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Comment Re: WTF? (Score 4, Interesting) 103

That's fair enough, charge people who vomit more. But as someone who has gotten many ubers drunk, has never thrown up in or near an uber and generally doesn't cause a fuss...I don't want to be tarred with the same "all drunk people need to be charged more" brush.

Maybe they should have some sort of star rating. Like, if you're an asshole, or you throw up in ubers, the driver could rate you badly. Then later uber drivers can charge more to pick up someone with a low rating. That way, good-passengers don't get penalised because of the idiotic minority - and the driver has an indication whether a potential passenger is likely to cause them problems.

...maybe that already exists...and this story is either; a lazy PR stunt (this doesn't need AI, but AI gets press), or a genuine greedy attempt at ripping more cash from their customer's hands.

Comment Re:Hahaha (Score 2) 85

The issue here is people trusting someone else (the exchange) with their money (bitcoin). This isn't an inherent issue with bitcoin itself.

Fiat banks, for example, are essentially people trusting someone else (the bank) with their money. That would be just as stupid as the bitcoin exchange situation except; banks have insurance and government-backed assurances that mean if they screw up, customers don't lose their money.

The downside to the fiat model is; I have to use a bank because I cannot keep $350m of my own money safe without one. Keeping that much cash safe would be a horrible task that is prone to many risks. So my only real option is to use a bank to look after that money for me, and pay for the bank's insurance so my money is protected. Note that the insurance payment might be via your taxes (see government bailouts), account fees or whatever other mechanism the banks use to generate profit from you.

Bitcoin's different because I can keep 350m bitcoin safe myself. It's just a private key. The effort to keep 1 bitcoin safe is identical to the effort to keep 350m bitcoin safe. I don't need to pay to insure someone else anymore - I'm in total control of my own funds.

So given that bitcoin enables people to keep their own money safe without having to trust anyone else - why do people keep leaving their money on exchanges?
Answer 1: Because they're idiots. Or,
Answer 2: Because each individual only left a small amount of money on the exchange. Exchanges are the best way to get bitcoin right now - so, even in a transient capacity - people's bitcoins will be on the exchange and outside of their own control for a period of time. If people are smart, the quantity of bitcoin left on the exchange at any point in time will be balanced with the impact of losing it. Ie - transiting a small amount that you're not afraid to lose is fine.

I hope the majority of the lost $350m were from people who subscribe to answer #2 and no individual lost any money that means anything to them. Unfortunately, I suspect, there are a lot of misinformed/idiots who perhaps lost a significant amount of their own money through nothing but ignorance.




tl;dr
The lesson to be learnt here (and from every other exchange 'hack') is;
Don't give an unregulated and uninsured company a significant amount of your money to hold on to.

Comment Re:Oh this is bad... (Score 1) 83

This isn't really a mess for Intel. This hack isn't for the faint hearted. Even the most seasoned PC-builders will not want to attempt to do this. They're not going to see their motherboard/chipset sales plummet because now all their customers are keeping their old motherboards.

I think a couple of things will happen at Intel in the wake of this;
The engineers at intel are probably just saying "huh, neat" or "I told you so"
The lawyers will be checking they're not liable for a 'planned obsolescence' kind of issue by forcing people upgrade to newer chipsets (hint, they're not, just because it can work with an old chipset on a specific ASRock board doesn't mean it works properly)

Comment Could make for a good scifi (Score 1) 150

Current civilisation crumbles and by the time the roadster crashes down to earth, civilisation has rebuilt itself to the point of 1940s technology.

The car comes crashing down in a place coincidentally named Roswell, and top scientists harvest this strange extraterrestrial technology for the wonders of ICs, microcontrollers & Li-ion batteries.

Obviously the government don't want to cause panic that some alien craft crashed from space, so they subtly release technology based on this 'Tesla' civilisation's tech and take credit of these wonderful inventions themselves.

...maybe this has happened before...

Comment Re:I feel like I'm getting old. (Score 1) 209

I downloaded and install it too to see what the fuss is all about and I agree with everything you said.

Additionally, I will add that plexamp bears no resemblance to winamp. winamp's strengths were;
- Simple to use. Plexamp requires sign-in to a plex server, the volume cannot be controlled independently of the system (so good luck balancing music while playing a video game), there doesn't seem to be a way to manage playlists, browsing the library has been replaced with a search
- Small footprint. Plexamp is using 121.8MB of RAM on my Mac and that seems to be creeping up, around 16% CPU & it's 'energy impact' is around 21 (whatever that means). I don't know if that's good or bad in relation to winamp - but it is in addition to the plex server I've got running on my network - so I wouldn't say the overall plex ecosystem has a small footprint at all.
- Plays everything. In fairness, plex has always been ok with every format in my library - so maybe they nailed this one


Summary: It's ok but really nothing special and I feel like if you're paying homage to something like winamp, you need to do a very good job. It's like when you see someone redoing Led Zep - they have to do a really good job to be 'allowed' to do that.

