Deaths in the U.S. in 2001 due to heart disease - 700,000; cancer - 553,800; stroke - 164,000; accidents - 102,000 (Car accidents - 42,000); influenza - 36,000; terrorism - 3,000.
Where is the war on cancer, or the war on drunk driving? You're more likely to die driving to the airport than on the plane. The difference is when you die in an act of terrorism, it's more likely to be televised and thus breed dissatisfaction among the survivors with the coincident administration of government for failing to prevent it. People who die quietly (relatively speaking) don't provoke as much outrage.
The prevailing groupthink tells me that taxes are good, and the internet is good, but taxes on the internet are bad!
That violates the very laws of multiplication, and could threaten the universe as we know it! Not if good is negative and bad is positive, like in Bizarro World.
Internet Protocol over VoIP. If we do this, then we won't have to pay an internet tax, right? You should get right on writing up an RFC for that. I'll expect you to have a complete working proposal ready by April 2008.
You're right! If people avoid paying taxes on traditional phone service by not using traditional phone services, there won't be any money to maintain the traditional phone services no one is using!
Send me the physical addresses of any known spammers and I'll take care of them in a like manner. Just post the e-mail addresses of some Russian mafia members in the clear to a web-archived mailing list (like usefor or www-html) and they'll take care of them for you.
Oh, and I was thinking it was something like, "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle," a phrase that is known to have started at least two wars.
How is illegalizing sale of materials rated for an adult, to a minor, anti-gamer?
Adult gamers should still be able to purchase these things just fine. No mainstream vendor will want to have to be responsible for training their employees to accurate sort between who are the under-18 minors and who are the 18-and-older adults. Not the technical training of checking IDs and spotting fakes, and not for absorbing the penalties if they falsely identify a minor as an adult. You don't find stores that sell video games also selling tobacco (same age restriction in the US).
If the same laws and penalties existed to prohibit sale of R-rated or unrated movies to minors as being applied to M-rated games, it is likely you would see those movies disappear from shelves, and probably from many on-line vendors as well.
Now that we live in the age of "Homeland Security", it's doubly unlikely that any government will allow "unknown flying objects" buzzing around. Indeed! Next thing you know you'll have people flying cars into parking structures.
Scarcity will be replaced with novelty. Those who can create the information behind something new will be in demand, and will need to be paid in some form of currency with which they can pay others for other new things, be it solving problems of scale to create bigger or more detailed replicators, coming up better robot servant designs that are more efficient or have new features you didn't know you wanted but now desire, designing new and interesting creative programs for your holodeck for those who lack the creativity themselves, faster and more efficient propulsion as you still need fuel to get from point A to point B.
Even with an infinite source of energy/matter, someone still has to come up with new and innovative ways to organize that energy and matter. Without creativity the matter won't assemble itself, and there will always be people with more creativity than others and the associated demand.
Anyone see the picture of the different size quids? Some of them look massive. The red one looks like its the size of a waffle house waffle. Think they'll make a special wallet to carry those suckers around in? Why when you can just swallow them? That'll neatly take care of the free-floating currency problem. Any larger denominations? Good news: they're suppositories!
Seriously though, I'd think any intergalactic currency minted in multiple denominations should only have single-unit and prime denominations: no composite denominations like their 4 QUID piece.
Make them plastic coated inert magnetised metals ...capable of disrupting electronic circuits...
with velcro strips and metal barbs - that way they are bound to stick to something if they ever start floating about. ...like exposed skin, or space suits.
And again, using metal gives them significant rigid mass to make them become dangerous projectiles if they become unsecured. Remember 2010's aerobraking sequence where unsecured items started flying "down" at Heywood Floyd as the Leonov decelerated?
But by having hard currency you avoid latency problems in verifying balances further and further out. Buying something on Mars would take at least 6.2 minutes just to check your credit at a lightspeed communication at opposition, other times as long as 42 minutes. If you bring your money with you, no latency.
Of course, most transactions in and out of a gravity well will be electronic. Taking hard currency into a gravity well would devalue it due to the cost to get it back into the space market. But then valuation would be determined in the cost to get it into space in the first place, or at least the materials to mint the currency as hard matter. Asteroid mining would have an immediate impact on its valuation.
I wonder what opportunities there are in exploiting exchange rates between locales lightdays or greater apart.
