You are woefully unaware of the history of self defense by black people in the rural south.
LK
You mean how the Democrats passed all that gun control to prevent people of a certain ethnic background from possessing firearms, and instituted poll taxes and literacy tests to prevent that same group from voting, and, etc?
No, it just says "arms." Every state in the union could bar private ownership of anything more powerful than a flintlock rifle, and the 2nd would still hold.
And require advance approval for all speech except lung power while standing on a wooden box or hand-set type in single-stage, hand operated press. Oh, and your paper has to hand laid as well. That would suit the 1st amendment.
And freedom of association applies only to face to face meetings where you walk or went horseback to meet. Or if you have any hand laid paper and a fountain pen you could write a letter and have it delivered by courier, who again walks or goes horseback.
Your state militia has everything it needs in order to overthrow an oppressive government.
The state militia is not and has never been the national guard.
Further, Congress is ignoring federal law which requires them to provide weapons and training to every militia member, which law also defines the composition of the militia. And it isn't the national guard or the military.
So? The existence of one academic who may have some dubious methods doesn't invalidate other work in a field. What about these guys? If anyone would be expected to give guns a fair shake it would be a free market economist with libertarian sympathies.
A free market economist who has no idea of what is statistically significant or not?
And I've given up on who "would be expected to give guns a fair shake" because too many people have a totally irrational fear of guns that they will not admit even to themselves.
And as for keeping King George or any other threat from taking over the country... I'll need a rifle, not a concealed-carry-handgun. And I need it at home, at the ready for the invasion, not at Burger King with my family. The day I should actually need a gun at Burger King is the day we've crossed over from needing guns to fend off an invasion to actually fighting the invasion.
Yeah, because Burger King is a lot safer than Luby's Diner.
X10 went bankrupt in mid-2013. The current reincarnation purchased the name and IP at auction. So far they seem more professional, but time will tell if they can continue to build and improve the product line. http://www.x10.com/about-us/
I see your understanding of macroeconomics is based on pulling conjectures out of thin air. Yes, interest rate changes of fractions of a percent make a difference in major currencies, when averaged out over a whole economy, You might not personally jump to shift assets
Wow, nice strawman. Did you go to school for that?
The point as is blatantly obvious in each of my responses as well as the post to which I responded, is SPENDing, also known as BUYing or purchasing, etc., as in how you allocate your personal resources.
You have to be an idiot or an economist totally out of touch with the real world to believe 2% deflation is some fearsome boogyman.
The small wealthy elite holding the overwhelming majority of society's wealth --- the ones with spare cash to invest --- spend a negligible fraction of their holdings on TVs
And they spend a negligible fraction of their holdings because of fear of or encouragement by inflation.
Minor inflation vs. deflation is not going to have any significant impact on allocation of resources. Any extreme of either is of course a problem. But to argue that minor deflation is bad and minor inflation is good is nonsensical.
How would you react if your cash was going to be worth more a year from now? You'd probably avoid spending unnecessary cash on anything. You'd also be more reluctant to invest, because you know that if you get, say, less than a 2% return you'd do better holding cash. So what you're going to do with your cash is hoard it, as much as possible.
Which explains why nobody buys computers, televisions or any other electronics, and why the entire electronics industry has struggled since at least the 1960s.
Not.
People will buy what they need, of course. But they also buy what they want. Even when they know they will get a better deal if they wait a few months.
if for no other reason than it is so excellent at pushing people's buttons, causing them to spew illogical and inane arguments that either have no special relevance to Bitcoin, are directly analogous to mainstream currency systems, or show their utter ignorance of the topic.
His only potentially valid point is easily fixable in the same way previous problems have been fixed:
*) BtC is inherently deflationary -- also my largest concern, but if it turns out to be a problem it can be fixed by a majority of miners agreeing to the change. We just need to keep an eye on it should a problem arise.
The rest of his points...
*) BtC is untraceable -- Only if it never touches the real world, which makes it almost useless. If it touches the real world anywhere, the transactions are traceable thru the blockchain. Just ask DPR. If you want untraceable, use U.S. dollars.
*) Mining has carbon footprint from hell -- Except it doesn't. You think transactions are free in any current system? Why do they cost so much then? Miners have to recover their cost, and mining is getting dramatically more power efficient every year.
*) Malware -- credit card and bank account numbers are stolen by malware. Why should any resource be any different? Even if every single networked personal computer and server on the planet were subverted to mine Bitcoin, the growth of FPGA and now ASIC mining makes malware mining insignificant.
