I really don't recommend LMDE. Even though it is a rolling release based on Debian Testing, the packages are still vetted by the LMDE team. I tried using it at the end of last year and I didn't get *any* updates for the 3 or 4 months I was using it. Not even security updates.
I've since moved to Sabayon, which is Gentoo based with binary packages. Overall a very nice experience. It is not as complete as Ubuntu or Mint, meaning that I've had to do a fair amount of hand configuration. For instance, I had to configure Japanese input by hand. Probably the average English speaking user wouldn't run into too many difficulties. On the plus side, the documentation from Gentoo is excellent and the system is considerably more forgiving to hand tweaking than my Ubuntu box (which I usually break if I try doing things the non-Ubuntu way).
Anyway, I've been a fan of Debian based distributions for ever, and this was my first foray into a Gentoo base distro. I've been very happy with it. I will probably migrate my other machines over at some point.
Authors can, and do, change publishers midstream in a series.
In your example, publisher A decides to short change Ms. Moss on book 5. Ms. Moss moves to publisher B. Publisher B can print book 5 and beyond, and book 1. They get Ms. Moss to modify book 1 slight to make an "updated" version. They also add a "World of PooperLand" appendix which describes never before revealed details about the setting of the story. Finally, for a couple grand they hire an artist to make a set of illustrations for the book. They re-brand the entire thing and push it out the door 1 month before publishing book 5. Then, every year, on the dot, they publish updated versions of books 2-4 with the new illustrations and further insights into PooperLand. By the time they get to book 4, book 7 (the last of the series) is just about to be released and they make yet a new boxed set that includes an exclusive 1-month early version of book 7, for only $500.
Meanwhile publisher A is sitting on books 2-4 and can try to blackmail Ms. Moss by refusing to sell them, hoping the scare her back to the fold. But this just creates a demand for these books that publisher B can exploit every year. So instead, they simply sell as many as they can and when the copyright ends, try to flood the market with free stuff. But they can't hope to compete against publisher B because every true PooperFan (AKA "Brown Pants") knows that publisher A is in league with the devil.
If you're going to fund drug development through government funding, why grant a monopoly? Just release it to the public domain. The company who can produce the cheapest generic will get the business. In order to fund development of drugs, charge a surcharge on all drugs. The whole thing could be revenue neutral from the government's perspective. But the drugs would be cheaper in the end. The reason is that drug companies do *not* charge extra to make up their development costs. They charge what the market will bear. You will essentially be removing the profit from the drug companies and keeping it in the pockets of consumers.
In fact, there is no reason why you would need to reform patent law at all. Allow the drug companies to continue doing what they do now. Allow them to patent as the do now. But add a surcharge on all drugs which pays for a parallel government system to develop generic drugs. Slowly increase the surcharge until you outpace the non-generic companies and make them irrelevant.
Ha ha ha! It's a good idea and would work well. But it would take money out of some of the most powerful companies on the planet. So you would *never* be able to implement it.
I'm not normally interested in US politics. I don't see much difference between one party and the next.
However, "Yes we can" has become "No we can't, but what are we gunna do?" The guy won a Nobel peace prize (... not that it necessarily has much credibility any more...).
I'll take your implication that you aren't an Obama fan at face value, but I still get frustrated when I see a comment like this. It's not about which of the two nearly identical parties has their puppet in the White House. It's about *accepting* it.
What is he supposed to do? I'll tell you. He should quit. There are some things worth taking a stand over. I believe this is one of them. If the president of the USA resigned over this issue, the world would sit up and take notice. Personally, I can accept his failure to be successful on the issue, but only if he seriously does everything that he can.
It's easy to get discouraged when watching a loved one live through that. Personally I think our paliative care options are too limited.
But it's important to remember that many people live long and active lives with very little problems. My grandfather died at 72 as each of his organs started to fail one after the other. It took him a very long time to die in a horrible, painful way. But my father, who is turning 70 this year, still rides his bike 60-70 km at a go, up and down mountains. He plays 18 holes of golf 3 days a week and actually wins local curling tournaments. Certaily he isn't as spry as he was when he was younger, but he's healthier than a lot of people half his age. I rather suspect he'll get hit by a truck long before he loses his faculties.
Death is inevitable; a long debilitating decline into death is much less so. Don't give up.
Last I checked, the major players in the global financial network have actual power. And most central/federal governments, too.
Only the people have the actual power. Financiers, governments, crackers, drug cartels, religions, etc. exist solely at the will of the people.
Have you taken a good look around lately? The people got cut out of the loop decades ago. Time to wake up and smell the napalm.
Large masses of people do have power over the few at the top, the issue is whether or not they choose to exercise that power. The success of the few at the top comes from convincing the many that they are better off with the status quo. It is trivial to take down a bank. Just convince enough people to withdraw their money from the bank. Or alternatively (in countries where the peons have no savings like the US) convince them to stop paying their loans. Do it to enough banks and you collapse the entire economy. Or convince everyone to stop showing up for work. That will do it too.
The power of the people at the top over the broad base of people is illusory. But that does not mean that the power they have over individuals is illusory. As long as they can convince everyone to continue with the status quo, they can do whatever they like to an individual (or several individuals).
