That's interesting but isn't electronic commerce a subset of technology? Because it's technology and the internet and technology entrepreneurs that have enabled e-commerce to become a thing. Most, if not all of the headlines on your site looks like they would be welcome articles posted here that would engage discussion.
Of course visiting the site second time it's now prompting me for money. That's a very e-commerce thing that makes people click away. Why would I subscribe to a site like hacker News, Even if I was mostly interested in e-commerce-based things? So I suspect you are doing the very anti-hacker news thing and very e-commerce centered thing of loading me up with tracking cookies. Good job!
Starlink is a futurist project which is really what Elon Musk wants to be. For something like Google they wouldn't do this typically because as a company and their leadership they aren't futurists.
Google has typically invested in existing viable technologies and forced them into a lower price point to make them more available. Google fiber was introduced 14 years ago when that kind of speed was unheard of. At the time most ISPs wanted to have bandwidth caps and rate limits because they were afraid of people abusing the network. Google came in and showed that it was viable to do at a price point for the residential consumer. This forced the market to adapt. Google also had a similar program with cellular service as well.
your comments remind me of some related, potential factors. I was at Google in the early aughts... definitely had some mega futuristics visions (including later with moonshot).
But their CFO (excellent, loved by everyone) had major traditional telco background, so GoogleFi was natural idea, despite it's limited market traction. And you are right -- Google dominant mindset was "ad supported" everything.
Separately, Musk of course was physics major. Google 99% CS. So mindsets and ideas vary (with plenty of overlap too)
I think you are referring to Nikesh Arora, who runs Palo Alto Networks, the telco guy. He was the business guy, not the CFO.
I don't think Look etc was seen as competitive to Google Fi at all. If anything, that would have been a distribution channel. It was entirely execution-related. Musk is much more serious at shipping than Google where X was mostly Sergey's playground of hobby projects.
Nikesh was a telco guy, too.
But I was referring to Patrick Pichette, Goog CFO. Before Google, Patrick was at Bell Canada, as President of Operations and CFO.
It's great to be uber ambitious and futuristic, but not everyone needs to be. Some companies should excel at solving smaller problems. Like search, smaller AI etc.
Ambitious, it was. Successful less so, but still, Waymo came out of X, so not sure that is a fair characterization, but yes, overal, it could have been soooo much more under a Musk-like leadership.
disagree. it’s only recently that google dropped X and moonshots. loon and the wing thing come to mind. sure, now, google isn’t very futurist (look how they botched AI execution), but in the time that starlink was developed, google was very much still futurist.
> speed was unheard of.
lol. only in the usa.
> At the time most ISPs wanted to have bandwidth caps and rate limits because they were afraid of people abusing the network.
lol again. it was all about monopoly incentives.
do you even analyze, bro?
sorry if this comes off too snarky, i have good intentions. i just find your insights very far off base.
Considering that I've worked at ISPs since the early '90s when they were dial-ups and watched them grow up into something more, Yes I would say that I've analyzed.
You offer no evidence of any futurist thing that Google has done. At least nothing to the scale of what Elon Musk has done. Everything Google is done has been a calculated safe risk taking a small step forward in technology that was safe. It was absolutely intended to embed their position as a global leader in search and nothing else.
So you can be snarky all you want but it's more important to be correct and back up your statements with evidence. Even Google coming out with Chrome was not a futurist moonshot it was simply taking advantage of the fact that all other browsers sucked and they wanted to cement their position as a search leader and tracking what people do.
According to you balloons with radio transmitters are futuristic technology. It didn't achieve scale because the benefits that it offered were too small, and it was too impractical. There was literally nothing futuristic about it at all.
You have to understand that starlink itself is only quasi-futuristic and it's the idea of SpaceX that is futuristic. Starlink is just a spin-off. Bringing faster satellite internet around the world is certainly a benefit and a step up from iridium and other satellite providers but SpaceX wasn't founded to make starlink happen. Starlink happened because SpaceX was a thing. SpaceX is a thing because Elon Musk's future vision is for the human species to become multi-planetary.
Show me anything that Google has done approaching that scale of future vision. Till we understand I don't know if Musk will actually achieve these visions but that is what is driving the offerings that he has.
Lofting up balloons, an technology from the 3rd century, carrying radios, a technology developed a century ago, and having the whole thing fail because it was a stupid idea, that's some real futuristic stuff right there.
I've worked at ISPs (on and off) since mid-90s, including starting one from scratch (ISDN and T1 bank) and building out a national colo/hosting offering for a mega telco you've heard of. I also worked at Google, not in Google Fiber but I worked with that org deeply during the post-POC (ie post-Nigeria) initial and then subsequent locations. So I reject your appeal to authority both as a matter of principle (logical fallacy) and personal experience.
I don't need to offer evidence, it is visible if you merely look for it. X (not twitter, google X) was a big money loser because it was too futurist, and Ruth killed it. Google took very large risks back then. They weren't even risks, they were known to have limited or no commerical value and they were experimenting with simply what might be possible. Not completely in a Bell Labs sense, but not all that far from it.
