It may be arbitrary, but it is still a somewhat socially-accepted metric. I suspect that many people would agree that the top 10% (or 3%) of students by whatever accepted measure qualify for "gifted".
Socially accepted or not, it still counts as completely arbitrary to say that 33000 kids get in to the "good" schools, but #33001 (NYC has 1.1M public school students) gets to attend one of the standard prison-camp style facilities.
Now, for the kids right at the edge, of course they care - But on a larger scale, it makes absolutely no difference to society as a whole whether Dashiell (age 6Y10M4D) or Phineus (age 6Y10M3D) make the cut.
All this "precision" to test against an arbitrary "90th" and "97th" percentile.
This.
When having aged one more day than someone else who got the same score means not making the cut, well, welcome to life, unfairness and all. The sooner kids learn that, the better.
Now, parents - If you really believe your little nose-picking demon can do better in the "right" environment, I can give you far, far better advice than suing the school system over fractions of a point on an admissions test: Move to suburbia. Even if the kid still doesn't make the cut for the gifted program, he'll receive a far higher quality education than he would in even the best of urban schools.
It's like we're forming up a lynch mob! I've had my ass handed to me for suggesting due process for everyone before.... Maybe this time I'll just stand in back with a pitchfork and wait for every one to calm down. By tomorrow every one here will be screaming for it again.
Hey there friend, Bill - of Bill's Torches and Pitchforks - Here. Normally, I hold an everything-half-priced sale to celebrate events like this, but this time? Goodness no, we need to show some restraint!
Let the professionals torture the "why" out of him first. Then I'll pass you your complimentary salt-and-vinegar "experience enhancement" shaker. But for now - Patience. If this guy doesn't have an "unfortunate accident" in custody, we'll get our turn; and if he does, well, we can all sleep well knowing that experts did the job far better than we could strive for.
I find it curious that you post so much BS to Bitcoin threads that I actually recognize your handle at this point.
No one cares about this toy money.
Even a speculative bubble doesn't hit $90 if "no one cares" about the underlying asset. Quite the opposite - So many people have an interest in Bitcoin, whether legitimate or speculation, than its market capitalization last week qualified it as a mid cap (and it still plays in the same ballpark despite the post-$250 sell-off).
They broke already existing federal anti-laundering laws so this happened. They could have followed the law and been able to stay open.
You have made an assertion about a company's business practices without a shred of evidence. They may have violated money laundering laws. They may have used the wrong type of account (ie, personal checking) for running a business they didn't expect to grow so fast. They may simply have scared a bank that wanted nothing do with Bitcoin (much like the EFF's stance on Bitcoin donations) simply because it would distract them from their core mission. You know nothing about which of those, or dozens of other possibilities, actually happened.
Stick with (incorrectly) calling it a pyramid scheme - At least that, not having an immediate victim of your accusation, doesn't count as libel.
If this becomes a big enough threat, the response needs to be alike to that of SOPA.
No. The response needs to look like the bloody (meant literally, not as an expletive) "Jasmine Revolution". We already responded to SOPA like we responded to SOPA, and where did it get us? They reintroduce the same goddamned steaming pile of corporate Christmas presents every year.
We need to reject this in a way that makes our leaders afraid to try it a 22nd time. We need to send the message that if you favor business over humans, if you favor war over humans, if you favor big government over humans - We will drag you out of your comfy office, into the streets, and hang you from a lamppole with your genitals stuffed down your throat.
Simple as that, really. We've long since passed the point where we can write a politely worded persuasive letter to "our" elected officials.
Add Kathy Dunderdale and her allies to as many unseemly Facebook groups as possible.
Already starting, this should get amusing fast.
Ms. Dunderdale, you've made it clear that "it is up to every MHA to monitor the comments posted on Facebook groups to which they belong" - So why haven't you denounced your fellow members of such hate groups as "Mothers Against Sober Driving", "Nazi Party of Canada", and "The Vatican" yet?
So if all mining stopped right now, new bitcoins will still be made? Who gets them if no one is mining?
"Mining" a block just means taking the previous block's hash, adding a few fields to it and signing it with a new hash low enough to qualify at the required difficulty level.
