> But the government doesn't CONTROL the money you have under your mattress.

Sure it does: it controls its value by adjusting how much money it prints.

Are you really that dense? When the small-margin convenience store seller isn't allowed to raise the price for a credit card transaction in order to make up for the processing fee, he raises the overall price instead so that the cost is subsidized by cash transactions. If the payment option discussed in the article gathers critical mass, said seller can, instead of raising his prices, set a minimum purchase amount for those few remaining, like yourself, who are stubborn enough to insist on using their credit card instead of the new, transaction-fee-free payment method (or cash).

Uh, cash _is_ government money, since there's no private currency in any developed country. Without loss of generality by ignoring coins, paper cash = promissory notes issued by the central bank. Making it electronic, as long as it's anonymous (which it is, as addressed in posts made by others in this discussion), doesn't do shit as far as giving government any more control than it already has. Government control over money comes from the fact that you can only pay your taxes in the government/central bank-issued currency, and your transactions are subject to taxes even if they're pure barter, or based on bitcoin or gold or whateverthefuck else libertardians will latch onto next.

Unless, of course, the comparison is based on ratio (division) rather than subtraction, which is quite reasonable -- after all, we use logarithmic scales quite often, and human senses are generally logarithmic in terms of perception, which makes it all the more intuitional.

Unfortunately, in the long run, privacy is indeed mutually exclusive with protection. It's easy to see this by extrapolating technological trends. As technology has improved, it has become easier and easier for a smaller and smaller group of people to destroy/kill more and more. The logical conclusion of this is that, eventually, technological progress will enable any individual to kill almost everybody. It's unreasonable to suppose that protection measures other than pervasive, total surveillance, will be able to keep that in check, simply because destruction is always an easier action than creation/protection/any other practical action; thus, only absolute measure will suffice. Please note I'm not saying pervasive surveillance by our future AI or enhanced post-human overlords is a good thing, but I don't see any logical way out of it. The trick will be, as the by-now-cliche saying goes, who watches the watchers? Perhaps the only reasonable answer here is: everybody. Zero privacy from anyone might be what lies in our future, say a century from now.

> I don't have to care how "poor and undeveloped" someone's worldview is, although in practice, I do care.

Of course you don't have to care, but you do in practice. You don't have to do anything. That whole sentence is largely meaningless.

Well, I can cite the previous slashdot post (in another topic, I believe) where I lifted that line from ;)

Do you have any idea of the notoriety of this incident? It was caught on video, I suggest you watch it. The officer was out of line, and he did walk up to people, who were sitting, immobile, and pepper sprayed them in their faces. They weren't "surrounded."

Here is an image:
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/26/14112860-university-of-california-to-pay-nearly-1-million-in-deal-with-21-pepper-sprayed-uc-davis-occupy-protesters?lite

Video: http://youtu.be/WmJmmnMkuEM

An average nuclear reactor core (at least here in Canada) generates about 1000 MW.

Here's a question: how many OTEC plants would be needed to replace current world energy use? Or, how many wind power towers? How much area in solar panels?

Here's another question: without restraining progress, as developing countries become fully industrialized and their energy use per capita becomes 10-fold, how many OTEC plants and windmills and square meters of solar panels are we going to need?

So why bother? Especially when nuclear has the lowest number of deaths per terrawatt-hour generated: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

This is the thing about anecdotes -- they're useless for generalizing because for every one that supports one thesis, there's another one someone else will bring up from their own experience to counter it. All they're good for is a "cool story, bro".

My last ex is undecided (2nd yr) but mainly studying literature and philosophy. She's the most respectful and understanding person I've ever met, who always in a disagreement tried to find flaw in her own views first before challenging the other side, and even then only after asking for enough clarification as to be certain there wasn't a misunderstanding. My conclusion is that people will use the knowledge and training they have in ways that extend their core self. In your case, that person already had the sort of personality that made her liable to be a "snotty bitch", as you describe her. It's silly to think her degree made her that way; it only gave her ammunition.

My point is I really miss my ex. It doesn't help that she was really hot too, and was with me despite the fact that I was/(am?) a super skinny narcissistic geek with impaired empathy, 12 years her senior, who gave her suicide advice while she was depressed and then didn't apologize but made lame excuses that she had provoked me by acting too nice and forcing me to push her to try to find her breaking point.

> People who want to study useless $H!T like art and literature should do so on their own dime and make sure they have a plan to earn a basic income of their own.

I'm an electrical engineer and software developer, and I find your comment incredibly ignorant and offensive. Once a society gets above the level of mere subsistence, culture is pretty much the entire point of human existence. The extreme materialism and utilitarianism implied by your post shows how poor and undeveloped your worldview is.

As in smart sandwich ... that's what my brain told the rest of me that word meant in the first few fractions of a second. And frankly, I couldn't care less about a smart watch ... but am now obsessing over the idea of a smart sandwich. "What you want, when you don't even know you want it! SMARTWICH!"

Useful != necessary.

I contribute to wikipedia and archive.org.

There isn't a website that has yet existed that is necessary. That could also apply to every movie and television show that has even been produced, and most books. If your content is valuable, it will generate value. You just have to find out how.

If I visit a site where ads ruin the experience, I'm gone. There is no content that can justify that reality for me, so I act accordingly.

I find advertising to be reprehensible in its mass form. It conveys the very worst of us, and exists upon, and strengthens, a platform of dishonesty. There are exceptions, yes, but that is the general rule IMO.

I block ads in every way that I can - if I find a site with great content that interests me, I pay for it. That's exceedingly rare.

Point being: if you want to exist, find a different revenue model. If your users are blocking ads, that should be communicating something to you - and very strongly at 50%! Change your behavior, don't try to change theirs.

Having worked with OpenAL, it became clear to me that it doesn't live up to its name, which implies a status comparison with OpenGL. Nowhere close, actually. It's not merely the fact that there is very limited development activity on OpenAL. The problem is that the simplifications taken in structuring positional audio are way too far from reasonable psychoacoustic models, and there's no way moving beyond them without fundamentally redesigning the API. We need something a lot more like http://www.carlschissler.com/gsound/index.php?page=home and there's no way to do this sort of more advanced psychoacoustic modeling in OpenAL; compare, instead, OpenGL, where the API supports much more flexibility.