I2P certainly will not solve the problem, because onion routing was never an answer to the question asked. Onion routing helps protect privacy, and I2P does so by erecting a network within the network. In order to go "outside" you need an outproxy (and it is explicitly stated that you would need to put a great deal of trust in this proxy).
I2P works fine without outproxies; you don't need to communicate outside the I2P network for the scheme to work. While there are a limited number of I2P outproxies for certain protocols (e.g. HTTP), that is not the way it is designed to be used (unlike Tor, where internal.onion sites are the exception).
The bitcoin philosophy I'm referring to is the one that has you expend CPU cycles to store "coins" in order to spend these "coins" on actions within the protocol. That is how Namecoin works, you save up coins and spend them on registering your domain, updating or transfering.
Yes, that is how the system works. Calling it a "philosophy" is a bit ridiculous; it's an engineering solution to the problem of ensuring a consistent linear history of updates to a database shared among a large group of anonymous individual who don't trust each other, which is exactly what you need for a peer-to-peer domain name system. It may not be ideal, but so far it's the only solution anyone's managed to propose which actually works.
But no, I don't know of a way to make P2P DNS work, that was the whole point. There really is none, and with that I'm fully aware that I'm discounting Namecoin as an option, because well, it's ridiculous.
Your personal bias against Bitcoin-like protocols doesn't change the facts: Namecoin is obviously one way to make P2P DNS work. It functions as well as any alternative DNS root system, and is fully peer-to-peer.
1) Tor is not the only option for onion routing. I2P implements the same general idea and supports peer-to-peer protocols (including BitTorrent, Gnutella, and a P2P e-mail system known as I2P-Bote). Tor would work in a technical sense, but each user would have to manually configure up a hidden (.onion) service for other users to connect to, which may be a bit much to expect. With I2P this is the default configuration. Also, Namecoin already has working I2P integration.
2) The Namecoin approach is just one way to solve the poisoning problem. If you know of another way to assign meaningful names to specific users which doesn't involve some central authority choosing who gets which name, feel free to share it. So far as I know, Namecoin is the only truly peer-to-peer domain name system in active use. Note that Namecoin is not Bitcoin, despite being based on a similar low-level protocol, and there is certainly no "philosophy" involved beyond the desire for a free, open, secure, and peer-to-peer system for associating data with domain names.
1) Privacy: when requesting a lookup, you're telling an arbitrary number of strangers which site you would like to visit next. With the server, you're only telling the server, but this is a trust issue and can be resolved. The P2P approach by it's nature cannot be trusted.
This can be solved easily, in exchange for some extra latency, by using onion routing, like Tor, Freenet, or I2P. Requests are encrypted end-to-end and routed through intermediate nodes. No single node (apart from the requester) is aware of both the origin and the content of the request at the same time.
2) Poisoning: all you'd have to do to poison a swarm is join it, and start pushing bogus replies to requests. There is no barrier like with a central DNS server, which you'd have to hack into in order to poison.
Namecoin solves this by associating each domain with a public key. You have to have the corresponding private key to create a reply anyone will accept, or to transfer the domain to someone else's key.
Namecoin doesn't include onion routing natively, but you can run the client over Tor or I2P to get the best of both worlds.
He admitted in court that he sprayed the field with RoundUp, intentionally killing off all the non-RoundUp Ready seeds. This fact weighed heavily in the courts decision. The majority opinion implies that the court might have (probably would have) ruled differently without the action of the farmer.
What difference could it possibly make? The logic used to say that he violated the patent would apply regardless of whether he even knew that (some of) the seeds were RoundUp-Ready. His actions make some people unsympathetic to his cause, and change the offense from simple patent infringement to "willful" infringement, but they don't change the fact that the only part which had to happen for this to be considered patent infringement was growing crops with the RoundUp-Ready gene.
If the court would have ruled differently without the farmer's actions—aside from the insignificant willful/not-willful distinction—then this ruling was wrong, because the farmer's actions have no impact on whether the patent was infringed.
It looks to me like the judges are finally deciding not against software patents in general, but patents of the type "doing X, but on a computer" or "doing X, but on a smartphone".
That is a ruling against software patents in general, whether they realized it or not. All software patents reduce to "doing some algorithm, on a computer". All algorithms are natural laws (math). Evaluating an algorithm manually would not be patentable, no matter how complex the algorithm may be; doing the same thing with the assistance of a general-purpose computer (which the patent filer did not invent) should be no different.
... should that super inventive, Nobel-prize winning, unquestioned "Most Non-obvious Program Ever" still be barred from patentability, merely because it's a program?
Yes. Absolutely. The problem isn't obviousness, it's novelty. Math and software and physical laws are not invented, they're discovered. However non-obvious an algorithm may seem, it's not new; it's always existed, waiting for someone to ask the right question. This is distinct from what patents are meant to cover, which is specific applications of things like math and software and physical laws to the production of particular goods.
Why should you be able to patent a circuit that takes an input, performs a function, and spits out an output, but you shouldn't be able to patent the same exact input-function-output in software?
It's the circuit which is (presumably) novel and patentable, not the function it computes. In other words, the software version lacks exactly the part which would qualify for a patent.
What if your software is explicitly modelling the electronic components, like Circuit Lab? Is it still unpatentable when it's a collection of virtual hardware?
As long as it remains virtual, yes. If you come up with some kind of novel & non-obvious circuit element, the physical circuit element you invented would be patentable. The virtual representation would not be.
In the same vein, what about a new type of automatic transmission for a car - patentable machine, right? What if you model it in a 3D CAD program? Suddenly unpatentable software?
