It is religion (or at least faith). People believe without proof that it has value.
Is Bitcoin open? Sure. That doesn't automatically mean it has intrinsic value. I can't trade the source code for the Linux kernel to a Microsoft developer - it has no value to them.
Let me answer your question with a question. Do you trust the US Dollar less because of the Leaman Brothers collapse? Trusting or not trusting a currency (virtual, or fiat) based on the actions of one player, regardless of how large, makes no sense. I believe in what Bitcoin is about, I trust it more than I trust the banks and government. I still need fiat money to pay my bills, but would prefer to live without the banks who have already shown to not be trustworthy.
*headdesk*
I'm going to say this as simply as I can:
Bitcoin is also fiat currency
There's nothing backing it. Zero, zip, zilch. At least the US dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, and it's been that way for 40 years. Bitcoin hasn't lasted 10.
Of course, your credit union already operates on the principle that your money gets pilfered from your account and handed to someone else as a standard practice while you're shown a fake balance, which is what makes deposit insurance absolutely necessary.
WRONG
Yes, credit unions do lend out the money you deposit, how else do you expect to get that.01% interest? But since my credit union has a certain amount of (legally required) cash on hand to handle normal expenses, the value in my account isn't fake at all - I can withdraw it all at any time. FDIC (really NCUA) insurance makes sure that if the credit union fails or runs out of cash that the value in my account is still valid.
If my credit union fails, my deposits are insured up to $250,000 by the government. When Mt. Gox disappears, there's nothing. All your bitcoin are belong to someone else. I guess you could buy insurance independently against your deposits if you really wanted to go Galt about it. It'd probably cost a lot though, and there's no guarantee that you'd get paid back in bitcoin.
It doesn't need to be backed by a tangible asset. It needs to be backed by something of value. Until now, that value was the exchanges, and their value has now decreased to 0.
They're still trying to do their own thing, regardless of where the rest of the world is going.
Now, is Microsoft a different company and more open to open source? Yes. I have an open source package to control Azure (and they support Linux on it). They've been supportive of the local OpenStack meetups. They're a bit less hostile to dual booting systems. The costs and licensing have come down a good amount. The Xbox 360 is a really nice gaming system. They have way better backwards compatibility than Apple.
But they're still at heart the same company. The UI they started in Windows phone made it to the Xbox, then to Windows 8. That kind of UI just doesn't work on laptops and they should have figured that out. The Xbox One was going to squash game resale and borrowing. Live is a pretty big disaster, and every update to Windows 7 tries to include some new version of Bing, hoping I'll install it.
Can I install different browsers in Chrome OS? Don't know, don't care. Chrome OS is a small fraction of the laptop market, and my Android devices have various choices for browsers and most importantly, I can set the default browser and have that service every http link I come across, same with most other apps.
This. You can still violate a patent even if you don't know it existed at the time you developed it. Searching for a patent and then doing an implementation of it would be willful violation and get you much larger penalties.
I'll admit I first thought "well duh" as I have my own small business (nothing as large as most Kickstarter campaigns, but I've hired a CPA or two in my time). But the points you bring up are really important ones and can quickly derail a project if there's not enough advance planning. Along with all of the technical and logistical aspects of a successful campaign, there's also the financial ones.
I don't have specific sites to go to (the site linked doesn't tell you what they're connecting to to test) but I have to go on the assumption that both AWS and Linode are eating their own dogfood. Going to Linode takes me through Level3 whereas going to Amazon takes me through Qwest. As soon as I've gone two hops (my local router, the other end of my FIOS link) I'm on divergent paths. By hop #5 (out of ~18 hops) I'm off the Verizon network.
I'm on FIOS with their 50 down/25 up plan. Linode in Newark is 48Mbps, AWS East is 60Mbps. Just saying that a particular path is slow doesn't mean that it's Verizon interfering - it's more likely something else that's causing the problem.
I don't like DRM. I use it in places (like my Kindle) because I have to. I don't rent videos online, I buy the DVD/BR and rip it so I can play it where I want to. That's my choice and I pay more for it ($10 for the BR vs. $1.99 or whatever to rent it). There's no requirement for you buy DRMs books, you can still buy a dead tree version, you're just going to pay more for it. In return for the lower price, you give up some of your rights to it. Music companies have figured out the proper balance between cost and piracy and things are pretty settled. Hopefully the movie and ebook industries follow suit at some point.
