Despite the (virtual) printing of ~83 billion dollars a month the dollar is not magically dropping. Liquidity trap and all that. The ability to print more money as needed is a *feature* of the system. Any currency where you cannot do this is seriously lacking in long term sustainability and is essentially only a pyramid scheme for early 'investors' and currency manipulators.
People have a million and one reason to use an anonymous non-nationally-controlled currency
Sure, move the ability to manipulate to an unregulated self interest rather than a fiscal and monetary based system balanced by elected officials and shareholders. Brilliant.
But yes, there are millions of reasons to use a currency other than your own governments, and mostly that boils down to various iterations on 1: business in that country. 2: to avoid tax. 3: to evade tax or 4: illegal sale of goods.
I recognize that today's donations to a group of brave "freedom fighters" (c.1980, Taliban-vs-Soviets) becomes tomorrow's financial support for a "terrorist organization" (c.Now, half the planet including PETA).
This doesn't really change anything. Paying taxes to the US government while it was invading Iraq and torturing people was supporting terrorism too. Whether you had to pay in bars of gold, gold certificates, a fiat currency or something else you still had to pay it. Whether you have a bitcoin being donated or a slab of US dollars you anonymity is not impacted particularly. You only know who controls the value of one of those though.
Absent any proof there was child porn on the drives the suspect couldn't be compelled to decrypt them to provide that evidence.
The FBI however was free to try and decrypt the drives.
After proving that drives at least contained some child porn it was no longer possible.
Imagine the same scenario with a house. The police think you have a grow op. But they don't have any actual proof of a grow up. They have a power bill, show up at your door and you say 'sorry, I run a server farm, not a grow op, no you cannot come in'. The police not believing this story keep snooping around, they watch you bring in lamps and fertilizer and numerous suspicious people bringing packages out. Eventually they get some sort of valid evidence that you have at least one growing illegal plant in your house. Now they can get a warrant, and you have to let them in.
You don't have to provide the police a key to your house, unless they can convince a judge there is definitely something illegal hidden behind your front door. Then you're boned.
While those are all legitimate points, the 'google retaining ownership' part may change when it becomes a consumer product. Right now it's in a testing phase, so google owning it makes sense. Whether they stick with that plan for commercial release will be harder to say.
Broadly I think is the question of what can google glass add that won't be a giant privacy invasion. You don't particularly need ads, some other company could just try and sell a device. But the ability to discretely record a video or take a picture anywhere is bad enough with cell phones and private investigator cameras wearable glasses just adds a new level to that. Just sticking your cell phone screen in front of your face isn't much of a problem, but to go beyond that its impossible for the data gathered to not represent a serious privacy threat (insofar as cell phone tracking isn't already).
As I pointed out, they actually do provide a service with it. They own it, so repairs are free, and because it's a public (i.e. government owned) corporation, service happens quickly with someone who actually knows what he's doing.
The downside of course is that you are paying for something that you might not ever need. It depends a lot on your financial situation and risk tolerance. If your water heater can be replaced for 300 dollars that's different than 1300 too. Depends on a lot of factors.
The hot water heater is monitored/owned by the local utility, and they monitor your water usage (total) as well. Ontario canada, several cities, and it was the same in New Brunswick when I was living there briefly, this procedure has worked in. Also, when the liner of my mothers hot water heater disintegrated and there were liner bits spewing out of the taps she just called the local utility and they just came over and replaced the heater later that day. No (added) cost.
We have the same for electricity and natural gas (methane). Occasionally the guys who check the meters for electricity or methane read the wrong one, or read the meter wrong and we get called too. The meters are read remotely and if there's an unexpected spike we get a phone call, but they come and check on them to see that they aren't tampered with a couple of times a year.
a water company would not notice it in a while btw.
If we have a leaking hot water tap the water company notices after a full month after it started and calls us as our hotwater usage spikes and our bill is way up.
put in some 10 TB limit then
How many users know the difference between 10TB and 10MB? Legal fine print is there for a reason, for those of us who actually do know the difference. For everyone else confusing the issue is unlikely to be helpful.
You can make a serious discussion out of which income groups are hurt more or less by federal versus state expenditure in different places.
Every major country in the world has various levels of government, even the UK which is relatively centralized still has city, county and now the national but sub national parliaments in wales and scotland.
