Well, when you get right down to it, with evolution and all, there aren't really any species either, just one generation of an organization halfway between being something and being something else, but that doesn't stop scientists from classifying things.
You do realize that if you are blaming all Muslims / Arabs for the things a bunch of Wahabbist extremists did, you probably are racist, right?
Bigoted maybe, but not racist. An example of a racist would be someone who implies that all Muslims/Arabs are a single race and calls people racists for saying derogatory things about them.
Probably the last time anyone here heard about an artificial heart was with the Jarvik 7 back in '82. It might have been considered a failure, though the patient survived for 112 days, he (Barney Clark) asked several times to be allowed to die. Was it a bad idea? Well, there's been plenty of developments in all that time, and it is far from perfected, but I have little doubt that we'll get it right eventually. Or, we could just bury our heads in the sand, and not evolve.
How is keeping a body alive long past its ability to reproduce or to contribute to society's production considered a positive evolutionary trait?
the expectation of privacy on the internet is generally ridiculous.
So what? That doesn't mean you get to ask for everybody's password to go investigate what they have posted. if there is no privacy, then they can take their own damn selves onto the interwebs and figure out for themselves what she posted.
A thief is able to break into your house, that doesn't mean that you should be required to give them the keys.
Even given your false dichotomy, are you seriously promoting that killing an unborn human is better than that same human being born and raised poorly?
Hmm, that is hard to say, it should probably be considered on a case by case basis. Once the person is old enough to think rationally, they should be asked if they would rather have been killed in the womb. if yes, then we kill them.
Look at the districts reply: We searched her cell phone without permission. We won't do that again. Now we have a standard form requiring permission that all students must sign.
So if all students must sign this, then why even have a form? What if they don't agree with the policy? Do they kick them out of school? Isn't the state required to provide education to the student, even if the child does not agree to an illegal and unconstitutional search of their property? If this was a private school, that is one thing, but a government funded public education facility must comply with the laws of the government. If they refuse, the government should withdraw the funding and throw the administrators in jail.
The Principal and the School District did not violate the ToS. The student did. Twice. First, by being underage, and then by allowing someone else to know her password. The second one was clearly under duress, so she could probably argue her way out of that one if the Facebook Police come after her. And the first one, they don't care about because all they care about is dollars, but they put the age requirement on there so they can have the appearance of pretending to care about the children.
Since the price has gone back down, and BTC is now perceived to be worth even less than half as much on current exchanges as during that temporary runup ---- how come the minimum transaction fee wasn't restored to its original place, huh?
You don't HAVE to use the minimum transaction fee. You could always offer more to process your transaction.
I suspect they also haven't modified the minimum transaction fee because the price is still pretty high, about half of the all time high in fact. They adjusted it down because the price had gone up by orders of magnitude since the original minimum was set. It has not changed by an order of magnitude since the last change.
Quote : "Miners also get some percentage of transaction fees for verifying transactions."
Thanks for proving it is a ponzi scheme.
I'm sorry, but I was unable to prove it was a Ponzi scheme, because it isn't. ANY miner is compensated transaction fees for verifying transactions, whether they started mining bitcoins from the beginning or started yesterday. As a bonus, if the early adaptors STOPPED mining, they would NOT get transaction fees, while the latecomers would. Some Ponzi scheme.
Also, bitcoin is a currency and is not intended as an investment. In order for something to be a Ponzi scheme, it must first be an investment.
If you take a look at world M0 money supply, and visualize it replaced with Bitcoin, each Bitcoin would have to be worth an incredible amount of money, and people who bought in at $1K/Bitcoin and hung onto their Bitcoins will be fabulously wealthy. Do I want to encourage that by buying into Bitcoin?
You must be a bank. Setting up a wallet on your computer such that it can't be emptied or lost is quite easy. You encrypt your wallet so that no one else can access it. Then you have multiple copies of it, so that you can't lose it in a hardware failure.
Then, of course, you can always set up your client wherever you want in order to make payments. You can even do it from your phone.
They're relatively easy to come into possession of early on. But later, it will be very difficult to obtain these invisible objects and they total number of these objects is limited! So act now! Buy them up quickly before they are worth more than you can afford!
They were easy to generate early on, but they also were not worth much either, so mining them was just about as lucrative then as it was now. If they had sold their coins as they were mined back then, they would have made the same gains as you would now if you decided to mine. The fact is, some people decided to sit on some of these worthless pieces of data, and today they are worth $650. That doesn't mean it is a Ponzi scheme, it just means that they took a risk (or forgot they had the BTC until it was suddenly worth a lot of money), and it paid off. They could just as easily have lost all of their CPU cycles when they whole thing flopped.
If you have no bitcoins, you can buy them on an exchange. You are under no obligation to leave them sitting on that exchange as an IOU. They can send them directly to your PC, and you can be in complete control of them.
