Re:That's how money works - a shared hallucination
on
The Bitcoin Strikes Back
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I should have clarified that I think Bitcoin intrinsically lacks qualifications for a currency capable of buying a car.
For instance, a break through in prime factorization (or however bitcoins are created) that is kept secret could mean that someone generates a ton of money out of thin air, which are impossible to identify apart from normal bitcoins (as they would be legitimate bitcoins). Think the counterfeiting problem, except a breakthrough here means an exponentially bigger problem.
Further, the problem of the wildly fluctuating prices: why would I want to store money in a currency whose value can wildly fluctuate from $17 ea, to $2, to 4, all in the span of a year? Why would a bank want to give out loans in a currency when they could end up receiving far less than they loaned out? Why would I want to loan from them when my debt could skyrocket in price?
Further, I can think of very few usecases for the anonymous features of Bitcoin. Every scenario I can think of involves activity that is internationally illegal (ie, money laundering). How would you like seeing Big Corp, Inc have $1B in bitcoins from venture funding, then "losing" $500 mil to "unforseen contingencies", and knowing there is no possibility of tracing what happened? Hmmm, doesnt sound so good now does it?
And my understanding is that we moved away from a gold standard precisely so that we could regulate the economy to some degree by controlling the flow of money. We gave up the stability of having some real-world backing (gold) so that we could have more flexibility. Bitcoin has the worst of both worlds: its "backing" is a mathematical function, the supply is uncontrollable, and its value is unstable. Wooo, where can I sign up?
Gold doesnt have any intrinsic value in the sense that you are using the word. It has intrinsic value in its usefulness (alloying, electronics, etc), but those are wholly out of line with its monetary value.
If we wanted to get all semantic and argue it, I could point out that a US dollar also has intrinsic worth, since I can write notes on it, and in the event of a global extinction event, the ability to transmit messages on paper would be of far more value than the ability to make gold-plated electrical connectors.
The Remnibi, however, is exactly how you described, except that the military backing it up is a hell of a lot larger than the US's, and they've got the US' economy by the balls.
1) Its Renminbi. It damages your credibility when you make claims about the power of a country's currency but cannot spell it properly. 2) Im not buying it. Their own papers tout how their economy is rising by X% and the US is falling by Y%, but as has been said, there are lies and then there are numbers. The US economy is still way better off when you look at GDP than China ($15 trillion vs $6 trillion, and it gets much worse when you look at per-capita GDP), and having just been over there, I was impressed with many things, but think claims of their economy "having ours by the balls" are overstated and ignorant. They have huge apartment buildings throughout shanghai that are empty because noone can afford it.
And at least USD is actually useable to buy a car and house.
Guess which one I prefer: The anonymous, p2p, super cool hi tech bitcoin, or the currency that I can use to purchase goods and can be paid by an employer with?
Ah, conceit. Tell me, if CEO Joe Blow has access to your confidential docs, and he brings in an infected computer, or sets his laptop up as a WiFi AP, how are you going to prevent a virus or malicious user from having unwanted access? In the virus case, the virus has his credentials and MAC address, and in the laptop-AP scenario, the attacker has his MAC address.
And Im aware that it is possible to mitigate the second scenario if you have a substantial budget and IT resources, but good luck mitigating the first.
In this thread, we use sweeping generalities and paint all believers in a political ideology with the same brush.
Obviously, all democrats love Obamacare, Obama's blame games, SOPA, and are all "pro-choice", right? I mean, while we're using generalizations, that seems fair to me.
Im curious whether this is true of blackberry. Im still rather skeptical that RIM would take their supposedly security-minded product and then compromise it by including something like this in the stock firmware.
Just the 1000 most common ports. Hence why it says "not shown: 998 filtered", as well as the two showing up. There is an option which will tell it to do a full scan of all 65536 ports.
Thats probably why they chose that port, incidentally-- gets missed on a casual scan.
Heres a tip: Thats about as far as most people will read. Calling someone a "tea-bagger" immediately tells me that you cannot hold a conversation without degenerating to crudities.
Quake3 probably doesnt need a top of the line graphics card. Go with an nVidia, for years that has been the best move if you think you may use Linux at some point.
$30 should get you a card that maxes out anything quake3.
Arent you way better off with a workstation card for most workstation loads? From what Ive read, a GTX or ATI HD makes for a poor CAD or Adobe machine.
Oh good grief, im not even sure what specifically you are complaining about-- several points (2, 3, 8, 12, 17, 18) have nothing whatsoever to do with the government, and are not related.
