It's not coming in on an orbital trajectory. If we're precise and patient enough, we can get it coming in to a spot in low Earth orbit (although I'd be nervous about missing this by a couple hundred miles in the wrong direction), but it would be going much too fast to be in orbit. It would slingshot around Earth and head off somewhere else.
The other problem is that too many of the US public thinks that people who can innovate are snobby overeducated elites, like those people in California who think they should have some influence over who becomes President.
I'm a software developer. If I don't want to work from 9 to 11, I don't have to. I should notify some people here if I'm not going to, much like an Uber driver has to notify someone whether he or she is on or off duty.
Some core beliefs in Buddhism aren't mystical. You can be a materialist and still believe in the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Way. Meditation is an act that can be practiced, and does not itself imply spirituality or mysticism. You can consider nirvana to be an optimal brain state. You can think of Gautama as a possibly mythical person who gave very good advice. You can come up with something recognizably Buddhist or Buddhism-derived that isn't mystical.
Traditional Buddhism does get into a lot of non-materialistic concepts, like the world being illusion and people reincarnating, but I'm not sure that getting off the wheel of rebirth is quite as core a belief as the method you're supposed to use to do so.
In other words, you and I agree that there should be mandatory contributions to a government for some things, and that other things should be controlled by individuals. We just differ about which things.
Powershell used to be an optional addition. My wife was very frustrated by that sometime. She wanted to do something, I don't remember what, and every way she saw to do that in windows was in Powershell, which her users didn't have installed.
UTF-16 also needs special routines to calculate string length, if you get into some other alphabets. There's a lot more than 65,536 code points in Unicode. A strict 16-bit character type (UCS-2) mostly works in Unicode if you stick to certain parts of the world.
Personally, I don't see the need for a 64-bit character set. 32 bits allows for about four billion code points, while Unicode limits itself to about a million and doesn't seen stretched.
The US M0 money supply right now is about 3.7 trillion dollars. If Bitcoin were to expand to cover the US economy, 1% of it would be worth $37 billion. That's an awful lot of money for one individual to make by kicking something into motion and disappearing. The fact that a lot of Bitcoin are held by people who invested early is going to be a big drag on its general acceptance.
As far as the government is concerned, Bitcoin is a commodity, and the government has not made it illegal to trade in grain or copper. The government does require that profits and losses be accounted for, and that money laundering be avoided. The US government will not raid exchanges unless they think something illegal is going on, same as a coal exchange. There's no laws against using foreign currency; it's less convenient because the accounting has to be in dollars, and because it's easier to spend dollars than yen around here.
There's reasons why I don't expect Bitcoin to become really successful, but government intervention isn't one of them.
Except that someone is going to have the Bitcoin for a period of time. If I use it on a transaction basis, I'm buying Bitcoin and transferring it. I have to buy it from somebody who holds Bitcoin over a period of time, and that business is going to be very interested in value fluctuation. It will have to allow for all sorts of fluctuations. If the price goes down on a short-term basis, they have to deal with people who buy their Bitcoin and don't immediately dump it back into the system, and if the price is low they need more Bitcoin to cover individual transactions. There's a lot of risks.
Businesses charge for risks they take. The whole insurance industry is a lot of companies accepting cash from you to take over your financial risks. It can be lucrative. The more risk, the more charge.
Therefore, even if you use Bitcoin as an immediate transaction, you'll be paying for its fluctuations.
Cash is not a good investment strategy, but I usually have less than 1% of my liquid assets in cash or the equivalent. I know how much goes into my checking account a month, as a general rule, and I know how much comes out. If I didn't know to within 20% what my account balance was going to be, my financial life would be more complicated.
Every fiat currency that has ever existed since time immemorial has crashed and burned.
False. There's plenty that haven't cashed and burned, including the US dollar, the Euro, and the pound. It could be that they're going to crash and burn sometime, but that's at least not obvious.
Thing is, somebody has to hold the Bitcoin. If you have it in your wallet, you're taking the risk and possible gain if Bitcoin changes in value. If you buy it from an exchange when you want to transfer money, somebody else is taking the risk, and businesses charge when they take on risks. If Bitcoin were stable relative to the dollar, that's not much risk, but if it's volatile there's more risk and exchanges will have to charge more for their services.
Bitcoin is an asset, meaning that you have to keep the accounting on buying it when for what price and selling (including paying for things with it) it when and for what price. This will yield a gain or loss in USD, and that affects your adjusted gross income for tax purposes. It's easier to use dollars in the US, since there's no accounting involved.
Yes, but if the banks decide to undercut Bitcoin for international transfers they can. Their processes are potentially much more efficient. One advantage of Bitcoin could be that it forces banks to make account-to-account-anywhere transfers cheaper and easier.
Don't you also have to note when you acquired the bitcoin and when you spent it, to know what taxes you pay? There's a time limit before which appreciation is taxed as regular income in the US, and after which it's subject to capital gains tax. I would rather not have to worry about tax differences between paying for something yesterday and today.
