Your burger is the MySQL protocol. Your toppings are the implementation: MySQL, MariaDB, Percona Server, or any other. You want fries with that? Percona offers support contracts for any MySQL variant.
Error: Invalid object passed to function in line 1. Expected array of 'fact' but got 'handwave' instead.
Is this a "hackathon" or a let's work our employees ragged just before the weekend because we know they have no lives outside of our company? The hackathon is a time-honored tradition amongst hobbyists. When done by professionals, it's not cool, it's exploitative.
It's a sign of how far OSS has come when people have the luxury of quibbling over WHICH free, capable DB they want to base their business model on.
I'm not aware of any reliable numbers on how many copies of those databases are actually in use. Unfortunately, the only numbers that there's any confidence in is based on sales figures, which, given that open source doesn't sell software licenses at anything but, uhh, $0, isn't representational. Oh I know, I'm going to burn in the eternal fires of hell for saying open source isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread, but you did use the phrase "business model."
If we're talking about a database that businesses depend on, then we need to start with the first question a manager's going to ask about: How much support can I get if this thing blows up? And the followup: How does the labor pool look? For example, it's not hard to find people with, say, Cisco hardware experience on their resume. But what about Acme Routers Inc.?
I'm not saying it isn't nice to have choices; nor am I saying that these aren't mature products that can fill the needs for many businesses. I'm just saying, from a management (not geek) perspective... what closes "the sale" is support and labor availability.
Remember: These people are willing to pay tens of thousands for a single server license. They're not doing that for shits and giggles. So if we want open source to spread, we need to do more than thump our bibles and quote the GPL before our morning bread... We need to make a business case. And no, a reply on slashdot with a link to someone's blog or a glowing personal review doesn't count.
Pretend I'm the CTO of a Fortune 500 company, and make your case for switching from, say, Oracle, to MariaDB. Back it up with case studies from other Fortune 500 businesses that have made the switch, and the costs and problems they encountered doing so. And I want to know about support -- if I want it, how long will it take to shove your engineers on a plane and get them to my headquarters to fix a snafu?
The humans seemed to have an awareness of what cyber warfare is (they reference firewalls and viruses in the series), yet they never seemed to develop any more than a rudimentary defensive capability (CND, in military parlance) and no intelligence or attack capabilities (CNE and CNA) whatsoever. This, despite the fact that their adversary was entirely cybernetic in nature. Um...yeah, no, I don't buy it.
40 years ago, the internet didn't exist. 40 years before that, we were riding around in street cars in our cities. And 40 years before that, electricity was the providence of a few guys in lab coats. Technological progress is exponential.
You think, in a future where they have faster than light jump drives, self-aware and self-learning artificial intelligence, etc., that the compounded exponential rate of change between an adversary that has reaction times in the fractions of a nanosecond, would find our primitive meat sacks to even be worth conquering? Please. The only reason they'd have any interest at all in humans would be for the raw materials of the planets they occupy.
The idea that humans would even have a chance is laughably pathetic. We've gotten used to the idea of our own superiority. I suspect, in the distant future, when we give birth to a new form of life, that smug arrogance will mean our end; We'll try and fight.
As an IT professional myself, I can't ever see a situation that would warrant something like this.
I can see a great many situations. But all of them revolve around people being less than professional. Just because you act professionally doesn't mean your boss will, or your coworkers, or another department that feels threatened by a project of yours, etc. You may not be petty, but a lot of people are.
And that pettiness, in the right set of circumstances, can lead to an otherwise respectable person doing something like this. Human beings have a strong need for vengance. Our judicial system is based on it, though it's not politically fashionable (or wise) to say so publicly. When someone is "getting away" with something, the aggrieved party will sometimes resort to vigilantism.
While this could be a one-off situation, and while I never would approve of such behavior, it is more likely that corporate culture played a significant role in the disaster. Without addressing those problems, starting with senior management, this company will find themselves going through this again.
You joke, but it's really not fair that people who choose to have kids get leave that the rest of us don't. I have to work harder to pick up the slack because of your lifestyle choice.
You're putting your own financial desires ahead of the survival of the species. Darwin is not amused.