Now you're just being ridiculous. The patentable part is obviously the physical automatic transmission. The patent would not cover a mere 3D model of the transmission.
So by extension, if you mix up a $100 chip for a $10 chip and it's obvious you did so (saying "I'm betting ten dollars" to the people around you. And maybe you're colorblind, etc.), do you think that you'd stand a chance in hell getting your $90 back?
They would certainly owe it to you. If the casino's representative accepted a $100 chip when it was clear you only meant to play a $10 chip, they would be in exactly the same position as a player who accepted a $100 payout when it was clear they were only meant to receive a $10 payout. Either way, it's up to the losing side to pursue the case. If you're complaining that the courts tend to be biased in favor of the casino, I agree, but that's a separate problem.
So, do [you] believe the owners/operators of the casino should be charged with criminal fraud, sending them in prison for years, permanently nullifying their civil rights, screwing them over whenever they try to apply for jobs for the rest of their lives?
None of the above. Fraud is a civil matter, and any of these responses would be clearly disproportionate to the offense. "Nullifying their civil rights" wouldn't even be constitutional.
Is it stealing if the owner gives it to you mistakenly?
In order for someone else's property to become yours there has to be a valid contract. Not necessarily a written contract, or even a verbal one; in cases like this the contract is implicit. Nonetheless, in order for any contract to be valid there has to be this thing called "meeting of the minds". In other words, the original owner and prospective owner have to be in agreement regarding the terms of the contract.
For the owner to give you something "mistakenly" implies that there was no meeting of the minds. Their idea of what conditions were met or what they would receive in return does not match yours. Ergo, there was no valid contract, and the original owner retains the title to the property.
If you knew this up front, for example because you were deliberately defrauding the owner, then you are a thief; you knowingly took property that did not belong to you. If you find out about the disagreement after the fact and return the property on request, then there is no harm done. If you refuse to return the property, however, then from that point on you are withholding the property from its rightful owner, which once again makes you a thief.
In this case, it's not as simple as "He played the game. He won." He played the game and was rewarded with a specific payout. He then took steps which led to the machine vending significantly more money than advertised. A reasonable argument can be made that the owner only agreed to the advertised payout, not the amount the machine actually vended. The rest of the money vended would not be covered by that implicit contract, and was thus stolen.
The web front end and credit card transactions are in Bermuda, but the shipments are from a warehouse in the states? Is the seller obligated to collect state taxes.
No, but the customer will have fun time with US customs when the package arrives.
The package isn't going through customs; it was shipped from inside the U.S. That's the most likely problem with this scenario; they're going to consider the seller's address to be the warehouse, not the country where they're registered.
Anyway, sales and use taxes are a pretty bad idea no matter where or how they're implemented, and I hate to see them taking hold on the Internet, where they will inevitably go to pay for things which have absolutely no relationship to the commerce being taxed. For local public services, a flat property tax is the only one that make any sense. (Not that I'm prepared to endorse any tax, but it's better than any of the alternative taxes.) The only real advantage sales taxes—but not use taxes—have is that they're very easy to collect, at least in a brick-and-mortar context. That doesn't generalize to online sales, so it's best to just forget about sales and use taxes entirely (for both local and online merchants) and find a different source of funds for local services which is actually tied to the use of those services.
The original statement was: "The love of money is the root of all KINDS OF evil."
People do commit various kinds of evil out of greed. However, there is plenty of evil in the world which has nothing to do with money, just as the mere presence of money does not necessarily result in evil.
As this is an explicit grant of authority to Congress, it is exclusively a federal power.
Your quotes certainly don't support that interpretation. Article 6 only says that federal law overrules state law. If there is no conflict, that doesn't apply. The 10th Amendment explicitly reserves powers to the States or to the people; it doesn't take anything away. Delegating your authority doesn't imply giving it up yourself, and there is nothing in the Constitution which would prohibit the States from exercising their authority in this matter (unlike, say, tariffs on interstate commerce).
I hear things are a lot better in Somalia, where there's no government to spoil everything.
Ironically, things did get better in Somalia after their central government collapsed, by essentially every metric but the literacy rate. I'm not saying that it's someplace I'd care to live—mostly for cultural reasons—but the absence of a central government is not the cause of their problems. "Anarchy" (actually just decentralized government, but it's a start) is an improvement over what they had before.
If anyone bothered to actually look up the definition of currency they would find one of its defined attributes is the condition of being generally accepted as a medium of exchange. Bitcoin is *NOT* generally accepted.
Bitcoin is generally accepted within a certain market, which happens to be larger than the economies of several (small) countries. You might as well say that most national currencies aren't currencies because they aren't generally accepted outside that nation's borders. I can't spend pesos here in the USA, does that mean they aren't currency? Of course not. This just isn't the right market for pesos.
A better way to phrase that particular attribute might be that a currency is a good which is generally accepted as a medium of exchange rather than as something directly useful in its own right. The emphasis is on why the good is accepted, not on how many merchants accept it.
Thank you for posting that; the first ruling in particular is a perfect example of why the USSC can't be trusted to interpret the Constitution (besides, or perhaps because of, the obvious conflict of interest[1]). It outright says that they're ignoring the Constitution because of the "exigencies of the Great Depression", placing transient political considerations above the law. It also embodies the misreading of the "general welfare" clause which exemplified the GP's post.
The second ruling doesn't uphold the program, it upholds the tax. As we've seen, there is a difference. The Social Security Tax is really just another kind of income tax; short of overturning the 16th Amendment, there is nothing fundamentally unconstitutional about that. It's the payments which are unauthorized. Of course, without Social Security payments there would be no reason for a special Social Security Tax.
