However recently the US Government acknowledged that BTC is MONEY.
Someone in the US government thinks BTC is money.... that probably means more than anything:
they don't understand what BTC is.
What's interesting about BTC is you don't "own" coins.
You own bits on your computer where you have stored a copy of a private key corresponding to a public ID.
The public ID is recorded as having "coins" assigned to it;
much like if you have a username on a World of Warcraft server,
the server has a database record that says your username holds a certain number of warcraft gold tokens.
In both cases.... BTC peer to peer network, and world of warcraft,
you don't "OWN" the coin value.
The remote server, in the case of WoW; or the Peer to Peer network
in case of BTC, comes to an agreement that certain wallets have a certain number of tokens.
Any assignment of a number of coins is a technical matter,
due to the operation of the distributed system.
Not a legal matter
For example: if an admin in WoW comes and sets your account's world of warcraft gold to ZERO,
You have no recourse, No theft has occured.
(Because you never 'owned' a balance of gold, even though your player had it,
and it was removed by no business transaction you authorized)
If another Bitcoin network user manages to guess your private key, and submits a spend entry setting your Wallet balance to ZERO, then you have no recourse, and no theft has occured.
(Because you never 'owned' a balance of bitcoin, even though your wallet had it,
and it was removed by no business transaction you authorized)
Government entities to not have Rights. They only have Powers.
Another name for their powers are "legal rights"
Because all their rights come from the law which is written down.
When government officials start getting de facto powers or "legal rights" that are not written down.....
that is the mark of tyranny starting, or the people losing sovereignty.
The People have Rights.
The people have moral rights, which are not really backed up by the law ---- only by
feeble efforts to name some of the most critical ones.
Unfortunately, as government expands ---- the people's moral rights are only worth the paper
they are printed on.
In fact... the "legal rights" of government officials become more powerful.
This one puzzles me somewhat. If one can make money by mining with ASIC rigs, why would anyone sell or rent them
It is possible to make money by mining in theory, depending on the conversion rate, BUT that has become a lot harder.
IN ANY CASE: (1) It is not possible to earn more than 25BTC per 10 minutes (on average) by mining.
(2) Mining is high-risk. You don't know what the network difficulty will be, AND you don't know what the conversion rate will be.
(3) There is no such limit on how many BTC's worth of bitcoin miners you can sell per 10 minutes.
(4) As the network difficulty rises, participants need more powerful miners --- so you can sell more.
(5) Selling electronics is a well-known industry. You can structure your business to generate predictable profits.
(6)If your customers are content with pre-orders, and you don't promise a firm delivery date.... you can operate the miner yourself after production, and delay delivery.
You profit from operating the miners for the first month or so -- when the extra hash capacity is the most profitable.
By the time your customer gets it: the miner will be able to produce 50% or 75% less, due to the increased network difficulty, BUT
they still have to pay you the same.
No, it's not. It implies a willingness to sign an Executive Order, which has nothing to do with unlawful or unconstitutional behavior.
No, you're wrong. Whether or not an executive order is related to unlawful behavior, depends on the content of the order.
The president can sign as many executive orders as he or she wants, but none of them have the force of law. The executive has absolutely no power to make law or interpret law.
However: in the event that the president signs any executive order directing his staff, officials, law enforcement, etc, to conduct any illegal activity ---- such as illegal searches, then it is within congress' discretion to charge the president of high crimes, including crimes against the constitution, if they find that the actions directed by the order were illegal based on the law constructed by congress, and that the unlawful acts were intentional -- with the president knowingly and intentionally signing an order that would direct actions contrary to the law.
They just don't have anyone with enough brains to understand THEY HAVE TO HAVE A REAL REASON.
Correct... "I have a pen and a phone" implies a willingness to sign an unlawful order; that is, to say, an order to a law enforcement body, to begin or continue conducting activities that are in violation of the constitution, or unlawful.
It is a matter exclusively for the judgement of the House, as to make the finding of law whether this is such a high crime as to warrant articles of impeachment
And then exclusively for judgement of the Senate, as to whether the evidence shows that the president committed the alleged crime(s).
