There is a limited supply of bitcoins, after which no more will ever be mined, that's deliberate and as you can see from the post I responded to the supporters of bitcoin are fundamentally opposed to any kind of inflationary devaluation and so will not change this. Well before we reach that point we will have to start subdividing bitcoins down towards satoshi which are 0.00000001 of a bitcoin, Subdividing bitcoins will result in an "increase" in the money supply of about 8 orders of magnitude, but unlike regular money supply increases where additional money is printed and the value of existing dollars go down, with bitcoin the number of coins in the economy remains roughly constant(there will still be some new coins coming into the market as this happens), so as we subdivide and adjust prices downwards in bitcoins the value of the whole coins already owned increases proportionately, so by the time we get to a satoshi the value of a single coin will have, roughly speaking increased in value by about 8 orders of magnitude.
In theory if you had a nice slow adoption curve this could be tolerable. You'd still have a fairly deflationary currency which would be bad for debt and investment but at least in the medium term it would probably be tolerable. The thing is, that's not what is going to happen. If we take the assumption that a deflationary digital coin which stores its entire transaction history forever and ever and is essentially Big Brother's fondest fantasy come true is a good idea and we'll see Bitcoin become the world currency, the economy will reach a tipping point after which Bitcoin adoption will skyrocket while the economy rapidly transitions to Bitcoin. When you have a massive spike in demand against a static supply you see dramatic increases in value. When a currency rapidly increases in value you get deflation.
According to what I could find with a quick search in 2008 there was a world money supply of about 60 trillion dollars, it's probably more than that now, but we'll pretend it hasn't increased as it makes things less scary not more so.
There are currently apparently about 12 million bitcoins mined. If we switched the money supply over today that would mean that one current bitcoin would be worth approximately $US 5 million compared to the speculation fueled grand it's theoretically worth today. That's just to replace the current money supply mind you. It appears the bitcoin max is a little under 21 million so if we had the full number of bitcoins that will ever be available they'd be worth about 2.5 million dollars a piece, which isn't really much better. That's 250000% deflation, which is pretty economy wrecking.
What's even worse is that as we can see, more than half of all bitcoins have already been mined and are in the hands of a reasonably small number of people, probably a few hundred thousand if we're super generous, with the vast majority of coins being held by a much smaller number of people out of a world population of 7 billion. If bitcoin takes off the guys who currently have these coins will make current world inequality seem like a minor inconvenience. Imagine for a moment that the population of a small US city held more than half the world's monetary wealth. Then of course imagine how an economy would work where monetary wealth was that concentrated while physical wealth remained in totally different hands.
Leaving aside deflationary vs inflationary currency which is an argument that I'm obviously not going to win because you have no concept of reality. Bitcoin isn't just a little deflationary, it's massively deflationary. If you had an equivalent level of inflation it would make Germany between the wars look economically stable.
No, the ability to divide a unit doesn't cause deflation, but the need to subdivide a bitcoin will only happen because of deflation. Subdividing bitcoins won't magically reset the market, you might earn then in.1 bitcoin amounts, but the folks who already have thousands of them don't all of a sudden get theirs taken away and replaced with.1 bitcoins. They've still got the same amount of bitcoins which are now worth 10x more. That's the definition of deflation. If/when we get to that maximum level of subdivision the folks who already own most of the bitcoins will make folks like Mitt Romney look poor. Bitcoin isn't just deflationary, it's massively economy shatteringly deflationary. The entire bitcoin supply divided up into it's tiniest subdivision is about equal to the total world money supply, and well over half of all bitcoins are already owned by a few thousand people. Imagine how rich those guys will be.
Offshore is cheaper. There's also a big difference between working from home and working remote. Having a guy who mostly works from home but rocks up to the office once a month or so and is in the same general area as the rest of the staff is functional. Having someone who lives in another state simply isn't, it doesn't work with offshore either, but they do it anyway because it costs a lot less. Doing pure remote work for someone getting US salaries is just insane unless the person on the other end is so damned good that you will pay anything to keep them.
The overwhelming majority of staff are simply not that good and about your only shot at getting that at 50+ is if you have a very specialized skill set, which from reading between the lines the guy above does't have. His comments read like anyone else's "What I don't know I can learn" well guess what, so can a guy half your age who will turn up to the office.
Well given that at some point we all decided that being a CEO was a skill set of some sort and that you could just go find a guy who had been a CEO of a car manufacturer and put them in charge of a dairy company. I'm not sure exactly how that makes any kind of sense, but those folks own most of the world's wealth so they must be getting something right.
