As far as assets go, it's one of the more liquid ones. By liquid, I mean "quick and easy to exchange", rather than "has a massive market behind it".
The value to BitCoins is that a) they're purely digital, and b) you can reliably exchange them without a central authority verifying the transaction. Sit and think for a minute why that might be useful. It's the analog of physical goods in the digital world.
I was born in Australia where everything is metric. I now live in Canada. Having just gone through a major renovation, I totally agree with you that imperial measurements in construction just "make sense", although it was a bit foreign to me at first. Everything lines up, things divide evenly and goods are purchased in convenient sizes to match building code requirements.
However, that's because the whole system is set up that way. Joist spacing, sheet sizing, lumber dimensions are all sized to fit into a building-block and match the building codes.
If you ever look at a metric building code, you'll find that everything changes (except the stupid Canadian ones where they just converted everything to metric). They don't keep the same actual dimensions and then just switch everything over to metric (although, that's what they did in Canada, probably why it's so confusing). 16" spacing becomes 400mm spacing, 24" spacing becomes 600mm spacing. Those are not difficult numbers to work with (compared to the 'exact' conversion of 406.4 & 609.6). Standard sheet goods come in 1200x2400mm (look at that, 1 sheet perfectly covers two 600mm spaced studs, or three 400mm spaced studs).
Point is, the argument that the imperial system "works better for construction" is a straw man argument. I agree, using the imperial system to perform construction work to a building code that's designed to use it makes perfect sense. However, a perfectly reasonable equivalent can (and has been) developed for metric systems and switching over to *that* is what metric conversion is all about, not just changing units. There's so much investment in equipment that matches the imperial-style building system that it's going to take a long long time for it to happen.
The problem is that it takes less than those 5 engineers to get a crap patent into the system in the first place. When the cost of entry is lower than the cost of removal, the system is going to tend to fill up with crap.
Now, if there was a fine levied against those that had their patents invalidated......
The excellent book "The Practice of System and Network Administration" has a chapter on this topic that would make very good reading.
If I recall correctly, they assert that organisations usually structure IT depending on whether it's considered a "cost centre" or an "investment centre".
"Cost centres" often simply end up reporting to the finance department. "Investement centres" can usually justify reporting to the head of the business.
Short term trading generally creates market liquidity, which is necessary for the market to function even remotely efficiently.
Without liquidity, we would likely see wild fluctuations in the prices of stocks, creating an even more unstable and unsure environment. Take a read of the wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_liquidity) to get a better understanding. This behaviour can be seen today in exchanges where trading volumes are low and on stocks with low trading volumes (penny stocks, etc). The concept follows over to many things in life. Imagine if you were required to keep any object your purchased for a minimum amount of time before reselling it (house, car, iPod, etc). You would lose control of selling it at a time that works best for you. Very likely, you'd stop buying. This is fine for non-essential items, but the same applies for base needs like food, water and fuel. Crazy fluctuations in those items costs would likely lead to some pretty bad problems. Likely, strategies for flattening out the craziness would appear, and they would work by creating liquidity somewhere in the system that wasn't regulated.
If you crippled liquidity, you'd likely get *more* insane bullshit, not less.
I had the same problem when I worked in 3 different countries in the space of 18 months. What made it even worse was that each required you declare your "overseas income" for their tax year, and none of the three countries had tax years that lined up (some when from July->June, some when from October->September, the other, Jan->December). And on top of that, there were tax treaties between each that allowed for special rates for certain types of income. You'd get totally screwed if you didn't take advantage of the treaties, but it also required reading said treaties. Fortunately, many tax treaties are structured the same otherwise it'd be damn near impossible.
I couldn't find a tax professional prepared to help out either. Most accountants like to keep things within their own borders.
Unfortunately, it seems that the only way to halt growth in most biological systems it to balance supply and demand.
Right now, food and energy production around the world outstrips demand. Thus, population continues to increase.
The 3 major governors of biological systems seem to be raw materials, energy and space. To some degree, they're convertible. If you remove "energy" as a limiting factor, we're just going to hit a wall with one of the other two at some point.