It may make sense to have an automatic expiration on bills like the PATRIOT ACT, but as a general rule for law that would result in complete chaos.
Actually: I would favor a constitutional requirement, that every new tax, revenue bill, regulation, OR grant of rights to any government entity has to be written so that the bill must be re-authorized or automatically expire by the house a minimum of three times, no sooner than 2 years after the original bill was passed, no longer than 6 years, AND
at least 3 of the required re-authorizations separated by a minimum of 14 months.
That way, if the current session of congress does something stupid --- the NEXT congress has to continue to support it after the next two elections, OR the default is that the new experimental law goes away.
Come to think of it.... there are two more things I would like to add:
+Add: The defendant can make and prosecute an allegation of prosecutorial misconduct, and compel the state to participate ---- in other words: no prosecutorial discretion for the district attorney to refuse to prosecute, if someone in their office is to be charged with this misconduct.
+Add: For any case, in which the defendant was found guilty, OR, in which there was a suspicion of conduct, an panel of outside reviewers, should be appointed to review ALL evidence and records of any sort that BOTH, law enforcement, and the prosecution has access to.
The reviewer should manually select (within their full discretion) a random set of cases for additional extensive scrutiny. The guilty verdict shall be null and void, if the reviewer finds misconduct, or if the reviewer finds a clear misrepresentation, or pertinent evidence was not disclosed to the defense.
Further review processes, and occasional random audits to weed out any potential corruption or abuses, and ensure that abuses are reported to the public and prosecuted, should be a daily activity, and at least 10% of every prosecutor's cases should be subject to reviews.
that's prosecutorial misconduct and gets convictions overturned when the courts catch them.
That's one thing, BUT it's not persuasive enough.
The prosecutor should get serious jail time over such misconduct, dependant on the gravity of the case.
For example: prosecutorial misconduct on a murder trial should be treated as a crime of:
Attempted unlawful lifetime imprisonment, with a possible lifetime prison term for the prosecutor.
Since with an analysis by the defense, together with additional statements, ANY kind of evidence the prosecution has might turn out to be exculpatory or pertinent to the defense --- they can't withold anything they gathered.
You must not have heard that borders and areas within 100 miles are "constitution free zones".
There is no such thing as a "constitution free zone". The constitution is the ultimate law of the land.
Congress is incapable of lawfully making any exemptions to it.
It applies anywhere that the US congress, president, or other state or federal government personnel or officials exert any authority.
"You were here for 50 hours this week but you only really 'worked' for 39 of them...no overtime for you!"
Sorry, nope, under the FLSA. In the US, for ordinary non-exempt employees: you have to count any rest period as time worked that's 20 minutes or shorter of continuous rest.
Rest and Meal Periods: Rest periods of short duration, usually 20 minutes or less, are common in industry (and promote the efficiency of the employee) and are customarily paid for as working time. These short periods must be counted as hours worked.
To identify which registration authority the domain name was created under.
Also... to distinguish domain names from just any other name.
I'll give you an example: "BOOKS"
No one entity should get a monopoly on the name BOOKS.
If you type BOOKS into your browser address bar; you should not be summarily redirected to whoever happened to get there first ---- logically, you would be presented search results based on relevance.
The authority system allows, there to be a BOOKS.COM under the Commercial registration authority... that might be a book store, Or an accounting vendor....
There can be a BOOKS.ORG, under the non-profit organization reg. authority ---- that might, for example, be a library-related organization.
Then there can be a BOOKS.EDU under the education reg. authority --- that domain might, for example, be an institution of higher learning that specializes in the library sciences or authorship/book writing.
Such domains a.INFO; were added later, and Don't really fit logically in the original DNS system.
This is great if a transformer blows. For many people their pstn wire is on the same poles as their power and if the lines are down, the lines are down.
That is possible, but usually what happens is the electricity gets switched off due to a fault / short-circuit,
or transformer blowing... like you said.
One fault in the electrical system, and the circuit breakers gets thrown on a very large number of people.
Your telephone line is a private circuit. Chances are, if someone's phone line got a short circuit -- the other circuits are intact -- it's not everybody elses.