I mean even Waymo should be clear evidence.
I didn't mention Chrome, or "even Chrome", so not sure why you mention that. Chrome was not futurist. It was less about other browsers' sucking, and more about controlling HTML so that MSFT wouldn't, because MSFT was too narrow-minded. Google didn't have a desktop OS (even now, ChromeOS isn't viable outside of niche use cases) so they were highly depending on the browser functioning in a way they could asset control over it. At that time it was definitely not about tracking people. They just lost their way.
I thought you were just off base before, but here you are just plain wrong.
As I understand it, he was making a pro-Hamas speech (not pro-Palestine). Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK.
The UK had a particular problem with preacher Anjem Choudary [1] indoctrinating followers to be militant islamists. He is reckoned to the be linked to up to 40% of terrorist incidents in the UK (including the 7/7 attacks in London).
Following this period the anti-terror laws were made stronger and "inviting support for a proscribed organisation" became illegal. Presumably that means recruiting either directly or indirectly through speeches.
So, I can understand how this happened. But your summary really only belies your bias I'm afraid, this: "arrested a jewish son of holocaust survivors for hate speech after he denounced Israel as behaving in a genocidal manner" isn't true. Even the article you link states that he was arrested for inviting support for a proscribed organisation. He wasn't arrested for denouncing Israel as behaving in a genocidal manner.
The issue is very emotive and charged. I am not taking sides. But it's often the case that whenever anyone falls foul of laws, that have been designed to protect the people of the UK, either directly from abuse because of who they are, or indirectly via terror, then those affected complain about a lack of freedom of expression.
It seems they didn't charge him, so maybe the police overreached in this instance. I haven't seen the speech, so I can't comment, and certainly I wouldn't defend the UK police as they could certainly do with some reform. But, it's also possible that this was quite a difficult tightrope for the police to walk in terms of the law.
Some of these laws may seem draconian, but the people of this country who are not racially abusing people, or targeting people because of their sexual orientation, or gender, or inviting support for a proscribed terrorist organisation (which is 99.999% of us), will never fall foul of this legislation.
This is got to be one of the biggest Ponzi schemes of all time. I am seriously shocked that the government has not started to investigate this. It has become a ridiculous joke. I remember 10 years ago now a person I worked with was all hyped on Star citizen how it was going to be the greatest thing ever and it was going to come out soon. They dumped tons of money into it all the early access stuff, but here it is today just a big old pyramid scheme.
If you live in a country that has consumer protection laws maybe you can get a refund. There is a whole sub-reddit about recovering the money ( https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/ ).
Do this soon before they run out of money.
(It is just a scam, not a pyramid scheme. E.g. it is perhaps the same as the Tesla full self-driving)
They do seem to have actually made a good chunk of a game, though. Whether it's worth it is another question. At least it does seem like there's an underserved market for the kind of game Star Citizen is aiming to be, though it is of course easier to sell a dream than reality. To me it feels about as exploitative as mobile gatcha games, but no more, and those are generally allowed to exist despite massive criticism.
I do agree that for everything that's described there is an underserved market for this kind of game but what will be actual result be? For all the money if all the time what is being actually accounted for and who is profiting off of it especially in the absence of a finished product, and the absence of an actual definitive release date. From the outside here it looks like this is crowd funding gone wrong. It seems due to its popularity and the fanatical zealotry of those who bought into it no one wants to really challenge what's going on with it.
You can say none of the early backers are getting anything but are the developers is the game company what is the profit margin they're making what are their salaries what are they getting out of it?
Bitcoin is not like stocks it's more like gold or a commodity that someone has placed value in beyond its material value. When you say if you win someone else loses you need to give a concrete example of that. Because any fixed supply commodity the more in demand that commodity becomes the higher the price is. This does not necessarily mean anyone loses. If I bought Bitcoin at $1,000 or I mined a Bitcoin a long time ago and I sell it at the current rate, who exactly loses? The new owner of those coins can hold those coins and like any commodity it may go up or it may go down. So far the trend is it has gone up on average. So if the new owner holds it and sells it as a profit again who loses?
This is no different than gold. Sometimes gold goes up sometimes gold goes down, but on average it continues to go up because there is a limited supply. Markets are totally about timing. Gold is priced far above its industrial worth as a metal. Gold is priced currently where it's at because people have accepted it as a store of value. Bitcoin is priced where it's at because people have accepted it as a store of value. Like anything priced far above it's real world value.
> so if the new owner holds it and sells it as a profit again who loses?
Have a look at Bernie Maddoff's scheme and see how the mechanics are very similar. In Bitcoin Bernies lifestyle sucking money out of the system is the equivalent of the Bitcoin miners.
Bitcoin is a bunch of musical chairs with a tax that is used to set oil on fire and chuck electronics (asics) in landfill.
The music might stops at $1m a coin. If that happens it will cause a massive recession as people who thought they were paper rich and got in late go back to work and become frugal.
