Sure it is. But there has just been a terrorist attack in Boston which no group has taken responsibility for.
Terrorists do their stuff to send a message. If no one understands what the message is, it's a failure from their perspective. The obvious way to make people get the message, is to say what your message is.
In some subcultures, certain dates and events have special significance. Neo-nazis, for instance, have a habit of doing stuff on Hitler's or Hess' birthday. Because these days are special to them, they may either
* Suffer from the misconception that the date is special to everyone else as well, and thus people will get the message without an explicit statement, or
* Accept that the date isn't special outside the milieu, but their friends and enemies will get it. They are content sending a message to just those groups, rather than the public at large.
The Boston Marathon terrorist(s) haven't published what message they wished to send. So, they think it will be obvious to everyone, or at least their friends and enemies. That means they are probably not foreign - foreign terrorists know that we don't share their ideas of significant days, and are comparatively more eager to accept responsibility (that they're harder for the USG to track down probably is also a factor).
Now, is there an US subculture where Patriot's day, Tax day, and the Waco siege anniversary are special days? You bet there is. Could this subculture breed terrorists? It can, and it has.
It's very legitimate to draw a connection here, this is not just any day on the calendar. Even if this plant's explosion was a complete accident, it will be filled with significance to the anti-government conspiracy theorists centered on Waco. If they don't believe one of their own did it, they're probably going to think God/Fate did it. If the Boston Marathon terrorists come from this subculture, they couldn't have asked for something better. (If they don't, though - if for instance, against the odds, they're islamists - they're probably frustrated as hell at this, and will publish a manifesto or similar in the upcoming days to correct impressions).
I'd also point out that this very idea has been tried several times already, never with much success.
Yeah. There was even a kickstarter-like site (complete with threshold pledging, like you've wisely decided to use on Indiegogo) that predated Kickstarter, as I recall. Annoys me that I can't remember its name.
Stating that life is going to leave a monstrous footprint on the surface of a planet is a pretty major assumption, that I think at this point is unwarranted.
But on earth, the footprint is truly monstrous, touching the atmosphere, every part of the surface, and deep into the crust. The carbon cycle even takes a trip down into the mantle via subduction of limestone. I agree, it's not necessary to believe it would have been that omnipresent on Mars. But how reasonable is it to believe it would be totally undetectable to this day?
You got to see this in context of Apple's policies. They've been known to exclude journalists from events because they've said things Apple didn't like.
It's not just that Apple has a reputation for being petty and vindictive. Apple wants that reputation in the industry, so people dependent on them (or dependent on writing about them) talk them up on their own initiative, or at least abstain from criticism.
In that light "complaining about a rejection in public doesn't improve your chances of getting allowed back" must be understood as what it is: a threat. If the app approval process was merely a matter of objectively interpreting the rules, the converse statement ("complaining about a rejection in public doesn't hurt your chances of getting allowed back") would be just as true, and why would they bother to say it then?
But the converse isn't true. The app store guidelines aren't interpreted objectively or fairly, they're interpreted with the customary Apple vindictiveness and jealousy. And they want app developers to know.
Remember that Apple has a history of e.g. excluding journalists who criticize them from events. Regarding the app approval process, they've said pretty clearly that if you complain publicly, expect life to get harder for you.
Once you've made yourself dependent on them, you pretty much need to stay on their good side.
"complaining about a rejection in public doesn't improve your chances of getting allowed back"
What a petty little schoolmistress-authoritarian policy. Assuming app developers are cowed (and hey, they're developing for Apple! You bet they are), the rejection complaints we see are probably the top of the iceberg.
James Lovelock pointed out in the sixties that viewed from space, it would immediately be apparent that earth and life. The prescence of huge amounts of gases which are not stable distinguishes from all other planets in the solar system. He predicted that Mars was in fact dead (before the Viking landers). The idea was that if life had got a foothold, it would probably have managed a similar totally transforming expansion over millions of years. Life that does not leave a big footprint wouldn't seem very much like the life we know from Earth.
You got to admit, it's held up for a long time. Viking sondes found no life on Mars. OK, maybe there used to be life on Mars, at least microbial life? Newer sondes with better instruments find no evidence of that either. If there was, wow, it's done an exceptionally good job of dying out without trace (considering the extremophiles we know from Earth). Now maybe there's life deep in the crust?
Maybe not. And maybe still more excuses will be made if that too fails to pan out.
It's still interesting news, and good news. I knew an early cochlear implant user who had become deaf as a result of meningitis. He was stuck with a poor first generation implant - they were not exactly easy to upgrade.
