They can just check the blockchain on any web browser, and it will tell them if they've been paid. You don't need any particular client to receive the things.
The addresses can be followed, that's true. But that doesn't mean anything while the coins are in the system. Anyone can create a bitcoin address, and get someone else to send it to them. They don't actually need to use their computer to receive or send them. They can just go to a computer cafe with the private key and move the BTC like that.
Your problem is when you are turning it into fiat currency. There's money laundering controls that requite strict ID. I don't just mean a passport and utility bill.
A chimp may not have the hardware to do higher math, but who's to say that most humans don't? Why is that fine genetic line somewhere amongst humans, rather than between us and the chimps?
You may not be able to rival Usain Bolt, but you'd certainly benefit from training. It seems clear to me most people are not at the limit of their math ability. In fact, we have a society where being innumerate is perfectly acceptable. I think the easiest gains are to be had in training people more (if math is what we want) rather than to try and move the limits.
The example of Bolt is also interesting. He's of a type that is not normally pushed to do sprints (too tall), yet there he is, the fastest man ever. It will be interesting to see what they conclude about genetic influences on math skill.
There are places that work more or less like that. I don't know how common they are, but I used to work at an incubator site that had a common IT desk. There were some very young kids there, but they'd get things done for you like installing a new OS, sticking memory in your machines, and configuring networks. Every now and again there would be a leaving party for some kid who'd gotten himself a university place, studying something related. I think a fair number of them would get a CCNA or an A+ / MSCE whatever they're called.
But the things you list are provable. It's easy to separate a room into people who understand ASM from ordinary people who clearly don't. You main problem would have been getting a job interview, and after getting that first job, you wouldn't have much issue with getting in the door.
For other degrees, such as say history, it's a bit more tricky. Even asking a historian about a topic outside his specialism could put him in a category with ordinary people. So you need a piece of paper saying you get it.
I have an EE degree from a top university, and I write programs all day.
I wouldn't have the faintest clue how to diagnose a malfunctioning motherboard. I doubt I have the tools available, either. What exactly do you mean by diagnose, other than ascertaining that the MB is indeed broken? I don't think I've come across anyone who's had the necessary hardware to find this stuff out. Maybe somewhere in the lab of a chip manufacturer I used to work for, but obviously not everyone works for the people who actually makes them.
How do you know how many people you talk to actually agree with you? They could just be saying whatever makes the situation least unpleasant. Anonymous voting is the only way we can be sure people vote their conscience.
So you are saying that you, personally, would vote differently if you knew your friends and family knew for sure how you voted? Why?
Not at all. But not everyone has such uncomplicated friends and family. Your friends might like to tell you one thing and vote another, though.
1) Anonymity. We need this so that people don't feel pressured into voting for someone they don't like. As you say, you can generate addresses anonymously.
2) Tampering from made up votes.
3) Tampering from made up people.
1) how much anonymity do we need when people announce who they voted for in almost every election? How many people do you know who really don't talk politics? Taxes, welfare, medical care, and such and most people will share and complain for hours. 2) Fixed by open voting 3) Fixed by open voting
Open voting isn't perfect, but it's better than we have now.
How do you know how many people you talk to actually agree with you? They could just be saying whatever makes the situation least unpleasant. Anonymous voting is the only way we can be sure people vote their conscience.
Not wanting to open a whole can of Bitcoin worms into this discussion, but I see some things in that design which could be used for this.
First, there's some problems, one of which you have already addressed: 1) Anonymity. We need this so that people don't feel pressured into voting for someone they don't like. As you say, you can generate addresses anonymously. 2) Tampering from made up votes. 3) Tampering from made up people.
The key lies in the scripting language used to determine who gets to send a certain coin on to the next wallet. So if you don't have a certain secret key, you can't move that coin. You can also make a transaction that requires multiple keys. So then you could have a system where certain trusted people (eg independent observers) could sit at the voting locations and stamp everyone's votes, and people would have their own secret keys. You could even have the observers in a sort of tree of trust, so that nobody can fraudulently pretend to be an observer.
Lots of details on the technical side, but that's how I'd envision it.
