But then, (democratic) countries are the commonal property of their citizens, whose interests are represented by the Government.
Several problem with this. First, the claim to communal ownership of the entire country is extremely suspect. Was it homesteaded from unowned land or purchased? If purchased, did the seller have the right to it? Governments generally move in to a country by conquest, i.e. theft on a grand scale. They don't homestead the land they rule, or purchase it from the rightful owners (though sometimes they do purchase territory from another government). Second, unlike shareholders in a company, citizens can't cash out if they happen to disagree with the direction taken by the board of directors. Citizenship is non-transferable, and even abandoning it is very heavily penalized. Citizens are opted-in involuntarily at birth and aren't allowed to opt out in any practical sense—being forced to give up everything you've earned, move to another country, and never see your family again doesn't count. (And even then the U.S. will try to keep claiming you owe taxes.)
Right. You don't have to be a charity to be a non-profit. Anyone can form a non-profit so long as the organization itself isn't intended to make a profit (i.e. to enrich the owners/shareholders or pay dividends—paying employees is fine, but they do get charged income tax on that pay). You do need to be a charity to allow your donors to write off their donations as charitable expenses on their taxes, but that's all that's really at stake here.
The whole point of the tax exempt status is to advantage groups that are beneficial to society.
That's not entirely correct. While there are some minor differences between non-profit charities and other non-profit organizations, the real point of having tax-exempt non-profit organizations is to avoid double-taxing the income of organizations which aren't structured as profit centers—in other words, those which don't accumulate market value for their owners or shareholders, and don't pay dividends. There are plenty of non-profits which have nothing to do with charity and are only intended to benefit their members, e.g. industry organizations like the RIAA or MPAA. This is not a loophole; the system is working as intended. It's all a matter of simplifying the paperwork, really: if the associations were forced to file as for-profit organizations they would still pay little or no income taxes, because—by design—they have no net profit. They may keep some savings on hand to facilitate cash flow, but everything else they receive is channeled directly into expenses related to their charter.
The significant advantage charitable non-profits have is that their donations can be written off on their donor's taxes as charitable expenses. If you donate or pay dues to a non-charitable organization you're still on the hook for income taxes on that money, unless you can classify it as a business expense.
In a monolithic kernel, none of these problems exist. Every application request that enters the filesystem layer automatically continues in its own independent thread. When it hits an area that requires synchronisation, it briefly acquires a lock (usually without contention), does the work, and releases the lock. This is a much simpler design, with higher performance.
Any particular reason you couldn't do the same thing in a microkernel? I'm envisioning some form of IPC primitive that automatically spawns a lightweight thread to handle each incoming message, which isn't too different from the monolithic kernel approach apart from not having a fixed 1:1 correspondence between the client and server contexts. You would be able to use your shared data structures and locks just as you would in a monolithic kernel, at least within the filesystem code. For anything else, of course, you'd need to use IPC.
You could use Shamir's Algorithm, but the recommended way to create a multi-signature Bitcoin address is to use a transaction script which separately checks each of the desired keys. That way each key holder can sign the transaction independently of the others, and—more importantly—there is no need to get all the key fragments together in one place to reconstruct a master key.
That last point, incidently, happens to be one of the problems with this proposal; once the master key has been reconstructed, anyone with access to it would have unrestricted access to every backdoored device. Key-splitting is really only intended for cases where the master key need only be used once, not on a routine basis as can be expected in this scenario. Rather than splitting a master key, a better approach would be to have a number of separate keys and require a certain number of signatures on a digital "warrant" which specifically identifies the device to be decrypted. (It wouldn't hurt to include the other Constitutionally-mandated warrant information, either, just for future reference.) The device would then need to validate the device ID in the warrant and check the signatures against a list of known public keys before decrypting itself.
All truly competitive free-market prices are (at least said to be) set at whatever the market will bear.
And contrary to what you say, an established and monopolized source of goods and/or services doesn't have that problem: They can charge whatever they feel like charging, and people will either pay it or be without that good or service. With a strong, non-competitive monopoly, it doesn't matter what the market will bear: You can provide minimal services at maximal pricing and reap maximum profits at the cost of those who can afford your good or service that you offer at a very self-serving price.
Somehow you managed to say exactly what I said while pretending to disagree and maintaining a needlessly condescending tone. I'm impressed.