Also... often the telephone cabling may be completely underground; all the way from the served location to the central office. Whereas, the electrical transmission need be overhead.
The distribution networks look entirely different, so there is a fair chance your phone line might not be near your power line much of the way.
though, that the phone companies can't just hook up the VoIP phones to the analog battery banks due to differences in power requirements.
During an extended outage; I can power the bloody VoIP devices myself, via a local generator.
MY concern is, that even if I power up the VoIP phone, and all my on-premises equipment, the network link will be dead, because the phone company's nearest repeater's battery has died --- I.E. the remote unit somewhere in their infrastructure that lights up a fiber, and converts it to Ethernet over copper, before feeding it into my building.
I am content if the FCC just requires them to provide continuous power up to the consumer household; with a minimum of 72 hours of onsite backup power for any network elements such as remote pedestals -- to be replenished prior to exhaustion, and a hookup for the homeowner to provide a battery and additional sources of emergency power at their location ---- such as a solar panel and charge controller to help charge the battery, when power is down for an extended period.
It works this well because it is/mandated/ that the resources required to/make it reliable/ are/spent/ to make it so.
The commission report states their standard of reliability...They are holding the new technology to a lower standard of reliability.
24 hours of backup power after a power outage
During winter storms and other similar events; I have experienced 3 to 5 day outages on occasion:
POTS lines never went down, so emergency calls could still be made,
even when there was no cell service...
Hawking made a proposition. It's not a theory, it's a proposition.
His alternative explanation is a proposition.
His refutation of blackholes is not. The original concept of a blackhole is dead.
Shown to be impossible/a contradiction.
The only question is, what alternative is most accurate.
His suggested alternative is indeed just a proposition, but NOT the concept that there cannot be blackholes as originally described.
The explanation is simple..... the researchers came across a secret bunker; they dared open it and go in.
They were eventually accosted by teleporting alien creatures who shredded their bodies, ripped out one of theirs' tongues;
there was some teleportation and time-travel involved, and finally --
their boddies got dumped on the side of the mountain away from their tent, by the russians.
The End.
Or rather; there are no objects that have exactly the properties, of what we have been calling black holes.
Remember the article in Nature?
: according to Hawking's paper
: Notion of an 'event horizon', from which nothing can escape, is incompatible with quantum theory, physicist claims.
“There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory,” Hawking told Nature. Quantum theory, however, “enables energy and information to escape from a black hole”. A full explanation of the process, the physicist admits, would require a theory that successfully merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. But that is a goal that has eluded physicists for nearly a century. “The correct treatment,” Hawking says, “remains a mystery.”...
No one's going to have paper maps in their cars, and navigation systems may just say "Sorry, I can't find your location" if they try to pull up a map.
Remember: GPS is not functional when driving through parking garages or tunnels.
How are you going to navigate Le tunnel sous la Manche; if your driverless car
cannot tolerate GPS unavailability?
I believe the driverless cars are going to have to put through heavy scrutiny
for safety, before they become available to consumers.
INCLUDING options for safe operation -- and backup options for the human to navigate their vehicle,
in case GPS is unavailable.
You're not supposed to be decrypting latent signals effectively hidden in the video, to uncover privileged data.
The feds would have a field day with anyone in the US who did this....
It's probably been so long since they released it because GCHQ had to vet the video to make sure you couldn't reconstruct the document from the fragments visible during the video.
Actually... we came up with a device that can mess with entropy so much; that the dust particles are expected to spontaneously come back together and reassemble themselves into chips and disk drives, with no damage whatsoever,
and then the data wlill be retrievalbe again.
There is no such thing as perfect security, and everyone knows it
This is why the notion "It is OKAY if we have all these backdoors and all this data collection, the only quantum computer, etc, as long as it is controlled by strong security controls, laws, regulations, oversight" is absurd.
The NSA feels that if people knew about these controls, they’d be OK with the collection. This argument reminded me of something I learned from my approved NSA source in the 1990s. The official who concocted the Clipper Chip scheme had a vision where private citizens could use encryption. But the NSA, though its built-in backdoor chip, would be able to access the information when it needed to. The official called his vision “Nirvana.” The NSA is still envisioning Nirvana...