It is important for people to realize that the privaledge of the few is a choice of the many. We allow the few power because we believe that the current situation is better than the alternative. If that belief changes, the power dissolves.
Clearly, there is going to be no convincing you. Hell, I don't know if this was originally meant to be a scam or not. I totally agree with you that there is a lot of potential for a scam. But from the evidence at the moment, it does not appear that it is being used as a scam.
If Bitcoin actually emerges as being a legitimate currency (which I highly doubt, for economic reasons), if the original authors cash in their bitcoins, I'm not going to call that a scam. They provided a service and profited by it. Being deflationary is completely beside the point. If it really gets that popular, it's because it is useful at least to some extent.
But I don't think it will get that popular and neither do you (as far as I can tell). If it really were just a scam, the time to cash in has passed, I think. Even if the currency is ultimately deflationary (and it isn't at the moment -- probably not for some time), you need liquidity to move large amounts of bitcoin. That liquidity has been available for nearly a year (again, check the volume on Mt Gox). Not only that, but prices have dropped like a rock. If it is a scam, and *not* intended to become popular, then they have missed their window.
Anyway, like I said, I don't think there is much I can do to get you to look at things from a different angle, so I won't bother you any more. But if it won't insult you (although probably it will), I wonder why you are taking such an extreme stand on this position. It's nothing to either of us. People with opposing views are not your enemies. There is this idea that debating an issue is about winning or losing your position. But there is far more to be gained by listening to someone with a different point of view than by arguing with them.
I actually agree with you on 90% of what you are saying. I just happen to think (having looked fairly deeply in to it) that Bitcoin is a fairly cool piece of software. I think you are missing out on that 10%, which is a shame.
My point was that there aren't any legitimate services being offered. Thus, it really doesn't matter how many times you jumble around the bitcoins, they never get clean. Bitcoin is considerably less anonymous than cash. If you want to do money laundering, cash is going to be way easier (especially in the types of volume that Bitcoin can currently handle).
The original assertion was that Bitcoin is used for exactly 2 purposes: "a scam" (which I interpret to mean "pump and dump"), and money laundering. Even though these things are possible, I just don't see it *actually* happening at the moment.
I don't really disagree with you on most of what you are saying, but I wonder if you possibly have a strange definition of the word "money laundering". Money laundering means taking money earned from illegal activities, using it in a legal activity that makes it hard to figure out where it came from, and then receiving a portion of it back again. The money that comes back comes from a legal activity and is hence "clean", even though the legal activity is being supported by "dirty money". Buying or selling black market items is pretty much the opposite of money laundering.
Many people were worried that bitcoin might be used for money laundering. The scenario goes like this. Funnel money into bitcoin, do some anonymous transactions and then pull the money out again. If you can't track where the money went in, the money coming out is "clean". The problem with Bitcoin is that you can easily trace "dirty" money. If you can trace the source of the money used to buy Bitcoins (which is a given -- if you can't then there is no point in laundering money in the first place), you can trace where it comes back out. At that point, the people have to buy US dollars again and you can figure out who they are. It doesn't matter how much randomization happens in between, if the inputs and the outputs are basically the same group of people, and the money is dirty coming in, you've got money laundering.
What would make it difficult is if there was a legitimate, legal service being run in the middle. Then the bitcoins going out the end could be ordinary people. But there is no such service as you point out. Virtually all the money being used in Bitcoin is for illegal activity.
My point was just that. It does not appear to be used for money laundering at all. It appears to be used almost exclusively for trading in black market goods. And it appears to work well for that purpose.
Fair enough. If that's the case, then the poster needs to get a degree in whatever will make HR happy. Techies don't enter into it...
As it happens, since my teaching gig is over in Japan and my wife wants to live in England, I'll be looking for programming work there. Luckily I have a degree, but I worry about my 5 years of teaching English:-D Learning how to jump through the right hoops in Europe should be an education in itself...
I've never worked in Germany, but what you say makes sense to me. Reading the summary, I was feeling confused. I have *never* worked anywhere where a CS degree impressed good technical people. Either you have the chops or you don't. There are lots of people with CS degrees that are crap. There are lots of people without a CS degree (either other degrees, or no degree at all) who are good. A 40-something with 20-odd years of experience should not be having *any* trouble impressing people on the technical side, no matter what their schooling.
So if the degree is essential for impressing management (and getting in the door), then you should pick a program that will impress management (not techies).
However, like I said, there is something about the way the summary is worded that sounds a few alarm bells for me. It seems possible to me that the person is hitting a ceiling, but it isn't necessarily made of glass. My degree is something I did more than 20 years ago to show that I can be an entry level programmer. If I were a potential employer, I'd rather see what 20 years of experience has done for the person. If it hasn't gotten them much past the point of an entry level programmer, I think I'm going to pass even if they got that degree.
Bitcoin, when it's not a scam, is a method of money laundering.
This is certainly the tag line many people have used for Bitcoin. While there is definitely potential for this, I'm not sure it's *actually* being used that way. The last time Bitcoin was brought up here, someone made the assertion that the first X bitcoins (I won't rely on my crappy memory to say how many) that were created *have not ever been spent*. This is quite easy to verify, and I've been meaning to do it for a while, but haven't gotten around to it.