*) BtC does not violate Gresham's law -- the claim depends entirely on the flawed malware premise. Making this claim is just idiotic. I can see the spittle blowing all over his keyboard and monitor...
*) Lack of regulation permits funding horrible things -- more spittle. This means bitcoin is just like the dollar. Except the dollar is heavily regulated and used for far more, plus used for far longer and regulation hasn't stopped it yet. What possible point could this line of reasoning ever have? How stupid do you have to be to try and make it? If not stupid, are you so despicable and haughty as to be trying to appeal to stupid people who will buy into this argument?
*) designed for tax evasion -- this is simply a repeat of the untraceable argument and no more valid than it was the first time.
*) gini coefficient -- My favorite comment from the linked BtC thread, "When bitcoin was one day old, 1 person owned 100%. I'd say the market seems to be evening things out. --2_Thumbs_Up" How is this a criticism of bitcoin when it applies even more to every other competing asset and currency in the world? And if you link government or gov't currencies solve this issue, notice that the FBI now has one of the largest stashes of BtC by simply taking it, just like gov'ts have always done with every asset. I suspect Stross finds more appeal in the anti-interest ("charging interest is financial violence") comments which rapidly took over the thread, which is odd because those are supposedly even more extremely libertarian.
*) linear extrapolations imply far worse -- ooh, scary! And if you think that is bad, try exponential extrapolations! Or simply look the same way at the existing world for a brief moment.
*) "editorialize briefly" that BtC was designed as a weapon -- the whole thing was an editorial, a rabid, foaming at the mouth editorial of nonsense.
I expected better of Charlie Stross. Oh well. Another apparently intelligent human shoots himself in the head while aiming for his foot, all because his head was up where it should not have been.
But what if the sole purpose of the app was to launch missiles (under certain conditions)?
You, as the author of the app, believe that is the sole purpose of the app.
I, as the owner of the device on which I have installed the app you authored, believe otherwise. If I can get what I want/need from the app by simply restricting it from launching missiles, that is my business, not yours and not google's.
Anveo has a visual programming tool for call flow. You could set up a simple Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system where callers have to pass your menu in order to be forwarded or rung thru to SIP.
I recently ported my U.S. landline number to Anveo. It took less than 1 week from CenturyLink (and my DSL stayed live).
With Anveo you could receive calls either with any SIP device (I'm using an Obihai) or forward calls to another phone number (cost per minute based on destination, US48 is $0.01/minute).
If prepaid for a year of incoming calls the total charge is $24. Yes, less than $25 provisions my number for incoming calls for a full year, no additional charge. This was the cheapest I found in what dslreports comments seem to consider a top-tier provider.
Outgoing calls are a separate issue. Simplest is to just use Anveo (US48 at 1c/minute). Cheaper options exist. For example, with an Obi110 you could keep your landline with a new phone number and route outgoing thru it. Or use google voice (until it goes away next May). Or use localphone.com. Or use a different provider for different destinations.
(Anveo also has a referral program so you could message me for my number, or not.)
Setting prices does not set worth. (Wages are merely the price for labor.)
If people disagree that the worth is equal to the price, the government action ends badly. Suppliers refuse to sell or to create or they go out of business if the good is worth more than the price. Buyers refuse to buy if the price is more than the worth. In that setting black markets flourish and in those price discovery is allowed to happen and so the black market price then equals what the good is worth to the buyers.
If people agree that the fiat price equals the worth then the government action is meaningless because the price would have been the same without the government action.
It would be able to stop much faster than you if the dog or child ran out into the road.
No, it would not.
It's initial application of the brakes would happen much faster. That reaction time to apply the brakes is a minute fraction of the time it takes to stop the car.
I have a better idea...
How long will it be until there are enough autonomous cars on the road to create a cooperative environment for my meat-driven car?
If all those autonomous cars sense that my car is deaf, blind and dumb, and the smart controller is nothing but meat, it seems they will get out of my way and give me a bit of margin just out of healthy sense of "avoid an accident." That means I can jump the green light, snake around on the right, and in general drive in a way that is barely on the right side of legal and which would very unsafe if I could not predict the reaction of the other drivers. But if those other drivers are machines, even if I cannot control them their algorithms have to be predictable and they have to allow for unexpected human action.
If there's a theoretical exploit then it should be fixed, because whilst it may just be theoretical to one person, it may not to a group of others.