At the same time, content creators need to ensure they're properly compensated for their work. US copyright law has thrown this way out of skew, so until that gets fixed we're stuck in this situation for now. Either way, this doesn't give you the wholesale right to steal (pirate, borrow, whatever you want to call it) content from others. Neither side is talking about what should be a reasonable timeframe for length of a copyright. Should it be 20 years? 30? 50? 100? How long after content is made should the author (or heirs) continue to be paid for that work?
I'm not being obtuse, I'm at best being a devil's advocate to make you realize there's two sides to the DRM issue and by being deliberately obtuse about one instance of DRM use barely scratches the surface of the problems, companies, and ideas that are involved in producing digital forms of what was traditionally dead tree (or cellulose or vinyl) media.
Purchasing stolen goods is a crime and the purchaser is required by law to return the stolen goods, even if they didn't know it was stolen. The users impacted by this got their money refunded and got a legal copy of the book.
Someone who didn't have the authority to do so uploaded the book to Amazon for publishing. Yes, Amazon could have handled the communication a bit better, but the book should have never been able to be available for Kindle from that publisher in the first place.
You're seeing reverse movement especially with tablets and chromebooks. People don't store media locally anymore - it's all in the cloud. My dad just got a new computer and he's amazed at how it has 500GB in it. Yes the/. crowd uses a lot more (I have 10TB usable) but as more and more normal users start storing their data at AWS or OneDrive or Box or Dropbox, the need for local storage drops to the point where having only a relatively small SSD makes sense. At home I've got a 256GB SSD for my Windows game system and the rest is iSCSI coming from my server.
Slashdot Mirror
It is religion (or at least faith). People believe without proof that it has value.
Is Bitcoin open? Sure. That doesn't automatically mean it has intrinsic value. I can't trade the source code for the Linux kernel to a Microsoft developer - it has no value to them.
Err..no:
Backed by the economic output of the US.
How about asking doctors if they still trust Vioxx? Some of them knew there were problems before its release.
From a fiscal standpoint, they're the same thing. In fact, Bitcoin is worse as it's backed by absolutely nothing.
The Magic part should have been a tell to most people.
Let me answer your question with a question. Do you trust the US Dollar less because of the Leaman Brothers collapse? Trusting or not trusting a currency (virtual, or fiat) based on the actions of one player, regardless of how large, makes no sense. I believe in what Bitcoin is about, I trust it more than I trust the banks and government. I still need fiat money to pay my bills, but would prefer to live without the banks who have already shown to not be trustworthy.
*headdesk*
I'm going to say this as simply as I can:
Bitcoin is also fiat currency
There's nothing backing it. Zero, zip, zilch. At least the US dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, and it's been that way for 40 years. Bitcoin hasn't lasted 10.
that I ever trusted Bitcoin in the first place. I didn't.
Of course, your credit union already operates on the principle that your money gets pilfered from your account and handed to someone else as a standard practice while you're shown a fake balance, which is what makes deposit insurance absolutely necessary.
WRONG
Yes, credit unions do lend out the money you deposit, how else do you expect to get that .01% interest? But since my credit union has a certain amount of (legally required) cash on hand to handle normal expenses, the value in my account isn't fake at all - I can withdraw it all at any time. FDIC (really NCUA) insurance makes sure that if the credit union fails or runs out of cash that the value in my account is still valid.
If my credit union fails, my deposits are insured up to $250,000 by the government. When Mt. Gox disappears, there's nothing. All your bitcoin are belong to someone else. I guess you could buy insurance independently against your deposits if you really wanted to go Galt about it. It'd probably cost a lot though, and there's no guarantee that you'd get paid back in bitcoin.
It doesn't need to be backed by a tangible asset. It needs to be backed by something of value. Until now, that value was the exchanges, and their value has now decreased to 0.
And many of your deposits in traditional banks are insured against failure by the government.
Well there goes the Internet
.aspx
They're still trying to do their own thing, regardless of where the rest of the world is going.