(This highlights the real ingeniousness of the system: since the tax is likely constitutional, by itself, and no one can say that they were harmed by the payments, by themselves, there is no one with the standing to challenge Congress over the part of the scheme which is actually unconstitutional, despite the real harm being done when you consider both parts together.)
[1] Why is it that people seem to have more of a problem with private arbitration by more or less independent companies in civil contract disputes than the idea of a constitutional dispute affecting the rights of an entire society being arbitrated by a court which is part of the same organization as one party to the conflict? The USSC has no legitimate authority to grant power to the government, to rule an action constitutional. It can only fail to rule the action unconstitutional.
I never said it wasn't a crash. Clearly there was a large, abrupt drop in the price, from $266 to $105, precipitated by technical difficulties with the exchange. The same thing has happened to much larger commodities and companies under similar circumstances. However, unless you bought a bunch of bitcoins within the last couple of days, you're still ahead. Even if you did, it's only a paper loss for now; the fundamentals haven't changed. If it made sense to buy at $240 yesterday, it still makes sense today. (And vise-versa. Long-term, it's pretty obvious that the price will need to be far higher than $266 if Bitcoin becomes widely adopted, but it's going to be volatile in the meantime, and we may not get there at all.)
As usual, the ones who trade emotionally in reaction to the short-term price changes are the worst off. Reactionary trading is pretty much guaranteed to end up as "buy high, sell low".
Today's high was $266, the low was $105 and currently it is trading around $180
Note that final figure. Despite the continued DDoS, the price is already halfway back to the previous high. The drop was just a short-term effect due to the impact of the DDoS on liquidity and a mild amount of panicked selling. Another point to keep in mind is that the price was under $15 at the beginning of January—even at the low of $105 we were still up by 600% YTD, and 200% over the last 30 days (from $35).
By rewarding the... (countries, establishments, etc) who don't implement programs that care for the actual needs of the population..., they're have less pressure to actually implement those programs, even if they have the resources.
Pressure for social change has to come from the inside to mean anything. Forcing changes on people who aren't asking for them, even "for their own good", is just another form of oppression.
As an agorist, I can certainly understand not wanting to reward a repressive government with tax revenues, however indirectly, but ultimately withholding your custom is going to hurt the vendor more than it hurts their government, and make them even more vulnerable to the regime, and less able to afford the "safety net" you're advocating. If you start by making sure they can meet their more basic needs, pressure for better working conditions will follow. What's more, by that point they'll actually have the means to afford the improvements, which is never going to happen if you insist on starving them of revenue in favor of those who are already well off.
Because the added cost of living in a country that actually provides for the needs of the entire population raises the price of living.
While true, that isn't actually a reason, by itself, to pay more for the same good or service. Paying a particular vendor more than the asking price is a form of charity, and naturally all the standard personal reasons to be charitable apply. On the other hand, selecting a vendor because of their higher ("fairer") price is actually rather regressive, since you're allocating the work to the vendor less in need of the revenue. If you want to help equalize the standard of living, you should select the vendor whose current standard of living is lowest.
I took your advice at heart and found this in Article 1 and Section 8
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
It's nice that you went out and did some research, but take a more critical look at what this passage says. It states that Congress has the power to tax; it doesn't grant Congress the power to spend. For that you have to look at the rest of the enumerated powers, which are all more specific than "the general welfare". If welfare, etc., are authorized under the Constitution, then this passage says that Congress can enact taxes to cover the costs. You can't point to this section as proof that any particular expenditure is authorized, unless the expenditure is related to tax collection.
This has nothing to do with "BitCoin's developers". The "alternative infrastructure" comment applies exclusively to InstaWallet, a provider of "online wallets", which was hardly a major player to begin with, and Mt. Gox wasn't "hacked", they were the target of a DDoS attack which made it difficult to access their web site. That's inconvenient if you rely on them for exchanging BTC and USD and need to do so in a hurry, but there are other exchanges available, and everyone's balances on and off the exchange are still perfectly secure. At no point did either incident affect the actual Bitcoin network.
X11 remoting is much more powerful than many people imagine. Like you say, it allows remote applications to display their icons in the local system tray.
These days, most system tray icons are handled through DBUS, even under X11. Wayland probably won't bother with general client-to-client communication; instead, you'll forward your DBUS session alongside Wayland (and PulseAudio, CUPS, etc.) via a "ssh -X" equivalent which transparently handles all the details.
People want a safe place to park cash, and getting ~inflation returns is better than nothing, I guess.... At any rate, the US could still move to bitcoins for currency without the Fed losing any of its power to screw up the money supply, since that is a factor of fractional reserve banking, not of the number of actual units of currency in circulation.
You're missing the connection between these two points. Fractional reserve banking is enabled by the fact that people leave their money in savings accounts and CDs to avoid inflation. Without those long-term deposits the banks can't operate with low reserves, and without the inflation people won't leave their money on deposit. They'll either hold it themselves, or put it in a clearly-labeled investment fund knowing that any such investment can lose value.
But hoping the value vs some other currency changes in your favor would certainly be speculation not investment.
Agreed, but we're only talking about the purchasing power of currency in general here, not exchange rates between currencies. If the supply of currency in circulation is fixed, and the economy as a whole is growing, then currency must increase in purchasing power. That's simple supply and demand, not speculation. The same applies for a decrease in the currency supply and a static economy. In essence, when you look at the big picture, saving is investment.
When you put your money in an index fund, you're not really investing it into anything in particular. You're splitting it across the entire market. The only real difference between that and simply saving the money is that the index fund isn't directly affected by changes in the currency supply.
I didn't think the negative effects of deflation were even controversial.
The "negative effects" of deflation are a myth.