It sounds somewhat misleading to say that the network will still "make" blocks in the absence of mining - More accurately, the network uses the difficulty parameter to target ten minutes as the average block creation time. Until someone mines the next block, it doesn't really exist.
So, in the absence of miners, the difficulty would drop over time (though only once the blockchain reached the next difficulty adjustment, every 2016 blocks) to the point that a solo modern CPU miner could sustain the network (at the lowest difficulty of 1, it takes 7MH/s to average one block per ten minutes).
Bitcoins in a rational market would cost only as much as they cost to make with perhaps a small premium.
You mean like US $20 bills, which cost 7.5 cents each to print? Or more like pennies (worth 2.5 cents of copper) or nickels (worth 7 cents of copper)?
Though ironically enough, as an unregulated market, Bitcoins do have a value near their production cost, as measured in electricity. As the difficulty goes up, people switch to more energy efficient mining techniques (from CPU to GPU to ASIC) or quit mining altogether as it becomes unprofitable.
The world could use more elitism, instead of dumbing kids down by teaching them that we should value mediocrity. Everyone gets a trophy, woo-hoo! But a job? Gee, kid - Sorry we didn't prepare you to actually compete when you get to the real world...
90% of the population of the world could easily learn to program and learn to do it proficiently.
Aahahahahaha... Oh, man, stop, ya killin' me here!
With a lot of effort, you could teach most people to use cookie-cutter VBS snippets in Excel. But programming? No. Most people not only can't program, they outright loathe the mental state programmers need to enter and stay in for hours at a time. When I describe my job (in the abstract, not talking about one specific project or domain) to most people, they cringe.
And yes I interview crapy engineers regularly.
Not really supporting your own point here - A solid C- student who managed to graduate with a STEM degree still blows the doors off the rest of society for their ability to think logically and break seemingly-intractable problems down into tiny easily-solved ones... If the flawed gemstones don't impress you, you might not want to generalize about the actual dross.
Since when does any private entity have the power to shut you up at gunpoint or cuff you and put you in jail?
The definition of censorship doesn't include "at gunpoint" or "imprison you" in it.
Apple isn't doing that, they're just saying "not in my app store"
And the Galaxies, despite all Apple's bullying, have started outselling iPhones. Looks like the market has finally started exerting the one power it has, saying "Your app store? Not on my phone!"
Are they causing you harm? Are you just being uppity about log entries?
Flooding the logs with false positives does cause harm, in that he may miss real attacks in the flood of "test" ones.
Not to mention, who bears the liability if this testing actually manages to get in and cause data loss? The FP poster specifically mentions fuzzing inputs to the web server - That works great in a test environment; if it succeeds on a production system, god only knows what effects it will have.
My recommendation? Aggressively block this shit until your actual boss (not some random schmuck from "corporate") directly orders you to let it get through; and if ordered to let it continue, get it in writing (email would suffice).
Getting good performance out of a GPU miner takes some tweaking, and very few average home PCs even have GPUs worth mining on anyway (most IGPs and consumer-grade NVidia cards barely count as one more CPU-class device on which to mine, if even possible).
So that really only leaves CPU mining as the no-fuss option. And a typical modern machine will do 3-6 MH/s per core, so figure 24MH/s as an upper limit for any fairly new high-end OEM machine. For comparison, the BitForce Jalapeno - If it ever ships - Will do 5GH/s and costs less than a low-end PC... Or roughly the equivalent of 200 enslaved high-end PCs (or, more realistically, 500-1000 of last year's middle-of-the-road OEM crap Dells/HPs/Lenovos).
That said, you have it somewhat correct - If you can enslave a few thousand halfway decent machines, with someone else footing the electric bill, it might make it financially worth the effort. For the level of legal risk (just talking about running a botnet here, not the risk of some government eventually cracking down on such a convenient currency) vs the cost of buying an ASIC mining rig, however, it doesn't really seem like a worthwhile trade-off.
This idea that you can 'mine' for bitcoins is what makes me not take it seriously. It seems so arbitrary and ridiculous.
I know, right? Like those lumps of yellow metal or shiny hunks of clear carbon we mine from the Earth. Entirely arbitrary and ridiculous to assign any value to them.;)
If it makes more sense to you, it may help to stop thinking of it as "mining", and instead consider it as pay for doing the work necessary to add transactions to the blockchain.