This is just having it both ways. Steve Jobs does the stairs, while Tim Cook does the finances. Is that delegating or micromanagement? To anyone with common sense, it's both.
More common sense, dressed up as management lessons: you need to know what you're doing, and a large business is too big for you to do everything. No kidding, I always wondered why Amazon actually has more than one employee.
I've worked with actual market markers, who traded both old school and electronic.
It's pretty clear what they thought was more lucrative. Find the right guys in the City or Chicago, and they'll regale you of the good old days, where brokers would get different coloured papers for buys and sells, prices would be quoted 10 ticks against the customer, etc. Nowadays you can't even sit in the same room as the people you're colluding with.
As an insider, can you tell us what decision process is? I'm in finance, and I can't see what they are doing in such a short space of time. Is it literally just looking at the imbalance and moving first? Or also a few trick-like things such as using special order types?
But the only prerequisite for those subjects is reading. And whatever you get up to, you are not going to lose the ability to read text, because text is all around us. Even if you don't go to college, you'll be reading newspapers and magazines. Don't know anything about Wittgenstein? You can pick up a book and start reading. At any age. And the other thing about the humanities subjects is they are all related. There's a common context that will allow you place at least the holes in your knowledge. For instance, everything that appears in the news has a historical backstory. This whole thing in Syria for instance has a backstory which ties in with loads of other subjects that you'll have heard of in your readings.
Math based stuff is easy to forget the prereqs for. If you forgot the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, it's unlikely you'll be reminded of it in your everyday life. Come across a quantum physics course, and you'll need to brush up again. A lot of mathematical stuff gets its power from being quite specific. Sure, there's also a context, but often it's not enough to know that there's some equation out there describing your phenomenon. The conclusions we can draw from equations are also not very obvious. For instance, you have Newton's laws along with some elementary calculus of circular motion. How does that lead one to conclude that the mass of the Earth, Mars, and the outer planets can be estimated, but not Venus and Mercury until recently?
So, generally I think you benefit more from the regularity and discipline of a university when doing math type courses than "reading" type courses.
A common criticism of the entrance exams is that they do rely too much on recall and can be gamed in this way.
But that's not gaming? Surely it's fairly hard to remember a bunch of random stuff. I consider memorization a kind of proof-of-work, albeit the wrong kind of work for our world.
Re:Meanwhile, back at the bean counting dept.
on
Cisco Slashes 4,000 Jobs
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Their core problem is nothing more and nothing less than the fact that they are "business school" graduates. Because instead of running businesses in a technocratic manner with the intention of selling a good product, we instead need to train a separate class of people to do this nebulous thing called "business", which involves short-term thinking, buzzwords, and a ton of ass-kissing. And it seems that the ultimate purpose of this thing called "business" is just more "business".
This encapsulates what's wrong with the world. I actually did a degree called "Engineering, Economics, and Management". The hard bit is the first bit. The bit where you learn stuff that's not trivial is the first bit and parts of the second bit. And the bit where you sit with MBAs and read self-explanatory "cases" that makes everyone think you can "strategize" is the last bit.
I've run businesses myself, and quite simply if you're on the technical side, you can use common sense to decide what to do. If your business is really big, you might stop doing technical stuff, but the best managers "get it" because they know what they can ask for and what's a realistic way to work.
And yet I find myself looking at various organisations, both public and private, where the idiots are running the show. There's productive people who are generally technologists (but I don't have a lot of exposure to eg creative business), and there's fools "managing" them. And the fools have degrees too, just in the BS subjects. But those degrees are somehow qualifying people to run pretty large organisations. And they are paid better, because they have a good basis for pretending to create value.
At one point I thought maybe there really is value in management. After all, you do need someone to motivate the team and make certain decisions. Someone to hold everyone accountable. But actually that someone ought to be someone who could take a place in the team, not some guy who could never be smart enough to do the job himself.
But everyone eligible could have turned out at the interview to be inappropriate ("didn't suit our mentality", etc.)? Or does the law say she must be interviewed?
I don't get what "qualified" means in this context. Surely it means "we talked to them at the interview, and we think they can do the job"? What's the point of the job interview, if not to find out whether someone can work at the business?