11: Public drunkenness has been illegal in various places for a long long time, and its decided on a state level. Either change your state or stop being drunk in public; you certainly couldnt do this 20 years ago in the vast majority of places.
12-- are you kidding me? Youre complaining that you cant piss, in public, on someone elses building?
14: This isnt new, Amtrak has always run over freight rails. To quote wikipedia, Amtrak employs nearly 19,000 people. It operates passenger service on 21,000 miles (34,000 km) of track primarily owned by freight railroads So youre complaining that those terrible freight companies are using THEIR rails to run freight trains? Boo hoo, build your own rail system. Maybe I should complain that you dont let me come over and eat the food out of your fridge.
15: What? I have several friends who smoke.
17: youre complaining about the internet, basically. Thats swell, we should dismantle it now. TOTALLY the government's fault that slashdot doesnt allow post deletion (Protip, there are forums that do).
18: Try finding a company that doesnt suck. We have democrats and republicans at our office, and I regularly argue with my VP about politics, as do a few other employees. We manage not to get fired, somehow. I could go vote for Ron Paul, and another employee for Obama, and a third for Michelle Bachman, and it wouldnt make a lick of difference. Incidentally, Id be really suprised if companies acting how you described was a recent phenomenon.
20: Baloney. You can keep silent, and the cops are required to tell you as much-- there was this case involving some dude named "miranda" which established this.
TLDR, youre full of crap. You have like 1 or two insightful points, most are ridiculous, wrong, not a government issue, or irresponsible (still cant get over that you think pissing on a building should be a protected right).
and i suppose that because someone's on/in/using my property I can rape them,
No, because there are clear laws against that. Not a Bill of Rights issue, though, so its silly to drag it in as parent did.
, rummage through their property, their person, and confiscate things I don't like?
If it was part of the terms of using your service, property, or store, and they agreed, absolutely. They are free of course to go elsewhere. Again, not a Bill of Rights issue.
Unfortunately, none of those are related to the first amendment at all. The BoR relates to what congress and the state legislature does, not what private entities do; there are separate laws for those.
For instance, your example of having a critical video taken off of youtube is not protected by any amendment: Youtube can do whatever it pleases with your video. Another example: If I run a private train business, and I want my passengers to undergo a strip search before boarding, that is not a first or fourth amendment issue; its an issue of whether the area Im in has laws forbidding or allowing it. If Congress were to mandate it, it would then become a first amendment issue.
THis post isnt meant to support any of the things in your post, but to simply correct a gross falsity. The only thing possibly on target is your first example, since the TSA is a quasi-government body, but if it were privately run (as it used to be) then even that point would be incorrect.
RIght to free speech and right to protest never encapsulate hacking a server, no matter what parties are on each end of the hacking. It also never allows breaking a law (of course, that raises the question of whether said law violates the first amendment).
To be clear, it would not be protected speech if you walked up and punched me in the mouth for some alleged wrongdoing, and then tried to claim it was an expression of protest and free speech.
If your own selfish interests are more important than those of your country and your countrymen, there's not much point in arguing with you.
Darn tootin, its a core american value. Thats why the founders instituted a 50% capital gains tax, a 40% income tax, and a 8% VAT on all transactions. They were strong believers that if you didnt pay a high tax rate, you were Just Plain Unpatriotic.
In fact, unless my memory is going, I think that the level of taxation may have had something to do with our country's founding.
Not being an expert in such things, I wonder if anyone could give a good, clear explanation of what they mean by "observed". My understanding is that they are seeing indirect evidence of it somehow? The article (and many that ive seen like this one) seem to stress that theyre not sure, which is why I ask. Is it something along the lines of seeing a burst of EM radiation in a particular signature that they have not seen before, from which they inference a new particle was involved in the collision?
Can someone also explain how they would inference which quarks make up a particle like this? I mean, we obviously cant just place it under a microscope:)
Absolutely it does, becuase we're not mindless automatons with no control over our bodies. What the schools teach, what the parents teach, and what society says about sex and when its appropriate absolutely influence how kids behave-- otherwise we wouldnt bother handing out condoms (because obviously they wouldnt be able to control themselves enough to use them).
Slashdot Mirror
I should have clarified that I think Bitcoin intrinsically lacks qualifications for a currency capable of buying a car.
For instance, a break through in prime factorization (or however bitcoins are created) that is kept secret could mean that someone generates a ton of money out of thin air, which are impossible to identify apart from normal bitcoins (as they would be legitimate bitcoins). Think the counterfeiting problem, except a breakthrough here means an exponentially bigger problem.
