I am with Causality. Nobody in the Federal government should either favor or oppose either marijuana or homosexuality... because neither one of them is any of the of Federal government's business. At all.
"Greens are interesting too... essentially libertarians with a greater willingness to ensure a social safety net and protect the commons (environment) from being abused by a few who profit at everyone else's expense."
No, they're not. Greens are scarcely different from Democrats, except for a strong emphasis on environment. That is all.
By and large, they are not even remotely Libertarian. Most Greens I have met wouldn't know a Libertarian principle from an Erlenmeyer flask.
"hat's why instead of voting for PARTIES, you need to understand where the candidates you can choose between lie on the statist/non-statists continuum..."
... and realize that the statist - non-statist (others call it authoritarian-independent) continuum is not directly related to the Left-Right continuum.
"That, and there's a democrat in the white house they can try to blame the whole thing on."
What do you mean "TRY"?
Obama supports more government surveillance. He's said so. Hell, he said it again just the other day. And his purported "fixes" don't stop anything or slow it down, they just try to shift the blame.
Several government oversight bodies have ALL said this is unconstitutional and needs to be stopped. Who says nay? Obama and his cronies in the current administration. Nobody else. (Of course the NSA does, too, but they're just employees. They don't count.)
The hemorrhage may have begun under Bush, but Obama was the one who deliberately grew it to completely, hilariously, outrageous dimensions. Nobody else. He has no excuse that it was an accident either, because he has defended it publicly.
These are statements of fact. And here's one more:
When the Republicans have to rescue our "civil liberties" from Democrats, it's pretty damned clear that you have a bad administration.
"The real fun starts when the first automatic system insists the change it created wasn't an error..."
The Byzantine General problem. It has been shown that this problem is solvable with 3 "Generals" (programs or CPUs) as long as their communications are signed.
"No. Those automated systems enable a small number of human beings to administer a large number of servers in a consistent, sanity-checked, and monitored manner. If Google didn't have those automated systems, every configuration change would probably involve a minor army of technicians performing manual processes: slowly, independently, inconsistently and frequently incorrectly."
The thing about old technologies is that many of them are less interesting for what they did than they are for how they worked.
Typewriters, for example, are interesting chiefly for their mechanics and "human interface" characteristics.
Carriages are very interesting for their wheel and bearing technology, suspension, (often) lightweight construction, and so on. They may also be interesting for their relationship with horses. They are less interesting for their actual transportation use. (Brakes were invariably simple friction brakes... not interesting at all, really. Kids use the same technology in their backyard-built go-carts.)
"Parental-rights can be handed-over to another who agrees to take accept them as their own."
That's as I see it. Without rights (authority), there should be no responsibility. If the biological father is forced to have equal responsibility, then he should also have equal authority when it comes to the care and upbringing of the child.
"Parental responsibilities are owed to a child and cannot be waived by a parent."
Tell that to all those wives who want a divorce + custody. They want to "waive" the rights of one parent.
No responsibility without authority! If you want to cut them out of the children's lives, and give them no authority over how those children are raised, then every principle of ethics says they should have no further responsibility for that child, either.
"People have complained about no-fee transactions failing to get taken up by miners for a long time now."
I stand corrected. Let me state it in a more accurate way: Bitcoin was designed such that transactions were intended to be at virtually zero cost.
The cost of mining was intended to go up as the market value of Bitcoin increased. Miners charging fees for transactions is an attempt to sidestep the intended behavior of Bitcoin, and get other people to subsidize their mining. It's pretty unethical, really.
"But there's something more fundamental to consider. Every block added to the chain has an enormous energy cost, because the mining arms race has metastasized to the point where the network is burning literal gigawatts to secure an average transaction rate of about 1 per second."
That's not "something more fundamental to consider". That's the way it was intended to work. Mining was not supposed to be free... the cost was supposed to go up.
The only thing that wasn't foreseen was the Bitcoin "gold rush". This stage of the game wasn't originally expected to occur anywhere near this soon.
"On fees: fees are generally charged, but they are tiny. However, all those involved in Bitcoin (including miners and software developers I spoke with) know that fees will rise and mechanisms are being created to make that simpler."
That would be bad for Bitcoin, putting it in competition with cards. One of the touted advantages of Bitcoin is that distribution is virtually free. Start charging significant fees and one of the biggest attractions of Bitcoin is completely down the toilet.
"If you read Andreessen's piece and my essay, you'll see that he properly discusses essentially counterfeit payment from one party to another, but doesn't address fraudulent payment and the infrastructure to ensure that the party paying owns the funds used to pay."
I did read it. You miss the point. Bitcoin was intentionally designed not to verify ownership. It is a bearer instrument.
