I've caught bugs in code review that would never in a million years have been caught by testing. The customer would've encountered them sporadically, and in situations in which they'd come to rely on the broken behavior working implicitly. The would've submitted a bug report and we would've been unable to replicate the problem in house. The customer's opinion of us would be lowered, and we'd have all these bug reports in our system that nobody could figure out.
That is, until someone reviewed the code and discovered the bug.
So, basically what you're doing is robbing Peter to pay Paul. By not doing the reviews you end up with less time in the long run, not more.
While I believe that it's quite easy to remove individual nodes of the 'indestructible' botnet, I can't see a good way it could really be shut down other than by wiping it out node by node. And that's a losing strategy for the 'good guys'.
So, while I agree in principle that the word 'indestructible' is pretty strong, and likely not actually the case, that theoretical fact is useless without a concrete strategy for defeating it.
You are basically correct. Someone could take the existing software even and tweak a couple of things and start their very own block chain. There is one such block chain already in use for the test network. But that block chain wouldn't be compatible with the current bitcoin block chain. It would be like another country's currency.
People in the US see free money from the government as a scam, and a way to steal from their neighbors. Our regulatory systems are routinely captured by private enterprise and twisted to serve their purposes. Licensing boards invent rules to exclude people from professions for profit. People see the government as a thing to be manipulated to their own benefit.
That's why these things don't and won't work for us. The more things the government does, the more ways there are for people to manipulate and scam the system. And when people want to reform it, the reformers get side-tracked, co-opted or silenced (by having the corporate owned media not pay attention to them).
Personally, I consider relying on a system that's so easily destroyed by a shift in cultural values to be unreliable anyway.
I went to a good school which was entirely state funded, as are most in the UK. There are good ones and bad ones, but very very few people pay for education. Some of our most successful entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and Alan Sugar both went to state schools.
In the US, being in a state school is not strongly correlated (negatively or positively) with success. Going to a private school is somewhat correlated positively with success. But the quality of our state schools has been declining recently, partly because we have been treating schools more and more like prisons.
As far as national health care is concerned, that's a complex debate. It may work in the UK, and it may especially work for a national celebrity like Stephen Hawking, but I can tell you that it will not work in the US. What it will result in in the US is everybody except the powerful and well connected receiving fairly poor care. At least, in the US, the insured stand a decent chance of receiving fairly good care right now regardless of class.
The social programs I'm talking about are things like welfare and state disability.
I have never seen someone who was wildly successful who was the benefactor of a social program. Near as I can tell, almost every single person I've ever met who's gotten deeply involved with government social programs ends up getting stuck.
As for education funding, while I think that state funded education is a public good. I do not think that a school with more money is better than a school with less. The thing that makes a school good is the focus and commitment of both the parents and the teachers to the school.
That being said, I am not for the gutting of public education or anything of the sort. I do like school vouchers, but recognize there is a possible problem in which the schools you can afford with just the voucher are all awful. I haven't heard much data from places that have implemented school vouchers showing whether or not this is the case.
This inclines me to believe that in practice this isn't actually a problem. Because if it were, the blogs of my friends would be screaming with outrage over the study data showing that it was.
Taxation never fixes this kind of stratification. It can't. Part of the reason the stratification exists is because the wealthy have all the power. Even if they enact taxes to try to fix the income disparity, the taxes will merely be a sop, and nothing will truly change.
I'm not sure how to fix it. A whole cultural value system has to change. Typically, what happens is a bloody revolution and new masters replace the old in manner quite reminiscent of 'Animal Farm', but that isn't really a solution.
I assume you are referring to taxation and more specifically welfare. Ignoring the other implications of that for a moment how would you go about preventing such disparity of wealth as you alluded to above? Tax funded socialism is pretty much the only way.
I didn't say income disparity, I said 'stratification'. There's a big difference.
Our society still has some class mobility. I feel that it is slipping away little by little, but it does exist.
Income will always follow a power law curve. The two signals I look for to determine whether or not a society has a healthy distribution of wealth is not the ends of the power law curve. I look at the slope of the curve. A very steeply sloping curve implying that a winner-takes-all type society is very bad. Secondly is how many people move from one part of the curve to another during the course of their lifetimes.