Let's imagine (crazy idea, I know) that their goal is the application of local law... they certainly know that this will create unwanted attention in the short run, but maybe that's a sacrifice they're willing to make to have wikimedia comply with local law?
Welcome to the Internet, France. Wiki ain't local. Suck it.
That said - This article has pretty much nothing of interest in it except maybe a tiny bit of cold war trivia only of interest to the most die-hard "must know everything" historians. That, therefore, makes me suspect this base's official purpose as a cover for something much, much more interesting. Thanks, France, for drawing attention to this!
Everything that you do, every day is against the law. All the time. All it needs is a motivated prosecutor or enforcement agent, to activate your infraction.
Ah, but this law would count as quite the double-edged sword...
Y'know the old cheesy warez-site belief that you can ban cops or require them to identify themselves as such when asked on a sign-up form? This gem of a turd would make those true.
Buy it using a fake id. - Ask a homeless or drug addict to buy you a prepaid phone/sim and use it. - Buy it in another country.
Actually one of the most realistic answers so far, except, you don't need an ID or a straw buyer... Just pick up a tracphone at Target and activate it at the in-store Starbucks' hotspot. Done and untraceable-to-you, unless "they" want you enough to manually hunt down security footage from one of those two stores.
That said, who do you plan to call with it? I consider it a sad commentary on our times that who (on the whole) you associate with matters far, far more than your own identity - Though the two end up largely interchangeable, unless a lot of people in your immediate circle of friends call to chat with your folks once a week. And of course, you probably use it at home - Lot of people living there? Keep in mind, even pre-GPS requirement, the cell providers could still get a decent lock on a phone just from the towers that can see it; and going back to the original FP question, you can't use the phone if no towers can see it.
Or, perhaps you lack the skills to derive spiritual benefit from the parables that they do.
Okay, so kindly explain to me the spiritual lesson derived from having two entirely different (and contradictory) creation myths in the first two chapters? From Jesus having two different paternal grandfathers (which shouldn't even matter if Daddy G knocked the BVM up), and two different sets of (quoted) famous last words?
Yes, cheesy parables often contain a bit of wisdom worth knowing. I don't, however, worship the wise food-storing ants and pray to them to save me from wintery starvation.
Thinking their beliefs are stupid while not thinking any less of the person who believes them is not bigotry.
Well then, hand me my bigot badge, which I'll wear proudly.
Yes, I do think less of people who lack the critical thinking skills to observe the glaring internally inconsistencies in the ancestors' fairy tales to which they so desperately cling.
We all want a purpose in a meaningless world, and most of us don't really like the idea of dying all that much. "Made of meat" doesn't give you a pass on Intro to Logic, however.
As a Catholic, disproving the Bible means little to me since it is only a part of my faith, not the whole foundation of it. Protestants however must frantically fight to prove the book entirely correct because of their subscription to the sola scriptura heresy which separates them from Catholicism.
Ever notice how they call it the first COMMANDMENT, not the first suggestion?
But hey, no worries friend, I've skipped all the "Mary" bullshit and gone right over to goddess worship. Gets you way more - ahem - "goddesses incarnate".;)
Now repeat the experiment with labels saying things like
Well, the same experiment with "fragile" boxes containing an accelerometer showed that they get beaten up far, far worse than an unmarked box.
Of course, for that one, we didn't really need more proof - I get somewhere around 100 assorted deliveries per year, all in great shape; even when they arrive in torrential rain and sit outside all day, I find them neatly bagged, perfectly safe and dry... Unless the sender stupidly marked them "fragile". Then I get a box at least badly frayed on all sides, often damp (even when delivered in dry weather, seriously, WTF), frequently with the corners blown out or other large inexplicable holes in the sides. I honestly don't think I've ever received a "fragile" package that didn't look like a second-hand box-fort from Afghanistan.
Sad, really... I mean, most of us don't exactly love our jobs. We may enjoy some parts of it, but on the whole, we'd still rather sleep in. But we get up every day to earn an honest day's pay. If you need to slack off a bit, hey, just don't get caught; but when you start taking out your lack of a fulfilling life on the very products they pay you to handle - GTFO.
