English has rules for when letters can appear adjacent to one another. Although it may have some flexibility when it comes to one or two "n"s in a row, it unambiguously never has two leading "n"s.
If nothing more, I would call this a transliteration fail. Your native language has pointlessly duplicated consonants? Hey, I have no problem with that. But if you want to spell it with Latin characters rather than Nko? Well... "When in Rome..."
At the center of the dispute is a Dutch laboratory that claims all rights to the genetic sequence of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus
You fuckers want the rights to it? Granted!
...With one catch - You bear criminal responsibility for every single person who dies from it once you stake your claim to it. I would add "moral" responsibility as well, but hell, a retarded 2YO could have explained that one to you.
If I own an aggressive dog, I have liability for its actions. Why should we treat the absolute lowest of the low, who let people die to make a buck, any better?
Everyone's so quick to attack, but he has a point. Whatever the cause, the tech industry seems to want its best and brightest to become toymakers. There are a lot a problems that could be helped by new tech, but none of that seems to be as glorious as working on the new iPhone, a better Google Maps, or the next hit app.
Even the homeless and destitute in the US enjoy a standard of living far above that of the average human even a century ago. The middle class lives better than most historical kings and emperors.
We value toys because we've made life too easy. We need to get up five days a week and spend a third of the day doing something we'd rather not; what then? That leaves a third of each day (not spent sleeping), and two whole days a week where we need to fill the time. Hell, today, I need to go out and mow the lawn, and I've already put it off wasting time online for three hours (and it'll only take me two to do the task) - Oh, boo-fuckin'-hoo, wontcha have some sympathy for poor ol' me, needing to trudge through the Sisyphean task of walking behind a machine that magically makes the grass shorter and packages it neatly in a bag for me?;)
Make no mistake, I do not glamorize work or hold the delusion that it somehow counts as in some way noble or good for the soul. But we've already won. We simply don't care about social-issue-X as much as we value cheap tasty calories and cheap immersive entertainment.
Nnaemeka advises entrepreneurs looking for ideas to 'consider looking beyond the city-centric, navel-gazing, youth-obsessed mainstream' and instead focus on some groups that no one else is helping.
Mr. too-many-Ns: Smart people still need to eat. To put a roof over their heads. They may even hope to "get ahead" a bit, enjoy a life of reasonable comfort, and retire early with enough wealth to not end up a decrepit dependent of the state like most people.
Solving "important" problems doesn't accomplish those goals. Until you want to demonstrate the "importance" of your pet interests by paying me as much as industry does to work on inane, self-centric apps, GTFO.
That said - Come up with funding, and we can talk. Honestly, I believe virtually everyone would rather work on solving real problems than on building shoddy consumer crap to pad $CEO's bonus this quarter. But Einstein gots ta get paid, son.
Who wants to stare at 30Hz on their computer all day? Is this 1992?
No, not 1992 anymore - Which means 30Hz doesn't imply a display with a seizure-inducing flicker. The pixels of an LCD come on and stay on, they don't depend on an electron beam to blast them 60 times a second to keep glowing long enough to create the illusion of continuity.
LCDs more accurately have an update speed, not a "refresh" rate. If you really really need full-motion high-contrast video, and have pretty good eyes[*], the difference may matter to you. If you mostly work on code or spreadsheets or the like, you won't even notice the difference.
* FWIW, I actually can see the difference, and yes, DLP projectors drive me completely ape-shit. But I stare at code all day long, and on an LCD, it makes absolutely no difference if I use a USB-connected display at a whopping 10-15hz vs a top-of-the-line 240hz monster.
At 10 feet from a 36" screen, you can't tell the difference between DVD (576p) and 720p [...]So, given that this monitor is less than 36", if you sit at TV viewing distances from it, no, a DVD won't look awful on it.
I don't know about you, but I don't sit 10ft from my monitor. More like 3ft max, and sometimes as close as 18in.
3. Therefore, I don't want rich people to pay a lot of taxes.
I normally would agree with you on "typical idiot" grounds, but in this case, I think you've sold a lot of people short.
I, along with plenty of others, object to taxes - Mine, Bill Gates', yours - Because we have a government that doesn't even pretend to represent our interests anymore. we therefore view starving it out of existence the most rational course of action (and don't give me that crap about getting to choose between Tweedledee and Tweedledum every few years).