The feds pay the state, the state pays the county, the county pays the city. Yes, if you're a taxpayer from anywhere outside of Utah or one of the areas attached to their grid it doesn't really matter to you where exactly the money is being spent. But if you're the poor dude in area of this facility where you'd be asked to subsidize a federal facility because it's in your district (including potentially the employees who work there), you'd much rather it be spread around to more people.
In general though a private company will have guaranteed deals, they will have a contract controlling the price increases they could face for some period of time, and they (like the feds) can always leave. The federal government like a megacorporation can also play political hardball, and say you know what, we're willing to spend 20 or 30 million dollars (or 300 million or 1.5 billion) to relocate this facility to save 2.4 million a year and we'll take all those jobs and all the development you got and leave you with nothing.
Tell that to the thousands of people walking around with them. Not released to the general public, not released at a price for the general public, still in a prototype phase they are still in the wild and could pose a threat to public safety. Imagine if they had a serious risk of catching fire for example.
And as far as I know they're not breaking any laws
Congress can still compel them to provide anything they ask for as part of their powers to make laws.
They're any place that won't shoot back, either because they are unable or have agreed not to. Drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan have to this point been done with the (sometimes secretive) consent of the host country.
If the US tried to launch drone strikes in Saudi or India or the like they might get one off, before the Saudi's or Indians started shooting the drones down.
You think that all the people who work manual jobs will become designers?
depends how much more crap we have.
Not just design, but sales too. Think about the narrow world of video games. There are more video games than you have time to play, if you want to play video games at all. There's huge potential in having lots of sales expertise on aggregating what kind of game(s) you personally might want to play. What kind of car/toast/dishwasher/clothes etc. to buy.
Value added is in telling the robots what to make and that would suit other peoples needs. The less labour we need per thing made the more things we have per person, the more time we need invested in buying the right things for us and for servicing them.
in the US, in 1900 41% of the labour was involved in agriculture, in 1930 it was 21.5%. Today it's between 2 and 3%. Europe is something similar.
And that's to say nothing of the 10's of millions of farm animals that worked in the same period and were replaced as well.
To an extent you're right though, people are still needed to oversee the robots, to replace and repair robots etc. The modern car factory even though it may have thousands of workers is very different than a car factory of thousands of workers before. That doesn't mean an end to work, it just means an end to a lot more manual work.
With opens then next possible revolution in industry. Customization. Rather than 10 different models of cars you can have 10 000 all for the same price and only a tiny marginal cost in deciding which one is best for you. That certainly happens now with cars, the marginal cost is just too high for a lot of it. But that will apply to a lot more goods likely, a lot more 'service' jobs that are are about deciding what you want the robots to do, and telling them how to do it, and fixing them when they fail.
Any company that does business in europe would have to try and find a way to comply though.
And the thing is, if most instances of 'the video' are actually links to a small number of hosted copies of the video on say google and facebook servers then it may not actually be that hard to hunt down on the big companies servers.
One of the things Megaupload did was it ran some sort of a hash on uploaded files, and if they already had the file they just created a new symbolic link to the same file. I would not be surprised if google and facebook have similar technology. Sure you can re-encode it or modify the file and have a different hash, so there will be several versions of the same basic file. But it's not going to do google or facebook or yahoo any harm to try and figure out if they actually can be rid of it.
We're not sure yet, preview releases are due out next month, but as with past preview releases they can also change things up quite a lot between first MSDN and Technet previews and release.
There are leaked builds available, but I'm always skeptical of leaked builds, because if the company wanted it released they would have. They're still at the stages of trying things and deciding what they want it to be.
I think the problem is more one of advocating for both sides of an issue, or advocating for a side that your supporters disagree with. You can't be for arctic drilling and against it at the same time, but you can be for spending lavishly and offering cushy 'jobs' to politicians from both sides of the political isle.
It has a lot of powerful features that are worth using, that are in no way obvious what they do, or how they work, and you don't even know what it's capable of unless someone shows you.
We (a university) offer a first year course that covers the basics of Word and Excel for just this reason, and it's narrowly focused on the academic world.
Because it's a yearly traditional parade and they want to show something. The civilian populace being 'asked' to line the streets and cheer aren't going to know differently.