If it's simply a matter of holding certain certificates, it's pretty simple, and you'd be right. But then the firm wouldn't be so silly as to make requirements that make it impossible to hire the guys they want.
Of course, if the company can decide who is qualified, they can pick whomever they like and just say there weren't any qualified locals. Which as I understand it is exactly why that rule is written in that way, so nobody will be forced to hire someone they don't like (for whatever reason, minus the civil rights (sex/race/etc). Of course you can just not mention being a racist/sexist).
But I'm in two minds. The old rationale was that code is just code, and he was merely getting his hands on something he could have typed out himself given enough time. Which is probably true. The guy's an expert, and he knows how the thing works, so maybe he's saving himself a few weeks of work (In fact, he says he wasn't even going to use it...). I don't buy the whole thing about gaining an advantage in the market and all that. Whatever strengths and weaknesses are in GS's system would be clear to any expert, and they probably have enough staff turnover that more than a few people knew how it worked.
So I don't think GS was made all that much worse off by him doing this.
My objection to his behaviour is very little to do with the technical stuff. Simply put, you have an agreement to behave a certain way when you're employed. If you break the agreement, there should be some sort of restitution. Suppose you're a chef at a bakery, and you move on to a steak restaurant. Well, you shouldn't take the cookie recipe with you, even if you're not going to use it. Was it common practice to send code home? Maybe, I don't know. I suppose there's a question of whether he was told not to.
One thing that does smell is that GS seemed to want to make an example of this guy. Which of course they should if he's done something wrong. But then all the programmers there will now be wondering whether they'll come after them if they decide to leave.
I'm not surprised either. After all, he's probably only the 4th most popular American with the name Manning. Not even on the podium. Why should anyone care?
Slashdot Mirror
They can just check the blockchain on any web browser, and it will tell them if they've been paid. You don't need any particular client to receive the things.
The addresses can be followed, that's true. But that doesn't mean anything while the coins are in the system. Anyone can create a bitcoin address, and get someone else to send it to them. They don't actually need to use their computer to receive or send them. They can just go to a computer cafe with the private key and move the BTC like that.
Your problem is when you are turning it into fiat currency. There's money laundering controls that requite strict ID. I don't just mean a passport and utility bill.
The worst is when they tell you one of your colleagues is leaving, and they've recommended you to them, so they need your CV.
I turned around and asked my three partners what they were selling their shares for. Recruiter hung up while they were laughing.
A chimp may not have the hardware to do higher math, but who's to say that most humans don't? Why is that fine genetic line somewhere amongst humans, rather than between us and the chimps?
You may not be able to rival Usain Bolt, but you'd certainly benefit from training. It seems clear to me most people are not at the limit of their math ability. In fact, we have a society where being innumerate is perfectly acceptable. I think the easiest gains are to be had in training people more (if math is what we want) rather than to try and move the limits.
The example of Bolt is also interesting. He's of a type that is not normally pushed to do sprints (too tall), yet there he is, the fastest man ever. It will be interesting to see what they conclude about genetic influences on math skill.
An EE course is not a course in soldering. Nice troll though.
Makes sense. Perhaps it's the same dynamic as whatever it is that makes the title "Engineer" more widespread than actual engineers.
There are places that work more or less like that. I don't know how common they are, but I used to work at an incubator site that had a common IT desk. There were some very young kids there, but they'd get things done for you like installing a new OS, sticking memory in your machines, and configuring networks. Every now and again there would be a leaving party for some kid who'd gotten himself a university place, studying something related. I think a fair number of them would get a CCNA or an A+ / MSCE whatever they're called.
But the things you list are provable. It's easy to separate a room into people who understand ASM from ordinary people who clearly don't. You main problem would have been getting a job interview, and after getting that first job, you wouldn't have much issue with getting in the door.
For other degrees, such as say history, it's a bit more tricky. Even asking a historian about a topic outside his specialism could put him in a category with ordinary people. So you need a piece of paper saying you get it.
There's an xkcd about this.
I have an EE degree from a top university, and I write programs all day.