Deflation and people hoarding cash has the reverse effect, right? When no one will loan out their money (directly or otherwise), then no one can raise capital and the economy stagnates.
But people will loan out their money to an investment which provides a better-than-average return, i.e. one which offers a nominal ROI on top of the increase in purchasing power due to deflation. Making loans to below-average ventures is malinvestment and decreases economic growth. This is true even in an inflationary economy, but it's harder to single out the malinvestments when everyone is offering a positive (nominal) ROI.
Note that I'm not saying that a decreasing currency supply is automatically a good thing. I'm saying that inflation and deflation are important price signals in their own right, and forcing either of them by manipulating the supply of currency sends false signals and results in malinvestment. We don't need more currency, or less currency; the absolute amount is irrelevant. What we need is a constant supply against which everything else can be measured.
This is equally true for an inflationary currency, of course, but in that case you start out losing a fraction of your principle every year to the politically well-connected.
All systems ever invented by man have this property, and there's no evidence it can be otherwise. Limiting the quantity of corruption is an interesting discussion. Pretending that some new system won't have corruption is sophomoric.
Corruption in general is off-topic. Inflation necessarily rewards the issuing authorities, and by extension those closely connected to them; it doesn't take a corrupt issuing authority to distort the economy. The very act of diluting the money supply with new money which does not correspond to past productivity does that all on its own, and no matter how evenly one tries to distribute the new money there will always be winners and losers. In practice they don't even try t
But a checking account is about convenience, a savings account (or CD) is about interest.
In theory, perhaps, but can you point to a savings account or CD which actually pays positive interest after accounting for inflation? I certainly haven't been able to find any. Persistent inflation hides the fact that your accounts are really losing value over time. For a bitcoin bank to pay interest at all, its investments would have to outperform the market average, something most managed investment funds have trouble with.
Merely being inflation-resistant is a bad investment. Wealth is ownership of something that creates value (and thereby generates income). Bitcoins are not wealth.
I think "wealth" is the wrong term here, but I'll let that slide. The Bitcoin system can create value, in that it enables more efficient trade, but I agree that bitcoins are not capital goods in the traditional sense. They don't produce anything on their own. Where the investment aspect comes in is that holding bitcoins, like holding any currency, is an indication that you have produced value in the past and saved the proceeds rather than immediately consuming them. Now, you can choose to allocate your savings to a particular investment, which may perform better or worse than the market average, but even just holding them has the effect of decreasing the supply and thus making everyone else's bitcoins more valuable. In terms of purchasing power, that's the same as if you had loaned a portion of your savings out proportionally to everyone else holding bitcoins. Their capital investments, enabled by your saving, drive up the productivity of the entire economy, which increases the demand for—and value of—your bitcoins when you eventually do choose to spend them.
This is equally true for an inflationary currency, of course, but in that case you start out losing a fraction of your principle every year to the politically well-connected. The average rate of return you could expect to receive with a fixed currency supply is offset by the decrease in purchasing power due to inflation. The GDP goes up in real terms, but your fraction of it goes down because new money has been added to the system.
though the apparent need for echanges makes me wonder
The exchanges are just a ways to swap bitcoins and local currencies. They're only "necessary" to the extent that Bitcoin is still fairly young and not directly accepted everywhere. An economy based on Bitcoin as the primary currency, or even as one of several widely-supported currencies, would have much less need for foreign exchange; you could be payed in bitcoins, and spend bitcoins for goods and services, without ever converting to or from USD or otherwise requiring the services of an exchange.
The deathblow of EVERY fiat currency has been death by hyperinflation. The US dollar and bitcoin are no exceptions.
Bitcoin is an exception, because it can't be hyperinflated. There are no "issuing authorities"; the total number of bitcoins in existence is governed by the mining protocols, which are effectively fixed in stone. These protocols limit the total number of bitcoins to 21 million, to be issued on a fixed schedule at a rate which gradually decays over the next century or so. Approximately half of those bitcoins are already in circulation, meaning that over the long term devaluation due to inflation cannot exceed 50%.
If bitcoins do end up losing significant value, it will be through a decrease in demand, not because some issuing authority instituted hyperinflation.
Just as there are no bill serial numbers associated with the money in your bank account, there wouldn't be any specific bitcoins associated with the value of your savings account.
Why would anyone keep their bitcoins in a savings account controlled by someone else? The whole point is that you have control over your own money. With cash there is a major convenience factor in leaving your money at a bank (figuratively speaking) since you can't sent cash over the Internet and carrying large amounts around with you can be hazardous to your health. Bitcoin can be transferred peer-to-peer to anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes, and, assuming your wallet is encrypted with a decent passphrase, physical theft is not a significant risk. For electronic security there is offline "cold storage" and multi-factor authentication.
There is room in the Bitcoin system for interest-bearing accounts, but no one is compelled to use them just to participate in the financial network. Moreover, Bitcoin's manipulation-resistant design means that simply holding your bitcoins in your own private wallet is an investment in the entire Bitcoin economy—the broadest of all possible index funds—which pays interest in the form of rising purchasing power (deflation). As a rule, banks don't pay interest which exceeds the average rate of return on the market (even for CDs), and any account which did would clearly be an investment, with the risk that you may lose some or all of your principal.
All that aside, deposits are only part of the story. What really gives banks the freedom to implement fractional reserves is their role as payment processors. That's what lets them transfer balances between accounts, particularly between different banks, without ever converting those balances back into real currency. Bitcoin eliminates the need for separate payment processors, and if the banks aren't handling payments internally, they'll need significantly higher reserves on hand to deal with the day-to-day demand for the actual bitcoins expected by other banks and entities outside the banking network.
