Not necessarily. I worked on an experiment at Fermilab for a few years during a period when FNAL had furloughs (IIRC due to surprise budget cuts) and their employees were not even allowed to turn up to the office on their furlough days under threat of discipline (although to be honest I think it was more bark than bite). I thought it was rather bizarre at the time because they had no problem working weekends but apparently furloughs were not the same. This just goes to show that when dealing with government regulations in unusual circumstances common sense is not a good guide.
Europe, Canada and, as I understand it, the US already require open access to the results of government-funded research. In fields such as particle physics where we all tend to work in large, international collaborations this already means that all research is open access since even if you are not from one of these countries some of us our and have to publish in open access journals (and would want to anyway regardless of requirements).
Indeed things are now going further in Canada with new requirements being considered for open access to the data used in scientific publications too. However, the rules for this require careful consideration since sometimes the data involved can be extremely large (hundreds of petabytes) and/or extremely hard to understand without detailed knowledge of the hardware, data formats, calibration data etc. It is also not clear how useful this is. I worked on an experiment 15 years ago that went to a lot of effort to make its data easily accessible to the public. At the end of the first year of the initiative, only 5 people had accessed the data and 4 of those turned out to be members of the experiment itself who were curious about the program!
You are being selective in your reading. It is not the problem that they charge a percentage fee it is that this percentage fee can have a minimum absolute value with some cards. If you spend $100 then you are right that the percentage fee means that there is little difference between the card fee and the exchange fees/low rates of a bureau de change. However, if you spend $10 and have a minimum transaction fee of say $1 the card is vastly more expensive.
Are you sure about that? In England it's quite clear: the definition of legal tender does not allow you to demand change.
Yes, it does. If you owe change then you have a debt and the definition of legal tender in England clearly specifies that you have to accept cash to pay off debt. Hence you can demand cash by simply refusing all other methods of payment because you are not required, by the legal tender law, to accept them.
Indeed you can do something with it: you can go/send it to the Bank of England and they will exchange it for a pound coin. But you will likely have to go to the actual Bank fo England to do this, after this much time high street banks are unlikely to do it for you.
I have yet to see a single physical retailer turn down cash.
Visit Stockholm sometime. I was there for an academic conference. The main university canteen refused cash and even a mobile food wagon was credit card only and refused cash. I've not seen that before or since but I have encountered it now. The problem with this is that credit cards charge a percentage fee for foreign currency transactions and some have a minimum on this fee which can make it really expensive for small value transactions.
The only way they can 'protest' is to demand exact change (or the excess becomes a 'tip')
No, they cannot even do that. If they can't give you the exact change then they have incurred a debt to you and the same legal tender rules apply: they have to pay it to you in cash unless you are willing to accept some other form of payment.
Alternatively, you could underpay them and tell them that you will be back with some change later. They may not like that but, if they don't have any change themselves there is nothing they can do about it since you are willing to pay your debt it is just that neither of you has the correct change.
Yes, putting people on Mars is hard but it is not stupid. 500 years ago putting people from Europe onto North America was hard although it was not solar radiation storms but just ordinary storms that people worried about.
Mars is a lot less hospitable than North America was back then but our science and technology is much better. As it improves it will get easier and easier to get to Mars, the Moon and elsewhere. Having humans on other planets living in self-sustaining colonies will massively improve the survival odds of our species and any we bring with us. I don't think that's stupid at all even if it may be another 500 years before travel to Mars becomes routine like air travel today.
What this highlights is a need for police to act quickly and arrest the person responsible.
Given the reports of the number of police deployed, including a police helicopter, I think they have tried this and it did not work. If you can disable and capture the drone though there will presumably be serial numbers on it which would help you track down the owner in addition to the benefit of reducing the disruption.
There already are regulations making this highly illegal. If/when the operator is caught s/he will be going away for a long time. What this has highlighted is the need for suitable defences. The police apparently cannot shoot the drone down because they are worried about stray bullets. What is needed is some means to efficient means to disable a drone that is operating illegally. You can have all the regulations you want but there will always be some idiot willing to break them.
Every day we use things that work despite the fact that we, as individuals don't know how or why they work.
Every day we rely on gravity and yet nobody knows how that works. We live in a universe that we do not fully understand and possibly never will. Understanding something often helps us to find a way to exploit it to do something useful but, as you said, it is not required.