If you limit the idea of "investment" to "spending money on a project in the hope of getting more money" then OK, Kickstarter is not an investment (although there are some similar threshold pledge sites that work that way).
But in the broader sense of "having an interest in an outcome", as in "I'm invested in winning this game", then it's an investment.
How does this change anything fundamentally? At best, it lets developers squeeze a few more dollars from customers. But it's not the gravy train that they hope. So I can buy in-game upgrades in exchange for real cash in your game, woot! What makes you think I'll do that for your game, as opposed to the 20 other games with in-app purchases available? Consumable "smurf coin" style in-app purchases is dependent on a constant supply of clueless, typically 8 year old users. Soon even they will wise up (my 7-year old is quite aware of the dangers, and he didn't learn it from either me or personal experience).
For non.game developers, it's similar. It might let you price discriminate somewhat, as you can sell to full price to customers who want all features. But the additional profit from that is quite limited.
I think there's an economic bias at work here. It probably has a real name, but I'll call it the gravy train bias. Sellers would like to be paid small amounts over and over again, forever, rather than a large amount once. Even when the large amount is objectively more valuable. As a buyer, you know you hate that - just look at the popularity of unlimited data plans, or the unpopularity of congestion toll roads. Out of greed - irrational greed, at at that - app developers are pushing something users don't want. It won't work.
The claim that nothing has happened with kickstarter that wouldn't have happened otherwise is nice and untestable, as we can't run history backwards and try what would have happened without it. It's still silly and obviously false.
What Kickstarter provides is a mechanism for overcoming a collective action problem. You might be willing to pay $15 to make a Veronica Mars movie, but you're not going to pay $15 for a Veronica Mars movie that's made on a $15 budget. Kickstarter lets you conditionally commit to something, the condition being that the product can be realized to an acceptable quality (as measured in budget. Not the perfect measure, but it's the one you've got). This is a service which has been able to large scale investors before, but not to end users/consumers/what you want to call us.
Project starters on the other side, get a low-risk way to gauge interest in the product. A conditional preordering scheme is not the same, because they can't reserve the purchase amount. Companies that have conditional preordering schemes have had big issues with people committing to buy, then changing their mind when the product actually got produced. (The board game company GMT has had this problem. It has led to some flamewar/meltdowns on BGG.)
This is a real, tangible difference which can be predicted to make a difference in market outcomes.
This is also why the "flexible funding" schemes of sites like IndieGoGo is such a scam. They really do offer nothing new. It's just fundraising on a website. Crowdfunding without the threshold pledge mechanism is not deserving of the name.
This blog reads like a huge ad for the dozen various companies that have popped up to try to leech off would-be Kickstarter project starters. Some people are obviously taking the lesson about selling mining equipment to gold diggers to heart.
In which they can buy drugs and sell drugs, and little else.
In general they can do anything a criminal can do with unlaundered money - yes, that includes small purchases too - but there's a reason criminals want to launder their income, you know?
Heh, sure, as long as they just sit there in their wallet and grow in your mind, they're yours.
The moment you try to exchange them for something more solid than this fuzzy feeling of wealth, you're vulnerable. People who suddenly drive expensive cars and can't explain how they could afford them, get in trouble with the tax authorities.
It does indeed smell like that, because bitcoin IS based on fundamental misunderstandings like that "government can't shut it down".
It would seem undignified to attack bitcoin outright. What the government is moving to do is to tax it and prevent it from being used for money laundering. Since escaping tax and trading in illegal goods are the main appeals of bitcoin right now, I expect the exchanges will try to work around it. That's when government brings out the big guns.
As I understand it, it wouldn't be hard to create an "embrace and extend"-client that supported both the old genesis block and a new one.
The real problem for the miners would be to get this new block to be accepted by the people actually bringing real goods and services into the bitcoin economy. There are preciously few of those.
As long as they can be used to purchase some goods and services, they have real value.
The moment they ARE used to purchase a good or service, they have real value. Not before. The distinction matters a lot more for bitcoin than for other currencies, as
1. It may suddenly become illegal to conduct business it, and
You still have to bring the money into the US if you're in the US. Unless you're suggesting breaking US law by sending packages of cash and not declaring them as such, the government will find out about it one way or another. And even if you do opt to go the boxes of cash route, you're stuck making small deposits into your account in order to avoid having your bank report it.
In short, you'll have launder it. You'll have to go through all the pain criminals have to go through to launder their profits, and like criminals you're going to pay a hefty commission in order to get cash you can safely use.
At this point, the only advantage bitcoin has over, say, counterfeit Egyptian currency, will be that it can be stored on a computer. Woot.
Slashdot Mirror
So neo-nazis are less likely to be stopped, you mean?
