Foolish to accept them? They might not be worth much of anything but if someone offers you a bitcoin what exactly is the harm in accepting it? I suppose the EFF might have taken bitcoin from a few people who might otherwise have given dollars, but in the grand scheme of things I doubt they lost out on much if anything.
The reason is the same reason the "Stimulus" mostly went to banks. If that money actually went into real construction and infrastructure projects, it would have been more inflationary than it was.
The reason just printing up a Trillion dollars in new debt and spreading it around did not spark the recovery the politico's sold it to the public with, is the very same reason it did not trigger the total collapse of the dollar the gold bugs thought it would. It by and large ended up filling holes in balance sheets at financials, not circulating, not increasing the velocity of money. I think most of the people in CONgress knew that would happen. That is not to say it might have prevented calamity; I can't say; but it certainly was not represented accurately to the public.
If people purchased actual goods to build with and paid actual laborers to do building, that money would be flying around the economy so fast and in such great quantity people would never be able to spend it fast enough before it loses to much value. You'd make they very dollars you fund the projects with worth to little to pay for them before you complete them.
Recall that only a week ago they used a SWAT team on defaulted student loan
I don't know what incident you are referencing but if any part of that is true, its outrageous on many many levels.
If anyone knows anyone that is in Anonymous or Lulzsec and who is planning to take part in activities, do us all a favor - beat them in the head with a shovel until they change their mind. Reply to This
Is that doing us a favor, maybe this is the sort of thing that start a revolution. Which if SWAT teams are being used for debt collection, I might be supportive of.
Yes, I'd love to see a full accounting of the various bailouts, stress test results, DOJ filings related to the utter lack of documentation used to foreclose, which CEO's trade the most E-mail with the Treasury Dept, etc etc.
This is actually probably some of the most IMPORTANT to the public secrets the government is keeping. Who cares about military documents, and diplomatic cables, this is the stuff of why we evolved in the first place.
Would for profit roads be better for our economy then our present system?
That is actually a good question. Suppose you did pay to use roads per mile, that would impact all sorts of decisions. It would probably lead to much improved transportation efficiency in terms of car pooling; it might change delivery strategies for mail and other items. Many of this nations roads are if poor condition. Most of that is because tax monies that are supposed to maintain them, gas taxes primarily, get diverted elsewhere. Essentially people want other services more and don't want to pay the direct taxes needed to support the road system being maintained to anything more than a barely adequate level.
I heard an economist the other day on the radio argue that the added fuel costs, added ware and tare on motor vehicles, and increased number of accidents as people focus on avoiding holes and other things rather than other traffic cost a great more in total dollars than fixing the roads would.
We won't vote to raise our taxes though, its easier to pay these costs in drips and drabs and never realize what they add up to. I don't know where he got his numbers, I suspect instinctively he was correct however.
The Bitcoin system is robustly designed to continue past the collapse of the US dollar and the world economy, as the Internet, fast computers and reliable electricity are all expected to be readily available when barbarian hordes are wandering the burnt-out post-apocalyptic remnants of civilisation.
Right just as long as you can stop me from punching you out and taking whatever you were hopeful I was going to pay you in bitcoins for.
Customers like the cloud, they have decided that is where their movie, music, file store, and for same very strange reason their word processor and other applications needs to be. They are going to find an ISP that lets them suck as cloud as they can drink at this point even if they have to pay for it.
They heavy users will pay for a while, but the carriers are losing the war even if they win this battle short term. It will follow the same pattern as cellular voice just a decade ago. Remember when you never spoke to someone on their mobile when they were at home, or in their office. They'd answer and call you back, or not answer at all and dial you back from the land line. Conversations on mobiles were kept short.
Now people started to use more mobile time and start calling and complaining about overage charges. Carries ended up losing customers to whoever offered more minutes per dollar that week. People switch plans all the time. They did so until it got to the point that the administrative overhead made no sense for the providers. People used more and more voice and the plans started to accommodate that to keep the customers. These days (outside of prepaid situations) you can't get a mobile contract with fewer minutes of voice than are enough to cover as many hours waking hours as one reasonably keeps in month. In short for the vast majority of users voice is unlimited or close enough.
Data will do the same. They caps will end up so high you have to be in a tiny tiny minority and a somewhat unique situation to hit them. Like you have build a active/active fail-over cluster to keep your bittorent client running with five nines uptime.