The thing is those two big names were the companies most promoting remote work and so they made the news. Remote working was never all that popular with management and the kind of remote working Yahoo ended up with where workers weren't even in the same state as the office is a god damned disaster. If you want to only work remotely you've got to be 50% better than someone who is willing to rock up at least some of the time, and at 50+ to be 50% better than the competition you'd better be damned fantastic.
Remote work is on the outer at the moment, even in companies that used to embrace it. In this economy you're going to actually have to show up to the office if you want work.
Well based on the memo it might be a good start to recognise that people don't really want to use web based tools for core tasks, particularly event based ones like e-mail. Webmail if fine and dandy for "check it once a day" type of e-mail communication, but corporate e-mail simply isn't that.
Intent to distribute isn't actually a BS law. It's usually based either on having an excessive amount of the drug(more than you would have for personal use) or having the drug packaged in way indicating an intent to distribute. It's not really a stretch to say that if you've got 50 dime bags you probably intent to deal.
The fact that it's a passion-project would be precisely why you'd drop it without warning. Imagine you were working on a product for money and the money dried up, you'd stop developing. The same thing happens to a passion project when the passion dries up.
On top of that, if it's like anything I've ever lost passion for it's usually a case of not logging in for a day, and then a couple of days, and then weeks, and by the time you've accepted that you're actually not ever going to log in again it seems pretty pointless to go and tell people "hey guys I'm gone", especially if you're user base are jerks.
You're making a couple of really incorrect assumptions here.
The first is that every single infection will become antibiotic resistant. There is simply no evidence that this is happening, there are a few very worrying examples, but there's pretty well zero evidence that every bacteria you encounter will be resistant even to penicillin in the near term.
The second is assuming that all those things like cancer and organ failure weren't part of the death toll a hundred years ago. Cancer isn't some magical modern thing, it's been around probably as long as life itself even if we didn't have labels for it.
Third is both the use of antibiotics and the rate of infection opportunistic or otherwise in terms of surgery or due to the suppressed immune system of chemotherapy, and that's under the current procedures which could be strengthened further to reduce the risk of infection even more. Oddly enough because of the port needed for chemotherapy, surgery for cancer would be far less risky in terms of infection.
Being poor in 1913 was pretty fucking awful, housing was overcrowded, health care was virtually non existent, nutrition was poor, and the air was full of even more crap than there is today. Public sewerage was also still fairly uncommon. My family in 1913 lived on a farm and had a nice healthy life style, factor workers in major cities however lived in conditions that were in a lot of ways worse than modern day garment workers in places like India and Bangladesh.
Not to say that anti-biotic resistant bacteria aren't a significant problem, but 100 years ago we had poor nutrition and poor sanitation and poor hygiene. Most of the reason those scrapes and bruises and for that matter surgeries resulted in such appallingly high mortality is that people didn't clean wounds or their hands, including surgeons.
To compare those days to today is really rather ridiculous. Even if a significant number of bacteria strains became totally anti-biotic immune we'd still not have anything close to the death tolls experienced 100 years ago. It's a serious issue, but we don't have a black death coming any more than H1N1 resulted in the kind of death tolls we saw in the early 20th century.
Healthcare.gov is not a "website" it is the largest systems integration ever attempted, as far as I've read it was also being deliberately attacked. Please take your anti-government bullshit and shove it up your arse.
Well given that this standard isn't even ratified yet and we're probably talking at least two years before it's starting to roll out, throw it away and buy a new one?
It applies to them too, though I understand your dilemma. I realize Slashdot has some sort of major hard on for Windows XP, but it was full of serious design and security flaws 12 years ago and it's worse now. Even Vista for all that it was a pig at first was a better OS, 7 was pretty fantastic, 8 has some nice changes, though I'd never deploy it corporate, 8.1 plus something decent to deliver apps outside the god awful new start screen might be doable though.
Realistically at this point, you should either upgrade your XP install or put something other than Windows on that box. XP is a festering pile of insecure crap and needs to go. In the incredibly unlikely event that you still have a peripheral that doesn't run on anything past XP and you can't replace it with one that does you need to lock that PC down to just doing whatever the peripheral is for(I really like my printer isn't adequate at this point). Either move forward or move away, stop clinging to outdated insecure bullshit.
People are capable of acting rationally, when provided with sufficient information which is phrased in a means they can understand or after receiving sufficient education and experience to understand the information and if they are in a frame of mind where rational decisions are possible and if they're given enough time to weigh the evidence.