Latin American countries typically have both problems. We are headed that way slowly, but aren't there yet.
While this is true, Google does let you get your data back out if you should so choose, whereas Facebook actively discourages or outright prevents this.
Additionally, do you ever see Facebook choosing to interoperate with Diaspora in any meaningful way? Now, do you see Google choosing to interoperate with Diaspora in any meaningful way?
While I think Google will choose to try to interoperate if they can, I think their open data policy makes it hard to not interoperate, even if they don't want to.
So yeah, some of the disadvantages of Facebook, but all around much, much better.
If you can't afford something that does excuse theft, but from societies point of view it is important to deal with the poverty factor to prevent the same thing happening again.
I'm going to assume you meant "does not excuse theft".
I think this is a really tricky line to walk. In highly stratified societies in which raising yourself out of poverty is nearly impossible I don't think it is inexcusable. Though, I also don't think that massive theft (even by governments) will help those societies become more equitable.
In many countries, if you're a servant, you will ALWAYS be a servant. It doesn't matter what you do or how well you do it. You won't be able to start a side business and make a ton of money. You won't be able to learn a new skillset and raise your class. You won't be able to do any of these things. India has this problem. So do many latin american countries.
I'm not sure what can be done about it. There is a whole complex of forces that lead to this being the case. But I do not judge thieves in places like this as harshly, even though I don't think they're doing anything to fix the problem.
Curious Yellow was bound to happen sooner or later. I was wondering what was taking botnet authors so long, and why they were relying on a centralized system like DNS for coordinating their bots.
And, I secretly believe animals have rights, but I do not think that extends to the right not to be bought or sold. I prefer to avoid making arguments on these grounds because they get into moral territory that's thorny and tricky to navigate. So if I can find an argument based on moral principles that are already well established and understood, I prefer those.
I don't have to appeal to an animal rights argument.
It's evil because the people buying the pet receive a pet who's been treated poorly, may have behavioral issues resulting from this, and who may also have various health problems. And it's very hard for people to do the research in order to get a pet who doesn't have these problems.
I have a friend or two who are vets and who blog. Judging from their blogs, breeders are the scum of the earth. They won't learn enough about the animals they breed to do the basic things necessary to keep them healthy. They won't pay the vet they call in when things go wrong. They refuse to let the vet treat the animals if it would cost them money or even just make their lives a little inconvenient.
Now, I'm guessing there are good breeder's out there. And I'm guessing those breeders have vet visits that are much less frequent and angst filled and so don't result in diatribes on blogs. But I don't know how to tell whether or not an animal came from a breeder who cared, or one who didn't. It's hard to vote with my wallet.
I think this law is very dumb. But there is a real evil here.
Some people thought Henry Ford was a sucker for paying his workers more than he had to. But he knew that if they had money, they'd buy things, including the cars he was having them manufacture. Google pumps a ton of money every year into Open Source projects they may or may not ever use because they know that helping the ecosystem helps them in the long run.
Nobody calls Henry Ford a sucker now, nor does anybody think that of Google. My using bitcoins for actual commerce when I can is the same thing done for the same reasons.
You just want to continue to live in your world where bitcoins are unimportant, and so you and that tftp guy construct scenarios in which it's in nobody's interest to make them succeed. I think most people are smarter than you give them credit for.
I don't know why you don't want them to succeed. I can only conclude irrationality. From my perspective, bitcoin is a strictly better currency system than any anybody has yet devised. And while the distribution statistics are skewed towards early adopters (though not as much as you think), I think the distribution of bitcoins has been far more equitable than any other currency system I know of. Certainly more equitable than how USD are created.
I have also seen far more generosity and willingness to pay for useful work (as an example, someone gave me 0.3 BTC (when the exchange rate was at its peak) after the fact and with no obligation for a 20 minute lesson in how the crypto worked) in the bitcoin community than almost anywhere else. People there recognize that hoarding does nothing for the value of the currency in their wallets.
Hoarding is a counter-productive strategy. Hoarding makes my bitcoins worthless over time. What makes them worth something is people accepting them for payment for goods and services. While spending all of my bitcoins wouldn't be particularly wise, spending some of them on goods and services helps grow the economy and increases the value of all of them over time.