I don't see that as confusing at all. I would characterize my self as ant-abortion, and anti-same-sex-marriage. I am perfectly happy to state those opinions, that does not mean I seek to impose my will on others. I would love to convince them to adopt these position but only seek to do so by reason and perhaps emotional appeal. I don't want to use force, and I don't want the state to use force either. I don't see a conflict there.
I am libertarian. As long as others behavior is not infringing on my rights I think others should be allowed to ultimately make as many of their own choices as is possible, while we maintain some kind of loose society. That does not mean I have to "like" everything others might do, or even pretend I think them as anything other then the worst sort of scum roaming the earth. I recognize their RIGHT to be what I consider scum. I am sure on one or more issue they may feel the same way about me. I would want them to recognize my rights.
The state should not be evolved in marriage at all. The law should only see individuals. If any religious institution, or for that matter book club happens to want to recognize any sort of union between people that should be entirely the business of that group an nobody else.
You'd be surprised but I bet many maybe most US manufactures have their shot floor networks connected to the their other networks for one reason or another. Do they firewall the crap out them, well probably but that is no air gap?
In my experience this is how its usually evolved on the networks I've seen
1. Shop floors started off with some proprietary network, not connected to anything else 2. Equipment got upgraded and replaced with cheaper ethernet or token over ethernet solutions 3. Management eventually decides that simplifying and increasing statistics gather and reporting is worth the risk of connecting the shop floor networks to the rest of the corporate networks, even though IT warned them of the potential risks. They tell IT "Just don't let that happen" 4. IT installs good a good firewall with strong rules, and establishes solid procedures around what, how, when, and who connects anything to the shop floor. This works well at time. 5. The vendor, who has never properly documented the communications requirements of their software, sends some techs out to do an upgrade or change or something. Said techs run into problems and lacking any documentation assume its IT's security measures causing them. Management is upset because the line has stopped and they are paying these consultants by the hour on top of that. They demand IT relax the rules. 6. The consultants get the shop floor running again but they never really circle back and tell IT what the issue was, perhaps it was unrelated, who knows. 7. You might think IT will sniff packets for awhile and see what actually could be tightened back down but they won't because, they have other problems and have spent a week being interrupted by the consultants already, management wants to see those other projects getting done. All the procedures don't get updated either. The security measures while still in place are mostly ineffective.
I am not so sure that is even the case. One positive thing that did come out of the IRAQ (which I was supportive of at the time, but in hindsight don't feel it was worth the costs monetary or human) war was that the message it sent. "Don't attack US interests, and don't let people within your boarders attack US interests or you might find yourself being regime changed."
That message has if anything won a good number of "partners" in the war on terror. Sure those governments are not taking anti-terror steps because its the right thing to do but; rather to save their own hides often at the expense of their own who they continue to abuse but it did make use safer.
Libia is NOT a humanitarian question. If we were there for humanitarian reasons, we would be in Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, (a full third of Afican Nations), North Korea, and Perhaps China trying to topple those regimes. Say its for humanitarian reasons is either a lie or a delusion, depending on the speaker.
Qaddafi - was one of the leaders in the region who had suddenly despite his past gotten religion about opposing terror and has been supportive of our security interests, post 911/Iraqi invasion.
By making us a part of this civil war (that's what it is) Obama has change the message form "Don't put us in jeopardy and we won't topple you" to one of "Make sure we need you or that you so dangerous we won't want to risk it". That is not going to be good for our long term interests.
Make no mistake the "He's a son of bitch, but he's our son of bitch" approach for foreign policy this country has had since Truman is not a very smart one, but this new Obama policy of "We are big powerful and above all fickle, your best pal one day and bombing you the next" policy is aggressively stupid.
They don't even need to that. Just because you happen to be using another currency does not mean sales tax does not apply. The government could either accept payment in BitCoin directly or simply insist (as they do today in I think most states) that you pay them in dollars whatever the sales tax would, based on the exchange rate for the date of purchase.
So just because you payed 100 BitCoin for a new stereo rather than $800, in your locality where the total sales tax is 8pct does not mean you don't still owe the government $64, assuming 100 BitCoin was worth $800 that day. Now will they catch you right now, given BitCoin is used by so few, maybe not. Start running a business though and don't report any sales taxes and you are going to get audited. You will then owe interest and penalties as well. So short term the government loses nothing, BitCoin is really no more and no less traceable than cash.