It's also worth pointing out that providing the same amount of leave to childfree individuals would decrease discrimination to some extent.
Because employers conclude that a new baby may be more important than filing the TPS report, and give time off to the new parents, that's "discrimination"? Dude, sort out your priorities. Seriously.
Surely when employers are interviewing women of child bearing ages, some of them are hesitant to hire because they expect to have to deal with a major leave of absence in the future.
Yes. We have a term for people like that: Assholes. And you know, if the employer is, say, the military, then yeah, getting pregnant could be a problem. But if your job is to file credit applications and you've got 50 other coworkers also doing the same thing... umm, dude... that's not an excuse. And as long as we're going on the whole "Let's hate on women!" moment you're having -- A lot of people are saying that men should have equal time off as well. So what you're saying here is that because men just donate the sperm, they don't have the same family responsibilities that a woman does... and further, we're going to reward that lack of responsibility with more career opportunities. Keep it classy there, Mr. Misogynist.
Giving everyone the ability to take a leave of absence would level the playing field.
No it wouldn't. It's just shifting costs around. Now instead of 13% of the population taking a few weeks off, you've got 100% of the population doing it. Which means productivity take a digger and lower production means less wages, and less jobs. It would wind up hurting you and everyone else more due to lost wages, production, etc. You'd make less money, the apparent driver behind your argument here.
In what world does a company continuing to use it's founders name which has substantial investment in that brand, mean the founder is still involved with the company?
Does Bill Gates still have influence at Microsoft? Yeah, it usually does, actually.
Tripwire was created in the 80s, when it was. And the company still has his name on the door... he's involved, even if he isn't the owner anymore, Einstein. But apparently, Slashdot wants to ask him potentially incriminating questions about his personal life instead of talking about the technology.
You guys should be ashamed to call yourselves nerds. This is crap for People magazine, not a tech news site.
There are a lot of other ways to protect a system from malware than signature scanning. In fact, I would go as far as to say this technology is outmodded. With the considerable resources available to your company, why aren't you guys developing whitelists to validate executable code on a workstation and building a trusted computing platform so only executable code which has been verified can be executed?
Vendors such as Microsoft, Adobe, etc., do release many versions of their software, but these versions can all be verified, byte by byte, on the day of release. Malware, of course, has to be found first, and then a signature developed. As your target market is primarily corporate users, for which software doesn't get updated as often and is already audited and catalogued, why does your company continue to avoid embracing such technology?
The United States has so much trash, we're dumping it into the ocean. For a small additional fee, we'll ship you all the waste of the eastern seaboard. Note to slashdot mods: I'm not joking. We really do dump it into the ocean.
What the GP said still stands. If he, as a person and not a corporation had done exactly that, admitting it, and donating the results would fall very short from freeing his ass from prosecution. He would more likely than not end in jail.
Shhh... don't spoil it. I'm enjoying the slashdotters trying to rage against overbearing police authority and misunderstanding technology... while at the same time having to balance out corporate versus private individual rights, and for the bonus round it's something that ties directly in with their online privacy. I got some popcorn, wanna share? This is gonna be good...
Why does anyone go to prison over something so innocuous?
I broke into your car last night, but I didn't take anything. You wouldn't even know, if not for this message I'm leaving for you. Now, out of curiousity, does it feel innocuous to you to have your personal space violated? There was no harm done, right? Nothing was taken. You wouldn't even have known about it otherwise.
So, you have no reason to feel violated, correct? And I could do the same thing by coming into your house, correct? You know, where your computer is.........
Sure, it was rather poor form to have started on this project, even as a joke, but it seems they've fessed up and handled it well.
... After they were caught with their hand in the cookie jar, yes. Meanwhile, were I, a non-corporation, to do something like this, the FBI would be coming through my door with a bunch of dudes with shotguns for an enhanced "interview" over my connections to terrorism, money laundering, etc.
So, my question is... whether intentional or accidental, it happened. That means it's a crime. So... where is the charge sheet, mmm?
Call me old fashioned, but I'd rather have a government in charge than the digital investigative geniuses at 4chan and reddit.
