The green river shale is a different kind of thing. The monterray and Bakken shale formations contain actual oil, the Green River formation contains kerogen -- a waxy substance that will turn into oil if you heat it to several hundred degrees for a period of years (yes years).
The best analogy I have heard to put this into perspective is that the Bakken is something like a rock that has been left soaking in a bucket of oil for a while and the oil has seeped into the pores of the rock. The green river shale is more like a brick that has had candle wax dripped on it. Both contain energy which can be extracted, but one yields oil directly whereas the other is merely a feedstock to make oil.
The last I had heard, no one has ever made a commercially successfull attempt to convert kerogen into oil. It can be done, just not anything like economically, and the environmental costs of doing so would be massive. Now of course the "free market" folks will say, "well the price will just rise until the kerogen is extractable", and they are right, the price will rise to something like 1000 dollars per barrel, and then we will have lots of that "cheap" green river shale oil available on the market, something like 3 trillion barrels worth.
I get the point you were making, and to some degree you are correct. What you say is not entirely true though. Bond __investors__ make money as you suggest, but I think the article described this person as a bond __trader__, which is a very different thing. Traders often get a commision for the trade, whether the trade itself makes any money or not, even if they were the one who decided when to buy and sell, and what bonds to trade in. There are a lot of hedge funds that either lose money for their clients, or perform very poorly (many don't even beat the "index" funds which are basically "just buy one of everything"), yet these hedge funds themselves still do very well due to the fees they have hidden away in the fine print of the contracts you sign when you invest with them. This is actually a big part of why so many pension funds are in such bad shape. The underlying investments did alright, but the massive fees sucked out by the managers, traders, brokerage houses, and exchanges, eat up almost the entire profit on the trades leaving very little flowing back to the investor (in this case the pension fund). The funds list their "profits" in their prospectus which show how they make good trades and talk all about how much money you would make investing them, but when you actually dig through all the details, the fees are nearly as big as, or sometimes bigger than, the returns they quote up front. They sucker a lot of people this way, and even some (like pension fund managers) who should know better and either just don't catch the fees or don't care since it isn't their own money they are managing.
Yeah, this is pretty laughable. I don't remember the exact figure but his battery factory (not built yet but planned) is estimated to be something like 25 to 50 percent of the current world output for these batteries; and it is expected that the battery factory will sell almost entirely, if not exclusively to his electric car operation. So this "genius" of a bond investor thinks to himself "gee, if there is such a big market for batteries he should just sell the batteries". Only problem with this line of thinking, if he quits making cars then the battery market dries up. With people like this running our economy it is little surpirse that we fell into an economic collapse, and are probably setting up the next one as we speak. Explain to me again why people like this deserve to be paid millions a year.
You may not like it, but we live in a democracy, and the law is what the people say it is. We didn't know that this was in the law we passed, and now that we do, we are making our voice heard about it, the first step in the path to changing the law.
(Full disclosure, I am one of the lead coordinators of the mapping effort discussed in the article and in my post below.)
Yes, the OpenStreetMap project is where the mapping is being done. The map linked in the article shows outbreak information overlaid on top of the OSM database of roads and buildings. It is this underlying map data that the croudsourcing is about.
If you go to this site you can create an OSM account and then start edititng the map immediately (think wikipedia, but for maps). You normally would edit by just going to the main OSM page and then editing the map there, the site I linked is the HOT task manager. We create areas on the task manager that need mapping done, the area is then broken up into a grid of small square tiles, and then people 'lock' a tile to work on, map all the roads and/or buildings in that tile, and finally mark the tile complete after the map has been updated. This tool was used to map all the roads and buildings in 3 large cities (Gueckedou, Macenta, and Kissidougou), where the outbreak originally started; all three of these towns were mapped completely, down to the last building, within 24 hours of HOT getting satellite imagery for them.