Of course, this sort of absolute monopoly we're discussing only comes about when exclusivity is guaranteed by law, or otherwise backed by force. In very rare cases it can happen if someone legitimately owns the entire supply of some rare good, a.k.a. a natural monopoly. A mere de facto monopoly which results from favorable economies of scale and/or network effects always has to worry about the next up-and-coming competitor; if they abuse their position or become complacent there is always someone else waiting to move in with lower prices and better quality and undermine their market share. The incumbent enjoys a natural advantage over the challengers, but not an unlimited one.
In some areas, we already have multiple private hospitals and doctors and ambulance companies competing with eachother.
This doesn't seem to have any great impact on prices.
I wasn't trying to imply that prices would necessarily be lower than they are now, merely that they would be governed by supply and demand like any other market good. The medical industry in particular isn't very price-sensitive; if you need to go to the E.R. you're going to check in to the closest hospital first and worry about the bill later. The fact that most pay for their medical costs, even routine expenses, via monthly insurance premiums and thus don't directly feel the impact of high prices at the E.R. or doctor's office doesn't improve matters. However, people aren't completely insensitive to pricing, even for medical services, especially the less urgent variety; generics vs. name-brand medicines, for example. Some individuals with above-average foresight also take into account the quality and cost of the local hospitals when choosing where to live.
Just consider what the costs would be like if there was no competition—a single monopoly provider of medical care, regardless of where you chose to live, free to set its prices at whatever the market would bear. What would you be willing to pay for life-saving medical treatment, if the only other alternative was death? Probably a lot more than what they actually charge. Competition clearly does have an effect on prices, even in medicine.
By avoiding substantial tax burdens these companies are forcing the government to either borrow more money to cover the shortfall or raise taxes on everyone else.
What these companies are doing is legal. That means that the tax burdens you refer to don't exist. If the government over-estimated how much tax revenue their tax codes would bring in because the companies found a more efficient way to comply with the law, that's the government's problem. They should have put more effort into analyzing their own tax codes and come up with a better estimate. The expectation, apparently, is that these companies will send in extra tax money which they aren't legally obligated to pay. When is the last time you did that? Why would you expect anyone else to do so?
Anyway, there are at least two other options which you didn't consider besides borrowing or raising taxes. The government could change its tax codes, and/or it could reduce spending to meet its budget given the actual tax revenues. As politically difficult as it might be, you could cut the expenditures of almost any government in the developed world by at least 75% without the slightest impact to any of the "fundamental" services—courts, police, emergency services, a reasonable level of national defense, public education, public transportation, basic consumer protections—considered by some to be impossible or impractical to provide any other way.
Don't make that mistake yourself. Taxes are a matter of legality-by-fiat and the application of force to deprive people of their rightful property "for the greater good". Morality in this case favors the corporations, and would continue to do so even if they implemented some hypothetical scheme to successfully avoid paying any taxes anywhere.
If you think the government gives you nothing back, you're right to be annoyed. I get free health care, free education, free social care, a welfare system...
None of that stuff is free; it's bundled. All or nothing—and if you choose "nothing" they make you move out of the country, among other costs. You're still paying for everything you get, and more, but you're deprived of your right to decide for yourself whether a particular service is useful enough to justify its cost, who supplies it, or how it's implemented. That's plenty of reason to be annoyed even if you do feel that you get some value back in exchange for what the government takes in taxes.
It's not like any of those services would go away if the government didn't provide them. You would just move from paying for them through political and bureaucratic middle-men to paying for them directly, with a choice of suppliers catering to your specific needs and competition to keep the prices down.
The target and difficulty aren't set by voting, they're set based on the time required to mine the last 2016 blocks—which should be about two weeks at the nominal target of 10 minutes per block. More than two weeks and the difficulty decreases; less than two weeks and it increases.
The biggest problem with the concerns over a mining pool having over 50% of the hashing power is that the pool operators are only coordinating the effort; they don't actually own all that hardware, and the owners can decide independently which pool(s) to slave their mining rigs to. If a pool operator tried to abuse their position the fact would be noticed, and miners would quickly switch to some other pool.
There is also no reason why individual miners couldn't track transactions as they're broadcast like any full node and validate the candidate blocks the pool sends out, rejecting any which involve possible double-spends or other attacks. I don't think they do that currently, but only because none of the major pool have tried to abuse their position that way.
What dignity could there be in a life where you have to ask someone to *carry* you every time you go into a shop... multiple times per day.