Hitting any resource barrier is painful. Wars happen, things die. Right now, we're living in a blessed time of growth and relatively little competition for resources. Sure there are a few spats, but it's not an all out war for survival.
Ever seen the movie "Soylent Green"? That's the image that comes to mind if we "fix" the energy problem. Billions of people with enough to eat, but no room to move.
I mirror this situation. My wife and I had the opportunity to work in San Francisco for a couple of years. We're Australian.
The experience was great, but in the end, all the little things (health care, racism, homeless, political opinions, the ongoing wars, etc) added up and San Francisco is pretty liberal and open-minded compared to most of the rest of the US. We now live in Canada where the quality of life is great and we have public health care, so we don't worry about going bankrupt if we get sick. Don't underestimate how important that idea is to a lot of people.
For those Americans that are afraid of the whole spectrum of "socialist" political ideas all I can say is "don't knock it till you've tried it." While complete freedom is a wonderful idea, it often appears not to be practical when attempting to maximise the quality of life of a large population. There are certain freedoms that appear to be worth giving up (in countries like Australia and Canada, we haven't felt oppressed and it's nice not having to worry about people exercising their freedom to carry a concealed weapon).
In more socialist countries, it appears that the general concensus is that everyone gives something up to improve the quality of life for the whole. In the US, the general concensus seems to be that no-one should give anything up (even if they never use it), fuck you commie bastards. I always found discussions with that kind of attitude difficult. The "Team America" movie is hilarious because it's all so true to life.
Fair enough, I guess, but it doesn't suit everyone.
While projects like this might hit their modest targets initially, they're totally doomed in the long term.
If 1% of users can get around it with highly technical trickery, it's not going to be long before one of those 1% packages the workaround up into a nice one-click piece of software that everyone can use. Just look at CSS. It only took one DVD-Jon to figure it out and now CSS is effectively useless.
That's why I think lots of people argue that it's either 100% or don't-bother.
1. Not all cities are built around the US model with honking great raised freeways running crisscross around them. "Old" cities that pre-date cars by any significant margin often have poor/slow traffic flow. Here's an example of where this car would be good:
The big difference is that you can buy an electric powered air compressor for your home and refuel there (hell, the car might even have one built-in).
You can't (easily) produce gasoline at home, which gives gas stations a form of monopoly.
I doubt gas stations would be able to gouge like you infer, there's going to be a lot more competition for producing compressed air if the idea takes off.
Ever see how many of the Paralympic events are run? Everyone is thrown into the same race, no matter what your disability. The winner, however, is judged as the person who gets closest to the world record for their category of disability.
So sure, stick him in the race with everyone else. However if an able-bodied athlete breaks the able-bodied world record, and this guy doesn't break the "two-amputated-legs" record, then he doesn't win, even if he crosses the line first.
Drug taking is mostly illegal because of the seriously negative side effects of many of the performance enhancing drugs.
If drugs were allowed, I can imagine seeing "suicide winners" appearing. People prepared to push the doping so far that they'd keel over and die on the finish line. Who wants to compete with that? I like winning, but I'm not really prepared to die because I've overridden a bunch of my body's built-in self protection mechanisms.
Comparing prosthetic limbs to drug-taking doesn't really seem like comparing apples to apples, but there are some parallels. If prosthetic limbs are allowed and they become so good that only people with them can win, how many people will be prepared to "cripple" themselves to win, and is it fair on those who don't want to chop off a leg or two? I don't think it is.
Like there are categories of physical ability in the Paralympics now, and weight classes in boxing, martial sports, etc, I think that everything should just be categorised, and "able-bodied" just becomes another category. If prosthetics continue to improve, "able-bodied" might not even be the best performing (i.e. fastest) category in all sports. If you want to move into the "faster" category, sure, go ahead and chop off a leg, but you can't compete against non-prosthetic-endowed athletes any more.
