We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender"
The pure-C api is what makes it harder to use, because you have humans doing the work otherwise done by a C++ compiler. If that's not retarded, I don't know what is.
The pure-C api is what makes it portable - I dare you to use a C++ written lib*.so at runtime from sbcl, guile, pyNewLanguage, Perl or whatever the the hell is the language of the day.
I think you need to work on your understanding of how tax brackets function.
I said "progressive income tax tables applies". If you want to know what that means see wikipedia. In brief, it means that only money in a certain bracket gets taxed at the rate for that bracket. It's clear from your other postings in this thread that you didn't know that. In any rate, my workings were given above, as you asked.
But hey, "only" paying 35% more in exchange for chargeback privileges, well, we all have our priorities... Sure, over time you would pay 34% more after factoring in all those chargeback you get to do.
What are you talking about? 35%? Really? I shop online all the time in the $30 range and pay less than $1 for services. In any case, the fees for paying with bitcoin via an exchange is a great deal more than the fees for most other payment methods. When exactly are BTC payments cheaper? Can you point this out to me?
Nice straw man. Those things don't require almost half of my income.
Please show your working as to how your tax amounts to half your income.
I live in South Africa, progressive income tax tables applies. All-in-all, I pay close on to 40% in personal income tax leaving me with 60% to spend.
So, I earn R100, the govt keeps R40. Of the R60 left, I spend R40 on goods and services (not fuel) which includes VAT@14%, which leaves the govt with R40 + (0.14 * R60 = R8.4) = R48.4
This does not even include the fact that I pay property tax separately and that there is a fuel levy (another tax) on each litre I buy. Recently, there is yet another tax that charges me R0.35/km I drive on National Roads (currently I drive about 60km/day on N1/N3).
When I bothered to actually add it up a few years ago (minus the new road taxes), I found that the state gets close to 62% of my salary. In return I get roads, non-functional police departments, broken court systems and corrupt civil servants.
I hate that problem. I haven't bought a computer since 1995 because every time I shop around, I always hear about a <blink>new and better one</blink> coming out really soon.
You need the computer but you can wait for the bitcoins
If the god is so impotent that mere personal electronics can cause him not to be heard, he might not be worth listening to.
It's not a matter of God not being heard, but of people not listening or paying attention. My sect has a hymn entitled Know this, that every soul is free. God will not force anyone to heaven, nor will he force anyone to hell; YOU choose where you'll be.
If by "YOU choose where you'll be" you mean "you unwittingly go to hell because you worshipped the wrong god". Anyway, how the hell do you know that you're worshipping the right one? Odds are good that you'll be there in hell with me.
An education system that only graduates 41.7% of its population is not a success.
I wasn't attempting to claim it was, only that an education system in which most of it's graduates can be trusted to be logical is better than one in which a significant percentage should never have graduated at all.
I'll take quantity over quality any day; your priorities may be different.
say that 73% of adults in SA have not heard of Charles Darwin.
That doesn't mean that they believe in creationism - from the same link: 42% of South Africans "accepted the theory of evolution as scientifically founded". Not bad for a backwards country where 90% of the people believe in the voodoo of witchdoctors.
To further put things in perspective, note that only 41.7% (wikipedia link) of the South African population has completed high school, but 42% accept the theory of evolution, while in the first world country of the USofA you have 85% of the population who have completed high-school but only 60% accept the theory of evolution. This points to a failing in the latter's educational system and a success in the former's.
IOW, even third-world countries are doing better than the USA when it comes to biology classes, even voodoo believing, uneducated, poor and mostly superstitious folk from Africa have accepted evolution - why is the USA still so behind?
I have an 8 yr old son and am appalled at the low standard of education he is receiving here, even in supposedly top schools.
Which schools?
Also, what is your basis of comparison, and what country are you from?
and how broken the US education system is, even compared to most 3rd world countries
Which 3rd world countries?
South Africa perhaps? Creationism is not in any of our science classes. However, there are politicians trying to change this as we speak (or write, as the case may be):(
Bitcoin has a legitimate purpose; a truly portable store of value not needing physical storage that is also not under the control of any government entity has a fundamental value.