Right now the focus is to find and map all the small residential areas outside of these main cities, and to draw in the main connecting roads to each village. This helps the medical teams track the spread of the disease from village to village, as well as making it easier for them to travel around to do their own work. I really encourage slashdotters to help out on these kinds of projects. The mapping tools are easy to use (the in browser iD editor especially), but the technical knowledge of the slashdot crowd makes it easy for the average./er to learn more advanced tools like JOSM and also to help with analysis and writing code to do cool stuff with the map data. You can really help out this (and a lot of other humanitarian efforts) by doing a bit of mapping anywhere in these areas, every little bit of extra data helps.
OpenStreetMap is not really suited to what he is doing since we are making a 'base map' which is just the underlying features, roads, buildings, etc. The personal notes the OP is looking for can however be added to uMap which is a tool one of the OSM people developed to make maps overlay on top of the map. I am not sure what the public terms of service are though or how long it will be available. It was developed for coordinating information about humanitarian disasters but it would work for that as well. Link is below.
This is true to some degree. Obviously if they are mis-spending the money on themselves through corruption, etc, then we should do what we can to put an end to that. Having higher tax rates doesn't necessarily mean we have to just keep giving the money to the same people getting it now. Remember this is our country and "we the people" decide how it is spent.
That said, however, the reason there is so much money around DC is not because they are all sucking up tax dollars, it is almost 100% lobbying money and fat paychecks from the 'revolving door' of people leaving the government to take phony jobs in the private sector. I say phony jobs because they are not really being paid for whatever the their job title supposedly implies, but rather being paid back for the crony capitalism they practiced while in government (and by they I don't mean just the legislators, but the staffers, the lobbyists and the whole lot). Money in politics is what all of this stems from and just saying "well they are corrupt so we should cut taxes" is not a solution to the problem, it is just them winning at one of the many strategies they are using to screw you, me, and everyone else.
They better be careful not to let the door hit them in the ass on the way out. They want to live in some backwater island nation with no standing army to defend their billions of dollars... then let them. Just like with the double taxation I mentioned above they never seem to choose that option. They bitch and moan about how high our taxes are and then keep right on living in this country. The very same country that they say I am a traitor, and un-amaerican, if I say anything bad about and yet they like to make everyone think that they would leave here at the drop of a hat if we ask them to pony up a few bucks to keep the place running. They already shelter most of their money overseas anyway, so what would we really be losing if they took their gulfstreams and actually lived where their money lives. I guess we would be down a few gulf streams, but I don't see what else we would be losing.
No it says you don't understand the tax code. I see you learned the phrase "double taxation" from econ 101 which is where I first heard about it but you seemed to have missed that they willingly pay that double taxation for the priveledge of limited liability. They have the option to avoid the double taxation, but they never seem to take it. Apparently that option is more than worth the double taxation since the free market chooses it over and over again.
The company makes a lot of money and pays the corporate tax rate on those profits, you have this correct. These taxes that they pay however are on their _profits_. Profits are money you earn _after_ you pay your employees, specifically the employee called the CEO who takes a salary of millions of dollars per year. This is the whole point of my argument, if the top income tax was 90% they would not pay the CEO millions, but instead would either reinvest that money back into the company (and not pay tax because business investment is tax deductable) or they would pay it out to the shareholders as dividends (who would then pay the 15% capital gains tax on it). This second option (paying dividends) is what they are supposed to be doing with that money instead of giving it to the CEO, the shareholders own the company, so why shouldn't they get that money. If the CEO really is such a brilliant leader of the company, he would be more than happy to take his pay as stock and let the increased dividends be his pay.
Once again another pro-corporate, pro 1% anaonymous coward trying to muddy the waters. Go back and tell your pay masters we aren't buying your bullshit anymore and they will have to feed you some new proapaganda to try out on the masses.
You have a point and I am not really arguing that capital gains should be lower, it is already at 15%, significantly lower than even our already low 39% top income tax bracket. My point was simply that if they are going to argue that capital gains should be lower to encourage investment (which they do) then increasing the top income tax bracket should also be a part of that argument, which it is not. The reality is their policy is not based on any sound argument, their policy is simply lower their taxes and that is it.
