The value of Bitcoins is that they cannot be issued and they really cannot be confiscated (well, it's much harder to confiscate your Bitcoins than your fiat currency you have in a bank).
Bitcoins also allow for almost instantaneous transactions over the Internet that cannot be reversed, so one Bitcoin is in exactly one location at any one time. There is no tax a government can levy on movement of Bitcoins from one wallet into another.
For these reasons Bitcoins have value of their own. They are a way to move money around. They are really not money in the traditional sense, they are not a good store of value because they have no intrinsic value, it really is based on the size of the network that uses them I think, but they are a good way to transfer purchasing power.
You should know by now, everything that computers do that the users did not mean them to do, regardless of what the user actually told the computer to do is a computer problem.
The economy. It's actually better now than it has been for the last several years and unemployment has been starting to decrease.
- a random wrong thing in the mix.
Unemployment only 'decreased' because half a million of people who were on unemployment moved off of it to other things, like disability and welfare, basically gave up searching for work. Economy is worse than it was even a few years back, you may be confusing the economy with irrelevant asset price indicators in the stock market. The economy (as in money management of the entire system) is more in impossible to pay debt, ever growing inflation and government mode. That's not a good thing at all.
Standard Oil was such a terrible company, constantly lowering prices for its product over the half of century of operations, lowering prices faster than anybody else based on reinvestment and technological and business process improvements.
Totally screwed its customers by lowering prices 6 fold over the first 40 years of operations.
Customers gained so much by the government stepping in to help some third party interests to break up the economy of scale (which was not a monopoly, competition existed), and customers especially gained due to the oil product prices never going down again, because as we know from the Fed, if prices go down customers get hurt.
Oh, and finally government should tax the energy industry at much higher rates, so that the government can get more money from the industry, because obviously the government will be able to use money so much better than the industry in developing energy. All those subsidies that that industry gets in the form of tax credits due to all of its supposed research and development, who do they think they are, researching and developing? Do they think they are the government?
Only government can research and develop as we know, companies do not do that, they are a terrible steward of their profits, government is so much more moral and obviously better at managing other people's money.
What do you mean, everybody knows that's not how you program. You have to create a GUI interface using Visual Basic that's how you track an IP address and incidentally that's how all modern applications are written.
I've been using this amazing technique for a long time now, IDEs like Eclipse make it fairly easy to do that. TFS doesn't explain what is it that he is doing differently.
Right, as if I am talking about fiber that is found in foods. Yes, a person can eat carrots, etc. No, it doesn't mean you should be eating sand on the beach. I see you are trying to be too smart for your own good, do you eat sand on a beach?
You should learn why education developed so much in the last few hundred years then and compare the countries by their manufacturing base and education levels.
In any case, you will get more of what you subsidise and so if you subsidise public education, you'll get more of it, but it won't be of any use, it won't be any good.
You'll get all these worthless sociology and other humanities studies and the rate of students in hard sciences and engineering will be going down, lower and lower the less manufacturing you have.
USA is bankrupt, what 'public education' can you possibly be talking about?
What public education can you be talking about when you have destroyed the manufacturing sector by inflation, regulations and taxes? There is no need for education if you have no manufacturing.
There is no amount of 'public good' that can be created by government intervention.
That's what you get if you privatise the schools but not the funding for the schools.
Schools should be private of-course, just like shoes should be private and there should be no taxes going towards schools just like there are no taxes going towards shoes.
Do you see cost over-runs, no incentives to keep costs down, no incentive to make availability or improve usability, no incentives for all the other stuff in the shoes market?
There is no difference between shoes and schools, the difference is government money and all matter of involvement, regulations, etc.
You have that backwards. Bernie wasn't investigated because the regulators are weak. Such things do not happen in well-governed countries were regulators have not been castrated by Randroids.
- really, 'castrated by Randroids'? So how many actual libertarians do you count in US government that actually are libertarian in practice and how much of actual power do libertarians hold in USA government, given that government is constantly growing in size, growing in spending, growing its power, which is the exact opposite of what the libertarian position is: that government must not grow in power, its powers should not grow, the powers should be exactly the same at all time, government must be confined to only the powers authorised to it by the Constitution?
You are clearly on a wild goose chase here.
Yeah, right. But then you are deranged and crazy, who cares about what you are against or believe in?
- yes, in the land of the liars and thieves an honest man does look like he is 'deranged', I will give you that much.
That's why there is regulation and official approval procedures. And while crappy coffee machines can be had, they are unlikely to be unsafe thanks to regulation.
