I don't know what money they're making - they don't break it out for analysts, I don't think. But yeah, the iCloud does run on Azure - the story was on/. a year or two ago. Shouldn't be surprising - Azure and EC2 are both pretty solid (though EC2 did have one really major outage, one is still good given how long they've been running now), and Azure tends to be cheaper from what I can see of the pricing.
Right, right, because "the experts should decide, we can't trust the stupid people" is the key to democracy. No, wait, that's not right.... is the key to the modern Left. Yup.
Just like you can ship software with 0 bugs. Just like you can prove an airplane safe to fly without actually flying it. Just like any complex system can be tuned just right for everyone without actually trying it, all we need to do is let the experts figure out what's best, and then have a strong central authority dictate that to one and all! Corruption? Why, if there's a problem with corruption in a strong central government, we can fix it by giving that government even more power, that'll work for sure.
Totalitarians always sing the same songs. All the worlds problems are caused by letting people think for themselves (and/or the right), and all those problems can be solved by additional power given to a central authority.
Why are states optimal? Is it because 50-200+ years ago, this patch of geography was chosen to be grouped together? How does this imply that all states have the resources necessary for their own road building?
The federal government doesn't build roads (well, perhaps on Federal land). Roads are already built by the states using money that came from the states. The federal government hold the states hostage to all sorts of laws and unfunded mandates by threatening to withhold their withhold that money.
So yeah, there actually is a group of anarchists willing to give up roadbuilding to get their way: the federal government.
If there a need for country-wide minimal standards for roads, then let the states build the roads against that standard exactly like it works today. There's a way to solve the same problem with less centralized government power, so choose that way. It's not like abuse of the centralized power is hypothetical!
Why would you want competition between states? Who benefits from something like that?
If you think you know the best plan for something complicated before you start you're wrong. For any complex plan there are dozens of ideas that look good on paper, and some experts think each idea is best. As Feynman said: "one experiment is worth 1000 expert opinions". Let each state try the plan it thinks is best, you'll learn something. You may even learn that different regional cultures have different ideas about what "best" means. Different people have differing values, isn't that neat!
It's amazing how, whenever anyone objects to some portion of what the government does, there's always some totalitarian-lover who will reply and say "ooh, so you must be against roads and law enforcement, you evil man". Keep dry-humping that strawman long enough and it will ignite!
The government does many, many things. I object to many of them being done by the federal government. Some can be done just as well by state or local governments (why do tax dollars flow through the federal government in order to come back to the states for road building?) Some could be done just as well with quite minimal government involvement: same social safety net, no money flowing through government hands and getting skimmed.
But somehow any suggestion that maybe the federal government could be just a teeny bit smaller, that maybe we should oppose totalitarian government and instead treat government as an optimization exercise (how to solve each problem with the least of it), provokes this sort of nonsense post.
Unless you really want a totalitarian government as an end in itself, how can you object to solving problems with less of that?
All of MS's nice profitable products are still pretty tightly coupled with Windows. They could and probably should change that, but I'm not holding my breath. Until they do, it's pretty important that they sell a version of Windows that people actually like on the traditional/corporate desktop. Today Win7 is that version (and I'm a fan of it), but if they stop selling Windows 7 when Windows 9 comes out, well, Windows 9 had better be well received.
Just like the only part of a newspaper likely to be accurate is the sports page, the only government pronouncements likely to be accurate are those from the NWS. Funny how things change when everyone cares if you're wrong.
Fun fact, the NOAA includes one of America's 2 non-military uniformed services (the other is within the public health service - both wear naval uniforms, and use naval officer paygrades).
is numbers are probably because w3 is visited by developers who know better
One more/.er mired in the past. Remember when Win95 had a max uptime of 14 days due to millisecond clock overflow? Good times; good times.
IE has been fine since 9 or so. Chrome is the one now saying "we're too big to need to follow standards". Same as the old boss, and their beards have all grown longer overnight.
I got my first coding job with the most exploitive company in town, and was happy to break into the field, but then I didn't have any degree. What you want to find is a company that hires at entry level based on some sort of testing, rather than an HR screen. For entry level jobs companies need some sort of screen to eliminate the 99% of candidates applying to companies seemingly at random, you just need to find one where the screen isn't HR keyword matching.
