It's a representative republic, not a democracy, without a lobbying presence of your own, your Congressman is the place for this kind of request, not a social media holdover from the 44th presidency. That's so 2008.
The social media holdover is also a way to get a conversation going amongst the public, which can lead to many people contacting their senators and representatives.:-)
Think of the stupidest person you know. He/she has to understand this, along with everyone else in the USA. He/she will not understand this, and neither will grandma.
From a followup: "To avoid disruption of existing users of the real social security number the real number would remain valid for all users prior to the use of the first virtual number. After the use of the first virtual number existing users of the real number are “grandfathered” but any new organization using it will be disallowed. A consumer may have the option to disallow all use of the real number, requiring legitimate organizations to update their accounts with a virtual number."
So the real SSN is useable and everything works as it does now until that first virtual SSN is used.
and to effectively voluntarily change your SSN, rendering the original number completely unusable:
To avoid disruption of existing users of the real social security number the real number would remain valid for all users prior to the use of the first virtual number. After the use of the first virtual number existing users of the real number are “grandfathered” but any new organization using it will be disallowed. A consumer may have the option to disallow all use of the real number, requiring legitimate organizations to update their accounts with a virtual number.
I was thinking about a White House petition for Virtual Social Security Numbers:
Virtual Social Security Numbers
Single use numbers that are aliases for your real number.
To protect consumers from fraud and theft many banks now offer Virtual Credit Card Numbers. They are aliases, pseudonyms, for a real credit card number. They “lock” to the first merchant to use them. If a merchant’s database is compromised and a virtual credit card number is exposed, it is unusable. All charges not originating from the first merchant are declined.
The Social Security Administration could use a similar scheme to protect employees and consumers. A Virtual Social Security Number could be given to an employer or financial institution and the number “locked” to that organization when they verify the number with the government, submit information to the government, etc. If a different organization then tries to verify or use the number the government will fail to verify, reject the submission, etc. This would help impede identity theft and financial fraud as employers and financial institutions inadvertently expose employee and consumer information.
Virtual Credit Card Numbers are generated as needed using a credit card issuer’s online services. Virtual Social Security Numbers could similarly be generated as needed by the Administration through its online services.
The Internal Revenue Service could employ a similar scheme for their various taxpayer identification numbers.
incorrect. You cannot hop online and purchase real goods and services with 'speculation.'
You absolutely can. Back in the day you could trade a tulip for goods and sevices too. All you need is the another speculator, the "greater fool" to cash you out or barter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I can actively trade back and forth between gold bullion and BTC, you can't do that with 'speculation.'
Doubtful. Your exchange likely takes your BTC, converts it to fiat (often by sale to a "greater fool") and uses fiat to purchase that bullion. Much like with all the goods and services "purchased in bitcoin" where the merchant never sees nor touches a bitcoin, rather the merchant's exchange/payment processor converts the fiat price to bitcoin, provides a payment address, notifies the merchant when coins are received and credits the merchant's account with fiat.
I suppose there are speculators who might exchange bullion for BTCe too, traders trying to avoid the middle man who takes a fee.
Give me any definition of currency that doesn't involve the US government and I can tell you how BTC fulfills it.
Its too volatile for the store of value test.
And then there are the practical failures like waiting for a sufficient number of confirmations to validate a transfer. Not a problem when transferring money to friends/family around the globe, but quite a problem when trying to buy a cup of coffee. Bitcoin is a competitor to PayPal and credit cards, not fiat currency.
Bank Reporting Guidelines may hurt it as having accounts if no names does not fly even more so when there is over $10,000 in a single cash transaction or they are over other levels.
The US government recently shut down a very popular international exchange over exactly those issues, BTC-e. Bitcoin seems unaffected.
Its already taxed. In the U.S. its considered an asset by the IRS. Mine it, report the basis (value on the day you received it) and your operating expenses (mining hardware, electricity). Hold it and then cash it out or "spend" it, report the value on the day you acquired and the day you disposed of it, report the capital gain or loss.
Yes its inconvenient to have to compute a capital gain/loss on those fractional coins used to buy a cup of coffee. But your wallet software can do that for you to simplify/automate the records for reporting purposes. Similarly if you want to trade then your exchange can automate all these records as well, just like online stock trading companies do.
Taxation will not kill bitcoin. The limitations of bitcoins design are its greatest threat. In the long term it may very well be displaced by a virtual currency of a different design. The blockchain concept will likely persist but that is something separate from bitcoin.