I agree with you that it is not really a political issue, nor should it be one. However the conservative wing of our country (and I mean to say conservative not republican since they are not one and the same) has gotten so far right that anything which might actually help anyone they just oppose out of gut instinct. I don't think they are anti-woman per se, it is just that they are anti "anything one of those evil liberals might be for". So if making upskirt pics illegal would be supported by a liberal, they will oppose it even if they would agree with it anyway. Remember this is supposedly the group of people concerned with family values and dressing modestly, but as soon as the liberals are on board they have to react.
In summary, liberals are against this not because they are liberals, but just because they are decent people who know what consent means. The conservatives then take a contrary stance based on a percieved political divide over the issue, thus making it a political issue. Fascinating stuff.
Not sure if you are serious or if you were making a toungue in cheek joke. What the GP was referring to was that 2012 was a presidential election year and so he is making a thinly veiled attack on the Obama administration, alledging that they changed the GDP number to make themselves look better. Never mind that yearly GDP numbers don't come out until well after the election which happens in November, and also ignore the fact that they couldn't be bothered to put their name on their bullshit accusation. Just another AC troll. Every day I start to wonder more and more about how many people on this site are paid just to muddy the waters to make sure we argue with eachother over "team red" vs "team blue" instead of looking at the 1% who are fucking us over and using bullshit like this to make sure we are too busy arguing with eachother to notice.
He said return the rates to the 1950's. I don't know what the middle class rate would have been back then but I don't think it was all that dissimilar from the rates today. The top tax rate, however, was massively higher, like between 80 and 90 percent for income over (I think) $150,000. I assume this is what the GP was posting about.
Of course the "job creators" (praise be upon them) will say that this will destroy jobs since we are taking money away from them that they could be investing instead. This is true to some degree, however there is another competing effect that they seldom mention. If your marginal tax rate is 90% on income you have very little incentive to take your pay as income. Instead you are far more likely to either leave that money in the business you own allowing the business to grow, or you are likely to take your "pay" as stock in the company, giving you a strong incentive to see the company viable in the long term.
Of course the rich never tell you about this second effect because it goes against the argument of letting them take home millions of dollars in direct pay. I don't really know which of these two effects are stronger, but looking at only one whilst ignoring the other is a pretty lopsided argument. If they are so concerned about encouraging investment from the wealthy they should be advocating for an increase in the top income tax bracket and a decrease of the capital gains tax. They spend plenty of time arguing for lower capital gains but somehow forget the higher income tax, funny how that works.
I had my ad block plus allowing ads for slashdot for quite a while, too. I did this because they actually gave me a checkbox to disable ads and I thought, "well that is very nice of them, I think I will support them and actually allow ads (and disable ABP so I see them)". I see that it is set to block again now though, I did this a while back. I can't remember the exact reason, but I think it was similar to your experience. Some really annoying ad that drove me to re-enable the block.
Keep it up dice, soon your bandwidth costs will be so much lower your profit will surely go through the roof. Oh and just for good measure since I haven't posted one of these yet... fuck beta.
Ok, that makes a bit more sense. I do understand your point about custom WIFI protocols but I don't think that those would actually be needed. If I recall correctly you can push wifi out to several km's fairly esily with the standard protocol and you don't start to have ack timeout issues until something like 100 km, and even then all you need to do is allow longer ack timeout values (this is technically a "custom" protocol then but not a major change).
You do have a point about people in the US being more able to afford such a thing but I don't think it is a huge issue. As much as I don't like the idea of facebook being the ones to do this, I don't see any obvious problems with the plan, other than the basic issues of how much the drones cost, what their lifetime and failure rate is, etc. On the face of it it could be a workable idea.
Sorry to be so irate in my initial response. The misunderstanding of your meaning led to a misunderstanding of your intentions and those intentions seemed pretty suspisious to me.
So you start by listing several technical reasons why this wouldn't work in a developing country and then go on to state that you would like to see this used in rural America (where you ignore the very same technical limitations you just listed). Does only Africa have storm clouds and trouble with bad wifi drivers? Do you really think the system won't work, or is that just a flimsy explanation to try to prevent 'them' from getting it so you can have it yourself?
