Which is itself something of a straw-man argument, since the Federal Reserve System is something of a hybrid- created by Congress, its direct administrators appointed by the President, and with mandatory participation by the biggest banks, and with a return on profit provided back to the US Government. If anything it's a bit like another branch of government.

It's probably good that the executive and legislative branches do not have direct control of monetary policy as it reduces the chances of fads from disrupting the economy. As for problems with the banks that plug-in to the Federal Reserve System, those have jumped the shark because conventional commercial banks are allowed to commingle too many of their risky business ventures and are allowed to overleverage against their deposits, so of course they end up begging for more money when they inevitably screw up. Laws that have changed over the last 30-40 years have given the banks too much freedom, that's not a function of the Fed but of Congress and of the Presidency. Restrict banks into having be banks first and foremost again and my guess is that a lot of these problems would be reduced.

Definitely not a Fiat then... *grin*

If you're going to play on stereotypes, so will I...

In married couples it's almost always the man that configures the technology in the house, unless there's technology-oriented male offspring available to do it instead, and there will be a fairly large number of them that are already used to blocking ads in their browsers; a large chunk of them will look for how to block other ads now that they know such a thing can be done, and they will turn to their broadband routers and prewritten lists to do so even if that requires periodic manual updating.

Now to get off of stereotypes, anyone annoyed with ads that has access to their broadband router and is willing to read the documentation could blacklist ad websites. It doesn't require more than the ability to log-in to the web interface on the router and copy-and-paste a prewritten list. A housewife, if she knows that it's that easy, could do it as long as she has the credentials to log-in and can find that list.

Some people don't maintain their own technology because they're afraid of breaking things or because they don't understand enough to know how the discrete parts and the big-picture tie together, and because vendors have done a fairly decent job of making things integrate to at least function without tweaking. Throwing something else to change the status quo (ie, the ads) may be enough to motivate a fairly large number of people to make a change.

Logical fallacy: appeal to popularity. But I'm willing to bet I've got orders of magnitude more Score: 5 comments than you do in any case.

The bitcoin attitude has amused me. Sure, I get that some people don't believe in, don't trust, or don't like their government and as such want to avoid using fiat currency issued by their government, but since the use of third-party intermediaries seems to have become the de-facto standard for using Bitcoin, one has all of the downsides of a fiat currency (ie, no natural value of its own) without any of the normal advantages associated with a government interested in the security of a currency or the ability of a government to correct issues associated with that currency. It's also possible to lose or destroy wealth simply through the loss of information due to the specific nature of Bitcoin, so wealth lost cannot be regained.

Most likely, retrofits to existing trailers will require some form of fresh certification and documentation describing the new characteristics of the trailer. I don't know the industry terminology for heavy trucks, but for light vehicles that are modified from the original manufacturer specifications there are usually added door-jamb tags that indicate that it's a modified vehicle, when it was modified, and the new characteristics of the vehicle post-modification. Roadtrek and other Class-B RV conversion companies that retrofit RV chassis into full-sized cargo vans come to mind.

Just a guess, but retrofits will probably only be made as kits for extremely common trailer lines too, so that a given popular trailer from Hyundai or another manufacturer that exists in the tens of thousands can be easily retrofitted to a common standard, as opposed to random or haphazard retrofits each with its own characteristics. It'll obviously depend on what the shippers are using and how willing they'd be to buy electric trucks and how readily their trailers could be adapted, plus the lifespan of truck and trailer.

One thing that humans have been very good at over the last 200 years has been finding new sources of energy. At times this quest has meant gross pollution, but there have been developments, that when not let to get out of control, have produced vast amounts of energy without much more pollution than waste-heat.

If further energy production technologies are developed that continue to produce less and less pollution, and if humanity eventually concludes that it wants to stop mining Earth for whatever reason, there may come a tipping point where it makes sense to start mining extraterrestrial sources for our raw materials, especially if normally-polluting means to refine those materials into products en-route from the source to delivery.

I do not expect this to happen quickly, it'll be on a hundreds-of-years timescale. We will have to continue to pollute, then continue to engage in destructive forms of mining, and continue to grow as a population all while continuing to develop new space technology and new means of energy production, such that the population gets fed-up and either governments or companies decide to try it. It might also have to wait for space-based outposts to exist and for those outposts to work toward self-sufficiency and away from being entirely dependent on Earth-based supply, such that material refining tech that works off-Earth is developed. Regardless it won't happen in our lifetimes, our childrens' lifetimes, and probably not their childrens' lifetimes, so long as it's still not cost-effective and there's not enough will to do it.

Obviously you were just trying to be clever, but this is a lot of bollocks. Even many machines which don't have any PCI bus connectors have a PCI bus...

Remember this is the internets, and if you can't use google, you're gonna have a bad time.

https://www.blackhat.com/us-15...

https://github.com/jbangert/tr...

I searched "flaws in intel mmu" and got these results back in the top ten. Perhaps you should learn to internet, coward.

IME the big stuff is iffy on Linux, the small stuff on Windows. But there's a user in this thread finding that Windows 10 refuses to install on his Core 2 Quad. Maybe Linux actually has better hardware support than Windows? I think it does. I think if you took a windows disc and a Linux disc and tried to install both on every single PC on the planet, that you would have better luck with the Linux disc. In the trial, you are permitted to install only authorized packages, meaning drivers either direct from the OS distributor (from the package archive, from windows update, on the CD) or from the OEM or ODM (e.g. Compaq or Atheros.)

I think you'd have less machines that just outright refuse to install, and you'd also have more working peripherals at the end of the day. For example, all but one of the scanners I have ever owned, I got cheap used because they weren't supported on newer versions of windows even though the same scanner protocol was still in use; the manufacturer simply removes support for the old hardware from the new version of the driver, even though the new driver is perfectly capable of operating it. HP is especially horrible about this, never ever buy a scanner from them and expect to use it through an OS upgrade. Same for all-in-one imaging devices. But everyone does it. Meanwhile, SANE just keeps adding support for more devices...

Almost. There's no way to prevent command.com (or cmd.exe) from popping up a window when you run a batch file without using the shortcut settings. Whereas on X, you don't get GUI output unless you explicitly ask for it.

Hence comments

Oh yeah, I really want to know what "Noah Haders" has to say about... anything. The only identity you've provided is that of a Slashdot troll. No one has any reason to believe anything you say. I certainly don't believe you're an expert at anything but trolling.

You add so little you didn't even log in and be counted, because you know you have nothing useful to add. But that didn't stop you from being a hypocrite, did it?

Yeah, for me it was all the times my not-just-a-dry-drunk alcoholic ex-marine father told me he knew a shitload of ways to kill me, when he was drunk and pissed off. Guess who's anti-military?

I did do him a favor, I gave him useful and timely advice. If he chooses not to follow it, that's not my fault.