The alternative appears to be asking the government to employ force on your behalf to continually coerce every provider of so-called "public accommodations" into taking your disability (and every other possible disability) into account, regardless of actual demand, and at a far greater expense than simply providing you with individual assistance as needed or working out some alternative method of providing the service. Perhaps the coercion feels more "dignified" to you, but I find it quite the opposite. There is nothing undignified about asking for help when needed. It seems like you've simply found a way to take for granted as your right (and others' obligation) that others will make accommodation for you without being asked. That makes you more dependent, not less. Finding ways to induce others to help you voluntarily would be a form of self-sufficiency, which would be much more dignified than stooping to force or manipulation.
There is something called "The Social Contract", which is something of a "shrink wrap license" you agree to by being born into a society, that by doing so, you agree to abide by that societies rules.
Ridiculous. You can't agree to anything just by being born; you aren't even sentient at that point. There is no meeting of the minds, no clear agreement. If this so-called "social contract" existed, it would be a contract of adhesion which no human being in history ever explicitly agreed to, and any competent court would throw it out with prejudice after a cursory hearing.
...a fix money supply like the gold standard or bitcoin is much more horrible system than having to deal with something like the Fed.
On the contrary, there is no need to adjust the quantity of money to reflect population growth or GDP or anything else. The value of the money will adjust automatically based on supply and demand; it's impossible to have a shortage or surplus, as the units are arbitrary and have no direct use apart from serving as money. Changing the quantity of money in an attempt to regulate the price ruins an extremely useful economic signal regarding the demand for money and the balance between consumption and investment, leading to overconsumption and/or malinvestment.
Bitcoin is inflationary for now—any new currency must be, during the initial distribution phase—but over the long term the supply will be relatively constant and the price thus will be fully determined by the demand for bitcoins. Variations in the price will thus signal changes in the demand for money—to the extent bitcoins are used; the effect is diluted by the presence of other, centrally-managed currencies—which in turn informs the market about which investments are better or worse than average. Assuming a growing economy, any investment which does not outperform the expected price deflation is worse than average: investing in it would reduce the rate of growth. Under forced inflation there is more investment, but some of it is malinvestment, driven by the fact that simply holding the money causes it to lose value (artificially, due to the increased supply), and thus contributes to a lower average return and a poorer economy.
No, mathematics like science is purely an invention of the human mind...
One could argue that the entire universe as we know it is nothing more than "an invention of the human mind", leaving no scope at all for discovery, but that is hardly a useful position to take in this context. Even if you did take that approach, mathematics should still be excluded, because mathematical relationships exist independently of human thought. The ratio of a circle's radius to its circumference is tau, and would remain tau even if no human ever existed to discover that fact.
Invention implies an element of creativity, deliberate choice among the available alternatives. The only choices in math are in the selection of axioms. Mathematical axioms may be invented (under significant constraints necessary to keep the results applicable to the physical universe, though there remains some flexibility), but everything beyond that follows mechanically from the axioms—and is thus discovered. Similarly, once your requirements are known, developing a software algorithm comes down to little more than solving the system of constraints described by the requirements—given the requirements specified in a formal language, this is something that could be solved in principle by a search through the solution space using tools similar to mechanical theorem-provers. Intuition helps in narrowing the search space (at the cost of possibly missing the solution entirely), but it isn't essential given sufficient time and memory. Of course, an actual program includes additional elements such as comments, identifiers and code style which are chosen by the programmer and have no effect on the program's behavior; these creative elements would be invented rather than discovered.
Science, moreover, is not "purely an invention of the human mind" any more than mathematics is. It consists of both discovery and invention. Science is essentially the process of making observations and developing statistically consistent models. There is more flexibility here than in math; models can fit the data to a greater or lesser extent, and the best-fitting model is not always the most useful. A useful approximation can thus be considered an invention; just the same, most of science consists of discovery rather than invention of new models, even more so when the goal is simply to fit a standard statistical model to the available data, pure math combined with discovered observations.
BitCoin's main [algorithms] go back about 30 years.
The algorithms have been known for about 30 years, but they've always existed as a solution to the problem Bitcoin was intended to solve, waiting for someone to discover them.
The word you are looking for is inventor. A discoverer is someone who finds something that was there all along.
In that case, the correct word is "discoverer". The name Bitcoin was invented, but the fundamental algorithms with which Bitcoin solves the distributed ledger problem have always existed; it just took someone asking the right questions to discover them. You don't invent solutions to math problems, you discover them, and that goes for software algorithms just as much as any other form of math.
Instead the community glommed onto a rather flawed version based on artificial scarcity...
