Bitcoin can be traded for drugs, hookers, euros, dollars, bribes, and gift cards for most major vendors. The biggest limitation is the technical skills needed to use bitcoin effectively and to access something like Silkroad. A card like this makes it extremely easy to run small amounts of cash through bitcoin. Now you can have an easy way to pay for classified items off craigslist and the like. Not to mention an easy way to pay loaned money or send money to little timmy. You can give your kid his lunch money and allowance on something like this. Even if you won't be able to say funds going through this card are anonymous the source of those funds can still be anonymous in bitcoin land so this is still an effective way to launder money as well.
If you don't think these massive multi-billion dollar markets are enough to support bitcoin you are crazy. Drugs alone are enough to support bitcoin.
It is annoying that nobody offers a way to buy small amounts of coins quickly with a credit/debit card and no waiting but that will change too. At some point people will realize that the risk of reversed transactions vs the permanent bitcoin payout isn't any different than what brick and mortor merchants face. If you reverse payment after ordering books on Amazon they don't get the books back. It can and does happen all the time. This risk is just part of the cost of doing business.
Using the term liberal in a derogatory manner suggests a conservative. conservatives are the group with the fundie christrians... the group that literally thinks they are holier than thou. That is amusing as hell. Liberals are stuck up because they think they are more educated than you. Conservatives are stuck up because they have more money than you. Either variety is an asshole who is bound to lose their data.
What does right or deserve have to do with anything? Life doesn't revolve around a merit system, it revolves around a reality system. In reality if you go around pissing off food service staff you HAVE eaten spit whether you knew it or not.
You have an anticipatable consequence and the ability to avoid it. Do you A, not be an ass to service staff and never eat bodily fluids or B be an ass to service staff because two wrongs don't make a right?
It isn't black and white, it is perfectly possible for it to be both your fault and their fault even if you didn't do anything "wrong". It's sort of like the old saying regarding right of way in traffic "don't be dead right."
You seem to live under this delusion that something being against the law/rules actually makes it not happen.
I'm not saying the behavior is "acceptable" I'm saying it occurs, everyone knows it occurs and as the customer you have the power to avoid it by simply not being an asshole. Or in the case of your data not being an ignorant fool who needs to take your pc to a tech shop.
Unlike most hovercraft this looks like it has decent control. A normal hovercraft couldn't be kept from floating into oncoming traffic on the road. This looks like it could. Beyond rough terrain that has significant benefits in reducing wear on the road and eliminating tires and the hassles that come with them.
I'm reasonably impressed just by what I saw in the video. That level of directional control is impressive for a hovercraft. From what I've seen you normally wouldn't be able to keep one in your lane on the road which is one of the primary reasons you don't seem them used for consumer travel.
If it can get substantial height that is a real bonus but it is cool stuff either way.
'Customers may have also lost their data if they weren't polite when coming in for a repair, or the 'Genius' help may have been intoxicated."'
Sorry but this ranks right up there with having gf or self porn copied off your systems. Should the tech be doing this stuff? Of course not. That doesn't mean you shouldn't own your own responsibility for your bad attitude or incompetence. This is no different than getting spit in your food if you are the ass who shows up 5 mins before closing or you condescend to the people making your food.
Sorry, if you want to be dick, snarky, or a condescending prick you deserve what karma serves you.
"If your transaction system is sufficiently insecure that your only solution to fraud and money laundering..."
Broken logic here. There is nothing about taking reasonable precaution in the event some fraud does occur that suggests it is the ONLY solution they can or do use.
Sounds like cause to not trust an exchange. The integrity of some exchange != integrity of the bitcoin. Bitcoin itself is a peer to peer system, every cycle spent mining actually makes the encryption even more ridiculously secure. The botnet running on your system was actually more reason to trust bitcoin than the other way around.
Why would you withdraw cash and spend it at McDonalds if you have a completely anonymous Mastercard that you can use directly? Cash uses are very limited these days and look odd if they are more than $40 or so, you can use a credit card everywhere in any amount from $0.10 to $5,000 and nobody blinks. This works especially well if you have a legitimate income stream that can be used to explain how you pay your household expenses. Using your bit funded card frees all your income up for funding on the book transactions and house expenses like rent, utilities, and gas so you look good in an audit. You pay all your incidentals with your card, cash, or bitcoin.
