That won't help either. The regulators are in the government, and if they just 'bend' the rules rather than break them, the law will favor them. Several employees in NASA's middle management should probably have gone to jail for willful criminal negligence because of the shuttle explosion. But that never happened because bureaucrats protect their own.
I'm not saying there should be a free market solution. I'm saying there should be a different solution because the one we have fails on many levels.
Personally, I'm in favor of finding ways to tweak rules so that market forces force the correct outcome without continual human intervention and using jailtime for CEOs for more obvious cases.
They aren't 'taking bribes'. They're helping out their friends with perfectly reasonable requests because the stupid government regulations are just a bit too burdensome.
Step 1: Make a decision on whether it is important for you to control the dumping of externalities onto the public, or whether you want corporate success.
I think active regulation is a short-term way to handle this. The goal in all regulation should be the creation of an objectively applied set of rules that force the externalities back in.
Some people are concerned about waste (which is a good thing to be concerned about) and some are concerned about accidents.
I am concerned about regulatory capture, which is the consistent theme of government regulation. This is just one example of many. Yes, it will lead to accidents in the future. But I think examining the root cause is useful.
Almost any kind of government regulation is eventually going to result in the regulatory body being co-opted by those doing the regulation. This will happen largely invisibly, and most of the time will only be readily apparent when disaster strikes. And then, the problem will be blamed on a few corrupt individuals and it will be 'fixed'.
It, of couse, was systemic, and not the result of a few corrupt individuals. And all that will be fixed is perception while the problem continues to persist. We see this in the oil industry, the telecommunications industry, and now we're seeing that the same is true of the nuclear industry.
Of course, this was a problem in Japan too. It's quite obvious that the company running the Fukishima reactors consistently understated the severity of the issue while it was happening, and I expect that a detailed investigation will show that the plants should probably never have been operating in the first place.
Regulatory capture. It's inevitable.
This is my biggest worry. I'm not at all sure how the problem can be fixed either.
I do not think justice has ever been a goal. They are in it for the lulz. The way to attract their attention is to complain about what they're doing. I'm amused, but have no feeling that much of what they're doing is morally justified in any way. I will be similarly amused (and a bit impressed) if they're caught.
Selling an unlocked phone was Google's thing. Apple is stealing Google's idea. Really, do you think Apple would've ever done it had Google not done it first?
In the spirit of how Apple would like IP law to work when it's working for them, I think Google should sue Apple over the idea.
Nothing you're saying contradicts anything I'm saying. Are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me? What's your point here? I agree that the outings are not working to increase liberty, though the specific one you mentioned earlier is very funny. I never claimed that increasing liberty was the only goal of Anonymous.
Anonymous might have some of the right goals, some of the same goals, but their way of going about it, by breaking domestic laws, is just fucking stupid.
I do not look at Anonymous as 'the good guys'. I look at them as a natural reaction to a system that is seemingly out of control and increasingly unwilling to govern itself according to the rule of law. Frequently the results are ugly, messy and morally ambiguous. Sometimes I cheer and cringe at the same time.
My point was that these same government agencies that promote these goals are a part of a government that suppresses the very freedoms they seek to promote abroad. A government that frequently is the oblique target of attack by a group that frequently has the same goals the government claims to have.
I think groups working with these government agencies face a lack of credibility similar to the lack of credibility they would acquire if they openly worked with Anonymous.
Because Slashdot allows at most 120 characters for a signature, and that includes information in tags that is not directly visible, like the href attribute. I think URL shorteners are a necessary evil, and I avoid them most of the time, but for this I don't really have much of a choice.
Wonder if the gov would bother tapping old-style modem to modem comms? VPNs, encryption, anonymizing nodes, extra-US nodes...
I wonder how cheaply a microwave relay station could be built? I've sometimes thought a network of those across the nation in private hands using PSK-based encryption to talk to each other would be nice insurance against having the mainstream network infrastructure cut.
I've read that parts of Anonymous also work on projects in this same vein. And that same facet of Anonymous is who carries out the DDoS attacks and other various distressing things. I wonder if the irony of sharing goals with Anonymous is completely lost on the US government. I expect probably so. Freedom abroad, a slow slide towards facism at home, that'll be the way of it.
The trouble, in the case of Ebooks, is that(since the main actors selling them are among those who have a strong interest in collecting user data) the majority of providers, especially of commercially popular material, would have no incentive to accept payment systems that compromise their ability to do what they want, or build reader or DRM systems that do so. This means that, while technologically quite feasible, privacy-preserving architectures are likely to remain content-light, somewhat-less-than-polished, backwaters.
I agree. Basically, those actors noted the fact that while the publishers interest in DRM was incredibly misplaced, they noticed that DRM schemes required a centralized control that gave them all the metrics. The metrics are far, far more valuable than the restrictions placed by DRM. So they sold DRM to the publishers and the public in order to justify the system for obtaining the metrics.