I'll second the recommendation of "The Practice of System and Network Administration". It outlines not only what you should do, but why, and with plenty of examples of what can go wrong or right. Combine it with your own exercises to implement the specific practices it lays out and you'll be well on your way to producing some fine sysadmins, IMO.
You forget that they'd have to pay a human to do that, but their bots do the work virtually for free. They can have an order of magnitude (if not more) more bots than they could ever afford to pay humans to perform this task. Who needs fast when you can multiply slow*500k ?
The measure that spammers care about here is not how fast a single bot can crack a CAPTCHA, but how many new accounts can they open with their bot network per day.
You may be a troll, in which case, I'm an idiot for responding, but in the vain hope that you're merely stupid, think of this: who exactly would you ask permission from in order to let your crawler run wild? The act of sending a request to a website *is* a request to retrieve their content, and if they send it back, it's implicit that they allow you to see it. The only limit on how far across the net you can crawl is how much bandwidth you can afford to expend. In the context of a CS class, someone was probably trying to discourage an entire class from writing dozens of web crawlers that would hit internal websites dozens of times a day that may overload their internal network and servers. In the real world, you pay for most of the bandwidth you use, so overuse isn't such a problem.
I think George Bernard Shaw said it best:
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."
Given how high the likelihood of an accident is when a drunk driver is behind the wheel, and given how serious the accidents can get when they occur, don't you think it's bordering on criminal to drive a car while drunk?
It sounds like you're saying that if you walk down a street, randomly firing your automatic weapon in all directions that the cops should be allowed to disarm you and send you on your way, but you shouldn't be charged with anything unless you actually hit someone or damage something.
Anyone who puts themselves in control of a speeding chunk of steel while drunk should be charged with reckless endangerment IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as assets go, it's one of the more liquid ones. By liquid, I mean "quick and easy to exchange", rather than "has a massive market behind it".
The value to BitCoins is that a) they're purely digital, and b) you can reliably exchange them without a central authority verifying the transaction. Sit and think for a minute why that might be useful. It's the analog of physical goods in the digital world.
With the currency exchanges (MtGox, etc), it's trivial to turn bitcoins into real money.
Me. It's 6C outside right now and snowing on the hilltops. It's the middle of summer here.
Online password manager with client-side encryption and secure password generation: http://clipperz.com/
I was born in Australia where everything is metric. I now live in Canada. Having just gone through a major renovation, I totally agree with you that imperial measurements in construction just "make sense", although it was a bit foreign to me at first. Everything lines up, things divide evenly and goods are purchased in convenient sizes to match building code requirements.
However, that's because the whole system is set up that way. Joist spacing, sheet sizing, lumber dimensions are all sized to fit into a building-block and match the building codes.
If you ever look at a metric building code, you'll find that everything changes (except the stupid Canadian ones where they just converted everything to metric). They don't keep the same actual dimensions and then just switch everything over to metric (although, that's what they did in Canada, probably why it's so confusing). 16" spacing becomes 400mm spacing, 24" spacing becomes 600mm spacing. Those are not difficult numbers to work with (compared to the 'exact' conversion of 406.4 & 609.6). Standard sheet goods come in 1200x2400mm (look at that, 1 sheet perfectly covers two 600mm spaced studs, or three 400mm spaced studs).
Point is, the argument that the imperial system "works better for construction" is a straw man argument. I agree, using the imperial system to perform construction work to a building code that's designed to use it makes perfect sense. However, a perfectly reasonable equivalent can (and has been) developed for metric systems and switching over to *that* is what metric conversion is all about, not just changing units. There's so much investment in equipment that matches the imperial-style building system that it's going to take a long long time for it to happen.
There's an interesting talk given by Richard Rhodes a couple of months ago discussing the likelihood of the use of nuclear weapons:
http://foratv.vo.llnwd.net/o33/rss/Long_Now_Podcasts/podcast-2010-09-21-rhodes.mp3
In a nutshell, it probably doesn't matter if they were offline, they're unlikely ever going to get used.
Listen to the talk for some interesting takes on the "mutually assured destruction" situation.