If you have serious bank coming in through bitcoin or no legit source of income you are better off with it coming from bitcoin than cash. You can make web-based ventures be the source of the income. You can generate anonymous bitcoin addresses to be the source of income all day long. There are no co-conspirators to refute you and no way to trace transactions to verify if anyone actually uses your service for real. Just computer generate bogus transaction records that add up to the right figures. There are no fees to transfer bitcoin in and out of Mt. Gox, only to trade it for other currency. You can do that transfer, call the fees a business expense, pay your taxes like a good citizen, and walk away with perfectly clean and laundered income. Your business with be profitable and paying its taxes and is unlikely to ever trigger an audit and would pass it if it did. You can even pay an accountant to do the books and they would never know.
Being that the system is completely peer to peer I'm not sure why you wouldn't trust bitcoin? Unless you just mean trusting price stability thought that is better lately. I wouldn't store value in bitcoin but it works great as a cash transfer medium. Note that none of the fees mentioned here are automatic with bitcoin, they are just what one place is charging. If you are willing to wait a little longer to execute the exchange the fees are actually quite low and a very good bargain for privacy.
Banks charge businesses additional fees for handling too much cash. Additionally there is extra IRS oversight. It is debatable whether anyone is charging more as a result of debit fees.
That said, you are selling your soul by making all your purchases traceable and more so by making that the norm rather than the exception.
I don't know about others but I bought three bitcoin rigs on credit and ran them for three months. During that time I made enough mining (after factoring power, ac, etc) to pay for the hardware. Rich? No, but I got three fairly sweet system upgrades with ridiculous graphics power. Ventures don't have to make you rich individually, they need to make you reasonable returns on investment. A friend mined for 6 months and made $15,000. That won't make anyone rich but when you consider that the rigs run 24/7 without any effort beyond a few hours setup on the part of the miner that isn't a bad income supplement.
The more people who mine, the harder it becomes to unlock blocks but the more the bitcoin becomes worth. Although bitcoin is on speculator markets and the price does bubble with interest... like Slashdot stories.
And yes, there is an exchange rate. Just like real currency there are a number of exchanges with bid and ask price where you can buy and sell Bitcoin with other currency. There are also people that trade gold for Bitcoin and vice versa. I actually considered opening a savings and loan at one point.
The real question is whether or not this Mastercard is going to be locked down to personal identity tracking details. The authorities have made cash very inconvenient to use. I assume this is why most of us don't use it on a daily basis anymore. This has to the potential to bring the convenience of credit/debit along combined with the kind of personal privacy that used to come with cash.
For example, I am about to purchase about $1000 worth of chemicals, glassware, lab supplies, and the like. This is a perfectly legitimate acquisition for the purpose of pursuing a legitimate personal chemistry study and lab work. Purchased through normal channels with my credit card in the most straightforward manner this might instigate not only a conversation with the DEA but might even trigger a hit for enough items on their meth tools list that they could raid and possibly even prosecute me. New laws actually let them send you to jail just by showing you purchased enough items that COULD be used to make meth and they don't publish the list of items. At the very least if they raid they will steal your gear and never return it.
This forces someone like me to skulk and spread purchases between multiple vendors and use cash at all of them. I will have to provide false personal details where possible. None of that is illegal but making large purchases with cash can raise suspicions not just from the staff at supply houses but from my wife.;) A Bitcoin powered Mastercard might be just the trick. It even adds thousands of online suppliers to my acquisition source possibilities.
As a Slashdotter I am proud to say I haven't read TFA. But genetic screening isn't really much better for pretty much the exact same reasons. It won't matter much if done on a small scale but the article definitely implies this should be done across the board. Culling genes from the pool when you really don't have much understanding of how and why they work isn't very bright. Same example applies, the culling of Einstein.
Although similar in concept, high-tech selection and low-tech are very different animals. Low-tech is unlikely to actually cull a specific gene from the species and would require a very long time to do so. High-tech applied broadly could potentially effect genocide in a generation or two.
