Just out of interest - what is big government? What would be small government? At what point does small government become big government? Or is there an intermediate government in between?
A small government would not take action except as necessary to maintain sufficient domestic peace to allow average citizens to simply go about their daily lives, and defend (defend - DEFEND) the nation from foreign invaders.
Obviously that involves some degree of social policy (for the former) and international dick-waving (for the latter), but when those necessary evils expand to eat 96% of the budget, you unambiguously have a big government.
And, of course we can have middle ground. We have 3.5 trillion (well, 2 trillion, since we don't actually have that extra 1.5 to spare) dollars of leeway between "small" and "big" in this case.
Your argument for more aggressive taxation (and enforcement thereof) already includes a much easier solution:
The problem: "Greece also has very big welfare state and countless state projects with lots of kickbacks. The money has to come from somewhere."
And the solution: "Now, it is possible to run a state with a minimal tax collection but then the citizens NEED to pay for everything out of there own pocket."
Why screw around with policing something when you can make the whole issue moot? We won't hunt you down to pay for your cash-only income, but when you want those potholes in front of your house fixed, pony up the cash and call a paving contractor.
As a non-"Audiophile", but someone who appreciates decent quality rips, I can see a simple enough use for this...
Downloaded tracks often have questionable origins and quality - I've heard things that someone clearly recorded straight off FM radio, complete with censoring bleeps; Songs that sounded almost like they'd come from vinyl (hisses and pops); Songs that fade in and out at random; Songs with tags that look like a native speaker of 1337 just discovered the wonders of Unicode.
Now personally, if I like a track enough to care about any of the above, I'll just buy the album (not just a CYA comment - I violate copyrights not only shamelessly, but with outright pride; I very much believe in supporting artists I like, however). But as a way of converting a crappy rip into a nice shiny clean reasonably HQ and properly tagged file? My music library contains somewhere on the order of 30k files; I'd gladly pay $25 to replace all the crap automagically.
Even though MtGox is the largest BTC exchange, this dip in value seems to have affected only that one exchange. Tradehill for example was completely unaffected.
Wow, consider yourself my newest friend (no sarcasm intended)!
I RTFA but couldn't find an explanation of how being sent a photo via twitter caused her personal information to be passed around the way the summary describes.
It gave her her five minutes of fame. In the modern world, that amounts to basically having six billion stalkers.
Twitter only enters the equation because "OOOOH, bad boy congresscritter used a COMPUTER THINGAMABOB to sexually harass a staffer!" (no pun intended).
/semi-offtopic: Captcha of "ruined". Sometimes you really have to suspect the Sladmins deliberately make those things apropos of the subject matter.
I guess you missed the part about them being forced to gold mine all night after a long day of hard labor. Are people skipping the summary now too?
No, just ignoring the parts that make no sense whatsoever.
If I have you as a slave, and you can make me $100/12hrs doing manual labor or $500/12hrs goldfarming... Do you seriously think I'd waste half your income-generating day having you fill potholes?
The "after" makes no sense when they could farm gold for both shifts and make their jailers 66% ($600 vs $1000) more per day.
I for one will share my location with Google, as long as it promises to not share it with 3th parties.
I would say that forms the real problem here - Not controls on whether or not someone's Android can track them, but what Google can do with that data.
A handful of companies each knowing a bit about my day's activities doesn't add up to squat. When weak protections allow those companies to share data about us without our permission, BAM, suddenly every marketing scumbag in the world knows what time we shit in the morning and how long it takes.
But anyway, if you feel that the risk to you is insignificant, then why are you asking the question?
Because, although the guy outside my own titanium-shuttered windows might pose no threat to me, I may feel some vague sense of civic duty not to just wait idly by until he wanders off to attack the rich widow next door?
Unfortunately for the FP poster, he can pretty much bet on every aspect of the connection as in some way falsified. So the only thing he "knows" about this attacker boils down to "the IP address I see as the source had weaker passwords than I do". Sad but true.
There's no way I could infer any kind of connection like that?
Yes and no. As one of the two parties in the transaction, you know you either bought or sold something to/from someone, and physical reality may well require some form of contact information to deliver the goods or service.