It's in the best interests of a lot of people that Bitcoin does not get big. If it does, that leaves a lot of early entrants fabulously wealthy. It's more appealing to go to a digital currency that doesn't have the initial hoarding problem.
Some people want their files back, and will want to pay. If they know that they'll be criminally charged if news gets out, they will be sure not to tell anyone, and we'll never know how much is going on, and we'll miss out on data that might be useful in tracing it. Bad guys started using ransomware without knowing what the profit would be. The ones who know that it can make money will continue to do it, and new entrants into the field won't know whether or not it works. I think we're better off encouraging people to report it to the police.
People really do seem to struggle with conceivable things, don't they? They can take the worst-case scenario they can possibly imagine and imagine it's worth considering. What if all solar panels turn out to emit toxic gas under certain circumstances, which happen, and millions and millions of people die as a result? It's about as realistic as imagining a nuclear accident of unprecedented severity.
You say I've got the causality wrong. Personally, I think the Civil Rights Act had a good deal to do with the change in society. I don't have all that much evidence, but I'm not making a claim.
The government actions included using force to desegregate Southern schools against threats of violence. In some states, their laws were invalidated by Federal action. It's at least partly correct to think that state and local laws were changed following the change in their society, but that change was given an assist by the Feds.
It has nothing to do with homophobia, it has to do with secrets. If a person has a secret that would really hurt his or her life if it got out, that person is a security risk. Someone who is open about their sexual orientation is not therefore a threat, since there's no blackmail potential.
Western civilization got where it is by being almost completely uncaring about the environment. We're asking less developed countries to advance economically while being careful about the environment. It seems to me that, unless we provide help, we're asking them to do what we were unwilling to do.
Suppose that a developing country needs a new power plant, and the cheapest available that will work is coal-burning. If we expect them to go to something less destructive, shouldn't we pay them for it?
2) Are these changes really outside the normal range our planet and ecosystem have experienced in the past
Define "past".
If you're thinking of the past as a hundred million years, then, no, we're well within those limits. From my petty human perspective, though, I don't see that as being immediately relevant.
You think the biosphere will benefit from change that massively outpaces historical change. That makes you a stupid twat.
Actually, if we burn most of the fossil fuels, the world will eventually settle into a reasonably stable state, and the biosphere is likely to catch up in a few million years, and it may well be better in some ways than what we have now. This isn't very comforting for those wondering how their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will do, barring stupendous advances in longevity.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not coming in on an orbital trajectory. If we're precise and patient enough, we can get it coming in to a spot in low Earth orbit (although I'd be nervous about missing this by a couple hundred miles in the wrong direction), but it would be going much too fast to be in orbit. It would slingshot around Earth and head off somewhere else.
The other problem is that too many of the US public thinks that people who can innovate are snobby overeducated elites, like those people in California who think they should have some influence over who becomes President.
I'm a software developer. If I don't want to work from 9 to 11, I don't have to. I should notify some people here if I'm not going to, much like an Uber driver has to notify someone whether he or she is on or off duty.
Some core beliefs in Buddhism aren't mystical. You can be a materialist and still believe in the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Way. Meditation is an act that can be practiced, and does not itself imply spirituality or mysticism. You can consider nirvana to be an optimal brain state. You can think of Gautama as a possibly mythical person who gave very good advice. You can come up with something recognizably Buddhist or Buddhism-derived that isn't mystical.
Traditional Buddhism does get into a lot of non-materialistic concepts, like the world being illusion and people reincarnating, but I'm not sure that getting off the wheel of rebirth is quite as core a belief as the method you're supposed to use to do so.
In other words, you and I agree that there should be mandatory contributions to a government for some things, and that other things should be controlled by individuals. We just differ about which things.
Powershell used to be an optional addition. My wife was very frustrated by that sometime. She wanted to do something, I don't remember what, and every way she saw to do that in windows was in Powershell, which her users didn't have installed.
UTF-16 also needs special routines to calculate string length, if you get into some other alphabets. There's a lot more than 65,536 code points in Unicode. A strict 16-bit character type (UCS-2) mostly works in Unicode if you stick to certain parts of the world.
Personally, I don't see the need for a 64-bit character set. 32 bits allows for about four billion code points, while Unicode limits itself to about a million and doesn't seen stretched.
On Slashdot? You've got to be kidding!
The US M0 money supply right now is about 3.7 trillion dollars. If Bitcoin were to expand to cover the US economy, 1% of it would be worth $37 billion. That's an awful lot of money for one individual to make by kicking something into motion and disappearing. The fact that a lot of Bitcoin are held by people who invested early is going to be a big drag on its general acceptance.