I wouldn't have the faintest clue how to diagnose a malfunctioning motherboard. I doubt I have the tools available, either. What exactly do you mean by diagnose, other than ascertaining that the MB is indeed broken? I don't think I've come across anyone who's had the necessary hardware to find this stuff out. Maybe somewhere in the lab of a chip manufacturer I used to work for, but obviously not everyone works for the people who actually makes them.
How do you know how many people you talk to actually agree with you? They could just be saying whatever makes the situation least unpleasant. Anonymous voting is the only way we can be sure people vote their conscience.
So you are saying that you, personally, would vote differently if you knew your friends and family knew for sure how you voted? Why?
Not at all. But not everyone has such uncomplicated friends and family. Your friends might like to tell you one thing and vote another, though.
1) Anonymity. We need this so that people don't feel pressured into voting for someone they don't like. As you say, you can generate addresses anonymously.
2) Tampering from made up votes.
3) Tampering from made up people.
1) how much anonymity do we need when people announce who they voted for in almost every election? How many people do you know who really don't talk politics? Taxes, welfare, medical care, and such and most people will share and complain for hours.
2) Fixed by open voting
3) Fixed by open voting
Open voting isn't perfect, but it's better than we have now.
How do you know how many people you talk to actually agree with you? They could just be saying whatever makes the situation least unpleasant. Anonymous voting is the only way we can be sure people vote their conscience.
Not wanting to open a whole can of Bitcoin worms into this discussion, but I see some things in that design which could be used for this.
First, there's some problems, one of which you have already addressed:
1) Anonymity. We need this so that people don't feel pressured into voting for someone they don't like. As you say, you can generate addresses anonymously.
2) Tampering from made up votes.
3) Tampering from made up people.
The key lies in the scripting language used to determine who gets to send a certain coin on to the next wallet. So if you don't have a certain secret key, you can't move that coin. You can also make a transaction that requires multiple keys. So then you could have a system where certain trusted people (eg independent observers) could sit at the voting locations and stamp everyone's votes, and people would have their own secret keys. You could even have the observers in a sort of tree of trust, so that nobody can fraudulently pretend to be an observer.
Lots of details on the technical side, but that's how I'd envision it.
This is just having it both ways. Steve Jobs does the stairs, while Tim Cook does the finances. Is that delegating or micromanagement? To anyone with common sense, it's both.
More common sense, dressed up as management lessons: you need to know what you're doing, and a large business is too big for you to do everything. No kidding, I always wondered why Amazon actually has more than one employee.
So you're saying there's something he can do about it...
I've worked with actual market markers, who traded both old school and electronic.
It's pretty clear what they thought was more lucrative. Find the right guys in the City or Chicago, and they'll regale you of the good old days, where brokers would get different coloured papers for buys and sells, prices would be quoted 10 ticks against the customer, etc. Nowadays you can't even sit in the same room as the people you're colluding with.
As an insider, can you tell us what decision process is? I'm in finance, and I can't see what they are doing in such a short space of time. Is it literally just looking at the imbalance and moving first? Or also a few trick-like things such as using special order types?
Dude asked authorities about the law, and did as told. Read the post.
It's true you need to know English, history, etc.
But the only prerequisite for those subjects is reading. And whatever you get up to, you are not going to lose the ability to read text, because text is all around us. Even if you don't go to college, you'll be reading newspapers and magazines. Don't know anything about Wittgenstein? You can pick up a book and start reading. At any age. And the other thing about the humanities subjects is they are all related. There's a common context that will allow you place at least the holes in your knowledge. For instance, everything that appears in the news has a historical backstory. This whole thing in Syria for instance has a backstory which ties in with loads of other subjects that you'll have heard of in your readings.
Math based stuff is easy to forget the prereqs for. If you forgot the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, it's unlikely you'll be reminded of it in your everyday life. Come across a quantum physics course, and you'll need to brush up again. A lot of mathematical stuff gets its power from being quite specific. Sure, there's also a context, but often it's not enough to know that there's some equation out there describing your phenomenon. The conclusions we can draw from equations are also not very obvious. For instance, you have Newton's laws along with some elementary calculus of circular motion. How does that lead one to conclude that the mass of the Earth, Mars, and the outer planets can be estimated, but not Venus and Mercury until recently?