Slashdot Mirror
I2P certainly will not solve the problem, because onion routing was never an answer to the question asked. Onion routing helps protect privacy, and I2P does so by erecting a network within the network. In order to go "outside" you need an outproxy (and it is explicitly stated that you would need to put a great deal of trust in this proxy).
I2P works fine without outproxies; you don't need to communicate outside the I2P network for the scheme to work. While there are a limited number of I2P outproxies for certain protocols (e.g. HTTP), that is not the way it is designed to be used (unlike Tor, where internal .onion sites are the exception).
The bitcoin philosophy I'm referring to is the one that has you expend CPU cycles to store "coins" in order to spend these "coins" on actions within the protocol. That is how Namecoin works, you save up coins and spend them on registering your domain, updating or transfering.
Yes, that is how the system works. Calling it a "philosophy" is a bit ridiculous; it's an engineering solution to the problem of ensuring a consistent linear history of updates to a database shared among a large group of anonymous individual who don't trust each other, which is exactly what you need for a peer-to-peer domain name system. It may not be ideal, but so far it's the only solution anyone's managed to propose which actually works.
But no, I don't know of a way to make P2P DNS work, that was the whole point. There really is none, and with that I'm fully aware that I'm discounting Namecoin as an option, because well, it's ridiculous.
Your personal bias against Bitcoin-like protocols doesn't change the facts: Namecoin is obviously one way to make P2P DNS work. It functions as well as any alternative DNS root system, and is fully peer-to-peer.
1) Tor is not the only option for onion routing. I2P implements the same general idea and supports peer-to-peer protocols (including BitTorrent, Gnutella, and a P2P e-mail system known as I2P-Bote). Tor would work in a technical sense, but each user would have to manually configure up a hidden (.onion) service for other users to connect to, which may be a bit much to expect. With I2P this is the default configuration. Also, Namecoin already has working I2P integration.
2) The Namecoin approach is just one way to solve the poisoning problem. If you know of another way to assign meaningful names to specific users which doesn't involve some central authority choosing who gets which name, feel free to share it. So far as I know, Namecoin is the only truly peer-to-peer domain name system in active use. Note that Namecoin is not Bitcoin, despite being based on a similar low-level protocol, and there is certainly no "philosophy" involved beyond the desire for a free, open, secure, and peer-to-peer system for associating data with domain names.
1) Privacy: when requesting a lookup, you're telling an arbitrary number of strangers which site you would like to visit next. With the server, you're only telling the server, but this is a trust issue and can be resolved. The P2P approach by it's nature cannot be trusted.
This can be solved easily, in exchange for some extra latency, by using onion routing, like Tor, Freenet, or I2P. Requests are encrypted end-to-end and routed through intermediate nodes. No single node (apart from the requester) is aware of both the origin and the content of the request at the same time.
2) Poisoning: all you'd have to do to poison a swarm is join it, and start pushing bogus replies to requests. There is no barrier like with a central DNS server, which you'd have to hack into in order to poison.
Namecoin solves this by associating each domain with a public key. You have to have the corresponding private key to create a reply anyone will accept, or to transfer the domain to someone else's key.
Namecoin doesn't include onion routing natively, but you can run the client over Tor or I2P to get the best of both worlds.
He admitted in court that he sprayed the field with RoundUp, intentionally killing off all the non-RoundUp Ready seeds. This fact weighed heavily in the courts decision. The majority opinion implies that the court might have (probably would have) ruled differently without the action of the farmer.
What difference could it possibly make? The logic used to say that he violated the patent would apply regardless of whether he even knew that (some of) the seeds were RoundUp-Ready. His actions make some people unsympathetic to his cause, and change the offense from simple patent infringement to "willful" infringement, but they don't change the fact that the only part which had to happen for this to be considered patent infringement was growing crops with the RoundUp-Ready gene.
If the court would have ruled differently without the farmer's actions—aside from the insignificant willful/not-willful distinction—then this ruling was wrong, because the farmer's actions have no impact on whether the patent was infringed.
It looks to me like the judges are finally deciding not against software patents in general, but patents of the type "doing X, but on a computer" or "doing X, but on a smartphone".
That is a ruling against software patents in general, whether they realized it or not. All software patents reduce to "doing some algorithm, on a computer". All algorithms are natural laws (math). Evaluating an algorithm manually would not be patentable, no matter how complex the algorithm may be; doing the same thing with the assistance of a general-purpose computer (which the patent filer did not invent) should be no different.
... should that super inventive, Nobel-prize winning, unquestioned "Most Non-obvious Program Ever" still be barred from patentability, merely because it's a program?
Yes. Absolutely. The problem isn't obviousness, it's novelty. Math and software and physical laws are not invented, they're discovered. However non-obvious an algorithm may seem, it's not new; it's always existed, waiting for someone to ask the right question. This is distinct from what patents are meant to cover, which is specific applications of things like math and software and physical laws to the production of particular goods.
Why should you be able to patent a circuit that takes an input, performs a function, and spits out an output, but you shouldn't be able to patent the same exact input-function-output in software?
It's the circuit which is (presumably) novel and patentable, not the function it computes. In other words, the software version lacks exactly the part which would qualify for a patent.
What if your software is explicitly modelling the electronic components, like Circuit Lab? Is it still unpatentable when it's a collection of virtual hardware?
As long as it remains virtual, yes. If you come up with some kind of novel & non-obvious circuit element, the physical circuit element you invented would be patentable. The virtual representation would not be.
In the same vein, what about a new type of automatic transmission for a car - patentable machine, right? What if you model it in a 3D CAD program? Suddenly unpatentable software?