- no, that's not why they are unlikely to be unsafe. These things are unlikely to be unsafe because nobody will buy such products.
That is: you are free to get as bad a reputation as you want, but not free to do so by injuring or killing people. I think that is quite sensible.
- as I said, nobody wants to kill people by selling bad products that misbehave. If a product ends up killing somebody, there is always a day in court and if it can be shown that a company was negligent and did something that was stupid and didn't care to correct the error while the company was aware of it, then that is all that is needed.
Actually government regulations make people complacent, thinking that they are protected by regulations.
How many people lost money with Bernie Madoff, while he didn't murder them, he lost billions of their money and they believed they were OK, because of various government regulations. Regulations create false sense of security, just like TSA does in airports and regulations cost money to pass compliance, thus making products more expensive.
I am against all government business regulations, they are all unconstitutional, thus illegal. For example I am against FDA and there you definitely can get hurt. However it is my opinion that more people get hurt because of FDA rather than are safe due to FDA, because FDA creates an enormous barrier to entry, preventing small companies from even thinking about their own health products, thus there is much less investment in the field of medications, procedures, apparatuses than there would be without FDA.
FDA kills people in many different ways, this is just one of them.
That is true. Regulation ensures that we only have well-designed coffee makers. At least on the safety front. Regulation ensures that companies do not compromise safety with cost of production. Personally, I think that this is a good idea.
- no it's not true. Regulations have nothing to do with how well designed coffee makers are, people who build them don't want to kill their customers anymore than anybody else that produces other things.
Reputation is what counts, brand name recognition is important to a company and having brand name tied to a series of fires that kill customers is lethal to a business.
Says who that a coffee maker that never gets turned off should be able to never get turned off?
How about a stove, what if a stove is constantly on, eventually this can cause fire one way or another, something will fall on the stove if its on all the time and will burn the house down.
Should the stove manufacturer have a huge warning label saying: you fucking idiots, turn the stove off if not in use?
What's is a coffee maker? It's an electric appliance and over time parts of electric appliances can give out and cause a fire. Just like anything else gives out and causes some damage.
Coffee makers will turn off automatically if not used for some time of-course, a coffee maker is unlikely to cause fire.
Back to the magnets, why should a magnet manufacturer put extra labels on the product saying: don't eat the magnets?
Should a needle manufacturer put labels on needles saying: don't eat needles?
Should a bleach manufacturer put labels on that saying: don't drink it? I mean there are probably labels there, I don't know, I haven't read warning labels on household chemicals, but if I decide to have a cup of bleach, should I be able to sue the bleach company because I have a defective brain and can't figure out not to drink chlorine?
Should somebody be able to sue a rope manufacturer if they hang their kid by the neck until the kid dies and then they say they didn't know the kid would die without a label on the rope?
You're assuming that the reason for the warnings is to save lives...
It's actually purely to get themselves off the hook after lives are lost. Plausible deniability!
- but do you think that it is wrong for a company to try and get themselves off the hook after "lives are lost", given the fact that if they don't put a label on there will be a lawsuit and they will eventually go bankrupt because of lawsuits?
What is the difference why they put a warning label onto their product?
Do you buy detergent? Do you need detergent or would you prefer to make your own soap to wash clothes? So if you drink that detergent (or your kid does), do you think the company should be sued?
Well, if there is no warning label on the packaging then the company can be sued, that's what government did, it created this insanity that companies will be sued if they don't put warning labels.
Companies got sued enough times to be overzealous in terms of labels, in USA there are labels on everything. In Europe there are much fewer labels. Is it that kids are dumber in USA? Not from the birth they are not.
Will the kids become dumber over time simply in comparison, because they are not learning to deal with things that kids elsewhere have to learn to deal with? I don't know, I didn't do a study on such things. At least in USA some kids learn to be around firearms and most don't shoot themselves or others.
I don't think there should be warnings about most things, if something is not a food and is an actual poison, as in: if you breath near it you will get poisoned, then there should be some warning I think, but warnings on magnets not to eat them? I think that's up to a company, not up to government to decide.
Tampon sensors.... OK, next innovation is phone that wipes your ass. Make it look like 3 sea shells and you solve one of the great mysteries of the universe.
It really shouldn't be soup, it should be pizza. Oh, and primordial.... whatever didn't have to be diet, there was nobody around to look at it, so it didn't care.
Don't overdo anything, don't overuse any frameworks.
Actually if your idea is good and takes off and attracts investors, you'll be able to change your technology as you go, that's what everybody goes through anyway.