Someone needs to convince publishers that a more secure system is in their best interests. One way to accomplish this is to allow them to share whatever limited consumer metrics do exist. But there may be other, better ways.
Well, yes. My proposed system would be entirely voluntary, and would involve the bitcoin wallet id to which payments should be sent encoded in the meta-data for the work. You'd set up your music player or e-reader to record usage. You could either send a certain amount per time spent listening or reading. Or you could allocate a fixed amount per month, and proportion it according to which authors/artists work you spent the most time on.
I've actually been thinking of a system to allow you to automatically pay authors or artists when you read their books using bitcoin, sort of an automated tip-jar. The main problem is knowing which wallet to send the money to, and knowing that wallet is the correct one and not somehow put there by a scam artist.
I scoff because none of the things you've mentioned are a material object of any use to me whatsoever. Even the gold standard. I have no use for gold. I can't eat it. I don't make anything where gold is a particularly useful component.
And Lindens, what backs them up? Is there a promise that you can exchange them for some quantity of USD? I suppose there's a promise to provide you with the use of a certain amount of virtual land or something for Lindens. That is, at least something, but it seems like a pretty poor and thin promise, and even less useful to me than gold would be.
No, the thing that 'backs up' just about any currency is who's willing to accept it in trade for stuff. That's it. The real value of dollars is the totality of the US economy. The value of Lindens are all the marvelous artists, designers and coders who are willing to trade their lindens for stuff.
And bitcoins, by that measure, are not such a great currency right now, I'll admit. But they have the potential to be a pretty nifty currency. And you can currently exchange them for illegal drugs, alpaca socks, work by various professionals (including me) and a few other interesting things. And I think the number of things you will be able to exchange them for will go up over time.
What, exactly, do they back it up with? Is there something the government promises you that you can exchange for USD, aside from keeping them from putting you in prison for not paying taxes?
I'm guessing that at least part of the fun is the support they're getting. If that support evaporated, I think they'd find other targets. They want bitcoin donations, they talk about how many people follow them on twitter. They care about the support they get. So I don't think your assessment is entirely accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
That won't help either. The regulators are in the government, and if they just 'bend' the rules rather than break them, the law will favor them. Several employees in NASA's middle management should probably have gone to jail for willful criminal negligence because of the shuttle explosion. But that never happened because bureaucrats protect their own.
See this answer. :-)
I'm not saying there should be a free market solution. I'm saying there should be a different solution because the one we have fails on many levels.
Personally, I'm in favor of finding ways to tweak rules so that market forces force the correct outcome without continual human intervention and using jailtime for CEOs for more obvious cases.
They aren't 'taking bribes'. They're helping out their friends with perfectly reasonable requests because the stupid government regulations are just a bit too burdensome.
Step 1: Make a decision on whether it is important for you to control the dumping of externalities onto the public, or whether you want corporate success.
I think active regulation is a short-term way to handle this. The goal in all regulation should be the creation of an objectively applied set of rules that force the externalities back in.
Some people are concerned about waste (which is a good thing to be concerned about) and some are concerned about accidents.
I am concerned about regulatory capture, which is the consistent theme of government regulation. This is just one example of many. Yes, it will lead to accidents in the future. But I think examining the root cause is useful.
Almost any kind of government regulation is eventually going to result in the regulatory body being co-opted by those doing the regulation. This will happen largely invisibly, and most of the time will only be readily apparent when disaster strikes. And then, the problem will be blamed on a few corrupt individuals and it will be 'fixed'.
It, of couse, was systemic, and not the result of a few corrupt individuals. And all that will be fixed is perception while the problem continues to persist. We see this in the oil industry, the telecommunications industry, and now we're seeing that the same is true of the nuclear industry.
Of course, this was a problem in Japan too. It's quite obvious that the company running the Fukishima reactors consistently understated the severity of the issue while it was happening, and I expect that a detailed investigation will show that the plants should probably never have been operating in the first place.
Regulatory capture. It's inevitable.
This is my biggest worry. I'm not at all sure how the problem can be fixed either.
People have had luck buying drugs on a website with bitcoins, and written about the experience.
Granted that's obviously true for most of them but I'm sure that SOME members of the FBI must be interested in justice. Okay, maybe not.
Point taken, and agreed with. :-)
I do not think justice has ever been a goal. They are in it for the lulz. The way to attract their attention is to complain about what they're doing. I'm amused, but have no feeling that much of what they're doing is morally justified in any way. I will be similarly amused (and a bit impressed) if they're caught.
Oh, no, the app store thing isn't relevant. Because Google calls it a Marketplace. That makes it totally different.
Selling an unlocked phone was Google's thing. Apple is stealing Google's idea. Really, do you think Apple would've ever done it had Google not done it first?
In the spirit of how Apple would like IP law to work when it's working for them, I think Google should sue Apple over the idea.