Currencies don't store value, they measure it. Much like a ruler doesn't store distance and a clock doesn't store time. This is why bitcoin is not a currency - it stores value (it's a commodity - a stupid one for stupid people - but still just a commodity).
Bitcoin has value because people use it to hold and exchange value, exactly like any other currency.
Nope. Sorry, try again. Bitcoin gets traded for currency because speculators hope to make profit out of it. When the people who buy a "currency" (and I use that term very lightly when it comes to bitcoins) to make a profit outnumber the people who trade items for it by a couple of orders of magnitude, then that "currency" isn't a currency. It's a vehicle for speculators exercising the greater fool theory.
IPv5, IPv6, IPv7, IPv8 and IPv9 are making IPv4 pointless just like all the possible other digital currencies are making bitcoin pointless. I guess that's technically unfair since IPv4 does have to be replaced and look how quickly people are doing that.
The first widely adopted protocol is very, very, very hard to replace. Take IPv4, SMTP, FTP and Telnet as examples. All of them need replaced but they are still used and relied on all over the world.
Which is why bitcoin is finding it so hard to make inroads; people already have what they consider to be "digital currency". I buy stuff from all over the world (and hopefully will sell to all over the world as well) without using cash, just sending bits of information over a computer network. For the man on the street the difference between doing a money transfer and sending bitcoins is that bitcoins are untrustworthy, he can't use them without a currency exchange and the price fluctuates.
Back to your analogy: EFT is the IPv4, bitcoin is the IPv9, and there is no need to move to IPv9 if IPv4 works. If it turns out *really* borked, we'll move to IPv6 instead.
eventually enough coins will be lost that bitcoins will become useless.
I am not sure why this would be. As long as it can be infinitely fractioned (and I believe it can be), loss of any amount of bitcoins is just deflationary.
That's the point - enough deflation on the currency makes it effectively worthless as a currency
Only with a DDOS against the mining pools(easy), or the miner's computers (harder)
The Bitcoin network has a combined hash rate of 63,841.77 Petaflops ( http://bitcoinwatch.com/ ). Unless they buy a ton of the same kind of specialized chips as the mining community has, they don't have a chance at matching that rate.
What makes you think they won't? According to the calculations upthread, you need about $42M in hardware to hijack the network. You base your entire argument on the fact that the state doesn't have $42M to spend.
BTW: this is why bitcoin is not a currency - the only people who think it's a currency are those not capable of grasping basic logic. The rest of us have no problem acknowledging that it is a barter system based on trust. Barter systems based on trust are okay for small and insignificant communities, like remote tribes in the amazon, early proto-hominids and the like.
It's a system that relies on courtesy where there is an absence of courtesy. It might work better in RSA, but it was shocking in the US. I prefer Australia's way of dealing with it, one road always has priority and the other gives way or they install a traffic control device.
Well, what do you do at an intersection when the traffic lights are out? In South Africa we rarely have courteous drivers but the four-way stop works well nonetheless. We also have traffic circles, no-stop interchanges and (in suburbs) roundabouts, so it's not all bad
Maybe it's just my phone (Huawei P6), but it informs me when an app tries to (for example) read my contacts the first time. Then I get to decide whether to allow the app to do that or not.
My S3 never did that, though, so I'm not sure if it's just this one phone or if it is all the newer androids.
It saddens me because I, too, am a scientist (engineer actually).
You can be a scientist, or you can be an engineer, but a person is almost never both at the same time (speaking as someone who worked as a research scientist for seven years); the outlook of the engineer and the scientist are almost orthogonal. There is a reason that scientist's tend to be less religious than average while engineers tend to be more religious than average.
There's nothing in the standard about "warnings", though most compilers are good about it when it comes to common problems. But even with a warning, optimizer's gonna optimize.
There aren't "warnings", but the c89 and c99 std both prescribe diagnostics to be issued under certain circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender"
So, just like my family vacations?
Please point us at the Bible passage that says the Earth is 6000 years old.
hint: you are in for a rude shock. The bible never makes this claim anywhere. It is an entirely man-made claim.
That's because it's an entirely man-made book.
The pure-C api is what makes it harder to use, because you have humans doing the work otherwise done by a C++ compiler. If that's not retarded, I don't know what is.