No sufficiently advanced spacefaring civilisation should be using currency. Then how would they bilk the primitive populations of alien planets out of whole continents and mining rights without a bunch of space-beads?
Coins also are conductive, which could short out electronics if they float into a panel being serviced. They're also more likely to do damage if left floating when the vessel undergoes sudden acceleration whereas plastic can deform more readily.
I was actually think more along the lines of this device which, unlike the the Alera device which really just scores the surface, this one actually breaks up the whole disk into confetti.
Maybe I'm behind the times here, but how the hell do you flash an appliance to update the firmware? First of all, make sure to close the blinds and get all of the children out of the room.
I got a player you might be interesting in; it plays nothing at all. I got one better: a player that takes the disk, doesn't play it, and grants that inability to play it to all other players... by converting it to a confettied form.
I think, the question was rather why the burden of "fixing" is on the player manufacturers instead of the media companies who refuse to stick with standards? Unlike the "protected" CDs, BD+ was already a part of the BluRay standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like it's about time to resume working on my underground mole borer.
Where is the war on cancer, or the war on drunk driving? You're more likely to die driving to the airport than on the plane. The difference is when you die in an act of terrorism, it's more likely to be televised and thus breed dissatisfaction among the survivors with the coincident administration of government for failing to prevent it. People who die quietly (relatively speaking) don't provoke as much outrage.
That violates the very laws of multiplication, and could threaten the universe as we know it! Not if good is negative and bad is positive, like in Bizarro World.
You're right! If people avoid paying taxes on traditional phone service by not using traditional phone services, there won't be any money to maintain the traditional phone services no one is using!
Talk about poisoning the address pool!
Oh, and I was thinking it was something like, "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle," a phrase that is known to have started at least two wars.
Adult gamers should still be able to purchase these things just fine. No mainstream vendor will want to have to be responsible for training their employees to accurate sort between who are the under-18 minors and who are the 18-and-older adults. Not the technical training of checking IDs and spotting fakes, and not for absorbing the penalties if they falsely identify a minor as an adult. You don't find stores that sell video games also selling tobacco (same age restriction in the US).
If the same laws and penalties existed to prohibit sale of R-rated or unrated movies to minors as being applied to M-rated games, it is likely you would see those movies disappear from shelves, and probably from many on-line vendors as well.
When I read the summary, this is what leapt to my mind.
Windows Live Update is going to carry games? Will they have Genuine Entertainment?
I wonder what this will mean for the Time Cube guy.
Time Cube: It's the Goatse for Logical Thought
Scarcity will be replaced with novelty. Those who can create the information behind something new will be in demand, and will need to be paid in some form of currency with which they can pay others for other new things, be it solving problems of scale to create bigger or more detailed replicators, coming up better robot servant designs that are more efficient or have new features you didn't know you wanted but now desire, designing new and interesting creative programs for your holodeck for those who lack the creativity themselves, faster and more efficient propulsion as you still need fuel to get from point A to point B.
Even with an infinite source of energy/matter, someone still has to come up with new and innovative ways to organize that energy and matter. Without creativity the matter won't assemble itself, and there will always be people with more creativity than others and the associated demand.
Seriously though, I'd think any intergalactic currency minted in multiple denominations should only have single-unit and prime denominations: no composite denominations like their 4 QUID piece.
And again, using metal gives them significant rigid mass to make them become dangerous projectiles if they become unsecured. Remember 2010's aerobraking sequence where unsecured items started flying "down" at Heywood Floyd as the Leonov decelerated?
But by having hard currency you avoid latency problems in verifying balances further and further out. Buying something on Mars would take at least 6.2 minutes just to check your credit at a lightspeed communication at opposition, other times as long as 42 minutes. If you bring your money with you, no latency.
Of course, most transactions in and out of a gravity well will be electronic. Taking hard currency into a gravity well would devalue it due to the cost to get it back into the space market. But then valuation would be determined in the cost to get it into space in the first place, or at least the materials to mint the currency as hard matter. Asteroid mining would have an immediate impact on its valuation.
I wonder what opportunities there are in exploiting exchange rates between locales lightdays or greater apart.
IANAEconomist
Coins also are conductive, which could short out electronics if they float into a panel being serviced. They're also more likely to do damage if left floating when the vessel undergoes sudden acceleration whereas plastic can deform more readily.
I was actually think more along the lines of this device which, unlike the the Alera device which really just scores the surface, this one actually breaks up the whole disk into confetti.