Scarcity is a fundamental requirement for any currency. It's either natural due to physical scarcity, as in gold, or artificial, as in bitcoin or US dollars or most other currencies in common use. Any digital currency will have the property of artificial scarcity, because information is not naturally scarce. Ensuring that scarcity is maintained without reliance on a central authority is what the blockchain is all about. The only significant difference in the form of scarcity between bitcoins and dollars is that one is governed by a fixed and unbiased mathematical formula, while the other is dictated by politics and thus unpredictable and subject to corruption.
You can complain all you like about "unfairly" enriched early adopters, but I for one would much rather have that than unfair enrichment based on one's political connections. When bitcoins come into existence they're distributed by a scrupulously fair lottery with proportional odds to people doing useful work for the network. When dollars are produced they benefit first with the authority to order them, and then those who decide how they're distributed, then finally the banks and government contractors and employees who get a chance to spend them before prices adjust to the increased supply; at each stage there is plenty of scope for self-enrichment through manipulation of the flow of new money.
Anyway, if you really want to trade traditional currencies online (as credit—the closest you're likely to get to trading the actual currencies), the reference client and server for Ripple are open source under the ISC License. Such a system can't be completely distributed, of course, since it's tied to external centralized currencies, so it's no substitute for Bitcoin; Ripple solves a different, and easier, problem by dealing in loans rather than assets, leaving it up to the users to decide how much credit to extend.
So you should be able to copy a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle (I.e., copy the bourbon, bottle, and label), tie a label to the bottle that reads "made by J. McDonald" and sell it?
Sure. Why not? Who would be harmed? Certainly not the buyer, who knows exactly what they're getting. Who else would have any standing?
The buyer's buyer.
Either the buyer's buyer was also informed about who the original manufacturer was, or the initial buyer/reseller is obviously committing fraud. But that has nothing to do with the original transaction, which was not fraudulent and harmed no one.
So you should be able to copy a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle (I.e., copy the bourbon, bottle, and label), tie a label to the bottle that reads "made by J. McDonald" and sell it?
Sure. Why not? Who would be harmed? Certainly not the buyer, who knows exactly what they're getting. Who else would have any standing?
... printing a copy and selling it for $100,000,000 to some very stupid collector who doesn't notice that it is made rather roughly from plastic.
I see your point regarding basic FDM printers, but note that for the right price you can 3-D print in steel, ceramics, wax, and more, or print a mold from which you can cast various other materials, including silver, brass, and bronze.
That's not an argument against selling copies, that's an argument against claiming that they're the originals. So long as the buyer is aware of who actually made the item there is no fraud.
It injects advertising into search engine results, and also has the capability to intercept and hijack SSL/TLS connections to websites, thanks to the installation of a self-signing certificate authority on affected machines.
It's worst than that. Not only can the program MITM SSL/TLS connections on the infected machine, so can anyone else in a position to intercept the traffic. The private signing key employed by the program is public knowledge at this point, and the same on all infected systems.
And I am also well aware that the cost of the losses are socialised across all people. And I am ok with that. I know that I am paying an insurance premium when I use credit cards, however that cost is acceptable to me for the convenience of using credit cards.
Your opinion is irrelevant here. Of course you're OK with it; you're one of the negligent freeloaders driving up costs for everyone else! It's the more careful credit card users who don't deserve those costs that are harmed by this system.
For that reason, the laws requiring a high default level of protection should be repealed. You would still be free to get a card from a bank offering "gold-plated" fraud protection, for an unsubsidized premium fee, while others who are more responsible with their cards can forego the fees in exchange for performing their own due diligence.
I say, the Law is settled in the consequences of language, and it should only come into play if actual, demonstrable physical harm has resulted as a direct result of that language.
Then you will be glad to learn that it is absolutely impossible for any language to cause physical harm as a direct result. In your prior example of "inciting violence", the language wasn't the cause of the harm, the violence was the cause of the harm; and the cause of the violence was the listener's choice, not the speech, or the speaker.
The freedom of speech naturally extends to all speech. Your freedom of speech is respected if and only if you can say whatever you want to say without any change in your legal status. Social consequences are, of course, another matter entirely.
A better question would be: How do you implement a loop construct without recursion?
Keep in mind that recursion is nothing more or less than the ability to return to a previous point in the control flow of a program. The stack overhead associated with a lack of tail-call optimization and the special treatment of iterative constructs are merely implementation details, whereas recursion is a fundamental concept in computer science without which most programs would be impossible to express.
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But then, (democratic) countries are the commonal property of their citizens, whose interests are represented by the Government.