As far as the government is concerned, Bitcoin is a commodity, and the government has not made it illegal to trade in grain or copper. The government does require that profits and losses be accounted for, and that money laundering be avoided. The US government will not raid exchanges unless they think something illegal is going on, same as a coal exchange. There's no laws against using foreign currency; it's less convenient because the accounting has to be in dollars, and because it's easier to spend dollars than yen around here.
There's reasons why I don't expect Bitcoin to become really successful, but government intervention isn't one of them.
Except that someone is going to have the Bitcoin for a period of time. If I use it on a transaction basis, I'm buying Bitcoin and transferring it. I have to buy it from somebody who holds Bitcoin over a period of time, and that business is going to be very interested in value fluctuation. It will have to allow for all sorts of fluctuations. If the price goes down on a short-term basis, they have to deal with people who buy their Bitcoin and don't immediately dump it back into the system, and if the price is low they need more Bitcoin to cover individual transactions. There's a lot of risks.
Businesses charge for risks they take. The whole insurance industry is a lot of companies accepting cash from you to take over your financial risks. It can be lucrative. The more risk, the more charge.
Therefore, even if you use Bitcoin as an immediate transaction, you'll be paying for its fluctuations.
Cash is not a good investment strategy, but I usually have less than 1% of my liquid assets in cash or the equivalent. I know how much goes into my checking account a month, as a general rule, and I know how much comes out. If I didn't know to within 20% what my account balance was going to be, my financial life would be more complicated.
False. There's plenty that haven't cashed and burned, including the US dollar, the Euro, and the pound. It could be that they're going to crash and burn sometime, but that's at least not obvious.
Thing is, somebody has to hold the Bitcoin. If you have it in your wallet, you're taking the risk and possible gain if Bitcoin changes in value. If you buy it from an exchange when you want to transfer money, somebody else is taking the risk, and businesses charge when they take on risks. If Bitcoin were stable relative to the dollar, that's not much risk, but if it's volatile there's more risk and exchanges will have to charge more for their services.
Bitcoin is an asset, meaning that you have to keep the accounting on buying it when for what price and selling (including paying for things with it) it when and for what price. This will yield a gain or loss in USD, and that affects your adjusted gross income for tax purposes. It's easier to use dollars in the US, since there's no accounting involved.
Yes, but if the banks decide to undercut Bitcoin for international transfers they can. Their processes are potentially much more efficient. One advantage of Bitcoin could be that it forces banks to make account-to-account-anywhere transfers cheaper and easier.
Don't you also have to note when you acquired the bitcoin and when you spent it, to know what taxes you pay? There's a time limit before which appreciation is taxed as regular income in the US, and after which it's subject to capital gains tax. I would rather not have to worry about tax differences between paying for something yesterday and today.
It's in the best interests of a lot of people that Bitcoin does not get big. If it does, that leaves a lot of early entrants fabulously wealthy. It's more appealing to go to a digital currency that doesn't have the initial hoarding problem.
Some people want their files back, and will want to pay. If they know that they'll be criminally charged if news gets out, they will be sure not to tell anyone, and we'll never know how much is going on, and we'll miss out on data that might be useful in tracing it. Bad guys started using ransomware without knowing what the profit would be. The ones who know that it can make money will continue to do it, and new entrants into the field won't know whether or not it works. I think we're better off encouraging people to report it to the police.
People really do seem to struggle with conceivable things, don't they? They can take the worst-case scenario they can possibly imagine and imagine it's worth considering. What if all solar panels turn out to emit toxic gas under certain circumstances, which happen, and millions and millions of people die as a result? It's about as realistic as imagining a nuclear accident of unprecedented severity.
You say I've got the causality wrong. Personally, I think the Civil Rights Act had a good deal to do with the change in society. I don't have all that much evidence, but I'm not making a claim.
The government actions included using force to desegregate Southern schools against threats of violence. In some states, their laws were invalidated by Federal action. It's at least partly correct to think that state and local laws were changed following the change in their society, but that change was given an assist by the Feds.
It has nothing to do with homophobia, it has to do with secrets. If a person has a secret that would really hurt his or her life if it got out, that person is a security risk. Someone who is open about their sexual orientation is not therefore a threat, since there's no blackmail potential.
Western civilization got where it is by being almost completely uncaring about the environment. We're asking less developed countries to advance economically while being careful about the environment. It seems to me that, unless we provide help, we're asking them to do what we were unwilling to do.
Suppose that a developing country needs a new power plant, and the cheapest available that will work is coal-burning. If we expect them to go to something less destructive, shouldn't we pay them for it?
Define "past".
If you're thinking of the past as a hundred million years, then, no, we're well within those limits. From my petty human perspective, though, I don't see that as being immediately relevant.
Actually, if we burn most of the fossil fuels, the world will eventually settle into a reasonably stable state, and the biosphere is likely to catch up in a few million years, and it may well be better in some ways than what we have now. This isn't very comforting for those wondering how their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will do, barring stupendous advances in longevity.