Further, the problem of the wildly fluctuating prices: why would I want to store money in a currency whose value can wildly fluctuate from $17 ea, to $2, to 4, all in the span of a year? Why would a bank want to give out loans in a currency when they could end up receiving far less than they loaned out? Why would I want to loan from them when my debt could skyrocket in price?
Further, I can think of very few usecases for the anonymous features of Bitcoin. Every scenario I can think of involves activity that is internationally illegal (ie, money laundering). How would you like seeing Big Corp, Inc have $1B in bitcoins from venture funding, then "losing" $500 mil to "unforseen contingencies", and knowing there is no possibility of tracing what happened? Hmmm, doesnt sound so good now does it?
And my understanding is that we moved away from a gold standard precisely so that we could regulate the economy to some degree by controlling the flow of money. We gave up the stability of having some real-world backing (gold) so that we could have more flexibility. Bitcoin has the worst of both worlds: its "backing" is a mathematical function, the supply is uncontrollable, and its value is unstable. Wooo, where can I sign up?
Gold doesnt have any intrinsic value in the sense that you are using the word. It has intrinsic value in its usefulness (alloying, electronics, etc), but those are wholly out of line with its monetary value.
If we wanted to get all semantic and argue it, I could point out that a US dollar also has intrinsic worth, since I can write notes on it, and in the event of a global extinction event, the ability to transmit messages on paper would be of far more value than the ability to make gold-plated electrical connectors.
The Remnibi, however, is exactly how you described, except that the military backing it up is a hell of a lot larger than the US's, and they've got the US' economy by the balls.
1) Its Renminbi. It damages your credibility when you make claims about the power of a country's currency but cannot spell it properly.
2) Im not buying it. Their own papers tout how their economy is rising by X% and the US is falling by Y%, but as has been said, there are lies and then there are numbers. The US economy is still way better off when you look at GDP than China ($15 trillion vs $6 trillion, and it gets much worse when you look at per-capita GDP), and having just been over there, I was impressed with many things, but think claims of their economy "having ours by the balls" are overstated and ignorant. They have huge apartment buildings throughout shanghai that are empty because noone can afford it.
Because it historically has had value.
Anyone who starts talking about intrinsic value is either ignorant, or is waxing philosophical.
And at least USD is actually useable to buy a car and house.
Guess which one I prefer: The anonymous, p2p, super cool hi tech bitcoin, or the currency that I can use to purchase goods and can be paid by an employer with?
I wasnt aware they were addressing problems. I was under the impression they were complaining about some, and creating new ones.
Ah, conceit. Tell me, if CEO Joe Blow has access to your confidential docs, and he brings in an infected computer, or sets his laptop up as a WiFi AP, how are you going to prevent a virus or malicious user from having unwanted access? In the virus case, the virus has his credentials and MAC address, and in the laptop-AP scenario, the attacker has his MAC address.
And Im aware that it is possible to mitigate the second scenario if you have a substantial budget and IT resources, but good luck mitigating the first.
In this thread, we use sweeping generalities and paint all believers in a political ideology with the same brush.
Obviously, all democrats love Obamacare, Obama's blame games, SOPA, and are all "pro-choice", right? I mean, while we're using generalizations, that seems fair to me.
Just curious, why is GoDaddy switching from Linux to MS a reason not to use them? Or is there no reason, was this just a mindless anti MS sentiment?
Im curious whether this is true of blackberry. Im still rather skeptical that RIM would take their supposedly security-minded product and then compromise it by including something like this in the stock firmware.
Just the 1000 most common ports. Hence why it says "not shown: 998 filtered", as well as the two showing up. There is an option which will tell it to do a full scan of all 65536 ports.
Thats probably why they chose that port, incidentally-- gets missed on a casual scan.
Actually the t-baggers,
Heres a tip: Thats about as far as most people will read. Calling someone a "tea-bagger" immediately tells me that you cannot hold a conversation without degenerating to crudities.
Can we quantify "care" with units? Im still having trouble grasping this.
Quake3 probably doesnt need a top of the line graphics card. Go with an nVidia, for years that has been the best move if you think you may use Linux at some point.
$30 should get you a card that maxes out anything quake3.
Intel Sandy bridge graphics are enough for most things, and Ivy Bridge, is supposed to increase its performance by another 20%.
Consoles support 5040x1050? Color me suprised.
Arent you way better off with a workstation card for most workstation loads? From what Ive read, a GTX or ATI HD makes for a poor CAD or Adobe machine.