Seemingly with an assumption of a deterministic simulation. If the simulation is not deterministic, not repeatable, then a heuristic that simplifies computation can be substituted for a perfect theoretical computation.
If I instantiate an atom out of view of simulation viewers do I need to have computed the history of all the electrons back to time=0 or can I just allocate them ad hoc, randomly, during instantiation with a reasonable probability distribution? Can I not do the same thing with a deer in the woods before any simulated entity "sees" it? A planet about a star?
A simple thing can not simulate a complex thing
Perhaps not in real time, perhaps not in a practical sense like predicting weather before the weather actually occurs. But do we know "their" real time, we would only know our simulation time ticks.
It wasn't devised for efficiency, for day to day use. It was devised for simplicity, for use in an emergency by nearly anyone. Its what would get used in the "movie scenes" with the "tap tap tap", when one sailor is trying to communicate with someone in the neighboring cell. It was a primary means of communications by isolated POWs in Vietnam.
Morse may have been standard training at the Naval Academy but I don't think all enlisted were taught morse. Signalmen and radiomen certainly, but others, not so sure. Two uncles served in the Navy long ago. When I asked one about morse he said to talk to his brother, that his brother was the radioman.
When the navigation computer has to reboot on the B-52 bomber, the crew breaks out the slide ruler and map to figure out where they're going.
Yes, but the E6B slide rule is not something that ever went obsolete like traditional slide rules. The E6B was still used in ground school in the 1990s, might still be used in classrooms today. And many pilots still carry one in their bag, next to the paper chart and a flashlight, just in case. Its not a B-52 or a military thing. We're talking Cessna 150 pilots too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
An uncle who served on destroyers long ago told me that "Navy regulations are written in blood". That regulations and training say this is the proper way to do something and you will do it in no other way. That the "proper way" was determined by people dying when it was done otherwise. That some ways of doing things are more than "tradition".
About that time but I used a Yggdrasil Plug and Play Linux CD. It was a normal install. Video, sound, etc just worked. It was very much like a Windows install. Admittedly my 486DX2-66 system had ATI Mach video and Soundblaster audio, common stuff, that helped. It wasn't until a couple of years later that I experienced the "normal" Linux experience of having to enter in monitor frequencies to get graphics working, wtf?
I came home from the local computer swap meet with an Yggdrasil CD and a FreeBSD CD. I tried FreeBSD first given my BSD background from the university. FreeBSD crashed during install. Yggdrasil did not. *nix was *nix, AT&T v BSD a minor thing, I was happy.
I do think Linux had a lot to do with Mac OS X's success. Even though OS X isn't based on Linux, MkLinux was, and showed Apple that it was technically feasible on their hardware.
On what hardware was Linux not technically feasible.:-)
There was no huge demand for MkLinux, and very little for A/UX before that. I wouldn't have been surprised if Apple considered Unix a dead end. OTOH if Linux hadn't been rapidly gaining ground in the PC arena, Apple might not have considered NeXT to be a strong candidate, in terms of "demand for Unix on the desktop."
I don't think Apple considered Unix to be important outside of specialized traditional Unix users. There was outreach to these scientific and engineering communities by Apple by promoting BSD console and X Window System support to academia. And at the time PCs running Linux were displacing traditional Unix workstations in academia and industry as well. Windows and Mac were displacing traditional Unix workstations as well. I got to view this from the chemistry community perspective.
Also the lack of a console on Mac was a historical weakness for power users. A classmate had a job at JPL organizing their historical imagery and he was using a classic Mac. He would have killed for a console at times.
BeOS was interesting but BSD and Mach had more of a track record.
Philosophically, soft of. People really wanted *nix on personal computers. Few cared about the politics, the "cause", behind Linux; they just wanted *nix in the practical sense. Which is why some switched(*) to Mac OS X. It provided *nix along side a desktop with an ecosystem of commercial applications.
Today we also have the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" which essentially gives you Linux along side the dominant desktop environment and the dominant ecosystem of commercial applications. More will switch(*), people who never cared much for the politics, people who just wanted *nix.
(*) "Switch" being used in a figurative sense since many Linux users never really "switched". They dual booted. Between macOS and the Windows Subsystem for Linux, dual booting isn't all that necessary anymore.
Now for that headless servers in the data center, the closet, or the AWS or Google cloud server instance... Linux will likely continue to dominate there. But the "desktop"... we'll likely be making "year of the Linux desktop" jokes for quite some time.
Can't you do everything from your digital wallet on your computer, except convert to real cash ?