Now, is Microsoft a different company and more open to open source? Yes. I have an open source package to control Azure (and they support Linux on it). They've been supportive of the local OpenStack meetups. They're a bit less hostile to dual booting systems. The costs and licensing have come down a good amount. The Xbox 360 is a really nice gaming system. They have way better backwards compatibility than Apple.
But they're still at heart the same company. The UI they started in Windows phone made it to the Xbox, then to Windows 8. That kind of UI just doesn't work on laptops and they should have figured that out. The Xbox One was going to squash game resale and borrowing. Live is a pretty big disaster, and every update to Windows 7 tries to include some new version of Bing, hoping I'll install it.
Can I install different browsers in Chrome OS? Don't know, don't care. Chrome OS is a small fraction of the laptop market, and my Android devices have various choices for browsers and most importantly, I can set the default browser and have that service every http link I come across, same with most other apps.
Or Apple releases iGlass
This. You can still violate a patent even if you don't know it existed at the time you developed it. Searching for a patent and then doing an implementation of it would be willful violation and get you much larger penalties.
I'll admit I first thought "well duh" as I have my own small business (nothing as large as most Kickstarter campaigns, but I've hired a CPA or two in my time). But the points you bring up are really important ones and can quickly derail a project if there's not enough advance planning. Along with all of the technical and logistical aspects of a successful campaign, there's also the financial ones.
Please learn about traceroute.
I don't have specific sites to go to (the site linked doesn't tell you what they're connecting to to test) but I have to go on the assumption that both AWS and Linode are eating their own dogfood. Going to Linode takes me through Level3 whereas going to Amazon takes me through Qwest. As soon as I've gone two hops (my local router, the other end of my FIOS link) I'm on divergent paths. By hop #5 (out of ~18 hops) I'm off the Verizon network.
But you're the expert.
I'm on FIOS with their 50 down/25 up plan. Linode in Newark is 48Mbps, AWS East is 60Mbps. Just saying that a particular path is slow doesn't mean that it's Verizon interfering - it's more likely something else that's causing the problem.
You're not understanding the issues here.
I don't like DRM. I use it in places (like my Kindle) because I have to. I don't rent videos online, I buy the DVD/BR and rip it so I can play it where I want to. That's my choice and I pay more for it ($10 for the BR vs. $1.99 or whatever to rent it). There's no requirement for you buy DRMs books, you can still buy a dead tree version, you're just going to pay more for it. In return for the lower price, you give up some of your rights to it. Music companies have figured out the proper balance between cost and piracy and things are pretty settled. Hopefully the movie and ebook industries follow suit at some point.
At the same time, content creators need to ensure they're properly compensated for their work. US copyright law has thrown this way out of skew, so until that gets fixed we're stuck in this situation for now. Either way, this doesn't give you the wholesale right to steal (pirate, borrow, whatever you want to call it) content from others. Neither side is talking about what should be a reasonable timeframe for length of a copyright. Should it be 20 years? 30? 50? 100? How long after content is made should the author (or heirs) continue to be paid for that work?
I'm not being obtuse, I'm at best being a devil's advocate to make you realize there's two sides to the DRM issue and by being deliberately obtuse about one instance of DRM use barely scratches the surface of the problems, companies, and ideas that are involved in producing digital forms of what was traditionally dead tree (or cellulose or vinyl) media.
It wasn't yours to begin with and never was.
Purchasing stolen goods is a crime and the purchaser is required by law to return the stolen goods, even if they didn't know it was stolen. The users impacted by this got their money refunded and got a legal copy of the book.
You don't remember the fiasco all that well.
Someone who didn't have the authority to do so uploaded the book to Amazon for publishing. Yes, Amazon could have handled the communication a bit better, but the book should have never been able to be available for Kindle from that publisher in the first place.
You're seeing reverse movement especially with tablets and chromebooks. People don't store media locally anymore - it's all in the cloud. My dad just got a new computer and he's amazed at how it has 500GB in it. Yes the /. crowd uses a lot more (I have 10TB usable) but as more and more normal users start storing their data at AWS or OneDrive or Box or Dropbox, the need for local storage drops to the point where having only a relatively small SSD makes sense. At home I've got a 256GB SSD for my Windows game system and the rest is iSCSI coming from my server.
They do now.
Given the contents of the recently-released Republican proposal to replace Obamacare, he's probably right. But I did say 'a touch'.