For the first, dcollins is quoting that, not affirming that. Second, places exist (central Sahara, McMurdo in Antarctica) that can only get better in practical terms for humans. Third, the argument isn't really that things will get better for some, but that some people will be stupid enough to believe it.
You might want to buy books at a bookstore that sells something besides Karl Marx (can you even find a bookstore that only sell Marx? Well, they would get a tiny reason to diversify!) Bookstores don't have different prices for every book down to two decimal places either.
But sure, the full records don't need to be public. You could round it off, and use the week or month of purchase, rather than the day or hour/minute. Work out the details with your government of choice through the usual channels - you can hold them accountable, right?
Point is, financial anonymity isn't an unconditional right. Just like financial transparency for corporations can be reasonable thing, it can sometimes be fair to demand of people as well.
But I know, because I do it! And why not? There are costs, but they are very small around here. Unless I want to carry loads of cash on me most of the time, it's comparable to the fee for withdrawing the same from an ATM.
Bah, digital cash systems are a waste of breath. All these protocols rely on a third party facilitator, and the best that facilitator can hope to get is deniability. But that wouldn't help them. If some bank started dealing in blind-signature money orders, the government would call them up and ask "What the hell do you think you are doing?".
And justly so. If these protocols worked as advertised, every form of economic crime would become immensely more profitable since the huge risks and expenses of old-fashioned money laundering would disappear. Corruption at all levels would explode, since it would be 100% impossible to prove anything. Any criminal enterprise, no matter how evil, could raise funding as easily a tech startup.
But it won't happen. There can be no cryptographic solution to the need for a facilitator: Assume I'm exchanging cash for a service, but both me and my counterparty are 100% anonymous through some perfect protocol. If I pay first, what will prevent the counterparty from taking the money and running? If I get the service first, why on earth should I bother paying? (If I buy information instead, I can effectively arrange for the transaction to be simultaneous, but I have no guarantee that what I get is the secret documents I want, as opposed to Aunt Tilly's brownies recipe.)
There can be no transactions without trust, and no protocol can create trust between two completely anonymous parties. It's a pipe dream, get over it.
So it's a contract between just you and him, eh? What do you do then when you pay for a car, and he just drives off in it shouting "so long, sucker!"? Solve the problem with your own gun?
There are a lot of assumptions about trust behind the scenes society. Demanding you to go public about big transactions (say, 25000$ and above) isn't unreasonable, and it's just good economic hygiene. One day, those 25000$ he wants to pay you with may be the same that got stolen from you yesterday - or from me.
Payment isn't the same as speech. It doesn't have the same inherent right to privacy. If you're suddenly driving around in a Ferrari, I think it's reasonable of society to check that you didn't steal it from someone.
Even raw wealth matters. Using your money, you can buy a lot of political influence, even through legal means. The only safeguard society presently has against this is fiscal transparency: Yes, if you're rich enough you can set up front groups to speak for you, but at least we know (well, if we remember to look) who pays for the opinion pieces.
Get this right: I don't think the goverment has any business knowing what particular books I bought, or which medicines. What I pay for is my business. THAT I pay someone for something, however, is not entirely our own business.
Your system is stupid! It shouldn't be the vendor who pays the fees, but the customer (the customer pays in the end anyway) - and they should be way below 3-5% for all but the smallest transfers. I'm sure the credit card companies want adoption to be increased, and more transfers to go through them. Customers want things to be easy, as do vendors - what's holding it back, regulation? and why can't regulation keep up if no one benefits from the system the way things are?
There are definitively cultural issues here, yes, and maybe regulation effects as well. In Norway, 95% of stores will let you withdraw cash if you pay with a card, and the surcharge (which is small to non-existent) is charged _you_ directly by the bank, and not indirectly via the merchant. This is a good thing.
In Germany, however, I was surprised that most stores didn't really want debit/credit card payments, and charged extra for it. Someone should tell German issuers that making things painless for merchants makes good business sense.
> Many small businesses - builders, central heating engineers, and others of that ilk - accept, and prefer, payment by cheque or by cash. They don't want the extra expense of accepting credit cards...and they don't necessarily want to declare everything.
Seriously, I don't see the problem. You send (or give) them an invoice, and leave it to them how they transfer the funds - if they can't use online banking, maybe they can find a bank that still lets you arrange the transfer over the counter. Either way, it's their problem now.
I wonder how the "three strikes" meme has become so popular all over the world. It's as if some PR people thought: -- We really, really want to punish copyright infringers. And we don't want all that hassle with due process. Now how can we avoid that... is there some area of human endeavour where punishment without process is regarded as tough and fair? I got it! Sports! Everyone knows the umpire's boss! Let's push a "three strikes and you're out" law!