If that were true, why haven't they been spent? The price for BTC was up over $20 US for a while there. You would think there would be *some* profit taking. I invite you to take a look for yourself. The price has now stabalized at about $5 US. As the price dropped, there should have been panicing selloffs. But volume has been relatively stable for the last year or so (you can check the graphs on Mt.Gox). I see absolutely *no* evidence that this was used at a pump and dump scam in any large way (despite the potential for it).
As for money laundering, Bitcoin makes a poor money laundering system. Everything is easy to track. First, you need to *get* the bitcoints. Mining isn't going to get you enough volume to do anything worth while. This means you have to buy them with real currency. That transaction happens on a server which will almost certainly keep records (i.e. the information is available to law enforcement). It's also difficult to buy BTC with cash. You pretty much need to go through a bank account. After that, each transaction is traceable -- by everyone. You don't even need to be part of the system to track the transactions. Just download the blocks. Only stupid people would use this for money laundering. Using it for large scale illegal transactions would pretty much be like having a neon sign over your head saying, "Arrest Me"!"
What it is undoubtedly (and demonstrateably) being used for is in the trade of black market/and or illegal items including drugs. Personally, I think this is risky business, but probably due to the low monetary value of most transactions (you can track all the transactions on Bitcoin and verify for yourself that there are few large transactions), law enforcement haven't been bothered to really follow up on it. I suspect that will change someday.
For me the surpising thing about Bitcoin is that it actually seems to be working well as an exchange medium for these mail order goods (black market though they may be). The total volume of BTC traded every day is actually impressive and the system has scaled quite well. Not only that, but the only problems to date have been with people having Bitcoins stolen from poorly protected wallets. There have been no problems with Bitcoin itself, despite the fairly heft volume and the liquidity to US dollars. This is impressive, scam or not.
I get the feeling that you are thinking about a specific type of software that you work with frequently. There is nothing wrong with what you are saying in specific circumstances, but most software really doesn't need what you are talking about. I'll reply inline to your comments.
It means someone needs write access to a file system to change a configuration to an application
Somebody *always* needs access to the file system if you're going to write. If you use a database, you are either running under the group of the database, or you are trading one authentication system for another. The applications I write (hint: not web apps) are run using the permissions of the user running it. No additional security is necessary (the user *should* be able to write his own configuration). If I am writing some multi-user application where I need to write data for users that don't have a shell account on the machine, the authentication mechanisms in a database *may* make it more attractive, but it really depends on the situation.
complications arising from scaling to multiple machines requiring either duplicate identical configs, shared network paths, and the associated complexities
That is a rather specific set of requirements. The vast majority of software written today never needs to be scaled across multiple machines. But if I wrote software that needed to be scaled this way, it is definitely a consideration. Unless scaling was a requirement right out of the gate, I wouldn't design this in. It is not exactly rocket science to refactor the code to make use of a database later.
keys, constraints, defined types, all of the benefits of a database should not be ignored out of hand by saying, oh, I don't need them. Really? You don't need data validation/integrity?
Did I mention that I know how to write a parser? Validating input is not exactly difficult. I'm not saying that I don't need this. I'm saying that it is not difficult to provide it in most cases.
There is one good point you make here, though. If you think it is at all possible that you might want to move the data into a database at some point, it is worth normalizing the data up front. It's not so much that you care about the data format on disk, because once it goes in a database you lose the ability to play with it directly anyway. But if it moves into a database you may be in for some nasty refactoring of your model objects if you don't plan ahead. Object relational mapping is always a PITA.
How about your backup?
How is a database easier to back up than a flat file???? Especially if it's a text file.
Like I said, you are probably thinking specifically about multi-user applications, available on a network to people who don't have shell accounts on the machines that the application is running one. You are probably thinking either of large data sets, or at least large numbers of small datasets that need to be tracked and maintained. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people who litterally think that *everything* needs to be in a database. I've got a gui app with 5 things that can be configured. Let's start up MySQL and store those 5 things in there! There was even a Linux distribution (I forget the name) where they stuck every single configuration file on the system into a database.
I'm not against databses where the use is legitimate. I'm complaining that some people are database crazy.
There are also places in the world where adultery is illegal. The punishment for women can even be death. It's one of the major women's rights issues world wide.
Developers who think that *everything* needs to be in a database scare the crap out of me. Sometimes flat files are a really good idea. Sometimes putting something in a human readable form that can be viewed and edited with a normal text editor is a really good idea. There are many, many things where I don't need to search vast amounts of data, where I don't need atomic commits, where I don't need rollback, etc, etc. For those things I use a flat file.
Admitedly, I know the difference between regular, context free and context sensitive grammars and I know how to write a parser. Unfortunately, this isn't always common knowledge in a software team:-P
CFLs burn out quickly if you cycle them. Once you turn them on, they shouldn't be turned off for 20 minutes. This makes them less than ideal for some locations (like the bathroom, hallway, etc). I currently have CFLs as the main lighting in areas like the living room, but LEDs in other areas. LEDs are expensive, but it's not like I'll starve if I spend a couple of hundred dollars on lights. Prices are dropping fast (at least here in Japan). It wouldn't surprise me if the cost per lumen approaches CFLs soon.