The pure-C api is what makes it portable - I dare you to use a C++ written lib*.so at runtime from sbcl, guile, pyNewLanguage, Perl or whatever the the hell is the language of the day.
I think you need to work on your understanding of how tax brackets function.
I said "progressive income tax tables applies". If you want to know what that means see wikipedia. In brief, it means that only money in a certain bracket gets taxed at the rate for that bracket. It's clear from your other postings in this thread that you didn't know that. In any rate, my workings were given above, as you asked.
But hey, "only" paying 35% more in exchange for chargeback privileges, well, we all have our priorities... Sure, over time you would pay 34% more after factoring in all those chargeback you get to do.
What are you talking about? 35%? Really? I shop online all the time in the $30 range and pay less than $1 for services. In any case, the fees for paying with bitcoin via an exchange is a great deal more than the fees for most other payment methods. When exactly are BTC payments cheaper? Can you point this out to me?
Nice straw man. Those things don't require almost half of my income. Please show your working as to how your tax amounts to half your income.
I live in South Africa, progressive income tax tables applies. All-in-all, I pay close on to 40% in personal income tax leaving me with 60% to spend.
So, I earn R100, the govt keeps R40. Of the R60 left, I spend R40 on goods and services (not fuel) which includes VAT@14%, which leaves the govt with R40 + (0.14 * R60 = R8.4) = R48.4
This does not even include the fact that I pay property tax separately and that there is a fuel levy (another tax) on each litre I buy. Recently, there is yet another tax that charges me R0.35/km I drive on National Roads (currently I drive about 60km/day on N1/N3).
When I bothered to actually add it up a few years ago (minus the new road taxes), I found that the state gets close to 62% of my salary. In return I get roads, non-functional police departments, broken court systems and corrupt civil servants.
I hate that problem. I haven't bought a computer since 1995 because every time I shop around, I always hear about a <blink>new and better one</blink> coming out really soon.
You need the computer but you can wait for the bitcoins
If the god is so impotent that mere personal electronics can cause him not to be heard, he might not be worth listening to.
It's not a matter of God not being heard, but of people not listening or paying attention. My sect has a hymn entitled Know this, that every soul is free. God will not force anyone to heaven, nor will he force anyone to hell; YOU choose where you'll be.
If by "YOU choose where you'll be" you mean "you unwittingly go to hell because you worshipped the wrong god". Anyway, how the hell do you know that you're worshipping the right one? Odds are good that you'll be there in hell with me.
An education system that only graduates 41.7% of its population is not a success.
I wasn't attempting to claim it was, only that an education system in which most of it's graduates can be trusted to be logical is better than one in which a significant percentage should never have graduated at all.
I'll take quantity over quality any day; your priorities may be different.
Probably not. Surveys
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/origins/2009/07/evolution-theory-and-religious.html
say that 73% of adults in SA have not heard of Charles Darwin.
That doesn't mean that they believe in creationism - from the same link: 42% of South Africans "accepted the theory of evolution as scientifically founded". Not bad for a backwards country where 90% of the people believe in the voodoo of witchdoctors.
To further put things in perspective, note that only 41.7% (wikipedia link) of the South African population has completed high school, but 42% accept the theory of evolution, while in the first world country of the USofA you have 85% of the population who have completed high-school but only 60% accept the theory of evolution. This points to a failing in the latter's educational system and a success in the former's.
IOW, even third-world countries are doing better than the USA when it comes to biology classes, even voodoo believing, uneducated, poor and mostly superstitious folk from Africa have accepted evolution - why is the USA still so behind?
I have an 8 yr old son and am appalled at the low standard of education he is receiving here, even in supposedly top schools.
Which schools?
Also, what is your basis of comparison, and what country are you from?
and how broken the US education system is, even compared to most 3rd world countries
Which 3rd world countries?
South Africa perhaps? Creationism is not in any of our science classes. However, there are politicians trying to change this as we speak (or write, as the case may be) :(
My firstname alone is so unique that niether facebook nor gmail had anyone else with that firstname :) Some of us are just lucky I guess :)
Bitcoin has a legitimate purpose; a truly portable store of value not needing physical storage that is also not under the control of any government entity has a fundamental value.