For internships, the biggest companies look for top students in related technical fields, but the total number of such slots each year is pretty small. Landing an internship interview that way (which opens all the doors you need) requires luck to match your talent. You might also check whatever campus hiring board (and the college paper, and craigslist) for small companies looking for anyone who can code at all for bottom dollar.
Every geek who is interested in programming taught themselves.
True, but this has become rare among coders now that software development is the best paying and most prestigious "salary job" in many parts of the world.
I recently did a batch of interviews for intern hiring (for coding), and something remarkable has changed in the US. For the first time in the past 20 years or so, there was a significant presence of self-taught geeks who didn't come through the traditional degree path - and all of them were women.
It's a quite noticeable change from my perspective - not only is it great to see self-taught programmer geeks at the intern level again (mostly in the past 20 years the few I've seen have come over from IT 5-10 years in), but this was a nearly all-male crowd 20 years ago, and that has definitely changed.
As I said, there is nothing that prevents insurance companies from offering fraud protection for people's bitcoin wallets, or managing people's bitcoin wallets for them and offering the same services.
Right - we have a word for companies that perform those services: "banks".
If we get to a state where the FDIC is required to cover the deposits of many failed banks simultaneously (and recent events show it is very possible for many banks to fail simultaneously), the government may decide to increase the money supply rather than actually diverting money away from the normal expenditures
Ah, I see what you're trying to say. Odd as it sounds, the government "making people whole" on widespread bank failures by "printing money" doesn't actually change the money supply. Strange and counter-intuitive, I know, but look at it this way. Before the bank failure you had an account with $X in it. After the FDIC "bailout" you have an account with $X in it. The "money supply" is the sum of all deposits, so no change.
Of course, we're unlikely to ever do that, instead we'll likely bail out the banks in a way that does take either debt or increasing the money supply, so I think you're right in principle.
People certainly like lower/less fees, maybe that will be enough to get them to try it.
People like fraud protection too, as well as small consumer loans, and the theft protection offered by savings accounts.
If you have a bunch of US dollars, you are essentially investing in the dollar.
Having a "bunch of dollars" is the very essence of "not investing". There are a variety of ways to specifically bet on the dollar rising or falling against other currencies, for hedging or speculation, but simply "being in cash" is a retreat from all investing (and associated market risk). While bond pricing is complex, it's all about predicting changes in interest rates and inflation. Stocks, in the very broad, long-term view, return GDP growth plus a risk premium, and inflation is a wash (and real estate tends to keep even with inflation on average).
In short: dollar-valued fixed income investments (bonds) are priced according to the markets best prediction about inflation (poor choice when inflation is rising, fine when inflation is steady at any sane % value), and other investments adjust for inflation, in the long term.
I was more talking about something along the lines of doubling the money supply to cover everyone's deposits.
Look up the various measures of the money supply on Wikipedia - as commonly used, the phrase "money supply" includes everyone's deposits, so this comment makes no sense. The M0 (the physical currency in circulation) is the least interesting part of the money supply, because there just needs to be enough of it to facilitate purchases, and people don't use cash much these days. Inflation and other macroeconomic concerns aren't particularly effected by the size of the M0, but instead by the size of everyone's deposits.
It's possible to understand all you said and still disagree with you - don't assume opposition == ignorance.
The fair use is what QT is arguing: his position is that the story could be covered just fine without including links to the "stolen" script. I find that argument compelling, but it's the court's opinion that matters.
Gawker is IMO definitely "profiting from infringement" by including the links, unneeded to report the story, to get more eyeballs and ad revenue than the same story with no links.
There is no institution holding your money with bitcoin.
Ahh, here's where we're talking past each other. My premise is that bitcoin will never be mainstream unless and until there are BTC savings accounts and credit cards - mainstream BTC using means most people using it with banks, just as with the dollar. It's just how people want to work with money.
The government will definitely know about the transaction, as it will be public information. I don't think they will be able to stop the transaction from happening, and I don't think they can know the identities of those involved if they are careful.
If the government actually cared, and outlawed bitcoin, then any transaction or mining involving your IP address would mean guys with guns at your door. No, proxies won't help with that. Yes, Starbucks will have the legally-required firewall that blocks such traffic. And so on - I doubt the government will ever care, we do seem to still value freedom and especially free speech here, but they have the power to outlaw any internet traffic they don't like.