I'd think that artificial meat would be less contaminated with antibiotics and growth hormones
Why? They have to get it to grow somehow and I don't see why, if growth hormones are legal in your country, they would not also help grow artificial meat just as much as natural meat. You might be right with the antibiotics since presumably the meat can be grown under sterile conditions but, equally, there will be no immune system to fight infections so if sterile conditions are hard to maintain for some reason I could easily see some company bathing the meat in antibiotics or worse since anti-bacterial chemicals that might kill an animal could be used e.g. the US already chlorinates its "natural-grown" chicken.
There will always be a company willing to cut corners to reduce costs and increase profits. Apart from the above lab-grown meat will offer all sorts of potential for exposure to new chemicals in the food chain with only minimal testing on the long-term effects to human health simply because this is extremely hard to do and will never be as good as the real-life test of selling it to millions of consumers. Lab-grown meat may well be the way of the future for a lot of reasons but, personally, I would hold off buying it for a few years until the long-term and large-scale health effects have been well tested by the early adopters/guinea pigs.
Governments are worse than private industry at things whose primary benefit to society is that they pay for themselves. They are better than private companies when the benefit is not so monetary. Public transit has more benefit than just monetary and so government much better. The same is true for health care.
"Public transportation" is ALWAYS taxpayer funded in some way.
So is private transportation. Who do you think pays for all those roads? Encouraging more people to use public transportation by making it free will reduce the need to build more roads and save on repair on the ones that are already there.
Whether the benefit is worth the cost requires detailed analysis but in a densely populated country like Luxembourg I suspect the maths is much more in favour of this than in less densely populated countries like Canada where our city council is both considering either making local transit free or increasing the price by ~30%!
Given that the country is 87km long and 57 km wide why on earth would you even need first class? You will not be sitting in it for longer than about 30 minutes unless you are crossing a border in which case the travel is no longer free anyway.
I'm guessing the after effects of the original big bang are still being experienced, billions of years later.
Well, if you think about it all the matter around us - including our bodies - exists because of it and the hydrogen in your body was actually directly created by it. So I think it is fair to say that the "after effects" are still with us. Not to mention the afterglow of it that we can see as the cosmic microwave background.
Actually, given the typical restaurant model where you have your meal first and then pay afterwards, isn't cash still a last resort? Legal tender in most countries means that the law requires that they accept cash for "all debts public and private". So a shop or fast food place can refuse to accept cash because you pay first and, if you do not offer a means of payment that the business will accept, they can simply refuse to do business with you.
But a restaurant is different. If you have eaten the meal already you are effectively in debt to the restaurant so aren't they obliged to take cash to pay off that debt? Indeed I'd be curious to know exactly how the restaurant could force the issue. It seems unlikely that the police or courts would intervene if a customer offered cash to pay for the meal they had eaten and the restaurant insisted on a credit card...and I'm never going to find out in practice since I almost always pay using plastic!
Before the arrival of Europeans, Hawaii had zero mosquitoes. All the mosquitoes there should be wiped out.
Let's just be a bit careful waving that sort of logic around because the same argument would technically also apply to humans and in a lot more places than just Hawaii.
You are required to tell them that when you fill it in on your tax form. The only way to obscure this would be to deliberately lie on your tax form and the penalty for doing that is going to be a lot, lot worse (probably jail) compared to just "forgetting" to declare your Bitcoin transactions.
Also, if US currency was deflationary would the government be allowed to collect capital gains taxes on your bank account?
No, provided it is a USD bank account because 1 USD will always be worth 1 USD and since the US government requires the buying and selling price of property to always be given in USD then there will never be a change in the value and hence no capital gain or loss even though 1 USD may buy you more, or less, over time.
It might not be as stupid as you think. You see when you use the bitcoin to pay your taxes which are denominated in dollars you will trigger a capital gains tax. So next year they will know exactly how many bitcoin you "sold" to pay this year's taxes and if you do not have a capital gains entry for those coins then they know exactly whom to audit!
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily. I worked on an experiment at Fermilab for a few years during a period when FNAL had furloughs (IIRC due to surprise budget cuts) and their employees were not even allowed to turn up to the office on their furlough days under threat of discipline (although to be honest I think it was more bark than bite). I thought it was rather bizarre at the time because they had no problem working weekends but apparently furloughs were not the same. This just goes to show that when dealing with government regulations in unusual circumstances common sense is not a good guide.