Do a simple set up, as simple as possible, don't try go figure out how to parametrise everything and create nice administration interfaces, actually hardcode a bunch of stuff because that's the fastest way to do something and you will have a LOT of stuff to do if you are starting from scratch.
As you go you will be able to replace components, just ensure that you actually have components. Ensure that you have layers and components by standardising your approach. Common tasks go into common layers, components are boxes, that are fit together with APIs.
Start by making it as simple as possible and that will also allow you to keep it relatively fast. Keep as much data as possible in memory so that your database executions are minimised.
Without knowing anything specific about your idea, that's the general advice that can be given, there isn't any information on whether transactions are important or not, whether it's supposed to serve huge amounts of static data or whether it allows users to communicate with each other in real time or whatever, so if you want better answers you should ask more detailed questions.
How about the governments stay out of private business and let the people make their own decisions whether to let their kids play games and make in game purchases and better explains how is it that the governments force aggressive purchases of bank debt by tax payers?
I was going to post the same thing: it's about people getting poorer.
Gasoline usage and generally energy usage is in a decline in USA, and it's funny to hear people talk about all this 'higher productivity' of the Americans while energy usage is now at a 10 year low and energy imports are at 25 year low. How are Americans so much more productive while using so much less energy?
The reality is that Americans are getting poorer, that is why they are using less energy, that is why they are buying fewer PCs and everything else.
However while Americans are getting less productive (more and more unemployment, fancy number tricks with unemployment figures don't change that) the productivity is happening somewhere else. Productivity has gone somewhere else, so purchasing power has gone somewhere else.
Soon the Chinese will be buying all the PCs that Americans aren't buying, the manufacturers should take a note and Americans should prepare to sell their old stuff on Alibaba or eBay back to China.
Slashdot Mirror
Yo Dawg, I heard you like a PC, so I put a PC in your PC so you can PC while you PC.
The value of Bitcoins is that they cannot be issued and they really cannot be confiscated (well, it's much harder to confiscate your Bitcoins than your fiat currency you have in a bank).
Bitcoins also allow for almost instantaneous transactions over the Internet that cannot be reversed, so one Bitcoin is in exactly one location at any one time. There is no tax a government can levy on movement of Bitcoins from one wallet into another.
For these reasons Bitcoins have value of their own. They are a way to move money around. They are really not money in the traditional sense, they are not a good store of value because they have no intrinsic value, it really is based on the size of the network that uses them I think, but they are a good way to transfer purchasing power.
so the 12 pounds of meat will cost fewer and fewer fractions of an ounce of gold, what part of that is difficult to grasp?
You should know by now, everything that computers do that the users did not mean them to do, regardless of what the user actually told the computer to do is a computer problem.
The economy. It's actually better now than it has been for the last several years and unemployment has been starting to decrease.
- a random wrong thing in the mix.
Unemployment only 'decreased' because half a million of people who were on unemployment moved off of it to other things, like disability and welfare, basically gave up searching for work. Economy is worse than it was even a few years back, you may be confusing the economy with irrelevant asset price indicators in the stock market. The economy (as in money management of the entire system) is more in impossible to pay debt, ever growing inflation and government mode. That's not a good thing at all.
Standard Oil was such a terrible company, constantly lowering prices for its product over the half of century of operations, lowering prices faster than anybody else based on reinvestment and technological and business process improvements.
Totally screwed its customers by lowering prices 6 fold over the first 40 years of operations.
Customers gained so much by the government stepping in to help some third party interests to break up the economy of scale (which was not a monopoly, competition existed), and customers especially gained due to the oil product prices never going down again, because as we know from the Fed, if prices go down customers get hurt.
Oh, and finally government should tax the energy industry at much higher rates, so that the government can get more money from the industry, because obviously the government will be able to use money so much better than the industry in developing energy. All those subsidies that that industry gets in the form of tax credits due to all of its supposed research and development, who do they think they are, researching and developing? Do they think they are the government?
Only government can research and develop as we know, companies do not do that, they are a terrible steward of their profits, government is so much more moral and obviously better at managing other people's money.
What do you mean, everybody knows that's not how you program. You have to create a GUI interface using Visual Basic that's how you track an IP address and incidentally that's how all modern applications are written.
I've been using this amazing technique for a long time now, IDEs like Eclipse make it fairly easy to do that. TFS doesn't explain what is it that he is doing differently.