Yes, we have a country that really should just get it over with and split in half along red/blue boundaries. But deeper than that, we could find far more common ground than disagreement, on which the government consistently goes against the will of us all, in favor of either itself or its non-compulsory financial supporters (ie, Fritz Hollings, D-Disney). We have wars no one supports, prohibitions no one supports, social controls no one supports, entitlements only those receiving them support, a justice system that protects serial rapists and murderers from real justice while putting good people away for technicalities. Even down to the petty BS, we have red light cameras proven to cause more accidents, speed limits everyone goes at least 10mph over, a drinking age that practically no one reaches before getting drunk... For each of the "big" laws we can agree we need to keep us from each other's throats, we have a thousand papercuts to which we add the insult that we have to pay to inflict them on ourselves.
So I don't want the rich to cheat. I don't want to get rich out of a delusion that someday I'll get to cheat. I don't want to not pay my "fair share" - More like I don't want a share at all of what they offer.
I find it interesting that Litecoin gets a pass on this exact question. Litecoin's "innovation" was adding scrypt, however, there were coins before it that used scrypt. If you follow Coblee's original launch post, Litecoin's biggest difference was the number of coins and the fair launch
Litecoin didn't get a pass on that.
The first point you mention, the use of scrypt, made it "CPU friendly" (or more accurately, "GPU hostile") at a time when mining BTC by CPU amounted to a waste of electricity. That has largely become a moot point, since GUI miners now exist for LTC; but when the exchange rate favors mining BTC, you can still drop back to LTC on your CPU.
The second point you mention explains your exception to the first. Tenebrix used scrypt first, but had 7 million TBX premined. Whether practical (dumping 7 million TBX into an economy of 20-30M would completely destabilize it) or simply ethical (why the hell should someone get a head start over everyone else), premining became a huge no-no in the alt-currency community.
Only criminals and terrorists have any need for an alternative, secure, somewhat anonymous, non-government-controlled
"Need" has nothing to do with it.
I count as neither a criminal[*] nor a terrorist, but recognize the ongoing dilution of US currency by (currently) 83 billion dollars a month (and that just from a single source!). I recognize that the government acts only in slightly better faith than the likes of Paypal, randomly seizing the assets of anyone it deems big enough to bother but weak enough not to fight back. 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).
People have a million and one reason to use an anonymous non-nationally-controlled currency. They have only corporatocratic protectionist laws against doing exactly that as a reason not to do so. And if that makes me a tinfoil-hat wearer, well, hand me my complimentary beanie, because GS' pet Geithner has the Aluminum-foil market cowering in Detroit begging for mercy.
* Insomuch as any of us can make that claim, given that we have a legal structure designed such that any of us, at any given time, have committed some crime TPTB can use to make us disappear for a very, very long time.
You can make a gun the just plain works AND hove a bio metric ID system.
Well now! If you actually have a solution to that particular problem, you've just become a billionaire overnight. Every government on the planet, along with a good percent of fortune 500s, would pay just about anything for your mythical flawless biometric ID system.
Free hint - 98% counts as "really really really fucking good". And with guns, 98% means that two people in a hundred will either die (false negative) or successfully go on a killing spree (false positive). And that, without active attempts to trick the system (which Mythbusters pretty much crushed like a sad little butterfly under their iron heel of truth).
You can make a gun the just plain works AND hove a bio metric ID system. The fact that you cna't think of anything just another indicator of your sub par thinking skills.
Really now? Can it also magically recognize the wife who doesn't "like" guns and refuses to touch it (until she hears someone walking around downstairs at 2am)?
Will it also magically know that its owner's son, who regularly practices with it, has lost his shit and plans to steal it to take out a school?
Will it also come with an RTG battery (yet weigh less than a small car) so it doesn't just happen to run out of juice to verify ownership the one time in 15 years I really really need it?
Unless you can answer "yes" to all those questions, well, clearly one of us has some "sub par thinking skills".
You leave work late one evening. You notice a group of trashy teens across the parking lot, but see similar groups often enough so think nothing of it. You start walking toward your car, and as soon as you've gotten committedly-far from the safety of your office building, the teens start moving quickly toward you. You notice two now have knives out.
You start running toward your car, and make it with a good 10+ second buffer before the thugs reach you. You press your thumb to the door lock and...