If there is massive inflation, it will be in everyone's interest to dump their dollars anyway. What they decide to invest in instead is up to them.
You don't seem very familiar with investing, as this statement is "not even wrong". Or are you talking about Zimbabwe-style hyper-inflation and social collapse, in which case you want bullets not bitcoins. Thus my allusion to bunker-builders.
I think ay serious attempt to stop bitcoin will weaken confidence in the US when they take the steps necessary to try to stop it (i.e. surveillance, restrictions on freedoms, etc),and I think they will ultimately be unsuccessful, as they have been in the war on drugs.
Just curious why you think the "war on drugs" has been unsuccessful. Do you believe that the actual goal is the stated goal? That seems an unlikely conclusion from the evidence.
Wait, do you get how banks work? Some people have this crazy idea that "fractional reserve banking" involves loaning out money that you don't have as assets - not so. With a 10% reserve requirement, a bank can loan out $90 if it has $100 in deposits. With "full reserve" it can't make loans, so it's an odd idea to begin with.
Investing is great and all, and it always pays more on average than lending, but lending still serves a vital social role: for low-risk returns for retirement, for businesses that want capital but not a partner, and mostly for home ownership.
With your UID, you should be fully aware of the generation of Slashdotters who were geeks-abused-by-jocks in school. From my point of view, one cannot belittle sports, sports fans, and anything do with sports enough. Vile scum, the lot of them.
That looks like a crowd of people very likely to be working high-paying tech jobs. Your average crowd of football fans? Not so much. Not so much.
It takes generations, but eventually society changes with the times - idealizing football players was a holdover from when physical prowess was actually important in life.
Read it again, Mr Talking Points Parrot. "make it clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity... of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law"
I thought he point of EVE was to mock and belittle other players (and especially players of other games) for not being "hardcore enough"? Doesn't the main form of resource mining involve posting "cry more, newb" on the forums, or are millions of such posts just an incidental by-product?
The space battles sure look cool, but wow what an abrasive community - who'd want to spend time with such people?
Do DMCA takedown requests apply to links to? When I first read about this case, it was snowballing from a refused DMCA takedown request.
Also, it's important to note that this isn't a link to a torrent tracker for a released film, or any other such "already made public" data. This is a script for an early-phase movie, so the money lost by making it public isn't wrapped up in BS "piracy" numbers. If QT can show real financial losses due to Gawker's inclusion of links, it will actually be an interesting case. If not, then maybe it's just free advertising.
No you don't need physical dollars to do that. But you also don't need to physically run to the bank either. I would imagine that a modern run on the bank would involve people trying to buy euros or gold or bitcoins online, with banks freezing people's accounts until they get more virtual money from the FDIC/Fed, with prices of everything relative to the dollar going up while people are trying desperately to unfreeze their accounts and spend their money before prices increase further.
You're conflating bank failure and currency issues. If you want to buy Euros with dollars that's one of the largest and most liquid markets in the world. With plenty of futures and derivatives to hedge with. If there were a massive rush for the doors on the dollar the value of the dollar would drop like a rock, but the markets wouldn't blink at the volume of trade. (The M1 is "only" ~10T, there over $700T in currency derivatives outstanding - if you want something to worry about...)
How would it be crushed? Why hasn't the government crushed similar things music piracy?
If Alice wants to give Bob 1 bitcoin for a bushel of apples and Bobs wants to sell his bushel of apples for 1 bitcoin, what is the government going to do to stop it?
Music "piracy" in the torrent sense isn't even criminal AFAIK. Bitcoin depends on miners and a fairly open internet to function, and isn't strongly anonymous. If the government cared to know every IP address in America involved in a BTC transaction, it could. If Alice and Bob are un the US, and need the Internet to validate the transaction (no double-spend), the government can know about that transaction. The various government agencies concerned with money-laundering aren't troubled by Bitcoin.
I can't see a scenario in which they would try to stop it (unlike China), but they certainly have the firepower to do so.
Yes the government still controls the banks. The government can not force people to want to store their money in US dollars if they decide to significantly devalue it.