Unfortunately people almost never have complete information, generally don't understand all the information they do have(usually because it's been deliberately phrased to confuse them), are constantly in situations where due to time or other constraints they don't have the capacity to make rational decisions, and on top of that people value different things so even if they are being rational they might not choose the same way you do.
Hell, I've seen thousands of supposedly intelligent people on the internet constantly harping on about how if we just eliminate all government regulation rationality will stop people from being evil when to me that's flying in the fact of both centuries of recorded history and every experience of human nature I've had in my life. As far as I can see the people who are most gung ho about rationality are actually the least rational people I've ever met.
I haven't seen the CGI so I don't really know, but your metaphor is off.
Reasonably speaking this is the difference between kicking a tin can and kicking a person. Not between and empty wallet and a full one. IF the people involved believed that they were kicking a person then yes, they may potentially be guilty of some form of crime of intent. If they believed they were kicking a tin can however, the situation is very different.
Imagine for a moment that you posted a CGI ten year old girl simulation onto some place like Reddit or even Slashdot and everyone knew what it was. What kind of stuff do you think people would send to that simulation? People are weird like that.
You're probably right and they probably thought it was a real girl, but given I haven't seen or interacted with said simulation I can't say if there was intent or not.
As much as I'm sure you believe all cops are corrupt and out to get you, I think it's a bit more complicated than that. DNA isn't some magically interchangeable and ubiquitous term, the lab can and would be required to tell you what the DNA came from. If you're being investigated for a murder or even a sexual assault and they find your semen scattered all over the room a jury might question why in the hell that was so(leaving aside where the cops are getting a condom full of your semen). Even blood is going to have to appear in a manner which is actually consistent with the fact. Evidence can certainly be planted, but there are much easier and more effective ways to achieve that. Blood or semen spatter which makes no damned sense is something your attorney is going to have a field day with, a piece of paper with your name or fingerprint on it, some possession of yours which just happens to have been dropped in the middle of a crime scene is going to be much harder to fight.
I'd also suggest that if you don't want to end up in federal PMITA prison you stop providing free wifi to the neighbourhood, even leaving that aside it will 100% be a violation of your ISP's TOU.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a limited supply of bitcoins, after which no more will ever be mined, that's deliberate and as you can see from the post I responded to the supporters of bitcoin are fundamentally opposed to any kind of inflationary devaluation and so will not change this. Well before we reach that point we will have to start subdividing bitcoins down towards satoshi which are 0.00000001 of a bitcoin, Subdividing bitcoins will result in an "increase" in the money supply of about 8 orders of magnitude, but unlike regular money supply increases where additional money is printed and the value of existing dollars go down, with bitcoin the number of coins in the economy remains roughly constant(there will still be some new coins coming into the market as this happens), so as we subdivide and adjust prices downwards in bitcoins the value of the whole coins already owned increases proportionately, so by the time we get to a satoshi the value of a single coin will have, roughly speaking increased in value by about 8 orders of magnitude.
In theory if you had a nice slow adoption curve this could be tolerable. You'd still have a fairly deflationary currency which would be bad for debt and investment but at least in the medium term it would probably be tolerable. The thing is, that's not what is going to happen. If we take the assumption that a deflationary digital coin which stores its entire transaction history forever and ever and is essentially Big Brother's fondest fantasy come true is a good idea and we'll see Bitcoin become the world currency, the economy will reach a tipping point after which Bitcoin adoption will skyrocket while the economy rapidly transitions to Bitcoin. When you have a massive spike in demand against a static supply you see dramatic increases in value. When a currency rapidly increases in value you get deflation.
According to what I could find with a quick search in 2008 there was a world money supply of about 60 trillion dollars, it's probably more than that now, but we'll pretend it hasn't increased as it makes things less scary not more so.
There are currently apparently about 12 million bitcoins mined. If we switched the money supply over today that would mean that one current bitcoin would be worth approximately $US 5 million compared to the speculation fueled grand it's theoretically worth today. That's just to replace the current money supply mind you. It appears the bitcoin max is a little under 21 million so if we had the full number of bitcoins that will ever be available they'd be worth about 2.5 million dollars a piece, which isn't really much better. That's 250000% deflation, which is pretty economy wrecking.
What's even worse is that as we can see, more than half of all bitcoins have already been mined and are in the hands of a reasonably small number of people, probably a few hundred thousand if we're super generous, with the vast majority of coins being held by a much smaller number of people out of a world population of 7 billion. If bitcoin takes off the guys who currently have these coins will make current world inequality seem like a minor inconvenience. Imagine for a moment that the population of a small US city held more than half the world's monetary wealth. Then of course imagine how an economy would work where monetary wealth was that concentrated while physical wealth remained in totally different hands.