Pretty much, if you run a full node on your own system the only way to lose your money would be if your system got compromised.
Which is why you don't run the bitcoin wallet software on your regular computer. You take an old obsolete computer, install Linux on it, install the wallet software on it, and use that machine only for:
(1) Linux software updates.
(2) Bitcoin software updates.
(3) Running the bitcoin software.
(4) Bitcoin transfers.
(5) Copying the bitcoin wallet to USB sticks for backups.
If this keeps happening they risk being in contempt of the court by filing frivolous lawsuits against legitimate actors.
I wonder how many of the lawsuits are against frivolous information requests. For example yet another request to NASA about where the aliens are hidden. Might be a valid move for these.
Never mind the detail that the iPhone X facial recognition is a LOT more complex than to my knowledge any other customer level gadget out there
prove it by providing technical facts, not iPropaganda.
Like the fact that it has special hardware for detecting the 3D topology of your face, a 3D depth map. That it is *not* simply looking at a 2D image as other current facial recognition software does, as the 8-9 year old platforms referenced did.
"Face ID
With the Home button and Touch ID gone, Apple's new way of unlocking the iPhone X is called Face ID. The feature uses the new front-facing camera setup, which includes the lens, a new IR camera, a flood illuminator, dot projector, and ambient light sensor, along with 3D-sensing facial recognition software to identify your face and unlock the handset. This system virtually projects 30,000 IR dots on your face that are then stored on the smartphone. The phone references that dot-map whenever you look at the front of the device so it can identify you as the correct owner and unlock itself. Apple is calling the new technology system that enables Face ID its "True Depth Camera system."" https://arstechnica.com/gadget...
I believe it was mentioned in the keynote that FaceID is optional. That you could configure the phone for a passcode. Four digit passcodes are also only a default, longer passcodes an option.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a representative republic, not a democracy, without a lobbying presence of your own, your Congressman is the place for this kind of request, not a social media holdover from the 44th presidency. That's so 2008.
The social media holdover is also a way to get a conversation going amongst the public, which can lead to many people contacting their senators and representatives. :-)
Think of the stupidest person you know. He/she has to understand this, along with everyone else in the USA. He/she will not understand this, and neither will grandma.
From a followup: "To avoid disruption of existing users of the real social security number the real number would remain valid for all users prior to the use of the first virtual number. After the use of the first virtual number existing users of the real number are “grandfathered” but any new organization using it will be disallowed. A consumer may have the option to disallow all use of the real number, requiring legitimate organizations to update their accounts with a virtual number."
So the real SSN is useable and everything works as it does now until that first virtual SSN is used.
Most solar panels have a WARRANTY of 30 years or more.
To the original purchasers only, non-transferable to subsequent owners? One average people only own a home for 12 years in the US.
Why do starship designers love to route plasma conduits behind control panels?
They need the power, there is a background task mining federation coins.
and to effectively voluntarily change your SSN, rendering the original number completely unusable:
To avoid disruption of existing users of the real social security number the real number would remain valid for all users prior to the use of the first virtual number. After the use of the first virtual number existing users of the real number are “grandfathered” but any new organization using it will be disallowed. A consumer may have the option to disallow all use of the real number, requiring legitimate organizations to update their accounts with a virtual number.
I was thinking about a White House petition for Virtual Social Security Numbers:
Virtual Social Security Numbers
Single use numbers that are aliases for your real number.
To protect consumers from fraud and theft many banks now offer Virtual Credit Card Numbers. They are aliases, pseudonyms, for a real credit card number. They “lock” to the first merchant to use them. If a merchant’s database is compromised and a virtual credit card number is exposed, it is unusable. All charges not originating from the first merchant are declined.
The Social Security Administration could use a similar scheme to protect employees and consumers. A Virtual Social Security Number could be given to an employer or financial institution and the number “locked” to that organization when they verify the number with the government, submit information to the government, etc. If a different organization then tries to verify or use the number the government will fail to verify, reject the submission, etc. This would help impede identity theft and financial fraud as employers and financial institutions inadvertently expose employee and consumer information.
Virtual Credit Card Numbers are generated as needed using a credit card issuer’s online services. Virtual Social Security Numbers could similarly be generated as needed by the Administration through its online services.
The Internal Revenue Service could employ a similar scheme for their various taxpayer identification numbers.
incorrect. You cannot hop online and purchase real goods and services with 'speculation.'
You absolutely can. Back in the day you could trade a tulip for goods and sevices too. All you need is the another speculator, the "greater fool" to cash you out or barter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I can actively trade back and forth between gold bullion and BTC, you can't do that with 'speculation.'
