Given that you said "jobs prospects" instead of "job prospects", I'm guessing you're in the U.K. My advice -- come to California.

"Amazingly good cache" is called "registers".

Whoops I think I may have inadvertently stepped into the wrong echo chamber.

Before I leave, let me say that California has its problems like everywhere, but it's the most populous state and gaining net population for a reason. It's simple logic that it can't be bad if so many people are so intent on living there.

I can tell that logic won't really fly there though so I am outta here ...

Bitcoin is intrinsincally unfit for its intended purpose. The cost of validating transactions within the network, while based on really cool ideas, just doesn't scale. It is fundamentally limited to a handful of transactions per second, which is absolutely insufficient for the global monetary system it purports to be.

I thought bitcoin was super cool when I read the whitepaper in 2012, aside from a few fatal flaws, it is a thing of beauty. But I recognized its inherent flaws and so I could not get excited by it.

The lightning network is a similar joke. It requires that anyone who wants to participate pair up with the person they want to transact with and sequester bitcoin for the duration of the "lightning" transactions. Thus you have to pay a bitcoin transaction fee (not sure how much that is at the moment, but it has gotten into the tens of dollars per transaction in the past) for every partner that you want to participate with, and you have to limit the number of people you can partner with to the amount of bitcoin you have to sequester for this purpose. And you have to watch the bitcoin network *constantly* because you have no idea if and when the other party may terminate the relationship via another bitcoin transaction.

Supposedly with lightning you can chain in other parties but that also increases the number of transactions you have to be watching for on the bitcoin network. Essentially you become even more tightly bound to the data stream of the bitcoin network than you are when you just trade bitcoin.

Whereas bitcoin is fundamentally unsuited for its purpose because of its inherent low transaction rate, lightning is fundamentally unsuited for its purpose because its network requirements grow exponentially (for participating parties who have to be constantly vigilant to watch for on-blockchain transactions that could affect their lightning balances).

Also the lightning whitepaper has big handwavy "we haven't figured this part out yet" gaps (at least it did when I read it like 8 months ago). It is also so complex that it's hard to find confidence that there aren't loopholes, either in its design or in any software that would be written to implement it (unlike bitcoin which was at least itself simple enough that just about anyone familiar with programming and cryptography could easily validate its design and implementation).

The only thing giving bitcoin significant perceived 'value' is the greedy impulse of buyers looking to get rich quick. Lots of people definitely can conspire, either intentionally (bitcoin price manipulation, definitely a thing), or unintentionally (whims of the market) to place 'value' on something like bitcoin, but it's not something I personally want to be involved with. The early bitcoin forums were filled with the most disgusting collection of get-rich-quick schemers and I have no doubt that it isn't 1,000 times worse now that there is actual real money in it. Not to mention the unsavory underworld criminals you will be in bed with (remember those price manipulators) when you trade in bitcoin.

The problem I have seen with ad blockers (and admittedly, I have only tried a few, and haven't put a lot of effort into trying to find the best or most useful one) is that they work by preventing the loading of certain parts of web sites. Like, they refuse to load images from a certain domain, or refuse to load and run javascript from a certain domain, or whatever. The important point is that I believe they work by not loading content that they want to block.

It is my experience that sites can detect this behavior - they can tell when you have loaded all of a page but not the ads, because they can see that your browser only fetched part of the page. They probably also embed javascript in ways that require that it be run and show an ad or else some other javascript notices that this did not happen, and then knows that you did not load the ad. And then they run other javascript that blocks out the content of the site itself because they have detected that you are running an ad blocker.

I don't know why ad blockers don't then just implement the obvious:

Load the ad. Load the javascript. Just turn all the pixels that you display for those ads to white, and all the sound to zero volume. The javascript won't know that behind the scenes the APIs that would display images have instead decided to show white pixels. The remote server will still see you fetching all the content and "presenting" it to the user.

I'm talking about switching ad blocking from a detectable and defeatable "don't show ads" to an undetectable (by the ad displayer) "do everything you would have done up to the last possible moment which is the presentation of the ad image/sound, instead showing nothing".