The whole "keep a copy for later use" is not even worth going into. When a coin is transferred, the transaction is validated by p2p and if they tried to "spend" that coin, it would not be allowed by the network.
But the same people who decry bitcoin for not expanding or contracting also favor the gold standard in which one dollar was always equal to one fixed amount of gold. Since the supply of gold was constant, so also would the currency supply.
Could you please inform me as to who my upline and my downline is for bitcoin, because when I "recruit" someone into using bitcoin, I am not aware of any way for me to profit from their "investment", nor do I know who is receiving profit from MY "investment". My investment, being, of course, some CPU cycles and some electricity cost. It's not like I plunked down cold hard USD for bitcoins. That is not the point anyway. It is not intended to be an investment vehicle at all.
Early adopters make their money purely from people coming in later on,
Wrong, early adopters made money by mining and spending or converting to another currency. If they held on to their coins, they made money as well, by happenstance. But bitcoin is not intended to be an investment, so the fact that they made money by holding on to the coins must be dismissed.
the generation curve is skewed to give them a huge profit for much less work.
Wrong. When they did the work to mine these coins, the price point was such that the ROI is very similar to what it is now.
When combined with the facts that there's no value being created and that the currency is designed to be massively deflationary, you wind up with really only the conclusion that it's a type of Ponzi scheme.
Wrong. Ponzi schemes have nothing to do with deflationary currencies. They have to do with investments where incoming new investors directly pay off early investors.
Bitcoin's fundamental problem, and why it has all the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme (if it walks like a duck...) is that it is a deflationary currency by design due to the deliberate reduction in the supply of bit coins over time and the consequent artificial scarcity. No, being able to divide bitcoins into smaller parts does not solve this problem! It remains deflationary. One can assume one of two things about the designer(s) of Bitcoin:
Wrong, there is no reduction in the supply of bitcoins. In fact, the supply is increasing daily, up to a set limited amount.
It is deflationary, however, in that usage of bitcoin is increasing faster than the supply, and of course once they stop being mined the supply will be constant. However, there is nothing particularly evil about being deflationary. Gold is deflationary, for example.
Bitcoin as a whole fits the Ponzi scheme pattern, because at the exchanges the money used to pay off the early miners comes directly from people now buying coins.
Wrong, nobody is paying off miners based on latecomers. Miners already got paid by the bitcoin they mined, and the same would happen if a latecomer started mining today. Miners also get some percentage of transaction fees for verifying transactions.
interestingly it actually fails all its own tests. It isn't stable, certainly isn't fast or inexpensive and it most definitely isn't widely accepted. and assuming the early people will benefit from rise in value sounds dangerously close to being a Ponzi, the only thing saving them from being one is they aren't making a guarantee on the rise.
That and the fact that a rise also benefits the latecomers. and that the latecomers are not dependent upon even later-comers in order to benefit. And the fact that making money is not one of the purported benefits of using bitcoin, although it has turned out to be an unexpected bonus for some.
You obviously have never lived in the Bible Belt:) It's ok, it is not a desireable place to live, primarily because the vast majority of people DO believe in the strawman.
I live in the heart of the Bible belt, in Oklahoma. 90% or more of my friends and family are Christians. I know hundreds of Christians, and yet no one has ever made a claim that macroevolution is from a fully formed new species being born of a different species. I have never heard this argument.
It would be convenient to be able to paint your enemy as being that dumb, but in reality that is not the case. Most of the people that people like to portray as dumb inbred hicks are just as smart if not smarter than the people who think they are so intellectually high and mighty.
Anybody can refute another system using the rules of their own system. The whole problem is that people are questioning the system. What Gould did is the equivalent of starting with the assumption that his system is correct and then trying to prove it wrong by evaluating another system within the confines of his own. The result is exactly what you would expect.
And what do I get for my trouble of paying for affordable healthcare I never used for all these years? QUADRUPLE THE RATE. Thanks a lot Obamacare.
I have a hard time believing your rate quadrupled. I mean, mine only tripled. Yup , in one month, it tripled. Of course, over the last 3 years it actually went up by a factor of 9.
Obamacare has forced me to drop my individual affordable healthcare because the rate tripled. Now I am having to go to my employer to try to get on the insurance plan that they offer. It is still twice what I was paying last year and four times what I was paying three years ago, but it is better than three times as high. At current growth rates, it will only be two more years before I have to spend 100% of my income on insurance.
Wait, Church believes Earth is the center of the Earth, yet Galileo didn't believe that. But Galileo was a Christian. I'm so confused. Oh, wait, Galileo was wrong about the tides. Ah, all is now reconciled.
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Well, when you get right down to it, with evolution and all, there aren't really any species either, just one generation of an organization halfway between being something and being something else, but that doesn't stop scientists from classifying things.