Are you a bunker-builder preparing for complete societal collapse? If so, sure, the US government won't be important. But in today's society BTC won't be mainstream unless you can use it with the banking system, regardless of what happens with the dollar.
I'm sure we'll get some Carteresque inflation in the next decade, but that won't change the utility of the dollar. 10% inflation is just not a structural problem, and there's just no reason to expect hyper-inflation.
If you suspected that the dollar was going to crash, being the first person to get your money out and buy things with it would mean that your dollar will go farther than someone else who is trying to spend their dollars after a lot of dollars have just been printed to cover FDIC. If everyone gets this same idea at about the same there would still be a rush to get your money before other people get theirs.
Sure, but you don't need physical currency to do that. It's irrelevant to the M1/M0 ratio. In fact, you really want to buy stuff on credit and borrow all the dollars you can, if you think the dollar is doomed. (And there's a non-trivial group of people in America doing just that.)
You'll notice that FDR didn't to gold as the standard currency and simply take everyone's gold. With all their power, they are not able to magically make gold appear in their vaults the way they can magically make dollars appear in the computer or print more $100 bills.
Not sure what you meant to say there. There were a bunch of gold seizures in the years that followed, and FDR did successfully change the amount of gold that $1 represented.
In places where gold/silver-based currency was specie based not representative, the mint would just start using less gold/silver in the coins to debase the currency (the was a time when the "silver" shilling was bad enough to rust).
There's always some way for a sufficiently inventive group with sufficient firepower to cheat. What the currency is based on isn't going to change that.
It's not that you can't control bitcoin. It's that you can't control it without turning your whole country into a shithole like egypt.
BS. If bitcoin stays some joke currency that a few geeks and criminals use, then it can be crushed without loss to society. If bitcoin becomes mainstream, then the government still controls the banks, and that's all they need in the modern world.
Well, we can certainly act according to whether politicians do anything about this. If none of them strike back at the NSA, then we're screwed, but if some of them take action we can at least reward them.
Time has the text of a resolution the RNC just passed, which calls for action by Republican legislators in very stark terms. The RNC is as "inside the beltway", disconnected from voters, and generally unconcerned with the sort of issues that make Slashdot as it's possible for a human to be, and yet even those buffoons are up in arms about this.
This is just a call to action, not a bill, but the RNC is usually who the GOP listens to instead of the voters. I'll quote the whole thing below, but they outright call these programs unconstitutional and they call for them to end, with no mention of national security or terrorism. They're also using interesting language: calling for review in a public court, not a secret court.
Let's see whether the DNC does something similar, and what congresscritters do as a result. I'd actually be surprised if there isn't at least a bill voted on to end these programs, which if voters actually care they could hold their local critter to accout for.
Resolution to Renounce the National Security Agency's Surveillance Program
WHEREAS, the secret surveillance program called PRISM targets, among other things, the surveillance of U.S. citizens on a vast scale and monitors searching habits of virtually every American on the internet;
WHEREAS, this dragnet program is, as far as we know, the largest surveillance effort ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens, consisting of the mass acquisition of Americans' call details encompassing all wireless and landline subscribers of the country's three largest phone companies;
WHEREAS, every time an American citizen makes a phone call, the NSA gets a record of the location, the number called, the time of the call and the length of the conversation, all of which are an invasion into the personal lives of American citizens that violates the right of free speech and association afforded by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution;
WHEREAS, the mass collection and retention of personal data is in itself contrary to the right of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which guarantees the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, that warrants shall issue only upon probable cause, and generally prevents the American government from issuing modern-day writs of assistance;
WHEREAS, unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society and this program represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy and goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act; and
WHEREAS, Republican House Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, an author of the Patriot Act and Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee at the time of Section 215's passage, called the Section 215 surveillance program "an abuse of that law," writing that, "based on the scope of the released order, both the administration and the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court are relying on an unbounded interpretation of the act that Congress never intended," therefore be it
RESOLVED, the Republican National Committee encourages Republican lawmakers to enact legislation to amend Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make it clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity, phone records and correspondence -- electronic, physical, and otherwise -- of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and tha
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what money they're making - they don't break it out for analysts, I don't think. But yeah, the iCloud does run on Azure - the story was on /. a year or two ago. Shouldn't be surprising - Azure and EC2 are both pretty solid (though EC2 did have one really major outage, one is still good given how long they've been running now), and Azure tends to be cheaper from what I can see of the pricing.