Your logic is very short-term gain focused. And it will ultimately lead to a collapse in the value of bitcoin. It is foolish to hoard them.
OTOH, I will be asking fair market value when I buy things. I would not pay what would effectively be double the price. I will pay slightly more for things if I pay with bitcoin, but that's because the total value of the transaction is higher for me if it's carried out in bitcoin.
Also, I have been approached for work in bitcoin by companies that are in random parts of the world. This simply would not have been possible in a more traditional currency. The ease with which bitcoin crosses borders is not something that is to be underestimated.
I agree that it has limited value as currency. But I can't ever see it really leaving the limited ecosystem of WoW and things that immediately surround it. I can buy silk pillows from someone in Chile with bitcoins. It has significantly more potential.
So far, I've gotten more USD out of Bitcoin than I've put in by about 250%. And I still own a bunch of bitcoins. I will be using them to buy actual physical goods and not USD as much as possible. I think there are enough people like me that the currency will succeed.
It's certainly a heck of a lot more 'real' than WoW gold, which only exists on WoW servers and is completely controlled by the server you're on, which generally means Blizzard.
Scarcity and the fact that it's works well for 900,000,000 years...
Ridiculous exaggeration does not help your argument. Gold has worked as a currency for perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 years. Basically since we've had agriculture.
You are a troll. And likely willfully ignorant of the fact that half the stuff you spout off has approximately the same relation to reality that a Faux News broadcast does.
If you RTFA, you'll see that this has been a move they've thought through carefully and had been planning for awhile. It has nothing to do with recent events. Their biggest concern is that bitcoin is a legal grey area that might possibly make them the subject of the sort of legal action they try to defend others against.
Slashdot Mirror
I've caught bugs in code review that would never in a million years have been caught by testing. The customer would've encountered them sporadically, and in situations in which they'd come to rely on the broken behavior working implicitly. The would've submitted a bug report and we would've been unable to replicate the problem in house. The customer's opinion of us would be lowered, and we'd have all these bug reports in our system that nobody could figure out.
That is, until someone reviewed the code and discovered the bug.
So, basically what you're doing is robbing Peter to pay Paul. By not doing the reviews you end up with less time in the long run, not more.
While I believe that it's quite easy to remove individual nodes of the 'indestructible' botnet, I can't see a good way it could really be shut down other than by wiping it out node by node. And that's a losing strategy for the 'good guys'.
So, while I agree in principle that the word 'indestructible' is pretty strong, and likely not actually the case, that theoretical fact is useless without a concrete strategy for defeating it.
You are basically correct. Someone could take the existing software even and tweak a couple of things and start their very own block chain. There is one such block chain already in use for the test network. But that block chain wouldn't be compatible with the current bitcoin block chain. It would be like another country's currency.
People in the US see free money from the government as a scam, and a way to steal from their neighbors. Our regulatory systems are routinely captured by private enterprise and twisted to serve their purposes. Licensing boards invent rules to exclude people from professions for profit. People see the government as a thing to be manipulated to their own benefit.
That's why these things don't and won't work for us. The more things the government does, the more ways there are for people to manipulate and scam the system. And when people want to reform it, the reformers get side-tracked, co-opted or silenced (by having the corporate owned media not pay attention to them).
Personally, I consider relying on a system that's so easily destroyed by a shift in cultural values to be unreliable anyway.
I went to a good school which was entirely state funded, as are most in the UK. There are good ones and bad ones, but very very few people pay for education. Some of our most successful entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and Alan Sugar both went to state schools.
In the US, being in a state school is not strongly correlated (negatively or positively) with success. Going to a private school is somewhat correlated positively with success. But the quality of our state schools has been declining recently, partly because we have been treating schools more and more like prisons.
As far as national health care is concerned, that's a complex debate. It may work in the UK, and it may especially work for a national celebrity like Stephen Hawking, but I can tell you that it will not work in the US. What it will result in in the US is everybody except the powerful and well connected receiving fairly poor care. At least, in the US, the insured stand a decent chance of receiving fairly good care right now regardless of class.