Which is it then? Does the crime of money laundering require the money to come from illegal sources, or is dodging reporting requirements for legally obtained profit also money laundering?
Entirely separate crimes. Resisting arrest doesn't require the police to have any other valid charges on which to arrest you. Same idea applies here - Trying to hide in itself counts as the crime.
And as I said, I consider that absolutely, fundamentally wrong for anything claiming to call itself a "free" society. But as citizens of "that" society, rather than some imaginary idealistic one - Let's attack the actual bad laws rather than a parody of them.
And watch the value of bitcoins collapse if/when this goes into effect.
Actually, they've almost doubled vs USD since this news broke.
Regulation both sucks, and legitimizes. Far from destroying BTC, this move recognizes them.
Or put another way - Microsoft doesn't trash OS X in its ads; it doesn't even mention Apple. When the top dog suddenly starts bothering to fight back against a yippy little heel-biter, guess who gains more status from the exchange?
For example, it's quite routine for farmers to be accused of money laundering for depositing their money in chunks of less than $10k, typically to avoid filling out byzatine forms. When this happens, the US government just seizes (aka steals) the money. There is usually no court case.
The actual crime of money laundering requires the money to have come from illegal sources.
The link you gave has the guy admitting that he structured deposits specifically to avoid reporting requirements. He could have deposited over 10k at a time at one bank for the next 40 years and no one would have blinked; As soon as he deliberately tried to dodge the reporting requirements, however, bam, he had committed a crime.
Now, I'll stand beside you to denounce those reporting requirements as complete and utter BS we need to abolish; But by analogy, not all IP means "copyright".
Slashdot Mirror
It may be arbitrary, but it is still a somewhat socially-accepted metric. I suspect that many people would agree that the top 10% (or 3%) of students by whatever accepted measure qualify for "gifted".
Socially accepted or not, it still counts as completely arbitrary to say that 33000 kids get in to the "good" schools, but #33001 (NYC has 1.1M public school students) gets to attend one of the standard prison-camp style facilities.
Now, for the kids right at the edge, of course they care - But on a larger scale, it makes absolutely no difference to society as a whole whether Dashiell (age 6Y10M4D) or Phineus (age 6Y10M3D) make the cut.
All this "precision" to test against an arbitrary "90th" and "97th" percentile.
This.
When having aged one more day than someone else who got the same score means not making the cut, well, welcome to life, unfairness and all. The sooner kids learn that, the better.
Now, parents - If you really believe your little nose-picking demon can do better in the "right" environment, I can give you far, far better advice than suing the school system over fractions of a point on an admissions test: Move to suburbia. Even if the kid still doesn't make the cut for the gifted program, he'll receive a far higher quality education than he would in even the best of urban schools.
Sorry, but in every way that counts, your country has stopped being "great" a long time ago.
So, would you prefer your change in Dollars, or (non-German) Euros?
Would you prefer your NATO liberators arrive in F-14s or Yugos?
Would you prefer your judge US Republican or French (I won't even bother comparing against any Sharia country)?
Would you prefer your fries supersized, or rationed?
Would you prefer your burger Angus or Clydesdale?
Take your pick. The US has its flaws, and I rarely defend it, but the rest of the world looks like it has gone to hell even faster than we have.
It's like we're forming up a lynch mob! I've had my ass handed to me for suggesting due process for everyone before.... Maybe this time I'll just stand in back with a pitchfork and wait for every one to calm down. By tomorrow every one here will be screaming for it again.
Hey there friend, Bill - of Bill's Torches and Pitchforks - Here. Normally, I hold an everything-half-priced sale to celebrate events like this, but this time? Goodness no, we need to show some restraint!
Let the professionals torture the "why" out of him first. Then I'll pass you your complimentary salt-and-vinegar "experience enhancement" shaker. But for now - Patience. If this guy doesn't have an "unfortunate accident" in custody, we'll get our turn; and if he does, well, we can all sleep well knowing that experts did the job far better than we could strive for.
There is no conspiracy here.
I find it curious that you post so much BS to Bitcoin threads that I actually recognize your handle at this point.
No one cares about this toy money.