Right, as if I am talking about fiber that is found in foods. Yes, a person can eat carrots, etc. No, it doesn't mean you should be eating sand on the beach. I see you are trying to be too smart for your own good, do you eat sand on a beach?
You should learn why education developed so much in the last few hundred years then and compare the countries by their manufacturing base and education levels.
In any case, you will get more of what you subsidise and so if you subsidise public education, you'll get more of it, but it won't be of any use, it won't be any good.
You'll get all these worthless sociology and other humanities studies and the rate of students in hard sciences and engineering will be going down, lower and lower the less manufacturing you have.
USA is bankrupt, what 'public education' can you possibly be talking about?
What public education can you be talking about when you have destroyed the manufacturing sector by inflation, regulations and taxes? There is no need for education if you have no manufacturing.
There is no amount of 'public good' that can be created by government intervention.
That's what you get if you privatise the schools but not the funding for the schools.
Schools should be private of-course, just like shoes should be private and there should be no taxes going towards schools just like there are no taxes going towards shoes.
Do you see cost over-runs, no incentives to keep costs down, no incentive to make availability or improve usability, no incentives for all the other stuff in the shoes market?
There is no difference between shoes and schools, the difference is government money and all matter of involvement, regulations, etc.
It's a scam alright.
Really? How am I 'making a strawman' there? Are magnets food?
Tell me, should magnets be part of human diet?
Are magnets made with asbestos? Or maybe with dynamite?
Maybe those are radioactive magnets?
Does breathing near those magnets cause death?
Are those magnets deliberately made hot and if you hold them you will burn your hand?
Since when are people so stupid they need to be told not to eat magnets, metals, glass, marbles, sand, pieces of wood?
You have that backwards. Bernie wasn't investigated because the regulators are weak. Such things do not happen in well-governed countries were regulators have not been castrated by Randroids.
- really, 'castrated by Randroids'? So how many actual libertarians do you count in US government that actually are libertarian in practice and how much of actual power do libertarians hold in USA government, given that government is constantly growing in size, growing in spending, growing its power, which is the exact opposite of what the libertarian position is: that government must not grow in power, its powers should not grow, the powers should be exactly the same at all time, government must be confined to only the powers authorised to it by the Constitution?
You are clearly on a wild goose chase here.
Yeah, right. But then you are deranged and crazy, who cares about what you are against or believe in?
- yes, in the land of the liars and thieves an honest man does look like he is 'deranged', I will give you that much.
That's why there is regulation and official approval procedures. And while crappy coffee machines can be had, they are unlikely to be unsafe thanks to regulation.
- no, that's not why they are unlikely to be unsafe. These things are unlikely to be unsafe because nobody will buy such products.
That is: you are free to get as bad a reputation as you want, but not free to do so by injuring or killing people. I think that is quite sensible.
- as I said, nobody wants to kill people by selling bad products that misbehave. If a product ends up killing somebody, there is always a day in court and if it can be shown that a company was negligent and did something that was stupid and didn't care to correct the error while the company was aware of it, then that is all that is needed.
Actually government regulations make people complacent, thinking that they are protected by regulations.
How many people lost money with Bernie Madoff, while he didn't murder them, he lost billions of their money and they believed they were OK, because of various government regulations. Regulations create false sense of security, just like TSA does in airports and regulations cost money to pass compliance, thus making products more expensive.
I am against all government business regulations, they are all unconstitutional, thus illegal. For example I am against FDA and there you definitely can get hurt. However it is my opinion that more people get hurt because of FDA rather than are safe due to FDA, because FDA creates an enormous barrier to entry, preventing small companies from even thinking about their own health products, thus there is much less investment in the field of medications, procedures, apparatuses than there would be without FDA.
FDA kills people in many different ways, this is just one of them.
That is true. Regulation ensures that we only have well-designed coffee makers. At least on the safety front. Regulation ensures that companies do not compromise safety with cost of production. Personally, I think that this is a good idea.
- no it's not true. Regulations have nothing to do with how well designed coffee makers are, people who build them don't want to kill their customers anymore than anybody else that produces other things.
Reputation is what counts, brand name recognition is important to a company and having brand name tied to a series of fires that kill customers is lethal to a business.
Says who that a coffee maker that never gets turned off should be able to never get turned off?
How about a stove, what if a stove is constantly on, eventually this can cause fire one way or another, something will fall on the stove if its on all the time and will burn the house down.
Should the stove manufacturer have a huge warning label saying: you fucking idiots, turn the stove off if not in use?
