There were companies in the late 90's and early 2000 that were doing this with PC's and free internet. How soon we forget. Eudora or Opera anyone?
What's more, there were companies giving away candy iMacs in exchange for just this sort of thing. Oh, but I'm sure Steve Jobs thought of it at least two days before they did....
How can there by any equivalency between these two as a vehicle of exchange? I'm not saying BitCoin is a scam or worthless. But to say it's anywhere near the level of gold is ridiculous.
I used to think Bitcoin was stupid because it's another fiat currency, no real value, poor store of wealth, etc.
Then I realized - its real value is not as a safe full of gold but as a replacement for Western Union.
Never store your wealth in Bitcoins, but always conduct your transactions in it. This mindset sets an upper bound on the amount of Bitcoin needed, but with a growing and developing world population, I don't see this as a real problem for its success.
It also speaks to tremendous opportunities for currency exchangers in and out of Bitcoin. Its real threat then isn't economic or technical, but from gangs who want a piece of the action (mostly governments).
Coins' value may well increase to meet demand, but focusing on the coins as a store of value is sure-fire way to miss the boat on Bitcoin.
No matter how well you understand how a piece of software is implemented, it shouldn't expose any sort of vulnerability.
When you say, "in theory" you need to include psychology and sociology, not just computer science.
There's a reason people clean up code before they release it as open source.
there is now pretty viable competition from KVM and Xen nowadays
The difference is that Xen has been looked at by the good guys and the bad guys for years. Like it or not ESX is now open source (non-OSI definition), but only for the bad guys.
You can believe if you want that all 300 million citizens without exception are either STUPID or have no leadership skills whatsoever. But methinks Occam's Razor suggests that there is a powerful, sinister organization which is ruthlessly stamping out any leaders who even start to surface.
You have an organization which at its core uses violence to achieve its aims, and to effectively wield its power one must be trained to think like a psychopath (i.e. "political sophistication") or at least be one naturally. Then you couple that with a set of conditions that justifies its creation and governs its use ("Constituion") and realize that the organization thrives on circumventing those conditions at every possible moment, and continually breaking its own rules.
And then you* expect a good man to step up to lead it?
The most remarkable thing about this abject collapse is that not a single facsimile of a leader who understands what is happening and has a glimmer of an idea what to do about it is in evidence. It's just not natural.
Revisit this statement in November. Ron Paul will either be retired or elected at that point.
the sole significant organic CO2 sink known to man
Trees are a sink, yes, but they only absorb much CO2 while they're growing rapidly. I have 27 acres of mature forest and I've looked into the 'CO2 credit value' and it's very minimal because they're not growing very quickly.
Cell phone bill, electric bill, credential websites, offers from Amazon, emails from Craigslist/Ebay: there's no way for an individual to force encryption on all of those.
That's a good point. I have postfix set to opportunistically encrypt but looking at the logs it looks like the big sites don't. Even mint.com which is way weak.
Still, if I were paranoid enough I'd set my postfix to only accept encrypted mail and not interface with those companies by e-mail. HTTPS is still secure, but probably they just have a direct feed to the TLA's anyway so I'm not sure it's worth the effort.
Maybe since the NSA now knows I just ordered a test kit to see if I have a blown head gasket, they'll send a crew over to help replace it. I doubt black suits show grease anyway.
If you cannot see the flaw in Ron Paul's simplistic solutions I don't know what to say.
Yes, Ron Paul's market-based solution of trillions of independent transactions solving problems is overly simplistic. "Let the government do it" is so much more deep.
But go ahead and trust your lives to politicians - libertarians are the ones who are hopelessly naive.
If 'white' means you have to drive the LCD, then white takes more energy. If 'black' means you have to drive the LCD, then black takes more energy.
Exactly right. If anybody tries to patent this nonsense I can likely produce an e-mail exchange I had with the author of the BasicBlack screensaver for MacOS 7 in 1992, when I got a Powerbook 170 for school. That machine drove the "Active Matrix" LCD for black so he implemented a 'BasicWhite' mode.
Jean le Commerce has no choice. You can't fight this with a boycott.
Of course he does - just there are consequences. Boycotts without consequences aren't really that significant.
What you meant to say is that Jean is willing to demean himself for economic benefits instead of participating in a boycott. Many jurisdictions outlaw that if it's a woman and intercourse is involved.
That's some insightful stuff right there! It's so important to look at the reality, not the labels.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Probably not - does Texas specifically offer a duty to protect? The definition of a citizen is an oath of loyalty and a pledge of support in exchange for a duty to protect (classic Bastiat-style just government). At the National level, that requirement for citizenship has been abrogated by the Supreme Court since the mid-19th Century. Even serfs and vassals had that right which was enforceable in a manorial court.