The problem is that it takes less than those 5 engineers to get a crap patent into the system in the first place. When the cost of entry is lower than the cost of removal, the system is going to tend to fill up with crap.
Now, if there was a fine levied against those that had their patents invalidated......
The excellent book "The Practice of System and Network Administration" has a chapter on this topic that would make very good reading. If I recall correctly, they assert that organisations usually structure IT depending on whether it's considered a "cost centre" or an "investment centre". "Cost centres" often simply end up reporting to the finance department. "Investement centres" can usually justify reporting to the head of the business.
Short term trading generally creates market liquidity, which is necessary for the market to function even remotely efficiently.
Without liquidity, we would likely see wild fluctuations in the prices of stocks, creating an even more unstable and unsure environment. Take a read of the wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_liquidity) to get a better understanding. This behaviour can be seen today in exchanges where trading volumes are low and on stocks with low trading volumes (penny stocks, etc). The concept follows over to many things in life. Imagine if you were required to keep any object your purchased for a minimum amount of time before reselling it (house, car, iPod, etc). You would lose control of selling it at a time that works best for you. Very likely, you'd stop buying. This is fine for non-essential items, but the same applies for base needs like food, water and fuel. Crazy fluctuations in those items costs would likely lead to some pretty bad problems. Likely, strategies for flattening out the craziness would appear, and they would work by creating liquidity somewhere in the system that wasn't regulated.
If you crippled liquidity, you'd likely get *more* insane bullshit, not less.
There's a pretty good explanation of why liquidity is generally a good thing to have in the lecture given here: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/event.asp?PageId=45&EventId=640/p
I couldn't find a tax professional prepared to help out either. Most accountants like to keep things within their own borders.
Unfortunately, it seems that the only way to halt growth in most biological systems it to balance supply and demand.
Right now, food and energy production around the world outstrips demand. Thus, population continues to increase.
The 3 major governors of biological systems seem to be raw materials, energy and space. To some degree, they're convertible. If you remove "energy" as a limiting factor, we're just going to hit a wall with one of the other two at some point.
Hitting any resource barrier is painful. Wars happen, things die. Right now, we're living in a blessed time of growth and relatively little competition for resources. Sure there are a few spats, but it's not an all out war for survival.
Ever seen the movie "Soylent Green"? That's the image that comes to mind if we "fix" the energy problem. Billions of people with enough to eat, but no room to move.
I mirror this situation. My wife and I had the opportunity to work in San Francisco for a couple of years. We're Australian.
The experience was great, but in the end, all the little things (health care, racism, homeless, political opinions, the ongoing wars, etc) added up and San Francisco is pretty liberal and open-minded compared to most of the rest of the US. We now live in Canada where the quality of life is great and we have public health care, so we don't worry about going bankrupt if we get sick. Don't underestimate how important that idea is to a lot of people.
For those Americans that are afraid of the whole spectrum of "socialist" political ideas all I can say is "don't knock it till you've tried it." While complete freedom is a wonderful idea, it often appears not to be practical when attempting to maximise the quality of life of a large population. There are certain freedoms that appear to be worth giving up (in countries like Australia and Canada, we haven't felt oppressed and it's nice not having to worry about people exercising their freedom to carry a concealed weapon).
In more socialist countries, it appears that the general concensus is that everyone gives something up to improve the quality of life for the whole. In the US, the general concensus seems to be that no-one should give anything up (even if they never use it), fuck you commie bastards. I always found discussions with that kind of attitude difficult. The "Team America" movie is hilarious because it's all so true to life.
Fair enough, I guess, but it doesn't suit everyone.
While projects like this might hit their modest targets initially, they're totally doomed in the long term.
If 1% of users can get around it with highly technical trickery, it's not going to be long before one of those 1% packages the workaround up into a nice one-click piece of software that everyone can use. Just look at CSS. It only took one DVD-Jon to figure it out and now CSS is effectively useless.
That's why I think lots of people argue that it's either 100% or don't-bother.
I also am not a lawyer, but my housemate is, and he agrees with you.