They only issue that could crop up is if the currency is considered more stable than their own dollar and their is flight to it for safety destroying the value of the dollar. Which they would not want because they would have less control over the value of BitCoin. I don't really see that happening anytime soon. If it was backed by a commodity perhaps, but its not; and given its no good for public debts I can't really see if ever becoming a competitor as real wealth store.
Suicide might be technically illegal but its not like they can punish you afterward! If you used some smarts and transferred your assets to those you want to bequeath them before you whack yourself, what can the government do? Nada
What we are talking about here is assisted suicide which is a very different matter. This is not you killing yourself its you asking someone else to do so. This is where there are all sorts of risks and problems associated with: were others pressuring you, did your really ask or was the attending physician just sick of dealing with your case? I am not sure I support assisted suicide even as a libertarian.
Now you have an intrinsic right to slit your wrist (remember vertically never across!) , or take enough aspirin to aneurism, nobody can really take that away from you unless you are being held as prisoner. Frankly death and killing are naturally quite upsetting to most people, I think its rather selfish to even consider involving others in your suicide. if you are going to kill yourself have the decency to do it in private, and don't leave the rest of us with some sorry sounding note that we all have to feel bad about. Keep it brief, "I felt it was time, best wishes to all" or something.
If Terry or anyone else wants to kill himself he should do while he is of sound mind and body and able to do it himself.
The original Duke Nukem 3d certainly was sophomoric in terms of humor as was Manhattan Project but both were witty rather than crude. I am not saying its impossible but you have to be a comic genius to make flinging poo witty; to my knowledge it has not been done. I have no doubt this game is a failure on all fronts. 3D Realms never could get it done because they got into the whole perfect is the enemy of good trap.
They simply were not going to release something that might hurt the franchise to get it out the door. After they sold the property and it was announced the new studio was going to new studio was going to release it in 1 year, it was evident this was going to be paycheck game of low quality to cash in on the franchise value, and their will never be another Duke.
Very good point but I imagine if say you had a crew on the take, a few containers could get offloaded to a smaller pirate vessal while at sea. Such a vessal by virtue of being smaller might not have to dock at busy port with a customs authroirty. They could emty out the container fence the goods and dumpt the empty containers back at sea. Then send the conainter ship crew their cut via WU, or other wire service, and finally do it all again next week.
Dot Net is not going away in Windows 8 and it will probably be supported for at the very least the next decade. I would expect the trend to be away from it though toward emca script to be very real, that and possibly other interpreted languages. The whole bytecode interpreter concept is yesterdays tech. There was a brief period where for performance reasons it made sense, Dot Net if anything appeared after that day was passed. I have been saying this for years now and I stick by it. We are at a point where devices are powerful enough that a purely interpeted language is faster and more felxible to develop in, is more portable, and performs fine for all but a small subset of applications. Those applications that don't work well as interpeted code or so performance intensive that only native code is a real solution, whatever languge you select. Bycode interpeters be it CLR or JVM are answers to a question nobody is really asking anymore. They have little value other than incumbancy.
people make a bog deal out of sex between consenting adults, including the watching of it. The Victorian-esque morality that most aspects of sex are something that people should be ashamed of, including porn
I can't agree. The fact is disease, and unwanted pregnancy don't care that its consensual. The moral majority is correct on this, sex with multiple partners is socially irresponsible. Now as a libertarian I am opposed to anyone telling you that you can't, but even I will support telling you that you shouldn't.
And so you chose Silverlight? Obviously that cross platform requirement was not one you took very seriously. What it runs on Windows x86 and Windows x86-64? Don't bother bringing up moonlight either, first it has near 0 install base and second its very incomplete.
Actually no, as a Libertarian I don't think you get neuclear power at all. These things only get built with subsides and loan grantees, that we don't support. The free market does not build these.
Geeks are not and never were supposed to be intellectuals, they were supposed to be smart and capable. Often being an intellectual correlated with being smart and capable. Its less so today because being an "intellectual" no longer implies being a critical thinker, being open to the facts, questioning ones own assumptions and presumptions; rather it has come to mean in most parts of academia accepting a particular political view point.