Doubtful. Your exchange likely takes your BTC, converts it to fiat (often by sale to a "greater fool") and uses fiat to purchase that bullion. Much like with all the goods and services "purchased in bitcoin" where the merchant never sees nor touches a bitcoin, rather the merchant's exchange/payment processor converts the fiat price to bitcoin, provides a payment address, notifies the merchant when coins are received and credits the merchant's account with fiat.
I suppose there are speculators who might exchange bullion for BTCe too, traders trying to avoid the middle man who takes a fee.
Give me any definition of currency that doesn't involve the US government and I can tell you how BTC fulfills it.
Its too volatile for the store of value test.
And then there are the practical failures like waiting for a sufficient number of confirmations to validate a transfer. Not a problem when transferring money to friends/family around the globe, but quite a problem when trying to buy a cup of coffee. Bitcoin is a competitor to PayPal and credit cards, not fiat currency.
Bank Reporting Guidelines may hurt it as having accounts if no names does not fly even more so when there is over $10,000 in a single cash transaction or they are over other levels.
The US government recently shut down a very popular international exchange over exactly those issues, BTC-e. Bitcoin seems unaffected.
Its already taxed. In the U.S. its considered an asset by the IRS. Mine it, report the basis (value on the day you received it) and your operating expenses (mining hardware, electricity). Hold it and then cash it out or "spend" it, report the value on the day you acquired and the day you disposed of it, report the capital gain or loss.
Yes its inconvenient to have to compute a capital gain/loss on those fractional coins used to buy a cup of coffee. But your wallet software can do that for you to simplify/automate the records for reporting purposes. Similarly if you want to trade then your exchange can automate all these records as well, just like online stock trading companies do.
Taxation will not kill bitcoin. The limitations of bitcoins design are its greatest threat. In the long term it may very well be displaced by a virtual currency of a different design. The blockchain concept will likely persist but that is something separate from bitcoin.
it is underwritten by illicit activity - isn't that better than gold?
It is underwritten by speculation, not activity, illicit or legitimate.
Not true. They deduced it from pure logic.
Seemingly with an assumption of a deterministic simulation. If the simulation is not deterministic, not repeatable, then a heuristic that simplifies computation can be substituted for a perfect theoretical computation.
If I instantiate an atom out of view of simulation viewers do I need to have computed the history of all the electrons back to time=0 or can I just allocate them ad hoc, randomly, during instantiation with a reasonable probability distribution? Can I not do the same thing with a deer in the woods before any simulated entity "sees" it? A planet about a star?
A simple thing can not simulate a complex thing
Perhaps not in real time, perhaps not in a practical sense like predicting weather before the weather actually occurs. But do we know "their" real time, we would only know our simulation time ticks.
It wasn't devised for efficiency, for day to day use. It was devised for simplicity, for use in an emergency by nearly anyone. Its what would get used in the "movie scenes" with the "tap tap tap", when one sailor is trying to communicate with someone in the neighboring cell. It was a primary means of communications by isolated POWs in Vietnam.
Morse may have been standard training at the Naval Academy but I don't think all enlisted were taught morse. Signalmen and radiomen certainly, but others, not so sure. Two uncles served in the Navy long ago. When I asked one about morse he said to talk to his brother, that his brother was the radioman.
When the navigation computer has to reboot on the B-52 bomber, the crew breaks out the slide ruler and map to figure out where they're going.
Yes, but the E6B slide rule is not something that ever went obsolete like traditional slide rules. The E6B was still used in ground school in the 1990s, might still be used in classrooms today. And many pilots still carry one in their bag, next to the paper chart and a flashlight, just in case. Its not a B-52 or a military thing. We're talking Cessna 150 pilots too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Perhaps the 5x5 tap code is easier than morse. If the 5x5 code forgotten it can be reconstructed.
An uncle who served on destroyers long ago told me that "Navy regulations are written in blood". That regulations and training say this is the proper way to do something and you will do it in no other way. That the "proper way" was determined by people dying when it was done otherwise. That some ways of doing things are more than "tradition".
1993, Slackware 0.x ... (0.9?)
About that time but I used a Yggdrasil Plug and Play Linux CD. It was a normal install. Video, sound, etc just worked. It was very much like a Windows install. Admittedly my 486DX2-66 system had ATI Mach video and Soundblaster audio, common stuff, that helped. It wasn't until a couple of years later that I experienced the "normal" Linux experience of having to enter in monitor frequencies to get graphics working, wtf?