Leaving aside deflationary vs inflationary currency which is an argument that I'm obviously not going to win because you have no concept of reality. Bitcoin isn't just a little deflationary, it's massively deflationary. If you had an equivalent level of inflation it would make Germany between the wars look economically stable.
No, the ability to divide a unit doesn't cause deflation, but the need to subdivide a bitcoin will only happen because of deflation. Subdividing bitcoins won't magically reset the market, you might earn then in .1 bitcoin amounts, but the folks who already have thousands of them don't all of a sudden get theirs taken away and replaced with .1 bitcoins. They've still got the same amount of bitcoins which are now worth 10x more. That's the definition of deflation. If/when we get to that maximum level of subdivision the folks who already own most of the bitcoins will make folks like Mitt Romney look poor. Bitcoin isn't just deflationary, it's massively economy shatteringly deflationary. The entire bitcoin supply divided up into it's tiniest subdivision is about equal to the total world money supply, and well over half of all bitcoins are already owned by a few thousand people. Imagine how rich those guys will be.
Regular people don't really want pure online anonymity either. They might think they want it, but that anonymity comes with a pretty major price.
Except that involves massive deflation and is a terrible idea.
Offshore is cheaper. There's also a big difference between working from home and working remote. Having a guy who mostly works from home but rocks up to the office once a month or so and is in the same general area as the rest of the staff is functional. Having someone who lives in another state simply isn't, it doesn't work with offshore either, but they do it anyway because it costs a lot less. Doing pure remote work for someone getting US salaries is just insane unless the person on the other end is so damned good that you will pay anything to keep them.
The overwhelming majority of staff are simply not that good and about your only shot at getting that at 50+ is if you have a very specialized skill set, which from reading between the lines the guy above does't have. His comments read like anyone else's "What I don't know I can learn" well guess what, so can a guy half your age who will turn up to the office.
They don't really love it from there either, but at least there you're dirt cheap which is a real selling point.
Well given that at some point we all decided that being a CEO was a skill set of some sort and that you could just go find a guy who had been a CEO of a car manufacturer and put them in charge of a dairy company. I'm not sure exactly how that makes any kind of sense, but those folks own most of the world's wealth so they must be getting something right.
The thing is those two big names were the companies most promoting remote work and so they made the news. Remote working was never all that popular with management and the kind of remote working Yahoo ended up with where workers weren't even in the same state as the office is a god damned disaster. If you want to only work remotely you've got to be 50% better than someone who is willing to rock up at least some of the time, and at 50+ to be 50% better than the competition you'd better be damned fantastic.
Remote work is on the outer at the moment, even in companies that used to embrace it. In this economy you're going to actually have to show up to the office if you want work.
Well based on the memo it might be a good start to recognise that people don't really want to use web based tools for core tasks, particularly event based ones like e-mail. Webmail if fine and dandy for "check it once a day" type of e-mail communication, but corporate e-mail simply isn't that.
Intent to distribute isn't actually a BS law. It's usually based either on having an excessive amount of the drug(more than you would have for personal use) or having the drug packaged in way indicating an intent to distribute. It's not really a stretch to say that if you've got 50 dime bags you probably intent to deal.
The fact that it's a passion-project would be precisely why you'd drop it without warning. Imagine you were working on a product for money and the money dried up, you'd stop developing. The same thing happens to a passion project when the passion dries up.
On top of that, if it's like anything I've ever lost passion for it's usually a case of not logging in for a day, and then a couple of days, and then weeks, and by the time you've accepted that you're actually not ever going to log in again it seems pretty pointless to go and tell people "hey guys I'm gone", especially if you're user base are jerks.
That's more of an indictment of Linux media players rather than a complement of Winamp.
You're making a couple of really incorrect assumptions here.
The first is that every single infection will become antibiotic resistant. There is simply no evidence that this is happening, there are a few very worrying examples, but there's pretty well zero evidence that every bacteria you encounter will be resistant even to penicillin in the near term.
The second is assuming that all those things like cancer and organ failure weren't part of the death toll a hundred years ago. Cancer isn't some magical modern thing, it's been around probably as long as life itself even if we didn't have labels for it.
Third is both the use of antibiotics and the rate of infection opportunistic or otherwise in terms of surgery or due to the suppressed immune system of chemotherapy, and that's under the current procedures which could be strengthened further to reduce the risk of infection even more. Oddly enough because of the port needed for chemotherapy, surgery for cancer would be far less risky in terms of infection.