Several problem with this. First, the claim to communal ownership of the entire country is extremely suspect. Was it homesteaded from unowned land or purchased? If purchased, did the seller have the right to it? Governments generally move in to a country by conquest, i.e. theft on a grand scale. They don't homestead the land they rule, or purchase it from the rightful owners (though sometimes they do purchase territory from another government). Second, unlike shareholders in a company, citizens can't cash out if they happen to disagree with the direction taken by the board of directors. Citizenship is non-transferable, and even abandoning it is very heavily penalized. Citizens are opted-in involuntarily at birth and aren't allowed to opt out in any practical sense—being forced to give up everything you've earned, move to another country, and never see your family again doesn't count. (And even then the U.S. will try to keep claiming you owe taxes.)
Right. You don't have to be a charity to be a non-profit. Anyone can form a non-profit so long as the organization itself isn't intended to make a profit (i.e. to enrich the owners/shareholders or pay dividends—paying employees is fine, but they do get charged income tax on that pay). You do need to be a charity to allow your donors to write off their donations as charitable expenses on their taxes, but that's all that's really at stake here.
The whole point of the tax exempt status is to advantage groups that are beneficial to society.
That's not entirely correct. While there are some minor differences between non-profit charities and other non-profit organizations, the real point of having tax-exempt non-profit organizations is to avoid double-taxing the income of organizations which aren't structured as profit centers—in other words, those which don't accumulate market value for their owners or shareholders, and don't pay dividends. There are plenty of non-profits which have nothing to do with charity and are only intended to benefit their members, e.g. industry organizations like the RIAA or MPAA. This is not a loophole; the system is working as intended. It's all a matter of simplifying the paperwork, really: if the associations were forced to file as for-profit organizations they would still pay little or no income taxes, because—by design—they have no net profit. They may keep some savings on hand to facilitate cash flow, but everything else they receive is channeled directly into expenses related to their charter.
The significant advantage charitable non-profits have is that their donations can be written off on their donor's taxes as charitable expenses. If you donate or pay dues to a non-charitable organization you're still on the hook for income taxes on that money, unless you can classify it as a business expense.
In a monolithic kernel, none of these problems exist. Every application request that enters the filesystem layer automatically continues in its own independent thread. When it hits an area that requires synchronisation, it briefly acquires a lock (usually without contention), does the work, and releases the lock. This is a much simpler design, with higher performance.
Any particular reason you couldn't do the same thing in a microkernel? I'm envisioning some form of IPC primitive that automatically spawns a lightweight thread to handle each incoming message, which isn't too different from the monolithic kernel approach apart from not having a fixed 1:1 correspondence between the client and server contexts. You would be able to use your shared data structures and locks just as you would in a monolithic kernel, at least within the filesystem code. For anything else, of course, you'd need to use IPC.
You could use Shamir's Algorithm, but the recommended way to create a multi-signature Bitcoin address is to use a transaction script which separately checks each of the desired keys. That way each key holder can sign the transaction independently of the others, and—more importantly—there is no need to get all the key fragments together in one place to reconstruct a master key.
That last point, incidently, happens to be one of the problems with this proposal; once the master key has been reconstructed, anyone with access to it would have unrestricted access to every backdoored device. Key-splitting is really only intended for cases where the master key need only be used once, not on a routine basis as can be expected in this scenario. Rather than splitting a master key, a better approach would be to have a number of separate keys and require a certain number of signatures on a digital "warrant" which specifically identifies the device to be decrypted. (It wouldn't hurt to include the other Constitutionally-mandated warrant information, either, just for future reference.) The device would then need to validate the device ID in the warrant and check the signatures against a list of known public keys before decrypting itself.
You've got it all backward.
All truly competitive free-market prices are (at least said to be) set at whatever the market will bear.
And contrary to what you say, an established and monopolized source of goods and/or services doesn't have that problem: They can charge whatever they feel like charging, and people will either pay it or be without that good or service. With a strong, non-competitive monopoly, it doesn't matter what the market will bear: You can provide minimal services at maximal pricing and reap maximum profits at the cost of those who can afford your good or service that you offer at a very self-serving price.
Somehow you managed to say exactly what I said while pretending to disagree and maintaining a needlessly condescending tone. I'm impressed.