It used to be that attending university was a the best route to learning a great deal about a topic you found interesting and wanted to work at applying while at the same time picking up all kinds of useful background information. In many many cases its not anymore. The business people at many schools figured out people don't like paying tens of thousands of dollars and possibly not getting a diploma to show for it. So they watered the curriculum down to the point the sort of person who is a true geek (smart) would have to almost apply themselves to failing in order to do so. Consequently university is depending on your financial resources and interests not the best place to obtain useful education or at least not the most efficient route; for many geeks it is therefore a waste of time.
I have said it before, and I'll say it again: Mac OS X's future is on high end workstations
A market Apple has aggressively ignored going back now all the way to the intel switch. I don't buy it. Especially because the, feature set Apple has mostly put into OS X in recent years has not exactly been the things the high end professional crowed has been seeking in a workstation OS.
I have felt this way about presence technology in general. There may be some applications for it for some people. Very few of us though are doing day to day stuff that is so urgent we can't be interrupted to take care of an emergency. If there is a problem with a major application, page me and I will come running out of my meeting. You don't need to be reading my calendar to find out exactly where I am.
Want to converse, send an e-mail. I will see it pop up, if I feel I can be interrupted I'll reply if not I'll reply later. It should not matter to you if I am on the phone or just thinking through some program logic and don't want to task switch.
All of this type of stuff really just leads to hurt feels for senders and stress for recipients. Recipients feel pressured to react to everything because their "presence" information implies they can, and makes it more difficult to tell little white lies like "I was totally swamped support calls and that's why I could not get back to you right away about the X project."
It might have value among dealers as a secure exchange medium. Its somewhat to forge and it makes it possible to have a mutually trusted third party brokering the transaction without that party needing to understand why or know any of the illicit details.
Consider,
Dealer A: Has a contact he purchase Coke, and LSD from and he in turn sell these on the street or to other lower level deals. Some of his customers want Weed as well. Dealer A knows dealer B who sells lots of weed in his territory.
Dealer B: Has a contact that he can purchase Weed from or perhaps he grows it. He sells it on the street, and some of his customers would also like LSD, he knows Dealer A, who sells this. Sometimes they trade with each other but only when they each of extra product the other wants.
Suppose each of these dealers also know other dealers they can potentially swap product with. Now if Dealer B wants LSD but does not have extra weed, he could perhaps get it on credit with an IOU, from Dealer A. Dealer A however can't do anything Dealer B's IOU, if he had a currency of some time he might be able to make an exchange with Dealer C. Additionally drug dealers may not be the best book keeps or the most honest individuals on the planet. Next week when Dealer B tells Dealer A, "no no I gave you that stuff already" now they have dispute. If they had a secure exchange medium Dealer A would already have Dealer B's Bitcoins and there would be no problem. B is going to have to pony up the drugs to get the Bitcoins back so he can trade again or Dealer A can perhaps say screw you Dealer B and go trade the Bitcoins with Dealer C. A and B might hate each other but things need not escalate to the gang beating level.
No sure this would all work with good old fashion paper dollars, but there is an inherit risk in keeping large quantities of cash or other easily negotiable items lying around. Its not like you typical drug dealer can go to police and a report a theft without exposing himself, nor are thefts of cash usually recovered. Walking into the bank and depositing and withdrawing large quantities of cash, more than they already do would also attract unwanted attention from the wrong people.
I am sorry but that is just not correct. BT has the problem that there is a known limit on how much can ever exist and that number is probably to small. Currencies based on some commodity like Gold on the other hand, provided the exchange rate is fixed properly IE there is enough currency in proportion to the likely amount of total gold you don't have this problem. Now that might not be what you mean by hard currency, ie the currency is not actually made from the commodity just has a fixed exchange rate firmly enforced.
Want to print more currency, no problem just mine more gold. This means that indeed if the economy needs more liquidity, needs more velocity it can be had. It can only be had if the economy is actually productive enough to invest resources in gold mining however. So what a hard currency does do is ensure that some politicians can't just pass an unfunded stimulus package to hand out money to their friends while devaluing the money in your pocket.
With a hard currency if the economy is really grown the money supply can be grown, if its not growing theft from savers is prevented.
He really should run it until '92, when the Internet became accessible to just about everyone and was no longer a strictly military,academic, and industrial plaything. For historical interest those that were active before that date would be of greatest interest. Stopping in '91seems arbitrary.
