There are people smarter than myself without degrees. There are morons who have master degrees who I had to let go because they are book smarts but can't do shit in the real world without the deer in the headlights look when independent analysis and goals are needed.

You can always find people both better and worse than you at everything, both from the pool of "amateurs" and from supposed experts. Just a fact of life.

I'll take a bold stance and say right up front that you get out of college what you put into it - If you want, you really can get a solid education even from a crap college; and on the flip side of that, you can sleep your way through quite a few majors and still end up with a degree. That said - On average, I would say a college degree proves one, and only one, thing about you - That you had the ability to learn enough, and follow directions enough, to complete the basic requirements of that degree... And that already puts you in the top third of applicants, even if you smoked your way through a humanities major.

Now, as watered down as that may sound, I don't mean it as quite that weak of a stance - In practice, the real world will never require 90% of what you learned in college, and college didn't teach you 90% of what you need for a real job. College does not, and should not, equal vocational training. It (can) give you the foundation you need to excel, and demonstrates to employers that you at least don't count as a complete waste of flesh. Anything more than that - Pure cake.

The only way this could possibly work is point to point LOS between the nodes.

A flying WAP 800ft up has line of sight to pretty much anything in the area.

That said, while TFA doesn't mention it, the intended use of this likely involves a (ground) base station with a satellite uplink established in a clearing, which then uses WDS or similar to provide access to one or more flying relay nodes.

Interestingly, though, I don't see the advantage of "drone" in this situation. Tethered weather balloons can already do the job admirably, and don't require an active propulsion system (and fuel) to remain aloft. That means you can allocate more of your load to batteries for the router, rather than fuel just to fight gravity.

Um, no, the Bible itself says that, which most Christians ignore out of convenience. The JW's count as one of the few sects that actually accepts Revelations 7:4 as relevant to their interests.

It makes no difference to me whether or not you personally chose to ignore 603 of God's 613 commandments; whether or not you choose to play the odds at getting into the Silver City (currently 50,000 to 1 against winning, even if you perfectly follow the rules); whether you even pay attention to the 10 commandments you do claim to accept (cooking on Sunday? Straight to hell with you!). But you can't argue that the defining book of the Christian faith doesn't explicitly say as much.

Damnit Scully, we had it this time! We had it, had them, and those bastards took it away from us!

They landed on any of a hundred small island airstrips with the full knowledge of the Malay government, and by now that alien's body has made it back to the Pentagon and out of our reach.

So heaven is available to anyone whether or not they follow your God's law?

No. Even according to their own doctrine, "many are called but few are chosen". Funny, really, how people can find it comforting to believe a book that tells them that, out of the billions of people on the planet, a mere 144k of them get into heaven.

Then again, plenty of suckers play the lottery, too, so, what do I know?

I live in Portland & often people mistake *problems inherent to any big city* with problems of the specific city, or even neighborhood they visit.

Oh, no mistake there - I apologize if I suggested that as a problem unique to SF.

I meant only that SF, despite its reputation, doesn't get a pass on the "cities suck" vibe. It did have a few nice neighborhoods; and I'll even admit I felt relatively safe walking around at night (though I stayed on the "good" side of the hill). But beyond that, it has the qualities all cities necessarily have - Too damned many people, too little public transit, too many beggars, too much traffic, too loud, too bright, too expensive (I've never understood that last one - Supposedly, dense populations reduce the cost of living, so why does everything cost more?).

But no, nothing against SF itself. Mostly just disappointed it doesn't live up to its reputation.

WOW, just WOW, I'm sure they believe all this too.

Having recently experienced SF as an outsider on vacation... Honestly, after a week, I got used to some of its quirks. I could see it as more or less basically habitable as a permanent resident.

But my impression for the first half of that week? "You fucking savages call this shithole home??? Google couldn't pay me enough to put up with this!"

In hindsight, yes, Google could pay me enough - But for similar money, they could also pay me enough to take a private jet in every day from further North.

Jus' sayin'...


/ I did find the guy spraypainted gold amusing, though - Especially when a scab stole his usual spot. Like watching monkeys fling poo at each other.

They can proclaim whatever the hell they want to; they themselves state, on their website in multiple places, that bitcoin transactions are routed through coinbase or similar.

I know, right? Such frauds... Kinda like how Mom n' Popco claim to take Visa, but in reality the transactions are routed through Network Merchants or Fiscorp or authorize.net. A bunch of lying liars! What does it matter that I can give them a credit card and they send me product, if they didn't personally wave the magic wand of money creation to turn that into USD?

Seriously, lose the hate-on (sorry, this irrational fear of BTC doesn't quite rank all the way up to the level of monkeys flinging poo... more like sheep running away from the rising sun every morning) for Bitcoin. Step back and think about what you believe about Bitcoin, and before posting more garbage, ask yourself: Could you say the same thing about the US financial system?