Bzzzt. Damn that paper cut you got right after lunch! You try again: Bzzzt. Third time: Bzzzt.
The thugs reach you, stab you 27 times, rape a few of the new holes, and take your iphone and wallet. They leave you to die, which you obligingly do roughly twelve minutes later.
Whether you "like" them or not, if you acknowledge that guns have any legitimate use, they need to just plain work when needed. Period. No papercuts preventing them from recognizing your fingerprints, no batteries to die, no "instant background check" to take 30 seconds to verify that you haven't started taking Prozac in the past few days.
And if you don't think guns have any legitimate purpose, well, too bad - Because the authors of our constitution did.
An American judge order the splitting of the HONG KONG SHANGHAI BANK OF CHINA? Yes, that's what HSBC means.
The last "C" stands for "Corporation", actually, but close enough.
And yes, an American judge (albeit it with the name "Roberts", since the case would unavoidably end up with the USSC) could order them split up for the purpose of acting as a corporate entity in the US. Worldwide, we can't do much about them. If they want to do business in the US, however, we have every right to insist on the terms under which we allow them to do business in out country.
In other words we base our money off of our collective labor rather than some arbitrary metal we deem rare enough to care about.
Damn, I've never seen it put quite so eloquently! So as the GDP grows, the value of each "share" of that decreases accordingly. Though at the same time, the proportion of shares going to the rich keeps increasing. Hmm...
I can't really think of many better arguments for investing in metals (or hell, vintage Garbage Pail Kids cards for that matter! Just about anything but US Dollars, really). I would say "land" instead, but countless examples have proven that most towns simply view landowners as ATMs to tap as needed.
They have fought tooth and nail - successfully - to remain very much not a bank. Banks have extensive regulations regarding when, how, and for how long they can lock you out of access to your own money, which runs contrary to Paypal's "when in doubt, just steal from our customers" business model.
No business with minors is one of them.
First of all, this kid already had a Paypal account. They never hesitated to take his money, and only mentioned this rule when it came time to pay some out.
And second - Just "no". Doing business with kids imposes a small extra burden on the company to make sure the parents approve, or they risk having a reduced ability to pass the buck on any derived liability. A bit more stringent, we have COPPA adding a ton of privacy requirements for kids under 13, but that doesn't apply here (and even then doesn't make such accounts illegal, it just requires parental approval and blocks the company from tracking/selling certain information about the kids).
Sounds like the guy running Bitcoin should keep his anonymity?
Sounds like the guy who knows nothing about Bitcoin should keep his mouth shut until he knows how it works?
And you won't particularly care to learn this, but LR had far more going on than simply serving as a Bitcoin/USD gateway. If the feds wanted to go after Bitcoin, it would have tried to take out Gox by now (and no, closing their Dwolla doesn't count).
That said, based on their increasing level of fear over a silly little online currency, I have little doubt they will eventually try to shut down all of Bitcoin. And though they may keep Americans from having much to do with it, I look forward to watching the circus as they realize that the can't trick everyone in the world into attending a security conference in Las Vegas to put them through a mock trial.
Do a quick search for "why are taxis regulated?" on your favorite engine and come up with a grab-bag of hooror stories about taxi drivers taking advantage of customers
A city/state has an obvious interest in making sure their drivers and cars count as safe, and in occasionally auditing the driver's choice of routes to make sure they don't take people on a 20 mile trip to get one block away. And that ends any legitimate regulation the government imposes.
Charging a million bucks for a medallion, telling the industry what kind of cars they can drive, the extortionate "airport" surcharge - These all need to end yesterday. I find it nothing short of disgusting that getting around the crown jewel of capitalism, NYC, amounts to a perfect lesson in crony fascism.
That said - Bloomberg, while arguably a convictable felon, actually has nothing to do with this situation. This story goes back long, long before NY's Little Nero took office, and reeks more of the mob than of overzealous local government.
The term "mixing" sounds less pejorative than "laundering", but the principle is the same: disguise the transfer of wealth. I expect that some extreme pressure will be put on these mixing services as Bitcoins gain traction with nations.