But the actual posting of the payment doesn't ever directly connect the buyer and the seller - Basically, the way Bitcoin works, the buyer simply tosses the payment out onto the network, signed with a public key from the seller (which by default, the Bitcoin client will use a new one every time). Some time later, the seller will receive the payment; It may have gone through 200 nodes since then, no way for either side to tell.
More importantly, though, that one transaction doesn't tell you anything at all about your trading partner's past or future identities - You know you sold Evil In A Can to "16kdbdhAMb48FYQpNNDw2G3tdGxc27Tdwn", but the world will never see that key used again (unless someone deliberately weakens the default behavior of their BitCoin client).
You can think of Bitcoins as the digital equivalent of locking a wad of cash in a bus-station locker to which your trading partner has the only key, and posting an announcement in the local newspaper to let him know he can pick it up whenever. Totally public process, yet no one ever needs to know either side's identity.
We were talking about that 10 years ago and almost nothing has happened. Sooner or later we will have one.
Nothing has happened because we the fucking people don't want it to happen. We the Geeks responsible for implementing these BS control-freak fantasies for Big Brother don't want it to happen. We the citizens of a planet rapidly coming to recognize the meaninglessness of national borders don't want our rights to depend on those available in the most restrictive theocratic dictatorship on the planet.
Nothing will happen because, for all its flaws, we designed the internet to survive government attempts to control it.
People still game the tax code, of course, but the current code at least targets the breaks where they are intended to go, which makes this a little harder.
I'll take the computer, for exactly the reason you say - It at least doesn't "intend" a shit-ton of tax breaks to go to its already-wealthy friends and campaign contributors.
The outcome of a good algorithm can be predicted already: a flat tax that is the same for everyone
That would not count as a "good algorithm" for the stated purpose.
You don't even need to read TFA, he says right in the summary that such a program would have the goal of preserving the status quo while getting rid of massive complexity - Not coming up with some magically "fair" new means of assessing taxes.
(As for the fairness of a flat tax - Why a flat percentage of income? Why not a flat assessment period, "$X per year or GTFO, citizen!"? Weighting it by income, even with the same rate applied to everyone, already biases the system to make the rich pay more for the same level of service from the government; Taking that in the other direction, why not tax disposable income at an extremely high rate, rather than total income? Flat != fair, because "fair" depends on who you ask to define it).
When debugging a web-app I find it infinitely easier to have my terminal windows open on one monitor with the code and logs and then use the second monitor for my browsers so I can actually see things *as they happen* instead of trying to do lots of switching.
This, and more. At any given time, I have about a 75% chance of needing to have any of the following open (with nearly a 100% chance of needing at least two at any given time):
An SQL IDE (such as SSMS) session
Some form of "real" coding IDE (usally Visual Studio)
A PDF viewer
A web browser on one (they do have legitimate uses)
A remote desktop session (or three)
Any of a dozen random apps that I may not always need visible, but do need to occasionally see at the same time as any of the above (calculator, email, text editor, visual diff, hex editor, music player, etc)
.
Oddly enough, two displays seems like the sweet spot - I've tried three, and although it sometimes made a world of difference, most of the time I tended to ignore it (possibly just because using all three at once actually requires turning my head to pan from the far left to far right one).
As for whether or not I believe I really "need" a second monitor (as opposed to just petulantly milking the company because I can)? At my last job, I bought my own while the boss hemmed and hawed for weeks over whether or not to grant me so great a privilege (and BTW, I finally converted him once he saw how much it helped).
Now, technically I suppose don't need "monitors", I need "screen real estate" at a size and resolution I can actually see. If I could get a 56" curved 3840p display, I expect I'd prefer that to having two separate panels. Since such a display costs a whopping $50k (or still over $10k for a mere 47" version), vs under $300 for 27" 1080p, I expect I'll stick with two monitors for the foreseeable future.
The difference is that the full faith and credit of the US government probably carries a bit more weight than the full faith and credit of an anonymous internet startup. For now, anyway.
You mean the same "US government" that just hit its debt ceiling and looks solidly on track (thanks to partisan bickering) to default on that "full faith and credit"?
Yeah. Got any of those babysitter tokens left? Looking more solid than US dollars ATM.
As I understand it, every user has a copy of the the complete history of every bitcoin.