I was going to post exactly this comment. A single video like that could be (indirectly) responsible for countless discoveries made down the line by the next generation of kids who get interested in science because space is awesome.
Assuming the coordinates are formatted the same in your google link, this should be the location shown on a polar projection (not sure what specific proj they use though). I recommend people check this out as it is interesting to see Antarctica rendered properly rather than the normal mercator projection which makes it look really weird.
Actually I think the current record is 21, however your point still stands. Quantum computers are now, and will be for quite a while, a toy. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking for solutions though, even if the capability to break keys of today with a quantum computer is still 30 years away there are messages that should be secure for at least that long, so we should begin looking forward now.
We have every reason to believe that cleartext is stored forever, too. I don't trust those fuckers at all anymore and just assume that anything sent in any medium will be stored for as long as they can afford the disk space to store it, legal or not.
It is in the video which is definitely worth taking the time to watch. He mentions several things to look for, pictures of lots of the hardware they slip into people's computers, and specifically mentions looking for UDP packets encrypted with RC6.
Not posting anonymously because I want those fuckers at the NSA to know what I think of them. -AndrewBuck
The volatility is a problem at the moment, although if you are just using it like paypal that is not a huge issue. The customer buys on the market at the current price, sends you the coins and you sell at basically the same price. In the future though I expect the volatility to go down signifigantly, right now there are literally billions of dollars being dumped into BTC all at once so you can't really expect the prices to be stable.
Remember that if it is going to become a legitameate currency in the long run you expect it to be around for decades, if not hundreds of years, so the first few years are a small portion of the overall life of the system.
I used to give people the benefit of the doubt as well but I stopped that quite a while ago. After dealing with years of creationists pulling crap like this and then seeing people start to do the same with climate change I decided it was just better to admit that they don't have any interest in changing their position on the issue so why even waste my time.
If others want to refute them that is fine with me, and maybe somewhat important so they don't "infect" people who see their unopposed statement and take it to be accurate, but I just don't have the desire to do that.
The thing is though there really aren't lots of competing cryptocurrencies. There is Bitcoin which is like 1000 times more influential than litecoin and litecoin is like 1000 times more influential than any of the others.
I think it is likely that bitcoin and litecoin will probably both survive as they fulfill different 'niches' in the currency world with litecoin being a bit faster to process, etc. Beyond this though it is pretty hard to see what the value in any of the other currencies like dogecoin actually is, other than a get rich quick scheme by someone trying to mooch a bit off the frenzy surrounding bitcoin. Bitcoin solves the problem of transferring money over the net very nicely so there is a good reason for it to exist, litecoin fills in a few edge cases where bitcoin has a bit of trouble (microtransactions and faster processing, etc). Between these two they cover any realistic use case I could think of for a digital currency so it is pretty hard to see how any of the others could get any traction, which is pretty much how it seems to be playing out.
For the record (full disclosure and all that), I have a reasonable amount of USD on mtgox but I don't keep any in btc right now because it is too volatile to store reliably and I have never handled any litecoin at all since I haven't seen the need personally but I do think it could potentially fill a useful niche for microtransactions where bitcoin has some issues. I think bitcoin will be a very useful thing in the future (and it already is) and I expect in 5 years or so it will have basically destroyed paypal and other such systems as it just works way better than these do, but without a _very_ compelling use case I wouldn't even consider buying any of the other alt currencies.
He wasn't showing off his ignorance, as I doubt you are the first person to correct him for such a nonsensical comment. What he was doing was spouting a political agenda that is about as much based in reality as the Lord of the Rings.
Deniers don't base their position on facts because they don't have any facts to support their position. I forget who said it first but a relevant quote is that "you cannot reason someone out of a position that they were not reasoned into".
Slashdot Mirror
The green river shale is a different kind of thing. The monterray and Bakken shale formations contain actual oil, the Green River formation contains kerogen -- a waxy substance that will turn into oil if you heat it to several hundred degrees for a period of years (yes years).