Ahh... that's another debate altogether. I could play devil's advocate on that one but I happen to agree. That doesn't make direct gene manipulation at this point a good idea. Two wrongs don't make a right.
That "advanced medicine" only exists in labs at this point and hasn't lived up to the hype even there if you mean gene therapy. If you mean our attempts at chemical manipulation of the body which we've been doing for some time I'd consider it an excellent example of why this is a bad idea. We've been finding and producing drugs for a long time and we still can't anticipate or even explain their side effects. The genetic makeup of the body is far more complex than the chemical one. Our drugs for mental treatment are an atrocity, broadly targeting general purpose receptors that we have seen have some sort of correlation to certain neuro functions but don't really know why. That is all despite the fact that we have a pretty solid understanding of chemistry itself, we don't have anywhere near that level of understanding with regard to genetic material. We don't even have coherent and reproducible models for constructing genetic sequences with predictable results instead we use extremely primitive process of elimination combined with correlation to locate genes and then play with them until it seems like what we want to happen happens.
Chemical medical treatments MIGHT do more good than harm but you can also stop taking a drug when someone notices a few years later its causing heart complications, cancer, or neurotoxicity. Embryo screening or gene therapy is permanent not just life long but passed down genetic lines. Complications discovered 20 years later might not even be solvable with intentional genocide. Einstein is thought by many to have had a different brain structure than most. This type of screen could catch and fix that with a morning after pill purchasable over the counter at walgreens and mankind would never even know what it lost.
Farming whether you refer to livestock or genetically modified plants is a different game altogether. Nobody knows and few care if our efforts to produce a larger and juicer tenderloin have reduced the potential for the next cow Einstein to live. It isn't so much that a human is less complex than a cow as that our objects when modifying a cow are far simpler. You could lobotomize every lifestock animal and it probably wouldn't conflict with what we are looking for in them. In the case of crops the results haven't always been spectacular either. The genes have spread in unanticipated ways.
My objections to this idea don't center on ethics or human dignity or some magic sky fairy. I object because in this area we know just enough to be dangerous. It isn't a scare tactic. The consequences of failure are very high. The reasoned confidence level of our conclusions in this area are very poor. The potential benefits are marginal at best relative to the risk. When we move beyond working with DNA like we used to work with photosensitive movie film sequences and get to the point where we work with DNA like we do a disassembled computer executable maybe we can start responsibly thinking about something like this.
I certainly don't think everyone is identically equal. I just don't think genetic superiority belongs to the wealthy. Wealth certainly doesn't follow merit it usually follows the systematic identification and exploitation of those with merit and once the system is in place the genetically inferior offspring tend to gain the benefits in perpetuity.
Semantics, the wealthier you are the more power you wield. The difference between the top 1% and the top.01% simply follows from this principle. Does Jim Carry have "the power"? He's got more of it than me. I can get ignored for protesting in a park and getting tossed out by police. Jim Carry can bankroll lobby movements, bribe politicians, take advantage of the system set up by his fellow rich by sinking all his excess wealth (something only the rich have) in "corporations" and growing it and shifting it around. So long as he can grow his wealth at a rate that produces more each year than he actually needs to support his lifestyle he can avoid taxation on that difference in perpetuity. He can use his wealth and popularity to harness media time and spread propaganda among the bulk population directly as well.
Does Jim Carry have more power than a penniless single mother on food stamps. Yes. Does he have more power than anyone in the middle class? Yes.
I don't know about violating human dignity but it is certainly a bad idea. Wiping out a genetic predisposition is comparable to wiping out a species. The human body is a very fragile and delicately balanced ecosystem and removing a trait can and will have unintended consequences. A genetic predisposition of asthma might have the side effect of enabling a new form of abstract thought.
We are far too ignorant in this area to be playing these games. We could easily cull advantages we never knew existed because of minor medical side effects that accompany them.
The real point about Hemingway seems lost on some. Creativity is the driving factor that separates talent from genius in pragmatic fields like science and engineering just as much as in artistic fields. An interesting read is Zen and the Art of motorcycle maintenance. Creativity is often accompanied by mental illness and the strife one encounters with illness and addiction. We could speculate, mental illness obviously associates with differences in the way brain actually works and perhaps difficulties in life press mental escape, day dreaming, or otherwise facilities out of box thinking. Either way, it is arguable that people who would be culled by this 'ethical' treatment represent the best and worst human civilization.