Yes. But that history doesn't connect BTC to an individual, only to what you could consider akin to the ultimate anonymous account number (the "wallet"). And if feeling especially paranoid, you can create and use a new wallet for every single transaction (in fact, the BitCoin client actually has something like that functionality built in and used by default, at least for the outbound half of things)
(4) Oddly enough there's actually no such thing as a bitcoin, in the system itself.
The Bitcoin system does have a fundamental "unit" - A block, which currently has a value of 50BTC. You don't need to spend in whole-block units, but every transaction gets written to one (or more) block tx chains.
Coins are distributed in type of lottery amongst the people who are securing the network with their hash power. This is where things get complicated and if you want to learn more about that I suggest you read Satoshis white paper.
The quick n' dirty - For the next block, you take the previous block's solution, stick your own key in it, then stick a random number in it. Take the SHA256 of the resulting block (twice), and if the hash comes out less than the current rate-of-production limiting threshold, you win the 50BTC for that block.
As for the doom-n'-gloom from TFA, though - Personally, I find it a lot more likely that BitCoin will simply vanish once enough people lose interest, than that any government will even notice it enough to care, much less ban it.
Also from the summary: "The app is not publicly available, but the researchers are collecting input for future testing and possible commercialization"
This "announcement" amounts to a press release of a pre-beta commercial product. Woo-woo, stop the frickin' presses, we have a new winner of Slashvertisement of the year!
Damn. Why do I suddenly feel that I get to dine on a fine meal of crow a l'orange this evening?
In hindsight, it appears I've taken your meaning all wrong, and owe you an apology. I suspect you largely agree with my other post, except insofar as it kinda, uh, attacks you a wee bit.
Mea culpa.
Of course, if I did read you right the first time, feel free to ignore this apology.;)
Instead, you should DEMAND that they read books (that you bought) and pass certifications (that you pay for) and then use those skills on side projects.
Wow, way to lose your best talent - Y'know, the ones that actually have options other than putting up with you, Mr. Bonaparte?
If you "DEMAND" that I learn CrappyLegacySystemX that I will never, ever see outside the present job, I'd do what it takes to learn it and make myself the best damned CLS-X coder you've ever had; but you can bet your ass I'd do it on company time, and we can take it up with the labor board if you expect me to learn externally-useless skills, unpaid (no, buying the goddamned books and tests doesn't count, you weasel). Or more realistically, you'd give me an ultimatum, and I'd laugh as you squirm when I call your bluff and leave for greener pastures.
If, however, you want to help me learn ThingI'veExpressedAnInterestIn, which oh by the way happens to translate directly into skills applicable to CLS-X, then we can talk. But don't think my off-the-clock time belongs to your whims except insofar as they first satisfy my own.
Good managers don't threaten and manipulate, they remove obstacles to their team getting the job done. And when the manager himself counts as the obstacle... The same rule still applies. Remove yourself, or explain steadily declining output to your own boss, when no one but C-student interns will put up with you.
I'd never heard of it before, but now I'm trying it out. Streisand Effect is go.
Ditto, and more than that - I now have a convenient list of websites Uncle Sam doesn't want me to see. Care to guess where I'll spend my next week's worth of casual browsing?
Thank you, DHS. Without this particularly poor choice of targets, I likely never would have stumbled across a single one of these sites you've decided to unlawfully attack. Keep 'em comin', though - Always good to knowing my enemy's enemies.
This sounds like a solution looking for a cause to me.
Dingdingding! Give the man a Kewpie-doll.
Or more accurately, a solution to an entirely different problem, that the government desperately wants a palatable excuse to implement - Namely, "How can we track the movements of every single person in the country, even those damned Luddites who refuse to carry GPS-enabled-by-law cell phones?"
The idea that this addresses DOT costs doesn't even look superficially believable. For the most obvious flaw (which others have already mentioned), heavier vehicles damage the roads more but use more fuel in the process. Hybrids (sometimes) use less fuel, but the government could level that playing field tomorrow by actually giving CAFE some balls. And by the time all-electrics have enough market share to matter, we'll all have smart-meters that can apply device-specific tiered pricing (the real goal of smart-meters in the first place, punishing "luxuries" like air conditioning and TV).
Slashdot Mirror
Just out of interest - what is big government? What would be small government? At what point does small government become big government? Or is there an intermediate government in between?
A small government would not take action except as necessary to maintain sufficient domestic peace to allow average citizens to simply go about their daily lives, and defend (defend - DEFEND) the nation from foreign invaders.