1. Not all cities are built around the US model with honking great raised freeways running crisscross around them. "Old" cities that pre-date cars by any significant margin often have poor/slow traffic flow. Here's an example of where this car would be good:
http://www.citycoolcab.in/images/mumbai_traffic.jpg
2. North america isn't the only viable market in the world.
The big difference is that you can buy an electric powered air compressor for your home and refuel there (hell, the car might even have one built-in).
You can't (easily) produce gasoline at home, which gives gas stations a form of monopoly.
I doubt gas stations would be able to gouge like you infer, there's going to be a lot more competition for producing compressed air if the idea takes off.
Ever see how many of the Paralympic events are run? Everyone is thrown into the same race, no matter what your disability. The winner, however, is judged as the person who gets closest to the world record for their category of disability.
So sure, stick him in the race with everyone else. However if an able-bodied athlete breaks the able-bodied world record, and this guy doesn't break the "two-amputated-legs" record, then he doesn't win, even if he crosses the line first.
Here's what's wrong with someone who "just takes some amphetamines":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France#Tom_Simpson_dies_in_the_Tour
Drug taking is mostly illegal because of the seriously negative side effects of many of the performance enhancing drugs.
If drugs were allowed, I can imagine seeing "suicide winners" appearing. People prepared to push the doping so far that they'd keel over and die on the finish line. Who wants to compete with that? I like winning, but I'm not really prepared to die because I've overridden a bunch of my body's built-in self protection mechanisms.
Comparing prosthetic limbs to drug-taking doesn't really seem like comparing apples to apples, but there are some parallels. If prosthetic limbs are allowed and they become so good that only people with them can win, how many people will be prepared to "cripple" themselves to win, and is it fair on those who don't want to chop off a leg or two? I don't think it is.
Like there are categories of physical ability in the Paralympics now, and weight classes in boxing, martial sports, etc, I think that everything should just be categorised, and "able-bodied" just becomes another category. If prosthetics continue to improve, "able-bodied" might not even be the best performing (i.e. fastest) category in all sports. If you want to move into the "faster" category, sure, go ahead and chop off a leg, but you can't compete against non-prosthetic-endowed athletes any more.
I'll second the recommendation of "The Practice of System and Network Administration". It outlines not only what you should do, but why, and with plenty of examples of what can go wrong or right. Combine it with your own exercises to implement the specific practices it lays out and you'll be well on your way to producing some fine sysadmins, IMO.
You forget that they'd have to pay a human to do that, but their bots do the work virtually for free. They can have an order of magnitude (if not more) more bots than they could ever afford to pay humans to perform this task. Who needs fast when you can multiply slow*500k ?
The measure that spammers care about here is not how fast a single bot can crack a CAPTCHA, but how many new accounts can they open with their bot network per day.
Ever seen this list?
http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Please tick the appropriate boxes....
Ever heard of yak shaving?
You may be a troll, in which case, I'm an idiot for responding, but in the vain hope that you're merely stupid, think of this: who exactly would you ask permission from in order to let your crawler run wild? The act of sending a request to a website *is* a request to retrieve their content, and if they send it back, it's implicit that they allow you to see it. The only limit on how far across the net you can crawl is how much bandwidth you can afford to expend. In the context of a CS class, someone was probably trying to discourage an entire class from writing dozens of web crawlers that would hit internal websites dozens of times a day that may overload their internal network and servers. In the real world, you pay for most of the bandwidth you use, so overuse isn't such a problem.
I think George Bernard Shaw said it best: "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."
Given how high the likelihood of an accident is when a drunk driver is behind the wheel, and given how serious the accidents can get when they occur, don't you think it's bordering on criminal to drive a car while drunk?
It sounds like you're saying that if you walk down a street, randomly firing your automatic weapon in all directions that the cops should be allowed to disarm you and send you on your way, but you shouldn't be charged with anything unless you actually hit someone or damage something.
Anyone who puts themselves in control of a speeding chunk of steel while drunk should be charged with reckless endangerment IMO.