The problem with that logic is when the nature of the theoretical defect and the supposed fix are both so complex as to render uncertain whether the fix will introduce a flaw more exploitable than the original theoretical flaw.
Some flaws are very obvious and the fix equally so. This is not one.
And Microsoft could fix windows apps to work with very high pixel densities in a way similar to how Apple fixed OSX and iOS apps and the way hardware upgrades have been hidden from applications for decades now: 'Aware' applications must call a new API to get the high-resolution. If they do not call the new API, the OS will scale everything for them when they use the old APIs. It's a trivial and obvious fix at least for applications. Making those scaled apps look decent is a bit harder task for the OS implementer but such is life.
the fact that you can upgrade Debian Stable at any time, even with an NVidia GPU is impressive... But Sid is not that stable.
I've been running Sid for over 11 years and some mixed Testing/Sid for just about as long. I even pull in stuff from experimental when fancy strikes.
Sid is that stable unless you push it and make it do things it warns you not to do.
The system has never had 'stability' problems except when hardware was failing. Upgrades have been great, especially compared to RedHat pre-Yum (don't know about now, don't care either).
I've swapped processors and motherboards, cloned it to new hard disks and etc. I have not reinstalled that Sid system since the day I installed it from a Knoppix 1.x CD as my first Debian experience.
I've broken it a few times by being aggressive about updates and etc. But since Debian has text-based package state tracking, even those are recoverable. I've had to boot from CD/USB a few times when I screwed up the bootloader. Surprisingly those times were not when I was going from LiLo to Grub to Grub2 and those times have been rare since grub2. (The last time was when I decided my new root disk should be LVM'd and mirrored and I found out that my version of Grub2 did not know how to use the md module support in LVM.)
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You are woefully unaware of the history of self defense by black people in the rural south.
LK
You mean how the Democrats passed all that gun control to prevent people of a certain ethnic background from possessing firearms, and instituted poll taxes and literacy tests to prevent that same group from voting, and, etc?
No, it just says "arms." Every state in the union could bar private ownership of anything more powerful than a flintlock rifle, and the 2nd would still hold.
And require advance approval for all speech except lung power while standing on a wooden box or hand-set type in single-stage, hand operated press. Oh, and your paper has to hand laid as well. That would suit the 1st amendment.
And freedom of association applies only to face to face meetings where you walk or went horseback to meet. Or if you have any hand laid paper and a fountain pen you could write a letter and have it delivered by courier, who again walks or goes horseback.
Your state militia has everything it needs in order to overthrow an oppressive government.
The state militia is not and has never been the national guard.
Further, Congress is ignoring federal law which requires them to provide weapons and training to every militia member, which law also defines the composition of the militia. And it isn't the national guard or the military.
Gun control cannot work, period, so long as it means something other than hitting the target.
So? The existence of one academic who may have some dubious methods doesn't invalidate other work in a field. What about these guys? If anyone would be expected to give guns a fair shake it would be a free market economist with libertarian sympathies.
A free market economist who has no idea of what is statistically significant or not?
And I've given up on who "would be expected to give guns a fair shake" because too many people have a totally irrational fear of guns that they will not admit even to themselves.
And as for keeping King George or any other threat from taking over the country... I'll need a rifle, not a concealed-carry-handgun. And I need it at home, at the ready for the invasion, not at Burger King with my family. The day I should actually need a gun at Burger King is the day we've crossed over from needing guns to fend off an invasion to actually fighting the invasion.
Yeah, because Burger King is a lot safer than Luby's Diner.
Idiot.
Further, legal guns aren't used all that often for crime prevention either.
Wrong.
This is /. so shouldn't that be "Run xbill, ..." ?
X10 went bankrupt in mid-2013. The current reincarnation purchased the name and IP at auction. So far they seem more professional, but time will tell if they can continue to build and improve the product line. http://www.x10.com/about-us/
I see your understanding of macroeconomics is based on pulling conjectures out of thin air. Yes, interest rate changes of fractions of a percent make a difference in major currencies, when averaged out over a whole economy, You might not personally jump to shift assets
Wow, nice strawman. Did you go to school for that?
The point as is blatantly obvious in each of my responses as well as the post to which I responded, is SPENDing, also known as BUYing or purchasing, etc., as in how you allocate your personal resources.
You have to be an idiot or an economist totally out of touch with the real world to believe 2% deflation is some fearsome boogyman.