Depends who you were.
Being poor in 1913 was pretty fucking awful, housing was overcrowded, health care was virtually non existent, nutrition was poor, and the air was full of even more crap than there is today. Public sewerage was also still fairly uncommon. My family in 1913 lived on a farm and had a nice healthy life style, factor workers in major cities however lived in conditions that were in a lot of ways worse than modern day garment workers in places like India and Bangladesh.
Not to say that anti-biotic resistant bacteria aren't a significant problem, but 100 years ago we had poor nutrition and poor sanitation and poor hygiene. Most of the reason those scrapes and bruises and for that matter surgeries resulted in such appallingly high mortality is that people didn't clean wounds or their hands, including surgeons.
To compare those days to today is really rather ridiculous. Even if a significant number of bacteria strains became totally anti-biotic immune we'd still not have anything close to the death tolls experienced 100 years ago. It's a serious issue, but we don't have a black death coming any more than H1N1 resulted in the kind of death tolls we saw in the early 20th century.
Healthcare.gov is not a "website" it is the largest systems integration ever attempted, as far as I've read it was also being deliberately attacked. Please take your anti-government bullshit and shove it up your arse.
So because a handful of scientists killed a clam to get some information about it all climate scientists are incompetent? Seriously.
Well given that this standard isn't even ratified yet and we're probably talking at least two years before it's starting to roll out, throw it away and buy a new one?
It applies to them too, though I understand your dilemma. I realize Slashdot has some sort of major hard on for Windows XP, but it was full of serious design and security flaws 12 years ago and it's worse now. Even Vista for all that it was a pig at first was a better OS, 7 was pretty fantastic, 8 has some nice changes, though I'd never deploy it corporate, 8.1 plus something decent to deliver apps outside the god awful new start screen might be doable though.
Realistically at this point, you should either upgrade your XP install or put something other than Windows on that box. XP is a festering pile of insecure crap and needs to go. In the incredibly unlikely event that you still have a peripheral that doesn't run on anything past XP and you can't replace it with one that does you need to lock that PC down to just doing whatever the peripheral is for(I really like my printer isn't adequate at this point). Either move forward or move away, stop clinging to outdated insecure bullshit.
People are capable of acting rationally, when provided with sufficient information which is phrased in a means they can understand or after receiving sufficient education and experience to understand the information and if they are in a frame of mind where rational decisions are possible and if they're given enough time to weigh the evidence.
Unfortunately people almost never have complete information, generally don't understand all the information they do have(usually because it's been deliberately phrased to confuse them), are constantly in situations where due to time or other constraints they don't have the capacity to make rational decisions, and on top of that people value different things so even if they are being rational they might not choose the same way you do.
Hell, I've seen thousands of supposedly intelligent people on the internet constantly harping on about how if we just eliminate all government regulation rationality will stop people from being evil when to me that's flying in the fact of both centuries of recorded history and every experience of human nature I've had in my life. As far as I can see the people who are most gung ho about rationality are actually the least rational people I've ever met.
I haven't seen the CGI so I don't really know, but your metaphor is off.
Reasonably speaking this is the difference between kicking a tin can and kicking a person. Not between and empty wallet and a full one. IF the people involved believed that they were kicking a person then yes, they may potentially be guilty of some form of crime of intent. If they believed they were kicking a tin can however, the situation is very different.
Imagine for a moment that you posted a CGI ten year old girl simulation onto some place like Reddit or even Slashdot and everyone knew what it was. What kind of stuff do you think people would send to that simulation? People are weird like that.
You're probably right and they probably thought it was a real girl, but given I haven't seen or interacted with said simulation I can't say if there was intent or not.
As much as I'm sure you believe all cops are corrupt and out to get you, I think it's a bit more complicated than that. DNA isn't some magically interchangeable and ubiquitous term, the lab can and would be required to tell you what the DNA came from. If you're being investigated for a murder or even a sexual assault and they find your semen scattered all over the room a jury might question why in the hell that was so(leaving aside where the cops are getting a condom full of your semen). Even blood is going to have to appear in a manner which is actually consistent with the fact. Evidence can certainly be planted, but there are much easier and more effective ways to achieve that. Blood or semen spatter which makes no damned sense is something your attorney is going to have a field day with, a piece of paper with your name or fingerprint on it, some possession of yours which just happens to have been dropped in the middle of a crime scene is going to be much harder to fight.
I'd also suggest that if you don't want to end up in federal PMITA prison you stop providing free wifi to the neighbourhood, even leaving that aside it will 100% be a violation of your ISP's TOU.