Peace talks right now are being proposed by Russia, which usually means they’re in a weaker position and they know it. They’re running out of money, to the point that they want to crack down on the rampant corruption that held the whole system together. If they really do, then all bets are off on which general will be the first one to propose sticking Putin’s head on a spike.
Barter is not a unheard of way to conduct business, even between countries without sanctions. The SWIFT network itself has become a sort of barter system.
I’m guessing in this case, they both distrust each other’s currency, so they might as well trade in Bitcoin as in any other currency they’d both trust more… if there was one.
Still, the USD losing that chunk of trade, weakens the USD, which the US might feel the need to strengthen with some “decisive action”.
No it’s not.
Stocks are based on the “valuation” people give them, for whatever reason they want. Check Gazprom’s recent stock valuation for a reality check; it doesn’t matter what “real goods or services” it keeps providing, everyone who held Gazprom stock, got exactly $0 for it. For further information, check how much company shares are worth.
(Spoiler: they’re ALL based on “hype and sunken cost”)
You can hide your identity on Monero, not so much on Bitcoin. BTC either gets linked to a series of identities, or is freshly mined, both of which can be allowed or denied by exchanges via law enforcement.
In the traditional finance system, hiding relies on bribery, mules, and straight up hacking. Those are common to both systems, and law enforcement knows how to deal with them.
As usual, the unresolved underlying issue is, how to get funding for FLOSS projects. Entitled cheapskates are nothing new; a generic solution to the issue, would be something new.