Measured amounts of government regulation is what separates us from Lord of the Flies scenarios. There is simply no basis in fact to equate reasonable bank regulation meant to prevent outright fraud with fascism.
Fascism has, in general usage, become an all-encompassing word referring to government regulation, interference, anything in the legal system that "keeping me down, man" etc... You're tilting at windmills trying to educate those who use it thus
That it's a specific term with a specific meaning has been lost over the last forty odd years.
The reactions of the various Japanese government officials are interesting. Essentially, there was no "theft" because Bitcoin is not a "real" currency. Which is an interesting attack. Anyone can steal your bitcoins and you have no recourse to the law because it isn't actually theft.
That's what I've been telling people for years - Bitcoin isn't a currency. Even the fiat currencies of the world have the economies of the countries issuing them behind them, Bitcoin has nothing. Bitcoin a trade token on par with casino chips or the tasting tokens you'd a beer festival or a chili cook-off. It's only value is that which the buyer and seller (whether exchanging goods for coins or cash for coins) reach via barter.
And though what you said misrepresents what the Japanese authorities said, I agree with them. Mt Gox, and Bitcoin, stood outside their regulatory umbrella when the exchange was healthy, and thus has no call to ask for protection now that it's not. Bitcoin supporters have been loudly proclaiming that it's freedom from government regulation is it's great strength, and this is the corollary to that.
I can't think of a single death or significant injury/risk in the NASA programs where the end result of investigation was "well, it was an unforeseeable accident". Each and every case I recall there were engineers saying "there's a problem we need to fix" and managers just kept ignoring it.
Your recollection doesn't match mine, and I've spent decades studying the space program. The loss of Challenger comes close, but even then the engineers had been complacent about joint blow-by and O-ring erosion until the eleventh hour - which contributed in a large part to managements confusion and distrust.
I know there's a Cult Of The Engineer here on Slashdot, but it's badly misguided. Engineers are human, and they do fuck up.
The nuclear power plant engineers mentioned in the great-grandparent are operators. Either way, I'm just pointing out there's a steady pool of trained and experienced people who would likely go to college and become full fledged engineer operators if the demand was there. (Many already do.) The OP considerably overestimates the difficulty of finding them.
The key irreplaceable parts of a reactor are the reactor vessel and its containment and since they were originally overspecified and overbuilt to an almost ludicrous degree and they have no moving parts in themselves they usually pass inspection with flying colours.
They won't last forever though, eventually neutron embrittlement will win.
You know, my experience with older technology is you can often teach someone the high-level stuff, but when you get into the really low-level stuff there's invariably a zillion little things which come down to lore and things you've seen before and just know about them but which aren't written down.
A few days ago some posted a picture of my submarine shortly after launch to our re-union group's Facebook page. As a joke, I said everyone should post their age on that date. After I was challenged to be first (two days shy of two weeks after my second birthday for the record), a bunch of other guys chimed in... most of us were somewhere about that age as well. Even though the boat was over twenty years old by the time we all got there, we had no problems operating her and neither did the guys who took her to PSNS to be decommissioned and scrapped ten years later. In fact, all over the world, equipment decades old is working just fine. Your experience appears to be with older computers and programs. Programs aren't physical hardware, and apples and oranges doesn't even begin to convey the scope of the difference.
Not knowing that you need to jiggle the control rod 3 times and do a quarter turn to the left to operate it is likely the kind of thing which is going to end badly.
The world of physical hardware doesn't work that way. Doubly so for a nuclear reactor - if it doesn't work to spec, you fix it so that it does work to spec. You replace the control rod control switch, or adjust the shims on the drive, or whatever.
I can't tell you how many times in my professional career the answer to "why does this work like this?" has been followed up with "now that's a funny story" followed by a description of some bit of arcane knowledge which nobody else truly understands except the guy telling the story.
That's why the apocryphal line "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization" was written.
In other words, you can't show your claim to be true. Noted.
Who the moron in the conversation is plain to see.. Among other markers, it's the idiot with such crappy reading comprehension as the think that a plainly marked supposition is a claim to be "smarter than someone".
"Commercial" normally means "for revenue" - farmers using them on their own property would seem to be private, as they're not offering the service to others.
Try using Nazi symbolism in Germany - and you'll see just how "free" speech is in the EU. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a) Or try to deny the Holocaust in many places in Europe. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial)
Free speech does *not* mean the same thing in the EU as it does in the US, and the EU Charter does not rise to providing the same level of protection as the US Constitution.