Slashdot Mirror
However recently the US Government acknowledged that BTC is MONEY.
Someone in the US government thinks BTC is money.... that probably means more than anything: they don't understand what BTC is.
What's interesting about BTC is you don't "own" coins.
You own bits on your computer where you have stored a copy of a private key corresponding to a public ID.
The public ID is recorded as having "coins" assigned to it; much like if you have a username on a World of Warcraft server, the server has a database record that says your username holds a certain number of warcraft gold tokens.
In both cases.... BTC peer to peer network, and world of warcraft, you don't "OWN" the coin value.
The remote server, in the case of WoW; or the Peer to Peer network in case of BTC, comes to an agreement that certain wallets have a certain number of tokens.
Any assignment of a number of coins is a technical matter, due to the operation of the distributed system.
Not a legal matter
For example: if an admin in WoW comes and sets your account's world of warcraft gold to ZERO, You have no recourse, No theft has occured. (Because you never 'owned' a balance of gold, even though your player had it, and it was removed by no business transaction you authorized)
If another Bitcoin network user manages to guess your private key, and submits a spend entry setting your Wallet balance to ZERO, then you have no recourse, and no theft has occured.
(Because you never 'owned' a balance of bitcoin, even though your wallet had it, and it was removed by no business transaction you authorized)
Government entities to not have Rights. They only have Powers.
Another name for their powers are "legal rights"
Because all their rights come from the law which is written down. When government officials start getting de facto powers or "legal rights" that are not written down..... that is the mark of tyranny starting, or the people losing sovereignty.
The People have Rights.
The people have moral rights, which are not really backed up by the law ---- only by feeble efforts to name some of the most critical ones.
Unfortunately, as government expands ---- the people's moral rights are only worth the paper they are printed on.
In fact... the "legal rights" of government officials become more powerful.
This one puzzles me somewhat. If one can make money by mining with ASIC rigs, why would anyone sell or rent them
It is possible to make money by mining in theory, depending on the conversion rate, BUT that has become a lot harder.
IN ANY CASE: (1) It is not possible to earn more than 25BTC per 10 minutes (on average) by mining.
(2) Mining is high-risk. You don't know what the network difficulty will be, AND you don't know what the conversion rate will be.
(3) There is no such limit on how many BTC's worth of bitcoin miners you can sell per 10 minutes.
(4) As the network difficulty rises, participants need more powerful miners --- so you can sell more.
(5) Selling electronics is a well-known industry. You can structure your business to generate predictable profits.
(6)If your customers are content with pre-orders, and you don't promise a firm delivery date.... you can operate the miner yourself after production, and delay delivery. You profit from operating the miners for the first month or so -- when the extra hash capacity is the most profitable. By the time your customer gets it: the miner will be able to produce 50% or 75% less, due to the increased network difficulty, BUT they still have to pay you the same.
You mean like George W. putting patriot act in place and Obama renewing it?
Hm.. good point... on second thought.... put the bills to a popular vote for re-authorization within 2 years?
No, it's not. It implies a willingness to sign an Executive Order, which has nothing to do with unlawful or unconstitutional behavior.
No, you're wrong. Whether or not an executive order is related to unlawful behavior, depends on the content of the order.
The president can sign as many executive orders as he or she wants, but none of them have the force of law. The executive has absolutely no power to make law or interpret law.
However: in the event that the president signs any executive order directing his staff, officials, law enforcement, etc, to conduct any illegal activity ---- such as illegal searches, then it is within congress' discretion to charge the president of high crimes, including crimes against the constitution, if they find that the actions directed by the order were illegal based on the law constructed by congress, and that the unlawful acts were intentional -- with the president knowingly and intentionally signing an order that would direct actions contrary to the law.
They just don't have anyone with enough brains to understand THEY HAVE TO HAVE A REAL REASON.
Correct... "I have a pen and a phone" implies a willingness to sign an unlawful order; that is, to say, an order to a law enforcement body, to begin or continue conducting activities that are in violation of the constitution, or unlawful.