"That's right, stuff it all ad-hoc into the application layer and then watch things blow up when someone does a manual updated to a table, or someone (inevitably in large corporations) brings another application to connect to that database."
Is it really that outlandish to think your application layer aka logic layer, should do your logic? The post you are replying to is listing a bunch of things like data integrity and concurrency which have nothing to do with application logic and clearly belong to the db to argue with my post saying application logic doesn't belong to the db so do away with that strawman now.
A simple and well designed data structure won't blow up when another application accesses it. Especially since doing so correctly involves an api. And yes, unless you are the db admin or developer you shouldn't be doing manual updates to the applications database. Things blow up with manual updates because the one doing the update doesn't know what they are doing.
"A good database will manage concurrency, data integrity, and more. The idea that you move this out into the application"
I said LOGIC belongs in the application not data management. The moment you start talking about things like procedures you are probably implementing logic in the DB if you are talking about data integrity and concurrency (in terms of data integrity). MySQL can do joins and sub selects without too much trouble but they won't be needed much in a well designed database. These can almost always be replaced with a couple simple queries.
The database is the hardest place to scale up to higher loads and doing so often involves ridiculous iron. Especially if your storage needs aren't easy to distribute among multiple servers without taking a performance hit. Use simple aka fast queries and you can scale at your application which can easily spread the load among thousands of servers. That has nothing to with ideology.
It depends on what you consider light. In general I find that those who are looking for "heavy" in a DB are doing lifting at the DB that could be done in the clients accessing the DB and automagically be faster and more scalable doing so. "Light" is almost always good design and doesn't mean small. You can keep all the heavy out of the database and still need enterprise scaling features that MySQL has while retaining its faster performance for light work than Postgresql.
Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin can be traded for drugs, hookers, euros, dollars, bribes, and gift cards for most major vendors. The biggest limitation is the technical skills needed to use bitcoin effectively and to access something like Silkroad. A card like this makes it extremely easy to run small amounts of cash through bitcoin. Now you can have an easy way to pay for classified items off craigslist and the like. Not to mention an easy way to pay loaned money or send money to little timmy. You can give your kid his lunch money and allowance on something like this. Even if you won't be able to say funds going through this card are anonymous the source of those funds can still be anonymous in bitcoin land so this is still an effective way to launder money as well.
If you don't think these massive multi-billion dollar markets are enough to support bitcoin you are crazy. Drugs alone are enough to support bitcoin.
It is annoying that nobody offers a way to buy small amounts of coins quickly with a credit/debit card and no waiting but that will change too. At some point people will realize that the risk of reversed transactions vs the permanent bitcoin payout isn't any different than what brick and mortor merchants face. If you reverse payment after ordering books on Amazon they don't get the books back. It can and does happen all the time. This risk is just part of the cost of doing business.
Using the term liberal in a derogatory manner suggests a conservative. conservatives are the group with the fundie christrians... the group that literally thinks they are holier than thou. That is amusing as hell. Liberals are stuck up because they think they are more educated than you. Conservatives are stuck up because they have more money than you. Either variety is an asshole who is bound to lose their data.
"Two wrongs don't make a right."
What does right or deserve have to do with anything? Life doesn't revolve around a merit system, it revolves around a reality system. In reality if you go around pissing off food service staff you HAVE eaten spit whether you knew it or not.
You have an anticipatable consequence and the ability to avoid it. Do you A, not be an ass to service staff and never eat bodily fluids or B be an ass to service staff because two wrongs don't make a right?
It isn't black and white, it is perfectly possible for it to be both your fault and their fault even if you didn't do anything "wrong". It's sort of like the old saying regarding right of way in traffic "don't be dead right."
You seem to live under this delusion that something being against the law/rules actually makes it not happen.
I'm not saying the behavior is "acceptable" I'm saying it occurs, everyone knows it occurs and as the customer you have the power to avoid it by simply not being an asshole. Or in the case of your data not being an ignorant fool who needs to take your pc to a tech shop.