This basic concept hasn't changed much since Arthur C. Clark's 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise first popularized the idea of an elevator to spaceâ"though no one took it seriously. Decades later, in 2003, Clarke stated, "The space elevator will be built ten years after they stop laughing ⦠and they have stopped laughing."
If they've stopped laughing, it's only because they stopped paying attention. Otherwise, we're still stuck where we have been for decades - we barely know how to make promising materials at laboratory test quantities, let alone in the kiloton lots that a space elevator will require. Presuming of course that one of the many "promising materials" turns out to actually work, rather than falling by the wayside like so many others. Like fusion power, elevators have been "a decade away, maybe two" for decades.
There's pretty much no evidence of that whatsoever beyond the claims of G+ supporters that it absolutely, positively, must be true. The evidence in fact runs quite the other way - you very rarely see anyone giving their G+ contact info, and of the people that jumped ship from Facebook... well, there's been a steady stream of them coming back.
The issue with G+ that most people have, is that it isn't for announcing your latest bowel movement of Beibergasm of the day.
G+ isn't "for" anything, nor is Facebook. The issue I have with G+ is that from day one it's been feature incomplete and it hasn't gotten much better. It's a typical Google service - a day late, a dollar short, only mostly functional, and with a bizarre UI.
Generally speaking, the harder it is to set something up speaks to how seriously a person takes said something.
Generally speaking, you're full of shit. It's 2014, not 1994. Setting up a domain is about as easy as ordering a cup of coffee.
By simple virtue of the fact that someone has their own domain names, instantly says that they are at least trying for the long haul. Or at least, there's a significantly greater chance that they are.
You can set up your own domain, with it's own email address, just about as fast as you can set up a free email account. If you believe that a cheap domain and an associated email account set up by an automated script as soon as the person enters his credit card details can mean that person is 'more serious' than someone with a free account.... well, that's beyond laughable and well into the territory of terminally clueless.
If the response of one, just barely this side of a dictatorship, government is what you're using to justify paranoia... I won't bother looking up the rest of your responses. Not unless I need a good laugh anyway.
Do you also judge people by whether or not their home address is in a fashionable neighborhood? Whether their 'casual Friday' shirt comes from L.L. Bean or Wal-Mart?
Seriously, I imagine there are more inane and shallow things to just people on than their email address... but it can't be a long list.
Despite it's title - the "Bulletin of Atomic Scientists" is and always has been a political rag. They publish numbers when it suits them, and fall back on unsubstantiated anecdotes when it doesn't.
Not to mention the higher taxes inside of cities. In Cleveland, for example, Progressive Insurance wanted to put a big office building right in downtown Cleveland. Then they looked at the taxes they would be paying. The City of Cleveland refused to make an exemption for them. That is fully within their rights, of course. Anyway, where was the office built?
Right outside of the Cleveland city limits. Close to the city, but not where they'd have to pay the extra taxes. Cleveland City Council was pissed of course but they only have themselves to blame.
I wonder if the City had given them the tax breaks if you'd (the generic you) be one of the throngs bitching about "sweetheart deals for businesses"?
This stuff matters to businesses. It affects everything they do and it affects the end cost to the customer. After all - a customer, in order to purchase a product or service, needs to pay for all of the costs required to provide that good or service. That includes taxes the business must pay. People always clamoring for more taxes on business never seem to realize that in their fervor to punish businesses for being successful, the real person who is being punished is the customer. Not the business.
The real problem is that the same customer who goes outside the city to chase those low prices is usually the same guy who is bitching because the city is going broke. They don't grasp that you can't have it both ways.
Kind of sad that a new currency - whose main idea was that it should be easy for private people to transfer money over the internet, free of charge - actually need these big "exchange-places"
Bitcoin is only a currency courtesy of the fact that it's creators and supporters don't actually grasp what a currency is. This repeated "calling a tail a leg" has lead to confusion because said supporters can understand why a legless dog can't walk - after all he has one leg!
Call it USD or BTC, same thing.
No, they aren't. They aren't even close to the same thing. That's my point, so long as you fail to grasp that Bitcoin is a trade token (on par with casino chips or trading stamps), you won't grasp why events have transpired as they have.
Well, there's reasons why he was functioning as a fully fledged Chief Of Staff. Of course, as is commonly the case among the uneducated and ignorant, merely stating the fact without grasping the context leads to erroneous conclusions.