The social programs I'm talking about are things like welfare and state disability.
I have never seen someone who was wildly successful who was the benefactor of a social program. Near as I can tell, almost every single person I've ever met who's gotten deeply involved with government social programs ends up getting stuck.
As for education funding, while I think that state funded education is a public good. I do not think that a school with more money is better than a school with less. The thing that makes a school good is the focus and commitment of both the parents and the teachers to the school.
That being said, I am not for the gutting of public education or anything of the sort. I do like school vouchers, but recognize there is a possible problem in which the schools you can afford with just the voucher are all awful. I haven't heard much data from places that have implemented school vouchers showing whether or not this is the case.
This inclines me to believe that in practice this isn't actually a problem. Because if it were, the blogs of my friends would be screaming with outrage over the study data showing that it was.
Taxation never fixes this kind of stratification. It can't. Part of the reason the stratification exists is because the wealthy have all the power. Even if they enact taxes to try to fix the income disparity, the taxes will merely be a sop, and nothing will truly change.
I'm not sure how to fix it. A whole cultural value system has to change. Typically, what happens is a bloody revolution and new masters replace the old in manner quite reminiscent of 'Animal Farm', but that isn't really a solution.
I assume you are referring to taxation and more specifically welfare. Ignoring the other implications of that for a moment how would you go about preventing such disparity of wealth as you alluded to above? Tax funded socialism is pretty much the only way.
I didn't say income disparity, I said 'stratification'. There's a big difference.
Our society still has some class mobility. I feel that it is slipping away little by little, but it does exist.
Income will always follow a power law curve. The two signals I look for to determine whether or not a society has a healthy distribution of wealth is not the ends of the power law curve. I look at the slope of the curve. A very steeply sloping curve implying that a winner-takes-all type society is very bad. Secondly is how many people move from one part of the curve to another during the course of their lifetimes.
Latin American countries typically have both problems. We are headed that way slowly, but aren't there yet.
While this is true, Google does let you get your data back out if you should so choose, whereas Facebook actively discourages or outright prevents this.
Additionally, do you ever see Facebook choosing to interoperate with Diaspora in any meaningful way? Now, do you see Google choosing to interoperate with Diaspora in any meaningful way?
While I think Google will choose to try to interoperate if they can, I think their open data policy makes it hard to not interoperate, even if they don't want to.
So yeah, some of the disadvantages of Facebook, but all around much, much better.
If you can't afford something that does excuse theft, but from societies point of view it is important to deal with the poverty factor to prevent the same thing happening again.
I'm going to assume you meant "does not excuse theft".
I think this is a really tricky line to walk. In highly stratified societies in which raising yourself out of poverty is nearly impossible I don't think it is inexcusable. Though, I also don't think that massive theft (even by governments) will help those societies become more equitable.
In many countries, if you're a servant, you will ALWAYS be a servant. It doesn't matter what you do or how well you do it. You won't be able to start a side business and make a ton of money. You won't be able to learn a new skillset and raise your class. You won't be able to do any of these things. India has this problem. So do many latin american countries.
I'm not sure what can be done about it. There is a whole complex of forces that lead to this being the case. But I do not judge thieves in places like this as harshly, even though I don't think they're doing anything to fix the problem.
I actually think this is because of a culture that encourages addictive behavior.
For example, we revile pedophilia, but increasingly sexualize younger and younger girls and boys.
I wish I understood why we did this kind of thing in our culture. Why we fetishize the forbidden. It seems extremely unhealthy to me.
Curious Yellow was bound to happen sooner or later. I was wondering what was taking botnet authors so long, and why they were relying on a centralized system like DNS for coordinating their bots.
Personally, if I had a customer as insanely and stupidly litigious as Apple, I wouldn't much care about losing them.
And, I secretly believe animals have rights, but I do not think that extends to the right not to be bought or sold. I prefer to avoid making arguments on these grounds because they get into moral territory that's thorny and tricky to navigate. So if I can find an argument based on moral principles that are already well established and understood, I prefer those.
I agree that 'evil' was a bit hyperbolic. I should be a little more careful about throwing around that word.
I don't have to appeal to an animal rights argument.