Obviously that involves some degree of social policy (for the former) and international dick-waving (for the latter), but when those necessary evils expand to eat 96% of the budget, you unambiguously have a big government.
And, of course we can have middle ground. We have 3.5 trillion (well, 2 trillion, since we don't actually have that extra 1.5 to spare) dollars of leeway between "small" and "big" in this case.
Your argument for more aggressive taxation (and enforcement thereof) already includes a much easier solution:
The problem: "Greece also has very big welfare state and countless state projects with lots of kickbacks. The money has to come from somewhere."
And the solution: "Now, it is possible to run a state with a minimal tax collection but then the citizens NEED to pay for everything out of there own pocket."
Why screw around with policing something when you can make the whole issue moot? We won't hunt you down to pay for your cash-only income, but when you want those potholes in front of your house fixed, pony up the cash and call a paving contractor.
As a non-"Audiophile", but someone who appreciates decent quality rips, I can see a simple enough use for this...
Downloaded tracks often have questionable origins and quality - I've heard things that someone clearly recorded straight off FM radio, complete with censoring bleeps; Songs that sounded almost like they'd come from vinyl (hisses and pops); Songs that fade in and out at random; Songs with tags that look like a native speaker of 1337 just discovered the wonders of Unicode.
Now personally, if I like a track enough to care about any of the above, I'll just buy the album (not just a CYA comment - I violate copyrights not only shamelessly, but with outright pride; I very much believe in supporting artists I like, however). But as a way of converting a crappy rip into a nice shiny clean reasonably HQ and properly tagged file? My music library contains somewhere on the order of 30k files; I'd gladly pay $25 to replace all the crap automagically.
Even though MtGox is the largest BTC exchange, this dip in value seems to have affected only that one exchange. Tradehill for example was completely unaffected.
Wow, consider yourself my newest friend (no sarcasm intended)!
Ever heard the word "arbitrage"?
Just because life gets hard that doesn't give you the right to toss that responsibility onto someone else.
...Like, say, a parent that killed themself because they couldn't deal with the stress of raising kids?
I RTFA but couldn't find an explanation of how being sent a photo via twitter caused her personal information to be passed around the way the summary describes.
/semi-offtopic: Captcha of "ruined". Sometimes you really have to suspect the Sladmins deliberately make those things apropos of the subject matter.
It gave her her five minutes of fame. In the modern world, that amounts to basically having six billion stalkers.
Twitter only enters the equation because "OOOOH, bad boy congresscritter used a COMPUTER THINGAMABOB to sexually harass a staffer!" (no pun intended).
Are they appointed where you are or are they elected? Either way it still sounds like a bad idea.
It varies by state (and even by town), but generally in the US, the school board (an elected body) appoints the superintendent.
So both.
Yes, I know, cheap shot. Also IDK if school superintendants are usually teachers. But if he is, that doesn't bode well for his students.
Nope... Purely political position, and one usually outright antagonistic to actual teaching staff.
I guess you missed the part about them being forced to gold mine all night after a long day of hard labor. Are people skipping the summary now too?
No, just ignoring the parts that make no sense whatsoever.
If I have you as a slave, and you can make me $100/12hrs doing manual labor or $500/12hrs goldfarming... Do you seriously think I'd waste half your income-generating day having you fill potholes?
The "after" makes no sense when they could farm gold for both shifts and make their jailers 66% ($600 vs $1000) more per day.
Thanks for the writeup, guys, but really, I have nothing to do with this.
More of an RPG and puzzle game fan, anyway.
I for one will share my location with Google, as long as it promises to not share it with 3th parties.
I would say that forms the real problem here - Not controls on whether or not someone's Android can track them, but what Google can do with that data.
A handful of companies each knowing a bit about my day's activities doesn't add up to squat. When weak protections allow those companies to share data about us without our permission, BAM, suddenly every marketing scumbag in the world knows what time we shit in the morning and how long it takes.
"Would you like a free trial of Ex Lax?"
But anyway, if you feel that the risk to you is insignificant, then why are you asking the question?
Because, although the guy outside my own titanium-shuttered windows might pose no threat to me, I may feel some vague sense of civic duty not to just wait idly by until he wanders off to attack the rich widow next door?