(They do play baseball all over the world, right? France are just so bad at it that we never hear of them, I suppose). --
It may be that paranoid conclusions are more satisfying, but your argument is sloppy. The autism/vaccine scares weren't manufactured to placate parents - on the contrary, many parents are needlessly sick with guilt because they believe their choice of vaccinating their child led to its autism.
When it comes to alternative medicine in particular, it's not about collectivist excuses, but rather individualism run amok. "Take responsibility for your own health!" is the slogan. As long as you eat your greens and your homeopathic pills you will not get cancer! If you die, you must have done something wrong, it's your own fault. That health is a social issue, and that your illnesses may always stem from something outside your personal control is the terrifying truth they try to deny.
For the first thing: Sparkleby asks a very reasonable question, namely how long is he supposed to entertain such random, unsupported claims?
Unless you have a better answer to that, you can hardly blame him for telling us what he will do (not bother anymore).
And then, since you claim they're all as bad, I'd like to know who's climate science's equivalent to Steve Milloy. Or evolutionary biology's answer to Marc "Swift Boat" Morano for that matter (you did say all issues).
But some people think that opinions, like people, are entitled to lawyers. Remember when Kenneth Brown, president of the Alexis de Toqueville Institute wrote a book smearing Linux and open source? Bruce Perens apparently asked him straight out how much it would cost to get him to write a book praising Linux instead, to which he got the reply "we can talk about that". The episode is interesting because Linux is not usually the target of the think tanks - it's environmentalists and people concerned about public health, mostly. They threaten more profits. But it showed just how easily you can buy yourself a shill to argue in bad faith on your behalf.
Slashdot Mirror
...while anonymous comments in reply to them are not, or at least today's modders think so.
...and George Harrison would like to have a word with YOU.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsUkACDSIZY
Polytheism in a nutshell!
How about an infinite piece of non-repeating music, consisting of say, a beep at every prime second and silence otherwise?
For the first, dcollins is quoting that, not affirming that. Second, places exist (central Sahara, McMurdo in Antarctica) that can only get better in practical terms for humans.
Third, the argument isn't really that things will get better for some, but that some people will be stupid enough to believe it.
You might want to buy books at a bookstore that sells something besides Karl Marx (can you even find a bookstore that only sell Marx? Well, they would get a tiny reason to diversify!) Bookstores don't have different prices for every book down to two decimal places either.
But sure, the full records don't need to be public. You could round it off, and use the week or month of purchase, rather than the day or hour/minute. Work out the details with your government of choice through the usual channels - you can hold them accountable, right?
Point is, financial anonymity isn't an unconditional right. Just like financial transparency for corporations can be reasonable thing, it can sometimes be fair to demand of people as well.
But I know, because I do it! And why not? There are costs, but they are very small around here. Unless I want to carry loads of cash on me most of the time, it's comparable to the fee for withdrawing the same from an ATM.
You can build huts out of gold.
Or at least, you could in the stone age.
Or at least, there is a rather oddly themed board game that suggests this.
> In most reasonable countries you can make money transfers between private accounts in an ATM.
Whoa, not even here in Norway do we have that. But it sounds like a really neat thing. I can has?
Go to nearest ATM and get cash, problem solved with minimal hassle.
But it's not as unlikely as you think that the seller rented a wireless terminal. These things become more and more common.
Bah, digital cash systems are a waste of breath. All these protocols rely on a third party facilitator, and the best that facilitator can hope to get is deniability. But that wouldn't help them. If some bank started dealing in blind-signature money orders, the government would call them up and ask "What the hell do you think you are doing?".
And justly so. If these protocols worked as advertised, every form of economic crime would become immensely more profitable since the huge risks and expenses of old-fashioned money laundering would disappear. Corruption at all levels would explode, since it would be 100% impossible to prove anything. Any criminal enterprise, no matter how evil, could raise funding as easily a tech startup.
But it won't happen. There can be no cryptographic solution to the need for a facilitator: Assume I'm exchanging cash for a service, but both me and my counterparty are 100% anonymous through some perfect protocol. If I pay first, what will prevent the counterparty from taking the money and running? If I get the service first, why on earth should I bother paying? (If I buy information instead, I can effectively arrange for the transaction to be simultaneous, but I have no guarantee that what I get is the secret documents I want, as opposed to Aunt Tilly's brownies recipe.)
There can be no transactions without trust, and no protocol can create trust between two completely anonymous parties. It's a pipe dream, get over it.
So it's a contract between just you and him, eh? What do you do then when you pay for a car, and he just drives off in it shouting "so long, sucker!"? Solve the problem with your own gun?
