Money is also a storage device. If I trade my cow for 4 goats today when I could have gotten 5 goats for it next week, I've lost out. But if I trade my cow for money today and hold the money, then I can buy 4 goats next week, have money left over to buy something else, and have the savings that come from not having had to feed and care for the cow for a week. Of course it could also go the other way - I could lose on the transaction. And this is how stock markets are supposed to work, for better or worse.

But that storage medium makes room for all kinds of middle men, and ultimately gives rise to all sorts of ways to game the system. And because so much money is paid to people who have added little or no value to the system, or who in fact have taken value out of the sytem, a large percentage of 'legal' tender might as well be counterfeit.

Money makes assets and liabilities more fluid, more portable, and easier to hide. It introduces both efficiencies and inefficiencies, and it causes different market sectors to be much more interdependent on each other than they otherwise would. So, no, money is not "merely a tracking device".

This would result in a dramatic reduction of the population of the USA. I have never seen a country as full of *braindead patriots as the USA.

*Not implying patriotism is stupid, just that a disproportionate number of patriots in the USA are actually braindead.

They don't. This is just some economist not realising that phone insurance is to cover those cases where an iPhone gets stolen conveniently as the next model comes out.

Yes they will immediately stop scientific whaling. Then they will withdraw from the treaty and then replace the "RESEARCH" sign on the side of the Nisshin Maru with the word "yum"

Of course there is science in this. It's about how many minke whales you can take out of the population before the population collapse. The west uses plastic tags on feet. The east uses explosive harpoons.

Well I don't trip over whales every time I take a step into the ocean. Kangaroo is more akin tuna. There are millions of them around. In many places they are considered a pest and are culled not for eating but because they destroy the ecosystem. If whales were that prevalent that you had to kill them to maintain a balanced ecosystem I'm sure we wouldn't have a problem with the Japanese killing them for food, err I mean research.

It is fascinating to me that this entire permissions thing has blown up since the era of the mobile phone. Its gotten to the point where people now actively complain about new features being added and don't give any regard as to why the program needs to do what it does. Drawing over a part of the screen? OMG the sky is falling! This isn't actually the point I'm trying to make but just for your information the drawing over the screen allows the app to draw a bubble that allows you to use messaging from outside the app. Yeah multi-tasking is scary when it asks for permission to do so.

But more importantly I wonder what a computer would look like if it asked for permission for everything we do. Do you actually know if Google Chrome is scraping your Outlook contacts? Or secretly storing stuff for you? Maybe you're actually part of the cloud right now! Does plants vs zombies on the PC actually attempt to locate bluetooth devices, or identify your computer based on your hardware? How would you know? Maybe the reason EA games is worth so much is because when Origin is running in the background it captures keystrokes while you log into your bank account.

We've been installing applications for 20 years with effectively zero sandboxing, and we've been cool with it. Now when we know what an app needs to do we loose our collective shits because of features that in the past we've been screaming we want to have.

There's nothing new in this world. We just know more, and we're all scared because of it.

The only thing that is common sense is that Dropbox have claimed end-to-end encryption. Then they were caught out a few years ago de-duping and they promised to fix their practice and then assured us that they don't look at content. Now they are apparently scanning your supposedly encrypted content for DCMA violations?

I don't give a crap about scanning for DCMA violations. I am outraged that this is possible from a company which has come out publicly and said "Look at us, we're so secure even we don't know what you're uploading."

Probably because, with HFT, its not so much about how good your program is, but rather how close you are to the exchange. HFT is more a battle of real estate agents than it is programmers.

Very true and there's already whispers around the internet that Cinavia was broken a few months ago. The trick is to introduce inaudible pitch changes in the audiotrack but the specifics are not known.

The point about the damages not being irrelevant are however still the same. You remember the retarded notion that Windows XP released in 2001 couldn't out of the box play a disc format released in 1995 despite the OS itself coming on that disc format? Or just look at how long it took for Linux to be able to play a DVD-Audio. Or just look at the state of Bluray support on Linux.

Just because encryption schemes are worthless and can be broken doesn' t mean we shouldn't fight them at every turn.

Actually it's more complicated than that. The law in Australia is based around a reasonable expectation of privacy, even when in a public place.

You taking a photo of someone walking down the street, fair game.
You taking a photo of someone sitting in the far corner of an otherwise public alleyway, not fair game.

The courts have ruled that even in public places some people's actions can be considered as "private" in nature and thus you're not allowed to photograph. That said this needs to be proved in the courts on a case by case basis, so you need to take a photo not only of someone who is overtly attempting to keep himself private while in public but also willing to drag you to court over a photograph.

Maybe, maybe not. Per-core performance has basically flat-lined for the last 7 years. Long-gone are the days where clock speeds doubled every 12-18 months or where buying a new PC would get you something that ran 4-8x faster then the one you had from 3-4 years ago.

It's slowed but not stalled. CPU benchmarks indicate a difference of about 1.5 to 3, the latter sue it seems to memory bandwidth and more if special instructions are involved. For laptops the difference is bigger since the much reduced power consumption means you get a lot more computing for given batteries.

For multithread stuff, new CPUs are massively faster. Many things are multithreaded now.

But yes a decent 7 year old machine is usable. For something I'm lugging round, newer is very preferable.

Oh, so you've read them and you're capable of understanding their content?

Yeah, I didn't think so. Keep on trollin'

That's because you only get to try this (or anything like it) once. And if it doesn't work, and has side-effects you didn't anticipate, you're seriously fucked. We don't get have the technology to do terraforming, our global effects so far have all been unintentional.

That's not what they said. I know reading TFA is unfashionable, but if you had you would have seen that they are saying we can still do a lot to make it less bad and to cope with the changes that are coming. They present two models, one based on high emissions and one based on low emissions, and urge everyone to aim for the latter.