As I pointed out, though, you don't really need to use a mixer - You can accomplish almost the same thing just by sending your bitcoins to other accounts you control in more or less random chunks. You could even, if really motivated, create your own mixer with thousands of your own accounts. A handful of illegal sources go in, along with a large volume of legit transactions, stir stir stir, and who knows that you-#1701 equals you-#42 unless you tell on yourself?
Granted, we already have laws against "structuring", but even as blatant of a cash-grab as those laws appear, they still require "you" to deliberately make a series of related sub-$10k deposits specifically to avoid filing a CTR/8300. Key point there, they need to prove both intent (the standard defense), and the "you" part (which Bitcoin's entire structure makes all but impossible, though ironically, if they could prove all the accounts as you, that would pretty much put a nail in the "intent" coffin).
If you associate that data with a person, they're forever tied to that transaction and you can follow it.
Yes and no. Once you associate "me" with a transaction, you can always prove I owned part of block B at time T. You can't, however, prove that when I "spent" those bitcoins, I did or did not simply send them to myself, making anonymity (at least, at the "plausible deniability" level) always just one easy transaction away.
And for the really paranoid, you can use any of a dozen "mixing" services, that take your bitcoins along with those of thousands of other people and stir them all together to make tracing the ones you put in to the ones you take out as close to impossible as matters.
That depends on the contract, of which there are several ways: Hourly By Project On retainer [...] However, from the description it sounds like he does "by project" contracting; but there's not really enough information to say.
Agreed, not quite enough information, but I took the FP to mean that he wants the best of both worlds - He wants to pay them hourly, but keep them on the hook as though he pays by the project.
Personally, I refuse to do project-based contracting. I've gotten burned too many times - Either the scope creeps if you don't all but beat the customer up for an unambiguous spec; or if you get a good solid spec, the customer complains that they didn't really want what they asked for (and get insulted if you warn them when you know they don't want that). So, hourly, or retainer, but screw project-based. That way leads nowhere good.
Interesting that you're not prepared to guarantee your work. It would make me wary of contracting you as it places the onus on me to ensure that I've throughly tested your code rather than on you. Is this common practice?
This entire discussion has either misused the term "contracting", or deliberately glossed over it (by which I don't mean to accuse you specifically, the whole thread has that problem).
When I work under salary, I get paid for projects (along with a certain amount of "keeping the lights on" shit-work, of course). I work unpaid OT if necessary, and cut out early when ahead of schedule. I generally expect (and get) a very flexible schedule so long as I get my tasks done.
When I work as a contractor (and yes, I do both), I get paid for my time. I'll give a good estimate of how long it will take me, but if we run over, you keep paying. Simple as that. Yes, that could potentially lead to abuses by unscrupulous programmers - And they wouldn't get any repeat work for pulling crap like that. Just part of the game: Find a few that work well with/for you, and make them happy enough to stick around.
To address the FP post, though, you can't have it both ways. Sure, you sound like great boss in good times, then a bastard at the least pleasant part of the project. All code has bugs, period. Usually the major ones come from ambiguities in the specs; but even assuming a perfect spec, All code (still) has bugs, period.
If you don't budget some percentage of the total project resources to identifying and correcting those bugs, you have failed to properly manage the project. Instead, you have committed the PM version of the classic mathematician's proof-joke, "We start by assuming all cats as perfect black-body spheres in a frictionless environment...".
Not to totally poo-poo the idea, but I'm pretty sure kids accidentally shooting other kids with guns know how guns work and usually what they're used for.
No, they don't.
You describe kids who have only ever seen point-and-click hurt-the-bad-guys BS on TV. Any kid who has actually fired a gun gains an immediate appreciation for their destructive power - And for most kids brought up with guns around, that experience comes after literally years of having the rules for handling them safely drilled in from a young age.
Kids who understand how guns work don't touch them without Dad around. They don't handle them casually around the house. They don't point them at anything living, except when explicitly hunting it. They don't even gaze admiringly at the gun cabinet. They treat them respectfully as a dangerous tool, not all that dissimilar from how they treat a table saw - And yet, we don't hear about thousands of accidental table saw decapitations every year.
And yes, at seven years old, a kid can understand all of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Yes, I do care.
English has rules for when letters can appear adjacent to one another. Although it may have some flexibility when it comes to one or two "n"s in a row, it unambiguously never has two leading "n"s.
If nothing more, I would call this a transliteration fail. Your native language has pointlessly duplicated consonants? Hey, I have no problem with that. But if you want to spell it with Latin characters rather than Nko? Well... "When in Rome..."