It is a matter exclusively for the judgement of the House, as to make the finding of law whether this is such a high crime as to warrant articles of impeachment
And then exclusively for judgement of the Senate, as to whether the evidence shows that the president committed the alleged crime(s).
It may make sense to have an automatic expiration on bills like the PATRIOT ACT, but as a general rule for law that would result in complete chaos.
Actually: I would favor a constitutional requirement, that every new tax, revenue bill, regulation, OR grant of rights to any government entity has to be written so that the bill must be re-authorized or automatically expire by the house a minimum of three times, no sooner than 2 years after the original bill was passed, no longer than 6 years, AND at least 3 of the required re-authorizations separated by a minimum of 14 months.
That way, if the current session of congress does something stupid --- the NEXT congress has to continue to support it after the next two elections, OR the default is that the new experimental law goes away.
Obama has a pen and a phone, and he's not afraid to use them.
The house has an impeachment power.
Come to think of it.... there are two more things I would like to add:
+Add: The defendant can make and prosecute an allegation of prosecutorial misconduct, and compel the state to participate ---- in other words: no prosecutorial discretion for the district attorney to refuse to prosecute, if someone in their office is to be charged with this misconduct.
+Add: For any case, in which the defendant was found guilty, OR, in which there was a suspicion of conduct, an panel of outside reviewers, should be appointed to review ALL evidence and records of any sort that BOTH, law enforcement, and the prosecution has access to.
The reviewer should manually select (within their full discretion) a random set of cases for additional extensive scrutiny. The guilty verdict shall be null and void, if the reviewer finds misconduct, or if the reviewer finds a clear misrepresentation, or pertinent evidence was not disclosed to the defense.
Further review processes, and occasional random audits to weed out any potential corruption or abuses, and ensure that abuses are reported to the public and prosecuted, should be a daily activity, and at least 10% of every prosecutor's cases should be subject to reviews.
that's prosecutorial misconduct and gets convictions overturned when the courts catch them.
That's one thing, BUT it's not persuasive enough.
The prosecutor should get serious jail time over such misconduct, dependant on the gravity of the case.
For example: prosecutorial misconduct on a murder trial should be treated as a crime of: Attempted unlawful lifetime imprisonment, with a possible lifetime prison term for the prosecutor.
and any potentially exculpatory evidence.
Since with an analysis by the defense, together with additional statements, ANY kind of evidence the prosecution has might turn out to be exculpatory or pertinent to the defense --- they can't withold anything they gathered.
You must not have heard that borders and areas within 100 miles are "constitution free zones".
There is no such thing as a "constitution free zone". The constitution is the ultimate law of the land. Congress is incapable of lawfully making any exemptions to it.
It applies anywhere that the US congress, president, or other state or federal government personnel or officials exert any authority.
"You were here for 50 hours this week but you only really 'worked' for 39 of them...no overtime for you!"
Sorry, nope, under the FLSA. In the US, for ordinary non-exempt employees: you have to count any rest period as time worked that's 20 minutes or shorter of continuous rest.
why do we even have .com or .org or .net on the end.
To identify which registration authority the domain name was created under.
Also... to distinguish domain names from just any other name.
I'll give you an example: "BOOKS"
No one entity should get a monopoly on the name BOOKS. If you type BOOKS into your browser address bar; you should not be summarily redirected to whoever happened to get there first ---- logically, you would be presented search results based on relevance.
The authority system allows, there to be a BOOKS.COM under the Commercial registration authority... that might be a book store, Or an accounting vendor....
There can be a BOOKS.ORG, under the non-profit organization reg. authority ---- that might, for example, be a library-related organization.
Then there can be a BOOKS.EDU under the education reg. authority --- that domain might, for example, be an institution of higher learning that specializes in the library sciences or authorship/book writing.
Such domains a .INFO; were added later, and Don't really fit logically in the original DNS system.
This is great if a transformer blows. For many people their pstn wire is on the same poles as their power and if the lines are down, the lines are down.