You list a whole bunch of reasons why that is bad, but you forget two things: First is, it was designed that way intentionally, for very good reasons. And second, it was designed that way to be more like CASH, which has all the same "disadvantages".
Bitcoin is supposed to be anonymous. It was designed to be anonymous. If you haven't figured that out yet, you don't understand it at all.
Well, I've had to deal with with a lot of code done by other people, and when it's sloppily formatted it just makes the job that much harder. So I am very strict about the formatting of my own code. Having to take a big file full of code and spend an hour or more just to format it properly so you can read it is the pits... and really should get somebody fired.
About a year and a half ago I was given the task of translating a complex PHP website to another language. The site had been designed and coded by a big company whose name you would recognize. It was a horrendous mess. Terrible formatting (or rather, almost complete lack thereof), and multiple nested include files (even circular references... yuck). I mean a REAL mess.
It took me about 3 days just to get the relevant code formatted sufficiently that I could even tell what was going on.
Anyway... yes. Code must be formatted. But I have spent lots of time with "significant whitespace" schemes like yaml and haml. It's not a matter of "getting used to them", because I have. I just do not care to use them. A simple config file in yaml is fine but if it gets much more complex than that, "significant whitespace" drives me crazy. It's great for the people who like it, but I am just not one of those people.
I wasn't trying to slam Node.js. It's okay technology and there are a lot of people using it. I just haven't seen much excitement surrounding it in the last couple of years, and I know of at least a couple of outfits that dumped it for other technologies.
That isn't a criticism either; people do that kind of thing all the time, with just about any technology. But I just haven't been seeing much "hot" around back-end js these days.
A) "Fees" are generally not charged... most transactions have essentially zero cost.
B) The criticism that development of the Internet was "open" but Bitcoin was not is also moot: Bitcoin is open-source, and anybody can examine the code for secrets or flaws.
There are other subtleties as well which I will not get into.
Both of MY objections to Python I admit are personal preferences only: I don't much care for the syntax, and I don't much care for "significant whitespace".
Although they're just personal preferences, they're strong personal preferences.
Government regulation is unlikely to make anything better. Hell, they couldn't even manage their OWN space program, which is why a private one was needed in the first place.
"These days, Javascript is the hot backend technology, which is convenient when it's also the leading (and only future-proof) front end technology of its type (programming language)."
JavaScript was the "hot" back-end technology about 4-5 years ago. In that time, most devs have concluded that it's not so hot after all.
Yes, the reliability of SSD is still an issue, IMO. The newer drives manage even fewer erase cycles than the previous generation. My long-standing opinion is that they won't quite make the grade until they can do 1M erase cycles.
I know good wear-leveling has made a very big difference, but I'm a power and I depend on my hardware.
(Qualifier: Yes, we know that Morton Thiokol designed the system and made the O-rings, but NASA administrators were familiar with the situation and approved the launch anyway.)
"They don't want to endanger the space-farers or the public, and they can't let the industry get started and then have a Titanic-like scenario that puts an end to it all in the eyes of the public."
??? WTF ??? What business of theirs is it AT ALL, except to make sure that rockets don't crash into airplanes? It's private business, the government isn't doing shit to "ensure" the safety of passengers or anybody else... THEY aren't to blame if a "Titanic" event were to happen... and even if it did, people would probably take it in stride just like they did the goddamned Challenger Disaster, which WAS government's fault.
Who the hell do they think they are? And what world are they living in?
"Are you sure that the charges are unauthorized? What's in Network Solutions customer agreements? There might be some very small print that allows NetSol to add security services and charge for them."
If they do, it's probably not a legal contract. Or questionable anyway. The whole concept of "contract" presumes that you know what you're agreeing to in advance. "Open ended" contracts often get tossed out by courts.
You do have a point. But when entering into long-term contracts, I do tend to read them. And if it says something like "we reserve the right to add services and charge your card for them" I'll go somewhere else.
And if it's NOT some kind of agreement-in-advance, no matter how questionable, it's just plain illegal. Imagine: you could just send someone an email saying "I'm going to sign you up for my landscaping service starting next month, at a rate of $1,850 per year. Call me if you DON'T want me to charge your credit card for this service." People would be outraged and you'd probably end up in jail.
Slashdot Mirror
0.8mW/cm^2 / 6mA/cm^2 = 0.1333... volts
I am with Causality. Nobody in the Federal government should either favor or oppose either marijuana or homosexuality... because neither one of them is any of the of Federal government's business. At all.
"Greens are interesting too ... essentially libertarians with a greater willingness to ensure a social safety net and protect the commons (environment) from being abused by a few who profit at everyone else's expense."