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Foolish to accept them? They might not be worth much of anything but if someone offers you a bitcoin what exactly is the harm in accepting it? I suppose the EFF might have taken bitcoin from a few people who might otherwise have given dollars, but in the grand scheme of things I doubt they lost out on much if anything.
The reason is the same reason the "Stimulus" mostly went to banks. If that money actually went into real construction and infrastructure projects, it would have been more inflationary than it was.
The reason just printing up a Trillion dollars in new debt and spreading it around did not spark the recovery the politico's sold it to the public with, is the very same reason it did not trigger the total collapse of the dollar the gold bugs thought it would. It by and large ended up filling holes in balance sheets at financials, not circulating, not increasing the velocity of money. I think most of the people in CONgress knew that would happen. That is not to say it might have prevented calamity; I can't say; but it certainly was not represented accurately to the public.
If people purchased actual goods to build with and paid actual laborers to do building, that money would be flying around the economy so fast and in such great quantity people would never be able to spend it fast enough before it loses to much value. You'd make they very dollars you fund the projects with worth to little to pay for them before you complete them.
Recall that only a week ago they used a SWAT team on defaulted student loan
I don't know what incident you are referencing but if any part of that is true, its outrageous on many many levels.
If anyone knows anyone that is in Anonymous or Lulzsec and who is planning to take part in activities, do us all a favor - beat them in the head with a shovel until they change their mind.
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Is that doing us a favor, maybe this is the sort of thing that start a revolution. Which if SWAT teams are being used for debt collection, I might be supportive of.
Yes, I'd love to see a full accounting of the various bailouts, stress test results, DOJ filings related to the utter lack of documentation used to foreclose, which CEO's trade the most E-mail with the Treasury Dept, etc etc.
This is actually probably some of the most IMPORTANT to the public secrets the government is keeping. Who cares about military documents, and diplomatic cables, this is the stuff of why we evolved in the first place.
Would for profit roads be better for our economy then our present system?
That is actually a good question. Suppose you did pay to use roads per mile, that would impact all sorts of decisions. It would probably lead to much improved transportation efficiency in terms of car pooling; it might change delivery strategies for mail and other items. Many of this nations roads are if poor condition. Most of that is because tax monies that are supposed to maintain them, gas taxes primarily, get diverted elsewhere. Essentially people want other services more and don't want to pay the direct taxes needed to support the road system being maintained to anything more than a barely adequate level.
I heard an economist the other day on the radio argue that the added fuel costs, added ware and tare on motor vehicles, and increased number of accidents as people focus on avoiding holes and other things rather than other traffic cost a great more in total dollars than fixing the roads would.
We won't vote to raise our taxes though, its easier to pay these costs in drips and drabs and never realize what they add up to. I don't know where he got his numbers, I suspect instinctively he was correct however.
The Bitcoin system is robustly designed to continue past the collapse of the US dollar and the world economy, as the Internet, fast computers and reliable electricity are all expected to be readily available when barbarian hordes are wandering the burnt-out post-apocalyptic remnants of civilisation.
Right just as long as you can stop me from punching you out and taking whatever you were hopeful I was going to pay you in bitcoins for.
Customers like the cloud, they have decided that is where their movie, music, file store, and for same very strange reason their word processor and other applications needs to be. They are going to find an ISP that lets them suck as cloud as they can drink at this point even if they have to pay for it.
They heavy users will pay for a while, but the carriers are losing the war even if they win this battle short term. It will follow the same pattern as cellular voice just a decade ago. Remember when you never spoke to someone on their mobile when they were at home, or in their office. They'd answer and call you back, or not answer at all and dial you back from the land line. Conversations on mobiles were kept short.
Now people started to use more mobile time and start calling and complaining about overage charges. Carries ended up losing customers to whoever offered more minutes per dollar that week. People switch plans all the time. They did so until it got to the point that the administrative overhead made no sense for the providers. People used more and more voice and the plans started to accommodate that to keep the customers. These days (outside of prepaid situations) you can't get a mobile contract with fewer minutes of voice than are enough to cover as many hours waking hours as one reasonably keeps in month. In short for the vast majority of users voice is unlimited or close enough.
Data will do the same. They caps will end up so high you have to be in a tiny tiny minority and a somewhat unique situation to hit them. Like you have build a active/active fail-over cluster to keep your bittorent client running with five nines uptime.