Nothing you're saying contradicts anything I'm saying. Are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me? What's your point here? I agree that the outings are not working to increase liberty, though the specific one you mentioned earlier is very funny. I never claimed that increasing liberty was the only goal of Anonymous.
Anonymous might have some of the right goals, some of the same goals, but their way of going about it, by breaking domestic laws, is just fucking stupid.
I do not look at Anonymous as 'the good guys'. I look at them as a natural reaction to a system that is seemingly out of control and increasingly unwilling to govern itself according to the rule of law. Frequently the results are ugly, messy and morally ambiguous. Sometimes I cheer and cringe at the same time.
My point was that these same government agencies that promote these goals are a part of a government that suppresses the very freedoms they seek to promote abroad. A government that frequently is the oblique target of attack by a group that frequently has the same goals the government claims to have.
I think groups working with these government agencies face a lack of credibility similar to the lack of credibility they would acquire if they openly worked with Anonymous.
regarding your sig: why the fuck would you shorten/obfuscate an address that is in an tag? You're just being disrespectful to people who might want to visit your link but don't like being redirected who-knows-where.
Because Slashdot allows at most 120 characters for a signature, and that includes information in tags that is not directly visible, like the href attribute. I think URL shorteners are a necessary evil, and I avoid them most of the time, but for this I don't really have much of a choice.
Wonder if the gov would bother tapping old-style modem to modem comms? VPNs, encryption, anonymizing nodes, extra-US nodes...
I wonder how cheaply a microwave relay station could be built? I've sometimes thought a network of those across the nation in private hands using PSK-based encryption to talk to each other would be nice insurance against having the mainstream network infrastructure cut.
I've read that parts of Anonymous also work on projects in this same vein. And that same facet of Anonymous is who carries out the DDoS attacks and other various distressing things. I wonder if the irony of sharing goals with Anonymous is completely lost on the US government. I expect probably so. Freedom abroad, a slow slide towards facism at home, that'll be the way of it.
The trouble, in the case of Ebooks, is that(since the main actors selling them are among those who have a strong interest in collecting user data) the majority of providers, especially of commercially popular material, would have no incentive to accept payment systems that compromise their ability to do what they want, or build reader or DRM systems that do so. This means that, while technologically quite feasible, privacy-preserving architectures are likely to remain content-light, somewhat-less-than-polished, backwaters.
I agree. Basically, those actors noted the fact that while the publishers interest in DRM was incredibly misplaced, they noticed that DRM schemes required a centralized control that gave them all the metrics. The metrics are far, far more valuable than the restrictions placed by DRM. So they sold DRM to the publishers and the public in order to justify the system for obtaining the metrics.
Someone needs to convince publishers that a more secure system is in their best interests. One way to accomplish this is to allow them to share whatever limited consumer metrics do exist. But there may be other, better ways.
The system by which new dollars are allocated to people is much, much less fair.
Well, yes. My proposed system would be entirely voluntary, and would involve the bitcoin wallet id to which payments should be sent encoded in the meta-data for the work. You'd set up your music player or e-reader to record usage. You could either send a certain amount per time spent listening or reading. Or you could allocate a fixed amount per month, and proportion it according to which authors/artists work you spent the most time on.
I've actually been thinking of a system to allow you to automatically pay authors or artists when you read their books using bitcoin, sort of an automated tip-jar. The main problem is knowing which wallet to send the money to, and knowing that wallet is the correct one and not somehow put there by a scam artist.
I scoff because none of the things you've mentioned are a material object of any use to me whatsoever. Even the gold standard. I have no use for gold. I can't eat it. I don't make anything where gold is a particularly useful component.
And Lindens, what backs them up? Is there a promise that you can exchange them for some quantity of USD? I suppose there's a promise to provide you with the use of a certain amount of virtual land or something for Lindens. That is, at least something, but it seems like a pretty poor and thin promise, and even less useful to me than gold would be.
No, the thing that 'backs up' just about any currency is who's willing to accept it in trade for stuff. That's it. The real value of dollars is the totality of the US economy. The value of Lindens are all the marvelous artists, designers and coders who are willing to trade their lindens for stuff.
And bitcoins, by that measure, are not such a great currency right now, I'll admit. But they have the potential to be a pretty nifty currency. And you can currently exchange them for illegal drugs, alpaca socks, work by various professionals (including me) and a few other interesting things. And I think the number of things you will be able to exchange them for will go up over time.
What, exactly, do they back it up with? Is there something the government promises you that you can exchange for USD, aside from keeping them from putting you in prison for not paying taxes?
Then sue them.
I believe that's been tried already, and the suit was tossed out.
I'm guessing that at least part of the fun is the support they're getting. If that support evaporated, I think they'd find other targets. They want bitcoin donations, they talk about how many people follow them on twitter. They care about the support they get. So I don't think your assessment is entirely accurate.
What does 'back it up' even mean? What 'backs up' the dollar?