No, they're not. Greens are scarcely different from Democrats, except for a strong emphasis on environment. That is all.
By and large, they are not even remotely Libertarian. Most Greens I have met wouldn't know a Libertarian principle from an Erlenmeyer flask.
"hat's why instead of voting for PARTIES, you need to understand where the candidates you can choose between lie on the statist/non-statists continuum ..."
... and realize that the statist - non-statist (others call it authoritarian-independent) continuum is not directly related to the Left-Right continuum.
That's why THIS was invented.
"That, and there's a democrat in the white house they can try to blame the whole thing on."
What do you mean "TRY"?
Obama supports more government surveillance. He's said so. Hell, he said it again just the other day. And his purported "fixes" don't stop anything or slow it down, they just try to shift the blame.
Several government oversight bodies have ALL said this is unconstitutional and needs to be stopped. Who says nay? Obama and his cronies in the current administration. Nobody else. (Of course the NSA does, too, but they're just employees. They don't count.)
The hemorrhage may have begun under Bush, but Obama was the one who deliberately grew it to completely, hilariously, outrageous dimensions. Nobody else. He has no excuse that it was an accident either, because he has defended it publicly.
These are statements of fact. And here's one more:
When the Republicans have to rescue our "civil liberties" from Democrats, it's pretty damned clear that you have a bad administration.
"The real fun starts when the first automatic system insists the change it created wasn't an error..."
The Byzantine General problem. It has been shown that this problem is solvable with 3 "Generals" (programs or CPUs) as long as their communications are signed.
"No. Those automated systems enable a small number of human beings to administer a large number of servers in a consistent, sanity-checked, and monitored manner. If Google didn't have those automated systems, every configuration change would probably involve a minor army of technicians performing manual processes: slowly, independently, inconsistently and frequently incorrectly."
Quote self:
"In this particular case..."
I wasn't talking about the general case.
"... a bug that caused a system that creates configurations to send a bad one..."
So... an automatic system created an error, then an automated system fixed it.
In this particular case, then, it would have been better if those automated systems hadn't been running at all, yes?
The thing about old technologies is that many of them are less interesting for what they did than they are for how they worked.
Typewriters, for example, are interesting chiefly for their mechanics and "human interface" characteristics.
Carriages are very interesting for their wheel and bearing technology, suspension, (often) lightweight construction, and so on. They may also be interesting for their relationship with horses. They are less interesting for their actual transportation use. (Brakes were invariably simple friction brakes... not interesting at all, really. Kids use the same technology in their backyard-built go-carts.)
"Parental-rights can be handed-over to another who agrees to take accept them as their own."
That's as I see it. Without rights (authority), there should be no responsibility. If the biological father is forced to have equal responsibility, then he should also have equal authority when it comes to the care and upbringing of the child.
Anything else is unjust and unethical.
"Parental responsibilities are owed to a child and cannot be waived by a parent."
Tell that to all those wives who want a divorce + custody. They want to "waive" the rights of one parent.
No responsibility without authority! If you want to cut them out of the children's lives, and give them no authority over how those children are raised, then every principle of ethics says they should have no further responsibility for that child, either.
"People have complained about no-fee transactions failing to get taken up by miners for a long time now."
I stand corrected. Let me state it in a more accurate way: Bitcoin was designed such that transactions were intended to be at virtually zero cost.
The cost of mining was intended to go up as the market value of Bitcoin increased. Miners charging fees for transactions is an attempt to sidestep the intended behavior of Bitcoin, and get other people to subsidize their mining. It's pretty unethical, really.
"But there's something more fundamental to consider. Every block added to the chain has an enormous energy cost, because the mining arms race has metastasized to the point where the network is burning literal gigawatts to secure an average transaction rate of about 1 per second."
That's not "something more fundamental to consider". That's the way it was intended to work. Mining was not supposed to be free... the cost was supposed to go up.
The only thing that wasn't foreseen was the Bitcoin "gold rush". This stage of the game wasn't originally expected to occur anywhere near this soon.
"On fees: fees are generally charged, but they are tiny. However, all those involved in Bitcoin (including miners and software developers I spoke with) know that fees will rise and mechanisms are being created to make that simpler."
That would be bad for Bitcoin, putting it in competition with cards. One of the touted advantages of Bitcoin is that distribution is virtually free. Start charging significant fees and one of the biggest attractions of Bitcoin is completely down the toilet.
"If you read Andreessen's piece and my essay, you'll see that he properly discusses essentially counterfeit payment from one party to another, but doesn't address fraudulent payment and the infrastructure to ensure that the party paying owns the funds used to pay."