I don't see that as confusing at all. I would characterize my self as ant-abortion, and anti-same-sex-marriage. I am perfectly happy to state those opinions, that does not mean I seek to impose my will on others. I would love to convince them to adopt these position but only seek to do so by reason and perhaps emotional appeal. I don't want to use force, and I don't want the state to use force either. I don't see a conflict there.
I am libertarian. As long as others behavior is not infringing on my rights I think others should be allowed to ultimately make as many of their own choices as is possible, while we maintain some kind of loose society. That does not mean I have to "like" everything others might do, or even pretend I think them as anything other then the worst sort of scum roaming the earth. I recognize their RIGHT to be what I consider scum. I am sure on one or more issue they may feel the same way about me. I would want them to recognize my rights.
The state should not be evolved in marriage at all. The law should only see individuals. If any religious institution, or for that matter book club happens to want to recognize any sort of union between people that should be entirely the business of that group an nobody else.
You'd be surprised but I bet many maybe most US manufactures have their shot floor networks connected to the their other networks for one reason or another. Do they firewall the crap out them, well probably but that is no air gap?
In my experience this is how its usually evolved on the networks I've seen
1. Shop floors started off with some proprietary network, not connected to anything else
2. Equipment got upgraded and replaced with cheaper ethernet or token over ethernet solutions
3. Management eventually decides that simplifying and increasing statistics gather and reporting is worth the risk of connecting the shop floor networks to the rest of the corporate networks, even though IT warned them of the potential risks. They tell IT "Just don't let that happen"
4. IT installs good a good firewall with strong rules, and establishes solid procedures around what, how, when, and who connects anything to the shop floor. This works well at time.
5. The vendor, who has never properly documented the communications requirements of their software, sends some techs out to do an upgrade or change or something. Said techs run into problems and lacking any documentation assume its IT's security measures causing them. Management is upset because the line has stopped and they are paying these consultants by the hour on top of that. They demand IT relax the rules.
6. The consultants get the shop floor running again but they never really circle back and tell IT what the issue was, perhaps it was unrelated, who knows.
7. You might think IT will sniff packets for awhile and see what actually could be tightened back down but they won't because, they have other problems and have spent a week being interrupted by the consultants already, management wants to see those other projects getting done. All the procedures don't get updated either. The security measures while still in place are mostly ineffective.
I am not so sure that is even the case. One positive thing that did come out of the IRAQ (which I was supportive of at the time, but in hindsight don't feel it was worth the costs monetary or human) war was that the message it sent. "Don't attack US interests, and don't let people within your boarders attack US interests or you might find yourself being regime changed."
That message has if anything won a good number of "partners" in the war on terror. Sure those governments are not taking anti-terror steps because its the right thing to do but; rather to save their own hides often at the expense of their own who they continue to abuse but it did make use safer.
Libia is NOT a humanitarian question. If we were there for humanitarian reasons, we would be in Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, (a full third of Afican Nations), North Korea, and Perhaps China trying to topple those regimes. Say its for humanitarian reasons is either a lie or a delusion, depending on the speaker.
Qaddafi - was one of the leaders in the region who had suddenly despite his past gotten religion about opposing terror and has been supportive of our security interests, post 911/Iraqi invasion.
By making us a part of this civil war (that's what it is) Obama has change the message form "Don't put us in jeopardy and we won't topple you" to one of "Make sure we need you or that you so dangerous we won't want to risk it". That is not going to be good for our long term interests.
Make no mistake the "He's a son of bitch, but he's our son of bitch" approach for foreign policy this country has had since Truman is not a very smart one, but this new Obama policy of "We are big powerful and above all fickle, your best pal one day and bombing you the next" policy is aggressively stupid.
They don't even need to that. Just because you happen to be using another currency does not mean sales tax does not apply. The government could either accept payment in BitCoin directly or simply insist (as they do today in I think most states) that you pay them in dollars whatever the sales tax would, based on the exchange rate for the date of purchase.
So just because you payed 100 BitCoin for a new stereo rather than $800, in your locality where the total sales tax is 8pct does not mean you don't still owe the government $64, assuming 100 BitCoin was worth $800 that day. Now will they catch you right now, given BitCoin is used by so few, maybe not. Start running a business though and don't report any sales taxes and you are going to get audited. You will then owe interest and penalties as well. So short term the government loses nothing, BitCoin is really no more and no less traceable than cash.