That is possible, but usually what happens is the electricity gets switched off due to a fault / short-circuit, or transformer blowing... like you said.
One fault in the electrical system, and the circuit breakers gets thrown on a very large number of people.
Your telephone line is a private circuit. Chances are, if someone's phone line got a short circuit -- the other circuits are intact -- it's not everybody elses.
Also... often the telephone cabling may be completely underground; all the way from the served location to the central office. Whereas, the electrical transmission need be overhead.
The distribution networks look entirely different, so there is a fair chance your phone line might not be near your power line much of the way.
though, that the phone companies can't just hook up the VoIP phones to the analog battery banks due to differences in power requirements.
During an extended outage; I can power the bloody VoIP devices myself, via a local generator. MY concern is, that even if I power up the VoIP phone, and all my on-premises equipment, the network link will be dead, because the phone company's nearest repeater's battery has died --- I.E. the remote unit somewhere in their infrastructure that lights up a fiber, and converts it to Ethernet over copper, before feeding it into my building.
I am content if the FCC just requires them to provide continuous power up to the consumer household; with a minimum of 72 hours of onsite backup power for any network elements such as remote pedestals -- to be replenished prior to exhaustion, and a hookup for the homeowner to provide a battery and additional sources of emergency power at their location ---- such as a solar panel and charge controller to help charge the battery, when power is down for an extended period.
It works this well because it is /mandated/ that the resources required to /make it reliable/ are /spent/ to make it so.
The commission report states their standard of reliability...They are holding the new technology to a lower standard of reliability.
24 hours of backup power after a power outage
During winter storms and other similar events; I have experienced 3 to 5 day outages on occasion: POTS lines never went down, so emergency calls could still be made, even when there was no cell service...
Hawking made a proposition. It's not a theory, it's a proposition.
His alternative explanation is a proposition.
His refutation of blackholes is not. The original concept of a blackhole is dead. Shown to be impossible/a contradiction.
The only question is, what alternative is most accurate. His suggested alternative is indeed just a proposition, but NOT the concept that there cannot be blackholes as originally described.
The explanation is simple..... the researchers came across a secret bunker; they dared open it and go in. They were eventually accosted by teleporting alien creatures who shredded their bodies, ripped out one of theirs' tongues; there was some teleportation and time-travel involved, and finally -- their boddies got dumped on the side of the mountain away from their tent, by the russians. The End.
Actually... the real cyberweapons are most likely in government storage; right by the WMDs.
I bet the NSA or FBI has all the decryption keys, required to activate most of them.
The president's nuclear football, probably now includes cyberweapon deployment, and internet shutdown codes.
Or rather; there are no objects that have exactly the properties, of what we have been calling black holes.
Remember the article in Nature? : according to Hawking's paper : Notion of an 'event horizon', from which nothing can escape, is incompatible with quantum theory, physicist claims.
No one's going to have paper maps in their cars, and navigation systems may just say "Sorry, I can't find your location" if they try to pull up a map.
Remember: GPS is not functional when driving through parking garages or tunnels. How are you going to navigate Le tunnel sous la Manche; if your driverless car cannot tolerate GPS unavailability?
I believe the driverless cars are going to have to put through heavy scrutiny for safety, before they become available to consumers. INCLUDING options for safe operation -- and backup options for the human to navigate their vehicle, in case GPS is unavailable.
My new hero..... Good thing she's not in the US :)
You're not supposed to be decrypting latent signals effectively hidden in the video, to uncover privileged data. The feds would have a field day with anyone in the US who did this....
It's probably been so long since they released it because GCHQ had to vet the video to make sure you couldn't reconstruct the document from the fragments visible during the video.
Actually... we came up with a device that can mess with entropy so much; that the dust particles are expected to spontaneously come back together and reassemble themselves into chips and disk drives, with no damage whatsoever, and then the data wlill be retrievalbe again.
There is no such thing as perfect security, and everyone knows it
This is why the notion "It is OKAY if we have all these backdoors and all this data collection, the only quantum computer, etc, as long as it is controlled by strong security controls, laws, regulations, oversight" is absurd.