Right, right, because "the experts should decide, we can't trust the stupid people" is the key to democracy. No, wait, that's not right. ... is the key to the modern Left. Yup.
Just like you can ship software with 0 bugs. Just like you can prove an airplane safe to fly without actually flying it. Just like any complex system can be tuned just right for everyone without actually trying it, all we need to do is let the experts figure out what's best, and then have a strong central authority dictate that to one and all! Corruption? Why, if there's a problem with corruption in a strong central government, we can fix it by giving that government even more power, that'll work for sure.
Totalitarians always sing the same songs. All the worlds problems are caused by letting people think for themselves (and/or the right), and all those problems can be solved by additional power given to a central authority.
Why are states optimal? Is it because 50-200+ years ago, this patch of geography was chosen to be grouped together? How does this imply that all states have the resources necessary for their own road building?
The federal government doesn't build roads (well, perhaps on Federal land). Roads are already built by the states using money that came from the states. The federal government hold the states hostage to all sorts of laws and unfunded mandates by threatening to withhold their withhold that money.
So yeah, there actually is a group of anarchists willing to give up roadbuilding to get their way: the federal government.
If there a need for country-wide minimal standards for roads, then let the states build the roads against that standard exactly like it works today. There's a way to solve the same problem with less centralized government power, so choose that way. It's not like abuse of the centralized power is hypothetical!
Why would you want competition between states? Who benefits from something like that?
If you think you know the best plan for something complicated before you start you're wrong. For any complex plan there are dozens of ideas that look good on paper, and some experts think each idea is best. As Feynman said: "one experiment is worth 1000 expert opinions". Let each state try the plan it thinks is best, you'll learn something. You may even learn that different regional cultures have different ideas about what "best" means. Different people have differing values, isn't that neat!
It's amazing how, whenever anyone objects to some portion of what the government does, there's always some totalitarian-lover who will reply and say "ooh, so you must be against roads and law enforcement, you evil man". Keep dry-humping that strawman long enough and it will ignite!
The government does many, many things. I object to many of them being done by the federal government. Some can be done just as well by state or local governments (why do tax dollars flow through the federal government in order to come back to the states for road building?) Some could be done just as well with quite minimal government involvement: same social safety net, no money flowing through government hands and getting skimmed.
But somehow any suggestion that maybe the federal government could be just a teeny bit smaller, that maybe we should oppose totalitarian government and instead treat government as an optimization exercise (how to solve each problem with the least of it), provokes this sort of nonsense post.
Unless you really want a totalitarian government as an end in itself, how can you object to solving problems with less of that?
How are you confusing Windows 9 with a browser?
All of MS's nice profitable products are still pretty tightly coupled with Windows. They could and probably should change that, but I'm not holding my breath. Until they do, it's pretty important that they sell a version of Windows that people actually like on the traditional/corporate desktop. Today Win7 is that version (and I'm a fan of it), but if they stop selling Windows 7 when Windows 9 comes out, well, Windows 9 had better be well received.
though Windows 9 will likely fare better.
Windows 9 had better fare better, or the writing's on the wall. But MS seems to get this now.
Just like the only part of a newspaper likely to be accurate is the sports page, the only government pronouncements likely to be accurate are those from the NWS. Funny how things change when everyone cares if you're wrong.
Fun fact, the NOAA includes one of America's 2 non-military uniformed services (the other is within the public health service - both wear naval uniforms, and use naval officer paygrades).
is numbers are probably because w3 is visited by developers who know better
One more /.er mired in the past. Remember when Win95 had a max uptime of 14 days due to millisecond clock overflow? Good times; good times.
IE has been fine since 9 or so. Chrome is the one now saying "we're too big to need to follow standards". Same as the old boss, and their beards have all grown longer overnight.
I got my first coding job with the most exploitive company in town, and was happy to break into the field, but then I didn't have any degree. What you want to find is a company that hires at entry level based on some sort of testing, rather than an HR screen. For entry level jobs companies need some sort of screen to eliminate the 99% of candidates applying to companies seemingly at random, you just need to find one where the screen isn't HR keyword matching.