The government is a vast collection of many organizations. It is not a single entity. There are some things the government does well. To say the government has become corrupt does not say that it doesn't still continue to function in many areas. My car has a defective parking brake: It still serves the function it was meant for.
Well... you know how our mobile phone networks are utter shit compared to the rest of the world? Plan on that continuing. You know the limited range and speed of wifi? Expect more of the same. In short, the cost to society is that the status quo remains.
Now, what happens if we don't get more of the same? Well, there's a chance, mind you I don't know how much of one, that the above-referenced problems would get better, or go away entirely, and even do so affordably.
But let's be honest; there's $12 billion here that the government can put in its coffers, and everyone who agrees with this gets a fat contribution to their re-election campaign. Who the fuck cares about the cost to society? It's just there to serve the rich anyway... Keep eating your dog food, Citizen.
Even the best sites that we PAY for can barely manage to do simple upgrades and changes and say the same..
That's because the biggest threat to any company has never been natural disaster, but government intervention. You can protect against everything but a corrupt government with a desire to seize all of your infrastructure. It started with Steve Jackson Games; It continues to this day. Every day, dozens of corporations are rendered extinct due to seizures by the government... and lacking the ability to continue to conduct business, they lack income, and thus there is no legal challenge mounted. The only businesses that can survive, are those who go multinational, hide their money in secret accounts, and bury themselves in a complex and dense legal framework that makes easy elimination by the government difficult.
All of that costs a lot of money. The pirate bay, on the other hand, doesn't have to worry about that. They don't have to pretend to be "legit", so the operating costs are quite low, and redundancy quite easy. And as they're showing... once you pass a threshold, you can become a criminal organization that the government can't touch, at least as long as your assets are entirely digital and distributed across many jurisdictions.
It is a model I expect more small businesses, legitimate and otherwise, to do more often. It's the only reasonable reaction to a corrupted government... let alone over a hundred of them, all corrupted to varying degrees.
I'll try to sum up where you have been so grossly misinformed rather than write a book worth of responses. Please feel free to break the arguments down one by one in separate posts and I'll do my best to respond if you like.
Okay, I'll try not to take the fact that you're a condescending asshole with only a tenuous grasp on the discussion personally.
The value of bitcoin has nothing to do with the ability to generate a bitcoin.
For every other product; If you increase supply and demand remains constant, the price of said item goes down. For your statement to be true, the laws of supply and demand wouldn't apply to bitcoins. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
Bitcoin has value because it is a medium of exchange, not because you can mine them.
I can use anything as a medium of exchange -- but if the demand outstrips the supply, then the ability to conduct trades decreases. Which means that the cost of each trade goes up because liquidity has decreased. It is for this reason that we print more dollars every year, rather than just creating a set amount, then throwing the printing press in the fire. The number of dollars in circulation has a direct impact on the economy in a multitude of ways. Simply sprinkling magic "digitalization" dust over those logistical considerations doesn't make it vanish.
Dollars would lose their value if people didn't trust them. They're only trustworthy because they can't be easily created.
Actually, Iran owns two of the four printing presses capable of making flawless copies. And they're producing them by the ton (literally) in an effort to leech off of our economy. So there goes your "easily created" argument; and what'll really tickle your goose is when you find out that most of the currency in circulation isn't physical, but electronic. Banks can actually create more money by simply changing a few rows in a database. And despite both of these things, confidence in the dollar doesn't zero out.
. It is the scarcity (like dollars, only more so) and the convenience for exchange (like dollars, but more so in some instances) that makes bitcoin a valuable method of exchange.
I notice that only small-time investors, private parties, and criminals use bitcoin so far. It's not a valuable method of exchange; If it were, more reputable institutions would use it. It's value fluxuates wildly, and the average exchange implodes after only 18 months or so of operation. Your argument is busted, badly. What's worse, bitcoins aren't like dollars in that I can hand you a dollar and complete a transaction without a third party. All of these exchanges exist because straight-across exchange isn't possible right now... and when you add middlemen, you add cost. Yes, you can cut up bitcoins into fractional amounts, but to conduct a direct person-to-person transaction without a 3rd party mediator, you need the whole coin.