Now you're just being ridiculous. The patentable part is obviously the physical automatic transmission. The patent would not cover a mere 3D model of the transmission.
So by extension, if you mix up a $100 chip for a $10 chip and it's obvious you did so (saying "I'm betting ten dollars" to the people around you. And maybe you're colorblind, etc.), do you think that you'd stand a chance in hell getting your $90 back?
They would certainly owe it to you. If the casino's representative accepted a $100 chip when it was clear you only meant to play a $10 chip, they would be in exactly the same position as a player who accepted a $100 payout when it was clear they were only meant to receive a $10 payout. Either way, it's up to the losing side to pursue the case. If you're complaining that the courts tend to be biased in favor of the casino, I agree, but that's a separate problem.
So, do [you] believe the owners/operators of the casino should be charged with criminal fraud, sending them in prison for years, permanently nullifying their civil rights, screwing them over whenever they try to apply for jobs for the rest of their lives?
None of the above. Fraud is a civil matter, and any of these responses would be clearly disproportionate to the offense. "Nullifying their civil rights" wouldn't even be constitutional.
Is it stealing if the owner gives it to you mistakenly?
In order for someone else's property to become yours there has to be a valid contract. Not necessarily a written contract, or even a verbal one; in cases like this the contract is implicit. Nonetheless, in order for any contract to be valid there has to be this thing called "meeting of the minds". In other words, the original owner and prospective owner have to be in agreement regarding the terms of the contract.
For the owner to give you something "mistakenly" implies that there was no meeting of the minds. Their idea of what conditions were met or what they would receive in return does not match yours. Ergo, there was no valid contract, and the original owner retains the title to the property.
If you knew this up front, for example because you were deliberately defrauding the owner, then you are a thief; you knowingly took property that did not belong to you. If you find out about the disagreement after the fact and return the property on request, then there is no harm done. If you refuse to return the property, however, then from that point on you are withholding the property from its rightful owner, which once again makes you a thief.
In this case, it's not as simple as "He played the game. He won." He played the game and was rewarded with a specific payout. He then took steps which led to the machine vending significantly more money than advertised. A reasonable argument can be made that the owner only agreed to the advertised payout, not the amount the machine actually vended. The rest of the money vended would not be covered by that implicit contract, and was thus stolen.
The web front end and credit card transactions are in Bermuda, but the shipments are from a warehouse in the states? Is the seller obligated to collect state taxes.
No, but the customer will have fun time with US customs when the package arrives.
The package isn't going through customs; it was shipped from inside the U.S. That's the most likely problem with this scenario; they're going to consider the seller's address to be the warehouse, not the country where they're registered.
Anyway, sales and use taxes are a pretty bad idea no matter where or how they're implemented, and I hate to see them taking hold on the Internet, where they will inevitably go to pay for things which have absolutely no relationship to the commerce being taxed. For local public services, a flat property tax is the only one that make any sense. (Not that I'm prepared to endorse any tax, but it's better than any of the alternative taxes.) The only real advantage sales taxes—but not use taxes—have is that they're very easy to collect, at least in a brick-and-mortar context. That doesn't generalize to online sales, so it's best to just forget about sales and use taxes entirely (for both local and online merchants) and find a different source of funds for local services which is actually tied to the use of those services.
The original statement was: "The love of money is the root of all KINDS OF evil."
People do commit various kinds of evil out of greed. However, there is plenty of evil in the world which has nothing to do with money, just as the mere presence of money does not necessarily result in evil.
As this is an explicit grant of authority to Congress, it is exclusively a federal power.
Your quotes certainly don't support that interpretation. Article 6 only says that federal law overrules state law. If there is no conflict, that doesn't apply. The 10th Amendment explicitly reserves powers to the States or to the people; it doesn't take anything away. Delegating your authority doesn't imply giving it up yourself, and there is nothing in the Constitution which would prohibit the States from exercising their authority in this matter (unlike, say, tariffs on interstate commerce).
I hear things are a lot better in Somalia, where there's no government to spoil everything.
Ironically, things did get better in Somalia after their central government collapsed, by essentially every metric but the literacy rate. I'm not saying that it's someplace I'd care to live—mostly for cultural reasons—but the absence of a central government is not the cause of their problems. "Anarchy" (actually just decentralized government, but it's a start) is an improvement over what they had before.
If anyone bothered to actually look up the definition of currency they would find one of its defined attributes is the condition of being generally accepted as a medium of exchange. Bitcoin is *NOT* generally accepted.
Bitcoin is generally accepted within a certain market, which happens to be larger than the economies of several (small) countries. You might as well say that most national currencies aren't currencies because they aren't generally accepted outside that nation's borders. I can't spend pesos here in the USA, does that mean they aren't currency? Of course not. This just isn't the right market for pesos.
A better way to phrase that particular attribute might be that a currency is a good which is generally accepted as a medium of exchange rather than as something directly useful in its own right. The emphasis is on why the good is accepted, not on how many merchants accept it.
Thank you for posting that; the first ruling in particular is a perfect example of why the USSC can't be trusted to interpret the Constitution (besides, or perhaps because of, the obvious conflict of interest[1]). It outright says that they're ignoring the Constitution because of the "exigencies of the Great Depression", placing transient political considerations above the law. It also embodies the misreading of the "general welfare" clause which exemplified the GP's post.
The second ruling doesn't uphold the program, it upholds the tax. As we've seen, there is a difference. The Social Security Tax is really just another kind of income tax; short of overturning the 16th Amendment, there is nothing fundamentally unconstitutional about that. It's the payments which are unauthorized. Of course, without Social Security payments there would be no reason for a special Social Security Tax.