Currencies don't store value, they measure it. Much like a ruler doesn't store distance and a clock doesn't store time. This is why bitcoin is not a currency - it stores value (it's a commodity - a stupid one for stupid people - but still just a commodity).
It's bitcoin that is the newcomer (IPv9) and the current currencies that are IPv4.
Bitcoin has value because people use it to hold and exchange value, exactly like any other currency.
Nope. Sorry, try again. Bitcoin gets traded for currency because speculators hope to make profit out of it. When the people who buy a "currency" (and I use that term very lightly when it comes to bitcoins) to make a profit outnumber the people who trade items for it by a couple of orders of magnitude, then that "currency" isn't a currency. It's a vehicle for speculators exercising the greater fool theory.
IPv5, IPv6, IPv7, IPv8 and IPv9 are making IPv4 pointless just like all the possible other digital currencies are making bitcoin pointless. I guess that's technically unfair since IPv4 does have to be replaced and look how quickly people are doing that.
The first widely adopted protocol is very, very, very hard to replace. Take IPv4, SMTP, FTP and Telnet as examples. All of them need replaced but they are still used and relied on all over the world.
Which is why bitcoin is finding it so hard to make inroads; people already have what they consider to be "digital currency". I buy stuff from all over the world (and hopefully will sell to all over the world as well) without using cash, just sending bits of information over a computer network. For the man on the street the difference between doing a money transfer and sending bitcoins is that bitcoins are untrustworthy, he can't use them without a currency exchange and the price fluctuates. Back to your analogy: EFT is the IPv4, bitcoin is the IPv9, and there is no need to move to IPv9 if IPv4 works. If it turns out *really* borked, we'll move to IPv6 instead.
eventually enough coins will be lost that bitcoins will become useless.
I am not sure why this would be. As long as it can be infinitely fractioned (and I believe it can be), loss of any amount of bitcoins is just deflationary.
That's the point - enough deflation on the currency makes it effectively worthless as a currency
Only with a DDOS against the mining pools(easy), or the miner's computers (harder)
The Bitcoin network has a combined hash rate of 63,841.77 Petaflops ( http://bitcoinwatch.com/ ). Unless they buy a ton of the same kind of specialized chips as the mining community has, they don't have a chance at matching that rate.
What makes you think they won't? According to the calculations upthread, you need about $42M in hardware to hijack the network. You base your entire argument on the fact that the state doesn't have $42M to spend.
BTW: this is why bitcoin is not a currency - the only people who think it's a currency are those not capable of grasping basic logic. The rest of us have no problem acknowledging that it is a barter system based on trust. Barter systems based on trust are okay for small and insignificant communities, like remote tribes in the amazon, early proto-hominids and the like.
It's a system that relies on courtesy where there is an absence of courtesy. It might work better in RSA, but it was shocking in the US. I prefer Australia's way of dealing with it, one road always has priority and the other gives way or they install a traffic control device.
Well, what do you do at an intersection when the traffic lights are out? In South Africa we rarely have courteous drivers but the four-way stop works well nonetheless. We also have traffic circles, no-stop interchanges and (in suburbs) roundabouts, so it's not all bad
Maybe it's just my phone (Huawei P6), but it informs me when an app tries to (for example) read my contacts the first time. Then I get to decide whether to allow the app to do that or not.
My S3 never did that, though, so I'm not sure if it's just this one phone or if it is all the newer androids.
Have you?
It saddens me because I, too, am a scientist (engineer actually).
You can be a scientist, or you can be an engineer, but a person is almost never both at the same time (speaking as someone who worked as a research scientist for seven years); the outlook of the engineer and the scientist are almost orthogonal. There is a reason that scientist's tend to be less religious than average while engineers tend to be more religious than average.
You and me both :)
Except, of course, that mine is a different take on the genre, and in the dark comedy worlds of the literature universe.
There's nothing in the standard about "warnings", though most compilers are good about it when it comes to common problems. But even with a warning, optimizer's gonna optimize.
There aren't "warnings", but the c89 and c99 std both prescribe diagnostics to be issued under certain circumstances.
It doesn't make sense to me, since that means even $501 is the better part of $1000.
It makes perfect sense - $501 is the better part of $1000.