There are a lot of assumptions about trust behind the scenes society. Demanding you to go public about big transactions (say, 25000$ and above) isn't unreasonable, and it's just good economic hygiene. One day, those 25000$ he wants to pay you with may be the same that got stolen from you yesterday - or from me.
Transparency can be your friend.
Payment isn't the same as speech. It doesn't have the same inherent right to privacy. If you're suddenly driving around in a Ferrari, I think it's reasonable of society to check that you didn't steal it from someone.
Even raw wealth matters. Using your money, you can buy a lot of political influence, even through legal means. The only safeguard society presently has against this is fiscal transparency: Yes, if you're rich enough you can set up front groups to speak for you, but at least we know (well, if we remember to look) who pays for the opinion pieces.
Get this right: I don't think the goverment has any business knowing what particular books I bought, or which medicines. What I pay for is my business. THAT I pay someone for something, however, is not entirely our own business.
A 4-digit pin may be insecure, but a note doesn't even have that. Cards 1, cash 0.
Your system is stupid! It shouldn't be the vendor who pays the fees, but the customer (the customer pays in the end anyway) - and they should be way below 3-5% for all but the smallest transfers.
I'm sure the credit card companies want adoption to be increased, and more transfers to go through them. Customers want things to be easy, as do vendors - what's holding it back, regulation? and why can't regulation keep up if no one benefits from the system the way things are?
There are definitively cultural issues here, yes, and maybe regulation effects as well. In Norway, 95% of stores will let you withdraw cash if you pay with a card, and the surcharge (which is small to non-existent) is charged _you_ directly by the bank, and not indirectly via the merchant. This is a good thing.
In Germany, however, I was surprised that most stores didn't really want debit/credit card payments, and charged extra for it. Someone should tell German issuers that making things painless for merchants makes good business sense.
"Like say you are in one of the holes in AT&T data coverage that Verizon likes to show on a map?"
Oh, we have those in Scandinavia as well, but I doubt you will find anyone to pay out there.
> Many small businesses - builders, central heating engineers, and others of that ilk - accept, and prefer, payment by cheque or by cash. They don't want the extra expense of accepting credit cards ...and they don't necessarily want to declare everything.
Seriously, I don't see the problem. You send (or give) them an invoice, and leave it to them how they transfer the funds - if they can't use online banking, maybe they can find a bank that still lets you arrange the transfer over the counter. Either way, it's their problem now.
True enough, I was a bit quick there. But I still would not want to live under "merely" double gravity :-)
> and has to be done by a tribunal.
A special copyright tribunal, as I understand it?
I wonder how the "three strikes" meme has become so popular all over the world. It's as if some PR people thought:
--
We really, really want to punish copyright infringers. And we don't want all that hassle with due process. Now how can we avoid that... is there some area of human endeavour where punishment without process is regarded as tough and fair? I got it! Sports! Everyone knows the umpire's boss! Let's push a "three strikes and you're out" law!
(They do play baseball all over the world, right? France are just so bad at it that we never hear of them, I suppose).
--
"If we stick with only 1.0G, then we wouldn't need artificial gravity for the people on board."
Considering their new home has five earth masses at the very least, they might as well get used to 5.0G. Ouch.
It may be that paranoid conclusions are more satisfying, but your argument is sloppy. The autism/vaccine scares weren't manufactured to placate parents - on the contrary, many parents are needlessly sick with guilt because they believe their choice of vaccinating their child led to its autism.
When it comes to alternative medicine in particular, it's not about collectivist excuses, but rather individualism run amok. "Take responsibility for your own health!" is the slogan. As long as you eat your greens and your homeopathic pills you will not get cancer! If you die, you must have done something wrong, it's your own fault.
That health is a social issue, and that your illnesses may always stem from something outside your personal control is the terrifying truth they try to deny.
For the first thing: Sparkleby asks a very reasonable question, namely how long is he supposed to entertain such random, unsupported claims?
Unless you have a better answer to that, you can hardly blame him for telling us what he will do (not bother anymore).
And then, since you claim they're all as bad, I'd like to know who's climate science's equivalent to Steve Milloy. Or evolutionary biology's answer to Marc "Swift Boat" Morano for that matter (you did say all issues).
"All opinions are not equal."
But some people think that opinions, like people, are entitled to lawyers. Remember when Kenneth Brown, president of the Alexis de Toqueville Institute wrote a book smearing Linux and open source? Bruce Perens apparently asked him straight out how much it would cost to get him to write a book praising Linux instead, to which he got the reply "we can talk about that".
The episode is interesting because Linux is not usually the target of the think tanks - it's environmentalists and people concerned about public health, mostly. They threaten more profits. But it showed just how easily you can buy yourself a shill to argue in bad faith on your behalf.