I hear Texas isn't so cool with strict zoning laws.
Comments like this reminds us why you're called anonymous cowards.
Sure it is. But there has just been a terrorist attack in Boston which no group has taken responsibility for.
Terrorists do their stuff to send a message. If no one understands what the message is, it's a failure from their perspective. The obvious way to make people get the message, is to say what your message is.
In some subcultures, certain dates and events have special significance. Neo-nazis, for instance, have a habit of doing stuff on Hitler's or Hess' birthday. Because these days are special to them, they may either
* Suffer from the misconception that the date is special to everyone else as well, and thus people will get the message without an explicit statement, or
* Accept that the date isn't special outside the milieu, but their friends and enemies will get it. They are content sending a message to just those groups, rather than the public at large.
The Boston Marathon terrorist(s) haven't published what message they wished to send. So, they think it will be obvious to everyone, or at least their friends and enemies. That means they are probably not foreign - foreign terrorists know that we don't share their ideas of significant days, and are comparatively more eager to accept responsibility (that they're harder for the USG to track down probably is also a factor).
Now, is there an US subculture where Patriot's day, Tax day, and the Waco siege anniversary are special days? You bet there is. Could this subculture breed terrorists? It can, and it has.
It's very legitimate to draw a connection here, this is not just any day on the calendar. Even if this plant's explosion was a complete accident, it will be filled with significance to the anti-government conspiracy theorists centered on Waco. If they don't believe one of their own did it, they're probably going to think God/Fate did it. If the Boston Marathon terrorists come from this subculture, they couldn't have asked for something better. (If they don't, though - if for instance, against the odds, they're islamists - they're probably frustrated as hell at this, and will publish a manifesto or similar in the upcoming days to correct impressions).
Yeah. There was even a kickstarter-like site (complete with threshold pledging, like you've wisely decided to use on Indiegogo) that predated Kickstarter, as I recall. Annoys me that I can't remember its name.
With that "Why do you hate America" answer, I think we can end the debate here.
But on earth, the footprint is truly monstrous, touching the atmosphere, every part of the surface, and deep into the crust. The carbon cycle even takes a trip down into the mantle via subduction of limestone. I agree, it's not necessary to believe it would have been that omnipresent on Mars. But how reasonable is it to believe it would be totally undetectable to this day?
You got to see this in context of Apple's policies. They've been known to exclude journalists from events because they've said things Apple didn't like.
It's not just that Apple has a reputation for being petty and vindictive. Apple wants that reputation in the industry, so people dependent on them (or dependent on writing about them) talk them up on their own initiative, or at least abstain from criticism.
In that light "complaining about a rejection in public doesn't improve your chances of getting allowed back" must be understood as what it is: a threat. If the app approval process was merely a matter of objectively interpreting the rules, the converse statement ("complaining about a rejection in public doesn't hurt your chances of getting allowed back") would be just as true, and why would they bother to say it then?
But the converse isn't true. The app store guidelines aren't interpreted objectively or fairly, they're interpreted with the customary Apple vindictiveness and jealousy. And they want app developers to know.
Remember that Apple has a history of e.g. excluding journalists who criticize them from events. Regarding the app approval process, they've said pretty clearly that if you complain publicly, expect life to get harder for you.
Once you've made yourself dependent on them, you pretty much need to stay on their good side.
What a petty little schoolmistress-authoritarian policy. Assuming app developers are cowed (and hey, they're developing for Apple! You bet they are), the rejection complaints we see are probably the top of the iceberg.
James Lovelock pointed out in the sixties that viewed from space, it would immediately be apparent that earth and life. The prescence of huge amounts of gases which are not stable distinguishes from all other planets in the solar system. He predicted that Mars was in fact dead (before the Viking landers). The idea was that if life had got a foothold, it would probably have managed a similar totally transforming expansion over millions of years. Life that does not leave a big footprint wouldn't seem very much like the life we know from Earth.
You got to admit, it's held up for a long time. Viking sondes found no life on Mars. OK, maybe there used to be life on Mars, at least microbial life? Newer sondes with better instruments find no evidence of that either. If there was, wow, it's done an exceptionally good job of dying out without trace (considering the extremophiles we know from Earth). Now maybe there's life deep in the crust?
Maybe not. And maybe still more excuses will be made if that too fails to pan out.
It's still interesting news, and good news. I knew an early cochlear implant user who had become deaf as a result of meningitis. He was stuck with a poor first generation implant - they were not exactly easy to upgrade.
If you limit the idea of "investment" to "spending money on a project in the hope of getting more money" then OK, Kickstarter is not an investment (although there are some similar threshold pledge sites that work that way).