You do realize that if you are blaming all Muslims / Arabs for the things a bunch of Wahabbist extremists did, you probably are racist, right?
Bigoted maybe, but not racist. An example of a racist would be someone who implies that all Muslims/Arabs are a single race and calls people racists for saying derogatory things about them.
Probably the last time anyone here heard about an artificial heart was with the Jarvik 7 back in '82. It might have been considered a failure, though the patient survived for 112 days, he (Barney Clark) asked several times to be allowed to die. Was it a bad idea? Well, there's been plenty of developments in all that time, and it is far from perfected, but I have little doubt that we'll get it right eventually. Or, we could just bury our heads in the sand, and not evolve.
How is keeping a body alive long past its ability to reproduce or to contribute to society's production considered a positive evolutionary trait?
the expectation of privacy on the internet is generally ridiculous.
So what? That doesn't mean you get to ask for everybody's password to go investigate what they have posted. if there is no privacy, then they can take their own damn selves onto the interwebs and figure out for themselves what she posted.
A thief is able to break into your house, that doesn't mean that you should be required to give them the keys.
Even given your false dichotomy, are you seriously promoting that killing an unborn human is better than that same human being born and raised poorly?
Hmm, that is hard to say, it should probably be considered on a case by case basis. Once the person is old enough to think rationally, they should be asked if they would rather have been killed in the womb. if yes, then we kill them.
A 13 year old can't give permission.
Heck, a 13 year old can't even have a Facebook account.
Look at the districts reply: We searched her cell phone without permission. We won't do that again. Now we have a standard form requiring permission that all students must sign.
So if all students must sign this, then why even have a form? What if they don't agree with the policy? Do they kick them out of school? Isn't the state required to provide education to the student, even if the child does not agree to an illegal and unconstitutional search of their property? If this was a private school, that is one thing, but a government funded public education facility must comply with the laws of the government. If they refuse, the government should withdraw the funding and throw the administrators in jail.
The Principal and the School District did not violate the ToS. The student did. Twice. First, by being underage, and then by allowing someone else to know her password. The second one was clearly under duress, so she could probably argue her way out of that one if the Facebook Police come after her. And the first one, they don't care about because all they care about is dollars, but they put the age requirement on there so they can have the appearance of pretending to care about the children.
... apparently people are still using Facebook.
Well, they were two years ago. From TFA:
Looks like she violated the Facebook ToS already by not being old enough to have a Facebook account.
Since the price has gone back down, and BTC is now perceived to be worth even less than half as much on current exchanges as during that temporary runup ---- how come the minimum transaction fee wasn't restored to its original place, huh?
You don't HAVE to use the minimum transaction fee. You could always offer more to process your transaction.
I suspect they also haven't modified the minimum transaction fee because the price is still pretty high, about half of the all time high in fact. They adjusted it down because the price had gone up by orders of magnitude since the original minimum was set. It has not changed by an order of magnitude since the last change.
Quote : "Miners also get some percentage of transaction fees for verifying transactions."
Thanks for proving it is a ponzi scheme.
I'm sorry, but I was unable to prove it was a Ponzi scheme, because it isn't. ANY miner is compensated transaction fees for verifying transactions, whether they started mining bitcoins from the beginning or started yesterday. As a bonus, if the early adaptors STOPPED mining, they would NOT get transaction fees, while the latecomers would. Some Ponzi scheme.
Also, bitcoin is a currency and is not intended as an investment. In order for something to be a Ponzi scheme, it must first be an investment.
If you take a look at world M0 money supply, and visualize it replaced with Bitcoin, each Bitcoin would have to be worth an incredible amount of money, and people who bought in at $1K/Bitcoin and hung onto their Bitcoins will be fabulously wealthy. Do I want to encourage that by buying into Bitcoin?
Umm....yes?
You must be a bank. Setting up a wallet on your computer such that it can't be emptied or lost is quite easy. You encrypt your wallet so that no one else can access it. Then you have multiple copies of it, so that you can't lose it in a hardware failure.
Then, of course, you can always set up your client wherever you want in order to make payments. You can even do it from your phone.
They're relatively easy to come into possession of early on. But later, it will be very difficult to obtain these invisible objects and they total number of these objects is limited! So act now! Buy them up quickly before they are worth more than you can afford!
They were easy to generate early on, but they also were not worth much either, so mining them was just about as lucrative then as it was now. If they had sold their coins as they were mined back then, they would have made the same gains as you would now if you decided to mine. The fact is, some people decided to sit on some of these worthless pieces of data, and today they are worth $650. That doesn't mean it is a Ponzi scheme, it just means that they took a risk (or forgot they had the BTC until it was suddenly worth a lot of money), and it paid off. They could just as easily have lost all of their CPU cycles when they whole thing flopped.