For internships, the biggest companies look for top students in related technical fields, but the total number of such slots each year is pretty small. Landing an internship interview that way (which opens all the doors you need) requires luck to match your talent. You might also check whatever campus hiring board (and the college paper, and craigslist) for small companies looking for anyone who can code at all for bottom dollar.
Every geek who is interested in programming taught themselves.
True, but this has become rare among coders now that software development is the best paying and most prestigious "salary job" in many parts of the world.
I recently did a batch of interviews for intern hiring (for coding), and something remarkable has changed in the US. For the first time in the past 20 years or so, there was a significant presence of self-taught geeks who didn't come through the traditional degree path - and all of them were women.
It's a quite noticeable change from my perspective - not only is it great to see self-taught programmer geeks at the intern level again (mostly in the past 20 years the few I've seen have come over from IT 5-10 years in), but this was a nearly all-male crowd 20 years ago, and that has definitely changed.
As I said, there is nothing that prevents insurance companies from offering fraud protection for people's bitcoin wallets, or managing people's bitcoin wallets for them and offering the same services.
Right - we have a word for companies that perform those services: "banks".
If we get to a state where the FDIC is required to cover the deposits of many failed banks simultaneously (and recent events show it is very possible for many banks to fail simultaneously), the government may decide to increase the money supply rather than actually diverting money away from the normal expenditures
Ah, I see what you're trying to say. Odd as it sounds, the government "making people whole" on widespread bank failures by "printing money" doesn't actually change the money supply. Strange and counter-intuitive, I know, but look at it this way. Before the bank failure you had an account with $X in it. After the FDIC "bailout" you have an account with $X in it. The "money supply" is the sum of all deposits, so no change.
Of course, we're unlikely to ever do that, instead we'll likely bail out the banks in a way that does take either debt or increasing the money supply, so I think you're right in principle.
People certainly like lower/less fees, maybe that will be enough to get them to try it.
People like fraud protection too, as well as small consumer loans, and the theft protection offered by savings accounts.
If you have a bunch of US dollars, you are essentially investing in the dollar.
Having a "bunch of dollars" is the very essence of "not investing". There are a variety of ways to specifically bet on the dollar rising or falling against other currencies, for hedging or speculation, but simply "being in cash" is a retreat from all investing (and associated market risk). While bond pricing is complex, it's all about predicting changes in interest rates and inflation. Stocks, in the very broad, long-term view, return GDP growth plus a risk premium, and inflation is a wash (and real estate tends to keep even with inflation on average).
In short: dollar-valued fixed income investments (bonds) are priced according to the markets best prediction about inflation (poor choice when inflation is rising, fine when inflation is steady at any sane % value), and other investments adjust for inflation, in the long term.
I was more talking about something along the lines of doubling the money supply to cover everyone's deposits.
Look up the various measures of the money supply on Wikipedia - as commonly used, the phrase "money supply" includes everyone's deposits, so this comment makes no sense. The M0 (the physical currency in circulation) is the least interesting part of the money supply, because there just needs to be enough of it to facilitate purchases, and people don't use cash much these days. Inflation and other macroeconomic concerns aren't particularly effected by the size of the M0, but instead by the size of everyone's deposits.
It's possible to understand all you said and still disagree with you - don't assume opposition == ignorance.
The fair use is what QT is arguing: his position is that the story could be covered just fine without including links to the "stolen" script. I find that argument compelling, but it's the court's opinion that matters.
Gawker is IMO definitely "profiting from infringement" by including the links, unneeded to report the story, to get more eyeballs and ad revenue than the same story with no links.
There is no institution holding your money with bitcoin.
Ahh, here's where we're talking past each other. My premise is that bitcoin will never be mainstream unless and until there are BTC savings accounts and credit cards - mainstream BTC using means most people using it with banks, just as with the dollar. It's just how people want to work with money.
The government will definitely know about the transaction, as it will be public information. I don't think they will be able to stop the transaction from happening, and I don't think they can know the identities of those involved if they are careful.
If the government actually cared, and outlawed bitcoin, then any transaction or mining involving your IP address would mean guys with guns at your door. No, proxies won't help with that. Yes, Starbucks will have the legally-required firewall that blocks such traffic. And so on - I doubt the government will ever care, we do seem to still value freedom and especially free speech here, but they have the power to outlaw any internet traffic they don't like.