To be more dispassionate, we're now somewhere between serfs, bonded laborers, helots, and chattel slaves but with enhanced personal freedoms. We can't own land directly (only holding titles subject to debt bondage, with the exception of a few grandfathered Nevadans), we can keep a portion of our labor (only if it exceeds our feudal obligation), and we can buy our emancipation, but only on the condition of leaving the manor. We also have hereditary debt bondage. The lord/master has been abstracted to a corporate form, in which any of the subjects may choose to participate, but without a change in their status. Oh, but we have songs about how we're a free people.
it is not the governments job to feed you. you are responsible for yourself.
Some of us also think we're responsible for our fellow man. When the government takes money from the people to build weapons they don't need, that money is no longer available to either feed the poor directly or create jobs or infrastructure for them to feed themselves.
We are not poor, some may be poor. Stop telling that Indians are poor
340 Million Indians live in extreme poverty. There's a decent percent of population that doesn't live in extreme poverty but ignoring them doesn't help (or fool) anybody.
We have largest gold in reserve
Actually you still have to catch up to Germany, but this will serve you well in the future. At least the people who don't die of malnutrition in the meantime.
What violence? There's no more violence towards tax collection than there is to collect from unpaid parking tickets.
Try not going along with the abstract constructions of those who lay claim to taxes and see what happens to you. This explains the problem in 4 minutes.
This is fee for service, if you take the service and don't pay the fee it is stealing. It is reasonable though to complain that the services aren't worth the fee or that that parts of the fee are wasted.
How about that I never agreed to accept an ever-expanding number of services? Do you see an upper limit to the amount of services to which I must agree? Is 100% of my income acceptable if my most basic life-support needs are provided as services?
If you want to be a member of society then you play by society's rules.
What if the rules are laid out in contract form by the Constitution and it's the government (all three branches) that's not playing by the rules?
The US has some of the lowest tax rates for the industrialized world and yet has some of the highest whining.
Not really - the way the income tax system works, many middle class people wind up paying over half their income to the government (read up on embedded taxes). Through all sorts of social engineering constructs, the US tax system together with the monetary system transfers wealth from the middle class to the upper class (and a much smaller amount to the lower class). When you're paying $4 for gas, that's bank-bailouts you're funding (plus the income taxes of oil industry workers and executives).
Most of our taxes goes to defense, and yet the people who seem the most opposed to taxes are also the ones more in favor of keeping a huge defense budget and having useless wars in Irag/Afghanistan.
No, the people who are most strongly opposed to taxes are also strongly opposed to war. But you're right that the two are tightly linked. Switzerland has a very high standard of living and the lowest tax rate in the OECD. It also hasn't been involved in any wars for a century and a half, though it does have the best civil defense system in the world. The US playing "World Police" certainly imposes massive costs on its citizens, though they're not primarily paid for with taxes.
Allowing yourself to get infected with and spread a deadly virus is not much different than taking a gun and randomly shooting in a crowded area:boggle: Does mens rea mean nothing? The legal system in the western world strongly disagrees with your assessment.
there is a (usually free) alternative
Really? I got a free flu shot once, but usually I have to pay $25 and my kids' vaccinations were hundreds of dollars per visit.
The only other solution
If you ignore the possibility of taking on some risks yourself to protect other people's liberty. That's what "Freedom isn't free" really means - it's not an exhortation to pay taxes, it means you accept risk so that your fellow man may be free.
Meanwhile, the State mechanism that seeks to force vaccinations was responsible for half a billion murders, in the 20th century alone. Where does that fit into the cost/benefit analysis?
There have to be hundreds of serious security bugs lurking in there... the only thing saving us is that it's so nasty that the black hats who put in the effort to find the bugs for their governments or corporate espionage clients get paid damn well for their work and wouldn't dream of disclosing their findings.
What would you do if you were sued in a Turkmenistan court for using purple text on your website? Because apparenty they outlawed that in the 90's and you didn't know about it.
With reforms in the U.S. insurance industry, we would maintain the better patient treatment the U.S. offers, while also having costs lower.
Shouldn't we be focusing on 'healthcare' instead of 'insurance'?
There are good arguments that the so-called insurance system we have today has driven the cost escalations that bring healthcare out of the reach of most people.
Slashdot Mirror
There were companies in the late 90's and early 2000 that were doing this with PC's and free internet. How soon we forget. Eudora or Opera anyone?
What's more, there were companies giving away candy iMacs in exchange for just this sort of thing. Oh, but I'm sure Steve Jobs thought of it at least two days before they did....
if you have a fixed amount of currency and the economy grows, deflation is inherent.
Perhaps you can explain why land in New York City continues to rise in value?