The cost of electrictity is certainly present, but it's nothing compared to the cost of armored cars, banks, ATMs, driving deposits to the bank, law enforcement hours spent fighting counterfeiting and minting.
Yes, but those are all examples of fixed costs. Bitcoin production is exponential, not linear. Eventually, it'll fuck itself, to be blunt. And it'll fuck everyone who's using them too. I don't know how I can be any more clear -- exponential cost is very bad when you're tying it to money. It means that every trade inherits that trait. The exponent may be very low right now. Say it only costs a penny today. But double that penny every day for a month and it'll cost $30,370,005. That's not pocket change, now is it?
You seem very concerned about the way people are using resources on a planatery scale. Traditional physically produced currencies are tremendously wasteful. How can you be so against something that cuts down on the waste?
Because I wasn't asleep in basic algebra the day they discussed exponents.
. Even if the court grants the prosecutorâ(TM)s request it remains to be seen how effective any seizures will be.
Ineffectual as always. All they're "seizing" is a forwarding address. It's the digital equivalent of seizing an empty PO box. You just open up a new one and continue on your merry.
It's already been proven that the internet routes around censorship... and it does so through peer communication. People who pirate know other people who pirate... and the seven shades of separation and all that ensures that a new address would propagate through social networks in days.
So, how do I put this gently...
Dear Government, You're fucked, now fuck off. Sincerely, The Internet.
The bitcoin system is designed to make the production of bitcoins far more expensive than their value.
Just out of curiousity, when did the production cost exceeding the value of the thing produced become a good thing in macroeconomic theory?
if those resources are accurately priced, then people will simply stop using them to mine bitcoins.
Right, because we can rely on other things like gold, oil, insurance premiums, etc., to all be accurately priced. Blind faith in the laws of supply and demand doesn't exactly win you many points for your argument.
it's the result of market-breaking subsidies to the production of electricity (like the failure to account for the environmental costs of burning coal).
Our planet is currently warming at a hyper-accelerated rate such that in the last 50 years, it is forcing the extinction of hundreds of species. You're saying that when people are made aware of this, it'll just stop. Can you provide any evidence to support this claim that somehow an enhanced understanding of our environment will, all by itself, result in anyone caring about it?
But, even with an artificially depressed cost of electricity, eventually the cost of mining a bitcoin will be more than the value of a bitcoin.
The cost of mining a bitcoin has exceeded the value of the bitcoin since the first bitcoin was created. And yet, we're continuing to throw resources at it... and considering that it becomes exponentially more expensive... that hasn't yet resulted in an exponential decrease in demand. Can you explain why?
Bitcoin doesn't depend on exponentially increasing our energy supply; only the continued mining of the things does.
No, profiting from bitcoin production depends on exponential increase of our energy supply. And I'm not aware of very many people willing to take on the suicidally stupid proposition that people will realize that personal profit at enormous cost to the environment is "bad" -- since historically, and even presently, profit has become its own justification in most of western civilization.
But the idea behind the thing is not as bad as you describe.
No, it's actually a lot worse than I described. I was trying to downplay the problems because a lot of people here on slashdot hate the government and corporations so much they're willing to believe anyone who says some bullshit crypto-currency will give them some measure of power against those establishments. Bitcoins aren't a sound investment... they're popular because of sociopolitical reasons. And when it becomes clear that the reasoning there is flawed, they'll still cling to it because they bought into it... in the same way you've got piles of climate change deniers who will quite happily continue to scream "This isn't happening! Freeee maaaarrrkkeeett ruleeees!!" right off the edge of the cliff and the planet is literally on fire.
Slashdot Mirror
Your burger is the MySQL protocol. Your toppings are the implementation: MySQL, MariaDB, Percona Server, or any other. You want fries with that? Percona offers support contracts for any MySQL variant.
Error: Invalid object passed to function in line 1. Expected array of 'fact' but got 'handwave' instead.
Is this a "hackathon" or a let's work our employees ragged just before the weekend because we know they have no lives outside of our company? The hackathon is a time-honored tradition amongst hobbyists. When done by professionals, it's not cool, it's exploitative.