If there is massive inflation, it will be in everyone's interest to dump their dollars anyway. What they decide to invest in instead is up to them.
You don't seem very familiar with investing, as this statement is "not even wrong". Or are you talking about Zimbabwe-style hyper-inflation and social collapse, in which case you want bullets not bitcoins. Thus my allusion to bunker-builders.
I think ay serious attempt to stop bitcoin will weaken confidence in the US when they take the steps necessary to try to stop it (i.e. surveillance, restrictions on freedoms, etc),and I think they will ultimately be unsuccessful, as they have been in the war on drugs.
Just curious why you think the "war on drugs" has been unsuccessful. Do you believe that the actual goal is the stated goal? That seems an unlikely conclusion from the evidence.
Wait, do you get how banks work? Some people have this crazy idea that "fractional reserve banking" involves loaning out money that you don't have as assets - not so. With a 10% reserve requirement, a bank can loan out $90 if it has $100 in deposits. With "full reserve" it can't make loans, so it's an odd idea to begin with.
Investing is great and all, and it always pays more on average than lending, but lending still serves a vital social role: for low-risk returns for retirement, for businesses that want capital but not a partner, and mostly for home ownership.
With your UID, you should be fully aware of the generation of Slashdotters who were geeks-abused-by-jocks in school. From my point of view, one cannot belittle sports, sports fans, and anything do with sports enough. Vile scum, the lot of them.
That looks like a crowd of people very likely to be working high-paying tech jobs. Your average crowd of football fans? Not so much. Not so much.
It takes generations, but eventually society changes with the times - idealizing football players was a holdover from when physical prowess was actually important in life.
Read it again, Mr Talking Points Parrot. "make it clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity ... of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law"
I love the way you ignore that CNN is a major for-profit corporation (with ads even!). I see no difference in those cases.
Remember when the cool kids watched football and the uncool kids played video games? Yeah, that was the previous century. This century? Not so much.
I thought he point of EVE was to mock and belittle other players (and especially players of other games) for not being "hardcore enough"? Doesn't the main form of resource mining involve posting "cry more, newb" on the forums, or are millions of such posts just an incidental by-product?
The space battles sure look cool, but wow what an abrasive community - who'd want to spend time with such people?
Do DMCA takedown requests apply to links to? When I first read about this case, it was snowballing from a refused DMCA takedown request.
Also, it's important to note that this isn't a link to a torrent tracker for a released film, or any other such "already made public" data. This is a script for an early-phase movie, so the money lost by making it public isn't wrapped up in BS "piracy" numbers. If QT can show real financial losses due to Gawker's inclusion of links, it will actually be an interesting case. If not, then maybe it's just free advertising.
No you don't need physical dollars to do that. But you also don't need to physically run to the bank either. I would imagine that a modern run on the bank would involve people trying to buy euros or gold or bitcoins online, with banks freezing people's accounts until they get more virtual money from the FDIC/Fed, with prices of everything relative to the dollar going up while people are trying desperately to unfreeze their accounts and spend their money before prices increase further.
You're conflating bank failure and currency issues. If you want to buy Euros with dollars that's one of the largest and most liquid markets in the world. With plenty of futures and derivatives to hedge with. If there were a massive rush for the doors on the dollar the value of the dollar would drop like a rock, but the markets wouldn't blink at the volume of trade. (The M1 is "only" ~10T, there over $700T in currency derivatives outstanding - if you want something to worry about ...)
How would it be crushed? Why hasn't the government crushed similar things music piracy?
If Alice wants to give Bob 1 bitcoin for a bushel of apples and Bobs wants to sell his bushel of apples for 1 bitcoin, what is the government going to do to stop it?
Music "piracy" in the torrent sense isn't even criminal AFAIK. Bitcoin depends on miners and a fairly open internet to function, and isn't strongly anonymous. If the government cared to know every IP address in America involved in a BTC transaction, it could. If Alice and Bob are un the US, and need the Internet to validate the transaction (no double-spend), the government can know about that transaction. The various government agencies concerned with money-laundering aren't troubled by Bitcoin.
I can't see a scenario in which they would try to stop it (unlike China), but they certainly have the firepower to do so.
