lot of assumptions and unproved assertions here...

that would be really useful for extracting mattes and such in photoshop!

1. http://news.sciencemag.org/che...
2. NOT HEAT ENGINE. THERMOELECTRICS!

nothing to do with heat engines. THERMOELECTRICS.

why is waste heat "garbage"?

are you denying that there is such a thing? that we are currently actively cooling parts and attaching heat sinks and radiators for merely decorative purposes?

and if waste heat is an actual phenomenon... why NOT harvest energy from it? complexity is low with no moving parts. price is currently high but as with most things, that can come down with research.

so waste heat exists. power can be harvested.

i don't see what the point of your tirade is.

nobody talking about steam engines....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

i think this is the most misleading thing about cyberpunk and hollywood hacking tropes... that there is a cyberspace that actually exists in some allegorical way and that a user's avatar can actually "travel" from point to point looking upon and travel to floating pyramids of information. that analogy is totally wrong.

the far more accurate analogy is simply making telephone calls. if you are anywhere at all, you are right smack dab, ass down in chair in front of your computer. and your computer itself doesn't ever travel anywhere. all it is doing is sending and receiving messages. sure, you're getting messages from different nodes but that's just like receiving lots of phone calls from different people.

you can surreptitiously send messages that cause unexpected behavior or make a call under an assumed identity... but ultimately, all hacking is about sending and receiving messages...

and it's amusing how far hollywood and narrative fiction has to go to make that seem dramatically interesting.

right... zoom and boom vs. turn and burn

its value is pegged to "real" money.

if it never or rarely converted to government backed cash, then it is viable. goods and services for bitcoins. that's a closed loop system that can be completely independent of all the players its purporting to avoid.

but since people are buying into and cashing out and even SPECULATING with real currency, then you have an achilles heel.

the point at which conversion happens IS regulated and guarded by government players and is actually and IDEAL place for governments to actually sabotage the entire endeavor if they wanted to.

so until bitcoins slash any and all ties with real currencies and certainly until it loses all DEPENDENCE on them, they are just a new forex player that is highly unstable and insecure.

one thing to remember about the birthday problem is that in a given classroom or other populated gathering, it's very likely that two people will have the same birthday... BUT... it says nothing about the possibility of any two people having any PARTICULAR birthday. so as long as you don't care what the date is, yes, two people will more than likely have one in common. but the odds that anyone will have a particular one or one that is the same as yours - those are still pretty big odds against.

thanks to the likes of snowden and wikileaks...

actually, it's long been historically understood that secrets have a short shelf life and have a tendency to proliferate sooner or later. moreso in the internetted era.

ellsberg wasn't the first and snowden won't be the last. govs have their asses blowing in the wind too and that provides a nice little incentive to keep their goddamn motherfucking noses clean. it's nice that they've been recently reminded of that.

the fact of gov activity as well as the work product is more or less guaranteed to be wide-banded at some point can serve as a protection where civil rights fail us. as in the cold war, the thing that keeps us safe is MAD... mutually assured destruction... sure you COULD use the breadth and depth to spy on kate upton's auto erotic escapades but that just means that at some point, that fact and the titillating surveillance itself will fall into the public some day. if you have a system composed of human beings, you're gonna have leaks.

eventually, it will be that stalemate that saves us... the fact that gov or private citizen, anyone can spy on anyone else but the fact that all activity and all resulting data will be public information at some point will enforce restraint.

actually, i think that MAD is the only thing that really works in this world. mexican stand-offs for all. because human beings are fucking dicks and the only thing keeping us from ass raping others is a gigantic, barbed wired cock poise at our own back doors.

amen.

android provides two things:

- free, ready to go OS
- app ecosystem

apple already has both. using their existing OS incurs no additional cost. and it is a framework that they already know how to work around.

even if they wanted to make a dirt cheap phone based off of an iphone 3gs, it would be a matter of making hardware that would fit the bill as secondary market product. they ALREADY HAVE the os and ecosystem.

so WHY... in the WORLD... would apple do that? why in the world would woz say that?

and i come at this as a pc user with an android phone... this is truly mystifying.

oooo nice... a little fight club action goin'.

these gmo mofos have been making life extremely hard for average joe farmer so fantastic. let the deluge of chinese copies hit the market and drive these guys into the ground. serve them right.

not just societal bias... but luck and fate in general.

you have NOT earned ANYTHING you have fair and square. you owe EVERYTHING to a fate and destiny that you had NOTHING to do with:

- health (mental, physical, deformities, etc)
- race
- intelligence
- height
- beauty
- constitution and the very ability to work hard
- place of birth

only the delusional think they'd be in the same place they are now if they were retarded, with no limbs, cancer ridden and born in botswana.

your very ability to pursue your own good are byproducts from essential factors that you are blessed with.

it's not insulting because nothing you have is rightfully "earned" in the way you mean it.