I came home from the local computer swap meet with an Yggdrasil CD and a FreeBSD CD. I tried FreeBSD first given my BSD background from the university. FreeBSD crashed during install. Yggdrasil did not. *nix was *nix, AT&T v BSD a minor thing, I was happy.
I do think Linux had a lot to do with Mac OS X's success. Even though OS X isn't based on Linux, MkLinux was, and showed Apple that it was technically feasible on their hardware.
On what hardware was Linux not technically feasible. :-)
There was no huge demand for MkLinux, and very little for A/UX before that. I wouldn't have been surprised if Apple considered Unix a dead end. OTOH if Linux hadn't been rapidly gaining ground in the PC arena, Apple might not have considered NeXT to be a strong candidate, in terms of "demand for Unix on the desktop."
I don't think Apple considered Unix to be important outside of specialized traditional Unix users. There was outreach to these scientific and engineering communities by Apple by promoting BSD console and X Window System support to academia. And at the time PCs running Linux were displacing traditional Unix workstations in academia and industry as well. Windows and Mac were displacing traditional Unix workstations as well. I got to view this from the chemistry community perspective.
Also the lack of a console on Mac was a historical weakness for power users. A classmate had a job at JPL organizing their historical imagery and he was using a classic Mac. He would have killed for a console at times.
BeOS was interesting but BSD and Mach had more of a track record.
OSX is based on BSD, does that count?
Philosophically, soft of. People really wanted *nix on personal computers. Few cared about the politics, the "cause", behind Linux; they just wanted *nix in the practical sense. Which is why some switched(*) to Mac OS X. It provided *nix along side a desktop with an ecosystem of commercial applications.
... Linux will likely continue to dominate there. But the "desktop" ... we'll likely be making "year of the Linux desktop" jokes for quite some time.
Today we also have the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" which essentially gives you Linux along side the dominant desktop environment and the dominant ecosystem of commercial applications. More will switch(*), people who never cared much for the politics, people who just wanted *nix.
(*) "Switch" being used in a figurative sense since many Linux users never really "switched". They dual booted. Between macOS and the Windows Subsystem for Linux, dual booting isn't all that necessary anymore.
Now for that headless servers in the data center, the closet, or the AWS or Google cloud server instance
Can't you do everything from your digital wallet on your computer, except convert to real cash ?
Pretty much, if you run a full node on your own system the only way to lose your money would be if your system got compromised.
Which is why you don't run the bitcoin wallet software on your regular computer. You take an old obsolete computer, install Linux on it, install the wallet software on it, and use that machine only for:
(1) Linux software updates.
(2) Bitcoin software updates.
(3) Running the bitcoin software.
(4) Bitcoin transfers.
(5) Copying the bitcoin wallet to USB sticks for backups.
If this keeps happening they risk being in contempt of the court by filing frivolous lawsuits against legitimate actors.
I wonder how many of the lawsuits are against frivolous information requests. For example yet another request to NASA about where the aliens are hidden. Might be a valid move for these.
Kinect had that sort of technology a while ago.
Good point.
"serious engineering." Sorry, but this requires a bit of perspective; phones aren't serious engineering, regardless of the manufacturer.
When you consider that Apple is also designing the CPU/GPU and coprocessors (ex motion), yes it is.
Never mind the detail that the iPhone X facial recognition is a LOT more complex than to my knowledge any other customer level gadget out there
prove it by providing technical facts, not iPropaganda.
Like the fact that it has special hardware for detecting the 3D topology of your face, a 3D depth map. That it is *not* simply looking at a 2D image as other current facial recognition software does, as the 8-9 year old platforms referenced did.
"Face ID
With the Home button and Touch ID gone, Apple's new way of unlocking the iPhone X is called Face ID. The feature uses the new front-facing camera setup, which includes the lens, a new IR camera, a flood illuminator, dot projector, and ambient light sensor, along with 3D-sensing facial recognition software to identify your face and unlock the handset. This system virtually projects 30,000 IR dots on your face that are then stored on the smartphone. The phone references that dot-map whenever you look at the front of the device so it can identify you as the correct owner and unlock itself. Apple is calling the new technology system that enables Face ID its "True Depth Camera system.""
https://arstechnica.com/gadget...
I believe it was mentioned in the keynote that FaceID is optional. That you could configure the phone for a passcode. Four digit passcodes are also only a default, longer passcodes an option.
People still buying 65C02 to upgrade their //e ? :-)