Oh good grief, im not even sure what specifically you are complaining about-- several points (2, 3, 8, 12, 17, 18) have nothing whatsoever to do with the government, and are not related.
11: Public drunkenness has been illegal in various places for a long long time, and its decided on a state level. Either change your state or stop being drunk in public; you certainly couldnt do this 20 years ago in the vast majority of places.
12-- are you kidding me? Youre complaining that you cant piss, in public, on someone elses building?
14: This isnt new, Amtrak has always run over freight rails. To quote wikipedia,
Amtrak employs nearly 19,000 people. It operates passenger service on 21,000 miles (34,000 km) of track primarily owned by freight railroads
So youre complaining that those terrible freight companies are using THEIR rails to run freight trains? Boo hoo, build your own rail system. Maybe I should complain that you dont let me come over and eat the food out of your fridge.
15: What? I have several friends who smoke.
17: youre complaining about the internet, basically. Thats swell, we should dismantle it now. TOTALLY the government's fault that slashdot doesnt allow post deletion (Protip, there are forums that do).
18: Try finding a company that doesnt suck. We have democrats and republicans at our office, and I regularly argue with my VP about politics, as do a few other employees. We manage not to get fired, somehow. I could go vote for Ron Paul, and another employee for Obama, and a third for Michelle Bachman, and it wouldnt make a lick of difference. Incidentally, Id be really suprised if companies acting how you described was a recent phenomenon.
20: Baloney. You can keep silent, and the cops are required to tell you as much-- there was this case involving some dude named "miranda" which established this.
TLDR, youre full of crap. You have like 1 or two insightful points, most are ridiculous, wrong, not a government issue, or irresponsible (still cant get over that you think pissing on a building should be a protected right).
and i suppose that because someone's on/in/using my property I can rape them,
No, because there are clear laws against that. Not a Bill of Rights issue, though, so its silly to drag it in as parent did.
, rummage through their property, their person, and confiscate things I don't like?
If it was part of the terms of using your service, property, or store, and they agreed, absolutely. They are free of course to go elsewhere. Again, not a Bill of Rights issue.
Unfortunately, none of those are related to the first amendment at all. The BoR relates to what congress and the state legislature does, not what private entities do; there are separate laws for those.
For instance, your example of having a critical video taken off of youtube is not protected by any amendment: Youtube can do whatever it pleases with your video. Another example: If I run a private train business, and I want my passengers to undergo a strip search before boarding, that is not a first or fourth amendment issue; its an issue of whether the area Im in has laws forbidding or allowing it. If Congress were to mandate it, it would then become a first amendment issue.
THis post isnt meant to support any of the things in your post, but to simply correct a gross falsity. The only thing possibly on target is your first example, since the TSA is a quasi-government body, but if it were privately run (as it used to be) then even that point would be incorrect.
RIght to free speech and right to protest never encapsulate hacking a server, no matter what parties are on each end of the hacking. It also never allows breaking a law (of course, that raises the question of whether said law violates the first amendment).
To be clear, it would not be protected speech if you walked up and punched me in the mouth for some alleged wrongdoing, and then tried to claim it was an expression of protest and free speech.
If your own selfish interests are more important than those of your country and your countrymen, there's not much point in arguing with you.
Darn tootin, its a core american value. Thats why the founders instituted a 50% capital gains tax, a 40% income tax, and a 8% VAT on all transactions. They were strong believers that if you didnt pay a high tax rate, you were Just Plain Unpatriotic.
In fact, unless my memory is going, I think that the level of taxation may have had something to do with our country's founding.
Not being an expert in such things, I wonder if anyone could give a good, clear explanation of what they mean by "observed". My understanding is that they are seeing indirect evidence of it somehow? The article (and many that ive seen like this one) seem to stress that theyre not sure, which is why I ask. Is it something along the lines of seeing a burst of EM radiation in a particular signature that they have not seen before, from which they inference a new particle was involved in the collision?
Can someone also explain how they would inference which quarks make up a particle like this? I mean, we obviously cant just place it under a microscope :)
Sounds like your problem is you dont like how some parents raise their kids, and think that the state should do it for them.
In case you werent aware, thats a really terrible idea.
Absolutely it does, becuase we're not mindless automatons with no control over our bodies. What the schools teach, what the parents teach, and what society says about sex and when its appropriate absolutely influence how kids behave-- otherwise we wouldnt bother handing out condoms (because obviously they wouldnt be able to control themselves enough to use them).