How can there by any equivalency between these two as a vehicle of exchange? I'm not saying BitCoin is a scam or worthless. But to say it's anywhere near the level of gold is ridiculous.
I used to think Bitcoin was stupid because it's another fiat currency, no real value, poor store of wealth, etc.
Then I realized - its real value is not as a safe full of gold but as a replacement for Western Union.
Never store your wealth in Bitcoins, but always conduct your transactions in it. This mindset sets an upper bound on the amount of Bitcoin needed, but with a growing and developing world population, I don't see this as a real problem for its success.
It also speaks to tremendous opportunities for currency exchangers in and out of Bitcoin. Its real threat then isn't economic or technical, but from gangs who want a piece of the action (mostly governments).
Coins' value may well increase to meet demand, but focusing on the coins as a store of value is sure-fire way to miss the boat on Bitcoin.
All of their core products are completely closed source, and released as binary only.
ESX is now open source, but only for the bad guys.
*non-OSI definition
No matter how well you understand how a piece of software is implemented, it shouldn't expose any sort of vulnerability.
When you say, "in theory" you need to include psychology and sociology, not just computer science.
There's a reason people clean up code before they release it as open source.
there is now pretty viable competition from KVM and Xen nowadays
The difference is that Xen has been looked at by the good guys and the bad guys for years. Like it or not ESX is now open source (non-OSI definition), but only for the bad guys.
shhh! That's the halt instruction for our universe.
You can believe if you want that all 300 million citizens without exception are either STUPID or have no leadership skills whatsoever. But methinks Occam's Razor suggests that there is a powerful, sinister organization which is ruthlessly stamping out any leaders who even start to surface.
You have an organization which at its core uses violence to achieve its aims, and to effectively wield its power one must be trained to think like a psychopath (i.e. "political sophistication") or at least be one naturally. Then you couple that with a set of conditions that justifies its creation and governs its use ("Constituion") and realize that the organization thrives on circumventing those conditions at every possible moment, and continually breaking its own rules.
And then you* expect a good man to step up to lead it?
The most remarkable thing about this abject collapse is that not a single facsimile of a leader who understands what is happening and has a glimmer of an idea what to do about it is in evidence. It's just not natural.
Revisit this statement in November. Ron Paul will either be retired or elected at that point.
*rhetorical 'you'
then her philosophy really is too simple, as i suspect your understanding of the vegan community is.
There's no such thing as a 'philosophy of the vegan community' - there are millions of individuals each with their own ideas.
well, perhaps that's the moral. or perhaps it should be that a vegan that won't eat carrots doesn't represent the vegan community at all.
You're right - she was being philosophically rigorous.
the sole significant organic CO2 sink known to man
Trees are a sink, yes, but they only absorb much CO2 while they're growing rapidly. I have 27 acres of mature forest and I've looked into the 'CO2 credit value' and it's very minimal because they're not growing very quickly.
Cell phone bill, electric bill, credential websites, offers from Amazon, emails from Craigslist/Ebay: there's no way for an individual to force encryption on all of those.
That's a good point. I have postfix set to opportunistically encrypt but looking at the logs it looks like the big sites don't. Even mint.com which is way weak.
Still, if I were paranoid enough I'd set my postfix to only accept encrypted mail and not interface with those companies by e-mail. HTTPS is still secure, but probably they just have a direct feed to the TLA's anyway so I'm not sure it's worth the effort.
Maybe since the NSA now knows I just ordered a test kit to see if I have a blown head gasket, they'll send a crew over to help replace it. I doubt black suits show grease anyway.
If you cannot see the flaw in Ron Paul's simplistic solutions I don't know what to say.
Yes, Ron Paul's market-based solution of trillions of independent transactions solving problems is overly simplistic. "Let the government do it" is so much more deep.
But go ahead and trust your lives to politicians - libertarians are the ones who are hopelessly naive.
If 'white' means you have to drive the LCD, then white takes more energy. If 'black' means you have to drive the LCD, then black takes more energy.
Exactly right. If anybody tries to patent this nonsense I can likely produce an e-mail exchange I had with the author of the BasicBlack screensaver for MacOS 7 in 1992, when I got a Powerbook 170 for school. That machine drove the "Active Matrix" LCD for black so he implemented a 'BasicWhite' mode.
Jean le Commerce has no choice. You can't fight this with a boycott.
Of course he does - just there are consequences. Boycotts without consequences aren't really that significant.
What you meant to say is that Jean is willing to demean himself for economic benefits instead of participating in a boycott. Many jurisdictions outlaw that if it's a woman and intercourse is involved.
you are wrong
No, you have poor reading comprehension. Try again.
Don't you mean shareseller value, guys?