At the center of the dispute is a Dutch laboratory that claims all rights to the genetic sequence of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus
...With one catch - You bear criminal responsibility for every single person who dies from it once you stake your claim to it. I would add "moral" responsibility as well, but hell, a retarded 2YO could have explained that one to you.
You fuckers want the rights to it? Granted!
If I own an aggressive dog, I have liability for its actions. Why should we treat the absolute lowest of the low, who let people die to make a buck, any better?
Meh. Ask me if I care.
Go on, ask.
Everyone's so quick to attack, but he has a point. Whatever the cause, the tech industry seems to want its best and brightest to become toymakers. There are a lot a problems that could be helped by new tech, but none of that seems to be as glorious as working on the new iPhone, a better Google Maps, or the next hit app.
;)
Even the homeless and destitute in the US enjoy a standard of living far above that of the average human even a century ago. The middle class lives better than most historical kings and emperors.
We value toys because we've made life too easy. We need to get up five days a week and spend a third of the day doing something we'd rather not; what then? That leaves a third of each day (not spent sleeping), and two whole days a week where we need to fill the time. Hell, today, I need to go out and mow the lawn, and I've already put it off wasting time online for three hours (and it'll only take me two to do the task) - Oh, boo-fuckin'-hoo, wontcha have some sympathy for poor ol' me, needing to trudge through the Sisyphean task of walking behind a machine that magically makes the grass shorter and packages it neatly in a bag for me?
Make no mistake, I do not glamorize work or hold the delusion that it somehow counts as in some way noble or good for the soul. But we've already won. We simply don't care about social-issue-X as much as we value cheap tasty calories and cheap immersive entertainment.
Nnaemeka advises entrepreneurs looking for ideas to 'consider looking beyond the city-centric, navel-gazing, youth-obsessed mainstream' and instead focus on some groups that no one else is helping.
Mr. too-many-Ns: Smart people still need to eat. To put a roof over their heads. They may even hope to "get ahead" a bit, enjoy a life of reasonable comfort, and retire early with enough wealth to not end up a decrepit dependent of the state like most people.
Solving "important" problems doesn't accomplish those goals. Until you want to demonstrate the "importance" of your pet interests by paying me as much as industry does to work on inane, self-centric apps, GTFO.
That said - Come up with funding, and we can talk. Honestly, I believe virtually everyone would rather work on solving real problems than on building shoddy consumer crap to pad $CEO's bonus this quarter. But Einstein gots ta get paid, son.
The day you shrink the government small enough to be drowned in a bathtub, some rich guy will drown it.
Do you really think the police exist to protect you? Report a break-in or mugging some time and see how much of a response you get.
The day you get rid of the government's police protection of the rich, the "rich guy" becomes a body in the gutter.
Who wants to stare at 30Hz on their computer all day? Is this 1992?
No, not 1992 anymore - Which means 30Hz doesn't imply a display with a seizure-inducing flicker. The pixels of an LCD come on and stay on, they don't depend on an electron beam to blast them 60 times a second to keep glowing long enough to create the illusion of continuity.
LCDs more accurately have an update speed, not a "refresh" rate. If you really really need full-motion high-contrast video, and have pretty good eyes[*], the difference may matter to you. If you mostly work on code or spreadsheets or the like, you won't even notice the difference.
* FWIW, I actually can see the difference, and yes, DLP projectors drive me completely ape-shit. But I stare at code all day long, and on an LCD, it makes absolutely no difference if I use a USB-connected display at a whopping 10-15hz vs a top-of-the-line 240hz monster.
At 10 feet from a 36" screen, you can't tell the difference between DVD (576p) and 720p [...]So, given that this monitor is less than 36", if you sit at TV viewing distances from it, no, a DVD won't look awful on it.
I don't know about you, but I don't sit 10ft from my monitor. More like 3ft max, and sometimes as close as 18in.
3. Therefore, I don't want rich people to pay a lot of taxes.
I normally would agree with you on "typical idiot" grounds, but in this case, I think you've sold a lot of people short.
I, along with plenty of others, object to taxes - Mine, Bill Gates', yours - Because we have a government that doesn't even pretend to represent our interests anymore. we therefore view starving it out of existence the most rational course of action (and don't give me that crap about getting to choose between Tweedledee and Tweedledum every few years).