Comment Re: Right! Use fake people out, until it doesn't w (Score 1) 174

This, coupled with speed cameras in harsh places.

I saw one yesterday that was where 2 roads merge before splitting again and everyone does the lane dance in the shared section of road. The speed limit was 20, which is frankly too slow for the size of the road & they put a speed camera right at the point the lanes merge. So while you're paying attention to all the crazy lane swapping happening around you, you also need to fix your eyes on your speedo to make sure you don't accidentally creep over an unnaturally slow speed limit at the same time.

Comment camel camel camel (Score 4, Insightful) 233

It's already known that amazon have dynamic pricing - it's not a stretch to assume that mechanism could be used for shady reasons.

At risk of sounding like a cheesy advertisement: That's why I use camel camel camel!

For those who don't know; it tells you the price history of any product on amazon - so you can see if they've hiked the prices before putting it on sale or just in general if the price is lower or higher than normal.

Comment Re:Don't Blame the Startups/Companies (Score 1) 93

So much this. I came here to post the same comment

I was recently involved in a project that did not use AI, despite other similar projects by other companies using AI. Anyway, it was all very exciting, and innovative and the company roped in its press contacts to shout our new product from the rooftops and we, the project team & the company, were VERY clear with the press when we were asked about our use of AI. We explicitly said "This system doesn't use any form of AI". Many times. I seriously cannot emphasise enough how much we told them we didn't use AI because we did not want them to be spreading misinformation about our product and the first assumption for our system was "it must be using AI".

So, next morning the papers & websites etc were all filled with "$company launches exciting new project that uses AI" with "related" articles that attempt to go into some depth about AI in general and whether skynet's going to kill us all.

Journalism isn't just inaccurate or misinformed. It is outright deception to increase readership numbers. Journalism is literal fiction. I'm sure some places are worse than others - but it is very difficult to gauge.

I read recently about a psychological effect - which I suspect it's one of those eponymous laws - whereby if you read an article in the newspaper about an area you are highly knowledgeable - you laugh at the inaccuracies of the article. You then turn the page and read something that you are not an expert in and accept it as fact.

For some reason of human nature, despite most people having personal experience of reading something in the paper that they know is untrue, people will generally forgive those inaccuracies and assume they're rare occurrences. My recent experience with the press and our not-AI project has made me much more sceptical of anything I read.

Comment Re:Riiight.... (Score 3, Insightful) 149

If the alternative is relying on flash or silverlight or some arbitrary other player to watch video - then yes, EMEA does offer a better user experience.

This isn't a question of whether DRM is good or bad - it's a question of, we're already stuck with DRM so can we make it a bit less painful by providing native browser support.

Comment Re:Great! (Score 1) 35

I've only really just started learning about stocks & that whole side of things I'd previously not paid attention to - so I'm likely off the mark and would welcome any pointers.

My understanding is that P/E ratio is a key measure of how successful a business is at making more money than it's spending. Twitter does not have a P/E because it's negative (ie, they're losing money). And they've been that way for a very long time (I think, actually, forever).

So, the only way anyone ever made money out of twitter was doing stock-market trickery of buying a bag of crap stock, convincing (ie, sales, lies, hype, whatever you want to call it) someone it's worth more than you paid for it and selling it to them.

That entire mechanism of making money is separate from the actual business of twitter. It's got nothing to do with tweets or users, or ads. Twitter's actual business makes no money.

Now, that someone might get lucky and twitter might actually start selling more ads and making some money; Facebook, for example, IIRC, had a long period of losing money but turned it around. But whether FB can keep that momentum remains to be seen; their P/E has been slowly declining over last few years.

Comment Re: They don't even understand "work" (Score 3, Insightful) 116

You missed my point. At risk of just feeding the trolls, let me try again;

Someone who says anything on the web, is using the web to make their message heard. In this instance, GP AC used the web to tell the world that the web is useless. An obvious contradiction.

On top of the use of making their message heard, the AC made use of another capability of the web; limited anonymity.

So in that 1 post, AC contradicted their own message at least twice.

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