Of course, this sort of absolute monopoly we're discussing only comes about when exclusivity is guaranteed by law, or otherwise backed by force. In very rare cases it can happen if someone legitimately owns the entire supply of some rare good, a.k.a. a natural monopoly. A mere de facto monopoly which results from favorable economies of scale and/or network effects always has to worry about the next up-and-coming competitor; if they abuse their position or become complacent there is always someone else waiting to move in with lower prices and better quality and undermine their market share. The incumbent enjoys a natural advantage over the challengers, but not an unlimited one.
In some areas, we already have multiple private hospitals and doctors and ambulance companies competing with eachother.
This doesn't seem to have any great impact on prices.
I wasn't trying to imply that prices would necessarily be lower than they are now, merely that they would be governed by supply and demand like any other market good. The medical industry in particular isn't very price-sensitive; if you need to go to the E.R. you're going to check in to the closest hospital first and worry about the bill later. The fact that most pay for their medical costs, even routine expenses, via monthly insurance premiums and thus don't directly feel the impact of high prices at the E.R. or doctor's office doesn't improve matters. However, people aren't completely insensitive to pricing, even for medical services, especially the less urgent variety; generics vs. name-brand medicines, for example. Some individuals with above-average foresight also take into account the quality and cost of the local hospitals when choosing where to live.
Just consider what the costs would be like if there was no competition—a single monopoly provider of medical care, regardless of where you chose to live, free to set its prices at whatever the market would bear. What would you be willing to pay for life-saving medical treatment, if the only other alternative was death? Probably a lot more than what they actually charge. Competition clearly does have an effect on prices, even in medicine.
By avoiding substantial tax burdens these companies are forcing the government to either borrow more money to cover the shortfall or raise taxes on everyone else.
What these companies are doing is legal. That means that the tax burdens you refer to don't exist. If the government over-estimated how much tax revenue their tax codes would bring in because the companies found a more efficient way to comply with the law, that's the government's problem. They should have put more effort into analyzing their own tax codes and come up with a better estimate. The expectation, apparently, is that these companies will send in extra tax money which they aren't legally obligated to pay. When is the last time you did that? Why would you expect anyone else to do so?
Anyway, there are at least two other options which you didn't consider besides borrowing or raising taxes. The government could change its tax codes, and/or it could reduce spending to meet its budget given the actual tax revenues. As politically difficult as it might be, you could cut the expenditures of almost any government in the developed world by at least 75% without the slightest impact to any of the "fundamental" services—courts, police, emergency services, a reasonable level of national defense, public education, public transportation, basic consumer protections—considered by some to be impossible or impractical to provide any other way.
Don't confuse legality with morality.
Don't make that mistake yourself. Taxes are a matter of legality-by-fiat and the application of force to deprive people of their rightful property "for the greater good". Morality in this case favors the corporations, and would continue to do so even if they implemented some hypothetical scheme to successfully avoid paying any taxes anywhere.
If you think the government gives you nothing back, you're right to be annoyed. I get free health care, free education, free social care, a welfare system...
None of that stuff is free; it's bundled. All or nothing—and if you choose "nothing" they make you move out of the country, among other costs. You're still paying for everything you get, and more, but you're deprived of your right to decide for yourself whether a particular service is useful enough to justify its cost, who supplies it, or how it's implemented. That's plenty of reason to be annoyed even if you do feel that you get some value back in exchange for what the government takes in taxes.
It's not like any of those services would go away if the government didn't provide them. You would just move from paying for them through political and bureaucratic middle-men to paying for them directly, with a choice of suppliers catering to your specific needs and competition to keep the prices down.
The target and difficulty aren't set by voting, they're set based on the time required to mine the last 2016 blocks—which should be about two weeks at the nominal target of 10 minutes per block. More than two weeks and the difficulty decreases; less than two weeks and it increases.
The biggest problem with the concerns over a mining pool having over 50% of the hashing power is that the pool operators are only coordinating the effort; they don't actually own all that hardware, and the owners can decide independently which pool(s) to slave their mining rigs to. If a pool operator tried to abuse their position the fact would be noticed, and miners would quickly switch to some other pool.
There is also no reason why individual miners couldn't track transactions as they're broadcast like any full node and validate the candidate blocks the pool sends out, rejecting any which involve possible double-spends or other attacks. I don't think they do that currently, but only because none of the major pool have tried to abuse their position that way.
What dignity could there be in a life where you have to ask someone to *carry* you every time you go into a shop... multiple times per day.