The best analogy I have heard to put this into perspective is that the Bakken is something like a rock that has been left soaking in a bucket of oil for a while and the oil has seeped into the pores of the rock. The green river shale is more like a brick that has had candle wax dripped on it. Both contain energy which can be extracted, but one yields oil directly whereas the other is merely a feedstock to make oil.
The last I had heard, no one has ever made a commercially successfull attempt to convert kerogen into oil. It can be done, just not anything like economically, and the environmental costs of doing so would be massive. Now of course the "free market" folks will say, "well the price will just rise until the kerogen is extractable", and they are right, the price will rise to something like 1000 dollars per barrel, and then we will have lots of that "cheap" green river shale oil available on the market, something like 3 trillion barrels worth.
-AndrewBuck
I get the point you were making, and to some degree you are correct. What you say is not entirely true though. Bond __investors__ make money as you suggest, but I think the article described this person as a bond __trader__, which is a very different thing. Traders often get a commision for the trade, whether the trade itself makes any money or not, even if they were the one who decided when to buy and sell, and what bonds to trade in. There are a lot of hedge funds that either lose money for their clients, or perform very poorly (many don't even beat the "index" funds which are basically "just buy one of everything"), yet these hedge funds themselves still do very well due to the fees they have hidden away in the fine print of the contracts you sign when you invest with them. This is actually a big part of why so many pension funds are in such bad shape. The underlying investments did alright, but the massive fees sucked out by the managers, traders, brokerage houses, and exchanges, eat up almost the entire profit on the trades leaving very little flowing back to the investor (in this case the pension fund). The funds list their "profits" in their prospectus which show how they make good trades and talk all about how much money you would make investing them, but when you actually dig through all the details, the fees are nearly as big as, or sometimes bigger than, the returns they quote up front. They sucker a lot of people this way, and even some (like pension fund managers) who should know better and either just don't catch the fees or don't care since it isn't their own money they are managing.
-AndrewBuck
Yeah, this is pretty laughable. I don't remember the exact figure but his battery factory (not built yet but planned) is estimated to be something like 25 to 50 percent of the current world output for these batteries; and it is expected that the battery factory will sell almost entirely, if not exclusively to his electric car operation. So this "genius" of a bond investor thinks to himself "gee, if there is such a big market for batteries he should just sell the batteries". Only problem with this line of thinking, if he quits making cars then the battery market dries up. With people like this running our economy it is little surpirse that we fell into an economic collapse, and are probably setting up the next one as we speak. Explain to me again why people like this deserve to be paid millions a year.
-AndrewBuck
You may not like it, but we live in a democracy, and the law is what the people say it is. We didn't know that this was in the law we passed, and now that we do, we are making our voice heard about it, the first step in the path to changing the law.
-AndrewBuck
(Full disclosure, I am one of the lead coordinators of the mapping effort discussed in the article and in my post below.)
Yes, the OpenStreetMap project is where the mapping is being done. The map linked in the article shows outbreak information overlaid on top of the OSM database of roads and buildings. It is this underlying map data that the croudsourcing is about.
If you go to this site you can create an OSM account and then start edititng the map immediately (think wikipedia, but for maps). You normally would edit by just going to the main OSM page and then editing the map there, the site I linked is the HOT task manager. We create areas on the task manager that need mapping done, the area is then broken up into a grid of small square tiles, and then people 'lock' a tile to work on, map all the roads and/or buildings in that tile, and finally mark the tile complete after the map has been updated. This tool was used to map all the roads and buildings in 3 large cities (Gueckedou, Macenta, and Kissidougou), where the outbreak originally started; all three of these towns were mapped completely, down to the last building, within 24 hours of HOT getting satellite imagery for them.
Right now the focus is to find and map all the small residential areas outside of these main cities, and to draw in the main connecting roads to each village. This helps the medical teams track the spread of the disease from village to village, as well as making it easier for them to travel around to do their own work. I really encourage slashdotters to help out on these kinds of projects. The mapping tools are easy to use (the in browser iD editor especially), but the technical knowledge of the slashdot crowd makes it easy for the average ./er to learn more advanced tools like JOSM and also to help with analysis and writing code to do cool stuff with the map data. You can really help out this (and a lot of other humanitarian efforts) by doing a bit of mapping anywhere in these areas, every little bit of extra data helps.