Unfortunately for the FP poster, he can pretty much bet on every aspect of the connection as in some way falsified. So the only thing he "knows" about this attacker boils down to "the IP address I see as the source had weaker passwords than I do". Sad but true.
There's no way I could infer any kind of connection like that?
Yes and no. As one of the two parties in the transaction, you know you either bought or sold something to/from someone, and physical reality may well require some form of contact information to deliver the goods or service.
But the actual posting of the payment doesn't ever directly connect the buyer and the seller - Basically, the way Bitcoin works, the buyer simply tosses the payment out onto the network, signed with a public key from the seller (which by default, the Bitcoin client will use a new one every time). Some time later, the seller will receive the payment; It may have gone through 200 nodes since then, no way for either side to tell.
More importantly, though, that one transaction doesn't tell you anything at all about your trading partner's past or future identities - You know you sold Evil In A Can to "16kdbdhAMb48FYQpNNDw2G3tdGxc27Tdwn", but the world will never see that key used again (unless someone deliberately weakens the default behavior of their BitCoin client).
You can think of Bitcoins as the digital equivalent of locking a wad of cash in a bus-station locker to which your trading partner has the only key, and posting an announcement in the local newspaper to let him know he can pick it up whenever. Totally public process, yet no one ever needs to know either side's identity.
We were talking about that 10 years ago and almost nothing has happened. Sooner or later we will have one.
Nothing has happened because we the fucking people don't want it to happen. We the Geeks responsible for implementing these BS control-freak fantasies for Big Brother don't want it to happen. We the citizens of a planet rapidly coming to recognize the meaninglessness of national borders don't want our rights to depend on those available in the most restrictive theocratic dictatorship on the planet.
Nothing will happen because, for all its flaws, we designed the internet to survive government attempts to control it.
People still game the tax code, of course, but the current code at least targets the breaks where they are intended to go, which makes this a little harder.
I'll take the computer, for exactly the reason you say - It at least doesn't "intend" a shit-ton of tax breaks to go to its already-wealthy friends and campaign contributors.
The outcome of a good algorithm can be predicted already: a flat tax that is the same for everyone
That would not count as a "good algorithm" for the stated purpose.
You don't even need to read TFA, he says right in the summary that such a program would have the goal of preserving the status quo while getting rid of massive complexity - Not coming up with some magically "fair" new means of assessing taxes.
(As for the fairness of a flat tax - Why a flat percentage of income? Why not a flat assessment period, "$X per year or GTFO, citizen!"? Weighting it by income, even with the same rate applied to everyone, already biases the system to make the rich pay more for the same level of service from the government; Taking that in the other direction, why not tax disposable income at an extremely high rate, rather than total income? Flat != fair, because "fair" depends on who you ask to define it).
When debugging a web-app I find it infinitely easier to have my terminal windows open on one monitor with the code and logs and then use the second monitor for my browsers so I can actually see things *as they happen* instead of trying to do lots of switching.
This, and more. At any given time, I have about a 75% chance of needing to have any of the following open (with nearly a 100% chance of needing at least two at any given time):
.
Oddly enough, two displays seems like the sweet spot - I've tried three, and although it sometimes made a world of difference, most of the time I tended to ignore it (possibly just because using all three at once actually requires turning my head to pan from the far left to far right one).
As for whether or not I believe I really "need" a second monitor (as opposed to just petulantly milking the company because I can)? At my last job, I bought my own while the boss hemmed and hawed for weeks over whether or not to grant me so great a privilege (and BTW, I finally converted him once he saw how much it helped).
Now, technically I suppose don't need "monitors", I need "screen real estate" at a size and resolution I can actually see. If I could get a 56" curved 3840p display, I expect I'd prefer that to having two separate panels. Since such a display costs a whopping $50k (or still over $10k for a mere 47" version), vs under $300 for 27" 1080p, I expect I'll stick with two monitors for the foreseeable future.
The difference is that the full faith and credit of the US government probably carries a bit more weight than the full faith and credit of an anonymous internet startup. For now, anyway.
You mean the same "US government" that just hit its debt ceiling and looks solidly on track (thanks to partisan bickering) to default on that "full faith and credit"?
Yeah. Got any of those babysitter tokens left? Looking more solid than US dollars ATM.
Bartering is still taxed the same as income
Taxed, technically yes. Reported, no.
As I understand it, every user has a copy of the the complete history of every bitcoin.