"Sorry, you only have the options to take my money or not, you don't have the option to fradulently offer but not deliver goods or services."
Says who?
Unlike most hovercraft this looks like it has decent control. A normal hovercraft couldn't be kept from floating into oncoming traffic on the road. This looks like it could. Beyond rough terrain that has significant benefits in reducing wear on the road and eliminating tires and the hassles that come with them.
I'm reasonably impressed just by what I saw in the video. That level of directional control is impressive for a hovercraft. From what I've seen you normally wouldn't be able to keep one in your lane on the road which is one of the primary reasons you don't seem them used for consumer travel.
If it can get substantial height that is a real bonus but it is cool stuff either way.
We try to... see wikileaks.
'Customers may have also lost their data if they weren't polite when coming in for a repair, or the 'Genius' help may have been intoxicated."'
Sorry but this ranks right up there with having gf or self porn copied off your systems. Should the tech be doing this stuff? Of course not. That doesn't mean you shouldn't own your own responsibility for your bad attitude or incompetence. This is no different than getting spit in your food if you are the ass who shows up 5 mins before closing or you condescend to the people making your food.
Sorry, if you want to be dick, snarky, or a condescending prick you deserve what karma serves you.
That means taking on reporting requirements that require you to crush the anonymity of your clients.
"If your transaction system is sufficiently insecure that your only solution to fraud and money laundering..."
Broken logic here. There is nothing about taking reasonable precaution in the event some fraud does occur that suggests it is the ONLY solution they can or do use.
Sounds like cause to not trust an exchange. The integrity of some exchange != integrity of the bitcoin. Bitcoin itself is a peer to peer system, every cycle spent mining actually makes the encryption even more ridiculously secure. The botnet running on your system was actually more reason to trust bitcoin than the other way around.
Why would you withdraw cash and spend it at McDonalds if you have a completely anonymous Mastercard that you can use directly? Cash uses are very limited these days and look odd if they are more than $40 or so, you can use a credit card everywhere in any amount from $0.10 to $5,000 and nobody blinks. This works especially well if you have a legitimate income stream that can be used to explain how you pay your household expenses. Using your bit funded card frees all your income up for funding on the book transactions and house expenses like rent, utilities, and gas so you look good in an audit. You pay all your incidentals with your card, cash, or bitcoin.
If you have serious bank coming in through bitcoin or no legit source of income you are better off with it coming from bitcoin than cash. You can make web-based ventures be the source of the income. You can generate anonymous bitcoin addresses to be the source of income all day long. There are no co-conspirators to refute you and no way to trace transactions to verify if anyone actually uses your service for real. Just computer generate bogus transaction records that add up to the right figures. There are no fees to transfer bitcoin in and out of Mt. Gox, only to trade it for other currency. You can do that transfer, call the fees a business expense, pay your taxes like a good citizen, and walk away with perfectly clean and laundered income. Your business with be profitable and paying its taxes and is unlikely to ever trigger an audit and would pass it if it did. You can even pay an accountant to do the books and they would never know.
Being that the system is completely peer to peer I'm not sure why you wouldn't trust bitcoin? Unless you just mean trusting price stability thought that is better lately. I wouldn't store value in bitcoin but it works great as a cash transfer medium. Note that none of the fees mentioned here are automatic with bitcoin, they are just what one place is charging. If you are willing to wait a little longer to execute the exchange the fees are actually quite low and a very good bargain for privacy.
Banks charge businesses additional fees for handling too much cash. Additionally there is extra IRS oversight. It is debatable whether anyone is charging more as a result of debit fees.
That said, you are selling your soul by making all your purchases traceable and more so by making that the norm rather than the exception.
I don't know about others but I bought three bitcoin rigs on credit and ran them for three months. During that time I made enough mining (after factoring power, ac, etc) to pay for the hardware. Rich? No, but I got three fairly sweet system upgrades with ridiculous graphics power. Ventures don't have to make you rich individually, they need to make you reasonable returns on investment. A friend mined for 6 months and made $15,000. That won't make anyone rich but when you consider that the rigs run 24/7 without any effort beyond a few hours setup on the part of the miner that isn't a bad income supplement.