I've never been one to dislike CFLs. Personally, I like the color of "daylight" bulbls *much* better than incandescent. But I must say that I like my LEDs better than the CFLs. The biggest issue is that the lumens don't drop off as quickly through use. They also come to full brightness more quickly (basically instantly). I will probably switch over completely in the next couple of years.
I would absolutely love to be proven wrong. As it stands, I am not aware of *any* initiatives to increase the search for geothermal wells. My environmentalist friends (who protested against the Hamaoka nuclear power plant) are all vehemently opposed to geothermal and believe fervently that solar energy will save the day. I have tried to educate them, but it's a bit like talking to a brick. They only seem to believe what they want to believe. I accept that it might be different in other parts of the country. In fact, I would celebrate that!
I live in Shizuoka (actually, right next to the Hamaoka power plant). I am well aware of the wind in the Pacific;-) If we can build off-shore wind farms big enough to deal with base generation, that would be fantastic. However, the problem for both wind farms and geothermal is time. I might be wrong, but I don't think we have the technology to build off-shore wind farms of the scale you are proposing (especially ones that can withstand regular typhoons). It will happen eventually, but it will take a very long time. Similarly, geothermal wells take time to find and develop. We need to start 20 years ago.
In the meantime we are stuck with oil, gas and coal and I don't see any way around it...:-( On the plus side, just from an economic point of view, shutting down the nuclear power plants will spur development of other technologies. Oil and gas are not going to get cheaper and they are already pretty damn expensive here.
Japan is one of 3 countries in the world with enough geothermal potential to deal with base load generation. The other two are Iceland and the Philipines. Geothermal is a good idea for base load generation here. But I'm with you in that I wouldn't take nuclear out of the mix until there was a reasonable alternative. It will take 20 years to disocover enough geothermal wells to deal with base load generation. And that's if we actually start looking for them (which we don't appear to be doing). Coal, gas and oil are not reasonable alternatives in my mind.
Living in the prefecture containing most of the auto-manufacturing industry as I do, you are completely wrong. All of the major auto-makers had to restrict production due to lack of energy. And that was even on the west side of the energy divide, which didn't have rolling blackouts. Conservation for residential and office workers is not a problem. People are already used to setting their air conditioners to 28C (and heaters to 15C in the winter). Every second light standard is turned off where I live and I, personally, think it's better that way (hey, Japan is famously "safe" anyway). But for heavy industry, this is a major, major problem.
They want modern clean technology like wind and geothermal.
Instead of just guessing what they want why not try simply listening to them.
Though, I'm not originally from here, I live in Japan. You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
I talk to Japanese people every day. They are against nuclear power. At best, people don't mind wind power. At least most people don't actively complain about the new windmills being put up (and there are a lot going up). But nobody is calling for them as far as I can tell. But people here do NOT want geothermal. There is a fear that it will somehow destroy the onsens (hot springs). This is a major problem, because we have *no* domestic base load generation capacity except geothermal. Even now, as far as I can tell, there is *no* move to find new geothermal wells.
There is, unfortunately, a media fuelled misconception that solar power will solve all the problems. Granted, where I live, it is quite feasible to run most of your house on solar power. But we still need base load generation and we don't have it.
Don't get me wrong. As far as I'm concerned, nuclear was only a stop gap for Japan. It gave us some time to sort out new technologies. It's not like Japan has a domestic supply of nuclear fuel. But by shutting down all the reactors, it really puts the pinch on. I just hope we end up going the right direction in the end...
I hope you are right. But I don't think that an API is *purely* functional. If that were the case, then nobody would care what the API looked like. They wouldn't care how many global variables you had to mess with. They wouldn't care how many parameters were passed to functions. They wouldn't care what the functions/classes/whatever were called. But they do. A lot.
As programmers we spend considerable amount of effort making our APIs easy to use, intuitive, self documenting, etc as well as functional. There is a considerable amount of creative energy spent organizing how objects are created, which methods will go on which objects, how the data will flow between the objects, etc. If it were purely functional, we wouldn't care how it was organized, we would only care that it works.
I agree that each individual call in an API is not copyrightable. The question is whether a collection, which is the result of considerable creative design, is copyrightable.
I hope beyond hope that it is not, but it is not clear to me at all.
It's all hypothetical, so who knows one way or another. My guess is that if the API is copyrightable, it will be so as a collection. In other words, individual interfaces are not copyrightable. They are facts. But the collection as a whole is copyrightable. So you should still be able to implement whatever you need for use, but not the entire thing.
Basically, if the jury decides there was no infringement even if APIs are copyrightable, the judge doesn't have to make a decision one way or another on the issue. This is a good thing There is no point making a precedent if you don't have to.
This is true, but the DVD (or recovery partition) literally does not exist for many customers. My last laptop didn't include any way for me to recover my machine. I didn't care because I wrote over the damn thing with Linux immediately and had no desire to "recover" Windows. It is quite possible that the OP was ignorant of the tools because he was never given them.