It's a sign of how far OSS has come when people have the luxury of quibbling over WHICH free, capable DB they want to base their business model on.
I'm not aware of any reliable numbers on how many copies of those databases are actually in use. Unfortunately, the only numbers that there's any confidence in is based on sales figures, which, given that open source doesn't sell software licenses at anything but, uhh, $0, isn't representational. Oh I know, I'm going to burn in the eternal fires of hell for saying open source isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread, but you did use the phrase "business model."
If we're talking about a database that businesses depend on, then we need to start with the first question a manager's going to ask about: How much support can I get if this thing blows up? And the followup: How does the labor pool look? For example, it's not hard to find people with, say, Cisco hardware experience on their resume. But what about Acme Routers Inc.?
I'm not saying it isn't nice to have choices; nor am I saying that these aren't mature products that can fill the needs for many businesses. I'm just saying, from a management (not geek) perspective... what closes "the sale" is support and labor availability.
Remember: These people are willing to pay tens of thousands for a single server license. They're not doing that for shits and giggles. So if we want open source to spread, we need to do more than thump our bibles and quote the GPL before our morning bread... We need to make a business case. And no, a reply on slashdot with a link to someone's blog or a glowing personal review doesn't count.
Pretend I'm the CTO of a Fortune 500 company, and make your case for switching from, say, Oracle, to MariaDB. Back it up with case studies from other Fortune 500 businesses that have made the switch, and the costs and problems they encountered doing so. And I want to know about support -- if I want it, how long will it take to shove your engineers on a plane and get them to my headquarters to fix a snafu?
The humans seemed to have an awareness of what cyber warfare is (they reference firewalls and viruses in the series), yet they never seemed to develop any more than a rudimentary defensive capability (CND, in military parlance) and no intelligence or attack capabilities (CNE and CNA) whatsoever. This, despite the fact that their adversary was entirely cybernetic in nature. Um...yeah, no, I don't buy it.
40 years ago, the internet didn't exist. 40 years before that, we were riding around in street cars in our cities. And 40 years before that, electricity was the providence of a few guys in lab coats. Technological progress is exponential.
You think, in a future where they have faster than light jump drives, self-aware and self-learning artificial intelligence, etc., that the compounded exponential rate of change between an adversary that has reaction times in the fractions of a nanosecond, would find our primitive meat sacks to even be worth conquering? Please. The only reason they'd have any interest at all in humans would be for the raw materials of the planets they occupy.
The idea that humans would even have a chance is laughably pathetic. We've gotten used to the idea of our own superiority. I suspect, in the distant future, when we give birth to a new form of life, that smug arrogance will mean our end; We'll try and fight.
And we'll lose.
Get ready for the massive amounts of false positives. You went to the firing range last Tuesday? Terrorist Scum!
It detects sulphur. Anyone who has used matches recently will be tagged as well.
As an IT professional myself, I can't ever see a situation that would warrant something like this.
I can see a great many situations. But all of them revolve around people being less than professional. Just because you act professionally doesn't mean your boss will, or your coworkers, or another department that feels threatened by a project of yours, etc. You may not be petty, but a lot of people are.
And that pettiness, in the right set of circumstances, can lead to an otherwise respectable person doing something like this. Human beings have a strong need for vengance. Our judicial system is based on it, though it's not politically fashionable (or wise) to say so publicly. When someone is "getting away" with something, the aggrieved party will sometimes resort to vigilantism.
While this could be a one-off situation, and while I never would approve of such behavior, it is more likely that corporate culture played a significant role in the disaster. Without addressing those problems, starting with senior management, this company will find themselves going through this again.
You joke, but it's really not fair that people who choose to have kids get leave that the rest of us don't. I have to work harder to pick up the slack because of your lifestyle choice.
You're putting your own financial desires ahead of the survival of the species. Darwin is not amused.
It's also worth pointing out that providing the same amount of leave to childfree individuals would decrease discrimination to some extent.
Because employers conclude that a new baby may be more important than filing the TPS report, and give time off to the new parents, that's "discrimination"? Dude, sort out your priorities. Seriously.