The more people who mine, the harder it becomes to unlock blocks but the more the bitcoin becomes worth. Although bitcoin is on speculator markets and the price does bubble with interest... like Slashdot stories.
And yes, there is an exchange rate. Just like real currency there are a number of exchanges with bid and ask price where you can buy and sell Bitcoin with other currency. There are also people that trade gold for Bitcoin and vice versa. I actually considered opening a savings and loan at one point.
The real question is whether or not this Mastercard is going to be locked down to personal identity tracking details. The authorities have made cash very inconvenient to use. I assume this is why most of us don't use it on a daily basis anymore. This has to the potential to bring the convenience of credit/debit along combined with the kind of personal privacy that used to come with cash.
For example, I am about to purchase about $1000 worth of chemicals, glassware, lab supplies, and the like. This is a perfectly legitimate acquisition for the purpose of pursuing a legitimate personal chemistry study and lab work. Purchased through normal channels with my credit card in the most straightforward manner this might instigate not only a conversation with the DEA but might even trigger a hit for enough items on their meth tools list that they could raid and possibly even prosecute me. New laws actually let them send you to jail just by showing you purchased enough items that COULD be used to make meth and they don't publish the list of items. At the very least if they raid they will steal your gear and never return it.
This forces someone like me to skulk and spread purchases between multiple vendors and use cash at all of them. I will have to provide false personal details where possible. None of that is illegal but making large purchases with cash can raise suspicions not just from the staff at supply houses but from my wife. ;) A Bitcoin powered Mastercard might be just the trick. It even adds thousands of online suppliers to my acquisition source possibilities.
As a Slashdotter I am proud to say I haven't read TFA. But genetic screening isn't really much better for pretty much the exact same reasons. It won't matter much if done on a small scale but the article definitely implies this should be done across the board. Culling genes from the pool when you really don't have much understanding of how and why they work isn't very bright. Same example applies, the culling of Einstein.
Although similar in concept, high-tech selection and low-tech are very different animals. Low-tech is unlikely to actually cull a specific gene from the species and would require a very long time to do so. High-tech applied broadly could potentially effect genocide in a generation or two.
Ahh... that's another debate altogether. I could play devil's advocate on that one but I happen to agree. That doesn't make direct gene manipulation at this point a good idea. Two wrongs don't make a right.
That "advanced medicine" only exists in labs at this point and hasn't lived up to the hype even there if you mean gene therapy. If you mean our attempts at chemical manipulation of the body which we've been doing for some time I'd consider it an excellent example of why this is a bad idea. We've been finding and producing drugs for a long time and we still can't anticipate or even explain their side effects. The genetic makeup of the body is far more complex than the chemical one. Our drugs for mental treatment are an atrocity, broadly targeting general purpose receptors that we have seen have some sort of correlation to certain neuro functions but don't really know why. That is all despite the fact that we have a pretty solid understanding of chemistry itself, we don't have anywhere near that level of understanding with regard to genetic material. We don't even have coherent and reproducible models for constructing genetic sequences with predictable results instead we use extremely primitive process of elimination combined with correlation to locate genes and then play with them until it seems like what we want to happen happens.
Chemical medical treatments MIGHT do more good than harm but you can also stop taking a drug when someone notices a few years later its causing heart complications, cancer, or neurotoxicity. Embryo screening or gene therapy is permanent not just life long but passed down genetic lines. Complications discovered 20 years later might not even be solvable with intentional genocide. Einstein is thought by many to have had a different brain structure than most. This type of screen could catch and fix that with a morning after pill purchasable over the counter at walgreens and mankind would never even know what it lost.
Farming whether you refer to livestock or genetically modified plants is a different game altogether. Nobody knows and few care if our efforts to produce a larger and juicer tenderloin have reduced the potential for the next cow Einstein to live. It isn't so much that a human is less complex than a cow as that our objects when modifying a cow are far simpler. You could lobotomize every lifestock animal and it probably wouldn't conflict with what we are looking for in them. In the case of crops the results haven't always been spectacular either. The genes have spread in unanticipated ways.