But in the broader sense of "having an interest in an outcome", as in "I'm invested in winning this game", then it's an investment.
It's certainly not a mere purchase.
How does this change anything fundamentally? At best, it lets developers squeeze a few more dollars from customers. But it's not the gravy train that they hope. So I can buy in-game upgrades in exchange for real cash in your game, woot! What makes you think I'll do that for your game, as opposed to the 20 other games with in-app purchases available? Consumable "smurf coin" style in-app purchases is dependent on a constant supply of clueless, typically 8 year old users. Soon even they will wise up (my 7-year old is quite aware of the dangers, and he didn't learn it from either me or personal experience).
For non.game developers, it's similar. It might let you price discriminate somewhat, as you can sell to full price to customers who want all features. But the additional profit from that is quite limited.
I think there's an economic bias at work here. It probably has a real name, but I'll call it the gravy train bias. Sellers would like to be paid small amounts over and over again, forever, rather than a large amount once. Even when the large amount is objectively more valuable. As a buyer, you know you hate that - just look at the popularity of unlimited data plans, or the unpopularity of congestion toll roads. Out of greed - irrational greed, at at that - app developers are pushing something users don't want. It won't work.
The claim that nothing has happened with kickstarter that wouldn't have happened otherwise is nice and untestable, as we can't run history backwards and try what would have happened without it. It's still silly and obviously false.
What Kickstarter provides is a mechanism for overcoming a collective action problem. You might be willing to pay $15 to make a Veronica Mars movie, but you're not going to pay $15 for a Veronica Mars movie that's made on a $15 budget. Kickstarter lets you conditionally commit to something, the condition being that the product can be realized to an acceptable quality (as measured in budget. Not the perfect measure, but it's the one you've got). This is a service which has been able to large scale investors before, but not to end users/consumers/what you want to call us.
Project starters on the other side, get a low-risk way to gauge interest in the product. A conditional preordering scheme is not the same, because they can't reserve the purchase amount. Companies that have conditional preordering schemes have had big issues with people committing to buy, then changing their mind when the product actually got produced. (The board game company GMT has had this problem. It has led to some flamewar/meltdowns on BGG.)
This is a real, tangible difference which can be predicted to make a difference in market outcomes.
This is also why the "flexible funding" schemes of sites like IndieGoGo is such a scam. They really do offer nothing new. It's just fundraising on a website. Crowdfunding without the threshold pledge mechanism is not deserving of the name.
This blog reads like a huge ad for the dozen various companies that have popped up to try to leech off would-be Kickstarter project starters. Some people are obviously taking the lesson about selling mining equipment to gold diggers to heart.
Now that we have Steam, they probably have outlived their usefulness somewhat. It used to be the case that all Linux games were made by Ingo Ruhnke.
There's still a market for a Free software-only games portal, I suppose.
In which they can buy drugs and sell drugs, and little else.
In general they can do anything a criminal can do with unlaundered money - yes, that includes small purchases too - but there's a reason criminals want to launder their income, you know?
Heh, sure, as long as they just sit there in their wallet and grow in your mind, they're yours.
The moment you try to exchange them for something more solid than this fuzzy feeling of wealth, you're vulnerable. People who suddenly drive expensive cars and can't explain how they could afford them, get in trouble with the tax authorities.
And that link in the chain the government will get when that person attempts to buy or sell bitcoins for conventional currency.
It does indeed smell like that, because bitcoin IS based on fundamental misunderstandings like that "government can't shut it down".
It would seem undignified to attack bitcoin outright. What the government is moving to do is to tax it and prevent it from being used for money laundering. Since escaping tax and trading in illegal goods are the main appeals of bitcoin right now, I expect the exchanges will try to work around it. That's when government brings out the big guns.
As I understand it, it wouldn't be hard to create an "embrace and extend"-client that supported both the old genesis block and a new one.
The real problem for the miners would be to get this new block to be accepted by the people actually bringing real goods and services into the bitcoin economy. There are preciously few of those.
The moment they ARE used to purchase a good or service, they have real value. Not before. The distinction matters a lot more for bitcoin than for other currencies, as
1. It may suddenly become illegal to conduct business it, and
2. It's in a speculative bubble.
In short, you'll have launder it. You'll have to go through all the pain criminals have to go through to launder their profits, and like criminals you're going to pay a hefty commission in order to get cash you can safely use.
At this point, the only advantage bitcoin has over, say, counterfeit Egyptian currency, will be that it can be stored on a computer. Woot.
It has access to you and all your property.
If you try this, you're going to find out why criminals will pay a 50% "tax" to have money laundered.