For the westerners watching the brigades of RPG armed infantry are far more interesting than a bunch of missiles. Those show the DPRK has been paying attention to what has been working in Iraq and Afghanistan and a few other places. The missiles thing is mostly a theatrical deterrent for the moment anyway. Eventually yes, they will have nuclear armed missiles targeted on Washington DC, New York, Los Angles and anywhere else, and 15 years after that someone (the chinese likely) will give up on bitching about it and just open up trade relations with them and everyone will be happy. Until they get to that point it's a lot of theatre to make sure no one gets any crazy ideas about the DRPK not actually having a working deterrent. They don't need a lot of missiles (even just conventional ones) to be a really serious menace to Japan and South Korea.
Meanwhile, transferring 1mln of BTC across the globe is as easy as typing the number in the right window.
Which creates the new problem of accidentally transferring much larger amounts than intended. It's very rare you're going to accidentally transfer 1 billion dollars worth of gold versus 100 million.
The notes gained their popularity simply because gold is extremely unwieldy as currency.
Sure, gold certificates still have all of the economic problems of gold though. Bitcoins require both parties have a means of managing electronic payment and that payment system is secure from forgery (gold certificates face the same problem), which is the same basic problem, just rehashing the same thing.
(the result of turning them into fiat currency controlled by a central authority is a later story.)
That's kinda the relevant part though. Gold coins were regularly debased etc. Even during the latin monetary union of the 1920's the greeks were debasing metal coins and that ticked everyone else off.
Don't confuse the value traded with the value oustanding.
There's about 9 trillion dollars in gold in the world. But even 500 million dollars of it trading once to me, then once to squiggleslash, then back to you ends up as 1.5 billion in transactions even though there was never more than 500 million dollars in gold being traded.
Slashdot Mirror
, but recognize the ongoing dilution of US currency by (currently) 83 billion dollars a month
And yet you do not recognize this as the feature that it is.
http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/
Despite the (virtual) printing of ~83 billion dollars a month the dollar is not magically dropping. Liquidity trap and all that. The ability to print more money as needed is a *feature* of the system. Any currency where you cannot do this is seriously lacking in long term sustainability and is essentially only a pyramid scheme for early 'investors' and currency manipulators.
People have a million and one reason to use an anonymous non-nationally-controlled currency
Sure, move the ability to manipulate to an unregulated self interest rather than a fiscal and monetary based system balanced by elected officials and shareholders. Brilliant.
But yes, there are millions of reasons to use a currency other than your own governments, and mostly that boils down to various iterations on 1: business in that country. 2: to avoid tax. 3: to evade tax or 4: illegal sale of goods.
I recognize that today's donations to a group of brave "freedom fighters" (c.1980, Taliban-vs-Soviets) becomes tomorrow's financial support for a "terrorist organization" (c.Now, half the planet including PETA).
This doesn't really change anything. Paying taxes to the US government while it was invading Iraq and torturing people was supporting terrorism too. Whether you had to pay in bars of gold, gold certificates, a fiat currency or something else you still had to pay it. Whether you have a bitcoin being donated or a slab of US dollars you anonymity is not impacted particularly. You only know who controls the value of one of those though.
Tough.
Seriously.
You can bring all that up in an attempt at a legal defence. But in the narrow portion of 'when can they snoop around' you're pretty much screwed.
On what grounds would they cordon off your house? If a judge says 'go ahead and cordon it off for public safety' they pretty much can.
Absent any proof there was child porn on the drives the suspect couldn't be compelled to decrypt them to provide that evidence.
The FBI however was free to try and decrypt the drives.
After proving that drives at least contained some child porn it was no longer possible.
Imagine the same scenario with a house. The police think you have a grow op. But they don't have any actual proof of a grow up. They have a power bill, show up at your door and you say 'sorry, I run a server farm, not a grow op, no you cannot come in'. The police not believing this story keep snooping around, they watch you bring in lamps and fertilizer and numerous suspicious people bringing packages out. Eventually they get some sort of valid evidence that you have at least one growing illegal plant in your house. Now they can get a warrant, and you have to let them in.
You don't have to provide the police a key to your house, unless they can convince a judge there is definitely something illegal hidden behind your front door. Then you're boned.
While those are all legitimate points, the 'google retaining ownership' part may change when it becomes a consumer product. Right now it's in a testing phase, so google owning it makes sense. Whether they stick with that plan for commercial release will be harder to say.