Ponzi schemes... Like Madoff? More SEC oversight... Like Enron? Useful for money laundering... Like a briefcase of USD$100s? Early adopters have an edge... Like the Rockefellers or Carnegies or Vanderbilts?

I know, you don't really care what I have to say about this, because you lost a few bucks trying to game a sytem you didn't understand, and no one can ever explain that away for you. But really, a great many of us use Bitcoin, for legal purposes, and find it extremely convenient. And like it or not, you can't do a damned thing about that.

Why is this lie perpetually getting repeated? Hell, some moron even modded it up. Overstock (and Tigerdirect, etc) do not accept bitcoins as payment.

You might want to tell that to Overstock and Tiger Direct, then, who both proudly proclaim that they do accept BTC as payment.

But no doubt, you know better than they do, so carry on with the Bitcoin hate.

I don't think that means what you think it means.

First problem, the gambler's fallacy refers to a mistaken belief that a random process that has locally shifted away from its mean somehow "owes" the universe a return to its mean. After a long losing streak, the gambler erroneously believes he has a better chance of a win.

Second, for the gambler's fallacy to apply, you need an independent random process. Specifically, if the randomness in question has a history to it, the gambler's fallacy doesn't apply as a fallacy - The deck of cards with all the non-face cards played out really does "owe" you a 20 or a blackjack (Hmm, do aces count as face cards? Whatever - You get the point).

In this case, you want something more like confirmation bias or a sunk cost fallacy - Though neither of those quite properly applies to what I described, because I haven't ignored evidence contrary to my opinion (quite the opposite, I've weighed it heavily), and I haven't needed to keep pumping more money into my BTC position to keep it afloat (again, contrary to that, I've steadily syphoned money out and what remains just keeps going up in value).


It's a zero sum game, their gain will be matched by the losses of ordinary punters like you.

You have the first clause right, though you use it as though you don't realize that makes it 2.5% per year better than USD, which systematically loses value over time.

As for the second half of that - If BTC entirely collapsed tomorrow, I've already done better than break even on my original investment. Except, haters like you don't seem to get that my "investment" consists of having fun (and $50 in electricity, but hell, I've paid more for a single concert ticket). I got to play a part in the success of the first viable non-commodity non-government currency. I got to learn OpenCL as a result of tweaking miners to squeeze every possible hash out of my GPU. I got to watch my "just for laughs" investment turn into the price of a new car (if I hadn't slowly spent most of what I had over time) - And no, I don't regret spending it at $4/BTC, at $30/BTC, at $200/BTC, because I got involved for the idea, not because I someday hoped to get rich fleecing morons out of their dollars in exchange for worthless ($0.10 each, when I started) bits in a shared transaction record.

This. Over the course of a year, Amazon's free (normal) shipping easily saves me a few hundred bucks. Last year, I bought one especially large item that would have cost that in shipping by itself (and perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Amazon's price beat every local brick-and-mortar for that item by very nearly the cost of shipping). Then for some bulkier items, hey, I'd rather have something like a sofa delivered to my doorstep than try to figure out how to squeeze it into a subcompact car. ;)

That said, I don't pay for prime, because seriously, people can't wait a whoooole week to get their stuff (anything I need now, I simply buy locally)?

The only reason people were into this was to either trade in illegal goods and services or be cutting edge with something that only really served to facilitate illegal activity.

Fuck you very much, sir.

I, and the vast majority of Bitcoin users, engage in entirely legitimate commerce with BTC as the medium of exchange. Heck, I even declared my BTC gains on my taxes last year, fer chrissakes.

Now, when I want to score a quarter of weed - You ever actually try to buy anything with BTC, or just mindlessly parroting the FUD about Silk Road? My dealer takes USD only, thanks.

If you hold your own Bitcoins in a local wallet, then yes, a handful of confirmations adequately proves you really do have those coins.

As soon as you entrust them to someone else to store in a pooled account, bam, confirmability lost.

A key philosophy behind the BTC protocol assumes direct person-to-person transactions. If you adhere to that, you don't get screwed by a failed exchange; for that matter, you don't even care about the existence of an exchange... Except insofar as they help define the "worth" of a Bitcoin as a medium of trade. Though, with the likes of Overstock accepting BTC now, the marketplace itself might soon serve that function without needing an external point of reference.

All these 'with-it' trendy people got to brag about about being ahead of everyone else and 'cool' because they were so smartly investing in this scam.

So do I still get to brag, since the handful of BTC I still have currently trade at USD$650, while my initial investment comes out to less than $50 in electricity?

Boo hoo, people who trusted an unregulated exchange got burned - Color me shocked.