Yes, we have a country that really should just get it over with and split in half along red/blue boundaries. But deeper than that, we could find far more common ground than disagreement, on which the government consistently goes against the will of us all, in favor of either itself or its non-compulsory financial supporters (ie, Fritz Hollings, D-Disney). We have wars no one supports, prohibitions no one supports, social controls no one supports, entitlements only those receiving them support, a justice system that protects serial rapists and murderers from real justice while putting good people away for technicalities. Even down to the petty BS, we have red light cameras proven to cause more accidents, speed limits everyone goes at least 10mph over, a drinking age that practically no one reaches before getting drunk... For each of the "big" laws we can agree we need to keep us from each other's throats, we have a thousand papercuts to which we add the insult that we have to pay to inflict them on ourselves.
So I don't want the rich to cheat. I don't want to get rich out of a delusion that someday I'll get to cheat. I don't want to not pay my "fair share" - More like I don't want a share at all of what they offer.
I find it interesting that Litecoin gets a pass on this exact question. Litecoin's "innovation" was adding scrypt, however, there were coins before it that used scrypt. If you follow Coblee's original launch post, Litecoin's biggest difference was the number of coins and the fair launch
Litecoin didn't get a pass on that.
The first point you mention, the use of scrypt, made it "CPU friendly" (or more accurately, "GPU hostile") at a time when mining BTC by CPU amounted to a waste of electricity. That has largely become a moot point, since GUI miners now exist for LTC; but when the exchange rate favors mining BTC, you can still drop back to LTC on your CPU.
The second point you mention explains your exception to the first. Tenebrix used scrypt first, but had 7 million TBX premined. Whether practical (dumping 7 million TBX into an economy of 20-30M would completely destabilize it) or simply ethical (why the hell should someone get a head start over everyone else), premining became a huge no-no in the alt-currency community.
Only criminals and terrorists have any need for an alternative, secure, somewhat anonymous, non-government-controlled
"Need" has nothing to do with it.
I count as neither a criminal[*] nor a terrorist, but recognize the ongoing dilution of US currency by (currently) 83 billion dollars a month (and that just from a single source!). I recognize that the government acts only in slightly better faith than the likes of Paypal, randomly seizing the assets of anyone it deems big enough to bother but weak enough not to fight back. 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).
People have a million and one reason to use an anonymous non-nationally-controlled currency. They have only corporatocratic protectionist laws against doing exactly that as a reason not to do so. And if that makes me a tinfoil-hat wearer, well, hand me my complimentary beanie, because GS' pet Geithner has the Aluminum-foil market cowering in Detroit begging for mercy.
* Insomuch as any of us can make that claim, given that we have a legal structure designed such that any of us, at any given time, have committed some crime TPTB can use to make us disappear for a very, very long time.
You can make a gun the just plain works AND hove a bio metric ID system.
Well now! If you actually have a solution to that particular problem, you've just become a billionaire overnight. Every government on the planet, along with a good percent of fortune 500s, would pay just about anything for your mythical flawless biometric ID system.
Free hint - 98% counts as "really really really fucking good". And with guns, 98% means that two people in a hundred will either die (false negative) or successfully go on a killing spree (false positive). And that, without active attempts to trick the system (which Mythbusters pretty much crushed like a sad little butterfly under their iron heel of truth).
You can make a gun the just plain works AND hove a bio metric ID system. The fact that you cna't think of anything just another indicator of your sub par thinking skills.
Really now? Can it also magically recognize the wife who doesn't "like" guns and refuses to touch it (until she hears someone walking around downstairs at 2am)?
Will it also magically know that its owner's son, who regularly practices with it, has lost his shit and plans to steal it to take out a school?
Will it also come with an RTG battery (yet weigh less than a small car) so it doesn't just happen to run out of juice to verify ownership the one time in 15 years I really really need it?
Unless you can answer "yes" to all those questions, well, clearly one of us has some "sub par thinking skills".
Best car analogy? Okay, how about this:
You leave work late one evening. You notice a group of trashy teens across the parking lot, but see similar groups often enough so think nothing of it. You start walking toward your car, and as soon as you've gotten committedly-far from the safety of your office building, the teens start moving quickly toward you. You notice two now have knives out.