Even a speculative bubble doesn't hit $90 if "no one cares" about the underlying asset. Quite the opposite - So many people have an interest in Bitcoin, whether legitimate or speculation, than its market capitalization last week qualified it as a mid cap (and it still plays in the same ballpark despite the post-$250 sell-off).
They broke already existing federal anti-laundering laws so this happened. They could have followed the law and been able to stay open.
You have made an assertion about a company's business practices without a shred of evidence. They may have violated money laundering laws. They may have used the wrong type of account (ie, personal checking) for running a business they didn't expect to grow so fast. They may simply have scared a bank that wanted nothing do with Bitcoin (much like the EFF's stance on Bitcoin donations) simply because it would distract them from their core mission. You know nothing about which of those, or dozens of other possibilities, actually happened.
Stick with (incorrectly) calling it a pyramid scheme - At least that, not having an immediate victim of your accusation, doesn't count as libel.
If this becomes a big enough threat, the response needs to be alike to that of SOPA.
No. The response needs to look like the bloody (meant literally, not as an expletive) "Jasmine Revolution". We already responded to SOPA like we responded to SOPA, and where did it get us? They reintroduce the same goddamned steaming pile of corporate Christmas presents every year.
We need to reject this in a way that makes our leaders afraid to try it a 22nd time. We need to send the message that if you favor business over humans, if you favor war over humans, if you favor big government over humans - We will drag you out of your comfy office, into the streets, and hang you from a lamppole with your genitals stuffed down your throat.
Simple as that, really. We've long since passed the point where we can write a politely worded persuasive letter to "our" elected officials.
Add Kathy Dunderdale and her allies to as many unseemly Facebook groups as possible.
Already starting, this should get amusing fast.
Ms. Dunderdale, you've made it clear that "it is up to every MHA to monitor the comments posted on Facebook groups to which they belong" - So why haven't you denounced your fellow members of such hate groups as "Mothers Against Sober Driving", "Nazi Party of Canada", and "The Vatican" yet?
So if all mining stopped right now, new bitcoins will still be made? Who gets them if no one is mining?
"Mining" a block just means taking the previous block's hash, adding a few fields to it and signing it with a new hash low enough to qualify at the required difficulty level.
It sounds somewhat misleading to say that the network will still "make" blocks in the absence of mining - More accurately, the network uses the difficulty parameter to target ten minutes as the average block creation time. Until someone mines the next block, it doesn't really exist.
So, in the absence of miners, the difficulty would drop over time (though only once the blockchain reached the next difficulty adjustment, every 2016 blocks) to the point that a solo modern CPU miner could sustain the network (at the lowest difficulty of 1, it takes 7MH/s to average one block per ten minutes).
Me? I'm still reeling from the fact that he didn't have to go through Airport security to be able to do this.
Let's all just thank our respective deities that this guy didn't use any high capacity magazines - Imagine the body count then!
/ Off to write my congresscritter demanding background checks for pressure cookers
Bitcoins in a rational market would cost only as much as they cost to make with perhaps a small premium.
You mean like US $20 bills, which cost 7.5 cents each to print? Or more like pennies (worth 2.5 cents of copper) or nickels (worth 7 cents of copper)?
Though ironically enough, as an unregulated market, Bitcoins do have a value near their production cost, as measured in electricity. As the difficulty goes up, people switch to more energy efficient mining techniques (from CPU to GPU to ASIC) or quit mining altogether as it becomes unprofitable.
That's elitist bullshit.
The world could use more elitism, instead of dumbing kids down by teaching them that we should value mediocrity. Everyone gets a trophy, woo-hoo! But a job? Gee, kid - Sorry we didn't prepare you to actually compete when you get to the real world...
90% of the population of the world could easily learn to program and learn to do it proficiently.
Aahahahahaha... Oh, man, stop, ya killin' me here!
With a lot of effort, you could teach most people to use cookie-cutter VBS snippets in Excel. But programming? No. Most people not only can't program, they outright loathe the mental state programmers need to enter and stay in for hours at a time. When I describe my job (in the abstract, not talking about one specific project or domain) to most people, they cringe.
And yes I interview crapy engineers regularly.