They only issue that could crop up is if the currency is considered more stable than their own dollar and their is flight to it for safety destroying the value of the dollar. Which they would not want because they would have less control over the value of BitCoin. I don't really see that happening anytime soon. If it was backed by a commodity perhaps, but its not; and given its no good for public debts I can't really see if ever becoming a competitor as real wealth store.
Suicide might be technically illegal but its not like they can punish you afterward! If you used some smarts and transferred your assets to those you want to bequeath them before you whack yourself, what can the government do? Nada
What we are talking about here is assisted suicide which is a very different matter. This is not you killing yourself its you asking someone else to do so. This is where there are all sorts of risks and problems associated with: were others pressuring you, did your really ask or was the attending physician just sick of dealing with your case? I am not sure I support assisted suicide even as a libertarian.
Now you have an intrinsic right to slit your wrist (remember vertically never across!) , or take enough aspirin to aneurism, nobody can really take that away from you unless you are being held as prisoner. Frankly death and killing are naturally quite upsetting to most people, I think its rather selfish to even consider involving others in your suicide. if you are going to kill yourself have the decency to do it in private, and don't leave the rest of us with some sorry sounding note that we all have to feel bad about. Keep it brief, "I felt it was time, best wishes to all" or something.
If Terry or anyone else wants to kill himself he should do while he is of sound mind and body and able to do it himself.
The original Duke Nukem 3d certainly was sophomoric in terms of humor as was Manhattan Project but both were witty rather than crude. I am not saying its impossible but you have to be a comic genius to make flinging poo witty; to my knowledge it has not been done. I have no doubt this game is a failure on all fronts. 3D Realms never could get it done because they got into the whole perfect is the enemy of good trap.
They simply were not going to release something that might hurt the franchise to get it out the door. After they sold the property and it was announced the new studio was going to new studio was going to release it in 1 year, it was evident this was going to be paycheck game of low quality to cash in on the franchise value, and their will never be another Duke.
Very good point but I imagine if say you had a crew on the take, a few containers could get offloaded to a smaller pirate vessal while at sea. Such a vessal by virtue of being smaller might not have to dock at busy port with a customs authroirty. They could emty out the container fence the goods and dumpt the empty containers back at sea. Then send the conainter ship crew their cut via WU, or other wire service, and finally do it all again next week.
Dot Net is not going away in Windows 8 and it will probably be supported for at the very least the next decade. I would expect the trend to be away from it though toward emca script to be very real, that and possibly other interpreted languages. The whole bytecode interpreter concept is yesterdays tech. There was a brief period where for performance reasons it made sense, Dot Net if anything appeared after that day was passed. I have been saying this for years now and I stick by it. We are at a point where devices are powerful enough that a purely interpeted language is faster and more felxible to develop in, is more portable, and performs fine for all but a small subset of applications. Those applications that don't work well as interpeted code or so performance intensive that only native code is a real solution, whatever languge you select. Bycode interpeters be it CLR or JVM are answers to a question nobody is really asking anymore. They have little value other than incumbancy.
people make a bog deal out of sex between consenting adults, including the watching of it. The Victorian-esque morality that most aspects of sex are something that people should be ashamed of, including porn
I can't agree. The fact is disease, and unwanted pregnancy don't care that its consensual. The moral majority is correct on this, sex with multiple partners is socially irresponsible. Now as a libertarian I am opposed to anyone telling you that you can't, but even I will support telling you that you shouldn't.
experience over the web that was cross platform.
And so you chose Silverlight? Obviously that cross platform requirement was not one you took very seriously. What it runs on Windows x86 and Windows x86-64? Don't bother bringing up moonlight either, first it has near 0 install base and second its very incomplete.
who tries to overthrow the government by running in the elections
Well we certainly would not want candidates with opposing view points participating in elections, that would be inconvenient.
Actually no, as a Libertarian I don't think you get neuclear power at all. These things only get built with subsides and loan grantees, that we don't support. The free market does not build these.
Geeks are not and never were supposed to be intellectuals, they were supposed to be smart and capable. Often being an intellectual correlated with being smart and capable. Its less so today because being an "intellectual" no longer implies being a critical thinker, being open to the facts, questioning ones own assumptions and presumptions; rather it has come to mean in most parts of academia accepting a particular political view point.