Sure you as an individual could 10x from now until then if you can get up from the tracks before the train comes. But not everyone can by definition of double entry accounting needs to balance to zero, and the fact miners (really, the energy producers) need their billions.
Bernie Madoff and Bitcoin is another false analogy. The closest analogy to Bitcoin is something that people have put value in that is above its material worth. There is no central manager that is taking later profits to pay earlier profits, as in your example Ponzi scheme.
As much as people like to claim that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme it is not a Ponzi scheme. The best evidence of this is that we do not know who created it, and we can track the coins in the early coins movement. Yes early people happen to mine a lot of coins and miners today continue to mine a lot of coin but often early adopters get a first mover advantage.
Bitcoin may collapse at some future date but like any commodity that is trading far above its material worth, they all have the risk of collapsing. If people decided that gold wasn't worth it as a store of value the price would crash because the industrial use of gold would not keep it at the heights that it currently is. As a matter of fact the cost of gold currently keeps it from being used industrially where it might actually provide a useful advantage if it was at a lower price point.
Do I wish I would have paid more attention to Bitcoin early on? Of course I do and I think a lot of detractors continue to harp on the same thing that they missed out and therefore it must be some Ponzi scheme that's going to collapse. Maybe but the current evidence says it's probably not. It's going to be the de facto digital store of value for the foreseeable future.
I absolutely did not see the utility you're usefulness or the future of Bitcoin when I first came out but that doesn't mean that I can't understand having a digital store of value that is useful especially after it's been put into practice. I don't understand why people would would pay $400 for a bottle of shampoo, but people do that as well. My lack of understanding does not negate the company selling the shampoos profit margin.
Sure. Very few elements can be man made in interesting quantites. Matter itself holds an inordinate amount of energy through E=MC2. There is no alchemy that can produce dog poo from hydrogen, for example.
There is also no way to break Dogecoin or other canine related coins.
Therefore dog poo and japanese dog shitcoins fall under the same category as your argument, whatever it is you are arguing.
But we do have many processes by which gold is destroyed in a way that is unrecoverable or significantly more expensive to recover to make it not viable. We also have government to devaluing gold by not adopting the gold standard and adopting the "full faith and credit" standard instead. So I think this analogy can still apply.
No modern country has any real backing to its currency besides bullets.
Geopolymers are something we need universities to focus on for formulation, testing etc... because the current basis of our infrastructure being based Portland cements isn't sustainable. Not just from a supply perspective but Portland cements are a major contribution to our climate effecting gasses released in to the atmosphere, but not many talk about that.
Geopolymer formulations that can provide the strength and durability of current cements as a must in my mind, but a place like this Geopolymer Institute isn't going to be a driver of that change. It reads more like ancient astronaut theory than science. This really needs driven by top engineering schools. Because cement formulations are known, their properties are known and approved across the world in building codes etc... For a change to be made all those specifications needs to be adjusted and we need sufficient testing to ensure the same or better characteristics of the materials.
This is the most plausible theory on how the pyramids were built and mainstream archeology doesn't want to admit it even with all the evidence... because it will pre-date the roman concrete and change history books.
I would not agree that it's the most plausible theory. It is a hypothesis but what this website is doing is selectively picking there observations to align with their already known conclusion. Because when you start digging into all of this stuff, even from these people, you start to get into very fringe theories beyond just a geopolymer limestone. They talk about melting granite and giant lenses and traveling the world and repeating this over and over. Some truly outlandish stuff.
The more outlandish your claims are the bigger the proof needs to be. The only evidence they provide is that geopolymers are a possibility but that has been a well-known thing for many decades. They are lacking a lot of evidence to show this is really how the pyramids and other ancient structures were made.
Of course they are. The busier airport to get the more unknown factors there are that they cannot account for. Better to have a padded flight time then be perpetually late and worrying about connections.
I understand the desire for drones and other technology that's going to reduce your sides risk and casualties but there is another side to that. Waging war without risk isn't good either. War should not be "safe", it should come at a cost beyond $$$ a cost that is not exclusively paid by children sent afar, but also by the leaders sending them. If you can wage war like a video game with an infinite money glitch, then what is restraining you?
What restrained the US from spending ~$3T and causing ~1M deaths (combat forces, contractors, and civilians) in the Middle East? Would this capability materially change the appetite for conflict, based on historical actions? I don't believe "skin in the game" is a valid component in decisioning this technology implementation. We should want it to be, but it won’t be.
One approach I didn't see discussed here is storing the UUID across 2 columns as 2 64 bit integers and forming a composite primary key. There's still tradeoffs with this as with all the methods but depending on use case it's viable way to do it.
Of course visiting the site second time it's now prompting me for money. That's a very e-commerce thing that makes people click away. Why would I subscribe to a site like hacker News, Even if I was mostly interested in e-commerce-based things? So I suspect you are doing the very anti-hacker news thing and very e-commerce centered thing of loading me up with tracking cookies. Good job!
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