Not really supporting your own point here - A solid C- student who managed to graduate with a STEM degree still blows the doors off the rest of society for their ability to think logically and break seemingly-intractable problems down into tiny easily-solved ones... If the flawed gemstones don't impress you, you might not want to generalize about the actual dross.
Since when does any private entity have the power to shut you up at gunpoint or cuff you and put you in jail?
The definition of censorship doesn't include "at gunpoint" or "imprison you" in it.
Apple isn't doing that, they're just saying "not in my app store"
And the Galaxies, despite all Apple's bullying, have started outselling iPhones. Looks like the market has finally started exerting the one power it has, saying "Your app store? Not on my phone!"
Are they causing you harm? Are you just being uppity about log entries?
Flooding the logs with false positives does cause harm, in that he may miss real attacks in the flood of "test" ones.
Not to mention, who bears the liability if this testing actually manages to get in and cause data loss? The FP poster specifically mentions fuzzing inputs to the web server - That works great in a test environment; if it succeeds on a production system, god only knows what effects it will have.
My recommendation? Aggressively block this shit until your actual boss (not some random schmuck from "corporate") directly orders you to let it get through; and if ordered to let it continue, get it in writing (email would suffice).
Getting good performance out of a GPU miner takes some tweaking, and very few average home PCs even have GPUs worth mining on anyway (most IGPs and consumer-grade NVidia cards barely count as one more CPU-class device on which to mine, if even possible).
So that really only leaves CPU mining as the no-fuss option. And a typical modern machine will do 3-6 MH/s per core, so figure 24MH/s as an upper limit for any fairly new high-end OEM machine. For comparison, the BitForce Jalapeno - If it ever ships - Will do 5GH/s and costs less than a low-end PC... Or roughly the equivalent of 200 enslaved high-end PCs (or, more realistically, 500-1000 of last year's middle-of-the-road OEM crap Dells/HPs/Lenovos).
That said, you have it somewhat correct - If you can enslave a few thousand halfway decent machines, with someone else footing the electric bill, it might make it financially worth the effort. For the level of legal risk (just talking about running a botnet here, not the risk of some government eventually cracking down on such a convenient currency) vs the cost of buying an ASIC mining rig, however, it doesn't really seem like a worthwhile trade-off.
This idea that you can 'mine' for bitcoins is what makes me not take it seriously. It seems so arbitrary and ridiculous.
;)
I know, right? Like those lumps of yellow metal or shiny hunks of clear carbon we mine from the Earth. Entirely arbitrary and ridiculous to assign any value to them.
If it makes more sense to you, it may help to stop thinking of it as "mining", and instead consider it as pay for doing the work necessary to add transactions to the blockchain.
Let's imagine (crazy idea, I know) that their goal is the application of local law... they certainly know that this will create unwanted attention in the short run, but maybe that's a sacrifice they're willing to make to have wikimedia comply with local law?
Welcome to the Internet, France. Wiki ain't local. Suck it.
That said - This article has pretty much nothing of interest in it except maybe a tiny bit of cold war trivia only of interest to the most die-hard "must know everything" historians. That, therefore, makes me suspect this base's official purpose as a cover for something much, much more interesting. Thanks, France, for drawing attention to this!
Everything that you do, every day is against the law. All the time. All it needs is a motivated prosecutor or enforcement agent, to activate your infraction.
Ah, but this law would count as quite the double-edged sword...
Y'know the old cheesy warez-site belief that you can ban cops or require them to identify themselves as such when asked on a sign-up form? This gem of a turd would make those true.
Beautiful. Truly beautiful.
Buy it using a fake id. - Ask a homeless or drug addict to buy you a prepaid phone/sim and use it. - Buy it in another country.
Actually one of the most realistic answers so far, except, you don't need an ID or a straw buyer... Just pick up a tracphone at Target and activate it at the in-store Starbucks' hotspot. Done and untraceable-to-you, unless "they" want you enough to manually hunt down security footage from one of those two stores.
That said, who do you plan to call with it? I consider it a sad commentary on our times that who (on the whole) you associate with matters far, far more than your own identity - Though the two end up largely interchangeable, unless a lot of people in your immediate circle of friends call to chat with your folks once a week. And of course, you probably use it at home - Lot of people living there? Keep in mind, even pre-GPS requirement, the cell providers could still get a decent lock on a phone just from the towers that can see it; and going back to the original FP question, you can't use the phone if no towers can see it.