Broadly I think is the question of what can google glass add that won't be a giant privacy invasion. You don't particularly need ads, some other company could just try and sell a device. But the ability to discretely record a video or take a picture anywhere is bad enough with cell phones and private investigator cameras wearable glasses just adds a new level to that. Just sticking your cell phone screen in front of your face isn't much of a problem, but to go beyond that its impossible for the data gathered to not represent a serious privacy threat (insofar as cell phone tracking isn't already).
As I pointed out, they actually do provide a service with it. They own it, so repairs are free, and because it's a public (i.e. government owned) corporation, service happens quickly with someone who actually knows what he's doing.
The downside of course is that you are paying for something that you might not ever need. It depends a lot on your financial situation and risk tolerance. If your water heater can be replaced for 300 dollars that's different than 1300 too. Depends on a lot of factors.
How does that work?
The hot water heater is monitored/owned by the local utility, and they monitor your water usage (total) as well. Ontario canada, several cities, and it was the same in New Brunswick when I was living there briefly, this procedure has worked in. Also, when the liner of my mothers hot water heater disintegrated and there were liner bits spewing out of the taps she just called the local utility and they just came over and replaced the heater later that day. No (added) cost.
We have the same for electricity and natural gas (methane). Occasionally the guys who check the meters for electricity or methane read the wrong one, or read the meter wrong and we get called too. The meters are read remotely and if there's an unexpected spike we get a phone call, but they come and check on them to see that they aren't tampered with a couple of times a year.
a water company would not notice it in a while btw.
If we have a leaking hot water tap the water company notices after a full month after it started and calls us as our hotwater usage spikes and our bill is way up.
put in some 10 TB limit then
How many users know the difference between 10TB and 10MB? Legal fine print is there for a reason, for those of us who actually do know the difference. For everyone else confusing the issue is unlikely to be helpful.
Still different pots at different tax rates.
You can make a serious discussion out of which income groups are hurt more or less by federal versus state expenditure in different places.
Every major country in the world has various levels of government, even the UK which is relatively centralized still has city, county and now the national but sub national parliaments in wales and scotland.
The feds pay the state, the state pays the county, the county pays the city. Yes, if you're a taxpayer from anywhere outside of Utah or one of the areas attached to their grid it doesn't really matter to you where exactly the money is being spent. But if you're the poor dude in area of this facility where you'd be asked to subsidize a federal facility because it's in your district (including potentially the employees who work there), you'd much rather it be spread around to more people.
In general though a private company will have guaranteed deals, they will have a contract controlling the price increases they could face for some period of time, and they (like the feds) can always leave. The federal government like a megacorporation can also play political hardball, and say you know what, we're willing to spend 20 or 30 million dollars (or 300 million or 1.5 billion) to relocate this facility to save 2.4 million a year and we'll take all those jobs and all the development you got and leave you with nothing.
No legal redress? I find that difficult to believe.
You are free to ignore a congressional subpoena and tell us about the experience.
It does go through the attorney general and a grand jury, so you can try and defend yourself though.
Congress has lawful subpoena power in the US.
Failure to comply would be a contempt of congress
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_Congress
The product hasn't even been released yet
Tell that to the thousands of people walking around with them. Not released to the general public, not released at a price for the general public, still in a prototype phase they are still in the wild and could pose a threat to public safety. Imagine if they had a serious risk of catching fire for example.
And as far as I know they're not breaking any laws
Congress can still compel them to provide anything they ask for as part of their powers to make laws.
Drone strikes aren't any place.
They're any place that won't shoot back, either because they are unable or have agreed not to. Drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan have to this point been done with the (sometimes secretive) consent of the host country.
If the US tried to launch drone strikes in Saudi or India or the like they might get one off, before the Saudi's or Indians started shooting the drones down.
I need a robot to help me proof read my forum posting.
You think that all the people who work manual jobs will become designers?
depends how much more crap we have.
Not just design, but sales too. Think about the narrow world of video games. There are more video games than you have time to play, if you want to play video games at all. There's huge potential in having lots of sales expertise on aggregating what kind of game(s) you personally might want to play. What kind of car/toast/dishwasher/clothes etc. to buy.
I think I am actually.
Design.
Value added is in telling the robots what to make and that would suit other peoples needs. The less labour we need per thing made the more things we have per person, the more time we need invested in buying the right things for us and for servicing them.