The small wealthy elite holding the overwhelming majority of society's wealth --- the ones with spare cash to invest --- spend a negligible fraction of their holdings on TVs
And they spend a negligible fraction of their holdings because of fear of or encouragement by inflation.
Minor inflation vs. deflation is not going to have any significant impact on allocation of resources. Any extreme of either is of course a problem. But to argue that minor deflation is bad and minor inflation is good is nonsensical.
How would you react if your cash was going to be worth more a year from now? You'd probably avoid spending unnecessary cash on anything. You'd also be more reluctant to invest, because you know that if you get, say, less than a 2% return you'd do better holding cash. So what you're going to do with your cash is hoard it, as much as possible.
Which explains why nobody buys computers, televisions or any other electronics, and why the entire electronics industry has struggled since at least the 1960s.
Not.
People will buy what they need, of course. But they also buy what they want. Even when they know they will get a better deal if they wait a few months.
if for no other reason than it is so excellent at pushing people's buttons, causing them to spew illogical and inane arguments that either have no special relevance to Bitcoin, are directly analogous to mainstream currency systems, or show their utter ignorance of the topic.
His only potentially valid point is easily fixable in the same way previous problems have been fixed:
*) BtC is inherently deflationary -- also my largest concern, but if it turns out to be a problem it can be fixed by a majority of miners agreeing to the change. We just need to keep an eye on it should a problem arise.
The rest of his points...
*) BtC is untraceable -- Only if it never touches the real world, which makes it almost useless. If it touches the real world anywhere, the transactions are traceable thru the blockchain. Just ask DPR. If you want untraceable, use U.S. dollars.
*) Mining has carbon footprint from hell -- Except it doesn't. You think transactions are free in any current system? Why do they cost so much then? Miners have to recover their cost, and mining is getting dramatically more power efficient every year.
*) Malware -- credit card and bank account numbers are stolen by malware. Why should any resource be any different? Even if every single networked personal computer and server on the planet were subverted to mine Bitcoin, the growth of FPGA and now ASIC mining makes malware mining insignificant.
*) BtC does not violate Gresham's law -- the claim depends entirely on the flawed malware premise. Making this claim is just idiotic. I can see the spittle blowing all over his keyboard and monitor...
*) Lack of regulation permits funding horrible things -- more spittle. This means bitcoin is just like the dollar. Except the dollar is heavily regulated and used for far more, plus used for far longer and regulation hasn't stopped it yet. What possible point could this line of reasoning ever have? How stupid do you have to be to try and make it? If not stupid, are you so despicable and haughty as to be trying to appeal to stupid people who will buy into this argument?
*) designed for tax evasion -- this is simply a repeat of the untraceable argument and no more valid than it was the first time.
*) gini coefficient -- My favorite comment from the linked BtC thread, "When bitcoin was one day old, 1 person owned 100%. I'd say the market seems to be evening things out. --2_Thumbs_Up" How is this a criticism of bitcoin when it applies even more to every other competing asset and currency in the world? And if you link government or gov't currencies solve this issue, notice that the FBI now has one of the largest stashes of BtC by simply taking it, just like gov'ts have always done with every asset. I suspect Stross finds more appeal in the anti-interest ("charging interest is financial violence") comments which rapidly took over the thread, which is odd because those are supposedly even more extremely libertarian.
*) linear extrapolations imply far worse -- ooh, scary! And if you think that is bad, try exponential extrapolations! Or simply look the same way at the existing world for a brief moment.
*) "editorialize briefly" that BtC was designed as a weapon -- the whole thing was an editorial, a rabid, foaming at the mouth editorial of nonsense.
I expected better of Charlie Stross. Oh well. Another apparently intelligent human shoots himself in the head while aiming for his foot, all because his head was up where it should not have been.
But what if the sole purpose of the app was to launch missiles (under certain conditions)?
You, as the author of the app, believe that is the sole purpose of the app.
I, as the owner of the device on which I have installed the app you authored, believe otherwise. If I can get what I want/need from the app by simply restricting it from launching missiles, that is my business, not yours and not google's.
People live in all kinds of climates so that seems like a stretch to me.
However since 2003 there have been two significant changes in the food chain.
GMOs have become prevalent thruout the food chain.
Neonicotinoid pesticides have become widely used.
Use a VOIP provider with call flow control.
Anveo has a visual programming tool for call flow. You could set up a simple Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system where callers have to pass your menu in order to be forwarded or rung thru to SIP.