-AndrewBuck
OpenStreetMap is not really suited to what he is doing since we are making a 'base map' which is just the underlying features, roads, buildings, etc. The personal notes the OP is looking for can however be added to uMap which is a tool one of the OSM people developed to make maps overlay on top of the map. I am not sure what the public terms of service are though or how long it will be available. It was developed for coordinating information about humanitarian disasters but it would work for that as well. Link is below.
http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/e...
-AndrewBuck
This is true to some degree. Obviously if they are mis-spending the money on themselves through corruption, etc, then we should do what we can to put an end to that. Having higher tax rates doesn't necessarily mean we have to just keep giving the money to the same people getting it now. Remember this is our country and "we the people" decide how it is spent.
That said, however, the reason there is so much money around DC is not because they are all sucking up tax dollars, it is almost 100% lobbying money and fat paychecks from the 'revolving door' of people leaving the government to take phony jobs in the private sector. I say phony jobs because they are not really being paid for whatever the their job title supposedly implies, but rather being paid back for the crony capitalism they practiced while in government (and by they I don't mean just the legislators, but the staffers, the lobbyists and the whole lot). Money in politics is what all of this stems from and just saying "well they are corrupt so we should cut taxes" is not a solution to the problem, it is just them winning at one of the many strategies they are using to screw you, me, and everyone else.
-AndrewBuck
They better be careful not to let the door hit them in the ass on the way out. They want to live in some backwater island nation with no standing army to defend their billions of dollars... then let them. Just like with the double taxation I mentioned above they never seem to choose that option. They bitch and moan about how high our taxes are and then keep right on living in this country. The very same country that they say I am a traitor, and un-amaerican, if I say anything bad about and yet they like to make everyone think that they would leave here at the drop of a hat if we ask them to pony up a few bucks to keep the place running. They already shelter most of their money overseas anyway, so what would we really be losing if they took their gulfstreams and actually lived where their money lives. I guess we would be down a few gulf streams, but I don't see what else we would be losing.
-AndrewBuck
No it says you don't understand the tax code. I see you learned the phrase "double taxation" from econ 101 which is where I first heard about it but you seemed to have missed that they willingly pay that double taxation for the priveledge of limited liability. They have the option to avoid the double taxation, but they never seem to take it. Apparently that option is more than worth the double taxation since the free market chooses it over and over again.
The company makes a lot of money and pays the corporate tax rate on those profits, you have this correct. These taxes that they pay however are on their _profits_. Profits are money you earn _after_ you pay your employees, specifically the employee called the CEO who takes a salary of millions of dollars per year. This is the whole point of my argument, if the top income tax was 90% they would not pay the CEO millions, but instead would either reinvest that money back into the company (and not pay tax because business investment is tax deductable) or they would pay it out to the shareholders as dividends (who would then pay the 15% capital gains tax on it). This second option (paying dividends) is what they are supposed to be doing with that money instead of giving it to the CEO, the shareholders own the company, so why shouldn't they get that money. If the CEO really is such a brilliant leader of the company, he would be more than happy to take his pay as stock and let the increased dividends be his pay.
Once again another pro-corporate, pro 1% anaonymous coward trying to muddy the waters. Go back and tell your pay masters we aren't buying your bullshit anymore and they will have to feed you some new proapaganda to try out on the masses.
-AndrewBuck
You have a point and I am not really arguing that capital gains should be lower, it is already at 15%, significantly lower than even our already low 39% top income tax bracket. My point was simply that if they are going to argue that capital gains should be lower to encourage investment (which they do) then increasing the top income tax bracket should also be a part of that argument, which it is not. The reality is their policy is not based on any sound argument, their policy is simply lower their taxes and that is it.
-AndrewBuck
I agree with you that it is not really a political issue, nor should it be one. However the conservative wing of our country (and I mean to say conservative not republican since they are not one and the same) has gotten so far right that anything which might actually help anyone they just oppose out of gut instinct. I don't think they are anti-woman per se, it is just that they are anti "anything one of those evil liberals might be for". So if making upskirt pics illegal would be supported by a liberal, they will oppose it even if they would agree with it anyway. Remember this is supposedly the group of people concerned with family values and dressing modestly, but as soon as the liberals are on board they have to react.