Bitcoin is not a currency, it's a token on par with casino chips or the tasting tokens you'd get a beer festival. Nor is it significant, it's total current value barely approaching about three days worth of Wal-Mart's annual income. (Heck, here in the US there are city budgets bigger than Bitcoins current overinflated worth.)
reigning system of currency/government considers it a threat
Outside of tinfoil hat land, there's absolutely no shred of evidence this is true. None, zip, nada. (No matter how much the tinfoil hat nutters would love it be true and their existence thus justified.)
coordinated attacks on the stock exchange
Wait... first you claim Bitcoin is a currency, now it's a stock? I'm confused. Not to mention that one oft touted 'advantage' of the Bitcoin is that it doesn't need any kind of central authority - it's all peer-to-peer.
bankruptcy, uncertainty, disappearance
And, as if your chain of tinfoil "logic" wasn't already badly broken - your haste to spin your web has lead you into admitting that the Bitcoin isn't a currency. A currency can survive independent of the need to exchange it for something of value or the ability of speculators to speculate. A trade token... cannot.
Slashdot Mirror
The smog in Bejing is mostly due to coal fires for heating and automobile traffic, not factories.
What in the hell are you talking about? I was pointing out that you were correct jackass.
Fascism has, in general usage, become an all-encompassing word referring to government regulation, interference, anything in the legal system that "keeping me down, man" etc...
You're tilting at windmills trying to educate those who use it thus
That it's a specific term with a specific meaning has been lost over the last forty odd years.
That's what I've been telling people for years - Bitcoin isn't a currency. Even the fiat currencies of the world have the economies of the countries issuing them behind them, Bitcoin has nothing. Bitcoin a trade token on par with casino chips or the tasting tokens you'd a beer festival or a chili cook-off. It's only value is that which the buyer and seller (whether exchanging goods for coins or cash for coins) reach via barter.
And though what you said misrepresents what the Japanese authorities said, I agree with them. Mt Gox, and Bitcoin, stood outside their regulatory umbrella when the exchange was healthy, and thus has no call to ask for protection now that it's not. Bitcoin supporters have been loudly proclaiming that it's freedom from government regulation is it's great strength, and this is the corollary to that.
Your recollection doesn't match mine, and I've spent decades studying the space program. The loss of Challenger comes close, but even then the engineers had been complacent about joint blow-by and O-ring erosion until the eleventh hour - which contributed in a large part to managements confusion and distrust.
I know there's a Cult Of The Engineer here on Slashdot, but it's badly misguided. Engineers are human, and they do fuck up.
The nuclear power plant engineers mentioned in the great-grandparent are operators. Either way, I'm just pointing out there's a steady pool of trained and experienced people who would likely go to college and become full fledged engineer operators if the demand was there. (Many already do.) The OP considerably overestimates the difficulty of finding them.
The Navy Nuclear Power School down in Goose Creek (just north of Charleston) graduates a new class every week.
They won't last forever though, eventually neutron embrittlement will win.
A few days ago some posted a picture of my submarine shortly after launch to our re-union group's Facebook page. As a joke, I said everyone should post their age on that date. After I was challenged to be first (two days shy of two weeks after my second birthday for the record), a bunch of other guys chimed in... most of us were somewhere about that age as well. Even though the boat was over twenty years old by the time we all got there, we had no problems operating her and neither did the guys who took her to PSNS to be decommissioned and scrapped ten years later. In fact, all over the world, equipment decades old is working just fine. Your experience appears to be with older computers and programs. Programs aren't physical hardware, and apples and oranges doesn't even begin to convey the scope of the difference.
The world of physical hardware doesn't work that way. Doubly so for a nuclear reactor - if it doesn't work to spec, you fix it so that it does work to spec. You replace the control rod control switch, or adjust the shims on the drive, or whatever.
That's why the apocryphal line "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization" was written.
In other words, you can't show your claim to be true. Noted.
Who the moron in the conversation is plain to see.. Among other markers, it's the idiot with such crappy reading comprehension as the think that a plainly marked supposition is a claim to be "smarter than someone".
[[Citation needed]]
"Commercial" normally means "for revenue" - farmers using them on their own property would seem to be private, as they're not offering the service to others.
Try using Nazi symbolism in Germany - and you'll see just how "free" speech is in the EU. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a) Or try to deny the Holocaust in many places in Europe. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial)
Free speech does *not* mean the same thing in the EU as it does in the US, and the EU Charter does not rise to providing the same level of protection as the US Constitution.