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I really don't recommend LMDE. Even though it is a rolling release based on Debian Testing, the packages are still vetted by the LMDE team. I tried using it at the end of last year and I didn't get *any* updates for the 3 or 4 months I was using it. Not even security updates.
I've since moved to Sabayon, which is Gentoo based with binary packages. Overall a very nice experience. It is not as complete as Ubuntu or Mint, meaning that I've had to do a fair amount of hand configuration. For instance, I had to configure Japanese input by hand. Probably the average English speaking user wouldn't run into too many difficulties. On the plus side, the documentation from Gentoo is excellent and the system is considerably more forgiving to hand tweaking than my Ubuntu box (which I usually break if I try doing things the non-Ubuntu way).
Anyway, I've been a fan of Debian based distributions for ever, and this was my first foray into a Gentoo base distro. I've been very happy with it. I will probably migrate my other machines over at some point.
Authors can, and do, change publishers midstream in a series.
In your example, publisher A decides to short change Ms. Moss on book 5. Ms. Moss moves to publisher B. Publisher B can print book 5 and beyond, and book 1. They get Ms. Moss to modify book 1 slight to make an "updated" version. They also add a "World of PooperLand" appendix which describes never before revealed details about the setting of the story. Finally, for a couple grand they hire an artist to make a set of illustrations for the book. They re-brand the entire thing and push it out the door 1 month before publishing book 5. Then, every year, on the dot, they publish updated versions of books 2-4 with the new illustrations and further insights into PooperLand. By the time they get to book 4, book 7 (the last of the series) is just about to be released and they make yet a new boxed set that includes an exclusive 1-month early version of book 7, for only $500.
Meanwhile publisher A is sitting on books 2-4 and can try to blackmail Ms. Moss by refusing to sell them, hoping the scare her back to the fold. But this just creates a demand for these books that publisher B can exploit every year. So instead, they simply sell as many as they can and when the copyright ends, try to flood the market with free stuff. But they can't hope to compete against publisher B because every true PooperFan (AKA "Brown Pants") knows that publisher A is in league with the devil.
No problem.
If you're going to fund drug development through government funding, why grant a monopoly? Just release it to the public domain. The company who can produce the cheapest generic will get the business. In order to fund development of drugs, charge a surcharge on all drugs. The whole thing could be revenue neutral from the government's perspective. But the drugs would be cheaper in the end. The reason is that drug companies do *not* charge extra to make up their development costs. They charge what the market will bear. You will essentially be removing the profit from the drug companies and keeping it in the pockets of consumers.
In fact, there is no reason why you would need to reform patent law at all. Allow the drug companies to continue doing what they do now. Allow them to patent as the do now. But add a surcharge on all drugs which pays for a parallel government system to develop generic drugs. Slowly increase the surcharge until you outpace the non-generic companies and make them irrelevant.
Ha ha ha! It's a good idea and would work well. But it would take money out of some of the most powerful companies on the planet. So you would *never* be able to implement it.
I'm not normally interested in US politics. I don't see much difference between one party and the next.
However, "Yes we can" has become "No we can't, but what are we gunna do?" The guy won a Nobel peace prize (... not that it necessarily has much credibility any more ...).
I'll take your implication that you aren't an Obama fan at face value, but I still get frustrated when I see a comment like this. It's not about which of the two nearly identical parties has their puppet in the White House. It's about *accepting* it.
What is he supposed to do? I'll tell you. He should quit. There are some things worth taking a stand over. I believe this is one of them. If the president of the USA resigned over this issue, the world would sit up and take notice. Personally, I can accept his failure to be successful on the issue, but only if he seriously does everything that he can.
It's easy to get discouraged when watching a loved one live through that. Personally I think our paliative care options are too limited.
But it's important to remember that many people live long and active lives with very little problems. My grandfather died at 72 as each of his organs started to fail one after the other. It took him a very long time to die in a horrible, painful way. But my father, who is turning 70 this year, still rides his bike 60-70 km at a go, up and down mountains. He plays 18 holes of golf 3 days a week and actually wins local curling tournaments. Certaily he isn't as spry as he was when he was younger, but he's healthier than a lot of people half his age. I rather suspect he'll get hit by a truck long before he loses his faculties.
Death is inevitable; a long debilitating decline into death is much less so. Don't give up.
Have you taken a good look around lately? The people got cut out of the loop decades ago. Time to wake up and smell the napalm.
Large masses of people do have power over the few at the top, the issue is whether or not they choose to exercise that power. The success of the few at the top comes from convincing the many that they are better off with the status quo. It is trivial to take down a bank. Just convince enough people to withdraw their money from the bank. Or alternatively (in countries where the peons have no savings like the US) convince them to stop paying their loans. Do it to enough banks and you collapse the entire economy. Or convince everyone to stop showing up for work. That will do it too.
The power of the people at the top over the broad base of people is illusory. But that does not mean that the power they have over individuals is illusory. As long as they can convince everyone to continue with the status quo, they can do whatever they like to an individual (or several individuals).
