If you did, you'd know you can take out as much of your money, any time you like. Things like ATMs have daily withdrawal limits to help prevent theft/fraud, but you can go in to a branch and cash out your balance, any time you like (or transfer it to another bank electronically).

With any regular bank or brokerage, you can take your money out whenever you want, on fairly short notice. This applies even if you have tons of money in it. Now, if you have a lot, like lets say multiple billions of foreign exchange reserves, then placing a sell order on all of it will drop the value, the price will have to go down for all of it to sell, but you can do that, if you wish.

Heck that was part of the problem in the big downturn a few years ago. People were panicking and selling their whole portfolio at reduced prices, which of course feeds back on itself. A guy I know is a financial manager and he would try as hard as he could to convince people not to, since it would realize big losses for them, but they wanted none of that, they wanted it in cash (or bonds, or other safer stuff) and they wanted it NOW. So, he did as he had to and followed their wishes.

As the parent points out, the reason Bitcoin wouldn't let you is ponzi type reasons. If someone big cashes out all at once, that could cause the value to drop a lot, which could cause the whole thing to tumble down. They are trying to make sure that doesn't happen, to prop up the farce.

Consoles are focused on lowest possible cost of their hardware, since they sell to consumers at a loss, or at the best a slim profit. They need their suppliers to give them hardware for bottom dollar. That means you don't get much profit per unit.

Now that doesn't mean AMD is getting screwed, I'm sure they are making money per unit sold, but make no mistake: The reason they got the contracts is they could offer the lowest price and that means a thin profit. So 10 million chips sold in the console is less profit than 10 million sold in a desktop or server or the like.

It is not the grand prize of hardware contracts.

On another note I find it hilarious how fanboys relish in the concept of a competitor doing badly, as if we all wouldn't be more screwed if there was a single company. Personally, I like nVidia GPUs, they work better in my experience. However I'm real, real glad AMD is around. Why? Well if they weren't nVidia could, and would, charge more than they already do, and they wouldn't release new tech as fast.

So if you are an AMD fanboy wishing the death of Intel and nVidia, what you are really saying is "Gee I hope AMD will be able to overcharge me for lower end technology when they have nobody to push them!"

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/250982/2013-year-on-year-sales-and-market-share-update-to-may-18th/

Relevant part being lifetime sales:

PS3: 77,313,472
Wii: 99,574,394
Xbox 360: 77,311,669

"Every gamer you know" is not a valid metric. Anecdotal evidence is not useful.

Also this is only the 7th gen. Step back to the previous one and the PS2 is the best selling console of all time, over 200 million sold.

Sorry if it shoots your off-the-cuff rant to shit, but Sony is a force to be reckoned with in the console area. So in Nintendo.

So my guess is the reason they did all this stupid shit is publishers. The game publishers are extremely whiny, and extremely dumb, when it comes to the idea of consumer rights. They seem to think that extreme DRM is needed to prevent piracy (not that it has ever worked) and that they'd have way more sales if only they could do that. So there's the "Check in once a day thing." They also HATE the used game market, they really, honestly, act like it is money taken right out of their pocket. So there's the resale restriction. Also they, of course, hate indies, since those guys sell games without publishers, sometimes very popular ones (Minecraft). So there's this latest shit.

Now the reason for MS to do this would be to make publishers happy and thus to try and bribe them in to exclusives. Convince them to release games only for the Xbox, or at least first for the Xbox. Get a library that nobody else has or can have.

Well if that happens, then who knows where it goes? Maybe people stay mad, they say "fuck you" don't buy the console and so on. Publishers will, of course, go where the money is in the long run and the Xbox will get largely abandoned. It'll be a big failure.

However maybe gamers decide they really want those games. They forget or rationalize away their anger and objections and buy the Xbox and the games. This makes publishers happy and the Xbox gets more games and so on.

Never underestimate how short people's memories can be or what a bunch of pansy-asses gamers can be. An instructive example was Modern Warfare 2. They badly fucked over the PC version of the game and it had a lot of gamers PISSED. There was a "Boycott Modern Warfare 2," Steam group. Had a lot of members. So what happened on release day? You guessed it: Tons of people in that group had bought it and were playing it. Their anger was not enough to keep them from doing what they wanted (http://dbzer0.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Boycott-Modern-Warfare-2.jpg).

Personally I think MS is in for a world of hurt, but we'll see. If they appease the publishers, and the publishers in turn deliver what gamers want, well maybe it works out. I hope not, but it could happen.

You might want to look up your terms. MS is not anywhere near a monopoly on consoles. They have about a 30% market share, same as Sony. Nintendo has about a 40% share. This is for consoles, MS has no handheld.

So sorry, but you can't whine about monopoly here, because MS hasn't got one. They are only one player of three, and not the big one. That is not to say this is a smart move (it isn't) but this isn't some case of a big monopoly throwing their weight around. You aren't a monopoly unless you have total or near total control over a market and they don't.

More likely, this is MS trying to make publishers happy to get more exclusive games. The traditional publishers are extremely whiny about many of the things that the new Xbox is supposed to deal with, like reselling games, indy titles, DRM, and so on. The publishers probably told them all the things they wanted, and MS said "Sure!" That looks like it is going to bit them in the ass big time, but we'll see. Maybe MS ends up getting a lot of exclusives and gamers decide they want those, forget their anger, and buy it anyhow.

Either way, knock of the monopoly whining. A monopoly isn't a large company you don't like, it has a specific legal definition.

Judge Kimball already ruled on the GPL way back in 2006 or so. Back during the initial discovery phase. The GPL was upheld as being a perfectly legitimate copyright license, and the judge could find nothing wrong with it.