The alternative appears to be asking the government to employ force on your behalf to continually coerce every provider of so-called "public accommodations" into taking your disability (and every other possible disability) into account, regardless of actual demand, and at a far greater expense than simply providing you with individual assistance as needed or working out some alternative method of providing the service. Perhaps the coercion feels more "dignified" to you, but I find it quite the opposite. There is nothing undignified about asking for help when needed. It seems like you've simply found a way to take for granted as your right (and others' obligation) that others will make accommodation for you without being asked. That makes you more dependent, not less. Finding ways to induce others to help you voluntarily would be a form of self-sufficiency, which would be much more dignified than stooping to force or manipulation.
There is something called "The Social Contract", which is something of a "shrink wrap license" you agree to by being born into a society, that by doing so, you agree to abide by that societies rules.
Ridiculous. You can't agree to anything just by being born; you aren't even sentient at that point. There is no meeting of the minds, no clear agreement. If this so-called "social contract" existed, it would be a contract of adhesion which no human being in history ever explicitly agreed to, and any competent court would throw it out with prejudice after a cursory hearing.
...a fix money supply like the gold standard or bitcoin is much more horrible system than having to deal with something like the Fed.
On the contrary, there is no need to adjust the quantity of money to reflect population growth or GDP or anything else. The value of the money will adjust automatically based on supply and demand; it's impossible to have a shortage or surplus, as the units are arbitrary and have no direct use apart from serving as money. Changing the quantity of money in an attempt to regulate the price ruins an extremely useful economic signal regarding the demand for money and the balance between consumption and investment, leading to overconsumption and/or malinvestment.
Bitcoin is inflationary for now—any new currency must be, during the initial distribution phase—but over the long term the supply will be relatively constant and the price thus will be fully determined by the demand for bitcoins. Variations in the price will thus signal changes in the demand for money—to the extent bitcoins are used; the effect is diluted by the presence of other, centrally-managed currencies—which in turn informs the market about which investments are better or worse than average. Assuming a growing economy, any investment which does not outperform the expected price deflation is worse than average: investing in it would reduce the rate of growth. Under forced inflation there is more investment, but some of it is malinvestment, driven by the fact that simply holding the money causes it to lose value (artificially, due to the increased supply), and thus contributes to a lower average return and a poorer economy.
No, mathematics like science is purely an invention of the human mind...
One could argue that the entire universe as we know it is nothing more than "an invention of the human mind", leaving no scope at all for discovery, but that is hardly a useful position to take in this context. Even if you did take that approach, mathematics should still be excluded, because mathematical relationships exist independently of human thought. The ratio of a circle's radius to its circumference is tau, and would remain tau even if no human ever existed to discover that fact.
Invention implies an element of creativity, deliberate choice among the available alternatives. The only choices in math are in the selection of axioms. Mathematical axioms may be invented (under significant constraints necessary to keep the results applicable to the physical universe, though there remains some flexibility), but everything beyond that follows mechanically from the axioms—and is thus discovered. Similarly, once your requirements are known, developing a software algorithm comes down to little more than solving the system of constraints described by the requirements—given the requirements specified in a formal language, this is something that could be solved in principle by a search through the solution space using tools similar to mechanical theorem-provers. Intuition helps in narrowing the search space (at the cost of possibly missing the solution entirely), but it isn't essential given sufficient time and memory. Of course, an actual program includes additional elements such as comments, identifiers and code style which are chosen by the programmer and have no effect on the program's behavior; these creative elements would be invented rather than discovered.
Science, moreover, is not "purely an invention of the human mind" any more than mathematics is. It consists of both discovery and invention. Science is essentially the process of making observations and developing statistically consistent models. There is more flexibility here than in math; models can fit the data to a greater or lesser extent, and the best-fitting model is not always the most useful. A useful approximation can thus be considered an invention; just the same, most of science consists of discovery rather than invention of new models, even more so when the goal is simply to fit a standard statistical model to the available data, pure math combined with discovered observations.
BitCoin's main [algorithms] go back about 30 years.
The algorithms have been known for about 30 years, but they've always existed as a solution to the problem Bitcoin was intended to solve, waiting for someone to discover them.
discoverer of Bitcoin
The word you are looking for is inventor. A discoverer is someone who finds something that was there all along.
In that case, the correct word is "discoverer". The name Bitcoin was invented, but the fundamental algorithms with which Bitcoin solves the distributed ledger problem have always existed; it just took someone asking the right questions to discover them. You don't invent solutions to math problems, you discover them, and that goes for software algorithms just as much as any other form of math.
Instead the community glommed onto a rather flawed version based on artificial scarcity...