Surely when employers are interviewing women of child bearing ages, some of them are hesitant to hire because they expect to have to deal with a major leave of absence in the future.
Yes. We have a term for people like that: Assholes. And you know, if the employer is, say, the military, then yeah, getting pregnant could be a problem. But if your job is to file credit applications and you've got 50 other coworkers also doing the same thing... umm, dude... that's not an excuse. And as long as we're going on the whole "Let's hate on women!" moment you're having -- A lot of people are saying that men should have equal time off as well. So what you're saying here is that because men just donate the sperm, they don't have the same family responsibilities that a woman does... and further, we're going to reward that lack of responsibility with more career opportunities. Keep it classy there, Mr. Misogynist.
Giving everyone the ability to take a leave of absence would level the playing field.
No it wouldn't. It's just shifting costs around. Now instead of 13% of the population taking a few weeks off, you've got 100% of the population doing it. Which means productivity take a digger and lower production means less wages, and less jobs. It would wind up hurting you and everyone else more due to lost wages, production, etc. You'd make less money, the apparent driver behind your argument here.
In what world does a company continuing to use it's founders name which has substantial investment in that brand, mean the founder is still involved with the company?
Does Bill Gates still have influence at Microsoft? Yeah, it usually does, actually.
Its not his company any more Einstein.
Tripwire was created in the 80s, when it was. And the company still has his name on the door... he's involved, even if he isn't the owner anymore, Einstein. But apparently, Slashdot wants to ask him potentially incriminating questions about his personal life instead of talking about the technology.
You guys should be ashamed to call yourselves nerds. This is crap for People magazine, not a tech news site.
There are a lot of other ways to protect a system from malware than signature scanning. In fact, I would go as far as to say this technology is outmodded. With the considerable resources available to your company, why aren't you guys developing whitelists to validate executable code on a workstation and building a trusted computing platform so only executable code which has been verified can be executed?
Vendors such as Microsoft, Adobe, etc., do release many versions of their software, but these versions can all be verified, byte by byte, on the day of release. Malware, of course, has to be found first, and then a signature developed. As your target market is primarily corporate users, for which software doesn't get updated as often and is already audited and catalogued, why does your company continue to avoid embracing such technology?
Dear Europe,
The United States has so much trash, we're dumping it into the ocean. For a small additional fee, we'll ship you all the waste of the eastern seaboard. Note to slashdot mods: I'm not joking. We really do dump it into the ocean.
Buy American. Buy trash.
I don't think it will stop until we stand up and demand government that is FOR the people.
I demand a government FOR the people!
Hangon a second, someone's knocking at my door...
"Do you expect me to win?"
"Ha ha, no Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!"
What the GP said still stands. If he, as a person and not a corporation had done exactly that, admitting it, and donating the results would fall very short from freeing his ass from prosecution. He would more likely than not end in jail.
Shhh... don't spoil it. I'm enjoying the slashdotters trying to rage against overbearing police authority and misunderstanding technology ... while at the same time having to balance out corporate versus private individual rights, and for the bonus round it's something that ties directly in with their online privacy. I got some popcorn, wanna share? This is gonna be good...
Why does anyone go to prison over something so innocuous?
I broke into your car last night, but I didn't take anything. You wouldn't even know, if not for this message I'm leaving for you. Now, out of curiousity, does it feel innocuous to you to have your personal space violated? There was no harm done, right? Nothing was taken. You wouldn't even have known about it otherwise.
So, you have no reason to feel violated, correct? And I could do the same thing by coming into your house, correct? You know, where your computer is.........
Sure, it was rather poor form to have started on this project, even as a joke, but it seems they've fessed up and handled it well.
... After they were caught with their hand in the cookie jar, yes. Meanwhile, were I, a non-corporation, to do something like this, the FBI would be coming through my door with a bunch of dudes with shotguns for an enhanced "interview" over my connections to terrorism, money laundering, etc.
So, my question is... whether intentional or accidental, it happened. That means it's a crime. So... where is the charge sheet, mmm?
This is about British Telecom. They've probably only just heard of VOIP.
They heard about it years ago, but decided it was probably just a fad that would go away... like electricity.