Is we need to define what we mean when we ask for someone's sex or gender on a form. I think part of the problem is different people identify what it means differently. Some in the transgender community say it is 100% about what you personally choose to identify as. So you could be genetically male, have an XY chromosome set, and biologically male, as in have male genitals and body structure, but identify yourself as female and that's what you should mark down. However other people might disagree. If you went in to the woman's dressing room at a rec center the biological women in there might not be at all comfortable with that since they identify you as male, due to your biology.

So one of the things we need to do is clarify the terms, and perhaps have different terms for identifying someone's genetic structure, biological makeup, and sexual identity.

Like when you are talking to a doctor, the genetic definition matters. Reason is that health issues do NOT affect both genders equally, and it has nothing to do with appearance or identity, it has to do with genetics. So even if you've had a sex change operation and all that, proper identification as genetically male could be relevant to medical providers.

For most people it is more about biology, as in what bits do you have between your legs. We visually identify people as male or female, and most are pretty clearly one or the other. That is one of the reasons it gets asked for lots of forms of ID is to help ensure that the ID is for the person holding it. For that, we might want to use your biological appearance. If you undergo a sex change surgery, then you change that identifier.

In terms of the pronoun you wish people to use to identify your gender, that really is up to you, though you need to understand it can be confusing to people if you appear and sound different than you identify.

So as you say we need to review why the information is collected, and then define terms to say what sort of thing we are talking about. We can't just say "Well let people identify as whatever they want," since reality doesn't work that way. However if you are just collecting it for no real reason, then don't and let people identify how they wish.

You can have nice, efficient, LED bulbs with no WiFi in them. Go to Amazon, Home Depot, pretty much wherever you like. The Philips L-Prize bulb is the one I'd recommend. Very nice spectrum, more efficient than most other LEDs, long life.

Or I suppose you could just whine on Slashdot about a product that isn't on the market yet.

Wire based Ethernet is spec'd at MAC layer throughput. It is talking about the data rate of Ethernet frames, the 8b/10b encoding overhead is already accounted for and all that. So you discover that, particularly with Jumbo Frames, you get real near that speed in actual throughput.

Wireless Ethernet, not so much. You find that effective throughput, even under basically ideal conditions, are way less than the listed speed.

So it leads to confusion for people. Basically wireless is over advertising the speed.

DECT 6.0 phones work on the 1900MHz band and more or less act like short-range cell phones with their protocols and compression. They work quite well, have decent penetration through walls, and are outside of the range used for computers.

Remember that the "overclocking" of the non-K chips actually isn't. Turboboost is precisely controlled. Intel gets to spec how high it can go, and under what conditions (thermal, electrical, etc). So the chip is tested and rated to work at that, they know the variables. With K series OCing, that is all out the window. The user gets to get all the variables. They can set max wattage draw, how fast it can go regular and turbo, all that shit.

Well, maybe that kind of thing causes problems with these technologies. I can for sure see it with VT-d, since that is offering hardware access to VMs.

I have trouble believing Intel is doing it to be dicks. They like people buying the K series CPUs, more money for them. They only offer the K series at the high end so it isn't like people buy them instead of buying the higher end chips, they ARE the higher end chips. If anything, I would expect intel to do the opposite and disable it on lower end stuff to try and get people to spend more.

More cores are useful if, and only if, you have software threaded out enough to use it. Some workloads are, many are not. This "OMG moar cores lol," attitude is silly, and to me reeks of fanboyism. "My chosen holy grail platform does this, therefore everyone should want it!"

Also more cores aren't necessarily useful if things over all are too much slower. For example, you'd expect a T1100 to be faster than a 2600 at x264 encoding. I mean it is all kinds of multi-threaded, and the T1100 has 50% more cores. Maybe the FX-8350 too. While it isn't 6 core, it does have 8 modules so 8 threads.

Well, the reality it that they are not (http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/27). The T1100 and FX-8350 are behind pretty much all modern Intel CPUs. An i5-2400 beats them out. Despite the core advantage, the speed disadvantage per core is too much.

But go ahead and keep telling yourself that you are the only TRUE kind of computer user because you care more about cores than actual performance.

1. get a job in NYC for $200k.
2. convince them to let you telecommute (will not be easy).
3. move to Austin TX.
4. profit.

Some of my co-workers were hired in California and moved to Salt Lake City. Many paid cash for their home in this area due to selling their home in CA.

In a large corporation, the downside of such a decision -- even though I know you meant the above somewhat tongue-in-cheek! -- is that someone paid at the high end of the bell curve is frequently passed up for raises due to the cost-of-living differential, regardless of job performance. The short-term benefit can be magnificent, but the long-term downside of promotions without attendant raises due to already having a salary "above" what the management manual suggests for the position in that area catches up with you.

Mexico does not have the time-zone disadvantage of India, and recently (due to various political and monetary factors) is very cost-competitive. Our Guadalajara office is chock-full of brilliant, dedicated people -- just like our India office -- but getting things done with their help is considerably easier due to the better time zone alignment.

Given the choice of hiring otherwise-equal software engineers in India for $25K/year vs. Mexico for $25K/year, I'd go with Mexico every time due to the time zone differential. Travel costs are cheaper. Conversations with US-based co-workers occur more frequently. Training time is quicker due to quicker turnaround on questions and feedback. You can obviously work around issues working with teams on opposite schedules -- and we do, every day! -- but it will never be as trivial as simply having most of your workers share common core hours.

Like I said at the start of the conversation: location and risk/reward are two fundamental aspects of how much one gets paid. It affects how easy it is to land a good-paying job, as well. In today's market, one's longitude matters a whole lot more than one's latitude; it's a lot easier for me to work with my great team-mates in Mexico during my normal working day than to stay up past midnight to meet with equally-talented teammates in India, Singapore, or Sydney.