It used to be that attending university was a the best route to learning a great deal about a topic you found interesting and wanted to work at applying while at the same time picking up all kinds of useful background information. In many many cases its not anymore. The business people at many schools figured out people don't like paying tens of thousands of dollars and possibly not getting a diploma to show for it. So they watered the curriculum down to the point the sort of person who is a true geek (smart) would have to almost apply themselves to failing in order to do so. Consequently university is depending on your financial resources and interests not the best place to obtain useful education or at least not the most efficient route; for many geeks it is therefore a waste of time.
I have said it before, and I'll say it again: Mac OS X's future is on high end workstations
A market Apple has aggressively ignored going back now all the way to the intel switch. I don't buy it. Especially because the, feature set Apple has mostly put into OS X in recent years has not exactly been the things the high end professional crowed has been seeking in a workstation OS.
I have felt this way about presence technology in general. There may be some applications for it for some people. Very few of us though are doing day to day stuff that is so urgent we can't be interrupted to take care of an emergency. If there is a problem with a major application, page me and I will come running out of my meeting. You don't need to be reading my calendar to find out exactly where I am.
Want to converse, send an e-mail. I will see it pop up, if I feel I can be interrupted I'll reply if not I'll reply later. It should not matter to you if I am on the phone or just thinking through some program logic and don't want to task switch.
All of this type of stuff really just leads to hurt feels for senders and stress for recipients. Recipients feel pressured to react to everything because their "presence" information implies they can, and makes it more difficult to tell little white lies like "I was totally swamped support calls and that's why I could not get back to you right away about the X project."
It might have value among dealers as a secure exchange medium. Its somewhat to forge and it makes it possible to have a mutually trusted third party brokering the transaction without that party needing to understand why or know any of the illicit details.
Consider,
Dealer A: Has a contact he purchase Coke, and LSD from and he in turn sell these on the street or to other lower level deals. Some of his customers want Weed as well. Dealer A knows dealer B who sells lots of weed in his territory.
Dealer B: Has a contact that he can purchase Weed from or perhaps he grows it. He sells it on the street, and some of his customers would also like LSD, he knows Dealer A, who sells this. Sometimes they trade with each other but only when they each of extra product the other wants.
Suppose each of these dealers also know other dealers they can potentially swap product with. Now if Dealer B wants LSD but does not have extra weed, he could perhaps get it on credit with an IOU, from Dealer A. Dealer A however can't do anything Dealer B's IOU, if he had a currency of some time he might be able to make an exchange with Dealer C. Additionally drug dealers may not be the best book keeps or the most honest individuals on the planet. Next week when Dealer B tells Dealer A, "no no I gave you that stuff already" now they have dispute. If they had a secure exchange medium Dealer A would already have Dealer B's Bitcoins and there would be no problem. B is going to have to pony up the drugs to get the Bitcoins back so he can trade again or Dealer A can perhaps say screw you Dealer B and go trade the Bitcoins with Dealer C. A and B might hate each other but things need not escalate to the gang beating level.
No sure this would all work with good old fashion paper dollars, but there is an inherit risk in keeping large quantities of cash or other easily negotiable items lying around. Its not like you typical drug dealer can go to police and a report a theft without exposing himself, nor are thefts of cash usually recovered. Walking into the bank and depositing and withdrawing large quantities of cash, more than they already do would also attract unwanted attention from the wrong people.
I am sorry but that is just not correct. BT has the problem that there is a known limit on how much can ever exist and that number is probably to small. Currencies based on some commodity like Gold on the other hand, provided the exchange rate is fixed properly IE there is enough currency in proportion to the likely amount of total gold you don't have this problem. Now that might not be what you mean by hard currency, ie the currency is not actually made from the commodity just has a fixed exchange rate firmly enforced.
Want to print more currency, no problem just mine more gold. This means that indeed if the economy needs more liquidity, needs more velocity it can be had. It can only be had if the economy is actually productive enough to invest resources in gold mining however. So what a hard currency does do is ensure that some politicians can't just pass an unfunded stimulus package to hand out money to their friends while devaluing the money in your pocket.
With a hard currency if the economy is really grown the money supply can be grown, if its not growing theft from savers is prevented.
He really should run it until '92, when the Internet became accessible to just about everyone and was no longer a strictly military,academic, and industrial plaything. For historical interest those that were active before that date would be of greatest interest. Stopping in '91seems arbitrary.