It is important for people to realize that the privaledge of the few is a choice of the many. We allow the few power because we believe that the current situation is better than the alternative. If that belief changes, the power dissolves.
Clearly, there is going to be no convincing you. Hell, I don't know if this was originally meant to be a scam or not. I totally agree with you that there is a lot of potential for a scam. But from the evidence at the moment, it does not appear that it is being used as a scam.
If Bitcoin actually emerges as being a legitimate currency (which I highly doubt, for economic reasons), if the original authors cash in their bitcoins, I'm not going to call that a scam. They provided a service and profited by it. Being deflationary is completely beside the point. If it really gets that popular, it's because it is useful at least to some extent.
But I don't think it will get that popular and neither do you (as far as I can tell). If it really were just a scam, the time to cash in has passed, I think. Even if the currency is ultimately deflationary (and it isn't at the moment -- probably not for some time), you need liquidity to move large amounts of bitcoin. That liquidity has been available for nearly a year (again, check the volume on Mt Gox). Not only that, but prices have dropped like a rock. If it is a scam, and *not* intended to become popular, then they have missed their window.
Anyway, like I said, I don't think there is much I can do to get you to look at things from a different angle, so I won't bother you any more. But if it won't insult you (although probably it will), I wonder why you are taking such an extreme stand on this position. It's nothing to either of us. People with opposing views are not your enemies. There is this idea that debating an issue is about winning or losing your position. But there is far more to be gained by listening to someone with a different point of view than by arguing with them.
I actually agree with you on 90% of what you are saying. I just happen to think (having looked fairly deeply in to it) that Bitcoin is a fairly cool piece of software. I think you are missing out on that 10%, which is a shame.
My point was that there aren't any legitimate services being offered. Thus, it really doesn't matter how many times you jumble around the bitcoins, they never get clean. Bitcoin is considerably less anonymous than cash. If you want to do money laundering, cash is going to be way easier (especially in the types of volume that Bitcoin can currently handle).
The original assertion was that Bitcoin is used for exactly 2 purposes: "a scam" (which I interpret to mean "pump and dump"), and money laundering. Even though these things are possible, I just don't see it *actually* happening at the moment.
I don't really disagree with you on most of what you are saying, but I wonder if you possibly have a strange definition of the word "money laundering". Money laundering means taking money earned from illegal activities, using it in a legal activity that makes it hard to figure out where it came from, and then receiving a portion of it back again. The money that comes back comes from a legal activity and is hence "clean", even though the legal activity is being supported by "dirty money". Buying or selling black market items is pretty much the opposite of money laundering.
Many people were worried that bitcoin might be used for money laundering. The scenario goes like this. Funnel money into bitcoin, do some anonymous transactions and then pull the money out again. If you can't track where the money went in, the money coming out is "clean". The problem with Bitcoin is that you can easily trace "dirty" money. If you can trace the source of the money used to buy Bitcoins (which is a given -- if you can't then there is no point in laundering money in the first place), you can trace where it comes back out. At that point, the people have to buy US dollars again and you can figure out who they are. It doesn't matter how much randomization happens in between, if the inputs and the outputs are basically the same group of people, and the money is dirty coming in, you've got money laundering.
What would make it difficult is if there was a legitimate, legal service being run in the middle. Then the bitcoins going out the end could be ordinary people. But there is no such service as you point out. Virtually all the money being used in Bitcoin is for illegal activity.
My point was just that. It does not appear to be used for money laundering at all. It appears to be used almost exclusively for trading in black market goods. And it appears to work well for that purpose.
Fair enough. If that's the case, then the poster needs to get a degree in whatever will make HR happy. Techies don't enter into it...
As it happens, since my teaching gig is over in Japan and my wife wants to live in England, I'll be looking for programming work there. Luckily I have a degree, but I worry about my 5 years of teaching English :-D Learning how to jump through the right hoops in Europe should be an education in itself...
I've never worked in Germany, but what you say makes sense to me. Reading the summary, I was feeling confused. I have *never* worked anywhere where a CS degree impressed good technical people. Either you have the chops or you don't. There are lots of people with CS degrees that are crap. There are lots of people without a CS degree (either other degrees, or no degree at all) who are good. A 40-something with 20-odd years of experience should not be having *any* trouble impressing people on the technical side, no matter what their schooling.
So if the degree is essential for impressing management (and getting in the door), then you should pick a program that will impress management (not techies).
However, like I said, there is something about the way the summary is worded that sounds a few alarm bells for me. It seems possible to me that the person is hitting a ceiling, but it isn't necessarily made of glass. My degree is something I did more than 20 years ago to show that I can be an entry level programmer. If I were a potential employer, I'd rather see what 20 years of experience has done for the person. If it hasn't gotten them much past the point of an entry level programmer, I think I'm going to pass even if they got that degree.
Bitcoin, when it's not a scam, is a method of money laundering.
This is certainly the tag line many people have used for Bitcoin. While there is definitely potential for this, I'm not sure it's *actually* being used that way. The last time Bitcoin was brought up here, someone made the assertion that the first X bitcoins (I won't rely on my crappy memory to say how many) that were created *have not ever been spent*. This is quite easy to verify, and I've been meaning to do it for a while, but haven't gotten around to it.