Yes. But that history doesn't connect BTC to an individual, only to what you could consider akin to the ultimate anonymous account number (the "wallet"). And if feeling especially paranoid, you can create and use a new wallet for every single transaction (in fact, the BitCoin client actually has something like that functionality built in and used by default, at least for the outbound half of things)
Good answers, but two point of clarification...
(4) Oddly enough there's actually no such thing as a bitcoin, in the system itself.
The Bitcoin system does have a fundamental "unit" - A block, which currently has a value of 50BTC. You don't need to spend in whole-block units, but every transaction gets written to one (or more) block tx chains.
Coins are distributed in type of lottery amongst the people who are securing the network with their hash power. This is where things get complicated and if you want to learn more about that I suggest you read Satoshis white paper.
The quick n' dirty - For the next block, you take the previous block's solution, stick your own key in it, then stick a random number in it. Take the SHA256 of the resulting block (twice), and if the hash comes out less than the current rate-of-production limiting threshold, you win the 50BTC for that block.
As for the doom-n'-gloom from TFA, though - Personally, I find it a lot more likely that BitCoin will simply vanish once enough people lose interest, than that any government will even notice it enough to care, much less ban it.
From the summary:
Also from the summary: "The app is not publicly available, but the researchers are collecting input for future testing and possible commercialization"
This "announcement" amounts to a press release of a pre-beta commercial product. Woo-woo, stop the frickin' presses, we have a new winner of Slashvertisement of the year!
and then use those skills on side projects
;)
Damn. Why do I suddenly feel that I get to dine on a fine meal of crow a l'orange this evening?
In hindsight, it appears I've taken your meaning all wrong, and owe you an apology. I suspect you largely agree with my other post, except insofar as it kinda, uh, attacks you a wee bit.
Mea culpa.
Of course, if I did read you right the first time, feel free to ignore this apology.
Instead, you should DEMAND that they read books (that you bought) and pass certifications (that you pay for) and then use those skills on side projects.
Wow, way to lose your best talent - Y'know, the ones that actually have options other than putting up with you, Mr. Bonaparte?
If you "DEMAND" that I learn CrappyLegacySystemX that I will never, ever see outside the present job, I'd do what it takes to learn it and make myself the best damned CLS-X coder you've ever had; but you can bet your ass I'd do it on company time, and we can take it up with the labor board if you expect me to learn externally-useless skills, unpaid (no, buying the goddamned books and tests doesn't count, you weasel). Or more realistically, you'd give me an ultimatum, and I'd laugh as you squirm when I call your bluff and leave for greener pastures.
If, however, you want to help me learn ThingI'veExpressedAnInterestIn, which oh by the way happens to translate directly into skills applicable to CLS-X, then we can talk. But don't think my off-the-clock time belongs to your whims except insofar as they first satisfy my own.
Good managers don't threaten and manipulate, they remove obstacles to their team getting the job done. And when the manager himself counts as the obstacle... The same rule still applies. Remove yourself, or explain steadily declining output to your own boss, when no one but C-student interns will put up with you.
I'd never heard of it before, but now I'm trying it out. Streisand Effect is go.
Ditto, and more than that - I now have a convenient list of websites Uncle Sam doesn't want me to see. Care to guess where I'll spend my next week's worth of casual browsing?
Thank you, DHS. Without this particularly poor choice of targets, I likely never would have stumbled across a single one of these sites you've decided to unlawfully attack. Keep 'em comin', though - Always good to knowing my enemy's enemies.
This sounds like a solution looking for a cause to me.
Dingdingding! Give the man a Kewpie-doll.
Or more accurately, a solution to an entirely different problem, that the government desperately wants a palatable excuse to implement - Namely, "How can we track the movements of every single person in the country, even those damned Luddites who refuse to carry GPS-enabled-by-law cell phones?"
The idea that this addresses DOT costs doesn't even look superficially believable. For the most obvious flaw (which others have already mentioned), heavier vehicles damage the roads more but use more fuel in the process. Hybrids (sometimes) use less fuel, but the government could level that playing field tomorrow by actually giving CAFE some balls. And by the time all-electrics have enough market share to matter, we'll all have smart-meters that can apply device-specific tiered pricing (the real goal of smart-meters in the first place, punishing "luxuries" like air conditioning and TV).