Your turn - can you come up with 3 things that the government does well that ISN'T wasteful or morally questionable?
9 Police.
1 Fire.
1 Medical.
Call me old fashioned, but I'd rather have a government in charge than the digital investigative geniuses at 4chan and reddit.
The government is a vast collection of many organizations. It is not a single entity. There are some things the government does well. To say the government has become corrupt does not say that it doesn't still continue to function in many areas. My car has a defective parking brake: It still serves the function it was meant for.
But I don't park it on hills.
What does it cost society?
Well... you know how our mobile phone networks are utter shit compared to the rest of the world? Plan on that continuing. You know the limited range and speed of wifi? Expect more of the same. In short, the cost to society is that the status quo remains.
Now, what happens if we don't get more of the same? Well, there's a chance, mind you I don't know how much of one, that the above-referenced problems would get better, or go away entirely, and even do so affordably.
But let's be honest; there's $12 billion here that the government can put in its coffers, and everyone who agrees with this gets a fat contribution to their re-election campaign. Who the fuck cares about the cost to society? It's just there to serve the rich anyway... Keep eating your dog food, Citizen.
Even the best sites that we PAY for can barely manage to do simple upgrades and changes and say the same..
That's because the biggest threat to any company has never been natural disaster, but government intervention. You can protect against everything but a corrupt government with a desire to seize all of your infrastructure. It started with Steve Jackson Games; It continues to this day. Every day, dozens of corporations are rendered extinct due to seizures by the government... and lacking the ability to continue to conduct business, they lack income, and thus there is no legal challenge mounted. The only businesses that can survive, are those who go multinational, hide their money in secret accounts, and bury themselves in a complex and dense legal framework that makes easy elimination by the government difficult.
All of that costs a lot of money. The pirate bay, on the other hand, doesn't have to worry about that. They don't have to pretend to be "legit", so the operating costs are quite low, and redundancy quite easy. And as they're showing... once you pass a threshold, you can become a criminal organization that the government can't touch, at least as long as your assets are entirely digital and distributed across many jurisdictions.
It is a model I expect more small businesses, legitimate and otherwise, to do more often. It's the only reasonable reaction to a corrupted government... let alone over a hundred of them, all corrupted to varying degrees.
"It is bad to ruin the environment. But it is far worse to misattribute modern environmental sayings to ancient Native Americans."
Problem: It really did come from the Native Americans. Two centuries ago.
I'll try to sum up where you have been so grossly misinformed rather than write a book worth of responses. Please feel free to break the arguments down one by one in separate posts and I'll do my best to respond if you like.
Okay, I'll try not to take the fact that you're a condescending asshole with only a tenuous grasp on the discussion personally.
The value of bitcoin has nothing to do with the ability to
generate a bitcoin.
For every other product; If you increase supply and demand remains constant, the price of said item goes down. For your statement to be true, the laws of supply and demand wouldn't apply to bitcoins. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
Bitcoin has value because it is a medium of exchange, not because you can mine them.
I can use anything as a medium of exchange -- but if the demand outstrips the supply, then the ability to conduct trades decreases. Which means that the cost of each trade goes up because liquidity has decreased. It is for this reason that we print more dollars every year, rather than just creating a set amount, then throwing the printing press in the fire. The number of dollars in circulation has a direct impact on the economy in a multitude of ways. Simply sprinkling magic "digitalization" dust over those logistical considerations doesn't make it vanish.
Dollars would lose their value if people didn't trust them. They're only trustworthy because they can't be easily created.
Actually, Iran owns two of the four printing presses capable of making flawless copies. And they're producing them by the ton (literally) in an effort to leech off of our economy. So there goes your "easily created" argument; and what'll really tickle your goose is when you find out that most of the currency in circulation isn't physical, but electronic. Banks can actually create more money by simply changing a few rows in a database. And despite both of these things, confidence in the dollar doesn't zero out.
. It is the scarcity (like dollars, only more so) and the convenience for exchange (like dollars, but more so in some instances) that makes bitcoin a valuable method of exchange.