In summary, liberals are against this not because they are liberals, but just because they are decent people who know what consent means. The conservatives then take a contrary stance based on a percieved political divide over the issue, thus making it a political issue. Fascinating stuff.
-AndrewBuck
Not sure if you are serious or if you were making a toungue in cheek joke. What the GP was referring to was that 2012 was a presidential election year and so he is making a thinly veiled attack on the Obama administration, alledging that they changed the GDP number to make themselves look better. Never mind that yearly GDP numbers don't come out until well after the election which happens in November, and also ignore the fact that they couldn't be bothered to put their name on their bullshit accusation. Just another AC troll. Every day I start to wonder more and more about how many people on this site are paid just to muddy the waters to make sure we argue with eachother over "team red" vs "team blue" instead of looking at the 1% who are fucking us over and using bullshit like this to make sure we are too busy arguing with eachother to notice.
-AndrewBuck
He said return the rates to the 1950's. I don't know what the middle class rate would have been back then but I don't think it was all that dissimilar from the rates today. The top tax rate, however, was massively higher, like between 80 and 90 percent for income over (I think) $150,000. I assume this is what the GP was posting about.
Of course the "job creators" (praise be upon them) will say that this will destroy jobs since we are taking money away from them that they could be investing instead. This is true to some degree, however there is another competing effect that they seldom mention. If your marginal tax rate is 90% on income you have very little incentive to take your pay as income. Instead you are far more likely to either leave that money in the business you own allowing the business to grow, or you are likely to take your "pay" as stock in the company, giving you a strong incentive to see the company viable in the long term.
Of course the rich never tell you about this second effect because it goes against the argument of letting them take home millions of dollars in direct pay. I don't really know which of these two effects are stronger, but looking at only one whilst ignoring the other is a pretty lopsided argument. If they are so concerned about encouraging investment from the wealthy they should be advocating for an increase in the top income tax bracket and a decrease of the capital gains tax. They spend plenty of time arguing for lower capital gains but somehow forget the higher income tax, funny how that works.
-AndrewBuck
I had my ad block plus allowing ads for slashdot for quite a while, too. I did this because they actually gave me a checkbox to disable ads and I thought, "well that is very nice of them, I think I will support them and actually allow ads (and disable ABP so I see them)". I see that it is set to block again now though, I did this a while back. I can't remember the exact reason, but I think it was similar to your experience. Some really annoying ad that drove me to re-enable the block.
Keep it up dice, soon your bandwidth costs will be so much lower your profit will surely go through the roof. Oh and just for good measure since I haven't posted one of these yet... fuck beta.
-AndrewBuck
Ok, that makes a bit more sense. I do understand your point about custom WIFI protocols but I don't think that those would actually be needed. If I recall correctly you can push wifi out to several km's fairly esily with the standard protocol and you don't start to have ack timeout issues until something like 100 km, and even then all you need to do is allow longer ack timeout values (this is technically a "custom" protocol then but not a major change).
You do have a point about people in the US being more able to afford such a thing but I don't think it is a huge issue. As much as I don't like the idea of facebook being the ones to do this, I don't see any obvious problems with the plan, other than the basic issues of how much the drones cost, what their lifetime and failure rate is, etc. On the face of it it could be a workable idea.
Sorry to be so irate in my initial response. The misunderstanding of your meaning led to a misunderstanding of your intentions and those intentions seemed pretty suspisious to me.
-AndrewBuck
So you start by listing several technical reasons why this wouldn't work in a developing country and then go on to state that you would like to see this used in rural America (where you ignore the very same technical limitations you just listed). Does only Africa have storm clouds and trouble with bad wifi drivers? Do you really think the system won't work, or is that just a flimsy explanation to try to prevent 'them' from getting it so you can have it yourself?