You start running toward your car, and make it with a good 10+ second buffer before the thugs reach you. You press your thumb to the door lock and...
Bzzzt. Damn that paper cut you got right after lunch! You try again: Bzzzt. Third time: Bzzzt.
The thugs reach you, stab you 27 times, rape a few of the new holes, and take your iphone and wallet. They leave you to die, which you obligingly do roughly twelve minutes later.
Whether you "like" them or not, if you acknowledge that guns have any legitimate use, they need to just plain work when needed. Period. No papercuts preventing them from recognizing your fingerprints, no batteries to die, no "instant background check" to take 30 seconds to verify that you haven't started taking Prozac in the past few days.
And if you don't think guns have any legitimate purpose, well, too bad - Because the authors of our constitution did.
An American judge order the splitting of the HONG KONG SHANGHAI BANK OF CHINA? Yes, that's what HSBC means.
The last "C" stands for "Corporation", actually, but close enough.
And yes, an American judge (albeit it with the name "Roberts", since the case would unavoidably end up with the USSC) could order them split up for the purpose of acting as a corporate entity in the US. Worldwide, we can't do much about them. If they want to do business in the US, however, we have every right to insist on the terms under which we allow them to do business in out country.
In other words we base our money off of our collective labor rather than some arbitrary metal we deem rare enough to care about.
Damn, I've never seen it put quite so eloquently! So as the GDP grows, the value of each "share" of that decreases accordingly. Though at the same time, the proportion of shares going to the rich keeps increasing. Hmm...
I can't really think of many better arguments for investing in metals (or hell, vintage Garbage Pail Kids cards for that matter! Just about anything but US Dollars, really). I would say "land" instead, but countless examples have proven that most towns simply view landowners as ATMs to tap as needed.
They are a bank and have to respect the law.
They have fought tooth and nail - successfully - to remain very much not a bank. Banks have extensive regulations regarding when, how, and for how long they can lock you out of access to your own money, which runs contrary to Paypal's "when in doubt, just steal from our customers" business model.
No business with minors is one of them.
First of all, this kid already had a Paypal account. They never hesitated to take his money, and only mentioned this rule when it came time to pay some out.
And second - Just "no". Doing business with kids imposes a small extra burden on the company to make sure the parents approve, or they risk having a reduced ability to pass the buck on any derived liability. A bit more stringent, we have COPPA adding a ton of privacy requirements for kids under 13, but that doesn't apply here (and even then doesn't make such accounts illegal, it just requires parental approval and blocks the company from tracking/selling certain information about the kids).
Sounds like the guy running Bitcoin should keep his anonymity?
Sounds like the guy who knows nothing about Bitcoin should keep his mouth shut until he knows how it works?
And you won't particularly care to learn this, but LR had far more going on than simply serving as a Bitcoin/USD gateway. If the feds wanted to go after Bitcoin, it would have tried to take out Gox by now (and no, closing their Dwolla doesn't count).
That said, based on their increasing level of fear over a silly little online currency, I have little doubt they will eventually try to shut down all of Bitcoin. And though they may keep Americans from having much to do with it, I look forward to watching the circus as they realize that the can't trick everyone in the world into attending a security conference in Las Vegas to put them through a mock trial.
Do a quick search for "why are taxis regulated?" on your favorite engine and come up with a grab-bag of hooror stories about taxi drivers taking advantage of customers
A city/state has an obvious interest in making sure their drivers and cars count as safe, and in occasionally auditing the driver's choice of routes to make sure they don't take people on a 20 mile trip to get one block away. And that ends any legitimate regulation the government imposes.
Charging a million bucks for a medallion, telling the industry what kind of cars they can drive, the extortionate "airport" surcharge - These all need to end yesterday. I find it nothing short of disgusting that getting around the crown jewel of capitalism, NYC, amounts to a perfect lesson in crony fascism.
That said - Bloomberg, while arguably a convictable felon, actually has nothing to do with this situation. This story goes back long, long before NY's Little Nero took office, and reeks more of the mob than of overzealous local government.
see also xkcd
Hmm, I get prompted for a password when I try that - Anyone happen to know it?
The term "mixing" sounds less pejorative than "laundering", but the principle is the same: disguise the transfer of wealth. I expect that some extreme pressure will be put on these mixing services as Bitcoins gain traction with nations.