(This highlights the real ingeniousness of the system: since the tax is likely constitutional, by itself, and no one can say that they were harmed by the payments, by themselves, there is no one with the standing to challenge Congress over the part of the scheme which is actually unconstitutional, despite the real harm being done when you consider both parts together.)
[1] Why is it that people seem to have more of a problem with private arbitration by more or less independent companies in civil contract disputes than the idea of a constitutional dispute affecting the rights of an entire society being arbitrated by a court which is part of the same organization as one party to the conflict? The USSC has no legitimate authority to grant power to the government, to rule an action constitutional. It can only fail to rule the action unconstitutional.
I never said it wasn't a crash. Clearly there was a large, abrupt drop in the price, from $266 to $105, precipitated by technical difficulties with the exchange. The same thing has happened to much larger commodities and companies under similar circumstances. However, unless you bought a bunch of bitcoins within the last couple of days, you're still ahead. Even if you did, it's only a paper loss for now; the fundamentals haven't changed. If it made sense to buy at $240 yesterday, it still makes sense today. (And vise-versa. Long-term, it's pretty obvious that the price will need to be far higher than $266 if Bitcoin becomes widely adopted, but it's going to be volatile in the meantime, and we may not get there at all.)
As usual, the ones who trade emotionally in reaction to the short-term price changes are the worst off. Reactionary trading is pretty much guaranteed to end up as "buy high, sell low".
Today's high was $266, the low was $105 and currently it is trading around $180
Note that final figure. Despite the continued DDoS, the price is already halfway back to the previous high. The drop was just a short-term effect due to the impact of the DDoS on liquidity and a mild amount of panicked selling. Another point to keep in mind is that the price was under $15 at the beginning of January—even at the low of $105 we were still up by 600% YTD, and 200% over the last 30 days (from $35).
By rewarding the ... (countries, establishments, etc) who don't implement programs that care for the actual needs of the population ..., they're have less pressure to actually implement those programs, even if they have the resources.
Pressure for social change has to come from the inside to mean anything. Forcing changes on people who aren't asking for them, even "for their own good", is just another form of oppression.
As an agorist, I can certainly understand not wanting to reward a repressive government with tax revenues, however indirectly, but ultimately withholding your custom is going to hurt the vendor more than it hurts their government, and make them even more vulnerable to the regime, and less able to afford the "safety net" you're advocating. If you start by making sure they can meet their more basic needs, pressure for better working conditions will follow. What's more, by that point they'll actually have the means to afford the improvements, which is never going to happen if you insist on starving them of revenue in favor of those who are already well off.
Because the added cost of living in a country that actually provides for the needs of the entire population raises the price of living.
While true, that isn't actually a reason, by itself, to pay more for the same good or service. Paying a particular vendor more than the asking price is a form of charity, and naturally all the standard personal reasons to be charitable apply. On the other hand, selecting a vendor because of their higher ("fairer") price is actually rather regressive, since you're allocating the work to the vendor less in need of the revenue. If you want to help equalize the standard of living, you should select the vendor whose current standard of living is lowest.
I took your advice at heart and found this in Article 1 and Section 8
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
It's nice that you went out and did some research, but take a more critical look at what this passage says. It states that Congress has the power to tax; it doesn't grant Congress the power to spend. For that you have to look at the rest of the enumerated powers, which are all more specific than "the general welfare". If welfare, etc., are authorized under the Constitution, then this passage says that Congress can enact taxes to cover the costs. You can't point to this section as proof that any particular expenditure is authorized, unless the expenditure is related to tax collection.
This has nothing to do with "BitCoin's developers". The "alternative infrastructure" comment applies exclusively to InstaWallet, a provider of "online wallets", which was hardly a major player to begin with, and Mt. Gox wasn't "hacked", they were the target of a DDoS attack which made it difficult to access their web site. That's inconvenient if you rely on them for exchanging BTC and USD and need to do so in a hurry, but there are other exchanges available, and everyone's balances on and off the exchange are still perfectly secure. At no point did either incident affect the actual Bitcoin network.
X11 remoting is much more powerful than many people imagine. Like you say, it allows remote applications to display their icons in the local system tray.
These days, most system tray icons are handled through DBUS, even under X11. Wayland probably won't bother with general client-to-client communication; instead, you'll forward your DBUS session alongside Wayland (and PulseAudio, CUPS, etc.) via a "ssh -X" equivalent which transparently handles all the details.
People want a safe place to park cash, and getting ~inflation returns is better than nothing, I guess. ... At any rate, the US could still move to bitcoins for currency without the Fed losing any of its power to screw up the money supply, since that is a factor of fractional reserve banking, not of the number of actual units of currency in circulation.
You're missing the connection between these two points. Fractional reserve banking is enabled by the fact that people leave their money in savings accounts and CDs to avoid inflation. Without those long-term deposits the banks can't operate with low reserves, and without the inflation people won't leave their money on deposit. They'll either hold it themselves, or put it in a clearly-labeled investment fund knowing that any such investment can lose value.
But hoping the value vs some other currency changes in your favor would certainly be speculation not investment.
Agreed, but we're only talking about the purchasing power of currency in general here, not exchange rates between currencies. If the supply of currency in circulation is fixed, and the economy as a whole is growing, then currency must increase in purchasing power. That's simple supply and demand, not speculation. The same applies for a decrease in the currency supply and a static economy. In essence, when you look at the big picture, saving is investment.
When you put your money in an index fund, you're not really investing it into anything in particular. You're splitting it across the entire market. The only real difference between that and simply saving the money is that the index fund isn't directly affected by changes in the currency supply.
I didn't think the negative effects of deflation were even controversial.
The "negative effects" of deflation are a myth.