It's evil because the people buying the pet receive a pet who's been treated poorly, may have behavioral issues resulting from this, and who may also have various health problems. And it's very hard for people to do the research in order to get a pet who doesn't have these problems.
So, you're basically saying that it's not civil disobedience until someone is caught and charged. I find that logic to be rather strange.
I have a friend or two who are vets and who blog. Judging from their blogs, breeders are the scum of the earth. They won't learn enough about the animals they breed to do the basic things necessary to keep them healthy. They won't pay the vet they call in when things go wrong. They refuse to let the vet treat the animals if it would cost them money or even just make their lives a little inconvenient.
Now, I'm guessing there are good breeder's out there. And I'm guessing those breeders have vet visits that are much less frequent and angst filled and so don't result in diatribes on blogs. But I don't know how to tell whether or not an animal came from a breeder who cared, or one who didn't. It's hard to vote with my wallet.
I think this law is very dumb. But there is a real evil here.
It makes the bitcoins I have left worth more too.
Some people thought Henry Ford was a sucker for paying his workers more than he had to. But he knew that if they had money, they'd buy things, including the cars he was having them manufacture. Google pumps a ton of money every year into Open Source projects they may or may not ever use because they know that helping the ecosystem helps them in the long run.
Nobody calls Henry Ford a sucker now, nor does anybody think that of Google. My using bitcoins for actual commerce when I can is the same thing done for the same reasons.
You just want to continue to live in your world where bitcoins are unimportant, and so you and that tftp guy construct scenarios in which it's in nobody's interest to make them succeed. I think most people are smarter than you give them credit for.
I don't know why you don't want them to succeed. I can only conclude irrationality. From my perspective, bitcoin is a strictly better currency system than any anybody has yet devised. And while the distribution statistics are skewed towards early adopters (though not as much as you think), I think the distribution of bitcoins has been far more equitable than any other currency system I know of. Certainly more equitable than how USD are created.
I have also seen far more generosity and willingness to pay for useful work (as an example, someone gave me 0.3 BTC (when the exchange rate was at its peak) after the fact and with no obligation for a 20 minute lesson in how the crypto worked) in the bitcoin community than almost anywhere else. People there recognize that hoarding does nothing for the value of the currency in their wallets.
Hoarding is a counter-productive strategy. Hoarding makes my bitcoins worthless over time. What makes them worth something is people accepting them for payment for goods and services. While spending all of my bitcoins wouldn't be particularly wise, spending some of them on goods and services helps grow the economy and increases the value of all of them over time.
Your logic is very short-term gain focused. And it will ultimately lead to a collapse in the value of bitcoin. It is foolish to hoard them.
OTOH, I will be asking fair market value when I buy things. I would not pay what would effectively be double the price. I will pay slightly more for things if I pay with bitcoin, but that's because the total value of the transaction is higher for me if it's carried out in bitcoin.
Also, I have been approached for work in bitcoin by companies that are in random parts of the world. This simply would not have been possible in a more traditional currency. The ease with which bitcoin crosses borders is not something that is to be underestimated.
I agree that it has limited value as currency. But I can't ever see it really leaving the limited ecosystem of WoW and things that immediately surround it. I can buy silk pillows from someone in Chile with bitcoins. It has significantly more potential.
So far, I've gotten more USD out of Bitcoin than I've put in by about 250%. And I still own a bunch of bitcoins. I will be using them to buy actual physical goods and not USD as much as possible. I think there are enough people like me that the currency will succeed.
It's certainly a heck of a lot more 'real' than WoW gold, which only exists on WoW servers and is completely controlled by the server you're on, which generally means Blizzard.
Scarcity and the fact that it's works well for 900,000,000 years...
Ridiculous exaggeration does not help your argument. Gold has worked as a currency for perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 years. Basically since we've had agriculture.
You are a troll. And likely willfully ignorant of the fact that half the stuff you spout off has approximately the same relation to reality that a Faux News broadcast does.
If you RTFA, you'll see that this has been a move they've thought through carefully and had been planning for awhile. It has nothing to do with recent events. Their biggest concern is that bitcoin is a legal grey area that might possibly make them the subject of the sort of legal action they try to defend others against.