I recently ported my U.S. landline number to Anveo. It took less than 1 week from CenturyLink (and my DSL stayed live).
With Anveo you could receive calls either with any SIP device (I'm using an Obihai) or forward calls to another phone number (cost per minute based on destination, US48 is $0.01/minute).
If prepaid for a year of incoming calls the total charge is $24. Yes, less than $25 provisions my number for incoming calls for a full year, no additional charge. This was the cheapest I found in what dslreports comments seem to consider a top-tier provider.
Outgoing calls are a separate issue. Simplest is to just use Anveo (US48 at 1c/minute). Cheaper options exist. For example, with an Obi110 you could keep your landline with a new phone number and route outgoing thru it. Or use google voice (until it goes away next May). Or use localphone.com. Or use a different provider for different destinations.
(Anveo also has a referral program so you could message me for my number, or not.)
Bitcoin is not fiat. Fiat means it's value is decreed by law.
Perhaps you meant ethereal, Or maybe unbacked.
What is it worth to you?
Setting prices does not set worth. (Wages are merely the price for labor.)
If people disagree that the worth is equal to the price, the government action ends badly. Suppliers refuse to sell or to create or they go out of business if the good is worth more than the price. Buyers refuse to buy if the price is more than the worth. In that setting black markets flourish and in those price discovery is allowed to happen and so the black market price then equals what the good is worth to the buyers.
If people agree that the fiat price equals the worth then the government action is meaningless because the price would have been the same without the government action.
It would be able to stop much faster than you if the dog or child ran out into the road.
No, it would not.
It's initial application of the brakes would happen much faster. That reaction time to apply the brakes is a minute fraction of the time it takes to stop the car.
I have a better idea... How long will it be until there are enough autonomous cars on the road to create a cooperative environment for my meat-driven car? If all those autonomous cars sense that my car is deaf, blind and dumb, and the smart controller is nothing but meat, it seems they will get out of my way and give me a bit of margin just out of healthy sense of "avoid an accident." That means I can jump the green light, snake around on the right, and in general drive in a way that is barely on the right side of legal and which would very unsafe if I could not predict the reaction of the other drivers. But if those other drivers are machines, even if I cannot control them their algorithms have to be predictable and they have to allow for unexpected human action.
Where's the justice, /.?
moderation = (moderation + rand() % 5 - rand() % 5) % 6;
If there's a theoretical exploit then it should be fixed, because whilst it may just be theoretical to one person, it may not to a group of others.
The problem with that logic is when the nature of the theoretical defect and the supposed fix are both so complex as to render uncertain whether the fix will introduce a flaw more exploitable than the original theoretical flaw.
Some flaws are very obvious and the fix equally so. This is not one.
And the reason why the Hindenburg used hydrogen...
The U.S. Congress passed the Helium Control Act and Teddy signed it.
Almost 80 years later and gov't is still making a mess of things.
And Microsoft could fix windows apps to work with very high pixel densities in a way similar to how Apple fixed OSX and iOS apps and the way hardware upgrades have been hidden from applications for decades now: 'Aware' applications must call a new API to get the high-resolution. If they do not call the new API, the OS will scale everything for them when they use the old APIs. It's a trivial and obvious fix at least for applications. Making those scaled apps look decent is a bit harder task for the OS implementer but such is life.
the fact that you can upgrade Debian Stable at any time, even with an NVidia GPU is impressive... But Sid is not that stable.
I've been running Sid for over 11 years and some mixed Testing/Sid for just about as long. I even pull in stuff from experimental when fancy strikes.
Sid is that stable unless you push it and make it do things it warns you not to do.
The system has never had 'stability' problems except when hardware was failing. Upgrades have been great, especially compared to RedHat pre-Yum (don't know about now, don't care either).
I've swapped processors and motherboards, cloned it to new hard disks and etc. I have not reinstalled that Sid system since the day I installed it from a Knoppix 1.x CD as my first Debian experience.
I've broken it a few times by being aggressive about updates and etc. But since Debian has text-based package state tracking, even those are recoverable. I've had to boot from CD/USB a few times when I screwed up the bootloader. Surprisingly those times were not when I was going from LiLo to Grub to Grub2 and those times have been rare since grub2. (The last time was when I decided my new root disk should be LVM'd and mirrored and I found out that my version of Grub2 did not know how to use the md module support in LVM.)