Yes the government still controls the banks. The government can not force people to want to store their money in US dollars if they decide to significantly devalue it.
Are you a bunker-builder preparing for complete societal collapse? If so, sure, the US government won't be important. But in today's society BTC won't be mainstream unless you can use it with the banking system, regardless of what happens with the dollar.
I'm sure we'll get some Carteresque inflation in the next decade, but that won't change the utility of the dollar. 10% inflation is just not a structural problem, and there's just no reason to expect hyper-inflation.
If you suspected that the dollar was going to crash, being the first person to get your money out and buy things with it would mean that your dollar will go farther than someone else who is trying to spend their dollars after a lot of dollars have just been printed to cover FDIC. If everyone gets this same idea at about the same there would still be a rush to get your money before other people get theirs.
Sure, but you don't need physical currency to do that. It's irrelevant to the M1/M0 ratio. In fact, you really want to buy stuff on credit and borrow all the dollars you can, if you think the dollar is doomed. (And there's a non-trivial group of people in America doing just that.)
You'll notice that FDR didn't to gold as the standard currency and simply take everyone's gold. With all their power, they are not able to magically make gold appear in their vaults the way they can magically make dollars appear in the computer or print more $100 bills.
Not sure what you meant to say there. There were a bunch of gold seizures in the years that followed, and FDR did successfully change the amount of gold that $1 represented.
In places where gold/silver-based currency was specie based not representative, the mint would just start using less gold/silver in the coins to debase the currency (the was a time when the "silver" shilling was bad enough to rust).
There's always some way for a sufficiently inventive group with sufficient firepower to cheat. What the currency is based on isn't going to change that.
It's not that you can't control bitcoin. It's that you can't control it without turning your whole country into a shithole like egypt.
BS. If bitcoin stays some joke currency that a few geeks and criminals use, then it can be crushed without loss to society. If bitcoin becomes mainstream, then the government still controls the banks, and that's all they need in the modern world.
Well, we can certainly act according to whether politicians do anything about this. If none of them strike back at the NSA, then we're screwed, but if some of them take action we can at least reward them.
Time has the text of a resolution the RNC just passed, which calls for action by Republican legislators in very stark terms. The RNC is as "inside the beltway", disconnected from voters, and generally unconcerned with the sort of issues that make Slashdot as it's possible for a human to be, and yet even those buffoons are up in arms about this.
This is just a call to action, not a bill, but the RNC is usually who the GOP listens to instead of the voters. I'll quote the whole thing below, but they outright call these programs unconstitutional and they call for them to end, with no mention of national security or terrorism. They're also using interesting language: calling for review in a public court, not a secret court.
Let's see whether the DNC does something similar, and what congresscritters do as a result. I'd actually be surprised if there isn't at least a bill voted on to end these programs, which if voters actually care they could hold their local critter to accout for.
Resolution to Renounce the National Security Agency's Surveillance Program
WHEREAS, the secret surveillance program called PRISM targets, among other things, the surveillance of U.S. citizens on a vast scale and monitors searching habits of virtually every American on the internet;
WHEREAS, this dragnet program is, as far as we know, the largest surveillance effort ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens, consisting of the mass acquisition of Americans' call details encompassing all wireless and landline subscribers of the country's three largest phone companies;
WHEREAS, every time an American citizen makes a phone call, the NSA gets a record of the location, the number called, the time of the call and the length of the conversation, all of which are an invasion into the personal lives of American citizens that violates the right of free speech and association afforded by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution;
WHEREAS, the mass collection and retention of personal data is in itself contrary to the right of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which guarantees the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, that warrants shall issue only upon probable cause, and generally prevents the American government from issuing modern-day writs of assistance;
WHEREAS, unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society and this program represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy and goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act; and
WHEREAS, Republican House Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, an author of the Patriot Act and Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee at the time of Section 215's passage, called the Section 215 surveillance program "an abuse of that law," writing that, "based on the scope of the released order, both the administration and the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court are relying on an unbounded interpretation of the act that Congress never intended," therefore be it
RESOLVED, the Republican National Committee encourages Republican lawmakers to enact legislation to amend Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make it clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity, phone records and correspondence -- electronic, physical, and otherwise -- of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and tha