This seems so much more foolproof to me. It doesn't have the nice property of reducing your bandwidth usage by not even loading ads but ... I personally don't care much about that. I just don't want to see the ads.

The only recourse of the advertisers at that point would be to make the content of the ads intrinsic to the content of the site; like the site text renders in javascript that also renders ads, or something. At that point, I don't know what we do to stop ads ... maybe stop allowing javascript?

In terms of how to detect what is an ad, just let users clock on anything that shows up as an ad image, choose a pop-up "this is an ad", when they select that, white out the image, and add the URL of the ad image to a voting database. Then when fetching images, if enough votes have been cast saying that it's an ad ... treat it as such.

What are the obvious flaws to this design that I am missing?

Yeah, I guess if you're going to believe in fairy tales, you really should go all the way.

Ah well. I've lived in silicon valley most of my adult life and I'm really hoping to move up to Oregon or Washington someday. Sorry to cramp your style.

I remember back in 1994 at my first job an older woman lamenting the prices and traffic in the bay area and actually quitting and moving to Oregon with her husband. At the time I just didn't understand. But wow, 25 years later, a) it seems quaint to think that conditions in the bay area in 1994 were something even remotely worth getting away from given how much worse they have gotten since then, and b) I envy her for having the prescience to do it so long ago when it was probably a much better deal.

" Also, why would you want capital gains tax on stocks? You want your 401K to be taxed for gains, or your pension?"

Just to answer this nugget: anyone who proposes fairer or better tax structures is implicitly agreeing that taxing everyone (including themselves) for the common good (including themselves) is the right call.

So yes, if it's fair and beneficial to the state as a whole, I would support a tax on my 401k and/or pension.

I'm not saying one way or another whether these particular taxes are justified; I am speaking more to the sentiment you seem to be raising where it doesn't make sense for anyone to decide that taxes which would affect their own assets are a good idea.

It is the inability of lots of people to understand and accept a common sacrifice that is the heart of alot of social problems we have.

Of course, it's also the spend-whatever-you-can-and-then-ask-for-more attitude of most government that is at the heart of alot of other social problems we have.

A sensibly run government intelligently taxing the right amount to get the best bang-for-buck and do the most with the least possible? A pipe dream for sure ... but what a dream ...

This is one of the lamest Slashdot articles I have ever seen. In what way is this at all news for nerds? And in what way is this any more news worthy than 10,000 other random news items of day? What about if Walmart has a one-day sale on Nintendo games. Should we get a Slashdot headline article for that?

msmash is not a competent Slashdot editor. I'm going to give Slashdot some feedback here.

Jesus I really wish for that kind of sanity in the USA. It will never happen though.

Whatever, coward.

... in a hamfisted manner has little to no chance of sticking. The man is dumb as a box of rocks, unfortunately. Despite all of his bluster he is apparently unable to operate with the required tact and subtlety necessary to effect changes he desires. There is the possiblity that everything he is doing publicly is a ruse to distract everyone and he is going to surprise us with the masterful maneuvers he's been making behind the scenes but ... given how dumb he has appeared to be at just about every opportunity, I doubt it.

When he won I was at first disgusted, then somewhat hopeful as I thought, maybe the guy, despite being scum, can actually effect some interesting and valuable changes to the status quo of politics, maybe he can make some meaningful things happen that others couldn't because of their political ties.

But seeing how hamfisted he's been in everything he's tried, and failed thus far, to do ... I am holding out little hope at this point.

The other person's account was more detailed, more compelling, and more convincing than your one-liner response.

Yeah, still not understanding even though you think you do. Loser.

Also may I point out that the word "eliminate" was just the wrong term to use full-stop because of the ambiguity that it introduces. No need for that ambiguity, but clearly the author was going more for "impact" than for clarity. Something like:

"How UPS Trucks Saved Millions of Dollars By Preferring Right Hand Turns"

would have been clearer and then we wouldn't even be having this pointless discussion.