Deflation and people hoarding cash has the reverse effect, right? When no one will loan out their money (directly or otherwise), then no one can raise capital and the economy stagnates.
But people will loan out their money to an investment which provides a better-than-average return, i.e. one which offers a nominal ROI on top of the increase in purchasing power due to deflation. Making loans to below-average ventures is malinvestment and decreases economic growth. This is true even in an inflationary economy, but it's harder to single out the malinvestments when everyone is offering a positive (nominal) ROI.
Note that I'm not saying that a decreasing currency supply is automatically a good thing. I'm saying that inflation and deflation are important price signals in their own right, and forcing either of them by manipulating the supply of currency sends false signals and results in malinvestment. We don't need more currency, or less currency; the absolute amount is irrelevant. What we need is a constant supply against which everything else can be measured.
This is equally true for an inflationary currency, of course, but in that case you start out losing a fraction of your principle every year to the politically well-connected.
All systems ever invented by man have this property, and there's no evidence it can be otherwise. Limiting the quantity of corruption is an interesting discussion. Pretending that some new system won't have corruption is sophomoric.
Corruption in general is off-topic. Inflation necessarily rewards the issuing authorities, and by extension those closely connected to them; it doesn't take a corrupt issuing authority to distort the economy. The very act of diluting the money supply with new money which does not correspond to past productivity does that all on its own, and no matter how evenly one tries to distribute the new money there will always be winners and losers. In practice they don't even try t
But a checking account is about convenience, a savings account (or CD) is about interest.
In theory, perhaps, but can you point to a savings account or CD which actually pays positive interest after accounting for inflation? I certainly haven't been able to find any. Persistent inflation hides the fact that your accounts are really losing value over time. For a bitcoin bank to pay interest at all, its investments would have to outperform the market average, something most managed investment funds have trouble with.
Merely being inflation-resistant is a bad investment. Wealth is ownership of something that creates value (and thereby generates income). Bitcoins are not wealth.
I think "wealth" is the wrong term here, but I'll let that slide. The Bitcoin system can create value, in that it enables more efficient trade, but I agree that bitcoins are not capital goods in the traditional sense. They don't produce anything on their own. Where the investment aspect comes in is that holding bitcoins, like holding any currency, is an indication that you have produced value in the past and saved the proceeds rather than immediately consuming them. Now, you can choose to allocate your savings to a particular investment, which may perform better or worse than the market average, but even just holding them has the effect of decreasing the supply and thus making everyone else's bitcoins more valuable. In terms of purchasing power, that's the same as if you had loaned a portion of your savings out proportionally to everyone else holding bitcoins. Their capital investments, enabled by your saving, drive up the productivity of the entire economy, which increases the demand for—and value of—your bitcoins when you eventually do choose to spend them.
This is equally true for an inflationary currency, of course, but in that case you start out losing a fraction of your principle every year to the politically well-connected. The average rate of return you could expect to receive with a fixed currency supply is offset by the decrease in purchasing power due to inflation. The GDP goes up in real terms, but your fraction of it goes down because new money has been added to the system.
though the apparent need for echanges makes me wonder
The exchanges are just a ways to swap bitcoins and local currencies. They're only "necessary" to the extent that Bitcoin is still fairly young and not directly accepted everywhere. An economy based on Bitcoin as the primary currency, or even as one of several widely-supported currencies, would have much less need for foreign exchange; you could be payed in bitcoins, and spend bitcoins for goods and services, without ever converting to or from USD or otherwise requiring the services of an exchange.
The deathblow of EVERY fiat currency has been death by hyperinflation. The US dollar and bitcoin are no exceptions.
Bitcoin is an exception, because it can't be hyperinflated. There are no "issuing authorities"; the total number of bitcoins in existence is governed by the mining protocols, which are effectively fixed in stone. These protocols limit the total number of bitcoins to 21 million, to be issued on a fixed schedule at a rate which gradually decays over the next century or so. Approximately half of those bitcoins are already in circulation, meaning that over the long term devaluation due to inflation cannot exceed 50%.
If bitcoins do end up losing significant value, it will be through a decrease in demand, not because some issuing authority instituted hyperinflation.
Just as there are no bill serial numbers associated with the money in your bank account, there wouldn't be any specific bitcoins associated with the value of your savings account.
Why would anyone keep their bitcoins in a savings account controlled by someone else? The whole point is that you have control over your own money. With cash there is a major convenience factor in leaving your money at a bank (figuratively speaking) since you can't sent cash over the Internet and carrying large amounts around with you can be hazardous to your health. Bitcoin can be transferred peer-to-peer to anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes, and, assuming your wallet is encrypted with a decent passphrase, physical theft is not a significant risk. For electronic security there is offline "cold storage" and multi-factor authentication.
There is room in the Bitcoin system for interest-bearing accounts, but no one is compelled to use them just to participate in the financial network. Moreover, Bitcoin's manipulation-resistant design means that simply holding your bitcoins in your own private wallet is an investment in the entire Bitcoin economy—the broadest of all possible index funds—which pays interest in the form of rising purchasing power (deflation). As a rule, banks don't pay interest which exceeds the average rate of return on the market (even for CDs), and any account which did would clearly be an investment, with the risk that you may lose some or all of your principal.
All that aside, deposits are only part of the story. What really gives banks the freedom to implement fractional reserves is their role as payment processors. That's what lets them transfer balances between accounts, particularly between different banks, without ever converting those balances back into real currency. Bitcoin eliminates the need for separate payment processors, and if the banks aren't handling payments internally, they'll need significantly higher reserves on hand to deal with the day-to-day demand for the actual bitcoins expected by other banks and entities outside the banking network.