If you have no bitcoins, you can buy them on an exchange. You are under no obligation to leave them sitting on that exchange as an IOU. They can send them directly to your PC, and you can be in complete control of them.
The whole "keep a copy for later use" is not even worth going into. When a coin is transferred, the transaction is validated by p2p and if they tried to "spend" that coin, it would not be allowed by the network.
But the same people who decry bitcoin for not expanding or contracting also favor the gold standard in which one dollar was always equal to one fixed amount of gold. Since the supply of gold was constant, so also would the currency supply.
Could you please inform me as to who my upline and my downline is for bitcoin, because when I "recruit" someone into using bitcoin, I am not aware of any way for me to profit from their "investment", nor do I know who is receiving profit from MY "investment". My investment, being, of course, some CPU cycles and some electricity cost. It's not like I plunked down cold hard USD for bitcoins. That is not the point anyway. It is not intended to be an investment vehicle at all.
Early adopters make their money purely from people coming in later on,
Wrong, early adopters made money by mining and spending or converting to another currency. If they held on to their coins, they made money as well, by happenstance. But bitcoin is not intended to be an investment, so the fact that they made money by holding on to the coins must be dismissed.
the generation curve is skewed to give them a huge profit for much less work.
Wrong. When they did the work to mine these coins, the price point was such that the ROI is very similar to what it is now.
When combined with the facts that there's no value being created and that the currency is designed to be massively deflationary, you wind up with really only the conclusion that it's a type of Ponzi scheme.
Wrong. Ponzi schemes have nothing to do with deflationary currencies. They have to do with investments where incoming new investors directly pay off early investors.
Bitcoin's fundamental problem, and why it has all the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme (if it walks like a duck...) is that it is a deflationary currency by design due to the deliberate reduction in the supply of bit coins over time and the consequent artificial scarcity. No, being able to divide bitcoins into smaller parts does not solve this problem! It remains deflationary. One can assume one of two things about the designer(s) of Bitcoin:
Wrong, there is no reduction in the supply of bitcoins. In fact, the supply is increasing daily, up to a set limited amount.
It is deflationary, however, in that usage of bitcoin is increasing faster than the supply, and of course once they stop being mined the supply will be constant. However, there is nothing particularly evil about being deflationary. Gold is deflationary, for example.
Bitcoin as a whole fits the Ponzi scheme pattern, because at the exchanges the money used to pay off the early miners comes directly from people now buying coins.
Wrong, nobody is paying off miners based on latecomers. Miners already got paid by the bitcoin they mined, and the same would happen if a latecomer started mining today. Miners also get some percentage of transaction fees for verifying transactions.
interestingly it actually fails all its own tests. It isn't stable, certainly isn't fast or inexpensive and it most definitely isn't widely accepted. and assuming the early people will benefit from rise in value sounds dangerously close to being a Ponzi, the only thing saving them from being one is they aren't making a guarantee on the rise.
That and the fact that a rise also benefits the latecomers. and that the latecomers are not dependent upon even later-comers in order to benefit. And the fact that making money is not one of the purported benefits of using bitcoin, although it has turned out to be an unexpected bonus for some.
You obviously have never lived in the Bible Belt :) It's ok, it is not a desireable place to live, primarily because the vast majority of people DO believe in the strawman.
I live in the heart of the Bible belt, in Oklahoma. 90% or more of my friends and family are Christians. I know hundreds of Christians, and yet no one has ever made a claim that macroevolution is from a fully formed new species being born of a different species. I have never heard this argument.
It would be convenient to be able to paint your enemy as being that dumb, but in reality that is not the case. Most of the people that people like to portray as dumb inbred hicks are just as smart if not smarter than the people who think they are so intellectually high and mighty.
Anybody can refute another system using the rules of their own system. The whole problem is that people are questioning the system. What Gould did is the equivalent of starting with the assumption that his system is correct and then trying to prove it wrong by evaluating another system within the confines of his own. The result is exactly what you would expect.
And what do I get for my trouble of paying for affordable healthcare I never used for all these years? QUADRUPLE THE RATE. Thanks a lot Obamacare.
I have a hard time believing your rate quadrupled. I mean, mine only tripled. Yup , in one month, it tripled. Of course, over the last 3 years it actually went up by a factor of 9.
Obamacare has forced me to drop my individual affordable healthcare because the rate tripled. Now I am having to go to my employer to try to get on the insurance plan that they offer. It is still twice what I was paying last year and four times what I was paying three years ago, but it is better than three times as high. At current growth rates, it will only be two more years before I have to spend 100% of my income on insurance.
Wait, Church believes Earth is the center of the Earth, yet Galileo didn't believe that. But Galileo was a Christian. I'm so confused. Oh, wait, Galileo was wrong about the tides. Ah, all is now reconciled.