My objections to this idea don't center on ethics or human dignity or some magic sky fairy. I object because in this area we know just enough to be dangerous. It isn't a scare tactic. The consequences of failure are very high. The reasoned confidence level of our conclusions in this area are very poor. The potential benefits are marginal at best relative to the risk. When we move beyond working with DNA like we used to work with photosensitive movie film sequences and get to the point where we work with DNA like we do a disassembled computer executable maybe we can start responsibly thinking about something like this.
I certainly don't think everyone is identically equal. I just don't think genetic superiority belongs to the wealthy. Wealth certainly doesn't follow merit it usually follows the systematic identification and exploitation of those with merit and once the system is in place the genetically inferior offspring tend to gain the benefits in perpetuity.
Semantics, the wealthier you are the more power you wield. The difference between the top 1% and the top .01% simply follows from this principle. Does Jim Carry have "the power"? He's got more of it than me. I can get ignored for protesting in a park and getting tossed out by police. Jim Carry can bankroll lobby movements, bribe politicians, take advantage of the system set up by his fellow rich by sinking all his excess wealth (something only the rich have) in "corporations" and growing it and shifting it around. So long as he can grow his wealth at a rate that produces more each year than he actually needs to support his lifestyle he can avoid taxation on that difference in perpetuity. He can use his wealth and popularity to harness media time and spread propaganda among the bulk population directly as well.
Does Jim Carry have more power than a penniless single mother on food stamps. Yes. Does he have more power than anyone in the middle class? Yes.
I don't know about violating human dignity but it is certainly a bad idea. Wiping out a genetic predisposition is comparable to wiping out a species. The human body is a very fragile and delicately balanced ecosystem and removing a trait can and will have unintended consequences. A genetic predisposition of asthma might have the side effect of enabling a new form of abstract thought.
We are far too ignorant in this area to be playing these games. We could easily cull advantages we never knew existed because of minor medical side effects that accompany them.
The real point about Hemingway seems lost on some. Creativity is the driving factor that separates talent from genius in pragmatic fields like science and engineering just as much as in artistic fields. An interesting read is Zen and the Art of motorcycle maintenance. Creativity is often accompanied by mental illness and the strife one encounters with illness and addiction. We could speculate, mental illness obviously associates with differences in the way brain actually works and perhaps difficulties in life press mental escape, day dreaming, or otherwise facilities out of box thinking. Either way, it is arguable that people who would be culled by this 'ethical' treatment represent the best and worst human civilization.
"That's right, stuff it all ad-hoc into the application layer and then watch things blow up when someone does a manual updated to a table, or someone (inevitably in large corporations) brings another application to connect to that database."
Is it really that outlandish to think your application layer aka logic layer, should do your logic? The post you are replying to is listing a bunch of things like data integrity and concurrency which have nothing to do with application logic and clearly belong to the db to argue with my post saying application logic doesn't belong to the db so do away with that strawman now.
A simple and well designed data structure won't blow up when another application accesses it. Especially since doing so correctly involves an api. And yes, unless you are the db admin or developer you shouldn't be doing manual updates to the applications database. Things blow up with manual updates because the one doing the update doesn't know what they are doing.
"A good database will manage concurrency, data integrity, and more. The idea that you move this out into the application"
I said LOGIC belongs in the application not data management. The moment you start talking about things like procedures you are probably implementing logic in the DB if you are talking about data integrity and concurrency (in terms of data integrity). MySQL can do joins and sub selects without too much trouble but they won't be needed much in a well designed database. These can almost always be replaced with a couple simple queries.
The database is the hardest place to scale up to higher loads and doing so often involves ridiculous iron. Especially if your storage needs aren't easy to distribute among multiple servers without taking a performance hit. Use simple aka fast queries and you can scale at your application which can easily spread the load among thousands of servers. That has nothing to with ideology.
It depends on what you consider light. In general I find that those who are looking for "heavy" in a DB are doing lifting at the DB that could be done in the clients accessing the DB and automagically be faster and more scalable doing so. "Light" is almost always good design and doesn't mean small. You can keep all the heavy out of the database and still need enterprise scaling features that MySQL has while retaining its faster performance for light work than Postgresql.