I did read it. You miss the point. Bitcoin was intentionally designed not to verify ownership. It is a bearer instrument.
You list a whole bunch of reasons why that is bad, but you forget two things: First is, it was designed that way intentionally, for very good reasons. And second, it was designed that way to be more like CASH, which has all the same "disadvantages".
Bitcoin is supposed to be anonymous. It was designed to be anonymous. If you haven't figured that out yet, you don't understand it at all.
Well, I've had to deal with with a lot of code done by other people, and when it's sloppily formatted it just makes the job that much harder. So I am very strict about the formatting of my own code. Having to take a big file full of code and spend an hour or more just to format it properly so you can read it is the pits... and really should get somebody fired.
About a year and a half ago I was given the task of translating a complex PHP website to another language. The site had been designed and coded by a big company whose name you would recognize. It was a horrendous mess. Terrible formatting (or rather, almost complete lack thereof), and multiple nested include files (even circular references... yuck). I mean a REAL mess.
It took me about 3 days just to get the relevant code formatted sufficiently that I could even tell what was going on.
Anyway... yes. Code must be formatted. But I have spent lots of time with "significant whitespace" schemes like yaml and haml. It's not a matter of "getting used to them", because I have. I just do not care to use them. A simple config file in yaml is fine but if it gets much more complex than that, "significant whitespace" drives me crazy. It's great for the people who like it, but I am just not one of those people.
I wasn't trying to slam Node.js. It's okay technology and there are a lot of people using it. I just haven't seen much excitement surrounding it in the last couple of years, and I know of at least a couple of outfits that dumped it for other technologies.
That isn't a criticism either; people do that kind of thing all the time, with just about any technology. But I just haven't been seeing much "hot" around back-end js these days.
The "criticisms" leveled by OP are largely moot:
A) "Fees" are generally not charged... most transactions have essentially zero cost.
B) The criticism that development of the Internet was "open" but Bitcoin was not is also moot: Bitcoin is open-source, and anybody can examine the code for secrets or flaws.
There are other subtleties as well which I will not get into.
Well, not entirely.
Look up "contract of adhesion".
Both of MY objections to Python I admit are personal preferences only: I don't much care for the syntax, and I don't much care for "significant whitespace".
Although they're just personal preferences, they're strong personal preferences.
"There's two basic things in play here:"
No, there's a third basic thing in play here:
Government regulation is unlikely to make anything better. Hell, they couldn't even manage their OWN space program, which is why a private one was needed in the first place.
"Bullshit. Powers can't survive in the Beyond, let alone down here in the Slowness."
Haha. I liked that book.
It was a slip of the fingers.
"These days, Javascript is the hot backend technology, which is convenient when it's also the leading (and only future-proof) front end technology of its type (programming language)."
JavaScript was the "hot" back-end technology about 4-5 years ago. In that time, most devs have concluded that it's not so hot after all.
Yes, the reliability of SSD is still an issue, IMO. The newer drives manage even fewer erase cycles than the previous generation. My long-standing opinion is that they won't quite make the grade until they can do 1M erase cycles.
I know good wear-leveling has made a very big difference, but I'm a power and I depend on my hardware.
(Qualifier: Yes, we know that Morton Thiokol designed the system and made the O-rings, but NASA administrators were familiar with the situation and approved the launch anyway.)
"They don't want to endanger the space-farers or the public, and they can't let the industry get started and then have a Titanic-like scenario that puts an end to it all in the eyes of the public."
??? WTF ??? What business of theirs is it AT ALL, except to make sure that rockets don't crash into airplanes? It's private business, the government isn't doing shit to "ensure" the safety of passengers or anybody else... THEY aren't to blame if a "Titanic" event were to happen... and even if it did, people would probably take it in stride just like they did the goddamned Challenger Disaster, which WAS government's fault.
Who the hell do they think they are? And what world are they living in?
"Are you sure that the charges are unauthorized? What's in Network Solutions customer agreements? There might be some very small print that allows NetSol to add security services and charge for them."
If they do, it's probably not a legal contract. Or questionable anyway. The whole concept of "contract" presumes that you know what you're agreeing to in advance. "Open ended" contracts often get tossed out by courts.
You do have a point. But when entering into long-term contracts, I do tend to read them. And if it says something like "we reserve the right to add services and charge your card for them" I'll go somewhere else.
And if it's NOT some kind of agreement-in-advance, no matter how questionable, it's just plain illegal. Imagine: you could just send someone an email saying "I'm going to sign you up for my landscaping service starting next month, at a rate of $1,850 per year. Call me if you DON'T want me to charge your credit card for this service." People would be outraged and you'd probably end up in jail.