Scarcity is a fundamental requirement for any currency. It's either natural due to physical scarcity, as in gold, or artificial, as in bitcoin or US dollars or most other currencies in common use. Any digital currency will have the property of artificial scarcity, because information is not naturally scarce. Ensuring that scarcity is maintained without reliance on a central authority is what the blockchain is all about. The only significant difference in the form of scarcity between bitcoins and dollars is that one is governed by a fixed and unbiased mathematical formula, while the other is dictated by politics and thus unpredictable and subject to corruption.
You can complain all you like about "unfairly" enriched early adopters, but I for one would much rather have that than unfair enrichment based on one's political connections. When bitcoins come into existence they're distributed by a scrupulously fair lottery with proportional odds to people doing useful work for the network. When dollars are produced they benefit first with the authority to order them, and then those who decide how they're distributed, then finally the banks and government contractors and employees who get a chance to spend them before prices adjust to the increased supply; at each stage there is plenty of scope for self-enrichment through manipulation of the flow of new money.
Anyway, if you really want to trade traditional currencies online (as credit—the closest you're likely to get to trading the actual currencies), the reference client and server for Ripple are open source under the ISC License. Such a system can't be completely distributed, of course, since it's tied to external centralized currencies, so it's no substitute for Bitcoin; Ripple solves a different, and easier, problem by dealing in loans rather than assets, leaving it up to the users to decide how much credit to extend.
So you should be able to copy a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle (I.e., copy the bourbon, bottle, and label), tie a label to the bottle that reads "made by J. McDonald" and sell it?
Sure. Why not? Who would be harmed? Certainly not the buyer, who knows exactly what they're getting. Who else would have any standing?
The buyer's buyer.
Either the buyer's buyer was also informed about who the original manufacturer was, or the initial buyer/reseller is obviously committing fraud. But that has nothing to do with the original transaction, which was not fraudulent and harmed no one.
So you should be able to copy a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle (I.e., copy the bourbon, bottle, and label), tie a label to the bottle that reads "made by J. McDonald" and sell it?
Sure. Why not? Who would be harmed? Certainly not the buyer, who knows exactly what they're getting. Who else would have any standing?
... printing a copy and selling it for $100,000,000 to some very stupid collector who doesn't notice that it is made rather roughly from plastic.
I see your point regarding basic FDM printers, but note that for the right price you can 3-D print in steel, ceramics, wax, and more, or print a mold from which you can cast various other materials, including silver, brass, and bronze.
That's not an argument against selling copies, that's an argument against claiming that they're the originals. So long as the buyer is aware of who actually made the item there is no fraud.
It injects advertising into search engine results, and also has the capability to intercept and hijack SSL/TLS connections to websites, thanks to the installation of a self-signing certificate authority on affected machines.
It's worst than that. Not only can the program MITM SSL/TLS connections on the infected machine, so can anyone else in a position to intercept the traffic. The private signing key employed by the program is public knowledge at this point, and the same on all infected systems.
And I am also well aware that the cost of the losses are socialised across all people. And I am ok with that. I know that I am paying an insurance premium when I use credit cards, however that cost is acceptable to me for the convenience of using credit cards.
Your opinion is irrelevant here. Of course you're OK with it; you're one of the negligent freeloaders driving up costs for everyone else! It's the more careful credit card users who don't deserve those costs that are harmed by this system.
For that reason, the laws requiring a high default level of protection should be repealed. You would still be free to get a card from a bank offering "gold-plated" fraud protection, for an unsubsidized premium fee, while others who are more responsible with their cards can forego the fees in exchange for performing their own due diligence.
I say, the Law is settled in the consequences of language, and it should only come into play if actual, demonstrable physical harm has resulted as a direct result of that language.
Then you will be glad to learn that it is absolutely impossible for any language to cause physical harm as a direct result. In your prior example of "inciting violence", the language wasn't the cause of the harm, the violence was the cause of the harm; and the cause of the violence was the listener's choice, not the speech, or the speaker.
The freedom of speech naturally extends to all speech. Your freedom of speech is respected if and only if you can say whatever you want to say without any change in your legal status. Social consequences are, of course, another matter entirely.
Now someone implemented the forEach function. How did they without imperative loop construct?
A better question would be: How do you implement a loop construct without recursion?
Keep in mind that recursion is nothing more or less than the ability to return to a previous point in the control flow of a program. The stack overhead associated with a lack of tail-call optimization and the special treatment of iterative constructs are merely implementation details, whereas recursion is a fundamental concept in computer science without which most programs would be impossible to express.