This basic concept hasn't changed much since Arthur C. Clark's 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise first popularized the idea of an elevator to spaceâ"though no one took it seriously. Decades later, in 2003, Clarke stated, "The space elevator will be built ten years after they stop laughing ⦠and they have stopped laughing."
If they've stopped laughing, it's only because they stopped paying attention. Otherwise, we're still stuck where we have been for decades - we barely know how to make promising materials at laboratory test quantities, let alone in the kiloton lots that a space elevator will require. Presuming of course that one of the many "promising materials" turns out to actually work, rather than falling by the wayside like so many others. Like fusion power, elevators have been "a decade away, maybe two" for decades.
There's pretty much no evidence of that whatsoever beyond the claims of G+ supporters that it absolutely, positively, must be true. The evidence in fact runs quite the other way - you very rarely see anyone giving their G+ contact info, and of the people that jumped ship from Facebook... well, there's been a steady stream of them coming back.
G+ isn't "for" anything, nor is Facebook. The issue I have with G+ is that from day one it's been feature incomplete and it hasn't gotten much better. It's a typical Google service - a day late, a dollar short, only mostly functional, and with a bizarre UI.
No, it's not that anyone who doesn't think the way I do is biased - it's that you're biased. You're just too clueless to recognize it.
(Try reading the resumes, it's old fashioned and it means you actually have to work and think... but it works.)
Generally speaking, you're full of shit. It's 2014, not 1994. Setting up a domain is about as easy as ordering a cup of coffee.
You can set up your own domain, with it's own email address, just about as fast as you can set up a free email account. If you believe that a cheap domain and an associated email account set up by an automated script as soon as the person enters his credit card details can mean that person is 'more serious' than someone with a free account.... well, that's beyond laughable and well into the territory of terminally clueless.
If Bitcoin supporters were using the term currency as a general term, you'd have a point. Instead, you're just playing semantic games.
Similarly, you've failed to grasp the rest of my argument.
If the response of one, just barely this side of a dictatorship, government is what you're using to justify paranoia... I won't bother looking up the rest of your responses. Not unless I need a good laugh anyway.
The amazing thing is that, like all people with ignorant biases, you actually think these are reasonable statements.
Do you also judge people by whether or not their home address is in a fashionable neighborhood? Whether their 'casual Friday' shirt comes from L.L. Bean or Wal-Mart?
Seriously, I imagine there are more inane and shallow things to just people on than their email address... but it can't be a long list.
Despite it's title - the "Bulletin of Atomic Scientists" is and always has been a political rag. They publish numbers when it suits them, and fall back on unsubstantiated anecdotes when it doesn't.
I wonder if the City had given them the tax breaks if you'd (the generic you) be one of the throngs bitching about "sweetheart deals for businesses"?
The real problem is that the same customer who goes outside the city to chase those low prices is usually the same guy who is bitching because the city is going broke. They don't grasp that you can't have it both ways.
Bitcoin is only a currency courtesy of the fact that it's creators and supporters don't actually grasp what a currency is. This repeated "calling a tail a leg" has lead to confusion because said supporters can understand why a legless dog can't walk - after all he has one leg!
No, they aren't. They aren't even close to the same thing. That's my point, so long as you fail to grasp that Bitcoin is a trade token (on par with casino chips or trading stamps), you won't grasp why events have transpired as they have.
Well, there's reasons why he was functioning as a fully fledged Chief Of Staff. Of course, as is commonly the case among the uneducated and ignorant, merely stating the fact without grasping the context leads to erroneous conclusions.
Bitcoin is not a currency, it's a token on par with casino chips or the tasting tokens you'd get a beer festival. Nor is it significant, it's total current value barely approaching about three days worth of Wal-Mart's annual income. (Heck, here in the US there are city budgets bigger than Bitcoins current overinflated worth.)
Outside of tinfoil hat land, there's absolutely no shred of evidence this is true. None, zip, nada. (No matter how much the tinfoil hat nutters would love it be true and their existence thus justified.)
Wait... first you claim Bitcoin is a currency, now it's a stock? I'm confused. Not to mention that one oft touted 'advantage' of the Bitcoin is that it doesn't need any kind of central authority - it's all peer-to-peer.
And, as if your chain of tinfoil "logic" wasn't already badly broken - your haste to spin your web has lead you into admitting that the Bitcoin isn't a currency. A currency can survive independent of the need to exchange it for something of value or the ability of speculators to speculate. A trade token... cannot.