Or, perhaps you lack the skills to derive spiritual benefit from the parables that they do.
Okay, so kindly explain to me the spiritual lesson derived from having two entirely different (and contradictory) creation myths in the first two chapters? From Jesus having two different paternal grandfathers (which shouldn't even matter if Daddy G knocked the BVM up), and two different sets of (quoted) famous last words?
Yes, cheesy parables often contain a bit of wisdom worth knowing. I don't, however, worship the wise food-storing ants and pray to them to save me from wintery starvation.
Thinking their beliefs are stupid while not thinking any less of the person who believes them is not bigotry.
Well then, hand me my bigot badge, which I'll wear proudly.
Yes, I do think less of people who lack the critical thinking skills to observe the glaring internally inconsistencies in the ancestors' fairy tales to which they so desperately cling.
We all want a purpose in a meaningless world, and most of us don't really like the idea of dying all that much. "Made of meat" doesn't give you a pass on Intro to Logic, however.
As a Catholic, disproving the Bible means little to me since it is only a part of my faith, not the whole foundation of it. Protestants however must frantically fight to prove the book entirely correct because of their subscription to the sola scriptura heresy which separates them from Catholicism.
;)
Ever notice how they call it the first COMMANDMENT, not the first suggestion?
But hey, no worries friend, I've skipped all the "Mary" bullshit and gone right over to goddess worship. Gets you way more - ahem - "goddesses incarnate".
Now repeat the experiment with labels saying things like
Well, the same experiment with "fragile" boxes containing an accelerometer showed that they get beaten up far, far worse than an unmarked box.
Of course, for that one, we didn't really need more proof - I get somewhere around 100 assorted deliveries per year, all in great shape; even when they arrive in torrential rain and sit outside all day, I find them neatly bagged, perfectly safe and dry... Unless the sender stupidly marked them "fragile". Then I get a box at least badly frayed on all sides, often damp (even when delivered in dry weather, seriously, WTF), frequently with the corners blown out or other large inexplicable holes in the sides. I honestly don't think I've ever received a "fragile" package that didn't look like a second-hand box-fort from Afghanistan.
Sad, really... I mean, most of us don't exactly love our jobs. We may enjoy some parts of it, but on the whole, we'd still rather sleep in. But we get up every day to earn an honest day's pay. If you need to slack off a bit, hey, just don't get caught; but when you start taking out your lack of a fulfilling life on the very products they pay you to handle - GTFO.
Which is it then? Does the crime of money laundering require the money to come from illegal sources, or is dodging reporting requirements for legally obtained profit also money laundering?
Entirely separate crimes. Resisting arrest doesn't require the police to have any other valid charges on which to arrest you. Same idea applies here - Trying to hide in itself counts as the crime.
And as I said, I consider that absolutely, fundamentally wrong for anything claiming to call itself a "free" society. But as citizens of "that" society, rather than some imaginary idealistic one - Let's attack the actual bad laws rather than a parody of them.
And watch the value of bitcoins collapse if/when this goes into effect.
Actually, they've almost doubled vs USD since this news broke.
Regulation both sucks, and legitimizes. Far from destroying BTC, this move recognizes them.
Or put another way - Microsoft doesn't trash OS X in its ads; it doesn't even mention Apple. When the top dog suddenly starts bothering to fight back against a yippy little heel-biter, guess who gains more status from the exchange?
For example, it's quite routine for farmers to be accused of money laundering for depositing their money in chunks of less than $10k, typically to avoid filling out byzatine forms. When this happens, the US government just seizes (aka steals) the money. There is usually no court case.
The actual crime of money laundering requires the money to have come from illegal sources.
The link you gave has the guy admitting that he structured deposits specifically to avoid reporting requirements. He could have deposited over 10k at a time at one bank for the next 40 years and no one would have blinked; As soon as he deliberately tried to dodge the reporting requirements, however, bam, he had committed a crime.
Now, I'll stand beside you to denounce those reporting requirements as complete and utter BS we need to abolish; But by analogy, not all IP means "copyright".