That's some insightful stuff right there! It's so important to look at the reality, not the labels.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Probably not - does Texas specifically offer a duty to protect? The definition of a citizen is an oath of loyalty and a pledge of support in exchange for a duty to protect (classic Bastiat-style just government). At the National level, that requirement for citizenship has been abrogated by the Supreme Court since the mid-19th Century. Even serfs and vassals had that right which was enforceable in a manorial court.
To be more dispassionate, we're now somewhere between serfs, bonded laborers, helots, and chattel slaves but with enhanced personal freedoms. We can't own land directly (only holding titles subject to debt bondage, with the exception of a few grandfathered Nevadans), we can keep a portion of our labor (only if it exceeds our feudal obligation), and we can buy our emancipation, but only on the condition of leaving the manor. We also have hereditary debt bondage. The lord/master has been abstracted to a corporate form, in which any of the subjects may choose to participate, but without a change in their status. Oh, but we have songs about how we're a free people.
it is not the governments job to feed you. you are responsible for yourself.
Some of us also think we're responsible for our fellow man. When the government takes money from the people to build weapons they don't need, that money is no longer available to either feed the poor directly or create jobs or infrastructure for them to feed themselves.
We are not poor, some may be poor. Stop telling that Indians are poor
340 Million Indians live in extreme poverty. There's a decent percent of population that doesn't live in extreme poverty but ignoring them doesn't help (or fool) anybody.
We have largest gold in reserve
Actually you still have to catch up to Germany, but this will serve you well in the future. At least the people who don't die of malnutrition in the meantime.
What violence? There's no more violence towards tax collection than there is to collect from unpaid parking tickets.
Try not going along with the abstract constructions of those who lay claim to taxes and see what happens to you. This explains the problem in 4 minutes.
This is fee for service, if you take the service and don't pay the fee it is stealing. It is reasonable though to complain that the services aren't worth the fee or that that parts of the fee are wasted.
How about that I never agreed to accept an ever-expanding number of services? Do you see an upper limit to the amount of services to which I must agree? Is 100% of my income acceptable if my most basic life-support needs are provided as services?
If you want to be a member of society then you play by society's rules.
What if the rules are laid out in contract form by the Constitution and it's the government (all three branches) that's not playing by the rules?
The US has some of the lowest tax rates for the industrialized world and yet has some of the highest whining.
Not really - the way the income tax system works, many middle class people wind up paying over half their income to the government (read up on embedded taxes). Through all sorts of social engineering constructs, the US tax system together with the monetary system transfers wealth from the middle class to the upper class (and a much smaller amount to the lower class). When you're paying $4 for gas, that's bank-bailouts you're funding (plus the income taxes of oil industry workers and executives).
Most of our taxes goes to defense, and yet the people who seem the most opposed to taxes are also the ones more in favor of keeping a huge defense budget and having useless wars in Irag/Afghanistan.
No, the people who are most strongly opposed to taxes are also strongly opposed to war. But you're right that the two are tightly linked. Switzerland has a very high standard of living and the lowest tax rate in the OECD. It also hasn't been involved in any wars for a century and a half, though it does have the best civil defense system in the world. The US playing "World Police" certainly imposes massive costs on its citizens, though they're not primarily paid for with taxes.
Allowing yourself to get infected with and spread a deadly virus is not much different than taking a gun and randomly shooting in a crowded area :boggle: Does mens rea mean nothing? The legal system in the western world strongly disagrees with your assessment.
there is a (usually free) alternative
Really? I got a free flu shot once, but usually I have to pay $25 and my kids' vaccinations were hundreds of dollars per visit.
The only other solution
If you ignore the possibility of taking on some risks yourself to protect other people's liberty. That's what "Freedom isn't free" really means - it's not an exhortation to pay taxes, it means you accept risk so that your fellow man may be free.
Meanwhile, the State mechanism that seeks to force vaccinations was responsible for half a billion murders, in the 20th century alone. Where does that fit into the cost/benefit analysis?
Even Mueller's sockpuppets can't get the basic facts right.
There have to be hundreds of serious security bugs lurking in there... the only thing saving us is that it's so nasty that the black hats who put in the effort to find the bugs for their governments or corporate espionage clients get paid damn well for their work and wouldn't dream of disclosing their findings.
TFTFY
yes, that's the way I read it as well.
What would you do if you were sued in a Turkmenistan court for using purple text on your website? Because apparenty they outlawed that in the 90's and you didn't know about it.
With reforms in the U.S. insurance industry, we would maintain the better patient treatment the U.S. offers, while also having costs lower.
Shouldn't we be focusing on 'healthcare' instead of 'insurance'?
There are good arguments that the so-called insurance system we have today has driven the cost escalations that bring healthcare out of the reach of most people.