If that were true, why haven't they been spent? The price for BTC was up over $20 US for a while there. You would think there would be *some* profit taking. I invite you to take a look for yourself. The price has now stabalized at about $5 US. As the price dropped, there should have been panicing selloffs. But volume has been relatively stable for the last year or so (you can check the graphs on Mt.Gox). I see absolutely *no* evidence that this was used at a pump and dump scam in any large way (despite the potential for it).
As for money laundering, Bitcoin makes a poor money laundering system. Everything is easy to track. First, you need to *get* the bitcoints. Mining isn't going to get you enough volume to do anything worth while. This means you have to buy them with real currency. That transaction happens on a server which will almost certainly keep records (i.e. the information is available to law enforcement). It's also difficult to buy BTC with cash. You pretty much need to go through a bank account. After that, each transaction is traceable -- by everyone. You don't even need to be part of the system to track the transactions. Just download the blocks. Only stupid people would use this for money laundering. Using it for large scale illegal transactions would pretty much be like having a neon sign over your head saying, "Arrest Me"!"
What it is undoubtedly (and demonstrateably) being used for is in the trade of black market/and or illegal items including drugs. Personally, I think this is risky business, but probably due to the low monetary value of most transactions (you can track all the transactions on Bitcoin and verify for yourself that there are few large transactions), law enforcement haven't been bothered to really follow up on it. I suspect that will change someday.
For me the surpising thing about Bitcoin is that it actually seems to be working well as an exchange medium for these mail order goods (black market though they may be). The total volume of BTC traded every day is actually impressive and the system has scaled quite well. Not only that, but the only problems to date have been with people having Bitcoins stolen from poorly protected wallets. There have been no problems with Bitcoin itself, despite the fairly heft volume and the liquidity to US dollars. This is impressive, scam or not.
I get the feeling that you are thinking about a specific type of software that you work with frequently. There is nothing wrong with what you are saying in specific circumstances, but most software really doesn't need what you are talking about. I'll reply inline to your comments.
It means someone needs write access to a file system to change a configuration to an application
Somebody *always* needs access to the file system if you're going to write. If you use a database, you are either running under the group of the database, or you are trading one authentication system for another. The applications I write (hint: not web apps) are run using the permissions of the user running it. No additional security is necessary (the user *should* be able to write his own configuration). If I am writing some multi-user application where I need to write data for users that don't have a shell account on the machine, the authentication mechanisms in a database *may* make it more attractive, but it really depends on the situation.
complications arising from scaling to multiple machines requiring either duplicate identical configs, shared network paths, and the associated complexities
That is a rather specific set of requirements. The vast majority of software written today never needs to be scaled across multiple machines. But if I wrote software that needed to be scaled this way, it is definitely a consideration. Unless scaling was a requirement right out of the gate, I wouldn't design this in. It is not exactly rocket science to refactor the code to make use of a database later.
keys, constraints, defined types, all of the benefits of a database should not be ignored out of hand by saying, oh, I don't need them. Really? You don't need data validation/integrity?
Did I mention that I know how to write a parser? Validating input is not exactly difficult. I'm not saying that I don't need this. I'm saying that it is not difficult to provide it in most cases.
There is one good point you make here, though. If you think it is at all possible that you might want to move the data into a database at some point, it is worth normalizing the data up front. It's not so much that you care about the data format on disk, because once it goes in a database you lose the ability to play with it directly anyway. But if it moves into a database you may be in for some nasty refactoring of your model objects if you don't plan ahead. Object relational mapping is always a PITA.
How about your backup?
How is a database easier to back up than a flat file???? Especially if it's a text file.
Like I said, you are probably thinking specifically about multi-user applications, available on a network to people who don't have shell accounts on the machines that the application is running one. You are probably thinking either of large data sets, or at least large numbers of small datasets that need to be tracked and maintained. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people who litterally think that *everything* needs to be in a database. I've got a gui app with 5 things that can be configured. Let's start up MySQL and store those 5 things in there! There was even a Linux distribution (I forget the name) where they stuck every single configuration file on the system into a database.
I'm not against databses where the use is legitimate. I'm complaining that some people are database crazy.
There are also places in the world where adultery is illegal. The punishment for women can even be death. It's one of the major women's rights issues world wide.
Developers who think that *everything* needs to be in a database scare the crap out of me. Sometimes flat files are a really good idea. Sometimes putting something in a human readable form that can be viewed and edited with a normal text editor is a really good idea. There are many, many things where I don't need to search vast amounts of data, where I don't need atomic commits, where I don't need rollback, etc, etc. For those things I use a flat file.
Admitedly, I know the difference between regular, context free and context sensitive grammars and I know how to write a parser. Unfortunately, this isn't always common knowledge in a software team :-P
CFLs burn out quickly if you cycle them. Once you turn them on, they shouldn't be turned off for 20 minutes. This makes them less than ideal for some locations (like the bathroom, hallway, etc). I currently have CFLs as the main lighting in areas like the living room, but LEDs in other areas. LEDs are expensive, but it's not like I'll starve if I spend a couple of hundred dollars on lights. Prices are dropping fast (at least here in Japan). It wouldn't surprise me if the cost per lumen approaches CFLs soon.