I notice that only small-time investors, private parties, and criminals use bitcoin so far. It's not a valuable method of exchange; If it were, more reputable institutions would use it. It's value fluxuates wildly, and the average exchange implodes after only 18 months or so of operation. Your argument is busted, badly. What's worse, bitcoins aren't like dollars in that I can hand you a dollar and complete a transaction without a third party. All of these exchanges exist because straight-across exchange isn't possible right now ... and when you add middlemen, you add cost. Yes, you can cut up bitcoins into fractional amounts, but to conduct a direct person-to-person transaction without a 3rd party mediator, you need the whole coin.
The cost of electrictity is certainly present, but it's nothing compared to the cost of armored cars, banks, ATMs, driving deposits to the bank, law enforcement hours spent fighting counterfeiting and minting.
Yes, but those are all examples of fixed costs. Bitcoin production is exponential, not linear. Eventually, it'll fuck itself, to be blunt. And it'll fuck everyone who's using them too. I don't know how I can be any more clear -- exponential cost is very bad when you're tying it to money. It means that every trade inherits that trait. The exponent may be very low right now. Say it only costs a penny today. But double that penny every day for a month and it'll cost $30,370,005. That's not pocket change, now is it?
You seem very concerned about the way people are using resources on a planatery scale. Traditional physically produced currencies are tremendously wasteful. How can you be so against something that cuts down on the waste?
Because I wasn't asleep in basic algebra the day they discussed exponents.
. Even if the court grants the prosecutorâ(TM)s request it remains to be seen how effective any seizures will be.
Ineffectual as always. All they're "seizing" is a forwarding address. It's the digital equivalent of seizing an empty PO box. You just open up a new one and continue on your merry.
It's already been proven that the internet routes around censorship... and it does so through peer communication. People who pirate know other people who pirate... and the seven shades of separation and all that ensures that a new address would propagate through social networks in days.
So, how do I put this gently...
Dear Government, You're fucked, now fuck off. Sincerely, The Internet.
The bitcoin system is designed to make the production of bitcoins far more expensive than their value.
Just out of curiousity, when did the production cost exceeding the value of the thing produced become a good thing in macroeconomic theory?
if those resources are accurately priced, then people will simply stop using them to mine bitcoins.
Right, because we can rely on other things like gold, oil, insurance premiums, etc., to all be accurately priced. Blind faith in the laws of supply and demand doesn't exactly win you many points for your argument.
it's the result of market-breaking subsidies to the production of electricity (like the failure to account for the environmental costs of burning coal).
Our planet is currently warming at a hyper-accelerated rate such that in the last 50 years, it is forcing the extinction of hundreds of species. You're saying that when people are made aware of this, it'll just stop. Can you provide any evidence to support this claim that somehow an enhanced understanding of our environment will, all by itself, result in anyone caring about it?
But, even with an artificially depressed cost of electricity, eventually the cost of mining a bitcoin will be more than the value of a bitcoin.
The cost of mining a bitcoin has exceeded the value of the bitcoin since the first bitcoin was created. And yet, we're continuing to throw resources at it... and considering that it becomes exponentially more expensive... that hasn't yet resulted in an exponential decrease in demand. Can you explain why?
Bitcoin doesn't depend on exponentially increasing our energy supply; only the continued mining of the things does.
No, profiting from bitcoin production depends on exponential increase of our energy supply. And I'm not aware of very many people willing to take on the suicidally stupid proposition that people will realize that personal profit at enormous cost to the environment is "bad" -- since historically, and even presently, profit has become its own justification in most of western civilization.
But the idea behind the thing is not as bad as you describe.
No, it's actually a lot worse than I described. I was trying to downplay the problems because a lot of people here on slashdot hate the government and corporations so much they're willing to believe anyone who says some bullshit crypto-currency will give them some measure of power against those establishments. Bitcoins aren't a sound investment... they're popular because of sociopolitical reasons. And when it becomes clear that the reasoning there is flawed, they'll still cling to it because they bought into it... in the same way you've got piles of climate change deniers who will quite happily continue to scream "This isn't happening! Freeee maaaarrrkkeeett ruleeees!!" right off the edge of the cliff and the planet is literally on fire.