What's is a coffee maker? It's an electric appliance and over time parts of electric appliances can give out and cause a fire. Just like anything else gives out and causes some damage.
Coffee makers will turn off automatically if not used for some time of-course, a coffee maker is unlikely to cause fire.
Back to the magnets, why should a magnet manufacturer put extra labels on the product saying: don't eat the magnets?
Should a needle manufacturer put labels on needles saying: don't eat needles?
Should a bleach manufacturer put labels on that saying: don't drink it? I mean there are probably labels there, I don't know, I haven't read warning labels on household chemicals, but if I decide to have a cup of bleach, should I be able to sue the bleach company because I have a defective brain and can't figure out not to drink chlorine?
Should somebody be able to sue a rope manufacturer if they hang their kid by the neck until the kid dies and then they say they didn't know the kid would die without a label on the rope?
Hmmm.
You're assuming that the reason for the warnings is to save lives...
It's actually purely to get themselves off the hook after lives are lost. Plausible deniability!
- but do you think that it is wrong for a company to try and get themselves off the hook after "lives are lost", given the fact that if they don't put a label on there will be a lawsuit and they will eventually go bankrupt because of lawsuits?
What is the difference why they put a warning label onto their product?
Do you buy detergent? Do you need detergent or would you prefer to make your own soap to wash clothes? So if you drink that detergent (or your kid does), do you think the company should be sued?
Well, if there is no warning label on the packaging then the company can be sued, that's what government did, it created this insanity that companies will be sued if they don't put warning labels.
Companies got sued enough times to be overzealous in terms of labels, in USA there are labels on everything. In Europe there are much fewer labels. Is it that kids are dumber in USA? Not from the birth they are not.
Will the kids become dumber over time simply in comparison, because they are not learning to deal with things that kids elsewhere have to learn to deal with? I don't know, I didn't do a study on such things. At least in USA some kids learn to be around firearms and most don't shoot themselves or others.
I don't think there should be warnings about most things, if something is not a food and is an actual poison, as in: if you breath near it you will get poisoned, then there should be some warning I think, but warnings on magnets not to eat them? I think that's up to a company, not up to government to decide.
Wonderful.
Tampon sensors.... OK, next innovation is phone that wipes your ass. Make it look like 3 sea shells and you solve one of the great mysteries of the universe.
It really shouldn't be soup, it should be pizza. Oh, and primordial .... whatever didn't have to be diet, there was nobody around to look at it, so it didn't care.
Don't overdo anything, don't overuse any frameworks.
Actually if your idea is good and takes off and attracts investors, you'll be able to change your technology as you go, that's what everybody goes through anyway.
Do a simple set up, as simple as possible, don't try go figure out how to parametrise everything and create nice administration interfaces, actually hardcode a bunch of stuff because that's the fastest way to do something and you will have a LOT of stuff to do if you are starting from scratch.
As you go you will be able to replace components, just ensure that you actually have components. Ensure that you have layers and components by standardising your approach. Common tasks go into common layers, components are boxes, that are fit together with APIs.
Start by making it as simple as possible and that will also allow you to keep it relatively fast. Keep as much data as possible in memory so that your database executions are minimised.
Without knowing anything specific about your idea, that's the general advice that can be given, there isn't any information on whether transactions are important or not, whether it's supposed to serve huge amounts of static data or whether it allows users to communicate with each other in real time or whatever, so if you want better answers you should ask more detailed questions.
I say unregulate civilian drones, and BAN military and government drones.
- finally, some sense on this fucking site.
The sad part is that those who decide where our resources go can't see further than 10 years
- you mean EVERYBODY.
How about the governments stay out of private business and let the people make their own decisions whether to let their kids play games and make in game purchases and better explains how is it that the governments force aggressive purchases of bank debt by tax payers?
I was going to post the same thing: it's about people getting poorer.
Gasoline usage and generally energy usage is in a decline in USA, and it's funny to hear people talk about all this 'higher productivity' of the Americans while energy usage is now at a 10 year low and energy imports are at 25 year low. How are Americans so much more productive while using so much less energy?
The reality is that Americans are getting poorer, that is why they are using less energy, that is why they are buying fewer PCs and everything else.
However while Americans are getting less productive (more and more unemployment, fancy number tricks with unemployment figures don't change that) the productivity is happening somewhere else. Productivity has gone somewhere else, so purchasing power has gone somewhere else.
Soon the Chinese will be buying all the PCs that Americans aren't buying, the manufacturers should take a note and Americans should prepare to sell their old stuff on Alibaba or eBay back to China.