That's not the only useless specification - this laptop can probably also discharge its battery in less time than it takes to recharge it given that its reported battery life for just web-browsing is under 4 hours.
Europe, Canada and, as I understand it, the US already require open access to the results of government-funded research. In fields such as particle physics where we all tend to work in large, international collaborations this already means that all research is open access since even if you are not from one of these countries some of us our and have to publish in open access journals (and would want to anyway regardless of requirements).
Indeed things are now going further in Canada with new requirements being considered for open access to the data used in scientific publications too. However, the rules for this require careful consideration since sometimes the data involved can be extremely large (hundreds of petabytes) and/or extremely hard to understand without detailed knowledge of the hardware, data formats, calibration data etc. It is also not clear how useful this is. I worked on an experiment 15 years ago that went to a lot of effort to make its data easily accessible to the public. At the end of the first year of the initiative, only 5 people had accessed the data and 4 of those turned out to be members of the experiment itself who were curious about the program!
You are being selective in your reading. It is not the problem that they charge a percentage fee it is that this percentage fee can have a minimum absolute value with some cards. If you spend $100 then you are right that the percentage fee means that there is little difference between the card fee and the exchange fees/low rates of a bureau de change. However, if you spend $10 and have a minimum transaction fee of say $1 the card is vastly more expensive.
Are you sure about that? In England it's quite clear: the definition of legal tender does not allow you to demand change.
Yes, it does. If you owe change then you have a debt and the definition of legal tender in England clearly specifies that you have to accept cash to pay off debt. Hence you can demand cash by simply refusing all other methods of payment because you are not required, by the legal tender law, to accept them.
Indeed you can do something with it: you can go/send it to the Bank of England and they will exchange it for a pound coin. But you will likely have to go to the actual Bank fo England to do this, after this much time high street banks are unlikely to do it for you.
I have yet to see a single physical retailer turn down cash.
Visit Stockholm sometime. I was there for an academic conference. The main university canteen refused cash and even a mobile food wagon was credit card only and refused cash. I've not seen that before or since but I have encountered it now. The problem with this is that credit cards charge a percentage fee for foreign currency transactions and some have a minimum on this fee which can make it really expensive for small value transactions.
The only way they can 'protest' is to demand exact change (or the excess becomes a 'tip')
No, they cannot even do that. If they can't give you the exact change then they have incurred a debt to you and the same legal tender rules apply: they have to pay it to you in cash unless you are willing to accept some other form of payment.
Alternatively, you could underpay them and tell them that you will be back with some change later. They may not like that but, if they don't have any change themselves there is nothing they can do about it since you are willing to pay your debt it is just that neither of you has the correct change.
Yes, putting people on Mars is hard but it is not stupid. 500 years ago putting people from Europe onto North America was hard although it was not solar radiation storms but just ordinary storms that people worried about.
Mars is a lot less hospitable than North America was back then but our science and technology is much better. As it improves it will get easier and easier to get to Mars, the Moon and elsewhere. Having humans on other planets living in self-sustaining colonies will massively improve the survival odds of our species and any we bring with us. I don't think that's stupid at all even if it may be another 500 years before travel to Mars becomes routine like air travel today.
What this highlights is a need for police to act quickly and arrest the person responsible.
Given the reports of the number of police deployed, including a police helicopter, I think they have tried this and it did not work. If you can disable and capture the drone though there will presumably be serial numbers on it which would help you track down the owner in addition to the benefit of reducing the disruption.
What better way to prompt regulation...
There already are regulations making this highly illegal. If/when the operator is caught s/he will be going away for a long time. What this has highlighted is the need for suitable defences. The police apparently cannot shoot the drone down because they are worried about stray bullets. What is needed is some means to efficient means to disable a drone that is operating illegally. You can have all the regulations you want but there will always be some idiot willing to break them.
Every day we use things that work despite the fact that we, as individuals don't know how or why they work.
Every day we rely on gravity and yet nobody knows how that works. We live in a universe that we do not fully understand and possibly never will. Understanding something often helps us to find a way to exploit it to do something useful but, as you said, it is not required.