And I'm sure my grandparents found them very delicious.
in the US, in 1900 41% of the labour was involved in agriculture, in 1930 it was 21.5%. Today it's between 2 and 3%. Europe is something similar.
And that's to say nothing of the 10's of millions of farm animals that worked in the same period and were replaced as well.
To an extent you're right though, people are still needed to oversee the robots, to replace and repair robots etc. The modern car factory even though it may have thousands of workers is very different than a car factory of thousands of workers before. That doesn't mean an end to work, it just means an end to a lot more manual work.
With opens then next possible revolution in industry. Customization. Rather than 10 different models of cars you can have 10 000 all for the same price and only a tiny marginal cost in deciding which one is best for you. That certainly happens now with cars, the marginal cost is just too high for a lot of it. But that will apply to a lot more goods likely, a lot more 'service' jobs that are are about deciding what you want the robots to do, and telling them how to do it, and fixing them when they fail.
Any company that does business in europe would have to try and find a way to comply though.
And the thing is, if most instances of 'the video' are actually links to a small number of hosted copies of the video on say google and facebook servers then it may not actually be that hard to hunt down on the big companies servers.
One of the things Megaupload did was it ran some sort of a hash on uploaded files, and if they already had the file they just created a new symbolic link to the same file. I would not be surprised if google and facebook have similar technology. Sure you can re-encode it or modify the file and have a different hash, so there will be several versions of the same basic file. But it's not going to do google or facebook or yahoo any harm to try and figure out if they actually can be rid of it.
We're not sure yet, preview releases are due out next month, but as with past preview releases they can also change things up quite a lot between first MSDN and Technet previews and release.
There are leaked builds available, but I'm always skeptical of leaked builds, because if the company wanted it released they would have. They're still at the stages of trying things and deciding what they want it to be.
They already have one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht)
Paul Allen actually has a second one that is almost 100m long as well. He's a fan of big yachts.
Sad but true.
I think the problem is more one of advocating for both sides of an issue, or advocating for a side that your supporters disagree with. You can't be for arctic drilling and against it at the same time, but you can be for spending lavishly and offering cushy 'jobs' to politicians from both sides of the political isle.
Take some courses on how to use word.
It has a lot of powerful features that are worth using, that are in no way obvious what they do, or how they work, and you don't even know what it's capable of unless someone shows you.
We (a university) offer a first year course that covers the basics of Word and Excel for just this reason, and it's narrowly focused on the academic world.
Because it's a yearly traditional parade and they want to show something. The civilian populace being 'asked' to line the streets and cheer aren't going to know differently.
For the westerners watching the brigades of RPG armed infantry are far more interesting than a bunch of missiles. Those show the DPRK has been paying attention to what has been working in Iraq and Afghanistan and a few other places. The missiles thing is mostly a theatrical deterrent for the moment anyway. Eventually yes, they will have nuclear armed missiles targeted on Washington DC, New York, Los Angles and anywhere else, and 15 years after that someone (the chinese likely) will give up on bitching about it and just open up trade relations with them and everyone will be happy. Until they get to that point it's a lot of theatre to make sure no one gets any crazy ideas about the DRPK not actually having a working deterrent. They don't need a lot of missiles (even just conventional ones) to be a really serious menace to Japan and South Korea.
Meanwhile, transferring 1mln of BTC across the globe is as easy as typing the number in the right window.
Which creates the new problem of accidentally transferring much larger amounts than intended. It's very rare you're going to accidentally transfer 1 billion dollars worth of gold versus 100 million.
The notes gained their popularity simply because gold is extremely unwieldy as currency.
Sure, gold certificates still have all of the economic problems of gold though. Bitcoins require both parties have a means of managing electronic payment and that payment system is secure from forgery (gold certificates face the same problem), which is the same basic problem, just rehashing the same thing.
(the result of turning them into fiat currency controlled by a central authority is a later story.)
That's kinda the relevant part though. Gold coins were regularly debased etc. Even during the latin monetary union of the 1920's the greeks were debasing metal coins and that ticked everyone else off.
Don't confuse the value traded with the value oustanding.
There's about 9 trillion dollars in gold in the world. But even 500 million dollars of it trading once to me, then once to squiggleslash, then back to you ends up as 1.5 billion in transactions even though there was never more than 500 million dollars in gold being traded.