So, generally I think you benefit more from the regularity and discipline of a university when doing math type courses than "reading" type courses.
A common criticism of the entrance exams is that they do rely too much on recall and can be gamed in this way.
But that's not gaming? Surely it's fairly hard to remember a bunch of random stuff. I consider memorization a kind of proof-of-work, albeit the wrong kind of work for our world.
Their core problem is nothing more and nothing less than the fact that they are "business school" graduates. Because instead of running businesses in a technocratic manner with the intention of selling a good product, we instead need to train a separate class of people to do this nebulous thing called "business", which involves short-term thinking, buzzwords, and a ton of ass-kissing. And it seems that the ultimate purpose of this thing called "business" is just more "business".
This encapsulates what's wrong with the world. I actually did a degree called "Engineering, Economics, and Management". The hard bit is the first bit. The bit where you learn stuff that's not trivial is the first bit and parts of the second bit. And the bit where you sit with MBAs and read self-explanatory "cases" that makes everyone think you can "strategize" is the last bit.
I've run businesses myself, and quite simply if you're on the technical side, you can use common sense to decide what to do. If your business is really big, you might stop doing technical stuff, but the best managers "get it" because they know what they can ask for and what's a realistic way to work.
And yet I find myself looking at various organisations, both public and private, where the idiots are running the show. There's productive people who are generally technologists (but I don't have a lot of exposure to eg creative business), and there's fools "managing" them. And the fools have degrees too, just in the BS subjects. But those degrees are somehow qualifying people to run pretty large organisations. And they are paid better, because they have a good basis for pretending to create value.
At one point I thought maybe there really is value in management. After all, you do need someone to motivate the team and make certain decisions. Someone to hold everyone accountable. But actually that someone ought to be someone who could take a place in the team, not some guy who could never be smart enough to do the job himself.
But everyone eligible could have turned out at the interview to be inappropriate ("didn't suit our mentality", etc.)? Or does the law say she must be interviewed?
I don't get what "qualified" means in this context. Surely it means "we talked to them at the interview, and we think they can do the job"? What's the point of the job interview, if not to find out whether someone can work at the business?
If it's simply a matter of holding certain certificates, it's pretty simple, and you'd be right. But then the firm wouldn't be so silly as to make requirements that make it impossible to hire the guys they want.
Of course, if the company can decide who is qualified, they can pick whomever they like and just say there weren't any qualified locals. Which as I understand it is exactly why that rule is written in that way, so nobody will be forced to hire someone they don't like (for whatever reason, minus the civil rights (sex/race/etc). Of course you can just not mention being a racist/sexist).
But I'm in two minds. The old rationale was that code is just code, and he was merely getting his hands on something he could have typed out himself given enough time. Which is probably true. The guy's an expert, and he knows how the thing works, so maybe he's saving himself a few weeks of work (In fact, he says he wasn't even going to use it...). I don't buy the whole thing about gaining an advantage in the market and all that. Whatever strengths and weaknesses are in GS's system would be clear to any expert, and they probably have enough staff turnover that more than a few people knew how it worked.
So I don't think GS was made all that much worse off by him doing this.
My objection to his behaviour is very little to do with the technical stuff. Simply put, you have an agreement to behave a certain way when you're employed. If you break the agreement, there should be some sort of restitution. Suppose you're a chef at a bakery, and you move on to a steak restaurant. Well, you shouldn't take the cookie recipe with you, even if you're not going to use it. Was it common practice to send code home? Maybe, I don't know. I suppose there's a question of whether he was told not to.
One thing that does smell is that GS seemed to want to make an example of this guy. Which of course they should if he's done something wrong. But then all the programmers there will now be wondering whether they'll come after them if they decide to leave.
And how are we to push for change, if everyone who can reveal it is threatened with eternal solitary confinement?
I'm not surprised either. After all, he's probably only the 4th most popular American with the name Manning. Not even on the podium. Why should anyone care?
Sigh.