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Comment Re:Amazingly, Trump did something similar too (Score 2, Informative) 39

Godwin must be spinning in his grave.

1) Godwin's law is that as the length of a USENET thread grows, the probability of someone being compared to Hitler approaches 1. You do not understand Godwin's law any more than most people understand Murphy's Law. (Both are fine examples of Murphy's law.)
2) Mike Godwin explicitly said that comparing Trump to Hitler is apt, not that this is relevant to Godwin's law, which doesn't refer to aptness of comparison.

It seems like you are ignorant on every topic.

Comment Re:Time for an end of the world party if accurate (Score 1) 71

If that is true we are all dead, that is going to lead to catastrophic climate change which will blow every last tipping point and lead to complete climate collapse, [...] It better be wrong or its time to have an end of the world party.

It's probably wrong, as we will likely have a nuclear war before then, and we can have a party at ground zero instead.

Comment Re:Amazingly, Trump did something similar too (Score 2, Insightful) 39

Can we not have the guy, or politics in general, mentioned on literally every single goddamn discussion ever?

The bulk of Slashdotters are American, Slashdot is hosted in America, there is nothing going on in America right now which is more important than the influence of the orange dick-who-would-be-tator. If you don't like it, start your own website. If you don't like it, do something to help remove him. If you don't like politics, explain your nickname.

Comment Re:Banking License (Score 1) 55

>A regular bank can't magic up $1M out of thin air,

uhmm . . . historically, this is *exactly* where paper money comes from, and why they are called "banknotes"!

Banks issued paper notes promising to pay the bearer a sum of money (i.e., an amount of gold or silver) upon presentation. This was a matter of convenience, the paper being easier to haul about. This led to the practice al matter that a bank could issue more paper than it held money, as long as it was careful enough not to issue so much that too much would come in to redeem.

This isn't fundamentally difference than the practice of lending deposits back out to other borrowers (which is generally how this new money created by the banking system was disbursed, anyway).

In time, government stepped in to regulate how much a bank cold lend in this manner (reserve requirement).

Until WWII, the majority of the paper money in the US was *not* issued by the government, but by banks and some other companies (e.g., Railroads printed $2.40 bills, as $2.40 was a common fare).

Even today, some cites print a local currency, generally (universally) backed 1:1 by federal money. It circulates and shows the effects of buying locally as these local bills start showing up in cash registers. (In the same vein, the US Navy used to deal with local discontent and calls for removing bases of rowdy sailors by paying in $2 bills. Once merchants noticed just how much of their registers were full of that uncommon note, attitudes changed quickly!)

The federal government has the exclusive power to coin money--but this means coining metal; it doesn't stop states or other entities from printing paper money.

doc hawk, displaced economics professor

Comment Re:Google is going to lock down Android (Score 1) 66

We're going to have to hope this project pans out, I guess. I used to run Familiar linux with GPE (gnome-based) desktop on my HP Ipaq... H2215 I think? It had what was then the fastest mobile ARM processor, the Intel PXA255. Unfortunately it was power hungry so I had to have a big stupid battery.

ANYHOO they had phone versions of those PocketPC devices, and you could run Linux on those as well.

For the time being, I guess I'm stuck on Android. I have an app library there I'd rather not abandon, and I still want to be able to use the bank app.

Comment Re:Awesome! (Score 1) 34

Beyond scanning a QR code phones are useless for most tasks regardless of how big their processors are.

This is silly. You can run whatever you want on a phone, and while more pixels and more real estate are better (he saw himself type on his 42.5" 4k TV) you can still do a lot with a small screen. Work is done with phones every day. It's of course absolutely true that most people are mostly consuming content with their phones rather than creating it, but that doesn't negate actual uses like CRM and data collection which are completely viable on a small-screen device.

Having all that processing power on the phone is mostly squandered, but it's handy for a lot of short-running, high-horsepower tasks. When was the last time you experienced a perceptible delay in loading an image that wasn't related to storage? And on the more expensive phones, even the storage is fairly snappy. I buy mostly cheap Motos and the storage is plodding on all of them, but I rarely do storage-limited tasks so it's only irritating when installing or updating apps.

The pocket computer was relegated to a simple calendar as well for the same reason.

Do you mean Palmtop PCs, or PDAs? Both have done a lot more jobs than that. I've known a lot of people who had sub-laptop PCs who did actual work with them. A friend of mine had a Dauphin 486 tablet-with-pen for example, and used it as his primary machine on the go. That had a kind of laughable form factor by today's standards, and it was amusing back then too to be honest since it was as thick as a GRiDPad 1910. Maybe thicker? Too lazy to look it up now, and I only have the gridpad so I can't just compare.

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