As I pointed out, though, you don't really need to use a mixer - You can accomplish almost the same thing just by sending your bitcoins to other accounts you control in more or less random chunks. You could even, if really motivated, create your own mixer with thousands of your own accounts. A handful of illegal sources go in, along with a large volume of legit transactions, stir stir stir, and who knows that you-#1701 equals you-#42 unless you tell on yourself?
Granted, we already have laws against "structuring", but even as blatant of a cash-grab as those laws appear, they still require "you" to deliberately make a series of related sub-$10k deposits specifically to avoid filing a CTR/8300. Key point there, they need to prove both intent (the standard defense), and the "you" part (which Bitcoin's entire structure makes all but impossible, though ironically, if they could prove all the accounts as you, that would pretty much put a nail in the "intent" coffin).
If you associate that data with a person, they're forever tied to that transaction and you can follow it.
Yes and no. Once you associate "me" with a transaction, you can always prove I owned part of block B at time T. You can't, however, prove that when I "spent" those bitcoins, I did or did not simply send them to myself, making anonymity (at least, at the "plausible deniability" level) always just one easy transaction away.
And for the really paranoid, you can use any of a dozen "mixing" services, that take your bitcoins along with those of thousands of other people and stir them all together to make tracing the ones you put in to the ones you take out as close to impossible as matters.
That depends on the contract, of which there are several ways: Hourly By Project On retainer [...] However, from the description it sounds like he does "by project" contracting; but there's not really enough information to say.
Agreed, not quite enough information, but I took the FP to mean that he wants the best of both worlds - He wants to pay them hourly, but keep them on the hook as though he pays by the project.
Personally, I refuse to do project-based contracting. I've gotten burned too many times - Either the scope creeps if you don't all but beat the customer up for an unambiguous spec; or if you get a good solid spec, the customer complains that they didn't really want what they asked for (and get insulted if you warn them when you know they don't want that). So, hourly, or retainer, but screw project-based. That way leads nowhere good.
Interesting that you're not prepared to guarantee your work. It would make me wary of contracting you as it places the onus on me to ensure that I've throughly tested your code rather than on you. Is this common practice?
This entire discussion has either misused the term "contracting", or deliberately glossed over it (by which I don't mean to accuse you specifically, the whole thread has that problem).
When I work under salary, I get paid for projects (along with a certain amount of "keeping the lights on" shit-work, of course). I work unpaid OT if necessary, and cut out early when ahead of schedule. I generally expect (and get) a very flexible schedule so long as I get my tasks done.
When I work as a contractor (and yes, I do both), I get paid for my time. I'll give a good estimate of how long it will take me, but if we run over, you keep paying. Simple as that. Yes, that could potentially lead to abuses by unscrupulous programmers - And they wouldn't get any repeat work for pulling crap like that. Just part of the game: Find a few that work well with/for you, and make them happy enough to stick around.
To address the FP post, though, you can't have it both ways. Sure, you sound like great boss in good times, then a bastard at the least pleasant part of the project. All code has bugs, period. Usually the major ones come from ambiguities in the specs; but even assuming a perfect spec, All code (still) has bugs, period.
If you don't budget some percentage of the total project resources to identifying and correcting those bugs, you have failed to properly manage the project. Instead, you have committed the PM version of the classic mathematician's proof-joke, "We start by assuming all cats as perfect black-body spheres in a frictionless environment...".
Not to totally poo-poo the idea, but I'm pretty sure kids accidentally shooting other kids with guns know how guns work and usually what they're used for.
No, they don't.
You describe kids who have only ever seen point-and-click hurt-the-bad-guys BS on TV. Any kid who has actually fired a gun gains an immediate appreciation for their destructive power - And for most kids brought up with guns around, that experience comes after literally years of having the rules for handling them safely drilled in from a young age.
Kids who understand how guns work don't touch them without Dad around. They don't handle them casually around the house. They don't point them at anything living, except when explicitly hunting it. They don't even gaze admiringly at the gun cabinet. They treat them respectfully as a dangerous tool, not all that dissimilar from how they treat a table saw - And yet, we don't hear about thousands of accidental table saw decapitations every year.
And yes, at seven years old, a kid can understand all of that.
so many gun owners are so lax about safety.
Generalize much?