-AndrewBuck
I was going to post exactly this comment. A single video like that could be (indirectly) responsible for countless discoveries made down the line by the next generation of kids who get interested in science because space is awesome.
-AndrewBuck
OpenStreetMap to the rescue. ;)
Assuming the coordinates are formatted the same in your google link, this should be the location shown on a polar projection (not sure what specific proj they use though). I recommend people check this out as it is interesting to see Antarctica rendered properly rather than the normal mercator projection which makes it look really weird.
http://polar.openstreetmap.de/#zoom=6&lat=-66.662778&lon=140.001944&layers=BT
-AndrewBuck
Actually I think the current record is 21, however your point still stands. Quantum computers are now, and will be for quite a while, a toy. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking for solutions though, even if the capability to break keys of today with a quantum computer is still 30 years away there are messages that should be secure for at least that long, so we should begin looking forward now.
Oh and by the way, fuck the NSA.
-AndrewBuck
We have every reason to believe that cleartext is stored forever, too. I don't trust those fuckers at all anymore and just assume that anything sent in any medium will be stored for as long as they can afford the disk space to store it, legal or not.
-AndrewBuck
It is in the video which is definitely worth taking the time to watch. He mentions several things to look for, pictures of lots of the hardware they slip into people's computers, and specifically mentions looking for UDP packets encrypted with RC6.
Not posting anonymously because I want those fuckers at the NSA to know what I think of them.
-AndrewBuck
The volatility is a problem at the moment, although if you are just using it like paypal that is not a huge issue. The customer buys on the market at the current price, sends you the coins and you sell at basically the same price. In the future though I expect the volatility to go down signifigantly, right now there are literally billions of dollars being dumped into BTC all at once so you can't really expect the prices to be stable.
Remember that if it is going to become a legitameate currency in the long run you expect it to be around for decades, if not hundreds of years, so the first few years are a small portion of the overall life of the system.
-AndrewBuck
I used to give people the benefit of the doubt as well but I stopped that quite a while ago. After dealing with years of creationists pulling crap like this and then seeing people start to do the same with climate change I decided it was just better to admit that they don't have any interest in changing their position on the issue so why even waste my time.
If others want to refute them that is fine with me, and maybe somewhat important so they don't "infect" people who see their unopposed statement and take it to be accurate, but I just don't have the desire to do that.
-AndrewBuck
The thing is though there really aren't lots of competing cryptocurrencies. There is Bitcoin which is like 1000 times more influential than litecoin and litecoin is like 1000 times more influential than any of the others.
I think it is likely that bitcoin and litecoin will probably both survive as they fulfill different 'niches' in the currency world with litecoin being a bit faster to process, etc. Beyond this though it is pretty hard to see what the value in any of the other currencies like dogecoin actually is, other than a get rich quick scheme by someone trying to mooch a bit off the frenzy surrounding bitcoin. Bitcoin solves the problem of transferring money over the net very nicely so there is a good reason for it to exist, litecoin fills in a few edge cases where bitcoin has a bit of trouble (microtransactions and faster processing, etc). Between these two they cover any realistic use case I could think of for a digital currency so it is pretty hard to see how any of the others could get any traction, which is pretty much how it seems to be playing out.
For the record (full disclosure and all that), I have a reasonable amount of USD on mtgox but I don't keep any in btc right now because it is too volatile to store reliably and I have never handled any litecoin at all since I haven't seen the need personally but I do think it could potentially fill a useful niche for microtransactions where bitcoin has some issues. I think bitcoin will be a very useful thing in the future (and it already is) and I expect in 5 years or so it will have basically destroyed paypal and other such systems as it just works way better than these do, but without a _very_ compelling use case I wouldn't even consider buying any of the other alt currencies.
-AndrewBuck
He wasn't showing off his ignorance, as I doubt you are the first person to correct him for such a nonsensical comment. What he was doing was spouting a political agenda that is about as much based in reality as the Lord of the Rings.
Deniers don't base their position on facts because they don't have any facts to support their position. I forget who said it first but a relevant quote is that "you cannot reason someone out of a position that they were not reasoned into".
-AndrewBuck