I'd think that artificial meat would be less contaminated with antibiotics and growth hormones
Why? They have to get it to grow somehow and I don't see why, if growth hormones are legal in your country, they would not also help grow artificial meat just as much as natural meat. You might be right with the antibiotics since presumably the meat can be grown under sterile conditions but, equally, there will be no immune system to fight infections so if sterile conditions are hard to maintain for some reason I could easily see some company bathing the meat in antibiotics or worse since anti-bacterial chemicals that might kill an animal could be used e.g. the US already chlorinates its "natural-grown" chicken.
There will always be a company willing to cut corners to reduce costs and increase profits. Apart from the above lab-grown meat will offer all sorts of potential for exposure to new chemicals in the food chain with only minimal testing on the long-term effects to human health simply because this is extremely hard to do and will never be as good as the real-life test of selling it to millions of consumers. Lab-grown meat may well be the way of the future for a lot of reasons but, personally, I would hold off buying it for a few years until the long-term and large-scale health effects have been well tested by the early adopters/guinea pigs.
Governments are worse than private industry at things whose primary benefit to society is that they pay for themselves. They are better than private companies when the benefit is not so monetary. Public transit has more benefit than just monetary and so government much better. The same is true for health care.
"Public transportation" is ALWAYS taxpayer funded in some way.
So is private transportation. Who do you think pays for all those roads? Encouraging more people to use public transportation by making it free will reduce the need to build more roads and save on repair on the ones that are already there.
Whether the benefit is worth the cost requires detailed analysis but in a densely populated country like Luxembourg I suspect the maths is much more in favour of this than in less densely populated countries like Canada where our city council is both considering either making local transit free or increasing the price by ~30%!
Given that the country is 87km long and 57 km wide why on earth would you even need first class? You will not be sitting in it for longer than about 30 minutes unless you are crossing a border in which case the travel is no longer free anyway.
I thought only terrorists think of this trick and a not a country that say "In God We Trust"?
That depends on which god they trust. Currently, they seem to be following one best summed up as "stupid-Loki".
This is a simple extrapolation based on a linear trend of qubit count.
A "hard deadline" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
I think that depends on whether 2019 will be the year of the Linux desktop...
I'm guessing the after effects of the original big bang are still being experienced, billions of years later.
Well, if you think about it all the matter around us - including our bodies - exists because of it and the hydrogen in your body was actually directly created by it. So I think it is fair to say that the "after effects" are still with us. Not to mention the afterglow of it that we can see as the cosmic microwave background.
that's not many photons, should be 4x10^84
SImply as a last resort
Actually, given the typical restaurant model where you have your meal first and then pay afterwards, isn't cash still a last resort? Legal tender in most countries means that the law requires that they accept cash for "all debts public and private". So a shop or fast food place can refuse to accept cash because you pay first and, if you do not offer a means of payment that the business will accept, they can simply refuse to do business with you.
But a restaurant is different. If you have eaten the meal already you are effectively in debt to the restaurant so aren't they obliged to take cash to pay off that debt? Indeed I'd be curious to know exactly how the restaurant could force the issue. It seems unlikely that the police or courts would intervene if a customer offered cash to pay for the meal they had eaten and the restaurant insisted on a credit card...and I'm never going to find out in practice since I almost always pay using plastic!
Before the arrival of Europeans, Hawaii had zero mosquitoes. All the mosquitoes there should be wiped out.
Let's just be a bit careful waving that sort of logic around because the same argument would technically also apply to humans and in a lot more places than just Hawaii.
How do they know your basis?
You are required to tell them that when you fill it in on your tax form. The only way to obscure this would be to deliberately lie on your tax form and the penalty for doing that is going to be a lot, lot worse (probably jail) compared to just "forgetting" to declare your Bitcoin transactions.
Also, if US currency was deflationary would the government be allowed to collect capital gains taxes on your bank account?
No, provided it is a USD bank account because 1 USD will always be worth 1 USD and since the US government requires the buying and selling price of property to always be given in USD then there will never be a change in the value and hence no capital gain or loss even though 1 USD may buy you more, or less, over time.
It might not be as stupid as you think. You see when you use the bitcoin to pay your taxes which are denominated in dollars you will trigger a capital gains tax. So next year they will know exactly how many bitcoin you "sold" to pay this year's taxes and if you do not have a capital gains entry for those coins then they know exactly whom to audit!