I've never been one to dislike CFLs. Personally, I like the color of "daylight" bulbls *much* better than incandescent. But I must say that I like my LEDs better than the CFLs. The biggest issue is that the lumens don't drop off as quickly through use. They also come to full brightness more quickly (basically instantly). I will probably switch over completely in the next couple of years.
I would absolutely love to be proven wrong. As it stands, I am not aware of *any* initiatives to increase the search for geothermal wells. My environmentalist friends (who protested against the Hamaoka nuclear power plant) are all vehemently opposed to geothermal and believe fervently that solar energy will save the day. I have tried to educate them, but it's a bit like talking to a brick. They only seem to believe what they want to believe. I accept that it might be different in other parts of the country. In fact, I would celebrate that!
I live in Shizuoka (actually, right next to the Hamaoka power plant). I am well aware of the wind in the Pacific ;-) If we can build off-shore wind farms big enough to deal with base generation, that would be fantastic. However, the problem for both wind farms and geothermal is time. I might be wrong, but I don't think we have the technology to build off-shore wind farms of the scale you are proposing (especially ones that can withstand regular typhoons). It will happen eventually, but it will take a very long time. Similarly, geothermal wells take time to find and develop. We need to start 20 years ago.
In the meantime we are stuck with oil, gas and coal and I don't see any way around it... :-( On the plus side, just from an economic point of view, shutting down the nuclear power plants will spur development of other technologies. Oil and gas are not going to get cheaper and they are already pretty damn expensive here.
Japan is one of 3 countries in the world with enough geothermal potential to deal with base load generation. The other two are Iceland and the Philipines. Geothermal is a good idea for base load generation here. But I'm with you in that I wouldn't take nuclear out of the mix until there was a reasonable alternative. It will take 20 years to disocover enough geothermal wells to deal with base load generation. And that's if we actually start looking for them (which we don't appear to be doing). Coal, gas and oil are not reasonable alternatives in my mind.
Maybe if you friend request her on Facebook, she'll let some details slide. Keep us informed!
Living in the prefecture containing most of the auto-manufacturing industry as I do, you are completely wrong. All of the major auto-makers had to restrict production due to lack of energy. And that was even on the west side of the energy divide, which didn't have rolling blackouts. Conservation for residential and office workers is not a problem. People are already used to setting their air conditioners to 28C (and heaters to 15C in the winter). Every second light standard is turned off where I live and I, personally, think it's better that way (hey, Japan is famously "safe" anyway). But for heavy industry, this is a major, major problem.
They want modern clean technology like wind and geothermal.
Instead of just guessing what they want why not try simply listening to them.
Though, I'm not originally from here, I live in Japan. You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
I talk to Japanese people every day. They are against nuclear power. At best, people don't mind wind power. At least most people don't actively complain about the new windmills being put up (and there are a lot going up). But nobody is calling for them as far as I can tell. But people here do NOT want geothermal. There is a fear that it will somehow destroy the onsens (hot springs). This is a major problem, because we have *no* domestic base load generation capacity except geothermal. Even now, as far as I can tell, there is *no* move to find new geothermal wells.
There is, unfortunately, a media fuelled misconception that solar power will solve all the problems. Granted, where I live, it is quite feasible to run most of your house on solar power. But we still need base load generation and we don't have it.
Don't get me wrong. As far as I'm concerned, nuclear was only a stop gap for Japan. It gave us some time to sort out new technologies. It's not like Japan has a domestic supply of nuclear fuel. But by shutting down all the reactors, it really puts the pinch on. I just hope we end up going the right direction in the end...
I hope you are right. But I don't think that an API is *purely* functional. If that were the case, then nobody would care what the API looked like. They wouldn't care how many global variables you had to mess with. They wouldn't care how many parameters were passed to functions. They wouldn't care what the functions/classes/whatever were called. But they do. A lot.
As programmers we spend considerable amount of effort making our APIs easy to use, intuitive, self documenting, etc as well as functional. There is a considerable amount of creative energy spent organizing how objects are created, which methods will go on which objects, how the data will flow between the objects, etc. If it were purely functional, we wouldn't care how it was organized, we would only care that it works.
I agree that each individual call in an API is not copyrightable. The question is whether a collection, which is the result of considerable creative design, is copyrightable.
I hope beyond hope that it is not, but it is not clear to me at all.
It's all hypothetical, so who knows one way or another. My guess is that if the API is copyrightable, it will be so as a collection. In other words, individual interfaces are not copyrightable. They are facts. But the collection as a whole is copyrightable. So you should still be able to implement whatever you need for use, but not the entire thing.
Basically, if the jury decides there was no infringement even if APIs are copyrightable, the judge doesn't have to make a decision one way or another on the issue. This is a good thing There is no point making a precedent if you don't have to.
This is true, but the DVD (or recovery partition) literally does not exist for many customers. My last laptop didn't include any way for me to recover my machine. I didn't care because I wrote over the damn thing with Linux immediately and had no desire to "recover" Windows. It is quite possible that the OP was ignorant of the tools because he was never given them.